The Words “Never Again” Ring Hollow Today As Aleppo Falls to Assad

By Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham

The words “never again” ring hollow today with reports that Aleppo is falling to Assad regime forces. For four long years, Aleppo has been at the center of the Assad regime’s war on the Syrian people. Together with its Russian and Iranian allies, the Assad regime has relentlessly targeted women and children, doctors and rescue workers, hospitals and bakeries, aid warehouses and humanitarian convoys.

There are now reports that a “ceasefire” has been reached in the city. This is not a cause to celebrate, but a sure sign of the fate that awaits other Syrian cities. Having consolidated its power in Aleppo and paid no price for its war crimes, the Assad regime will use the ceasefire to reset its war machine and prepare to slaughter its way to victory across the rest of the country, which will undermine U.S. national security interests and increase the risk to U.S. troops serving in Syria.

It is heartbreaking that we have reached this point — a Syrian conflict that has killed more than 500,000 people, created the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, spawned ISIL’s terrorist army, and forged an unholy alliance between a Syrian dictator, a Russian autocrat, and an Iranian theocrat. It did not have to be this way. But this is the inevitable result of hollow words and inaction, red lines crossed without consequences, tarnished moral influence, “leading from behind,” and a total lack of American leadership.

Just a few months after the revolution in Syria began in 2011, President Obama issued a Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities, stating: “Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” Two years later, President Obama addressed the UN General Assembly: “[S]hould we really accept the notion that the world is powerless in the face of a Rwanda, or Srebrenica? If that’s the world that people want to live in, they should say so, and reckon with the cold logic of mass graves.”

That reckoning is now upon us. The cold logic of mass graves confronts us yet again, and the name Aleppo will echo through history, like Srebrenica and Rwanda, as a testament to our moral failure and everlasting shame.