U.S. confirms: Assad used chemical weapons against Syrian rebels, civilians (updated)

think that’s a big mistake,” Clinton said during a Tuesday event on behalf of the McCain Institute for International Leadership in New York City.

“I agree with you about this,” Clinton told McCain. “Sometimes it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t over-commit — like, as long as you don’t make an improvident commitment.”

The Times reports that earlier this week, during a broad evaluation of U.S. Syria policy, senior State Department officials have been pushing for an aggressive military response to the recent battlefield gains by the Assad government, and that these officials’ position has only been strengthened by the intelligence community’s determination about chemical weapons. These officials have advocated measures such as airstrikes to hit the primary landing strips in Syria that the government uses to launch the chemical weapons attacks, ferry troops around the country, and receive shipments of matériel from Iran.

White House officials, however, remain wary, and one American official told the Times that a meeting on Wednesday of the president’s senior advisers yielded no firm decisions about how to proceed.

Following the administration’s report to Congress about the determination of the U.S. intelligence community, the president’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told reporters that the president had decided to provide “direct military support” to the opposition.

He would not specify whether the support would include lethal aid, such as weapons, which would be a reversal of Obama’s opposition to arming the rebels.

Haaretz reports that Rhodes said the U.S. military assistance to the rebels would be different in “both scope and scale” from what had been authorized before, which included non-lethal equipment such as night-vision goggles and body armor.

When pressed on what the United States would do next, Rhodes said the White House would share the information with Congress and U.S. allies, but will “make decisions on our own time line.”

Britain and France have persuaded the EU to lift the ban on providing arms to the rebels, but agreed not to go ahead and do so until 1 August. Delaying arms supplies until 1 August was meant to allow an international conference to take place to try and find a diplomatic solution to the civil war. The conference was scheduled for July, but has not been postponed with no firm date set for the meeting. This may convince the United Kingdom and France not to wait until August, especially as their diplomats have been arguing that the best way to address the twin threats of Assad victory or a victory by Islamist rebels would be to beef up support for the moderate Free Syrian Army.