President Obama, with Great Britain having rejected military action in Syria, finds himself on the verge of pursuing the very kind of go-it-alone approach that he accused his predecessor of using in Iraq.

Obama, though, may not even have a “coalition of the willing” at his back, as George W. Bush did, should he choose to pursue the military option in Syria. America’s most vital ally, Great Britain, effectively pulled out before the fireworks began, when the House of Commons voted against military action on Thursday evening.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who was pushing for intervention in Syria, indicated he would not defy the will of Parliament.

“It is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly,” he said.

The United Nations Security Council has also refused thus far to give its consent to intervention in Syria.

Yet the White House remained undeterred, escalating an argument that any potential action on Syria, to punish the Assad regime for a chemical weapons attack last week and deter future attacks, would be in the U.S. interest.

“The U.S. will continue to consult with the U.K. Government – one of our closest allies and friends. As we’ve said, President Obama’s decision-making will be guided by what is in the best interests of the United States,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

The approach is a far cry from then-candidate Obama’s campaign-trail appeals for international cooperation.

During an April 2007 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Obama said the U.S. cannot try to “bully [the world] into submission.”

In a 2007 essay in Foreign Affairs, he specifically warned about breaking off from European allies: “In the case of Europe, we dismissed European reservations about the wisdom and necessity of the Iraq war.”

During his July 2008 campaign speech in Berlin, Obama told Europeans that “no one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone.” He warned that “on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart, and forgotten our shared destiny” and that neither America nor Europe can “turn inward.”

Bush, asked by Fox News on Friday about Obama’s current choice in Syria, declined to comment on what the current commander-in-chief should do.

“The president has to make a tough call,” Bush said, adding that “I was not a fan of Mr. Assad.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says the U.S. is still pushing for an international effort on Syria despite the vote in London. French President Francois Hollande reportedly said overnight that the Parliament vote would not affect his country’s willingness to act. The German government, though, says it still is not considering military action.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Thursday rejected the notion that the current situation is in any way similar to the run-up to the Iraq war under the George W. Bush administration.

“I think that there are some very important differences. What we saw in that circumstance was an administration that was searching high and low to produce evidence to justify a military invasion, an open-ended military invasion of another country, with the final goal being regime change,” he said.

Yet from the press corps and from the halls of Congress, the administration is already hearing echoes of Iraq.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., among those in Congress criticizing a potential Syria mission, released a statement saying “we should have learned our lesson from the Iraq War.”

He said Obama “thinks he is the police chief of the world,” but “Americans have already paid too high a price for that grandiose notion.”

Still, after administration officials briefed top lawmakers on Thursday evening, some in Congress voiced a willingness to hear out the administration’s argument for intervention.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would support a “surgical, proportional military strikes” on Syria given the “strong evidence” that the regime used chemical weapons.

The administration is expected to release information from its intelligence reports on the alleged chemical weapons attack as early as Friday.

Secretary of State John Kerry has determined that the four State Department officials placed on administrative leave by Hillary Clinton after the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi do not deserve any formal disciplinary action and has asked them to come back to work at the State Department starting Tuesday.

“No explanation, no briefing, just come back to work. So I will go in tomorrow,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell previously told The Daily Beast that the reasons for his administrative leave designation had never been explained to him. He contended that he had little role in Libya policy and no involvement whatsoever in the events leading up to the Benghazi attack.

“The overall goal is to restore my honor,” Maxwell had said.

While not a formal discplinary action, Maxwell regarded his treatment as punishment because he was not able to work and was publicly identified as being blamed for the tragedy that cost the lives of four Americans, including his friend Ambassador Chris Stevens.

A senior State Department official confirmed to The Daily Beast Monday that all four officials placed on administrative leave were now returned to regular duty and would not face any formal disciplinary action. The administrative leave designation was not a formal punishment, but did prevent the officials from working while the Kerry team, which inherited the Benghazi issue from the Clinton team in February, reviewed their cases.

“As soon as he came into the department, Secretary Kerry wanted to invest the time to review the ARB’s findings and match those against his own on-the-job findings about security,” the senior State Department official said. “He’s been hands-on focused on building on the lessons learned from the Benghazi attack to strengthen security at missions world-wide and continue the ARB’s security paradigm shift.”

As part of this process, Kerry asked his high command to complete a thorough review of the ARB’s findings. At the time of the report’s release, Pickering said the ARB had determined that blame for the security failures leading up to the Bengazi attack should be placed at the Assistant Secretary level but that no officials had committed breaches of duty that would warrant outright termination.

After consideration, Kerry reaffirmed the ARB’s finding that no employee breached their duty or should be fired but rather that some should be reassigned, the official said. The four individuals are not blameless and the fact that they will not be returned to the same positions is relevant, the official said.

Kerry and his team also considered the long records of the four individuals and the circumstances leading up the Benghazi attack when considering what to do with the sidelined officials, the official said. None of the officials will be able to get their old jobs back and Boswell will not return as the head of diplomatic security.

“[Secretary Kerry] studied their careers and studied the facts,” the official said. “In order to implement the ARB and to continue to turn the page and shift the paradigm inside the Department, the four employees who were put on administrative leave last December pending further review, will be reassigned inside the State Department.”

There was also concern in Congress that only mid-level officials with little direct responsibility for the Benghazi attack had been taken out of their jobs following the ARB report release.

“The ARB tried to blame everyone but hold no one responsible, except for some of the lower level people who were not in control of the situation,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight National Security subcommittee, told The Daily Beast in May.

UPDATE: House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) issued the following statement in response to The Daily Beast’s report:

Obama administration officials repeatedly promised the families of victims and the American people that officials responsible for security failures would be held accountable. Instead of accountability, the State Department offered a charade that included false reports of firings and resignations and now ends in a game of musical chairs where no one misses a single day on the State Department payroll. It is now clear that the personnel actions taken by the Department in response to the Benghazi terrorist attacks was more of a public relations strategy than a measured response to a failure in leadership.

In the course of our investigation, the Oversight Committee learned that the State Department’s review of these four individuals did not include interviews with them or their supervisors to either substantiate or challenge allegations. The Oversight Committee will expand its investigation of the Benghazi terrorist attack to include how a supposed ‘Accountability Review Board’ investigation resulted in a decision by Secretary Kerry not to pursue any accountability from anyone.

by Josh Rogin / The Daily Beast

At least 36 people were killed Sunday when Muslim Brotherhood members tried to escape from a prison truck convoy in Cairo, Egypt’s state-run news agency says.

The official news agency, MENA, said gunman belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood approached the trucks — which were carrying more than 600 detainees rounded up in street violence between security forces and supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi — and exchanged fire with guards.

The detainees were being transferred to Abu Zaabal prison in northern Cairo when the attack happened, MENA reports. The official website for Egyptian state television reported that security forces fired tear gas at the attackers.

The deaths came after Egyptian authorities raided the homes of Muslim Brotherhood members Sunday, detaining hundreds of mid-level officials in a bid to crack down on attacks on Christian churches and businesses. The group had plans for marches in Cairo, but cancelled them later in the day, claiming that snipers were positioned on rooftops along the routes.

Since security forces cleared two sit-in camps filled with Morsi supporters on Wednesday, Islamists have attacked dozens of Coptic churches, along with homes and businesses owned by the Christian minority. The campaign of intimidation appears to be a warning to Christians outside Cairo to stand down from political activism.

At least 300 Muslim Brotherhood officials and field operatives were detained in several cities during Sunday’s raids, security officials and group statements said.

In Assiut, 200 miles south of Cairo, 163 of the group’s officials and operatives were rounded up in different towns in the province, security officials said. They said those arrested face charges of instigating violence and orchestrating attacks on police stations and churches.

In the city of Suez, nine people were arrested after being caught on film attacking army vehicles, burning churches and assaulting Christian-owned stores, officials said. And in Luxor, more than 20 Brotherhood senior officials were detained, officials said.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has launched protests since Morsi’s July 3 ouster by the military, scuttled plans for two Sunday demonstrations in Cairo.

Prior to the cancellations, authorities stationed armored vehicles and troops in front of the Supreme Constitutional Court courthouse in Cairo, which may have turned into another focal point of street violence.

Sources in the Muslim Brotherhood told the BBC that the protests were canceled because of the “presence of snipers on buildings along the routes of the marches,” although the claim could not be verified.

Egypt’s military leader, Gen. Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, said Sunday during a gathering of top military commanders and police chiefs that the army will not stand by silently in the face of violence. It was El-Sissi’s first appearance since the deadly crackdown on Wednesday.

He also said that the Army has no intention to seize power, while calling on Islamists to join the political process.

“We will not stand by silently watching the destruction of the country and the people or the torching the nation and terrorizing the citizens,” he said in comments quoted on state television and posted on an official military Facebook page. “We have given many chances … to end the crisis peacefully and call for the followers of the former regime to participate in rebuilding the democratic track and integrate in the political process and the future map instead of confrontations and destroying the Egyptian state.”

A military timetable calls for the nation’s constitution to be amended and for presidential and parliamentary elections to be held in 2014.

Christians have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Egypt, where they make up 10 percent of the population of 90 million. Attacks increased after the Islamists rose to power in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak from power, emboldening extremists. But Christians have come further under fire since Morsi was ousted on July 3, sparking a wave of Islamist anger led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Many Morsi supporters say Christians played a disproportionately large role in mass rallies that occurred before Morsi was ousted by the military, as millions took to the streets to demand Morsi’s resignation.

Despite the violence, Egypt’s Coptic Christian church renewed its commitment to the new political order Friday, saying in a statement that it stood by the army and the police in their fight against “the armed violent groups and black terrorism.”

Some Christians have also drawn closer to moderate Muslims in a few provinces, in a rare show of solidarity.

Hundreds from both communities thronged two monasteries in the province of Bani Suef south of Cairo to thwart what they had expected to be imminent attacks on Saturday, local activist Girgis Waheeb said. Activists reported similar examples elsewhere in regions south of Cairo, but not enough to provide effective protection of churches and monasteries.

Waheeb, other activists and victims of the latest wave of attacks blame the police as much as hard-line Islamists for what happened. The attacks, they said, coincided with assaults on police stations in provinces like Bani Suef and Minya, leaving most police pinned down to defend their stations or reinforcing others rather than rushing to the rescue of Christians under attack.

Another Christian activist, Ezzat Ibrahim of Minya, a province also south of Cairo where Christians make up around 35 percent of the population, said police have melted away from seven of the region’s nine districts, leaving the extremists to act with near impunity.

Sister Manal, the 47-year-old principal of the Franciscan school in Bani Suef, told the Associated Press that she was having breakfast with two visiting nuns when news broke of Wednesday’s crackdown on the Cairo sit-ins. In an ordeal that lasted about six hours, she, sisters Abeer and Demiana and a handful of school employees saw a mob break into the school through the wall and windows, loot its contents, knock off the cross on the street gate and replace it with a black banner resembling the flag of Al Qaeda.

By the time the Islamists ordered them out, fire was raging at every corner of the 115-year-old main building and two recent additions. Money saved for a new school was gone, said Manal, and every computer, projector, desk and chair was hauled away. Frantic SOS calls to the police, including senior officers with children at the school, produced promises of quick response but no one came.

Manal recalled being told a week earlier by the policeman father of one pupil that her school was targeted by hard-line Islamists convinced that it was giving an inappropriate education to Muslim children. She paid no attention, comfortable in the belief that a school that had an equal number of Muslim and Christian pupils could not be targeted by Muslim extremists. She was wrong.

Bishoy Alfons Naguib, a 33-year-old businessman from Minya, had a similarly harrowing story.

His home supplies store on a main commercial street in the provincial capital, also called Minya, was torched this week and the flames consumed everything inside.

“A neighbor called me and said the store was on fire. When I arrived, three extremists with knifes approached me menacingly when they realized I was the owner,” recounted Naguib. His father and brother pleaded with the men to spare him. Luckily, he said, someone shouted that a Christian boy was filming the proceedings using his cell phone, so the crowd rushed toward the boy shouting “Nusrani, Nusrani,” the Koranic word for Christians which has become a derogatory way of referring to them in today’s Egypt.

Naguib ran up a nearby building where he has an apartment and locked himself in. After waiting there for a while, he left the apartment, ran up to the roof and jumped to the next door building, then exited at a safe distance from the crowd.

Two Christians have been killed since Wednesday, including a taxi driver who strayed into a protest by Morsi supporters in Alexandria and another man who was shot to death by Islamists in the southern province of Sohag, according to security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information.

A total of 888 people have been killed nationwide since Wednesday’s dismantling of two encampments of Morsi supporters in Cairo, with 79 of those deaths occurring on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian government has begun deliberations on whether to ban the Brotherhood, a long-outlawed organization that swept to power in the country’s first democratic elections a year ago.

Such a ban — which authorities say would be implemented over the group’s use of violence — would be a repeat of the decades-long power struggle between the state and the Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood faces increasing public criticism over the ongoing violence in Egypt. Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, the powerful head of Al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam’s main seat of learning, issued an audio statement asking Brotherhood members to stop the violence.

“The scenes of violence will not grant you any rights and the bloodshed nor chaos spreading across the country will give you no legitimacy,” el-Tayeb said.

By Fox News and The Associated Press.

A California-born convert to Islam is praising the killers of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in the Benghazi attacks on Sep. 11 last year, while calling for more violence against Western diplomats in the Middle East.

Al Qaeda militant Adam Gadahn, whose capture will garner a $1 million reward from the U.S. government, made the statements in a recently released video on Arabic websites frequented by terrorists, according to the SITE monitoring group.

Gadahn, indicted in California for treason and material support for Al Qaeda, called on wealthy Muslims to offer rewards for militants to kill ambassadors, citing bounties set by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The group is offering 106 ounces of gold for the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and $23,350 for the killing of American soldiers in the country, according to Reuters.

Gadahn previously said in 2007 that Al Qaeda would target diplomats and facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan in response to U.S.-led military action.

He is believed to be in Pakistan since 2004 and the FBI has been trying to question him, Reuters reports.