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WASHINGTON

The Obama administration is facing a tougher examination of its plans for military intervention in Syria, squaring off against tea party Republicans and other skeptical House members a day after gaining Speaker John Boehner’s endorsement and significant support in the Senate.

With President Barack Obama in Europe, his top security aides were to participate today in a series of public and private hearings at the Capitol to advance their case for limited strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime in retaliation for what the administration says was a deadly sarin gas attack by his forces outside Damascus last month.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee could vote on the use of force as early as today.

The panel’s top members drafted a resolution late Tuesday that permits Obama a “limited and tailored” military mission against Syria, not to exceed 90 days and involving no American ground troops.

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“We have pursued a course of action that gives the president the authority he needs to deploy force in response to the Assad regime’s criminal use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people, while assuring that the authorization is narrow and focused,” said the committee’s chairman, U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who drafted the measure with U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

“We have an obligation to act, not witness and watch while a humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in plain view,” Menendez said.

While the administration was making progress in the Senate, it also needed to persuade a Republican-dominated House that has opposed almost the entirety of Obama’s agenda since seizing the majority more than three years ago. Several conservative Republicans and some anti-war Democrats already have come out in opposition to Obama’s plans, even as Republican and Democratic House leaders gave their support to the president Tuesday.

Boehner emerged from a meeting at the White House and declared that the U.S. has “enemies around the world that need to understand that we’re not going to tolerate this type of behavior.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, will appear at a public hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee today. They and other administration officials also will provide classified briefings to the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees.

The administration says 1,429 died from the attack Aug. 21 in a Damascus suburb.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which collects information from a network of anti-government activists in Syria, says it has been compiling a list of the names of the dead and says its toll has reached 502.

Assad’s government blames the episode on the rebels. A United Nations inspection team is awaiting lab results on tissue and soil samples before completing a report.



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