McCain Rips Obama’s Poor Leadership on Syria: He’s ‘Opposite of Commander-In-Chief’
“The tragic loss last week of Master Sergeant Joshua [Wheeler], a veteran of 14 combat deployments, reminds us of the high stakes of our mission in the Middle East, and how grateful we are to those Americans serving there. We need a strategy worthy of those who carry it out, and unfortunately, we do not have that.
What’s worse, it appears the Administration has not even defined the problem correctly. A policy of ‘ISIL first’ fails to understand that ISIL, for all of the threat it poses, is actually just a symptom of a deeper problem—the struggle for power and sectarian identity now raging across the Middle East, the epicenter of which is Iraq and Syria. That is why ISIL exists today with the strength that it does, and this problem will only get worse the longer this conflict rages on.
We hear it said all the time that there is no military solution to this problem, which is a truism. But that, too, is misleading. The real problem is that there can be no diplomatic solution without leverage, and there is a clear military dimension to this problem. Secretary Kerry can take all the trips he wants to Geneva, but unless the military balance of power changes on the ground, diplomacy, as it has been amply proven, will achieve nothing.
Changing those conditions is what the Administration has consistently failed to do. Instead, it has assumed our nation could withdraw from the Middle East and avoid the conflict at its heart. Moreover, on those occasions when the Administration has felt compelled to respond—after the use of chemical weapons, for example, or with the rise of ISIL, and now amid the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II—the Administration has merely addressed the symptoms of the underlying problem, rather than the problem itself, and all too often made that problem worse.
There is no clearer example of this than the Syria train and equip program. From the start, the Administration said the fighters in this program could only fight ISIL, not Assad’s forces, which have slaughtered and displaced exponentially more Syrians than ISIL has. In addition, the Administration made no commitment, until only recently, to provide these forces with any meaningful military support once they returned to Syria. After millions of dollars and months of effort, the program failed to come anywhere close to the Department’s original expectations.
The President has expressed surprise about this failure. It was not a surprise. It was completely predictable, and many of us here did predict it. Only someone who does not understand the real problem, which is the underlying conflict in Syria and Iraq—or does not care to—could think that we could effectively recruit and train large numbers of Sunni Syrians to fight only against ISIL, with no promise of coalition assistance if they came under fire from Assad’s forces.
Rather than fixing the program, the president suspended it. But this is tantamount to killing the program, because it is destroying what little trust our Syrian partners have left in us—to say nothing of allies like Turkey and Jordan, which invested their own money and prestige in this program. The president now says the failure of this program, his program, actually proves he was right for not wanting to do it in the first place. Harry Truman must be [indecipherable] in his grave. If there is an opposite for commander-in-chief, this is it."
