On September 9, 2013, Congressman Bentivolio from Michigan was granted permission to address the United States House of Representatives regarding the situation in Syria – what he said shocked many people in the room.
“We live in a fallen world. Bad things happen to innocent people everyday across the glob. Drug cartels beheading people in central America, Christians being burned alive in Nigeria, human trafficking in Asia – all these things are heart wrenching but none of them involves our common defense.”
“When I see what is happening in Syria and read the intelligence given to us, I do. not see how this terrible civil war involves our common defense. I understand the horrors of the Assad regime and it sickens me. It hurts me to see the pictures of the dead children brutally gassed by a hateful dictator. Yet the actions our President wishes us to take would do little to prevent such a man from continuing to murder his people, nor would it help our soldiers (who) were sworn to protect our constitution…”
The congressman also railed against the Obama administration and took issue with Secretary of State John Kerry public statements on Syria:
“The Secretary of State also had the gall to tell both the Senate and the House Foreign Relations Committees that bombing Syria is ‘not a war in the classic sense.’ Let me tell you something Mr. Speaker, if another nation attacked us the way our president wants to attack Syria, everyone in this room would call it war. Let me tell you something else Mr. Speaker: war has consequences.”
” The Secretary of State told the House Foreign relations Committee that the goal of bombing Syria was to ‘degrade’ Assad’s chemical weapons and cause a stalemate in the fighting. Another words, Assad will still have the capability of using chemical weapons and could very well use them again to break the stalemate we create. Does anyone really think that we will just stop with the first round of bombing? That’s not how war works. Wars are a ‘yes or no’ question. You cannot, as Secretary Kerry suggests, only kind of fight a war. If we break it, we’re going to have to fix it”, he said (source: Congressional record September 9, 2013).