by John McCain
I heard about what had happened the same way most Americans did, from news reports. In those first days after his death, I was just terribly saddened by it. I wasn’t angry with the administration. I remember listening to Secretary Clinton’s memorial remarks about him, and being very moved by them, and I asked Chris Brose to send her a note of thanks. I started to get angry when it appeared administration officials were knowingly misleading us about the attack, attributing it to a video that some idiot had made mocking Islam that incited a spontaneous mob that turned violent. It took more than a week for the White House to acknowledge it had been a planned terrorist attack. The uproar that ensued became a lasting political controversy that’s still debated. I was one of the most vocal critics, calling the administration’s analysis “willful ignorance or abysmal intelligence,” and a “massive cover-up or incompetence.” I demanded that a special committee investigate it. In the end, all it established is what could have been presumed at the beginning, bureaucratic incompetence and ass-covering, two common conditions in Washington. Anger subsides, politics moves on, but sadness remains. Chris Stevens deserved better from all of us.
And what of the country he died trying to help? It disintegrated into anarchy as warring militias clashed, politicians feuded, rival legislatures contested for control, and ISIS exploited the chaos to establish a franchise operation in the country. Libyans who were ecstatic over their enfranchisement in 2012 showed up in reduced numbers to vote in 2014, half as many as two years before. The U.S. and Europe, having intervened to change the regime, disengaged from the urgent, complex task of transforming a terrorized nation into a functioning civil society, of helping Libyans build national institutions where none existed. A U.N.-brokered agreement in 2015 called for a new “Government of National Accord,” and a new constitution and election that various warring factions continued to hinder. ISIS lost its territory but remains a presence. Last September, a new U.N. reconciliation plan was announced. A little hopefulness flickers in the embers that the worst might be behind. The memory of the heady optimism of 2011 that gave way quickly to resignation and despair cautions against great expectations. But that’s not to say there are no Libyans left who believe in the promise of 2011. There are many who still have faith they are capable of building a modern democracy. I do, too. I have met them, and been inspired by them, and believe in them. They need other Libyans to believe in their future, too, and assistance from the West to help them build it. They need guidance and resources and security. They need time. They need the generosity and vision of Chris Stevens, reflected in the efforts of those who emulate the example of that good man.
• • •
As NATO contemplated whether to intervene in Libya in March 2011, the first large protests in Syria began in provincial towns. Fifteen kids were arrested in Deraa in the southwest corner of the country for scrawling anti-regime graffiti on school walls. Protesters marched to demand their release. Government security forces opened fire on them, killing several. More protesters marched in response, and police fired on them, too, killing scores. Protests proliferated nationwide, as did demands for Bashar al-Assad’s resignation. The regime responded to the demonstrations with force, and casualties climbed, as Alawite Assad made war on the majority of his countrymen, who were Sunni. One hundred thousand demonstrated in Homs, the country’s third-largest city. By the summer, as many as a million Syrians were marching. The regime was using tanks to put down the protests. The U.S. and Europe imposed sanctions on the regime. President Obama called for Assad to step down. Syrian army officers defected and formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and civil war ensued. In January 2012, they were fighting in the Damascus suburbs. In February, the army began shelling Homs, starting the offensive to retake the city that would kill thousands, and was described by an evacuated British journalist as a scene of “medieval siege and slaughter.” In May, pro-regime forces executed over a hundred Syrians, most of them women and children, in the town of Taldou in the Houla region of Syria.
Syria’s descent into hell was nearing the point of no return when I spoke on the Senate floor in March 2012 to argue for arming the Free Syrian Army and call for air strikes by the U.S. and our European and regional allies to ground the Syrian air force, which was indiscriminately bombing population centers. I proposed creating safe havens for opposition forces and refugees.
We had reached a “decisive moment” in the conflict, I began. Seventy-five hundred lives had been lost, and the regime was committing crimes against humanity. Most of the world had turned against Assad. The Arab League had expelled Syria and the U.N. General Assembly had rebuked the regime, though Russia and China used their vetoes to protect Assad in the Security Council. The Russians hadn’t yet intervened militarily, though Moscow and Beijing were supplying arms and other assistance to the regime. Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world, and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, had deployed fighters to the conflict. There were already Revolutionary Guard officers in Syria, but the full extent of Iran’s involvement was a year away. ISIS hadn’t yet exploited the conflict to establish the center of its caliphate. Had the U.S. and Europe intervened in that first year of the conflict, eliminated Assad’s airpower advantage, and provided the FSA arms and munitions, including antitank weapons, I believe it would have been decisive. The regime would have collapsed and Assad, if he had survived, would likely have fled the country. Hundreds of thousands of lives might have been spared.
I commended the administration for leading international diplomatic and economic pressure on the regime, and I recognized their legitimate concerns “about the efficacy of military options in Syria.” But the conditions on the ground in Syria were dire, and the “administration’s approach is starting to look more like hope than a strategy.” I criticized the insistence that Assad’s collapse was inevitable. “Claims about the inevitability of events can often be a convenient way to abdicate responsibility.” I argued that in addition to humanitarian concerns, we had important geopolitical interests at stake. As Iran’s only Arab ally, Syria serves as “a forward operating base” for our adversary, and the supply route for arms to Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the gateway to Iraq for foreign extremists.
“The time has come for a new policy,” I contended. America and our allies should support both political and military opposition groups. “What opposition groups . . . need most urgently is relief from Assad’s tanks and artillery sieges in the many cities that are still contested.” The only realistic way to do that “is with foreign airpower.”
Our goal should be to establish and defend safe havens in the north, “where opposition forces can organize and plan . . . [and] could serve as platforms for humanitarian and military assistance.” I acknowledged we would have to destroy Assad’s air defenses in most if not all of the country before we could ground his air force. But that wouldn’t have been as great a challenge as some in the administration were suggesting it would be. We had to act now. With Iran’s and Russia’s backing, Assad had regained the momentum. The world was hedging their bets on Syria waiting for our leadership. The President had to make clear by word and deed that Assad “will not be able to finish what he started.”
Are there dangers and risks and uncertainties in this approach? Absolutely. There are no ideal options in Syria. All of them contain significant risk. . . . [But] none so much that they should keep us from acting.
And the risks get worse the longer we wait. “The surest way for al-Qaeda to gain a foothold in Syria is for us to turn our backs on the Syrians fighting to defend themselves. . . . Sunni Iraqis were willing to ally with al-Qaeda when they felt desperate enough. But when America gave them a better alternative they turned their guns on al-Qaeda.” Concerns that the civil war was a sectarian conflict and our intervention would allow Sunnis to take bloody revenge against their Alawite persecutors were legitimate, too. But that threat would only grow worse the longer the conflict lasts. “As we saw in Iraq, or Lebanon before it, time favors the hard-liners
in a conflict like this.” The worse the Sunnis suffered, the stronger the calls for revenge become, and the more it incentivizes the Alawites to keep fighting. And to those who argued all our intervention would do is further militarize the conflict, I noted that Iran and Russia were doing just that and could be counted on to continue strengthening Assad’s “killing machine.”
These warnings all came to pass, I’m sorry to say. Every concern raised as an argument against U.S. intervention became reality in the absence of our action. Al-Qaeda’s role in the opposition grew stronger as nonextremist militias were compelled by necessity to join forces with it. Foreign jihadis flooded into Syria and ISIS claimed a huge swath of Syrian territory for its barbarous caliphate. The role Iran and Russia played in Syria escalated with every passing month, until the regime’s dependence on them was total. And the slaughter surpassed imagination. By the summer, fighting had spread to Aleppo, Syria’s then largest city. The regime ordered fixed-wing air strikes on rebel positions there and in Damascus, indiscriminate bombing that killed as many civilians as rebels. By the end of the year, another fifty thousand Syrians had perished in the conflict. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that over three-quarters of a million Syrians had fled the country, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced within Syria. Citing concerns that they could fall into the hands of terrorists, the administration continued to reject calls to intervene and to arm the Free Syrian Army with anything more than light arms and nonlethal assistance when they desperately needed antitank and antiaircraft weapons. Obama did announce in August that one thing could change his mind about intervening. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime,” he stated,
that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.
By February 2013, the U.N. Security Council estimated that over seventy thousand civilians had been killed directly and indirectly by the war.
For a year now, Lindsey, Joe, and I had continued our appeals to arm and train the opposition and for a no-fly zone. In response to administration reluctance to expose U.S. pilots to Syria’s air defenses, I recommended using Patriot missile batteries in Turkey to shoot down Syrian warplanes. In every conversation, every committee hearing, every private discussion with senior members of the administration, I was told over and over that a no-fly zone was practically impossible. We would have to roll back all Assad’s air defenses, destroy his command and control, bomb all his airfields, crater all his runways. It would take months before we could safely defend safe havens. In essence, the administration’s pushback was that grounding Assad’s air force and defending a no-fly zone was too complex and dangerous for the greatest airpower in the world to manage safely and quickly. And this was more than two years before Russia’s first air strikes in Syria. It was a ridiculous assertion.
Rebel forces had gained the momentum by early 2013, and were advancing on multiple fronts. But Hezbollah fighters rushed to Assad’s aid. In April, the regime launched an offensive and the opposition’s advance had stalled. I had made a few trips to Turkey by then to meet with members of the Syrian political opposition, and with humanitarian workers, including a young Syrian from Homs, Abu Salim (a nom de guerre), who regularly ran arms and nonlethal assistance across the border to the FSA. He was an impressive young man, not an Islamist, who appeared to have ample resources and extensive contacts. I met with him several times, including twice in Washington, when he brought members of a Syrian volunteer group he was helping finance to meet me. They would eventually be widely known and admired as the White Helmets. I don’t know where Abu Salim is these days or even if he’s still using that name. I remember him as someone I hoped would be around when the war was over to help put the country back together. He wasn’t a zealot, just a guy who wanted to help his country and took risks. I hope he’s well, and if by some coincidence he should ever have an occasion to read this, I want him to know I admired him and wished him and his country well.
From my meetings in Turkey, I grew increasingly worried over reports that Syria might be using chemical weapons, that Iranians were committing more men and resources to the war, and that al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda front, was gaining strength and influence with rebel forces because their fighters were proving the most effective. I was tired of butting up against administration excuses that suppressing Assad’s air defenses was too time-consuming and dangerous an undertaking. I spoke on the Senate floor to call for measures that could tip the balance without a full-out assault on Assad’s SAMs and antiaircraft artillery. “More than seventy thousand Syrians have been killed indiscriminately,” I noted,
with snipers, artillery, helicopter gunships, fighter jets, and even ballistic missiles. Indeed . . . more than 4,300 civilians have been killed by Assad’s airstrikes alone since July 2012.
At the same time, Iran and its proxy Hezbollah are building a network of militias inside Syria, and the al Qaeda–aligned al Nusra Front has gained unprecedented strength on the ground. According to estimates that have been published in the media, some believe there were no more than a few hundred al Nusra fighters in Syria last year—but today, it is widely believed that there could be thousands of extremist fighters inside Syria.
I talked about the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who were overwhelming Jordan and Lebanon. “Syria is becoming a failed state in the heart of the Middle East,” I warned,
overrun by thousands of al Qaeda–affiliated fighters, with possibly tons of chemical weapons, and poised to ignite a wider sectarian conflict that could profoundly destabilize the region.
We didn’t have to take out the regime’s air defenses, I argued, to arm and train vetted opposition forces, which was something the President’s entire national security team had recommended he do, but that he continued to resist. And we could use precision strike capabilities to target Assad’s aircraft and SCUD launchers without suppressing his defenses. We could use them against artillery, too, and use Patriot batteries to defend safe zones from aerial and missile attacks.
Would any of these options immediately end the conflict? Probably not. But they could save innocent lives in Syria. They could give the moderate opposition a better chance to succeed in marginalizing radical actors.
I went to Turkey at the end of the month after convincing the State Department to let me enter northern Syria for a few hours. The Washington-based Syrian Emergency Task Force had arranged for me to meet with members of FSA units. I went with General Salim Idris, the head of the FSA’s Supreme Military Council. I don’t know what I had expected but crossing the border into a war turned out to be a pretty unremarkable experience. General Idris, Brose, two Syrian Emergency Task Force staffers, and I loaded into SUVs and drove less than a mile to a border crossing, where the guards were expecting us. They raised the gates and we crossed into Syria, and with that easy effort I became for the time being the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Syria since the war began. Another short drive took us to the building where FSA commanders from around the country had gathered to meet us. They described recent fighting on various fronts where the regime was trying to retake territory, and how increasingly large a share of the fighting Hezbollah was conducting. They were doing all of the fighting in Homs, they said. There were more Russians in the country as well. They told me they were running low on ammunition and didn’t have weapons they could use against aircraft. They also insisted Assad had already used chemical weapons several times. They asked me for the things I had been arguing for months they be provided with, antitank and antiaircraft weapons and air strikes. I told them I’d keep at it. We took a few photographs, and then we left for another uneventful border crossing.
When I got back to the hotel, I instructed my Washington office to tweet one of the pictures. I don’t remember exactly how long it took, but some days if not weeks later, a Lebanese television station affiliated with Hezbollah accused two of the FS
A commanders of being al-Nusra fighters who had been involved in kidnapping Shia pilgrims to Lebanon. The names mentioned didn’t match any of the names of the people we had met with, and we soon determined the story was bullshit. But it lives forever on the Internet, in easy reach of McCain-hating conspiracy nuts everywhere. Some troll even went to the trouble of Photoshopping the head of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi onto the body of one of the FSA leaders.
• • •
In the predawn hours of August 21, 2013, the regime fired as many as fifteen rockets at two densely populated rebel-held areas in the Damascus suburbs. They carried warheads filled with sarin gas. It wasn’t long before video and photographs appeared of some of the victims, many of them children, gasping their last breaths. As many as fifteen hundred civilians were massacred. Assad denied his regime was culpable, and blamed the attacks on the rebels, as did Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, whom I’ve gotten to know over the years at conferences in Munich and elsewhere, and who lies as easily as he breathes. But a U.N. inspection team confirmed that a sarin gas attack on sleeping civilians had occurred. On August 30, U.S. intelligence services revealed they had surveilled each step in the attack from preparing the rockets to after-action reports. President Obama’s red line had been crossed. I believed he would retaliate as he had promised, and I hoped the force used to punish the regime would seriously degrade its military capabilities.