MESOP INSIGHT FLASH : U.S. HEARING ABOUT OBAMA’S SYRIA POLICY

National Journal on Wednesday conveyed details of what the outlet described as an “explosive” hearing held that day by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which saw senators from both parties “eviscerate” Obama administration officials over what Sen. Bob Corker described as a “delusional” understanding of the Syrian conflict.

Corker leveled the characterization at Tom Countryman, State’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, after Countryman suggested that the Bashar al-Assad regime has sustained “actual losses” due to a deal in which the regime committed to giving up its chemical weapons arsenal. Statements made this week by Ahmet Uzumcu, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, indicated that Syria will miss the deadline set by the deal for dismantling its arsenal. An exchange between Corker and Anne Patterson – the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs – also grew heated, after Patterson insisted that the Obama administration had a secret plan to deal with the Syrian crisis but that she wouldn’t tell the committee about it during that session. Senators broadly criticized the administration for having objectively propped up the Assad regime by inking the chemical weapons deal, a concern that had been made early by skeptics of the White House’s diplomacy but that had been brushed off. The hearing came amid the release of a U.N. report that assessed that “massive and indiscriminate use of violence” on the part of the Assad regime was the “single most important factor” impeding Syrian civilians from receiving access to humanitarian relief workers. Syrian troops and Hezbollah fighters continued to make advances near the Lebanese border on Thursday, the latest in a series of campaigns that have seen the regime consolidating control along the Syria-Lebanon border and restrict the flow of materials to opposition forces.

 Al-Monitor on Thursday reported that top House lawmakers are in the early stages of drafting terror-related sanctions – the outlet described any legislation as “a work in progress” – that would target Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors due to the group’s global terror activities and its fighting on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Al-Monitor that Iran could not be allowed to “blackmail” the United States via terrorist proxies, even and especially amid ongoing negotiations being conducted over Tehran’s nuclear program. The outlet contextualized the effort as at least partially a response to the Obama administration, after the White House conducted a publicly controversial but nonetheless successful campaign to prevent lawmakers from moving forward on legislation that would have potentially imposed nuclear-related sanctions on Iran in the future should current negotiations fail. Mark Dubowitz, the executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, had assessed in late February that lawmakers would continue to investigate how to impose pressure on Iran, and that there would also be “strong momentum behind another push” should the six-month interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA) expire without a comprehensive agreement for putting Iran’s atomic program beyond use for weaponization. A report published earlier this month in Congressional Quarterly assessed that “groups on opposite sides of the Iran debate” were converging on the need for a strong congressional role in shaping Washington’s diplomacy with Iran.