Rohrabacher: Don’t Intervene in Syria

Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, cautioned the United States in an interview Monday against hastily getting involved in Syria.

Despite the recent uproar that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons against its citizens, Rohrabacher argues on Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio that such revelations should not lead to a knee-jerk response against the Assad regime.“They may have poison gas, they may not,” he said. “But the fact that they’re mass slaughtering each other, targeting civilians, both sides seem to be engaged in a brutal, no-holds barred war.”

“Each side has groups within it that we don’t want to have anything to do with. Fighting against Assad, we’d put in Al Qaeda and some of these radical Sunnis who’ve been murdering Americans, and on the other side you’ve got the Islamic mullah dictatorship from Iran playing a major role and propping Assad up.  And then complicating matters, Assad is one of the protectors of the Christian community and other minority communities in Syria.”

Because he sees no clear side that the United States should be supporting in Syria, Rohrabacher doesn’t believe that “we should worry as much about one of those groups getting poison gas as we should be worried about having America drawn into yet another conflict.”

Rohrabacher tells Gaffney that one area where US intervention is badly needed, however, is concerning the imprisonment of Dr. Shakil Afridi in Pakistan, the man who gave the US government the information it needed to verify the location of Osama bin Laden.

A leading voice in the US House of Representatives calling for decisive action to be taken in freeing Afridi, Rohrabacher decries the fact that the imprisonment of “one of the greatest heroes of our time” “has been going on for months and months. Six months and they haven’t done anything. He’s still languishing away… I’m having trouble even getting the resolution [to free Afridi] to the floor. But what does come to the floor is a foreign aid budget that includes hundreds of millions for Pakistan.”

Representative Rohrabacher is pushing for an amendment to the foreign aid bill that would make money to Pakistan contingent on the release of Dr. Afridi.

LISTEN to the interview on Secure Freedom Radio.