The International Criminal Court should be on the list
of possible options, Rep. Barbara Lee says.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee didn't want to sign
a letter initiated by Republicans calling on President Obama to submit to congressional authority on a military strike against Syria. Too many of them, she knew, had signed that letter because they were against anything President Obama favored. If a Republican president had proposed intervention, they would be shaking pom poms and doing cartwheels on the White House lawn in support.
So Lee put together her own letter and got 53 other Democrats to sign it. The president soon surprised many people by saying on the day that some had thought he might announce attacks would soon be under way that he was, in fact, going to ask for Congress to give its imprimatur to intervention.
Lee isn't stopping with that success. At Salon Monday, she answered questions on Syria from editor at large Joan Walsh. An excerpt:
WALSH: Rep. Chris Van Hollen is trying to craft a very narrow resolution, backing limited strikes to degrade Assad’s capacity to deliver chemical weapons. Is there any resolution that backs military force, however narrow, that you would support.
LEE: I can’t see myself supporting any military options at this point. As I’ve always said, I’m not a pacifist. But the use of force at this point would create more havoc, more violence, more death. I’m concerned about the possibility of retaliation, of regional conflict or war breaking out, I’m concerned about more innocent lives being taken. I think there are non-military alternatives that we have to push hard. No one says it’s going to be easy, but we have to get to a negotiated settlement that the president and John Kerry talk about. Now some would insist that a strike is the only way you could get the Assad government to come to the table, but I don’t believe going to war will lead to a negotiated settlement.
WALSH: But there haven’t been a lot of diplomatic alternatives so far. The most specific recommendation I’ve seen is to work through the U.N. General Assembly; we know the Security Council won’t do anything, but go to the General Assembly and make our case and try to to get a referral to the International Criminal Court.
LEE: I agree, that’s an alternative, and we’re working on an alternative right now. But ICC is very important, the General Assembly is very important, the Geneva II conference is very important. A variety of diplomatic options are out there that need to be exhausted.
One of those diplomatic options—putting Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons under international control leading to their safe destruction—started out as an apparently off-handed remark by Secretary of State John Kerry and is now endorsed, in theory at least, by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov. That could be a game-changer. Proof that all the diplomatic options had not been exhausted before the administration announced it would bomb Syria. That is lesson to remember the next time
any president of secretary of state says otherwise.