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President Barack Obama bluntly told lawmakers Wednesday that he does not need their permission to strike Syria, but challenged Congress to do more than “sit on the sidelines (and) snipe.”
“As commander in chief, I always preserve the right and the responsibility to act on behalf of America’s national security. I do not believe that I was required to take this to Congress,” Obama said during a visit to Stockholm, Sweden.
“But I did not take this to Congress just because it’s an empty exercise; I think it’s important to have Congress’s support on it,” Obama said at a press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.
The president expressed confidence that Congress will ultimately give him its green light for military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces, whom Washington accuses of massacring civilians with chemical weapons on Aug. 21.
“I believe Congress will approve it,” he said.
“We can send a very clear strong message in favor of the prohibition against using chemical weapons. We can change Assad’s calculus about using them again. We can degrade his capabilities so that he does not use them again,” Obama said.
“What I’m talking about is an action that is limited in time and in scope, targeted at the specific task of degrading his capabilities and deterring the use of those weapons again,” the president said.
And Obama said that Congress must be more invested in the use of American military force abroad — at least when American national security, or that of an ally, is not directly and imminently threatened.
“It’s important for us to get out of the habit of just saying ‘well, we’ll let the president kind of stretch the boundaries of his authority as far as he can. Congress will sit on the sidelines, snipe. If it works, the sniping will be a little less. If it doesn’t, a little more. But either way, the American people and their representatives are not fully invested in what are tough choices,” Obama said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-reserves-right-to-buck-congress-on-syria-strike-140227751.html