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AP poll: Most Americans oppose strike on Syria

WASHINGTON (AP) — Only 1 in 5 Americans believe that failing to respond to chemical weapons attacks in Syria would embolden other rogue governments, rejecting the heart of a weeks-long White House campaign for U.S. military strikes, an Associated Press poll has concluded.

The poll of 1,007 adults nationwide found that most Americans oppose even a limited attack on Syria — likely with cruise missiles — despite Obama administration warnings that inaction would risk national security and ignore a gruesome humanitarian crisis. And a slim majority — 53 percent — fear that a strike would lead to a long-term U.S. military commitment in Syria.

The survey reflects a U.S. public that is tired of Mideast wars after a dozen years of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. It undercuts political support President Barack Obama is hoping to garner as he seeks congressional authorization this week to strike the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

"We need to stop being so aggressive militarily," Izzy Briggs, a business services consultant from Epsom, N.H., said Monday. "I think these small countries are feeling very intimidated by the U.S. and some feel they have to have these sorts of weapons."

U.S. officials have cited a high confidence in intelligence that indicates Assad's government launched the Aug. 21 attacks that they say killed more than 1,400 Syrians. Obama last year warned Assad that using chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war would amount to a "red line" that, if crossed, would bring a swift U.S. response.

In the weeks since the attacks, the administration has argued that hostile governments in Iran and North Korea, and extremist groups like Hezbollah, would be more likely to use weapons of mass destruction in future conflicts if Assad is not punished. To bolster the case, U.S. officials last weekend also released grim video footage showing young children gasping for breath and rows of dead bodies in the hours after the chemical attack in the Damascus suburbs.

But support in Congress is lukewarm at best, and many lawmakers have questioned whether the strikes would create more of a problem for the U.S. than they would help the nearly three-year effort to overthrow Assad.

"We must balance the legitimate concerns that Americans have about the use of military force with our strategic interests," said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who on Monday announced she would not support the White House plan.

U.S. opposition to striking Syria cuts across party lines, as does doubt that an American attack would deter other world leaders from using chemical weapons.

The poll indicated that 53 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents and 73 percent of Republicans believe Congress should vote against the plan to strike Syria. Only one out of four Democrats think that an attack would deter other world leaders from acquiring and using chemical weapons; even fewer Republicans and independents agreed.

"It's not good what they're doing to their own people, but we don't want to start World War III," said Rosie Vega, a retired receptionist who was at a Glendale, Calif., bakery on Monday morning.

Overall, 61 percent of people surveyed said they wanted Congress to vote against authorizing U.S. military strikes in Syria, the poll found. By comparison, 26 percent said they supported it, and the rest were undecided.

Just 16 percent of Americans said they did not think that the limited strikes would lead to a longer military campaign, the poll indicated. And an overwhelming majority — 75 percent — said they do not support sending U.S. troops to Syria. Obama has already pledged that will not happen.

The Syria dilemma has become a major test of Obama's political mettle on national security and foreign policy issues. After months of resisting U.S. military action in Syria, the White House abruptly reversed course after the Aug. 21 attacks — only to confront withering public support both at home and abroad.

The AP poll found that 54 percent of people do not approve the way Obama has handled the U.S. response to Syria. That marked an increase from 43 percent in June 2012.

Darrell West, vice president of governance studies at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, said Obama is likely to play on Americans' emotions to convince them to support strikes.

"It is very difficult for a president to persuade people when they've already made up their mind against some type of foreign intervention," West said Monday. "But what he can do is basically explain much better than he has done to date about what has been going on in Syria, the use of chemical weapons, the impact on young children and women there."

Released Monday, the AP poll was conducted Sept. 6-8 by GfK Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,007 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

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Associated Press Writers Tracy Brown and Dennis Junius in Washington, Raquel Dillon in Glendale, Calif., Rik Stevens in Concord, N.H., and Tammy Webber in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Follow Lara Jakes and Jennifer Agiesta on Twitter at https://twitter.com/larajakesAP and https://twitter.com/jennagiesta

Poll: Little public support for Syria strike

An AP poll finds more than six in ten Americans want Congress to vote against authorizing a U.S. attack.
Cuts across party lines

Threat of U.S. Syria attack eases as crisis moves to U.N.

Ahmad Abu Layl (R), a 15 year-old fighter from the Free Syrian Army, looks through a hole in wall with his father in Aleppo September 10, 2013. REUTERS/Hamid Khatib

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Roberta Rampton

WASHINGTON/AMMAN (Reuters) - Syria accepted a Russian proposal on Tuesday to give up chemical weapons and win a reprieve from U.S. military strikes but serious differences emerged between Russia and the United States that could obstruct a U.N. resolution to seal a deal.

Even as the White House said it was determined to push ahead with a congressional resolution authorizing force, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the weapons plan would only succeed if Washington and its allies rule out military action.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said in a statement shown on Russian state television that Damascus was committed to the Russian initiative.

"We want to join the convention on the prohibition of chemical weapons. We are ready to observe our obligations in accordance with that convention, including providing all information about these weapons," Moualem said.

"We are ready to declare the location of the chemical weapons, stop production of the chemical weapons, and show these (production) facilities to representatives of Russia and other United Nations member states," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington believes the proposal must be endorsed by the U.N. Security Council "in order to have the confidence that this has the force it ought to have."

Moscow has previously vetoed three resolutions that would have condemned the Syrian government over the conflict.

The latest proposal "can work only if we hear that the American side and all those who support the United States in this sense reject the use of force," Putin said in televised remarks.

Kerry and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Congress the threat of military action was critical to forcing Assad to bend on his chemical weapons.

"For this diplomatic option to have a chance of succeeding, the threat of a U.S. military action - the credible, real threat of U.S. military action - must continue," Hagel told the House Armed Services Committee.

U.S. officials said Kerry would meet Lavrov in Geneva on Thursday for further talks.

Amid the whirlwind of diplomatic activity focused on the response to a suspected chemical weapons attack on a Damascus neighborhood on August 21, the civil war resumed in earnest, President Bashar al-Assad's jets again bombing rebel positions in the capital.

UNITED NATIONS

The United States and its allies remain skeptical about the Russian proposal and President Barack Obama sought to keep the pressure on Syria by maintaining his drive for congressional backing for a possible military strike while exploring a diplomatic alternative.

France wants a binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would provide a framework for controlling and eliminating the weapons and says that Syria would face "extremely serious" consequences if it violated the conditions.

Britain and the United States said they would work on quickly formulating a resolution.

The U.N. Security Council initially called a closed door meeting asked for by Russia to discuss its proposal to place Syria's chemical weapons under international control, but the meeting was later canceled at Russia's request.

French officials said their draft resolution was designed to make sure the Russian proposal would have teeth, by allowing military action if Assad is uncooperative.

"It was extremely well played by the Russians, but we didn't want someone else to go to the U.N. with a resolution that was weak. This is on our terms and the principles are established. It puts Russia in a situation where they can't take a step back after putting a step forward," said a French diplomatic source.

Russia, however, made clear it wanted to take the lead.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his French counterpart that Moscow would propose a U.N. draft declaration supporting its initiative to put Syria's chemical weapons under international control, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Russia also told France that a proposal to adopt a Security Council resolution holding the Syrian government responsible for the possible use of chemical weapons was unacceptable.

PUTIN: "NO THREAT OF FORCE"

The United States and France had been poised to launch missile strikes to punish Assad's forces, which they blame for the chemical weapons attack. Syria denies it was responsible and, with the backing of Moscow, blames rebels for staging the attacks to provoke U.S. intervention.

The White House said Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande had agreed in a telephone call on their preference for a diplomatic solution, but that they should continue to prepare for "a full range of responses."

Obama asked Congress on Tuesday to delay votes on authorizing military strikes in order to give Russia time to get Syria to surrender its chemical weapons, according to U.S. senators.

"What he (Obama) wants is to check out the seriousness of the Syrian and the Russian willingness to get rid of those chemical weapons in Syria. He wants time to check it out," Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin told reporters.

The White House said Obama, who has called the Russian proposal a potential breakthrough, would still push for a vote in Congress to authorize force when he makes a televised address to Americans later on Tuesday.

But the U.S. congressional vote now appeared more about providing a hypothetical threat to back up diplomacy, rather than to unleash immediate missile strikes. A bipartisan group of senior members of Congress was working on a resolution that would take into account the Russian proposal.

While the prospects of a deal remain uncertain, the proposal could provide a way for Obama to avoid ordering unpopular action. It may make it easier for him to win backing from a skeptical Congress, which could have severely damaged his authority if it withheld support for strikes. Opinion polls show most Americans are opposed to military intervention in Syria, weary after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whether international inspectors can neutralize chemical weapons dumps while war rages in Syria remains open to question.

Western states believe Syria has a vast undeclared chemical arsenal. Sending inspectors to destroy it would be hard even in peace and extraordinarily complicated in the midst of a war.

The two main precedents are ominous: U.N. inspectors dismantled the chemical arsenal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the 1990s but left enough doubt to provide the basis for a U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was rehabilitated by the West after agreeing to give up his banned weapons, only to be overthrown with NATO help in 2011.

SYRIAN REBELS DISMAYED

The Syrian war has already killed more than 100,000 people and driven millions from their homes. It threatens to spread violence across the Middle East, with countries endorsing the sectarian divisions that brought civil war to Lebanon and Iraq.

The wavering from the West dealt an unquestionable blow to the Syrian opposition, which had thought it had finally secured military intervention after pleading for two and a half years for help from Western leaders that vocally opposed Assad.

The rebel Syrian National Coalition decried a "political maneuver which will lead to pointless procrastination and will cause more death and destruction to the people of Syria."

Assad's warplanes bombed rebellious districts inside the Damascus city limits on Tuesday for the first time since the poison gas attacks. Rebels said the strikes demonstrated that the government had concluded the West had lost its nerve.

"By sending the planes back, the regime is sending the message that it no longer feels international pressure," activist Wasim al-Ahmad said from Mouadamiya, one of the districts of the capital hit by the chemical attack.

The Russian proposal "is a cheap trick to buy time for the regime to kill more and more people," said Sami, a member of the local opposition coordinating committee in the Damascus suburb of Erbin, also hit by last month's chemical attack.

Troops and pro-Assad militiamen tried to seize the northern district of Barzeh and the eastern suburb of Deir Salman near Damascus airport, working-class Sunni Muslim areas where opposition activists and residents reported street fighting.

Fighter jets bombed Barzeh three times and pro-Assad militia backed by army tank fire made a push into the area. Air raids were also reported on the Western outskirts near Mouadamiya.

But Damascenes in pro-Assad areas were grateful for a reprieve from Western strikes: "Russia is the voice of reason. They know that if a strike went ahead against Syria, then World War Three - even Armageddon - would befall Europe and America," said Salwa, a Shi'ite Muslim in the affluent Malki district.

(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris; Writing by Peter Graff, David Storey and Claudia Parsons; Editing by Jim Loney)

Syria says it will give up weapons arsenals

President Bashar Assad's regime says it will forfeit its chemical weapons but President Obama remains skeptical.
Putin's latest demand

NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian court convicted four men Tuesday in the deadly gang rape of a young woman on a moving New Delhi bus, a brutal crime that galvanized public anger over the widespread — yet widely tolerated — sexual violence faced by Indian women.

As word of the verdict filtered out, protesters outside the courthouse chanted "Hang them! Hang them!"

The men were convicted on all 11 counts against them, including rape and murder, and now face the possibility of hanging. The sentences are expected to be handed down Wednesday.

Judge Yogesh Khanna said in his verdict that the men, who tricked the 23-year-old rape victim and a male friend of hers into boarding the bus they were driving, had committed "murder of a helpless person."

The parents of the woman, who cannot be identified under Indian law, had tears in their eyes as the verdicts were read. The mother, wearing a pink sari, sat just a few feet from the convicted men in a tiny courtroom jammed with lawyers, police and reporters. The hearing lasted only a few minutes, and the four men were quickly led from the courtroom by policemen after the verdicts were read.

Speaking before the convictions, the father of the victim called for the four to be executed.

"For what happened with her, these brutes must be hanged," he told reporters as he left home for the courthouse. "Nothing but the death penalty is acceptable to us."

Protesters called the Dec. 16 attack a wake-up call for India, where women have long talked quietly of enduring everything from sexual comments to public groping to rape, but where they would often face blame themselves if they complained publicly.

"Every girl at any age experiences this — harassment or rape. We don't feel safe," said law school graduate Rabia Pathania. "That's why we're here. We want this case to be an example for every other case that has been filed and will be filed."

Lawyers for the men have insisted they were tortured — a common occurrence in India's chaotic criminal justice system — and that confessions, which were later retracted, were coerced.

A.P. Singh, who at times has worked as a lawyer for all the men, said they were innocent.

"These accused have been framed simply to please the public," he told reporters. "This is not a fair trial."

The men were identified by the young woman's friend, and police say they could be seen on security cameras near the bus.

The men, most of them from a crowded New Delhi neighborhood of hand-made brick shanties filled by migrants from poor rural villages, were joy-riding around the city in an off-duty bus when police say they came across the woman and her friend waiting at a bus top. The pair — by most accounts they were not romantically involved — were heading home after an evening showing of "Life of Pi" at a high-end mall just a short walk from the courthouse where Tuesday's verdict was read.

It wasn't late. It wasn't a bad neighborhood. The bus, by all appearances, was just a way for the two to get home.

Instead, the attackers beat the friend into submission, held down the woman and repeatedly raped her. They penetrated her with a metal rod, causing severe internal injuries that led to her death two weeks later.

The woman, who was from another poor migrant family, had recently finished her exams for a physiotherapy degree. Her father earned a little over $200 a month as an airport baggage handler. She was, the family hoped, their path to the bottom rungs of India's growing middle class.

The defendants also came from poor and ill-educated families. One, Mukesh Singh, occasionally drove the bus and cleaned it. Another, Vinay Sharma, was a 20-year-old assistant at a gym and the only one to graduate from high school. Akshay Thakur, 28, occasionally worked as a driver's helper on the bus. Pawan Gupta, 19, was a fruit seller.

With them were two other men. Police say Ram Singh, 33, hanged himself in prison, though his family insists he was murdered. He was the brother of Mukesh Singh, who was convicted Tuesday. Another man — an 18-year-old who was a juvenile at the time of the attack and cannot be identified under Indian law — was convicted in August and will serve the maximum sentence, three years in a reform home.

Facing public protests and political pressure after the attack, the government reformed some of its antiquated laws on sexual violence, creating fast-track courts to avoid the painfully long rape trials that can easily last over a decade. The trial of the four men, which took about seven months, was astonishingly fast by Indian standards. The men can appeal their convictions.

While many activists heralded the changes that came with the case — more media reporting on sexual violence, education for police in how to treat rape victims — they note that women remain widely seen as second-class citizens in India. Girls get less medical care and less education than boys, studies show. Millions of female fetuses are statistically "missing" because of illegal sex-selective abortions.

Victims of sexual assault, meanwhile, often find themselves blamed by their families and police, who deride them for inviting attacks. Activists say most rapes are simply kept secret, even from authorities, so that the woman and her family are not seen as tainted.

"We can celebrate this particular case. But total change is a much larger issue," said Rebecca John, a supreme court lawyer and prominent advocate for women in India.

"As we celebrate this case, let us mourn for the other cases that are not highlighted."

The victim's family was, in many ways, far different from most in India. Her parents had pushed her to go as far as possible in school, and even encouraged her to leave home for a better education, both seen as highly suspect in the conservative village culture that her parents were born into. They had saved for years to help pay her school fees, and made clear that her brother would not be favored.

And when she was raped, the only people they blamed were her rapists.

Their pain has been staggering.

"I always told my children: 'If you study hard you can escape this poverty.' All my life I believed this," the mother told the AP in an interview earlier this year. "Now that dream has ended."

Four men guilty in India gang rape case

The fatal attack on a young woman on a New Delhi bus set off a wave of protests across the country.
Face possibility of hanging