Tom Cotton Quotes

On Putin's order, Russia intervenes in Syria not to fight terrorists but to abet the war crimes of the Assad regime. Russian bombers deliberately target aid workers and hospitals. They threaten Syrian freedom fighters trained by the U.S. They are allied with our enemies in the Middle East and trying to weaken our friendships there.

Iran has basically propped up Assad, who has waged an absolute war of horror against the Syrian people. And he has done anything he could to stay in power with the full support of the Iranians and including Iranian troops and Hezbollah from Lebanon, which are an Iranian proxy.

In August 2012, the international community should have been far more determined in dealing with the Bashar Assad regime.

Back in August 2013, when Obama entertained the White House press corps in the Rose Garden to explain that he wasn't quite as eager to upbraid Bashar Assad as he might have inadvertently led them earlier to believe, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees counted about two million Syrians in its refugee statistics.

One sure way to ruin American credibility in the Arab world is to sit silently in Damascus and look like you're part of the Assad show.

While Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator and should be tried at the Hague for international war crimes, the United States should not militarily overthrow him.

A majority of the Syrian people believe in the regime and support Bashar al-Assad.

It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad's soldiers.

The United States should propose partition in Syria. Assad can keep what he controls, and the rebels can form local governments and establish a new entity.

Assad has to go. I mean, the way that ISIS can recruit, and the rebels that are in the north, and all the chaos that's happening through a lot of Syria circles around a lot of people that do not like Assad.

We don't see a peaceful Syria with Assad in there.

Unlike the Vietnam boat people or Cuban refugees after Castro came to power, the U.S. has no moral responsibility for the chaos in Syria. In fact, just the opposite is the case.

If Assad continues to conduct strikes against the Free Syrian Army at will, it would be very difficult for them to have any success against ISIS.

Trump has long said he favors a 'safe zone' in Syria to prevent Basher al Assad's regime from carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes against Syrian civilians and to halt the refugee flow out of Syria.

In the three years since Obama invited Russia to help him renege on his 'red line' on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented 136 occasions in which the Assad regime has deployed poison gas in its war on the Syrian people.

The U.S. would still like to see Assad go at some point. That would be our desired outcome.

No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

President Bush was disgusted by the Assad regime's oppression of the Syrian people as well as its support for terrorism, interference in Lebanon, and encouragement of jihadist attacks on Americans in Iraq.

The fall of the Syrian regime is in the interest of America and Israel.

I just don't understand how Kerry or Obama or anybody else thought Assad was going to change.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of [Syrian] depravity sinks lower.

We have no vital national interest in Syria's civil war.

There is no question that President Barack Obama should be commended for the successful removal of Assad's ghastly chemical weapons stockpile. But it hasn't been enough.