Report at Business Week that John McCain is yet again calling for US-led air strikes against Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria.
While opposing the use of U.S. ground troops, the Arizona senator said the U.S. should give weapons to the Syrian rebels and establish “sanctuaries” in the war-torn country that would be protected by allied air power.
“For the United States to stand by and for the president of the United States not to say a word on behalf of these people is shameful,” McCain said today at a Bloomberg Government conference in Washington on defense strategy.
With Iran aiding the Syrian government and Russia providing weapons to the regime, “it’s not a fair fight,” McCain, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said. “Here we are, standing by, watching a massacre go on.”
Fortunately, Michigan's Carl Levin and (Republican) Mike Rogers are holding the line.
Several weeks ago I blogged about whether or not McCain had ever learned to play chess. Chess, of course, is a game the mastery of which entails planning several moves ahead as well as foreseeing contingencies. One would hope that after an Iraq "intervention" for which McCain became cheerleader in chief (and which he still seems to believe was a "victory" for the US), and which became a debacle largely because Bush and the neocons failed to foresee contingencies, McCain would have been left more wary of where new US interventions in the Middle East - Syria, specifically - might lead.
Instead, the Chief Amigo seems unable to get beyond conceptualizing foreign-policy decision-making as the equivalent of coming to the rescue in a schoolyard brawl.
(And, by the way, on the matter of the US victory in Iraq, and what we left behind . . . I recommend highly Ned Parker's new essay in Foreign Affairs, where he makes it quite clear - with a plethora of evidence - that Iraq is descending into failed-state status. Not recommended, but nonetheless worth noting, are the two responses to Parker's essay at the Foreign Affairs site. They stand as textbook examples of poorly supported refutations designed to cover the boss's ass.)
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