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Edition: U.S. / Global

Middle East

Kerry Becomes Chief Advocate for U.S. Attack

Comparing Kerry and Obama on Syria: As President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry made the case for United States military action against the Syrian government on Friday, each carried his arguments with a different tone.

WASHINGTON — Jabbing his finger at the lectern, his voice forceful, his words brimming with indignation, John Kerry laid out the case like the prosecutor he once was, making a closing argument to a skeptical jury.

Again and again, some 24 times in all, he used the phrase “we know” as he described the intelligence that Syria’s government massacred more than 1,400 people with chemical weapons. And then, while saying no decision had been made, he left no doubt that the United States would respond with military power.

“We know that after a decade of conflict, the American people are tired of war — believe me, I am, too,” said Mr. Kerry, who opposed the Iraq war in his failed presidential bid in 2004. “But fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility. Just longing for peace does not necessarily bring it about. And history would judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator’s wanton use of weapons of mass destruction against all warnings, against all common understanding of decency.”

Just seven months after being sworn in as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry has become President Obama’s frontman in the public argument for a military strike against the Syrian government. While the president sounds restrained in his language and even perhaps personally ambivalent about the operation he seems likely to order, Mr. Kerry came across on Friday as an unstinting advocate for action against what he called “a despot’s brutal and flagrant use of chemical weapons.”

In effect, Mr. Kerry has picked up the mantle of his predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who pressed Mr. Obama unsuccessfully to take a more assertive role in the Syrian civil war. With the evidence of a chemical weapons attack now confronting the president and his team, Mr. Kerry’s position has met with more favor in the Situation Room.

White House officials said Mr. Kerry had been “seized with the importance” of making sure that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was held accountable. Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, said: “He doesn’t do anything halfway. He has no hesitancy about throwing himself into the most difficult challenges.”

That Mr. Kerry is the administration’s most prominent hawk is the latest turn in his central involvement in American military affairs over four decades. He came to national attention as a Vietnam War hero who became an antiwar activist, asking Congress in 1971, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” In 2003, he supported the war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein — a “brutal, murderous dictator,” as he put it at the time — only to turn against what he called the “catastrophic choice” as the war went south and he ran for president against George W. Bush in 2004.

That change of heart was used against him with devastating effectiveness in his presidential run. It was at Mr. Kerry’s nominating convention that year that he gave a major speaking role to an Illinois state senator who would ride that early visibility to the White House and end up installing Mr. Kerry at the State Department.

Mr. Kerry has a history with Syria as well. As a senator, at the start of the Obama administration, he met with Mr. Assad in Damascus in 2009, hoping he could help broker a rapprochement between Syria and the United States as a step toward Middle East stability. After becoming secretary this year, he flew to Moscow to arrange for a Geneva peace conference between Mr. Assad’s government and Syrian rebels, an idea stymied by disagreements about who would attend and overtaken by events on the ground.

In his closed-door meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin in May, Mr. Kerry argued that if Russia and the United States joined forces there was no need for Syria to become another Iraq, invoking an analogy that was calculated to appeal to Russian officials who have long complained that the American intervention there yielded a violent, failed state.

Mark Landler and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Washington, and Susan Beachy from New York.