Sen. Tim Kaine: Obama Admin ‘Doesn’t Have a Comprehensive Strategy’ on Syria
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT]
SCARBOROUGH: “Yesterday I saw a tweet that said that Russia now has more boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq in the fight against ISIS than does the United States of America. It seems to me that we’re leading from behind and from behind Vladimir Putin. Doesn’t seem like a safe thing to do. What’s your reaction?”
KAINE: “Well, Joe, I think the problem is we don’t have a comprehensive strategy. When this war started August of 2014, two very limited purposes. Protect U.S. Consulate in Erbil. We saw ISIS go to a presence ISIS in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia. We recently dispatched troops to Cameroon to counter Boko Haram. So, this is a threat that’s mutating. We spent nearly $5 billion. We’ve lost service members lives. It’s time to really have a strategy between Congress and the president and that involves Congress being willing to engage and Congress hasn’t been willing to do that.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Senator, let me ask you then and obviously it all starts with the commander-in-chief, but you actually have 200,000 people that have died in Syria since this conflict began and here we are November of 2015, years later, you say we still don’t have a strategy. Why doesn’t the United States of America after the refugee crisis of unspeakable performances, after the slaughter of over 200,000 people in Syria, after the arrival of Putin’s armies, why do we still not have a strategy?”
KAINE: “Joe, put it this way. We’re doing things but they just don’t knit together into a whole. We’re the largest provider of humanitarian aid to refugee. That’s a positive. U.S. forces working with the Iraqi military. I think that’s a positive. I would vote for it. It doesn’t fit together because there’s frankly three pieces to this crisis. There is the battle against ISIL. There’s what to do about Assad and his atrocities and there’s what to do with these millions of refugees, worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. And the administration hasn’t put on the table a strategy that encompasses all three, and frankly Congress hasn’t really been demanding it. What Congress wants to do is criticize the White House but neither authorize nor stop what the president is doing. Congress is just trying to keep its fingerprints off this. It’s one of the most shocking examples of congressional authority to declare war in the history of this country.”
GEIST: “Senator Kaine, it’s Willie Geist from New York. One of the things we heard again and again from the president is that Assad must go. We have British foreign secretary seated with us yesterday saying it’s clear Assad must go. If that’s true, why hasn’t Assad gone?”
KAINE: “I think when the president said Assad must go, I think it was probably a little bit of a mistake. He got out ahead of himself. When he said those words, he realized President Bush said Saddam Hussein must go. I said Gaddafi must go. I said Mubarak must go. When the United States has tried to say who the leader of another country should be in this region, we usually have not done a very good job at it. After the president made that commitment, Assad must go, he raised expectations in Syria and then he didn’t follow through on it because he realized the limits of America’s ability to change a regime that did dash a lot of hopes and expectations. That was unfortunate. Look, we got to deal with this situation today. Russia is there on the ground. Because they’re there in Syria and propping up the Assad regime, you see ISIL celebrating the downing of this Russian aircraft in the Sinai and so there is a joint interest between the U.S. And Russia. It’s a small overlap in our diagram in terms of bringing stability to Syria. It’s my hope that the discussions that Secretary Kerry started in Vienna might pick up momentum again.”
