03/06/12
It's Time to Use American Airpower in Syria John McCain
After a year of bloodshed, the crisis in Syria has
reached a decisive moment. It is estimated that more than 7,500 lives have been
lost. The United Nations has declared that Syrian security forces are guilty of
crimes against humanity, including the indiscriminate shelling of civilians, the
execution of defectors, and the widespread torture of prisoners. Bashar Al-Assad
is now doing to Homs what his father did to Hama. Aerial photographs procured by
Human Rights Watch show a city that has been laid to waste by Assad’s tanks and
artillery. A British photographer who was wounded and evacuated from the city
described it as “a medieval siege and slaughter.” The kinds of mass atrocities
that NATO intervened in Libya to prevent in Benghazi are now a reality in Homs.
Indeed, Syria today is the scene of some of the worst state-sponsored violence
since Milosevic’s war crimes in the Balkans, or Russia’s annihilation of the
Chechen city of Grozny.
What is all the more astonishing is that Assad’s killing spree has continued despite severe and escalating international pressure against him. His regime is almost completely isolated. It has been expelled from the Arab League, rebuked by the United Nations General Assembly, excoriated by the U.N. Human Rights Council, and abandoned by nearly every country that once maintained diplomatic relations with it. At the same time, Assad’s regime is facing a punishing array of economic sanctions by the United States, the European Union, the Arab League, and others—measures that have targeted the assets of Assad and his henchmen, cut off the Central Bank and other financial institutions, grounded Syria’s cargo flights, and restricted the regime’s ability to sell oil. This has been an impressive international effort, and the Administration deserves a lot of credit for helping to orchestrate it.
The problem is, the bloodletting continues. Despite a year’s worth of diplomacy backed by sanctions, Assad and his top lieutenants show no signs of giving up and taking the path into foreign exile. To the contrary, they appear to be accelerating their fight to the finish. And they are doing so with the shameless support of foreign governments, especially in Russia, China, and Iran. A steady supply of weapons, ammunition, and other assistance is flowing to Assad from Moscow and Tehran, and as The Washington Post reported yesterday, Iranian military and intelligence operatives are likely active in Syria, helping to direct and sharpen the regime’s brutality. The Security Council is totally shut down as an avenue for increased pressure, and the recently convened Friends of Syria contact group, while a good step in principle, produced mostly rhetoric but precious little action when it met last month in Tunisia. Unfortunately, with each passing day, the international response to Assad’s atrocities is being overtaken by events on the ground in Syria.
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