War on Syria Imminent, US Won’t Seek UN or NATO Vote

International Support Apparently Just Means Britain and France

With the pretense of the US “considering” a war long gone, and indications that the attacks could begin any day now, officials are backing off yesterday’s reports of seeking an international endorsement, either from the UN or NATO, for attacking Syria.

With neither UN nor NATO approval, and Congress in recess, President Obama is going to be launching the war virtually unilaterally, with only a brief agreement by Britain and France to get in on the bombings passing for “international support.”

In Britain, there are concerns about the total lack of legal justification for the war, especially with the Iraq debacle still fresh in everyone’s minds. President Obama, for all of his long-standing pretense of internationalism, seems set to follow the Bush-style of selling a war on flimsy evidence and launching it anyhow when he can’t get any international bodies to endorse it.

Which of course was the plan all along. Giving lip-service to the idea of the UN or even NATO endorsing a war is more about getting them to react favorably to the calls for war than anything, but once a US president decides he wants to go warring abroad, nothing from facts to public opinion to international law is going to get in his way.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.