U.S.-Russia Syria deal: Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham slam agreement

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Saturday called the U.S.-Russia accord to bring Syria’s chemical weapons under international control “significant progress toward protecting our national security and global stability.”
But two senior Republicans on his committee – Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – blasted the agreement as a sign of U.S. “weakness.”

The chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), said it was “an enforceable agreement with the potential to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons would be an even better outcome than the goals of the authorization approved just a few days ago – not just deterring and degrading [Bashar] Assad’s chemical weapons capability, but eliminating it altogether.”

But he warned in a statement after the framework agreement was announced in Geneva: “As the president said, the United States remains prepared to act if Syria does not implement this agreement. Russia and Syria sought two things in any agreement: a promise on our part not to use military force, and an end to international support for the Syrian opposition. This agreement includes neither item.
“Just as the credible threat of a strike against Syria’s chemical capability made this framework agreement possible,” Levin concluded, “we must maintain that credible threat to ensure that Assad fully complies with the agreement.”
But McCain and Graham, in a separate joint statement, saw little good in the U.S.-Russia deal.
U.S. allies and enemies alike, they said, will see the accord “as an act of provocative weakness on America’s part. We cannot imagine a worse signal to send to Iran as it continues its push for a nuclear weapon.”
Without a United Nations Security Council resolution that would threaten the use of force for noncompliance by the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the two senators said, “this framework agreement is meaningless. Assad will use the months and months afforded to him to delay and deceive the world using every trick in Saddam Hussein’s playbook.”
“Is the message of this agreement that Assad is now our negotiating partner, and that he can go on slaughtering innocent civilians and destabilizing the Middle East using every tool of warfare, so long as he does not use chemical weapons?” the senators asked, concluding: “That is morally and strategically indefensible.”
“The only way this underlying conflict can be brought to a decent end is by significantly increasing our support to moderate opposition forces in Syria,” they said. “We must strengthen their ability to degrade Assad’s military advantage, change the momentum on the battlefield, and thereby create real conditions for a negotiated end to the conflict.”