MSNBC’s Morning Joe panel lambasted the Obama administration on Thursday for not acting more forcefully in the Syrian civil war, which has become a humanitarian nightmare for the people living there.
BBC anchor Katty Kay was discussing how Russia was defending its use of Iranian airbases for launching air strikes in Syria when Morning Joe cut to a photo of a little boy pulled from rubble in Aleppo, Syria, after a Russian air strike hit where he was. The boy was carried by a rescuer to a seat in an ambulance, where he sat in a daze, covered in dust and blood.
Scarborough then went off on what he called the president’s failure to act in Syria as the death toll continues to rise in the country’s ongoing civil war, which began in 2011.
"You know, Katty, looking at that image, you go back and think about the recriminations after Rwanda, you think about the recriminations in the 90s after the Balkans and you sit and wonder, not only how does the United States government sit back and do nothing–and we have done nothing, but direct knowledge," Scarborough said. "Again, I remember, unrolling 20,000 dead, 40,000 dead, 80,000 dead, 100,000 dead, 150,000 dead, 200,000 dead, and all along, people would come on this set and say, ‘Well, it’s just too difficult. We can’t do anything.’"
"What’s the purpose of being the last best hope for a dying world? What’s the purpose of NATO? What’s the purpose of the United Nations? What’s the purpose of international organizations if you cannot step in and stop this mass slaughter in Syria, which continues unabated?" Scarborough added.
"We can’t say we didn’t know, right? We cannot say we don’t know what’s happening right now every day in Aleppo when we see images like that one," Kay said.
Kay then turned to Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, for his opinion, which included strong words for Secretary of State John Kerry and the world’s inaction in Syria.
"Richard, I mean, I don’t know what you think," Kay said. "I think this is still the single biggest failing in terms of foreign policy of the Obama administration."
"Absolutely, and it shows, Katty, that what you don’t do can be every bit as consequential as what you do do when it comes to foreign policy," Haass said. "Also shows that there’s no such thing as an international community, no matter how many times people invoke the phrase."
"But it also shows that John Kerry’s diplomacy with Moscow isn’t working and the United States now has to decide whether we are going to take the fight to some extent to Syria. and that would mean using American cruise missiles or American aircraft amongst other things to keep Syrian aircraft on the ground," Haass continued. "And we’ve got to make that decision because all this diplomacy isn’t working."
"We have got to make it more difficult for the Syrians and for their Russian friends to kill innocent people," Haass added. "The death toll now is, what? 400, 500,000 people. More than half the country, half the population of Syria is no longer living in their homes. They’re either internally displaced or they’re refugees. Probably one out of every four of the refugees in the world right now is Syrian."
"So, this is, this is a major, major, not just failure strategically, but morally on the United States and really on the world," Haass said.
The panel then discussed how Donald Trump’s foreign policy would affect the situation in Syria if he were elected president. Scarborough said that it was not a matter of political parties before delivering a scathing indictment of the Obama administration.
"Unfortunately, not just the Republican Party but what we have done as a nation for well over 100 years," Scarborough said. "We went to Europe in 1917 to end a hellacious world war and we did a year later and, obviously, we were the indispensable power in World War II, at least on the western front bringing that to an end."
"But you look at what’s happened over the past several years in Syria, and I’ll quote Samantha Power, the UN secretary in her book, A Problem from Hell, you know, that’s what this is, it’s a problem from hell in Syria that’s destabilized, wrecked Syria, destabilized the Middle East, bringing terrorism to Europe, will bring terrorism to the United States," Scarborough continued. "But just morally causing an extraordinary amount of anguish and pain and suffering and death. And the United States has remained silent; Europe has remained silent; the EU has remained silent; the United Nations has remained silent. The world community has remained silent while this suffering continues unabated."
"We will look back on this and we will have a lot of people asking why we abandoned the people of Syria and the world the way we did over the past eight years," Scarborough said before cutting to the picture of the little boy in Aleppo.