WASHINGTON -- When Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) reached out to the Russian embassy Monday morning to express interest in seeing what intelligence it had on last month's chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, he didn't expect to wind up at the vanguard of a major diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis.
But that's where he found himself on Tuesday when the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, came to his office on the Hill.
Kislyak visited ostensibly to share information produced by the Russian Legislature. He did that. But in the course of their discussion, he also offered Sherman one of the first -- if not the first -- direct congressional briefings about Russia's new proposal to have Syria turn over its chemical weapons to international inspectors.
That proposal is now the best, perhaps last, chance to find a resolution to the Syria quandary, with Secretary of State John Kerry set to discuss the matter with his Russian counterpart in Geneva, Switzerland, this Thursday.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Sherman insisted that the idea is far from a political ploy to distract the United States.
"The Russian government is very serious," said the California Democrat. "The Russian government knows how important this is. The Russian government has every reason to want to make sure that the chemical weapons of Syria are not used against the Syrian people but also are not spirited away. We saw what happened to [Libyan dictator Muammar] Gaddafi's stash of weapons, which fortunately for the most part did not include chemical weapons. But we saw what happened to his weapons. [Syrian President Bashar] Assad could fall. And just as Gaddafi's weapons made its way to Mali, anything Assad has could make its way to Chechnya. The Russian government is well aware of that."
A senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Sherman said there were classified elements of his discussion with Kislyak that he could not share. But he called the "Russia option" the best of the remaining few.
"The Russians are working on a detailed proposal," said Sherman. "They are working on getting Assad to agree to it. And those of us who are skeptical will say, 'Well, Assad will hide a few things.' But even if we only get 90 percent of it, that is so much better an outcome than anything else that we are talking about. I mean, the president's proposal is that we bomb. We can't bomb the chemical weapons. That would create an environmental and humanitarian disaster."
Still, there are hurdles, which Sherman acknowledged could foil the whole diplomatic push. For starters, the rebel factions in Syria would have to agree not to interfere with any effort to broker and execute the deal. But they may not go along with that on the grounds that the deal does nothing to resolve the broader issue of Syria's two-year-old civil war.
Moreover, a United Nations resolution requiring Syria to turn over its chemical weapons cache also has to be written with the care. That may require that it doesn't accuse Assad of using chemical weapons in the first place. Russia, Sherman noted, would not "support a resolution that named and shamed Assad and otherwise did nothing else."
But the congressman insisted -- based in part on his meeting with the ambassador on Tuesday -- that the diplomatic conversation is moving in the right direction and that it is in the United States' interest to see what the Russian government can do while working through the United Nations. Certainly, he added, there is time now to let the chips fall where they may.
"Congress is not rushing towards the yes button on the floor of the House," said Sherman. "There is no congestion at the front doors as members run to the floor to declare how enthusiastic they are to authorize military action against Syria. It will be many weeks before Congress authorizes anything, if ever, and therefore we do not have to delay anything in Washington in order to allow things in New York and Damascus and Moscow to proceed. It will take Russia some time. It will take the U.N. some time. They will need less time than we need."
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