The U.K. is to blame for U.S. President Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on a promise to bomb the Syrian regime if it used chemical weapons, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry said at a press conference late Thursday, according to a Guardian report.

Obama had said chemical weapons were a "red line" for America, but failed to act when Syria's President Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas on civilians in August 2013.

According to Kerry, Obama was ready to respond to the "blatant violation of international law," but the then British prime minister, David Cameron, derailed his plans by putting a motion for U.S.-led air strikes to a vote in parliament, applying pressure on Obama to get congressional permission to act.

“Now, we were marching towards that time when, lo and behold … Prime Minister David Cameron went to the parliament … and he sought a vote for approval for him to join in the action that we were going to engage in. And guess what, the parliament voted no, they shot him down," Kerry said.

"So as we were briefing Congress — and I was on one of those briefing calls with maybe a hundred members of Congress on the call — many of them were saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to come to us. You’ve got to go through the constitutional process, get permission from us to do something."

The administration, Kerry said, thought Congress would be quick to approve the air strikes, given the "blatant violation."

However, as the vote was being organized, Kerry said, Russia and the U.S. were able to broker a deal for the Assad regime to get rid of its chemical weapons.

“All of a sudden [Russia's Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei] Lavrov and I were thrown together by our presidents,” Kerry said, “in an effort to try and achieve that and guess what, we did achieve it, before Congress voted."

That was misinterpreted as a sign of weakness, Kerry said, stressing: "The president never said, 'I won't drop a bomb.'"

Kerry's statements come a week after British Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesperson criticized his position on Israel. In late December, the U.S. chose to abstain instead of vetoing a U.N. Security Council motion condemning Israel's settlements on territory claimed by Palestinians.

Using language rarely heard from a U.S. secretary of state, Kerry warned that the settlers’ growing political power would eventually force Israel to make a fateful choice: “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic — it cannot be both — and it won’t ever really be at peace.”

May's spokesperson said: “We do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically elected government of an ally."

http://www.politico.eu/article/john-kerry-blames-david-cameron-for-syria-failure/