Britain Rules Out Military Strike on Syria as U.N. Inspects Sites

Prime Minister David Cameron said that Britain would not participate militarily in any strike against Syria after he lost a parliamentary vote on Thursday on an anodyne motion urging an international response by 13 votes.

It was a stunning defeat for a government that had seemed days away from joining the United States and France in a short, punitive cruise-missile attack on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons against civilians.

Thursday evening’s vote was nonbinding, but in a short statement to Parliament afterward, Mr. Cameron said that he respected the will of Parliament and that it was clear to him that the British people did not want to see military action over Syria. “I get it,” he said.

The government motion was defeated by 285 votes to 272.

As part of its efforts to win the vote, Britain had taken the unusual step of publishing an intelligence assessment on Thursday blaming the Syrian government for a deadly chemical onslaught last week that left hundreds of people dead. The British government also laid out legal reasoning arguing that striking Syria would be justified on humanitarian grounds, with or without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council.

Mr. Cameron sought to calm the dissent among lawmakers by signaling that Britain would await the findings of United Nations inspectors currently working in Syria, though their U.N. mandate is to establish whether and what chemical weapons were used, not to determine who had used them. And the resolution he offered Parliament on Thursday would simply have endorsed tough criticism of the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but would not yet approve military action. But Parliament rejected even that, though by a margin of just 13 votes.

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, told reporters in Vienna that the inspectors would complete their work on Friday and report to him on Saturday. On Thursday, the inspectors traveled in a six-car convoy toward the Ghouta neighborhood for a third day of collecting evidence and samples, activists said, and were focusing on the Zamalka area.

In its intelligence document, the British government gave its reasons for concluding that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical attacks last week, citing an attached assessment by its Joint Intelligence Committee.

“It is not possible for the opposition to have carried out a CW attack on this scale,” said the document, referring to chemical weapons. “The regime has used CW on a smaller scale on at least 14 occasions in the past. There is some intelligence to suggest regime culpability in this attack. These factors make it highly likely that the Syrian regime was responsible.”

But Mr. Cameron had to admit to lawmakers during the parliamentary debate that there was “no smoking piece of intelligence” proving culpability.

The intelligence assessment said that “there is no obvious political or military trigger for regime use of CW on an apparently larger scale now, particularly given the current presence in Syria of the U.N. investigation team.” It added that permission to authorize the use of chemical weapons “has probably been delegated by President Assad to senior regime commanders” but that “any deliberate change in the scale and nature of use would require his authorization.”

Mr. Cameron insisted in the debate that if there was no response to the use of chemical weapons, there would be “nothing to stop Assad and other dictators from using these weapons again and again.” The Syrian leader was “testing the boundaries,” he added, while stressing that he was not pressing for full military intervention.

One obstacle he faced was the shadow of events in 2003, when assurances from Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, had weapons of mass destruction proved to be inaccurate and a false pretext for war.

The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, argued in the debate that the country should “learn the lessons of Iraq, because people remember the mistakes that were made in Iraq.” Mr. Miliband said his party would vote against the government’s resolution because, while he did not oppose military action against Syria, he had yet to be persuaded by the evidence provided. That led one of Mr. Cameron’s officials to accuse Mr. Miliband of “flipping and flopping,” a charge rejected by a Labour spokesman as “frankly insulting.”

Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.