McCain: US Must Use Ground Troops and Strike at Assad

​SenatorMcCain has called for the UnitedStates to launch war on SyrianPresident Bashar al-Assad and to launch ground troops against Islamic State group.

Interviewed on CNN this Sunday, the rightwing hawk called on the Pentagon to send Special Forces troops to supplement bombing by the US-led coalition .

Since September 23, the United States and some of its Arab allies have been bombing Islamic State targets inside Syria. They have neither asked for nor received authorization from Damascus.

US warplanes have also conducted hundreds of air strikes in Iraq since mid-August.

McCain, however, argues that the campaign has been unsuccessful.

“There has to be a fundamental re-evaluation of what we're doing because we are not ‘degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS’,” McCain said, in reference to the Islamic State group. “They’re winning and we're not.”

McCain had formerly supported the arming of Islamic State groups and their training by the CIA in Jordan to destabilize the Syrian government.

In his latest remarks, McCain says that the United States must revamp its strategy since it “can't afford to let this continue.”

“The stronger ISIS gets, the greater the threat to the United States of America. That's what we have to understand and that's why tough decisions have to be made and not gradually,” he said. “We have to completely revamp our strategy, which clearly is not succeeding.”