Obama Backs Idea for Syria to Cede Control of Arms

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, MICHAEL R. GORDON and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday tentatively embraced a Russian diplomatic proposal to avert a United States military strike on Syria by having international monitors take control of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons. The move added new uncertainty to Mr. Obama’s push to win support among allies, the American public and members of Congress for an attack.

In a series of television interviews with six cable and broadcast networks, Mr. Obama capped a remarkable day of presidential lobbying for military action and a dizzying series of developments at home and abroad. Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said early Monday that Syria could avoid an attack by putting its chemical weapons in the hands of monitors and agreeing to ultimately eliminate its massive arsenal of poison gas. It was an idea that was quickly praised by top officials in Syria and some lawmakers in the United States.

“It’s possible,” Mr. Obama said on CNN of the Russian proposal, “if it’s real.”

Mr. Obama’s statements about the haphazardly constructed plan appeared to offer him an exit strategy for a military strike he had been reluctant to order, and it came as support on Capitol Hill for a resolution authorizing force was slipping. Even some lawmakers who had announced support for it reversed course.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Monday evening that he would not force an initial vote on the resolution on Wednesday, slowing Senate consideration until at least next week. Democrats said they had enough votes to overcome a filibuster but possibly not enough to pass it.

Secretary of State John Kerry opened the door to the Russian idea when he told a reporter at a news conference earlier on Monday that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria could avoid strikes by agreeing to give up his chemical weapons, although Mr. Kerry doubted the plan was feasible.

“Turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting,” he said. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

Mr. Lavrov seized on the idea, saying that it might form the basis of a compromise. “We don’t know whether Syria will agree with this,” he said at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, adding, “We call on the Syrian leadership to not only agree to setting the chemical weapons’ storage sites under international control, but also to their subsequent destruction.”

But to some, the offhand nature of Mr. Kerry’s comment and Moscow’s hurried response raised suspicions that the Russians and Syrians were making plans to control the chemical stockpile or were, at the least, using the proposal as a delaying tactic that could undermine Mr. Obama’s efforts for a military strike.

Either way, the proposal did not appear to be one that Mr. Kerry or the Obama administration had intended.

The effort to police such a proposal, even if Syria agreed, would be a laborious and prolonged effort, especially since Mr. Assad’s government has shrouded its arsenal in secrecy for decades. As United Nations inspectors discovered in Iraq after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, even an invasive inspection program can take years to account for chemical stockpiles and never be certain of complete compliance, something that President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, who was in Moscow, welcomed Russia’s proposal, though he stopped short of pledging that Mr. Assad would comply. His remarks, however, tacitly acknowledged that Syria possessed a chemical arsenal, something it had never publicly done.

It is not known whether Mr. Moallem has the authority to commit Mr. Assad to a significant step like the international control and ultimate destruction of an arsenal that Syria has maintained in large part as a deterrent to Israel, which is widely assumed to have a nuclear arsenal that it has never officially acknowledged.

The Kerry remark that inspired the Russian proposal did not appear to signal a shift in policy. The State Department’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, later clarified in an e-mail to reporters that Mr. Kerry had simply been “making a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied using.”

In Washington, a senior Democratic aide said the Russian proposal was a significant factor in the delay of the Senate vote, allowing members to consider the plan and also to hear from the president, who is to meet with them at the Capitol before an address to the nation on Tuesday night.

Mr. Obama called the Russian proposal “a potentially positive development” in his interview on CNN, and promised that his administration would engage with the Russians to see if the world could “arrive at something that is enforceable and serious.” But he said that “if we don’t maintain and move forward with a credible threat of military pressure, I do not think we will actually get the kind of agreement I would like to see.”

The Russian proposal received the early support of Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I would welcome such a move,” Ms. Feinstein said in a statement Monday afternoon.

The cautious tone from Mr. Obama about the Russian proposal suggested that his administration was not yet ready to give up on its all-out push for a military response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens. Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, continued that effort on Monday morning in a speech at the New America Foundation, a Washington research institution, in which she made the case for a military strike even as news of the Russian proposal was crossing the Atlantic.

Ms. Rice emphasized the brutality of the chemical attacks, opening her remarks by describing the “little children, laying on the ground, their eyes glassy.” Failing to act, she said, would send a message of weakness.

But by the end of the day, the White House had clearly signaled that the Russian idea might offer a way to avoid the potential for Congressional rejection of Mr. Obama’s plans for a strike. After meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the president’s former secretary of state, told reporters that the proposal could be an “important step” toward preventing Syria from using chemical weapons again.

Later, in the television interviews, Mr. Obama repeated his desire to take the plan seriously, while still pressing the case for military action to the American public and lawmakers. Mr. Obama told NBC News that he would take the plan “with a grain of salt initially.” But he said that if Syrian officials accepted the Russian proposal, “then this could potentially be a significant breakthrough.”

Reacting to comments by Mr. Kerry that military action against Syria would be “unbelievably small,” Mr. Obama said any attack would not be felt like a “pinprick” in Syria.

“The U.S. does not do pinpricks,” he said in the NBC interview. “Our military is the greatest the world has ever known. And when we take even limited strikes, it has an impact on a country like Syria.”

Mr. Obama also responded to warnings of “repercussions” that Mr. Assad made in an interview on Monday morning with Charlie Rose of CBS News. Mr. Obama waved aside that threat in an interview with Fox News.

“Well, actually, we know what Assad’s capabilities are, and, you know, Mr. Assad’s are significant compared to a bunch of opposition leaders, many of whom are not professional fighters,” the president said Monday evening. “They’re significant relative to over 400 children that were gassed. They’re not significant relative to the U.S. military.”

Michael D. Shear reported from Washington, Michael R. Gordon from London, and Steven Lee Myers from Moscow.