Last week, when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, reading from a letter sent from the White House to members of Congress, announced that the U.S. intelligence community believed that the Syrian regime may have used chemical weapons against its own people, the Obama administration wasn't quite ready for the round-the-clock cable-news frenzy that followed.
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Back in August, and on multiple occasions since, President Obama laid out his "red line" for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Don't use chemical weapons. But now, reports had been trickling out of Syria for weeks of rebel fighters claiming they had been attacked with mysterious chemical gases. Videos emerged that appeared to show victims foaming at the mouth, in agony. Officials from Britain, France, Israel, and Qatar all said they believed chemical weapons had been used. With Hagel's remarks, the Obama administration seemed to be confirming that the president's red line might indeed have been crossed.
But officials told me that as late as Thursday morning, the White House had yet to assemble talking points for the State Department on the subject, a rarity for a White House famously adept at managing 23rd St.'s messaging from Pennsylvania Ave. Just minutes before Secretary of State John Kerry went to brief members of Congress in a closed-door session on Syria, his team was still scrambling to prepare talking points based on the White House letter.
"I think that they just weren't prepared for that assessment by the intel community -- it caught them off guard," one State Department official said, referring to the White House. (Another State Department official denied that the administration was unprepared. "The Hill briefing was long planned and given the decision to release an unclassified letter on Wednesday night, that was naturally a part of what the secretary discussed," this person said. "The language for the briefing and our public language was closely coordinated at every step with the White House. The White House hosted a briefing call with the press." But the invitation to that call went out only minutes before the briefing.)
As for the White House letter to Congress, it was carefully hedged. "[O]ur intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin," it read. "[O]ur standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts," it continued.
The use of qualifiers and the focus on the evidence from the White House is no accident: Past intelligence failures and the public's war exhaustion loom over the entire discussion of what to do when it comes to Syria. But among many at the State Department, as the death toll from the conflict climbs toward 100,000 people and the refugee population soars into the millions, a sense of "huge frustration" is growing, one department source said.
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