David Frost dies at 74; British journalist interviewed Nixon

David Frost badgered statesmen and made small talk with stars, but one exchange towered over all the others in his 50-year career.

"You've explained how you have got caught up in this thing," he told Richard Nixon in his famous 1977 TV interviews with the disgraced former president. "You've explained your motives: I don't want to quibble about any of that. But just coming to the substance: Would you go further than 'mistakes' — the word that seems not enough for people?"

Nixon — three years after stepping down from office in the wake of Watergate — astonished the unflappably British Frost by appearing to acknowledge that "mistakes" may have been too mild a term.

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"What word would you suggest?" Nixon asked.

In a 2007 interview with Timothy Naftali, then director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, Frost called it "the most heart-stopping answer I've ever heard."

"I knew that he was more vulnerable at that moment than he probably ever would be again and that I must phrase my response in order to get that across," Frost said. "And I threw down my clipboard to indicate that this was not a scripted job, that this was not a prepared ambush…."

An interviewer who proved as adept at probing the inner Nixon as he was at asking celebrities their secrets to a successful marriage, Frost died Saturday night, apparently of a heart attack, while aboard the cruise liner Queen Elizabeth, his family said. He was 74.

He was scheduled to give a shipboard speech and died en route from England to Portugal.

Frost interviewed the last eight British prime ministers and the seven U.S. presidents who held office from 1969 to 2008, according to the Associated Press. His Nixon interviews were the most widely watched news programs broadcast anywhere until that time.

"He could be — and certainly was with me — both a friend and a fearsome interviewer," British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a statement Sunday.

Dick Cavett told the L.A.Times on Sunday that he admired Frost for "his fits of incisiveness."

"He was excessively polite at times," veteran interviewer Cavett said, "and then he would burst out of that and just skewer somebody with a short dagger."

When Frost interviewed U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, he wouldn't let the politician off the hook for his alleged misuse of public funds.

"Being his elegant, arrogant, contemptuous self, Powell used the phrase, 'I've paid my dues' at least three times," Cavett said. "On the fourth time, David said: 'We've all heard enough of your wretched dues!' I wanted to kiss him for that and so did everyone in the studio audience."

Frost's best-known interview was with Nixon and it was controversial well before it was aired. Even though the former president was to break his silence for the first time since leaving office, the three major networks wouldn't run Frost's four 90-minute programs. By paying Nixon $600,000, Frost had breached CBS' ethical code, the network ruled. ABC and NBC declined because their own personnel had not been involved.

But Frost, taping more than 28 hours with Nixon at a Dana Point home, contracted with individual stations and made global headlines. Under his questioning, Nixon, at times combative and at others almost teary, acknowledged Watergate's toll.

"I let down my friends," he told Frost. "I let down the country. I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but think it's too corrupt.... I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me the rest of my life."

Nixon denied committing any crimes or impeachable offenses but said he had lied to the American people while under fierce attack from a "fifth column" of political enemies and journalists.

"I brought myself down," he told Frost, a TV host long known to Americans. "I gave 'em a sword and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I'd been in their position, I'd have done the same thing."

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Mexico's Vicente Fox pushes marijuana debate to forefront

SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico — Former President Vicente Fox grew up on a farm here in rural Guanajuato, one of Mexico's most conservative states. He is the kind of guy who wears big belt buckles, collects hand-tooled saddles and worships the free market.

Ask him about his experience with the drug culture and the big man with the cowboy-movie mustache exhibits a kind of straight-laced pique: Never smoked pot, he says. Hardly knew anyone who did.

But Fox has always fancied himself a policy maverick. And these days, the former standard-bearer of Mexico's conservative National Action Party, or PAN, has emerged as one of Latin America's most outspoken advocates of marijuana legalization.

Fox, 71, came out for legalization a few years ago. But this summer he has significantly ramped up his efforts. In June, he declared that he would grow the plant if it were legalized — "I'm a farmer," he said — and added that he'd like to see marijuana sold in Mexican convenience stores.

Some see him as a visionary, others as a cynical promoter milking the issue for attention (and, perhaps, lucrative speaking fees). Many think he's simply nuts. In a poll published in the liberal Mexico City newspaper La Jornada, 43% of respondents agreed that the former president "had finally gone crazy," while 32% said he should be investigated for promoting criminality. Only 11% said he had the right idea.

It was an unsurprising response from the Mexican left, who have long considered Fox to be a rash bumpkin with an embarrassing history of speaking before thinking. But these days, it is arguably the right-wing Fox who has done the most to promote this pet cause of the left and finally force a serious debate in the Mexican mainstream.

Fox speaks like a true believer about legalization's potential to save his troubled country, at times lapsing into the giddy visionary jargon of online TED talks: It would be a "game-changer," he says, "a change of paradigm."

A month after his pot-growing comments made international headlines, Fox built momentum for the cause with an attention-grabbing legalization symposium at his presidential library, the Centro Fox, here in the farming town where he grew up.

Since then, the national discussion has grown considerably. Mexican TV and newspapers are suddenly rife with articles debating the pros and cons. The mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Angel Mancera, has reiterated his promise to debate legalization in the left-leaning capital. More recently, the liberal governor of Morelos state, Graco Ramirez, said he would push to ease marijuana restrictions in his state.

Though Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto opposes the idea, it now seems possible that the nation might follow the pattern of the United States, where residents of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational marijuana use, despite the continuing opposition of the federal government. The Mexican Congress decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana in 2009.

Fox favors the eventual legalization and regulation of all drugs in Mexico. The idea is to rob the bloodthirsty drug cartels of their profits and power. Legal pot, he says, would be the first step.

"This prohibition is the last frontier of prohibitions," Fox told The Times during a break in his July symposium. Revealing a marked libertarian streak, he argued that government efforts to regulate other personal behaviors had been found wanting: "The issue of abortion. The issue of same-sex marriage. The issue of gays. The issue of alcohol," he said. "These arbitrarily imposed prohibitions have ended. And they have ended because they don't work."

Across Latin America, there is a growing frustration with long-standing U.S.-backed prohibitionist drug policies. Several current and former heads of state in the region have, like Fox, declared their support for marijuana legalization — declarations that would have been considered unthinkable just a few years ago.

One of the most significant cracks in the previous drug-war consensus came in late July, when Uruguay's lower house of parliament approved a landmark marijuana legalization bill. Observers say it has a good chance of becoming law.

During his 2000-06 presidency, Fox was a prohibitionist. But now, he says, he doesn't see any sense in Mexico fighting domestic pot growers when the legalization trend appears to be picking up steam in the U.S., where Mexico sends about 40% to 70% of the marijuana it grows.

His change of heart took place during the six-year term of his successor, Felipe Calderon, who launched a military-led crackdown on Mexico's drug cartels. From 2006 to the end of Calderon's term late last year, an estimated 70,000 Mexicans died, and thousands more disappeared — what Fox today calls a "butchery" and a "gully of blood."

Fox's friends say he was affected by the Calderon era. "I think Fox is a religious person, and he is a humanist," said Ruben Aguilar, Fox's former spokesman. "He lives with a lot of sadness over the deaths in those last six years."

Calderon, for his part, has said that he launched the offensive because he discovered, after winning the election, that Mexico's criminal groups had become frighteningly powerful, and that the institutions charged with fighting crime were, in many cases, mixed up in it.

Embedded in such comments is an implicit critique of Fox's leadership, and it reflects the broader criticism that some other observers level against him: that he accomplished little of note after the milestone 2000 election in which he vanquished the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which governed Mexico in a semi-autocratic fashion for more than 70 years.

Aguilar defended Fox's record as president and noted that he has always been more popular with the Mexican mainstream than with the left and the news media. Even so, it will be a challenge for Fox to sell the idea of a radical shift in drug policy to ordinary Mexicans. In a poll released last month by the research firm GCE, nearly 50% of Mexicans said they were "totally opposed" to marijuana legalization, while about 14% said they strongly favored it. The rest fell somewhere in between.

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Obama steps up campaign for Congress' support for Syria strikes

WASHINGTON — The White House appealed Monday to two of Congress' most powerful interests — protecting Israel and challenging Iran — as President Obama and his aides scrambled to win lawmakers' support for a resolution authorizing punitive missile strikes in Syria.

Obama led the full-throttle Labor Day lobbying campaign by dialing up congressional leaders and huddling for an hour with two Republican hawks, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who now may prove pivotal to the president's aims. McCain later gave a qualified endorsement, which cheered the White House.

The president is staking his credibility, and arguably his legacy, on the battle that will play out in Congress over the next two weeks. Before he leaves Tuesday night on a four-day trip to Sweden and Russia for an economic summit, he will meet with the leaders and ranking members of the key national security panels, including the Senate and House committees on armed services, foreign relations, and intelligence.

Obama is betting that a deeply divided Congress will come together on an issue that he has called a core security interest, and give him political cover to attack Syria without a United Nations mandate. The White House stands to lose a great deal if Congress refuses.

Analysts say a congressional rebuke could undermine the use of executive power and prerogatives in the future, severely damage U.S. standing with Israel and other Middle East allies, and embolden Iran, North Korea and other adversaries.

Obama worked hard Monday to avoid that scenario. McCain, who long has pushed for greater U.S. intervention in Syria, said after meeting with Obama that he would back a resolution if it included greater support for the opposition militias that have fought to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad since March 2011.

Rejecting a resolution against Syria would be "catastrophic," McCain told reporters. "It would undermine the credibility of the United States of America and the president of the United States. None of us wants that."

But in a sign of the uphill contest, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and other senior administration officials struggled to convince skeptical House Democrats that military action was needed to punish Assad's government for allegedly using sarin nerve gas on civilians Aug. 21.

In a sometimes heated conference call, House Democrats, many of whom are still in their home districts during the summer recess, said they were getting an earful from constituents deeply opposed to launching another war, according to a Democratic aide briefed on the call.

A senior administration official said the White House was working with lawmakers to adjust the language in the resolution to address their concerns.

Obama "made clear that he was not contemplating U.S. boots on the ground or an open-ended intervention, and that he intends to undertake tailored military operations, limited in scope and duration," the official said. "We are open to working with Congress" to win authorization for use of military force.

The White House strategy for threading the needle between opposing views rests heavily on the argument that airstrikes are necessary to send a clear message about U.S. resolve. The target, the White House argues, is not just Syria.

The broader strategic goal is to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to safeguard Israel's security, sensitive issues that tend to galvanize an otherwise-gridlocked Congress.

Obama has pledged to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, and lawmakers are generally united on that issue. They also understand that Israel, though officially silent on how Congress should vote, is looking to Washington to help shield it from the Syrian civil war's spillover into neighboring countries.

Administration officials warn privately that a "no" vote in Congress would encourage Iran to push ahead with its nuclear development program and would make it harder for the United States to intervene if Tehran decides to build a bomb.

Some officials say pro-Israel advocates who have leverage among House Republicans may play a key role in the coming debate.

Conservative Christians, who are passionate defenders of Israel, can be expected to weigh in with House Republicans from the South and West, said a House Republican aide. "They're tuned in to all of this," said the aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly under office rules.

Congressional antagonism toward Iran has grown over the last decade, as lopsided bipartisan majorities repeatedly have voted for tougher Iran sanctions, sometimes against the wishes of the White House. Lawmakers have discounted arguments that economic sanctions mostly hurt ordinary Iranians, not government rulers.

Some antiwar Republicans have begun arguing that missile strikes could put Israel more at risk by encouraging Syria and its ally, the Islamic militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, to launch attacks on Israeli settlements or cities. But many analysts doubt Syria or Hezbollah would want to provoke Israel's powerful military while Assad's forces are fully engaged in a civil war.

Israel doesn't want to be seen as urging the U.S. to take military action for Israel's protection. For that reason, the Israeli government can be expected to keep a low profile, and pro-Israel groups in Washington will probably avoid taking too prominent a role on the issue, said an official of one group.

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David Frost dies at 74; interviewed Nixon

David Frost may be best remembered for his post-Watergate interviews with former President Richard Nixon, but the veteran British broadcaster was equally at ease as a satirist, game show host and serious political journalist.

In a television career that spanned half a century across both sides of the Atlantic, Frost interviewed a long list of the world's most powerful and famous, including virtually every British prime minister and U.S. president of his time. He also was a gifted entertainer, a born TV host, and his amiable and charming personality was often described as the key to his success as interviewer.

"Being interviewed by him was always a pleasure but also you knew that there would be multiple stories the next day arising from it," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.

PHOTOS: David Frost | 1939 - 2013

Blair's former communications chief, Alastair Campbell, added on Twitter that Frost was "one of best interviewers because his sheer niceness could lull you into saying things you didn't intend."

Frost, 74, died of a heart attack on Saturday night aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship, where he was due to give a speech, his family said. The BBC said it received the statement from Frost's family saying it was devastated and asking "for privacy at this difficult time." The cruise company Cunard said its vessel left the English port of Southampton on Saturday for a 10-day cruise in the Mediterranean.

Prime Minister David Cameron, one of the first public officials to send condolences, praised Frost for being an "extraordinary man with charm, wit, talent, intelligence and warmth in equal measure," while BBC executives lauded him as "a titan of broadcasting."

Frost began his career almost fresh out of college as the host of an early 1960s BBC satirical news show "That Was The Week That Was," then a pioneering program that ruthlessly lampooned politicians. The show gained a wide following, and Frost's signature greeting, "Hello, good evening and welcome" was often mimicked.

Frost was popular in Britain and just beginning to launch a career on U.S. television when he became internationally known in 1977 with a series of television interviews with Nixon.

They were groundbreaking for Frost and the ex-president, who was trying to salvage his reputation after resigning from the White House in disgrace following the Watergate scandal three years earlier. At the time, it was the most widely watched news interview in the history of TV.

The interviewer and his subject sparred through the first part of the interview, but Frost later said he realized he didn't have what he wanted as it wound down. Nixon had acknowledged mistakes, but Frost pressed him on whether that was enough. Americans, he said, wanted to hear him own up to wrongdoing and acknowledge abuse of power — and "unless you say it, you're going to be haunted for the rest of your life."

"That was totally off-the-cuff," Frost later said. "That was totally ad-lib. In fact, I threw my clipboard down just to indicate that it was not prepared in any way. … I just knew at that moment that Richard Nixon was more vulnerable than he'd ever be in his life. And I knew I had to get it right."

After more pressing, Nixon relented. "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life," he said.

The face-off went on to spawn a hit play, and in 2008 a new generation was introduced to Frost's work with the Oscar-nominated movie "Frost/Nixon," starring Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon.

Frost was born on April 7, 1939, in Kent, England, the son of a Methodist preacher.

The young Frost began television hosting while still a student at Cambridge University, and soon after graduation he was approached by a BBC producer to front "That Was The Week That Was."

He went on to host a sketch show called "The Frost Report" and became a regular figure on U.S. television. Behind the camera, Frost also co-founded two television companies, London Weekend Television and breakfast station TV-am, churning out a prolific amount of programs.

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Over the years his interviewees included a wide-ranging roster of politicians and celebrities, from Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev to Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto to leading entertainment figures such as Orson Welles and the Beatles.

He was the only person to have interviewed the last eight British prime ministers and the seven U.S. presidents in office from 1969 to 2008. Besides the Nixon interviews, one of the more memorable moments included a tense interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over the sinking of the Argentine warship during the Falklands conflict.

"He could be — and certainly was with me — both a friend and a fearsome interviewer," Cameron said.

In later years Frost kept up his probing questioning of political leaders, although some came to criticize him for being "too nice" to his subjects. Somewhat incongruously, he also hosted a game show called "Through the Keyhole" that spied on the homes of celebrities from 1987 to 2008.

"His sense of humor shone through everything he did," Richard Brock, a producer who worked with Frost at Al-Jazeera, told the broadcaster. "He wasn't all heavyweight, political interviews. He really got a kick out of some of the lighter stuff."

Frost, who wrote about a dozen books, won numerous awards and was knighted in 1993. Most recently he was hosting programs for Al-Jazeera English, where he had worked since its launch several years ago.

He is survived by his wife, Carina, and their three sons.

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Obama's pause on Syria may prompt British Parliament to reconsider

LONDON — President Obama's decision to seek congressional approval for a military strike on Syria could open the door to another vote by the British Parliament, which rejected such intervention, senior officials here suggested Sunday.

French lawmakers also seized on Obama's decision as an argument for holding their own vote on armed intervention in Syria.

The delay before a possible strike as Obama makes his case to U.S. lawmakers could give their British counterparts time to consider new evidence pointing toward the Syrian government's culpability in gassing rebel-held neighborhoods in Damascus.

"It opens a very important new opportunity," the chairman of the parliamentary intelligence committee, Malcolm Rifkind, told the BBC. Rifkind, a former British defense secretary, supports force as an option in responding to the Syrian government's alleged chemical attack.

He said Prime Minister David Cameron and opposition leader Ed Miliband should now agree to revive the matter in the House of Commons, which dealt Cameron a shocking defeat Thursday by rejecting his request for an endorsement, in principle, of a military strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Lawmakers from Miliband's Labor Party were joined by skeptics among Cameron's own Conservatives in shooting down the motion by a 285-272 vote last week. A grim-faced Cameron immediately announced that his government would not participate in any U.S.-led military intervention.

French President Francois Hollande has said his country would join the U.S. in a military strike and, unlike Cameron, has not sought the consent of Parliament. But opposition parties warned him not to make any "hasty decisions" and demanded a vote in the National Assembly, even though Hollande is not obliged to call or heed such a vote.

A debate on Syria in the assembly is scheduled for Wednesday.

"Like the president of the United States, who, in the name of democratic principles, has decided to consult the American Congress, the French president must do the same and organize a formal vote of Parliament," Jean-Louis Borloo, head of the centrist Union of Democrats and Independents, said in a written statement.

henry.chu@latimes.com

Times staff writer Chu reported from London and special correspondent Willsher from Paris.

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David Frost dies at 74; British journalist interviewed Nixon

David Frost badgered statesmen and made small talk with stars, but one exchange towered over all the others in his 50-year career.

"You've explained how you have got caught up in this thing," he told Richard Nixon in his famous 1977 TV interviews with the disgraced former president. "You've explained your motives: I don't want to quibble about any of that. But just coming to the substance: Would you go further than 'mistakes' — the word that seems not enough for people?"

Nixon — three years after stepping down from office in the wake of Watergate — astonished the unflappably British Frost by appearing to acknowledge that "mistakes" may have been too mild a term.

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"What word would you suggest?" Nixon asked.

In a 2007 interview with Timothy Naftali, then director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, Frost called it "the most heart-stopping answer I've ever heard."

"I knew that he was more vulnerable at that moment than he probably ever would be again and that I must phrase my response in order to get that across," Frost said. "And I threw down my clipboard to indicate that this was not a scripted job, that this was not a prepared ambush…."

An interviewer who proved as adept at probing the inner Nixon as he was at asking celebrities their secrets to a successful marriage, Frost died Saturday night, apparently of a heart attack, while aboard the cruise liner Queen Elizabeth, his family said. He was 74.

He was scheduled to give a shipboard speech and died en route from England to Portugal.

Frost interviewed the last eight British prime ministers and the seven U.S. presidents who held office from 1969 to 2008, according to the Associated Press. His Nixon interviews were the most widely watched news programs broadcast anywhere until that time.

"He could be — and certainly was with me — both a friend and a fearsome interviewer," British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a statement Sunday.

Dick Cavett told the L.A.Times on Sunday that he admired Frost for "his fits of incisiveness."

"He was excessively polite at times," veteran interviewer Cavett said, "and then he would burst out of that and just skewer somebody with a short dagger."

When Frost interviewed U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, he wouldn't let the politician off the hook for his alleged misuse of public funds.

"Being his elegant, arrogant, contemptuous self, Powell used the phrase, 'I've paid my dues' at least three times," Cavett said. "On the fourth time, David said: 'We've all heard enough of your wretched dues!' I wanted to kiss him for that and so did everyone in the studio audience."

Frost's best-known interview was with Nixon and it was controversial well before it was aired. Even though the former president was to break his silence for the first time since leaving office, the three major networks wouldn't run Frost's four 90-minute programs. By paying Nixon $600,000, Frost had breached CBS' ethical code, the network ruled. ABC and NBC declined because their own personnel had not been involved.

But Frost, taping more than 28 hours with Nixon at a Dana Point home, contracted with individual stations and made global headlines. Under his questioning, Nixon, at times combative and at others almost teary, acknowledged Watergate's toll.

"I let down my friends," he told Frost. "I let down the country. I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but think it's too corrupt.... I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me the rest of my life."

Nixon denied committing any crimes or impeachable offenses but said he had lied to the American people while under fierce attack from a "fifth column" of political enemies and journalists.

"I brought myself down," he told Frost, a TV host long known to Americans. "I gave 'em a sword and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I'd been in their position, I'd have done the same thing."

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Syrian rebels feel let down by delay on U.S. strikes

CAIRO — Syrian rebel commanders preparing for possible U.S. missile strikes against the government said Saturday that they were concerned President Obama's decision to seek congressional approval would mean one more broken promise of help.

Obama's announcement came late in the day in the Middle East, and there was no immediate reaction from authorities in Damascus, the Syrian capital. The government labeled as lies U.S. accusations that Syria killed more than 1,400 people, including 426 children, in an Aug. 21 chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus.

The delay appeared to be at least a minor victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Rebel commanders say the limited campaign Obama has described in recent days is insufficient, and delaying it further will only allow the Syrian government to protect its military assets.

"They are all playing us," said 1st Lt. Muhammad Sheikh, who leads a rebel militia in Rastan in Homs province, referring to the international community. "The Syrian people were very hopeful."

Musab Abu Qatada, spokesman for the Damascus military council of the Free Syrian Army rebel group, said the lengthy debate in the West had allowed the government to move weapons and soldiers into schools, empty residential buildings and underground garages.

An entire regiment and intelligence unit has been moved into university dorms and more than a dozen schools throughout the capital, he said.

Though the Supreme Military Council, the nominal head of the Free Syrian Army, is in regular contact with U.S. intelligence and military representatives, no coordination between the two sides is actually expected, according to rebel commanders.

The rebel military councils in Dara, in southern Syria, and Damascus reported receiving small daily weapons shipments in the last week, in what one member of the Dara council said was to allow rebels "to continue the work after the airstrikes."

As has often been the case though, rebels complained that fewer weapons than expected were received. They were insufficient to help them seize military bases and installations after the strikes, said Lt. Col. Mohammad Khair Harbaat of the Dara council.

Rebels received dozens of antitank weapons, antiaircraft guns, missiles and small arms, he said. A rebel near the Turkish border with Syria also reported an uptick of weapon shipments into the country in the last few days.

Rebels long have received shipments of weapons from U.S. allies in the region. Washington announced this summer, after determining that Syria had used chemical weapons in previous cases, that it would start sending arms directly to the rebels. Insurgent groups say they have yet to receive them.

Jamal Maroof, commander of the Martyrs of Syria Brigade in the north, said he thought the strikes were intended only to get both sides to reach a peaceful solution.

"The position [world leaders] are taking is just to satisfy themselves; it is not to relieve the oppression from the Syrian people," he said. "It is just to lessen the pressure on them to act."

The delay also opened up the possibility that before Congress acts, U.N. experts who visited Damascus to look for evidence of chemical weapons use will issue their findings. The inspectors left Syria on Saturday, returning to Europe with environmental and biological samples, along with other evidence to be analyzed.

The U.N. analysis could take up to three weeks, according to the world body, but U.N. officials have said they would try to expedite it. Though the report will not apportion blame for the apparent attack, experts say the findings could provide additional clues about who may have released toxic materials.

Maroof and others also expressed concern that the United States would use missile strikes to target armed Islamist groups, some of whom are linked to Al Qaeda.

Abu Firas Halabi, a spokesman for Al Tawheed Brigade near Aleppo, said opposition fighters are likely to remain on alert around military sites that could be targets.

"The fighters are watching now, and depending on the strike they will act accordingly," he said.

raja.abdulrahim@latimes.com

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Abdulrahim reported from Cairo and McDonnell from Beirut.

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Obama to seek Congress' support for strike against Syria

WASHINGTON — President Obama abruptly announced that he would seek approval from a polarized Congress for missile strikes against Syria, stopping the clock for at least a week on what had loomed as an imminent attack for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

Speaking Saturday in the Rose Garden shortly after consulting with congressional leaders, Obama said that he had made up his mind to take military action in response to this "assault on human dignity," but that the country needed to debate it.

"Over the last several days, we've heard from members of Congress who want their voices to be heard. I absolutely agree," he said. "I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective."

In the days since the Aug. 21 attack on Damascus suburbs, White House officials had said they would not seek congressional approval, even as lawmakers turned up the volume on their calls for Obama to seek a vote.

Now, a potentially prolonged and difficult debate lies ahead, one that poses a clear risk of defeat for the president. Many newer lawmakers have never authorized the use of military force, and an unlikely alliance of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats is reluctant to do so. In the House, a new generation of GOP lawmakers leans more toward isolationism than the views of defense hawks.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also sought legislative backing for military action and suffered a stinging defeat in the House of Commons, putting America's most trusted ally on the sidelines.

Obama administration officials would not rule out going ahead with a military operation against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, even if Congress does not authorize it. Like previous presidents, Obama argued that he did not need congressional approval.

"I'm ready to act in the face of this outrage," he said. "Today I'm asking Congress to send a message to the world that we are ready to move forward together as one nation."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he would call the Senate back early from its summer break for hearings this week and a vote on the resolution no later than the week after. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said his chamber would consider the issue as soon as lawmakers returned from their break Sept. 9.

The White House sent a proposed authorization to Boehner late Saturday. The resolution would authorize the president to use force "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" to prevent the use and spread of weapons of mass destruction and protect the United States and its allies from the threats "posed by such weapons."

Under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war. The 1973 War Powers Resolution permits the president to take the country to war for as long as 90 days without congressional authorization.

But about 200 members of Congress signed letters in the last week calling on the president to seek a vote in Congress. Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), who led one such effort, welcomed Obama's announcement, saying congressional votes would "reflect the collective wisdom and the definitive position of the American people."

On Saturday, Reid and a few other lawmakers issued statements strongly supporting a strike. "I believe the use of military force against Syria is both justified and necessary," Reid said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said he would work with other leaders to pass a resolution "as expeditiously as possible," calling Assad's actions "searing to the soul and blinding to the eye." And Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the panel's ranking Republican and a supporter of military action, called on the president to use "every ounce of his energy to make his case to the American people."

But most other lawmakers were noncommittal. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said only that a congressional vote "would strengthen the president's decision to take military action." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) expressed a similar sentiment.

In a twist, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who back military action, indicated they might vote against a resolution if it was too weak. "We cannot in good conscience support isolated military strikes in Syria that are not part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the president's stated goal of Assad's removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict," they said in a joint statement.

Obama argued Saturday that a military strike was essential to protect the nation's security and offered a succinct summary of the danger: "It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria's borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm."

He cited a U.S. intelligence report released Friday, which concluded that a special Syrian chemical weapons unit launched rocket and artillery fire that dispersed clouds of poisonous gas in rebel-held neighborhoods outside Damascus, the capital. The report also said a preliminary assessment determined that 1,429 people were killed.

The White House had signaled that it was preparing an assault that would come after United Nations chemical weapons experts left Syria and before he boarded a plane Tuesday night to head to Sweden and Russia.

On Saturday, the U.N. team that had been in Syria arrived in The Hague. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was briefed by his arms control advisor and will be briefed Sunday by the chief of the inspection team. The U.N. said it could take up to three weeks to assess the evidence gathered in Syria.

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President Obama's U-turn on Syria is a gamble

WASHINGTON — As often happens at the end of a busy day, President Obama took a quiet walk Friday night on the rolling South Lawn of the White House with his chief of staff and longtime confidant, Denis McDonough. The two men talked war.

Pentagon officials had fine-tuned their target lists in Syria. Five U.S. destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean were awaiting orders to launch fiery salvos of Tomahawk missiles. Obama's aides had canceled Labor Day weekend plans, expecting an imminent attack.

But after less than an hour's stroll, Obama returned to the Oval Office and stunned his mostly new second-term national security team. He tapped the brakes on a military operation he had set in motion a week ago.

The president's abrupt announcement Saturday that he would seek congressional approval before trying to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces for their suspected use of chemical weapons marked a startling U-turn. During the previous week, he and his advisors had never vigorously debated going to Congress.

If the decision was intended to seize the moral high ground from his critics, it also represented a clear gamble by a famously deliberate president. He was making a surprising surrender — at least for now — of presumed executive authority.

Obama could act alone, his aides insist, even if Congress refuses to authorize use of armed force in Syria. But he has temporarily handed the most critical decision of his second term so far to a fractious Congress with which he's had, to put it charitably, a rocky relationship.

Senior administration officials called the move consistent with Obama's legacy of seeking bipartisan consultation, and pulling America out of more than a decade of post-9/11 wars. On Friday, he betrayed his dilemma about ordering U.S. forces into another Middle East conflict. "I assure you nobody ends up being more war weary than me," he had said.

On Saturday, he said, "I respect the views of those who call for caution, particularly as our country emerges from a time of war that I was elected in part to end."

Colin Kahl, who served in Obama's first term as deputy assistant Defense secretary for the Middle East, said the president must be confident about gaining congressional approval of a strike against Assad's government.

"He has to have made a calculation that this is a fight he can win," Kahl said. "If he wins on this issue, not only will the strike have more domestic legitimacy, it will strengthen the president on other issues."

But critics called it an example of a less flattering Obama characteristic: delaying and splitting the middle on major decisions, muddling the power of his argument and, in this case, perhaps blunting the effectiveness of military action.

Just a day earlier, Secretary of State John F. Kerry had made an impassioned case for action, calling Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons a "crime against humanity" and a test of U.S. credibility.

"History would judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator's wanton use of weapons of mass destruction against all warnings, against all common understanding of decency," Kerry said.

Obama has rarely sounded as certain as that. A day after the first videos of writhing bodies and glassy-eyed babies emerged from the Damascus suburbs, the president warned in a CNN interview against "immediate action, jumping into stuff, that does not turn out well, gets us mired in very difficult situations, can result in us being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region."

In his comments Saturday, Obama said he's decided that military action is warranted and he's prepared to give the order once Congress agrees. The Senate is expected to hold hearings on the matter this week. The House is expected to meet after members return from summer recess Sept. 9.

Some critics say the longer Obama waits, the less effect the missiles may have in deterring Assad from using chemical weapons again, or perhaps more important, in convincing America's allies in Israel and its adversaries in Iran that Obama will live up to his vow to take swift military action, if necessary, to deny Tehran a nuclear weapon.

"All of this dithering is very counterproductive," said Barry Pavel, a former Defense Department official who is vice president of the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. "And if it looks like he's just checking the box, it gets much worse."

Obama said Saturday that his decision was rooted in assurances from Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that the military options on the table weren't "time-sensitive" and he could launch the attack in a week or a month.

But after British Prime Minister David Cameron was humiliated when the House of Commons failed to approve a watered-down bid of support for military action — leaving the United States without its most stalwart ally — Obama took a clear risk of suffering the same defeat in a Congress that is deeply conflicted over Syria.

"This is a risky gamble that could have lasting effects for his foreign policy record — for his overall record," said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

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Syria strike justified on humanitarian grounds, Britain's Cameron says

LONDON -- As lawmakers prepared to debate their response to alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian regime, the British government laid out its arguments Thursday for the legality of military intervention "as an exceptional measure on grounds of overwhelming humanitarian necessity."

Prime Minister David Cameron's office said the aim of striking specific targets within Syria would be to deter President Bashar Assad's regime from launching further chemical attacks and to alleviate human suffering. Any military operation would be confined solely to that objective and to a limited amount of time, officials said.

Also Thursday, the British government's Joint Intelligence Committee released a memo calling it "highly likely" that Assad's forces were behind a suspected major chemical attack in eastern Damascus last week. It said evidence from many sources supported that conclusion, but it expressed puzzlement as to "the regime's precise motivation for carrying out an attack of this scale at this time."

The Obama administration is expected to release its own explanation for concluding that Assad gassed rebel-held neighborhoods.

Cameron has been one of the most vocal advocates of punishing the Syrian regime and has introduced a resolution at the U.N. Security Council to authorize it. Chances that the resolution will pass are slim in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition.

He is now confronted with serious reservations at home as well, with the opposition Labor Party and some of his fellow Conservatives demanding that he slow down the pace toward military intervention and wait for a report from U.N. weapons inspectors before making a decision. Many Britons are leery of striking Syria after watching their country go to war in Iraq based on false claims of weapons of mass destruction there.

Under increasing pressure from skeptics, Cameron was forced to pull back Wednesday night from putting forward a motion in Parliament authorizing military intervention.

Instead, British lawmakers are to debate a watered-down government motion Thursday deploring the use of chemical weapons and endorsing military force as a legitimate response in principle. Any actual attack would be subject to another vote.

"I'm determined we learn the lessons of the past, including Iraq," Labor Party leader Ed Miliband said. "And we can't have the House of Commons being asked to write a blank check to the prime minister for military action."

Cameron's government has said that launching an attack on Syria would ideally be done with U.N. backing. But even without the world body's blessing, British officials say, such intervention would comply with international law.

The argument released Thursday identifies the legal basis as allowable "humanitarian intervention" as long as certain conditions are met: that there is convincing evidence of a humanitarian catastrophe requiring immediate relief, that there is "no practicable alternative to the use of force if lives are to be saved," and that any attack is limited in time and scope.

Separately, British defense officials said they were deploying six Typhoon fighter jets to Cyprus to protect Britain's military base there.

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