Drumbeat on Syria echoes calls for war on Iraq in 2003

A grim-faced secretary of state reading a bill of charges against a rogue Arab leader. The White House promising intelligence that will provide proof about weapons of mass destruction. Frenetic efforts to piece together a coalition of the willing. Breathless news reports about imminent bombing raids.

The days since the deadly chemical weapons attack last week in Syria carry an eerie echo of the tense days leading up to the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some veterans of that period are expressing qualms that this time, too, the war drums are beating too loudly.

"There's some risk," said Thomas Fingar, a fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies. "Political pressure is a factor. It appears to me that the situation has crossed a tipping point." In short, he said, the case for military action has moved so rapidly that it has become difficult for those counselling restraint.

Fingar has first-hand experience. He was the head of the State Department's intelligence bureau, which dissented from the Bush administration's intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programme. Neither properly scrutinised nor challenged, that faulty intelligence paved the road to war a decade ago.

In Syria's case, there is little doubt that chemical weapons were used outside Damascus on August 21. But Fingar and other experts predicted it would be hard, if not impossible, for the administration to produce definitive evidence that President Bashar al-Assad ordered it.

There were other possible situations, analysts said, like a rogue military commander who went beyond his orders, or a military unit that intended a smaller attack, but miscalculated. "The Syrian case involves the empirical issue of whether chemical weapons were used and an analytical judgment about who used them," Fingar said. "It's very different than Iraq."