Syria Feature: US Considering Military Steps for No-Fly Zone (Entous/Barnes)

Patriot Anti-Missile SystemAdam Entous and Julian E. Barnes write for the Wall Street Journal:

The White House, under pressure from key allies and U.S. lawmakers, is reviewing a new set of potential military options for assisting rebels in Syria, according to U.S. officials.

Among the ideas were proposals to bomb Syrian aircraft on the ground and to use Patriot antimissile batteries in Turkey to defend swaths of northern Syria from the regime's Scud missiles, they said.

Defense officials said those two options faced potentially insurmountable technological and legal hurdles, however — underscoring the difficulty of finding a plausible way to address increasing international pressure to weigh in more forcefully on the side of the Syrian rebels. Other options were also presented to the White House but officials declined to discuss them.

Top U.S. national-security officials met this week at the White House to discuss the revamped options, which were drawn up by the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff in response to a request from the White House.

President Barack Obama and Pentagon chiefs remain skeptical about using force because of concerns about being drawn into a new conflict, and this latest review may only lead to further incremental steps, officials say.

The Obama administration has come under increasing pressure from close allies including the U.K., France and Israel to strengthen some rebel groups and help them gain ground militarily against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Officials from these countries say they are concerned that radical Islamist groups, including the al Qaeda-linked al Nusra Front, could dominate post-Assad Syria the longer the civil war drags on. They have also told Washington its reluctance to support moderate rebels more fully will reduce the West's ability to influence the country's future.

As the death toll in Syria climbed over the past year — from 5,000 to 70,000, according to the United Nations — the Obama administration has been locked in debate over whether or how to intervene, exposing rifts between State Department and Central Intelligence Agency officials who advocated greater U.S. involvement against top White House advisers deeply resistant to anything that would drag the U.S. directly into an open-ended conflict.

The military's Joint Chiefs of Staff first presented military options to the White House last July. They included a no-fly zone, a humanitarian corridor and a more limited aerial campaign, as well as options, backed by the CIA, for arming and training rebel fighters who don't have ties to radical Islamist groups, according to current and former officials.

Mr. Obama rebuffed the CIA's proposal to arm select rebel fighters, but the spy agency got a green light to provide limited training to select rebels, according to current and former officials. The White House declined to comment.

In the new review conducted in recent weeks, the Joint Staff studied the possibility of destroying Mr. Assad's aircraft on the ground by using weapons that can be launched from ships offshore, reducing the need to send U.S. aircraft into Syrian airspace.

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