We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us...
said Wednesday he had not yet signed off on a plan to strike Syria, but action appeared likely after Washington abandoned the hunt for a last-minute U.N. mandate.
Political uproar in London, meanwhile, cast doubt on whether Britannia will join American military action to punish
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad's
Despoiler of Deraa...
regime for a chemical weapons attack, should the response take place before next week.
And a team of U.N. inspectors pressed on with its hazardous work in Damascus, testing victims of the alleged poison gas attack, which killed hundreds of people last week and threatens to draw reluctant Western states into a vicious civil war.
Obama, who has warned that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a U.S. "red line," said Washington had definitively concluded that the Assad regime was to blame for last week's attack.A senior White House official told Agence La Belle France Presse that the administration will brief senior U.S. politicians on Thursday about classified intelligence about the chemical attack.
Asked how close he was to ordering a U.S. strike, expected to start with cruise missile raids, Obama told PBS NewsHour: "I have not made a decision."
But he warned that U.S. action would be designed to send a "shot across the bow" to convince Syria it had "better not do it again."
He admitted that the limited strikes envisioned by the White House would not stop the killing of civilians in Syria but said he had decided that getting involved in a civil war that has already killed 100,000 people would not help the situation.
The U.S. leader, who wants to seal a legacy of ending foreign wars, not getting into new ones, argued that it was vital to send a clear message not just to Syria, but around the world.
"Hans?"
"Ja, Jean-Pierre?"
"Does this message make any sense to you?"
"Well, every single word means something."
"Do the sentences mean anything?"
"I think that one, does. And that one. What do you think, Nigel?"
"Ummm... That one does, up to the colon, anyway. None of the paragraphs do."
"Maybe it makes more sense in the original Remulakian?"