John McCain is Right About Striking Syria

COMMENTARY | Senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, R-Ariz., has called for the U.S. to lead a military coalition that would conduct airstrikes against Bashar Assad's Syrian government. And as much as the U.S. does not need another war to manage or more Americans to die halfway around the world, McCain is absolutely correct.

Syria has become a humanitarian catastrophe. It is no longer an internal struggle, or even a civil war -- if it ever was either of those things. Residents of the Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs recently told Reuters about dead bodies rotting in the streets and about representatives from the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

Plus the United Nations humanitarian organization is not being allowed into the neighborhood to offer assistance to residents who have mostly been cut off from food, water, electricity and communication for more than a month. Activists' reports of rape, cold-blooded killing and the indiscriminant shelling of homes abound. According to the U.N. more than 7,500 people have been killed during the yearlong uprising.

It is quite clear the Assad regime is not fighting "terrorists" in its midst as it likes to tell the world. No, Assad's government is killing Syrians in a desperate attempt to cling to power. And it has become clear as well that many of the Syrians who are suffering and dying are innocent civilians.

Thanks to vetoes by Russia and China in the U.N. Security Council, the world body sits idly by while the Syrian government unleashes death and destruction on its own people. As with innumerable other humanitarian disasters, the U.N. is again hamstrung by its member nations.

Is the world then supposed to sit by and watch -- as it did in Rwanda, Cambodia and elsewhere -- because the U.N. is prevented from acting on wanton killing? Are we expected to allow a humanitarian disaster to unfold unabated only to ask ourselves, years later, how we could have let such a disaster happen?

Leading yet another military conflict is not something that the U.S. should ever take lightly. But engaging in a low-risk endeavor, like airstrikes, to help stop a vicious, unfriendly dictator clinging to power by killing his own people? Sounds like a no-brainer.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/john-mccain-striking-syria-193500382.html

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