U.S. Sen. John McCain, Arizona’s senior senator, is in international hot water. On Monday, Jan. 5, Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari accused McCain of entering his country without a visa, which he told the U.N. Security Council violated his nation’s sovereignty. He then pressured member states to take action against their nationals who entered his nation without a visa.

Ja’afari is the ambassador of the Syrian Arab Republic.

To those who may not know, Syria is in the midst of a brutal three-and-a-half-year civil war in which Ja’afari’s government, led by dictator/President Bashir al-Assad, has used chemical weapons against civilians, met peaceful protests with tanks and dropped “barrel bombs” filled with shrapnel and high explosives in the middle of suburban neighborhoods thought loyal to the opposition.

Ja’afari’s government is mad McCain didn’t knock and ask its permission to speak with leaders of the opposition fighting to end Assad’s terrorist regime. Syria has banned aid workers, international human rights observers and Western reporters from entering the country, so a visa for McCain was likely not an option, even less so considering with whom he planned to speak.

The Assad family dictatorship took partial power in 1966, total power in a 1970 coup d’état and has used a 48-year so-called state of emergency to suppress and terrorize dissents among their own people. Assad’s security services uses bribes and intimidation to encourage people to report dissident activity by their neighbors who are then abducted, never to return. Since the civil war began, an estimated 85,000 civilians in government-held areas have been “disappeared” by security forces and more than 200,000 have been openly arrested and imprisoned. Some 280,000 civilians have been killed and 4.5 million, almost a quarter of the population, have fled to safer areas or to other countries.

In a reply Monday, McCain said, “It is a sad but unsurprising truth that the Assad regime is less concerned with its massacre of more than 200,000 men, women and children than it is my visit with those brave Syrians fighting for their freedom and dignity. The fact that the international community has done virtually nothing to bring down this terrible regime despite its atrocities is a stain on our collective moral conscience.”

Although this statement was statesmen-like, I hope McCain’s initial reaction was “Are you kidding me?” peppered with profanity.

After Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation on streets of Ben Arous, Tunisia, on Jan. 4, 2011, touched off the Arab Spring, the Middle East and the Maghreb have seen massive changes. Filled with momentum, anger and hope, oppressed people have overthrown of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, held major protests in Algeria, Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon and achieved government reforms and concessions in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait Bahrain and Oman. Libya collapsed into a quick but nasty civil war that ended with dictator Muammar Gaddafi being dragged from a drainage ditch and shot.

Four years ago, Assad had a chance to meet dissenters’ demands and reform, but refused and blamed protests on foreign agitators, Western spies and the media.

Now guilty of human rights violations and war crimes against his own people he is essentially accusing Arizona’s senior senator of a paperwork violation.

Assad should instead rewatch the footage of a bloodied and wounded Gaddafi’s last minutes alive and ask McCain where the rebels want him to spend his exile.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor