Do we have the coalition to intervene and make it work in Syria?

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Lebanese gather where car bombs exploded Friday outside a mosque in Tripoli, killing 29 people and wounding hundreds. The coordinated attacks in the predominantly Sunni city ? the deadliest fallout from Syria's civil war to hit Lebanon ? raised sectarian tensions to dangerous levels amid fears the country was slipping into a prolonged cycle of revenge. / AFP/Getty Images

Lebanese gather where car bombs exploded Friday outside a mosque in Tripoli, killing 29 people and wounding hundreds. The coordinated attacks in the predominantly Sunni city ? the deadliest fallout from Syria?s civil war to hit Lebanon ? raised sectarian tensions to dangerous levels amid fears the country was slipping into a prolonged cycle of revenge. / AFP/Getty Images

WASHINGTON ? President Barack Obama downplayed the prospect of speedy U.S. intervention in Syria, stressing Friday the difficulty of ordering military action against the Assad government without a strong international coalition and a legal mandate from the United Nations.

While his administration weighed military responses to this week?s claims of a large-scale chemical weapons attack near Damascus, Obama spoke as cautiously as ever about getting involved in a war that has killed more than 100,000 people and now includes  Hizballah and al-Qaida on opposite ends of the fighting.

He made no mention of the ?red line? of chemical weapons use  that he marked out for Syrian President Bashar Assad a year ago and which U.S. intelligence says has been breached at least on a small scale several times since.

?If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a UN mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it ? do we have the coalition to make it work?? Obama said Friday. ?Those are considerations that we have to take into account.?

The reported attack Wednesday, which killed at least 100 people in a Damascus suburb, would amount to the most heinous use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja two and a half decades ago.

Obama conceded in an interview on CNN?s ?New Day? program that the episode is a ?big event of grave concern? that requires American attention. He said any large-scale chemical weapons usage would affect ?core national interests? of the U.S. and its allies. But nothing he said signaled a shift toward U.S. action.

Even so, U.S. defense officials said Friday that the Navy moved an additional warship into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, meaning it now has four destroyers in the region. Each can launch ballistic missiles.

There are no immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren?t authorized to discuss ship movements publicly. But if the U.S. wants to send a message to Assad, the likeliest military action to start with would be a Tomahawk missile strike, launched from a ship in the Mediterranean.

For a year now, Obama has threatened to punish Assad?s regime if it resorted to its chemical weapons arsenal, among the world?s vastest, saying use or even deployment of such weapons of mass destruction constituted a ?red line? for him. A U.S. intelligence assessment concluded in June that chemical weapons have been used in Syria?s civil war, but Washington has taken no military action against Assad?s forces.

U.S. officials have instead focused on trying to organize a peace conference between the government and opposition. Obama has authorized weapons deliveries to rebel groups, but none is believed to have been sent so far.

In his first comments on Syria since the alleged chemical attack, Obama said the U.S. is still trying to find out what happened.

Internal White House deliberations in recent days haven?t indicated any imminent policy shift, according to officials. They described senior members of Obama?s administration divided over whether and how to respond to the latest allegations. Many of those same advisers are staking out roughly similar positions on a list of military options that have hardly changed in the last year.

One senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn?t authorized to speak for attribution about the deliberations, said U.S. enforcement of a no-fly zone has been effectively eliminated as an option.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that Obama doesn?t see any scenario where he?d have to authorize putting American boots on the ground in Syria. The president is evaluating next steps in Syria based on ?the best interests of national security,? Earnest said, adding that concrete evidence of chemical weapons use ?would have an impact on the calculus.?

Americans are hardly clamoring for war. Polls have consistently found that most people in the U.S., tired from the costly and bloody fights in the Muslim world over the last decade, see little upside to U.S. involvement in a conflict that in some ways mirrors that of Iraq.

Associated Press Associated Press Associated Press

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