The following dialogue was part of a radio interview with Alan Comes, September 28, addressing the role of troops in the Middle East and a US role in addressing refugees.
WEBB: The mistake that I believe we made in Syria and some of these other places in the Arab Spring is to be drawing some of these red lines that were unenforceable in reality.
COLMES: So when the President said there was going to be a red line, that was a mistake. Is there anything that we should be doing now?
WEBB: I’ll tell you what we shouldn’t be doing is putting troops on the ground over there and I warned about it beforehand and I was saying Syria is going to be Lebanon on steroids. When I was a journalist in Beirut, you could see the divisions, the historic thousands of year old divisions in that part of the world. So we should be calling on, particularly, the Sunni nations in that region to step up and to do more, and also on the refugees situation in Syria, to do more. They’re not doing more, they’re simply trying to drop this on us and I think it’s appropriate for the President today to have said that he will work with the Russians in an attempt to stabilize the situation.
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COLMES: Do you believe we should take more refugees in? They say 10,000, is what the White House is saying, should we take more?
WEBB: I think the Saudis should take more. I think people in the region should step up to try to stabilize Syria. And we should be very careful about bringing a large number of refugees here. I say that as someone, my wife is an immigrant and a refugee from the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. We have a large problem in our country right now in terms of resolving the immigration issue. So for those who are truly political refugees in some way affiliated with what we’ve been doing, we should consider that.
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WEBB: The mistake that I believe we made in Syria and some of these other places in the Arab Spring is to be drawing some of these red lines that were unenforceable in reality.
COLMES: So when the President said there was going to be a red line, that was a mistake. Is there anything that we should be doing now?
WEBB: I’ll tell you what we shouldn’t be doing is putting troops on the ground over there and I warned about it beforehand and I was saying Syria is going to be Lebanon on steroids. When I was a journalist in Beirut, you could see the divisions, the historic thousands of year old divisions in that part of the world. So we should be calling on, particularly, the Sunni nations in that region to step up and to do more, and also on the refugees situation in Syria, to do more. They’re not doing more, they’re simply trying to drop this on us and I think it’s appropriate for the President today to have said that he will work with the Russians in an attempt to stabilize the situation.
*****
COLMES: Do you believe we should take more refugees in? They say 10,000, is what the White House is saying, should we take more?
WEBB: I think the Saudis should take more. I think people in the region should step up to try to stabilize Syria. And we should be very careful about bringing a large number of refugees here. I say that as someone, my wife is an immigrant and a refugee from the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. We have a large problem in our country right now in terms of resolving the immigration issue. So for those who are truly political refugees in some way affiliated with what we’ve been doing, we should consider that.
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