President-elect Donald Trump promised Thursday he'd enact safe zones to help refugees fleeing war torn Syria and Aleppo, and while Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Friday he thinks that's a "big start," the Syrian civil war is just going to go on.
"You look at obviously the human tragedy, that's one thing," the Illinois Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "You look at the political implications, have you this mass migration coming out of the Middle East into Europe and destabilizing, that you have the clash of cultures that's going on, and only going to continue to get worse."
Trump is realizing the need to do something, Kinzinger continued, but "he's probably not talking about going as far as I would like to go. The safe zone is a big start, and the fact is this, even with the fall of Aleppo, this is not going to burn itself out. It's not going to end."
What needs to happen, he continued, is an "enforceable cease-fire; you need to have a stick behind it."
"This is where Secretary of State [John] Kerry, President [Barack] Obama have utterly failed as they keep trying to sue for peace but don't have a stick," Kinzinger said. "If you violate it, the repercussions are strikes against the regime. Doesn't mean you start war, it means you can enforce a cease-fire. I hope President-elect Trump, when he gets in there, says let's do everything we can to stop this."
On Thursday, Kerry called for Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to return to the negotiating table, but Kinziger said that would just result in delaying tactics "while they make gains on the ground and pretend they're interested in a cease fire . . . you have to back this up with enforceable action."
Kinzinger said he understands Kerry has advocated for military strikes, but Obama is "too worried about upsetting the delicate deal with Iran and upsetting the Russians. By the way, the Russians have an economy the size of Italy. This isn't the old Soviet Union."
The congressman does believe Russia was involved to an extent in hacking and releasing sensitive details from Hillary Clinton's campaign, but he thinks it goes "a bridge way too far to say it elected Trump as president. I think Trump was elected overwhelmingly by the vast majority of the country and delegitimize what is wrong."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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