Her former boss led the world into Bosnia to quell the humanitarian horrors following the breakup of Yugoslavia, but Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is urging a go-slow approach to the murdering regime of Syria’s Assad government.
“We are at the beginning of trying to figure out how to deal with it,” she said. For now, the administration and White House should be considering “options” to stop the killing and mostly from the world community, not the Pentagon, she added at an Atlantic Council briefing to address issues the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago will handle.
But that wasn’t good enough for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who’s crusading for swift NATO action in Syria, or even soft-spoken former Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who compared what’s happening in Syria to the earlier humanitarian disaster in Libya, which the U.S. helped to end. “I hope there will be a role of the U.S. into that problem,” Warner said of Syria.
McCain, who quoted former President Clinton’s justification for getting into Bosnia, didn’t call for unilateral U.S. action, instead urging a united NATO effort. “It is now the policy of NATO, that we will stand by as rulers kill their people by the thousands and our alliance won’t even discuss what we might to do to help stop them. That is shameful. It is shameful. It only gives Assad and his forces a green light for greater brutality,” warned McCain.
