McCain, Kerry tangle over Syria

Sen. John McCain tangled with Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday in an unusually terse exchange over the administration’s Syria policy.

Particularly, the Arizona Republican demanded to know why the administration wasn’t protecting the Syrian opposition that’s eager to fight the Islamic State from Syrian President Bashar Assad, who the senator charged continues to “barrel bomb” and commit other “atrocities.”


“Maybe, you can respond to that and tell me how you justify morally telling young Syrians to go and fight in Syria and then allow them to be barrel-bombed by Assad,” McCain scolded Kerry at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on proposals for the use of military force in the fight against ISIL.

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Kerry, a former Democratic senator from Massachusetts who used to chair the committee, responded that the opposition, especially in the north, was fighting both ISIL and the Assad regime.

McCain and Kerry interrupted each other several times, with McCain reiterating that 200,000 Syrians have been “butchered” by Assad while the administration has no strategy to deal with it.

It was “disingenuous,” Kerry said, to suggest nothing was being considered within the administration to deal with Assad — and offered to brief McCain in a classified session.

And McCain fired back, saying the Syrians “want to know why you haven’t helped them.”

Then, running out of his allotted time to question Kerry, the senator quickly left the hearing room.