National Security Brief: Top Senate Democrat Wants Greater U.S. Role In Syria

Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) said on Monday that the United States should play a more active role in bringing about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s downfall. “I would go further than the President,” Levin said, adding that President Obama should consider establishing so-called “safe zones” for Syrian rebels within the country. Levin also said the U.S. should consider taking out the Syrian military’s anti-aircraft batteries and other Syrian Air Force assets.

Meanwhile, House Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) introduced legislation on Monday giving Obama that authority to provide “lethal equipment” to Syrian rebels fighting Assad’s forces. In a statement, Engel said the U.S. is “long past due to arm friendly rebels and turn the tide to allow for a more hopeful Syrian future.”

While U.S. officials mull whether and how much to intervene in Syria, the Syrian opposition coalition elected a Syrian born U.S. citizen to be the first prime minister of an interim government there should Assad fall. The group chose Ghassan Hitto, an information technology executive who lived in Texas until recently.

In other news:

Former Pentagon top counsel Jeh Johnson criticized the idea of any secret court to oversee the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, saying it would simply act as a “rubber stamp” for anything the executive wants to do. Johnson said that instead, the program should be brought within the auspices of the Defense Department in order to ensure its legality.

The AP reports: A hunger strike at the Guantánamo Bay prison has grown and now involves at least 21 men, a U.S. military official said Monday while denying reports trickling out from prisoners through lawyers that there is a more widespread protest and lives are in danger.

The Washington Post reports: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered the Pentagon to reconsider a sweeping military strategy that the Obama administration unveiled just last year to determine whether it is still affordable in light of recent budget cuts.

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International Democrat Union

(Difference between revisions)

The International Democrat Union is a worldwide organization of conservative political parties. It has 54 members and its youth organization is the International Young Democrat Union.

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Top House Democrat To Introduce Bill Authorizing Arms To Syrian Rebels

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY)

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Sunday that he plans to introduce legislation to allow the Obama administration to transfer weapons to Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Reporting from the region, ABC’s Terry Moran said on the network’s Sunday program “This Week” that the U.S. faces a choice, either arm the rebels or work with Russia, and perhaps Assad himself, on a potential peace deal between the two warring factions. When asked about that choice, Engel said he thinks “it’s time” to allow President Obama to provide the rebels with direct military assistance:

TERRY MORAN: The United States has a choice: arm the rebels, engage even more deeply in what is becoming a chaotic and dangerous war to this region or broker a peace, probably with Russia, give the Syrian people an opportunity to determine their future and at least in the first stages, Bashar Assad is likely to be part of that process.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Congressman Engel is that the choice?

ENGEL: I think it’s the choice and I will be introducing legislation to allow the President to arm the rebels. I think it’s time to do that. I think the Free Syria Army needs help. We know who they are and I think it’s time we make that move.

Watch the clip:

The United States has been providing training and logistics and communications assistance to the rebels but thus far, the Obama administration has been reluctant to provide arms, instead preferring to allow other regional allies to send weapons to the rebels fighting Assad. But with recent revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey supported a plan to arm the rebels, and now with the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to introduce legislation backing that plan, momentum may be gaining to persuade the Obama administration to shift course.

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House Democrat: ‘Majority’ of NRA members would back stricter gun laws

The House Democrat elected to replace former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) on Monday said he believes the majority of National Rifle Association (NRA) members would back new gun-control laws.

“There are a lot of NRA members in this country, and we have significant evidence to suggest that they are not all opposed,” Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.) said Tuesday on CNN. “In fact, there may well be a majority who are in favor of some limitations on the assault weapon availability.” 

Barber recounted an anecdote about a hunter and gun enthusiast from his district who told him he would favor some gun restrictions.

“This is not about taking away people’s guns,” Barber said. “This is about preventing mass shootings and doing so through providing mental health services and reducing access to these assault weapons and the high-capacity magazines that shot us in Tucson.”

Barber was among the 19 people, including Giffords, who were shot in 2011 by Jared Lee Loughner at an event in Tucson, Ariz. Giffords was shot in the head at the event, and stepped down last year to concentrate on her recovery. Six people were killed in the incident.

Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, launched a new effort to promote gun-control laws on Tuesday, the two-year anniversary of the Tucson shooting.

In an op-ed in USA Today, Giffords said her new group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, would “raise the funds necessary to balance the influence of the gun lobby, and will line up squarely behind leaders who will stand up for what's right.” “Until now, the gun lobby's political contributions, advertising and lobbying have dwarfed spending from anti-gun violence groups,” they wrote. “No longer. With Americans for Responsible Solutions engaging millions of people about ways to reduce gun violence and funding political activity nationwide, legislators will no longer have reason to fear the gun lobby.”

Barber said he believed it was “possible” to take on the NRA, but that money is needed to “make a difference in communicating information and getting a message out,” which was the impetus for Giffords’s new initiative.

But the push for heightened gun control will face strong opposition from the NRA, which argues that more restrictions will do little to prevent violence.

Gun-control efforts also face an uncertain path in the Republican-controlled House. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that oversees firearms regulations, told Roll Call last month that “gun control is not going to be something that I would support.”

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Death of the Moderate . . . Democrat

It is worth noting that on Tuesday several moderate Democrats went down in flames in Pennsylvania, continuing a trend that has escalated since 2008. Liberals do not want moderate Democrats in their caucus.

What is most interesting about it from a conservative perspective, however, is how there has not been a ton of coverage about the death of the blue dogs — more dogs dead in Barack Obama and the left’s war on dogs. Had moderate Republicans been defeated, we would have major stories on pretty much every news network and on the front page of every paper in America.

Routinely we hear that Republicans cannot win in New England, despite Republican successes in New England in 2010. Routinely we hear about the GOP driving moderates out of the party. Big tent cliches surround the stories. Rarely does the ongoing purging of the Democratic Party make such news.

In fact, the Democratic Party has become increasingly hostile to moderates, though the media rarely cares to focus on this because the reporters who’d pay attention often are to the left of the moderate Democrats and proclaim their position the center. Those moderate Democrats are, therefore, well outside the mainstream.

I do not lament the decline and fall of the Blue Dog Coalition. The United States remains a center-right nation and Democrats must continue to run as “centrist” to appeal in swing states. Their true colors ruin their chances. The fewer “centrists” they have, the more difficult it becomes for them to appeal to voters, including Hispanic voters who continue to be some of the most socially conservative voters in America.

The lesson, here, though is that partisans in both parties prefer their candidates to stand for something and fight for something. The media’s predominant bias is a good government bias and reporters hail those Republicans and Democrats who work across party lines to get things done in Washington. And what have they done?

We’re at $15 trillion and counting to what they’ve done. But it was done in the name of good government — a concept that is always framed as our salvation and will ultimately be our damnation as we go bankrupt with repeated good government compromises.

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