Little Consensus Within Obama Administration on How to Stop Fall of Aleppo to Assad
Little Consensus Within Obama Administration on How to Stop Fall of Aleppo to Assad by Karen DeYoung, Washington Post
It may be no small irony that President Obama’s peripatetic secretary of state will travel next week to Rwanda, where up to a million people were killed in a three-month ethnic genocide in 1994, and has tentative plans to attend an international meeting on Syria, where civilian dead are fast approaching the halfway point of that number.
Bill Clinton, president at the time of the Rwandan massacre, has said that U.S. failure to intervene there is one of his biggest regrets. Just two years later, an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica while “the world’s great nations,” including the United States, “failed to respond adequately,” the United Nations later said.
As Obama constructs the final months of his legacy, both historical events loom large.
“Another Srebrenica, another Rwanda” are “written on that wall in front of us unless something takes place” to stop the slaughter, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy to Syria, said late last week as Russian and Syrian aircraft and artillery continued their relentless bombardment of rebel-held eastern Aleppo.
But there is no consensus within the administration about what the United States can or should do to try to bring a halt to the killing and stop what now appears to be the increasingly inevitable fall of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, to government forces…