GENEVA - The U.S. may accept a United Nations Security Council resolution that stops short of authorizing military action for Syrian violations of a chemical-weapons deal, according to U.S. officials.
The move would overcome objections from Russia and contribute to talks in Geneva and New York on a Syrian disarmament accord. A resolution acceptable to the U.S. could impose other consequences for Syrian violations, including economic sanctions and a provision for the council to revisit military authorization, said the officials, who asked not to be identified in briefing reporters.
Such a resolution wouldn’t foreclose unilateral U.S. military strikes, as President Barack Obama threatened after what he said was an Aug. 21 attack by the Syrian regime with the nerve agent sarin that killed more than 1,400 people, including more than 400 children, outside of Damascus.
“The use of chemical weapons that we saw in Syria was a criminal act” Obama said Friday. “It is absolutely important for the international community to respond in not only deterring repeated use of chemical weapons but hopefully getting those chemical weapons outside of Syria.”
An agreement on securing and destroying Syria’s chemical weapons must be “verifiable and enforceable,” Obama said, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry reported “constructive conversations” in Geneva with his Russian counterpart.
Obama, who put his threat of military action against Syria on hold this week, said he hopes that the negotiations between Kerry and Lavrov will “bear fruit.” He commented at the conclusion of a meeting at the White House with Sheikh Sabah Al- Ahmed Al-Sabah, the emir of Kuwait, one of the Persian Gulf nations sending arms to Syrian rebels seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
The Geneva talks will continue for a third day Saturday because Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are addressing “some serious stuff,” Russian spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in Geneva.
U.S. and Russian experts made progress narrowing the gap between their estimates about the size of Syria’s chemical arsenal, according to a U.S. official in Geneva. Syria didn’t officially acknowledge it has such weapons until this week.
Kerry has put the stockpile at 1,000 metric tons, while Russia has used a lower figure. Consensus on the size of the arsenal is necessary to ensure that Assad doesn’t hide some of his weapons from international inspectors.
Kerry Friday added plans to go to Paris on Sept. 16 for meetings with the British, French and Saudi foreign ministers, following a stop the previous day in Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Agreement in Geneva on an approach to securing the weapons would shift the focus to the U.N. for Security Council action to mandate implementation.
In Washington, the U.S. officials indicated a lengthening timeline for action that extends for months under a potential accord. Syria is unlikely to embarrass its main ally, Russia, by conducting further chemical attacks in the meantime, the officials said.
It may take several weeks to pass a U.N. Security Council resolution embodying a disarmament plan and then months to see real progress in bringing Syria’s chemical weapons under international control to be destroyed, according to the officials. Even so, they portrayed that outcome as better than if the U.S. took military action, which couldn’t destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal.
The current round of diplomacy was initiated by Russia after a Sept. 9 comment in London by Kerry that Assad could avert a threatened U.S. attack by turning over “every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week.” While Kerry added immediately that Assad “isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously,” the idea took on a life of its own.
In New York, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said Friday that a report by U.N. inspectors will confirm that chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 in an opposition-controlled area near Damascus. The U.N. team wasn’t permitted under its mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, and Syria and Russia have blamed anti-regime “terrorists.”
While it is up to the Syrian people to decide whether to oust Assad, Ban said at a U.N. development forum in New York, the regime’s leader has “committed many crimes against humanity” and will be held accountable when the conflict is over.
Looking beyond the immediate focus on efforts to turn over Syria’s chemical arsenal to international control, Kerry and Lavrov also discussed Friday prospects for convening a long- proposed peace conference on Syria.
Assad and Russia, Syria’s principal great-power ally since the 1970s, have exploited Obama’s focus on ridding the country of chemical weapons while seeking to keep the U.S. out of the civil war.
The goal is to “design a road that makes sure this issue is resolved quickly, professionally, as soon as practical,” Lavrov said of the chemical weapons.
Assad appeared on Russian television Thursday to announce that Syria would sign an international protocol known as the Chemical Weapons Convention banning chemical weapons and to warn the U.S. that the solution to the strife wouldn’t be a “one-way street.” Assad said the U.S. must forswear any military strike and cease arming the rebel “terrorists” fighting to overthrow his regime.
The U.S. will “retain the military option and we will maintain our military readiness while the Geneva process is ongoing,” Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters Friday in Washington. Earlier this week, Kerry called Syrian opposition leaders to say they will continue to have U.S. support.
France, the main U.S. ally in any military operation, has pressed for a strongly worded U.N. Security Council resolution to govern Syria’s behavior, including a military-action trigger.
The head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the world body that administers the convention, said in a statement Friday that Syria’s application to join the accord and to obtain technical assistance is being reviewed. At the U.N. Thursday, Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari said his country now considers itself bound by the accord as it undertakes the process necessary to become the 190th signatory nation.
U.S.-Russian talks over chemical weapons were entwined with a broader diplomatic push to end the hostilities by bringing Assad and the opposition to the negotiating table.
In that effort, Kerry and Lavrov met for an hour early Friday with U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. The prospects for a Geneva peace conference “obviously depend” on whether the current talks to have Syria surrender control of its chemical weapons are successful, Kerry told reporters.
Putting together intra-Syrian peace talks is “extremely important,” Brahimi said. Efforts to get Assad and the opposition talking have failed since world powers met in Geneva in June 2012.
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