Obama’s political gamble over Syria

Is Barack Obama taking a massive gamble in asking Congress to back a strike against Syria, and what are his motives? Emily Hohler reports.

President Barack Obama's decision to seek approval from the US Congress before using force against Syria is "not the behaviour of a commander-in-chief who has the courage of his own convictions", says The Times. Before his "loss of nerve", Obama had stated that if President Assad used chemical weapons, there would be consequences; more than 1,400 civilians were killed during last month's gas attack in Damascus."The dangers should the world come to see such threats as empty are hard to overstate."

Obama has therefore taken a gamble that Congress "cannot afford to let him lose". In public Obama has said that any military action would send a stronger signal if endorsed by Congress. In private, his reasoning is "largely political": he wants members of Congress to share responsibility for what happens next.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.