Richard Williamson, a top foreign policy adviser for the Mitt Romney campaign, said that the US should arm selected rebel forces in Syria and be willing to go beyond the UN Security Council to intervene in Syria as President Bill Clinton did in Kosovo, if necessary. Williamson also demanded that Iran cease all uranium enrichment and said the US should be more loyal to Israel, which he said President Barack Obama had thrown "under the bus."

“You get more respect by being honest, candid and forthright than by overselling and undercutting your friends and failing to get concrete results and that’s the record of the Obama administration,” he said. Williamson, a former US ambassador to the UN for political affairs, assistant secretary of State and special envoy to Darfur under the George W. Bush administration, made the remarks in an interview with Al-Monitor Washington correspondent Barbara Slavin. Other excerpts follow:

Al-Monitor: In an interview on Friday (June 8), you said that there are Syrian rebels the US should be arming. How do we identify them and how can we be sure they would serve US interests in the long term?

Williamson: The first thing is we should be in there… You can have covert operatives, others you are working with, Turkey and … working with exiles, just like we did with Libya. The suggestion that you should lead from behind is folly in a case like this. We have great strategic interests in Syria. The commander of Central Command [Gen. James Mattis] said that the greatest strategic blow to Iran would be a change of the Assad regime… The question really is why haven’t we done more in the last 14 months.