September 28, 2016 | No Comments
John McCain and Lindsey Graham have long mocked Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to negotiate with Russia to stop the bloodshed in Syria. Now they’re mocking him for threatening to call off the talks.
In an extraordinarily snarky statement released Wednesday, the Republican senators dismissed the idea that Kerry’s threat would lead Russia to stop its military support for the Syrian regime.
“Finally, a real power move in American diplomacy,” the two wrote with more than a dash of sarcasm. “Secretary of State John ‘Not Delusional’ Kerry has made the one threat the Russians feared most — the suspension of U.S.-Russia bilateral talks about Syria.”
In what appeared to be a dig at Kerry’s patrician reputation, the senators went on: “No more lakeside tête-à-têtes at five-star hotels in Geneva. No more joint press conferences in Moscow. We can only imagine that having heard the news, Vladimir Putin has called off his bear hunt and is rushing back to the Kremlin to call off Russian airstrikes on hospitals, schools, and humanitarian aid convoys around Aleppo,” the northern Syrian city currently under fierce bombardment.
“After all, butchering the Syrian people to save the Assad regime is an important Russian goal,” the pair went on. “But not if it comes at the unthinkable price of dialogue with Secretary Kerry.”
McCain, of Arizona, and Graham, of South Carolina, are both high-ranking, hawkish senators. They have advocated in the past for sending more U.S. troops to the Middle East, but to fight the Islamic State, not to intervene in the Syrian civil war. But they and other Republicans also have questioned the value of the Obama administration’s efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis when President Barack Obama has ruled out the use of force to give the U.S. some leverage in the talks.
Kerry made the threat to break off talks with Russia in a call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday. The call came as the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, backed by the Russian military, has continued to attack hospitals and other key infrastructure in Aleppo. A cease-fire in Syria agreed to by the U.S. and Russia collapsed after just a few days earlier this month.