Chabot to Chair Subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia

Incoming Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) announced subcommittee chairs Tuesday. Ros-Lehtinen tapped Steve Chabot (R-OH), a veteran House Foreign Affairs Committee member who won back his seat in November after a two-year absence, to chair the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. A member of the Human Rights Caucus, Chabot has co-sponsored legislation sanctioning Iran for failing to pursue political reform and Syria for occupying Lebanon, in addition to his support for legislation praising successful elections and condemning human rights violations around the world. Also, Chabot co-sponsored a resolution honoring Seeds of Peace for promoting peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

In 2003, during a hearing on the Middle East Partnership Initiative, Chabot spoke about the challenges and opportunities facing the region: “The potential of that particular region of the world is almost without limit if one could resolve some of the problems that have seemed over the years to be unresolvable […] But when you consider just a couple of things that they have going for them, I mean, having the oil that is there; there is that resource, which many of the other parts of the world do not have, that if it could be used actually for the benefit of the people as opposed to just building up military arsenals [...] There are just so many things that that region has going for it.”