WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today called the Obama administration’s approach to resolving the worsening conflict in Syria “a failure” of U.S. foreign policy.
“I could not be more disappointed at where we are in Syria. It’s kind of amazing how prognosticators, both here on this panel…[and] around the world, stated what was going to happen to Syria over time if we didn’t change the balance on the ground, and unfortunately that’s exactly what has happened. It’s turned into a regional conflict, destabilizing other countries. Al Qaeda, and other extremists, [are] on the rise, not only in Syria, where our director of national intelligence and others are now stating this [conflict] is becoming a threat to the homeland--but it’s also a threat to the entire region,” said Corker at a hearing on the threat of terrorism from the conflict in Syria.
“We tried to help the administration by passing something here in this committee, and we did so in a 15-3 vote, to arm and really support the vetted opposition, and unfortunately the administration just never came around to doing the things that it stated publicly that it would do. And so this has festered, and there’s never been a change that’s caused Assad to really even want to sit down and negotiate, and obviously what happened at Geneva II is what everybody expected,” added Corker. “We gave the president out of this committee on a 10-7 vote the authorization for the use of force, and yet the president not only really didn’t make the case for it publicly but obviously…sort of jumped in Russia’s lap to help us out of this situation in the deal with chemical weapons. And since then another 30 – 40,000 people have been killed…It’s is a disaster of great proportions. It is certainly a failure on our part and many other nations relative to foreign policy.”
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