The Guardian. Pentagon supported plan to arm Syrian rebels

Pentagon leaders have said they supported a recommendation from the US state department and CIA to arm Syrian rebels, which Barack Obama ultimately decided against.

The Obama administration has limited its support to non-lethal aid for the rebels who, despite receiving weapons from countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are poorly armed compared with the army and loyalist militias of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

John McCain, a Republican senator who has championed greater US involvement, asked Pentagon leaders at a congressional hearing: "How many more have to die before you recommend military action?"

He then pressed the outgoing defence secretary, Leon Panetta, and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US military's joint chiefs of staff, about whether they backed the recommendation by the state department and CIA chiefs last year to arm the rebels.

Panetta and Dempsey said US forces could not have reached Libya in time to prevent the deaths of the US ambassador and three other Americans on 11 September 2012, and insisted Obama was kept in the loop.

Panetta stressed that it was not the US military's responsibility to be able to immediately respond anywhere in the world to a crisis. There was no intelligence about a specific plan to attack the consulate, he and Dempsey noted.

"The United States military … is not and, frankly, should not be a 911 service capable of arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world," he said.