Kerry fires back at McCain: I’m not ‘delusional’

Secretary of State John Kerry pushed back Monday on Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s description of him as “intrepid but delusional” for negotiating with Russia over Syria.

“If we hadn’t had the conversations we had, there would have been absolutely continued violence and many more people dead,” Kerry told reporters in Colombia. “So I mean, John McCain wants to talk about ‘delusional.’ Where’s the congressional vote for force? Where’s the congressional vote to go do something? They weren’t even willing to help support a vote to get the chemical weapons out of Syria. We got that out by talking to the Russians and by actually taking action.”

{mosads}McCain last week slammed the Obama administration’s Syria policy during his opening statement at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. 

“While Russian and Syrian regime aircraft bombed hospitals, markets, aid warehouses and other civilian targets, President Obama sent his intrepid but delusional secretary of State to tilt yet again at the windmill of cooperating with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, even committing to share intelligence with Russia for coordinated military operations,” said McCain, chairman of the committee.

McCain and fellow Armed Services Committee Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) followed up with a joint statement Monday calling the diplomatic effort a “fig leaf” to cover the administration’s failed Syria policy.

The Obama administration’s Syria policy has come under growing criticism since the latest attempt at a cease-fire all but collapsed.

Late last week, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with Russian backing, launched an assault on the rebel-held parts of Aleppo, reportedly with some of the fiercest bombing of the civil war to date. Hundreds of people have been reported killed since Thursday.

Kerry spent months negotiating the cease-fire with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. If the cease-fire held for seven days and humanitarian aid was delivered to besieged areas of the country, the United States and Russia would start coordinating militarily to target terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The cease-fire went into effect Sept. 12 but had mostly collapsed a week later after U.S. forces mistakenly struck Syrian troops while targeting ISIS and an aid convoy was destroyed in an airstrike suspected to be carried out by Russia or the regime.

Asked Monday about McCain’s comments, Kerry said “talk is cheap.”

“I just think talk is cheap and the important thing right now is to figure out what’s the alternative that the America people and the United States Congress will support,” he said. “I have my own views about what we ought to do, but I’m not going to be arguing about them publicly.”

Further, he said, the deal with Russia was not the cause of the regime’s latest offensive.

“The cause of what is happening is Assad and Russia wanting to simply try to pursue a military victory,” he said. “And it would be diplomatic malpractice not to try to pursue whether or not through some kind of diplomatic effort you could actually wind up reducing the violence.

“And what’s the alternative? Today there’s no cease-fire, and we’re not talking to them right now. What’s happening? The place is being utterly destroyed, OK? That’s not delusional. That’s a fact.”