NICE, Calif. – Lake County’s two members of Congress visited the community on Saturday night, sharing dinner and updates on issues, including the developments in Syria.
The Saturday afternoon barbecue dinner event, held at the Sons of Italy Club in Nice, was the first campaign fundraiser in the county for Congressman John Garamendi, who represents the northern part of Lake County. He is up for reelection next year.
He invited along Congressman Mike Thompson, who represents the county’s southern area.
In interviews with Lake County News at the event, both Garamendi and Thompson discussed the latest news about Syria.
Over the past several weeks, Garamendi had strongly urged President Barack Obama to bring the matter to Congress for a debate and vote.
“There is no greater decision we can make than the decision to go to war,” Garamendi, who made appearances on national news channels to argue his case, said late in August.
In recent days, the possibility of the United States taking military action against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – who on Aug. 21 is alleged to have launched a chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that killed innocent civilians, including children – has lessened as a diplomatic option, proposed by Russia, has arisen.
Assad has said he will hand over his country’s chemical weapons to international control as proposed by the Russians, a move that in the international press he has credited to Russian diplomacy. President Obama has since asked Congress to delay votes on military action against Syria.
An agreement regarding Assad’s chemical weapons handover was put together on Saturday, said Garamendi. “We’re moving very aggressively.”
Now, with plans to try to get Syria to hand over its chemical weapons, Garamendi said it’s possible that within the next year 1,000 tons of “very dangerous weapons” could be removed from Syrian control and destroyed.
“We never, a week ago, imagined that we could take that step,” he said, after the country came close to starting a new war.
He said it won’t be easy and it will take time, and pressure, on the Assad regime.
Earlier this week, after the president addressed the nation a televised speech to argue the case for taking action against Syria, Thompson said that when weapons of mass destruction are used, “as appears to be the case in Syria, there should be a robust, global response to deter these types of atrocities from ever happening again. Any such response, military or otherwise, must be taken with a strong, international coalition.”
However, Thompson has remained skeptical that a US military strike would diminish Assad’s ability to carry out more chemical attacks, a sentiment he reiterated on Saturday.
He said he’s very hopeful that a diplomatic solution will work and avoid a military confrontation, as well as further chemical weapons usage by the Assad regime. “Everybody in the world needs to speak out against that,” he said of chemical weapons usage.
Thompson said he also hopes work with the Russians will succeed and “we’ll be able to get ahold of those chemical weapons, get them out of the Assad quiver and be able to secure those in a way that they don’t fall into the wrong hands.”
See their full comments in the video at top, and event highlights in the second video.
John Jensen contributed to this report.
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