Nearly 16 months after the United States launched its air campaign against IS in Syria, the White House still lacks a clear plan, the Virginia Democrat told Yahoo News in an interview broadcast on Sirius/XM Channel 124.
Kaine, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cautiously welcomed Obama's placement of up to 50 US special operators in Syria. The elite forces will advise and assist so-called "moderate" rebels battling the Islamic State, but they’ll also find themselves under fire from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Still, Kaine said, the administration has yet to present a comprehensive strategy that addresses the three major issues in the war-torn country.
"They've got to put a credible Syria strategy on the table," Kaine said. "They've got to put a strategy on the table that deals with the ISIL third of the problem, with the Assad third of the problem, and with the massive humanitarian disaster third of the problem. And they're just not doing that."
Washington has insisted that any plans for Syria’s future must include Assad relinquishing power.
Kaine lamented that the Obama who ran for president in 2007 vowing to rein in American military intervention has given way to a commander in chief who has embraced a potentially dangerous view of executive war-making power, Yahoo News reported.
The senator worried that this assertiveness and congressional unwillingness to challenge the White House would leave a terrible legacy to the next president.
"I'm a strong supporter of the president. I think ISIL is evil. I think the United States should be undertaking military action against ISIL. But not without a vote of Congress," he said. "Because if we allow this president, or any president, to wage a war for 16 months without needing the permission of Congress, we’re setting a horrible precedent."
He continued: "I would think this president would want to finish his term in office as somebody who had imposed some order on a disorderly, kind of carte blanche grant of power rather than walking out of office having participated in a broad expansion of the doctrine of undeclared executive war."
