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General Says Syrian Rebels Aren’t Ready to Take Power

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military officer, just back from the Middle East, has told Congress that the Pentagon could forcefully intervene in Syria to tip the balance in the civil war, but that there were no moderate rebel groups now ready to fill any power vacuum there.

“Syria today is not about choosing between two sides but rather about choosing one among many sides,” wrote Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It is my belief that the side we choose must be ready to promote their interests and ours when the balance shifts in their favor. Today, they are not.”

General Dempsey was responding to a letter from Representative Eliot Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, asking for a detailed analysis of potential, but limited, options for punishing President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, like long-range strikes against government air bases.

Mr. Engel’s query acknowledged that limited attacks would not destroy the Syrian military, but “could help prevent the Assad regime from using aircraft against innocent civilians and members of the opposition that the administration has decided to train and arm.”

Such strikes by ordnance launched from safely outside Syrian airspace also “could help reduce the flow of arms from Iran, Russia and others that continue to assist the Assad regime,” Mr. Engel wrote on Aug. 5.

General Dempsey’s response was written before Syrian rebels accused the Assad government on Wednesday of carrying out a major attack with chemical weapons, an accusation that Syrian officials denied.

While the White House and Pentagon sought to assess what had occurred, official confirmation that the Assad government had used banned weapons, like chemical munitions or poison gas, might alter the general’s calculus on the use of force. Russia accused the rebels of staging the attack to frame the government.

The general, who spent last week in Israel and Jordan for talks with government and military leaders, responded to Mr. Engel with a letter dated Monday, in which he agreed that there were a number of military actions short of intervention, which would be costlier and riskier. He previously outlined those major actions for Congress, like imposing a no-fly zone or safeguarding a geographic buffer for rebels and refugees.

“We can destroy the Syrian Air Force,” General Dempsey wrote, but he warned that that could also “escalate and potentially further commit the United States to the conflict.”

While the American military can change the balance of power in Syria, he wrote, “it cannot resolve the underlying and historic ethnic, religious and tribal issues that are fueling this conflict.”

After receiving General Dempsey’s letter, Mr. Engel released a statement rejecting the assertion that American involvement in Syria “would simply constitute ‘choosing sides’ between one armed group and another.”

“Our involvement represents a choice between hastening the end of the Assad regime or continuing to allow the cycle of violence, displacement and terror to continue unabated,” he wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: General Says Syrian Rebels Aren’t Ready To Take Power. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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