Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) predicted during a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the Obama administration's decision to not create a safe zone in Syria will go down in history as one of the most severe mistakes the U.S. has ever made, tantamount to the country's failure to act during the Rwanda genocide of 1994.
Kaine made his statement during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Paul Selva testified on the current state of the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Multiple senators asked the witnesses about the prospect of implementing a no-fly zone over Syria to help construct safe zones on the ground to which refugees in the country could flee for safety and where rebel forces could be trained to fight the Islamic State.
Both Carter and Selva said that the costs of a no-fly zone would outweigh the benefits by increasing the risk of U.S. forces directly confronting Russian and Syrian armed forces in the air.
Kaine told the witnesses and the committee in response that he originally agreed with the Obama administration that a no-fly zone would be unwise because of testimony at the time saying such a move would run the risk of Washington conflicting with Syrian air defenses.
However, the senator reversed his position when the administration said it was not worried about those defenses while calling for airstrikes against the Syrian regime after President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people.
Kaine then said why he thinks "the absence of the humanitarian zone [in Syria] will go down as one of the big mistakes that we've made, equivalent to the decision not to engage in humanitarian activity in Rwanda in the 1990s."
"With respect to Syria," Kaine began, "there's been testimony from the military to us that the Syrian air defense system is really all not that great, and that we could take care of it. And with respect to Russia, Russia voted for [United Nations] Security Council Resolution 2139 in February of 2014, calling for cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid into Syria without the permission of Bashar al-Assad."
"There are few guarantees in life," Kaine said, "but I can pretty much give you this one. Russia would not intervene and try to mess around with us if we were engaged in a humanitarian effort that was premised upon a U.N. Security Council Resolution that they actually voted for."
Kaine added that the United States has had the "ability and legal rationale to enforce that resolution" but has failed to do so.
As a result, he argues, millions of refugees from Syria have fled to neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Europe, and are trying to get into the U.S., which has destabilized the Middle East and the West.
Kaine believes that a no-fly and safe zone could still be effective if implemented today, and he told Carter and Silva that previous testimony from the Pentagon has "undercut" the arguments they made during Wednesday's hearing.
President Obama and the Pentagon have rejected growing bipartisan calls for implementing humanitarian safe havens in Syria since the onset of the civil war there in 2011.
The administration has placed a priority on avoiding any escalation of conflict with Russia and also pushing a political process in Syria to transition away from Assad's rule in conjunction with its military strategy to counter the Islamic State.