30 Oct 15. Lawmakers Rap Obama on Syria Escalation. President Barack Obama’s authorization to send a small group of US special operations troops into the fight against the Islamic State group in northern Syria Friday met criticism Friday from congressional lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Senate Armed Services Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, called the move “another insufficient step in the Obama Administration’s policy of gradual escalation,” insufficient to address Syrian President Bashar Assad, the growth of Russian and Iranian influence, or al-Qaida affiliate al-Nusrah.
“Such grudging incrementalism is woefully inadequate to the scale of the challenge we face,” McCain said in a statement Friday. “Syrian and Iraqi civilians are dying on the battlefield every day, hundreds of thousands of refugees are flooding into Europe, the erosion of America’s credibility is accelerating, and America’s foes are rapidly destabilizing the rules-based international order.”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. William “Mac” Thornberry, R-Texas, said “a more serious effort against ISIS in Syria is long overdue” — but intimated that this was not it.
“Absent a larger coherent strategy, however, these steps may prove to be too little too late,” Thornberry said. “I do not see a strategy for success, rather it seems the administration is trying to avoid a disaster while the President runs out the clock.”
Presidential candidate Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, who hammered the administration’s strategy as “half-assed” earlier in the week, said Friday that the troop deployments are “an incremental change that will not change conditions on the ground,” and that the Islamic State group would view it as “weakness.”
“ISIL will not be intimidated by this move,” Graham said in an MSNBC interview. “They’re all in for their agenda and their view of the world, and President Obama is not all-in when it comes to degrading and destroying ISIL. This just reinforces that.”
House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, said that Obama’s decision to send special operations forces to Syria comes “after years of neglect of our Syria policy and a failed Syrian training program.”
“Putting small numbers of troops in Syria is yet another tactical move in the absence of a comprehensive strategy for Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East that does nothing more than create the appearance of serious action,” McCarthy said in a statement on Friday. “What the President has failed to address is a proper response to increased Russian-Iran cooperation in Syria, including Russia’s willingness to help Iran smuggle weapons to Iran’s proxies in the civil war.”
Obama’s decision received support from two key Democrats on defense, the ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees: Sen. Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, and Rep. Adam Smith, of Washington state. Each mentioned that troops would have an advisory role against the Islamic State.
“The president’s decision to send advisors to Syria makes sense because it will make Syrian forces opposing ISIL more effective,” Reed said. “Their mission is to provide advice and assistance and then let the Syrian commanders — through their forces on the ground — engage with and push back against ISIL. These kinds of operations can also result in critical intelligence to support the coalition’s broader campaign against ISIL.”
Reed tempered his support, noting that after nearly a decade and a half of US military involvement overseas, “Americans are rightly concerned about being drawn deeper into a seemingly intractable Middle East conflict.” He noted that such support is typically through advice, assistance, airpower, equipment and resupply, and that the fight on the ground, “can only be won by the local populations as they are fighting for their homes and their future.”
“The situation in Syria and Iraq is extremely complicated, but our goals are clear—combatting ISIL and a negotiated