The US military have moved up their assets and are ready to take any action on Syria ordered by President Obama, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday, amid building international pressure over last week’s alleged chemical attack near Damascus.
“We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfill and
comply with whatever option the president wishes to take,”
Hagel told the BBC in an interview.
Hagel added that there were a range of options available, from
doing nothing to a limited cruise missile strike, or to boots on
the ground — in the style of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Should the order be given, US forces were “ready to go, like
that,” he said.
The Defense Secretary pointed out no decision would be made until
more facts had been gathered about the alleged chemical weapons
attack, which killed anywhere from dozens to 1,300 people in
Syria last week.
Hagel said he believed it was “pretty clear chemical weapons
had been used in Syria” and that intelligence would prove
that it wasn’t the rebels who used them.
“It’s clear that the government of Syria was responsible,”
he said.
When asked what he thought about Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov’s comments that any attack on Syria would breach
international law, Hagel indicated that he didn’t think a UN
resolution would be sought and that no nation “is bound by
only one dimension of whether they make a decision to respond to
the kind of humanitarian violations we saw in Syria.”
He denied that the US was now duty bound to launch a strike on
Syria, after Obama’s comments earlier this year that Assad would
cross a “red line” if he used chemical weapons.
“Let’s get the facts, let’s get the intelligence and then a
decision will be made on whether caution should be taken, what
action or no action.”
Hagel’s comments come after US Secretary of State John Kerry
appeared to lay the groundwork for military action, saying that
Obama believed there needed to be “accountability” for the
use of chemical weapons.
A US official said that any military strikes could be launched
“as early as Thursday”, it was reported in the US media.
The official added that “three days” of strikes would be
limited in scope and would be aimed at sending a message to the
regime of President Bashar Assad.
Republished from: RT