- anteontem
Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? (2024)
Obama did not want to be dragged into another war in the Middle East, but when the Syrian regime began to consider the use of chemical weapons, he warned them they would be crossing a red line.
Obama did not want to be dragged into another war in the Middle East, but when the Syrian regime began to consider the use of chemical weapons, he warned them they would be crossing a red line.
Categoria
😹
DiversãoTranscrição
00:00The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded
00:11to President Barack Obama. In the first year, the president had what for most people would have been
00:19a wonderful thing happened to him, which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For him,
00:23it was a disaster. When you haven't yet started to make peace anywhere, you haven't had five minutes
00:29to even begin. And really what they were saying was, this is a vote of confidence in you. But it did
00:35seem to me like a golden opportunity to say some things. Samantha saw this Nobel Peace Prize speech
00:43as this opportunity for Obama to say something found about the responsibility to protect.
00:50She'd written this memo outlining all the things he could do. He liked this memo. He thought it was
00:56more in line with the kind of ambition that he wanted to reach for in the speech than what,
01:00you know, I had given him.
01:05We got on Air Force One and the whole flight, I'm sitting at a computer in the back editing the
01:13speech while giving him drafts that he's giving back to me. Samantha is kind of over everybody's
01:20shoulder. She kept trying to put this in. I knew full well what that meant. If the president of the
01:26United States makes a statement of policy that we have a responsibility to protect, that means,
01:32in practice, that we have a responsibility to intervene, potentially militarily, whenever civilians
01:38are threatened or atrocities are being committed. Responsibility to protect is about if mass atrocity
01:46is happening, you elevate, you open your toolbox. There's no automaticity in responsibility to protect,
01:51that you were supposed to go send the Marines. Obama kept saying, I don't feel like I should be
01:58making that dramatic of a policy statement here. I'm uncomfortable with this. Can we really universally
02:04apply this? More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of
02:24civilians by their own government. I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds,
02:31as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our
02:38conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must
02:43embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace. If you want to see the
02:52boundaries of where Obama said he would do something, and where he left ambiguity about whether
02:57he would, that speech is actually a pretty compelling roadmap. America cannot act alone.
03:04It's kept, by his choice, somewhat ambiguous. There is a role to play if there is a clear
03:11mandate. Inaction tears at our conscience. Yes, to me, this speech foreshadows the incredibly difficult
03:19decisions we had, and it really ends up coming down to the two cases, where we did intervene in Libya
03:25and where we didn't in Syria. And so when I hear that it tears at your, inaction tears at your
03:29conscience, that obviously has a haunting resonance to how all of us felt about Syria for all the years
03:36after 2011.
03:38The Western world has been freed of the evil forces. We're the nation that liberated continents,
03:51concentration camps, and the death camps still bear witness that evil is real and must be opposed.
03:59Decent people must never remain silent and inactive in times of moral crisis.
04:05The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing
04:14of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.
04:20It is easy to say never again, but much harder to make it so.
04:25The Northern nation has made the advancement of human rights and dignity so central to its foreign policy
04:30because it's central to who we are as Americans.
04:34America truly is the world's indispensable nation.
04:38The one indispensable nation in world affairs.
04:41A shining city on a hill where all things are possible.
04:46We can make a difference. And we will do it. We are Americans.
04:51Never forget. Never again.
05:10The Obama administration had a policy to engage American adversaries diplomatically.
05:18So my assignment in Syria was to have a frank, direct, and serious conversation with Syrian officials
05:28about a variety of topics on which our two governments were in strong disagreement.
05:34First time in six years, a U.S. ambassador is back in Syria.
05:41Robert Ford arriving in Damascus today, a career diplomat.
05:46I grew up in Damascus and left Syria at age 13.
05:49So I had pretty good memories of what life is and was like under an authoritarian government.
05:56This was Syria under Hafez al-Assad in the 80s.
06:02Really a kind of pseudo-Stalinist state.
06:05There's no political freedoms, no freedom of speech or assembly or the security services are ubiquitous.
06:13They're everywhere. Neighbors listen on neighbors and report them.
06:17And so even if you're able to keep your head down and stay out of trouble with the government,
06:23you're always limited in terms of what you could achieve in a society like that,
06:28without paying bribes and perhaps even oppressing other people so you can get ahead.
06:34My first couple of nights in Damascus, I would walk around the streets of the city.
06:39We didn't have a cook, so I had to go find some food at a restaurant to eat.
06:43I was being followed by the Syrian intelligence, the Mokhabarat.
06:48And I didn't want to cause problems for the man who's cutting shawarma at the food stand.
06:55So most of the time I just said, good evening, how are you?
06:58And sometimes they might say, I'm fine, who are you?
07:02And I would just say, I'm an American.
07:04And that was enough, they would stop talking.
07:07Ambassador Ford and his team arrived to find an entire region in turmoil.
07:18A month before, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian food peddler,
07:23distraught over government mistreatment, had set himself on fire in protest.
07:28Bouazizi died of his injuries.
07:31But his match set off a wave of protest that swept through Tunisia and across the Arab world.
07:38The day before Ambassador Ford touched down in Damascus,
07:46long-time strongman Zayn al-Abidin bin Ali was forced to flee his country.
07:52Three weeks later, Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for three decades, was driven from power.
08:04Suddenly, the fear wielded by the old Arab dictators was gone.
08:08In Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets,
08:13rallying against the government and demanding freedom.
08:17In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi's troops opened fire on demonstrators.
08:26The protestors began to take up arms and fight back.
08:34The United Nations Security Council approved a NATO military operation
08:38to protect Libyan civilians.
08:40Days later, NATO's war planes began destroying Gaddafi's tanks,
08:46and artillery.
08:55You could just see the televisions on, and the cafes, and the little food shops,
08:59and everyone was watching what was happening.
09:03And Syrians were fascinated by it.
09:06And I thought, I wonder if this is going to come here.
09:10I actually asked President Assad about it at our first meeting.
09:19I had to phrase the question delicately.
09:22So I said to him, are you worried about the winds from North Africa blowing into the Mashrak,
09:28into the Levant?
09:29And he understood exactly what I was saying.
09:32And he said, oh no, my people love me because I'm leading the resistance front.
09:36Bashar's confidence came less from his people's love than from the dark legacy of his father.
09:49During the early 1970s, Hafez al-Assad had constructed a national security regime of singular brutality,
09:55with ubiquitous secret police and interlocking intelligence agencies that savagely crushed the least resistance.
10:08Syrians, even suspected of harboring anti-government sentiment, were thrown into prison and tortured,
10:13or they simply disappeared.
10:16When Islamic militants rose up in 1982 in the city of Hama,
10:23Assad sent in his tanks and artillery and leveled large parts of the city,
10:28killing tens of thousands of his own people.
10:43We had a meeting in February.
10:45All of the directors and senior directors who had countries involved in the Arab Spring,
10:51or on the periphery of the Arab Spring,
10:53were pulled together by the deputy national security adviser to sit down and reflect
10:57and try and figure out what on earth was going on.
11:00When people say there'll be a civil war...
11:02And I remember when the question of Syria was raised,
11:04and Dennis Ross was the first to predict the next country to get hit by the wave of protests would be Syria.
11:12The National Security Council will be done.
11:14He's preparing for him.
11:15He's preparing for him.
11:16He's preparing for him.
11:17He's preparing for him.
11:18He's preparing for him.
11:19What happened?
11:20What happened?
11:21What happened?
11:22A group of teenagers at a school in Daraa graffitied on the side of a wall in Arabic
11:31the slogan that was common in the Arab Spring, which was,
11:34we want to topple the regime.
11:36They quickly were detained by the Syrian government forces.
11:41They were taken, not to be heard from.
11:43And that's what sparked the protests.
11:45We heard it from contacts of the political section of the embassy,
11:53who called and said, you should look at what's happening in Daraa.
11:58Look at it on YouTube.
12:01People would grab their cell phones and take films of the protest marches
12:07and then upload them to YouTube.
12:10Those were the real heroes of the Syrian revolution.
12:13Average people, men and women, who found courage to first rise up against this violent regime
12:24and to risk everything.
12:26I felt pride in the fact that finally people of the region were rising up.
12:33The parents of these students had had enough.
12:39They were done with this lack of dignity.
12:41They were done with this frustration and this feeling that they had no basic human rights.
12:46On March 18th, the parents joined religious leaders in a march to demand their children be released.
12:53The marches were peaceful, but the forces of the regime opened fire, killing four.
13:16Fueled by vivid images on social media, the demonstrations spread throughout the country.
13:22The demands of people in Daraa have steered other forces across the country.
13:26The crowd on the streets of Hama last night.
13:28The so-called Day of Dignity demonstrations were held across the country on Friday.
13:32Within a week, thousands were marching in Latakia, Homs, Hama, Deir Azur, Raqqa, even Damascus, the seat of the regime.
13:41Syrians had lost their fear.
13:46Amid the growing popular outcry, authorities in Daraa, in a gesture of goodwill, released the 15 children.
13:53But they bore on their faces and bodies the marks of torture.
13:58And before these living signs of the regime's brutality, the people's anger only grew.
14:03And before these living signs of the regime's brutality, the people's anger only grew.
14:10At that point, we were watching and waiting to sort of see how things developed.
14:15Relatively quickly, Bashar al-Assad began firing on the people's anger,
14:18and the people's anger only grew.
14:20At that point, we were watching and waiting to sort of see how things developed.
14:40Relatively quickly, Bashar al-Assad began firing on the protestors.
14:46And so, people were looking at Syria and asking, what's going to happen here?
14:50In Libya, for instance, you have specific policy in terms of trying to get rid of Qaddafi.
14:56What is your policy to get President Assad to move?
15:00One day in the press briefing, I got something like 11 questions in a row.
15:05Well, why Qaddafi and not Assad?
15:07Qaddafi has lost legitimacy in Moscow.
15:09Why not Assad?
15:10How much longer is it okay for the Syrian authorities to, you know, kill their people?
15:16And I had to tap dance my way through that set of interviews because there was no decision taken.
15:24President Obama was nervous about saying Assad must go because he knew what the next question was going to be then,
15:31which is, what are you going to do about it?
15:33How are you going to make it happen?
15:34And he knew that at the time, we didn't have particularly good answers to that question.
15:38We heard about these big protests in Hama.
15:44Very peaceful, but big.
15:46Tens of thousands of people.
15:48And we heard that the army was moving its troops around the city.
15:53There's a news blackout, and already there was criticism that the Obama administration wasn't doing enough.
16:02And I said, we have to have eyewitness accounts of what's happening.
16:06So it seemed to me that the way to get ahead of the problem was for me myself to go.
16:16So we're driving around, and we come to the north side of the main square.
16:21As soon as they saw our car, we were surrounded by hundreds of people, and they were throwing flowers and tree branches.
16:35And I said, we have to get out of here right now. We have to go back to Damascus.
16:38Now we are the subject of attention, and we are not supposed to be the subject of attention.
16:50Of course, we reported it back to Washington and said, Robert, we think you're doing right stuff out there.
16:56You're standing up for people whose human rights we respect, and Washington has your back.
17:05Ambassador Ford traveled throughout the country as long as he could.
17:09These were missions that were discussed usually in advance.
17:13We wanted to demonstrate some solidarity with those who were standing up and asking for their rights.
17:19The situation was getting out of control from the regime perspective.
17:22And you had some defectors from the Syrian army join them.
17:29And you see the famous videos of, you know, a few officers every few days in Syria during that time,
17:34get on YouTube and declare that they are joining the revolution and give themselves some kind of name for their brigade.
17:39The U.S. government came to feel like Saad was not going to be able to survive this.
17:52These revolutions were all leading to one ending, you know.
17:56They'd all topple. Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saleh.
18:00Assad looked like he was next.
18:05The Assad regime will come to an end.
18:08It's a matter not of if, but when.
18:12It seems clear that the Assad regime is ultimately going to fall.
18:17By mid-August, the pressure in Washington for Obama to say that Assad should step down had skyrocketed.
18:32What is our greatest concern?
18:34The difficulty of the Obama administration was, how can you avoid giving legitimacy to the Assad government by not calling on him to step down?
18:47At the same time, it is becoming more and more brutal on the ground in Syria.
18:54The Obama administration was caught in this pincer.
18:57I was in the Oval Office briefing the president on that torture that was going on.
19:06Individuals were taken into prisons and stadiums, being beaten, being tortured, being electrocuted.
19:13If it was somebody who wrote things that were against the government, they would dip the hand in acid.
19:19They would gouge people's eyes out. I mean, just horrific stories.
19:22There was a report I was reading, and when I read this, I had to stop.
19:27They would put bags over prisoners' heads, and they would put mice in the bag.
19:32And the thought of it, I just started visualizing it, feeling it, and I almost wanted to throw up right there.
19:39I think Bashar wins the title of the most abominable government in the Middle East and North Africa.
19:46No other government has starved its own people into submission and done it very publicly.
19:55Written on the walls of communities that were fighting against Assad was,
20:01which means in Arabic, you either kneel or you starve.
20:05It was so clear that Assad was employing a how-to manual of how to basically be the most savage leader in the Arab world,
20:18the most savage responder to peaceful protests.
20:22You're seeing him use incendiary weapons.
20:25Into 2012, he's using napalm.
20:26We're already hearing the reports of what snipers are doing and how people are being tortured with acid and electric shock in the prisons.
20:35And so, on one level, having already called for Gaddafi to leave and having urged Mubarak also to step down,
20:43it was sort of untenable when there was a guy who was using much more savage means for the president to hold on.
20:48The president understood that calling on Assad to step down ran the risk of him not listening and then putting the United States on the spot,
20:58looking either weak or feckless if there was no response or feeling obligated to actually do something to enforce the opinion that we've given.
21:09About Syria. Violence continues. It's been months. It's only getting worse.
21:14Syrian army appears to be...
21:16At what point does Assad lose his legitimacy for attacking his people?
21:20What is the policy at the moment towards Syria? I mean, you say that...
21:24The collective weight of press questions, questions from members of Congress,
21:31others basically saying to the administration,
21:34why can't you declare yourself on this point? The collective weight of that wore down the administration.
21:40This was a decision that was the product of just getting worn down.
21:44The temptation to think that there's a quick fix to...
21:47I'll say it again. Assad will leave power. It's not a question of if, but when.
21:52This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.
21:57The transition to democracy in Syria has begun, and it's time for Assad to get out of the way.
22:05I think that was maybe one of my mistakes.
22:09I should have just said, don't do it, because it's going to make everything we try to do harder.
22:14But I didn't say that. I was so sympathetic to the political problems that they were having back in Washington,
22:21from conservative Republicans on one side, from liberal Democrats on the other side, the American media,
22:27and we had governments, I'll name them, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates,
22:37all of whom were demanding that the Americans say this.
22:40And so I just didn't argue against it. I should have. It was a mistake.
22:44I think that was a good example of not thinking through consequences of what if he doesn't step down.
22:53I think when he said that, it appeared that Assad was not going to be able to survive.
22:57Yeah.
22:58Well, he's still there.
23:02Most people knew he was a butcher, and so he's got to step down.
23:06Well, what are you going to do if he doesn't, Mr. President?
23:09I think a lot of people in this country don't realize that when the President of the United States
23:13makes statements like that around the world, the world listens.
23:18Everything we do and say around the world matters a great deal.
23:22If someone had told me,
23:25you're still going to be dealing with this, you know, in 2016 on your last day at work,
23:32I don't know that I would have taken that.
23:36We basically had a position going into any diplomatic conference on Syria
23:39that part of the end result had to be Assad going.
23:44And Assad had a going-in proposition that there was no scenario in which he was going to go.
23:48And so, to me, this is the, if you want to criticize us,
23:53you know, I would look at this question of embracing regime change
24:00where you are not capable of or prepared to engage in regime change.
24:09in a small company,
24:25you know, we're not capable of.
24:28No way!
24:32I should've brought a panic to now.
24:34The United Nations estimates that more than 3,500 people have been killed since...
24:42According to UN estimates, more than 5,400 civilians have already died.
24:48Already, as many as 9,000 civilians have died, and many tens of thousands more have been displaced from their homes.
25:04I got the sense that Syria was going to be a problem from hell in early 2012.
25:16When the Russian perm rep to the UN, Vitaly Cherkin, told Susan Rice, who was our ambassador to the United Nations,
25:23that the Russians would go along with the resolution, it called for a halt to the violence.
25:28And then Secretary Clinton had a meeting with Sergey Lavrov to talk about the resolution before the vote.
25:34And Lavrov basically told her, it ain't happening, we're not supporting it, we're backing Assad.
25:43And at that moment, it became clear to me that you now had great powers pitted against each other in Syria.
25:50And with that, the conflict was going to be very difficult to manage,
25:54and Assad was going to be empowered to slaughter even more of his own people.
25:58On February 4th, 2012, it was the anniversary of the Hama massacre that had taken place under Hafez al-Assad.
26:11The protesters came out with signs saying, we are sorry, Hama.
26:18The Syrian government responded for the first time using Syrian jets.
26:23By now, the regime was fighting for its life.
26:45To embolden his supporters, Assad began to recast the popular uprising as a sectarian civil war.
26:59Though three quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, Assad and most of the elite controlling the country are Alawites,
27:06a minority Shia sect with strong historic ties to Iran.
27:10Now, Assad exhorted his fellow Alawites to fight.
27:16Defeat at the hands of the Sunnis, he declared, meant not just loss of power, but loss of life.
27:24Extermination.
27:26The Syrian civil war had become a struggle for existence.
27:30The regime needed a foot soldier, but also wanted some plausible deniability that its army is being involved in massacres.
27:45So they went ahead to these, initially to the Alawite villages, and they recruited young men and gave them a free hand to commit all kind of atrocities
27:54and to literally loot the belongings of their victims and bring it back and sell it.
27:58The Shabihah, you know, the ghosts, they were young men in their 20s and 30s, who were used by the regime to squash the opposition.
28:09The Shabihah would roll in, and they would go into the apartment buildings and break down the doors and massacre entire families with knives.
28:31I mean, there was a number of massacres, for example, in Baidah.
28:39It's meant to be as a brutal warning to others not to support the opposition.
28:44It's a few hundred people who got butchered that way.
28:46And it sent a wave of fear to the Sunni communities, because it was a Sunni town they attacked.
28:52And I really think the intention was actually to cause the communities, to cause tension between the Sunnis and the Alawis,
29:00because Baidah was next to Alawite towns, and the purpose of it was really to instigate sectarian violence.
29:06...
29:18Some buses pulled up in front of the embassy.
29:33dozens of young men got out of the bus strong young men and they started protesting right in
29:42front of the gates and maybe 15 began to climb the fencing that we had on top of a concrete wall
29:52these 15 or so climbed it in about two minutes shocked my security team the u.s marines and
30:01then they were inside the embassy compound and they tried to force the door of it was very frightening
30:11they tried to force the door of the embassy and the door did not go all the way to the floor
30:24it came up about that short so we could see the feet of the people trying to push the door in
30:31i had four marines two on each side of me and the marines said if that door breaks mr ambassador
30:40we're going to open fire and i said no you may not open fire if the door breaks we'll say stop
30:46they'll see your guns if they charge us i said then we'll have to shoot because we could get killed
30:53anyway thank god the door held finally the police did come it took them about maybe two hours and
31:08they kind of cleared everybody out breaking news from cnn uh this news out of syria the united states
31:13is closing its embassy in syria and the u.s ambassador has left syria over fears for his safety this is a
31:20serious step by the united states government ambassador ford continued to be our ambassador
31:26to syria from a small office at the state department he ran you can say a de facto embassy there
31:33and i joined that team i was in charge of leading our efforts to engage with the syrian opposition
31:39know who the activists were speak with them via skype
31:43go to turkey go to jordan go to paris anywhere where syrian activists oppositionists exiled
31:54representatives of people inside of syria were gathering and meeting and providing information
31:59of what's happening and telling us what kind of support the people inside needed so we were kind
32:04of that window to the entire u.s government now these activists started coming to us saying
32:11we need weapons we need bullets some of them would say we need u.s airstrikes
32:17we sent a memo to the secretary of state and we said the only way to avoid using american forces
32:28is to help these moderates quickly while they still can win the war for recruits and contain
32:37the extremist element and then i had a meeting with secretary clinton and i expected to have a big
32:43fight and instead it was just the opposite she said uh she said this makes sense to me
32:49i thought the cost of inaction was significant and i teamed up with uh dave petraeus then the
33:00director of the cia and leon panetta then the secretary of defense to come with a proposal
33:06that we thought would send a signal to assad the iranians and then eventually the russians
33:13uh that their cost of action would also be uh significant the concept was that if you could
33:23change the military balance of power on the ground to the advantage of the rebels and against the
33:29advantage of assad it would force assad to come to the table and negotiate some kind of uh political
33:35process that would result eventually in a changing government in syria the problem is that there were
33:42literally a hundred or more different opposition groups all of whom did not get along with any
33:49anybody and were all doing their own thing you hope the opposition can get its act together
33:55but it isn't going to happen unless we are the ones who force that that situation on them i don't think
34:02we we felt that we had a good enough understanding of exactly who we were dealing with and this too
34:07was colored by the experience in libya uh where arguably we didn't have as granular enough
34:13understanding of some of the people we were dealing with as we would have liked to have had
34:17the president asked the intelligence community to come up with examples from the past where u.s
34:22efforts to build an upstate opposition actually succeeded and what the intelligence community came up
34:29with was not particularly impressive so you know he was doubtful that this was going to actually lead to
34:37the kind of outcomes that that people were hoping for or arguing was possible
34:45i sat in rooms in the white house where there were options on the table to arm people to fight against
34:52different leaders that we didn't like and i couldn't help but think that in the 1980s
35:00people like me sat in the exact same rooms and were presented options that said well if we arm these
35:07mujahideen fighters in afghanistan we can bloody the soviets and that's in our interest and i doubt
35:14that a single person in that room thought to themselves well what's going to happen to these people
35:20are they going to turn into some terrorist organization that someday might attack the united
35:24states so i'm sitting in these rooms and we didn't really know who these people were
35:32what if this is the next 1980s what if we are starting to arm the people that are going to end up
35:37being isis what if they shoot down an el al jet and and this was literally discussed obama would
35:42said this in the situation what do i do when there's a congressional hearing two years from now
35:49where someone can literally establish that i gave shoulder-to-air missiles to jihadists who then
35:57used them against israel can you imagine a political fallout in the united states of that
36:04we were not successful that was not accepted and this is one of those
36:11very difficult calculations i mean i can't sit here today and said oh if only they had done what
36:16i and others had suggested we wouldn't be where we are i don't believe that
36:19we're going to go all the way in and have another war and we'll move aside ourselves
36:23it was frustrating it was just really frustrating because here i was syrian
36:53american working for the department of state with pretty good access to the powers that be in our
37:00own government telling the stories of what is happening the the massacres the the detention the
37:07violations the systematic rape of women and men i mean activists would tell us that some of them were
37:14sexually abused when they were in detention so here i was with my colleagues speaking to real human
37:20beings on the other side knowing that we represented arguably the strongest nation on earth and we
37:27were just incapable or unwilling to to help them
37:34it's heartbreaking to to think you can do more but not to do it did you speak with your parents
37:41about it i mean your feelings or what you felt when you were doing that or not as much as you think
37:46you would because i really i think just preserve my own mental sanity when i go home or i'm i'm having
37:54any supposed downtime i spoke to them sometimes where i had to because they were just so frustrating
38:02could not understand how the united states was not doing enough what's happening in syria is heartbreaking
38:08and it's not a question of if asad leaves it's a question of when on the other hand for us to take
38:16military action uh unilaterally i think is a mistake i used to tell reporters it was not a question of if
38:25but when and there was a point um in the summer spring of 2012 where i started to doubt my own words
38:35we organized the friends of syria i could see that we were not pursuing the right options to actually
38:42achieve our outcome and that's really when i knew i had to leave because i didn't believe in the policy
38:49anymore free syria army grew in strength and it increased its territorial gains i think the opposition
39:04writ large had control of 75 percent of territorial syria and the regime began really using air power
39:11not necessarily to take out opposition fighters but to punish their communities
39:19literally there are videos online of of syrian air force personnel lighting fuses of barrel bombs
39:28these metal dumpster size canisters full of metal shards and and explosives and lighting it with a
39:35cigarette and then kicking it over civilian populations
39:45schools hospitals homes markets
39:58the opposition starts gaining the briefings we were getting was that it was a matter of weeks
40:05not months before the assad regime would fall
40:09it was a fear that assad would employ some new weapon from his brutality playbook right and starts
40:16considering using chemical weapons
40:27i was asked to call uh the foreign minister waleed mohal and to tell him directly that we weren't going
40:32to tolerate further use of chemical weapons we had people communicate directly to the russians i
40:37communicated directly to the iranians so we put the message down firm and hard but privately uh at first
40:43that this was a serious issue for the united states and we were going to do something about it
40:48chuck todd uh the president uh update us on your latest thinking on where you think things are in syria
40:54and in particular whether you envision using
40:58u.s military if simply for nothing else of safe keeping of the chemical weapons
41:02uh we have been very clear to the assad regime but also to other players on the ground
41:12that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being
41:19utilized that would change my calculus that's a red line for us and that there would be enormous
41:25consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons all right thank you everybody
41:33one of my team came into my office and said look what the white house just said they've said red
41:37line for chemical and i said i don't believe it because if you say red line it implies military
41:42force and i knew very well that obama didn't want to use military force in syria he is just a human
41:49being talking and he gives this answer and has this one line in it so this is a the result of someone
41:58using a colloquial expression that took on the force of biblical or talmudic exhortation obama violated
42:11one of the core tenets of press conferences which is you never answer a hypothetical question
42:16so he answered a hypothetical question but at the moment it became this this kind of line in the sand
42:24if chemical weapons were used the full force and fury of u.s military power would be used against assad
42:34obama declared his red line in august 2012. by year's end the administration have received
42:41multiple reports that assad was using chemical weapons in small attacks against syrian civilians
42:54we got calls from uh the city of hama countryside where the activists on the other side saying that
43:05the regime used some mysterious bombs it's causing people you know eyes to burn and to foam in the
43:12mouth and to not be able to breathe and it's really caused people to just run away from the whole area
43:22the regime was
43:26using it in small quantities it's almost testing the waters and testing international resolve
43:31beginning in late 2012 and into the spring of 2013 we started to get more reports of
43:37especially of uh chlorine gas and in particular in a place called han yunas up in the north near alapo
43:44and we had to go through these ridiculous contortions inside the u.s government would say
43:49well that's not a very big chemical weapons attack the red line is for a big one
43:53so we had these reports of use obama says okay we're going to respond some entrepreneurial policy
44:03makers put forward the idea of okay well we've been having a debate now for two years about whether
44:07to support the moderate opposition that would be an option for a response to crossing the red line
44:15i can't speak specifically about the program but uh why because it's a classified program and so even
44:21though i'm out of government i i like my life in the free world uh so so it's so um but in general
44:30there was a question of can you do things that can help empower and build up the opposition in a
44:35way that they can be more capable to fight the trouble with that is that the assistance that was
44:43provided could not be talked about publicly if your objective is to deter further use if something is
44:49done kind of incrementally and behind the scenes can that deter the chemical attacks led obama to change
44:59course and finally approve a secret program to vet arm and train moderate syrian rebels
45:07in 2013 the cia special activities division launched what it dubbed operation timber sycamore
45:15the cia officers and contractors began training arming and supporting more than 50 rebel groups
45:24the details remain classified and the results controversial some insist that timber sycamore had
45:33catastrophic success that its trainees killed and wounded more than 100 000 syrian soldiers and militia
45:40in any case by the time it was discontinued in 2017 the covert action program had become one of the costliest in cia history
45:54in this time i i began to feel like if we're going to have a debate about whether or not to intervene
45:59militarily i'll make the case for intervening militarily because that's what we're really talking about
46:05this arming the opposition was just kind of middle ground that people were trying to find
46:13i remember making this argument and all the reasons why we should and i remember obama said okay ben
46:22what do you suggest we do and so because i was versed in the options i said well you know we could
46:28bomb the runways where the planes take off that are dropping these barrel bombs on children
46:33and he says to me what do i do the next day when they rebuild the runways with the iranians
46:42just bond them again the military option that you're recommending that you are making limited
46:48because you know i don't want to invade syria won't work and then what do i have to do the president
46:54when i've begun to bomb things it's making no difference he's still killing people the iranians
46:59and russians are rebuilding the runways for him and then i'm faced with this pressure of like are
47:05you going to escalate or are you just going to look feckless
47:16august 21 uh i remember that's one thing i remember like it was yesterday i was then the deputy national
47:21security advisor uh and going in uh that morning into my office in the west wing um with the intent
47:28of going on vacation that afternoon and we had the overnight reports about this horrific use of
47:37chemical weapons in syria the images you are about to see are so important because they're being held
47:43up tonight by syrian rebels as evidence of what may be the worst chemical weapons attack anywhere since
47:49saddam hussein gassed the iraqi kurds in 1988
48:10the suffering of people on the ground
48:14the horrific deaths of those who succumb and the sheer agony and terror of those who survive
48:24uh it's the these are images that don't um that stay with you forever
48:30i remember feeling um revulsion
48:43recognizing that this was something that we would have to um address forthrightly clearly uh strongly
48:53looking at those photographs of those kids lined up those little uh kids and these wrapped in these
49:02white sheets but you just see the size of them the size of my own kids um
49:07and just line just rows of them you know i mean
49:12for me that my darkest moments were those moments
49:15i was in my office at the state department with another colleague of mine and uh we heard about
49:29the attack we got on skype and we got hold of an individual and he proceeded to tell us that uh yeah
49:37he was there during the attack and when he thought that the attack you know had ended went out to the streets
49:47and he immediately um he didn't understand what was happening but seeing literally people just
49:56on the ground in the streets the next thing i remember him telling us is
50:00i am here in our building and there are tens of bodies and many of them are my relatives
50:10um and just very emotional uh he was crying
50:17me and my colleague were were stunned and it was uh
50:22just a very emotional time what did you do next we cried
50:30yeah
51:00It was then time to go in and brief the president in the Oval Office with Susan Rice, the National
51:09Security Advisor, the Chief of Staff, Dennis McDonough, the Vice President, the Vice President's
51:14National Security Advisor. We were all there in the Oval Office telling the president what had
51:18happened and the fact that the intelligence was much more detailed than previous instances.
51:25The United States government now knows that at least 1,429 Syrians were killed in this
51:37attack, including at least 426 children. We know where the rockets were launched from and
51:47at what time. We know where they landed and when. And we know, as does the world,
51:55that just 90 minutes later, all hell broke loose in the social media.
52:01I did not think of the red line as having taken on the decisive quality that it had until
52:09the gassing in Ghouta kind of forced the issue for us, made us have to confront it. Then I understood
52:16if we don't act, the reaction, not just in the region, but globally to the U.S. not moving
52:24on the red line is going to be severe.
52:26So the primary question is really no longer, what do we know? The question is, what are
52:33we, we collectively, what are we in the world going to do about it? It is directly related
52:38to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something.
52:45They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put
52:51the world at greater risk.
52:54I went into the first meeting with the president after the strike with my arguments lined up,
52:58ready to make the case for how this is an existential threat, that if this went unresponded to,
53:05it would become a conventional weapon of war. I mean, imagine what that would mean if you
53:09could just kill 1,500 people, 500 kids, and then that they would look around a couple
53:15of days later and be able to keep using. I mean, I went in ready to make all those arguments
53:19and I didn't need to make any argument. President Obama knew exactly what he was going to do.
53:24In a very decisive, brisk way, the president decides that he is going to pursue punitive airstrikes
53:33against the Syrian regime.
53:35The entire orientation of that meeting suggested we were going to bomb Syria.
53:40Marty Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who had been against going to Syria, saying,
53:44look, one of the reasons why I oppose going to Syria is because I don't like to recommend
53:50military options when I don't know what's going to happen. But this attack is so atrocious
53:54we have to do something right.
53:56And Obama at the end of the meeting says, OK, I want you to draw up military options.
54:03He was already thinking quite specifically, he said to Dempsey, and can we include, like,
54:09as much as we can in that? If I'm going to go in with a strike, like, let's take a big
54:14shot here.
54:16I was personally convinced that we were going to use force and I thought it was one of those
54:21instances where, you know, you could avoid the slippery slope, which was a legitimate
54:27concern because here a very important international norm had been violated, a line had been crossed.
54:34It didn't necessarily mean that we needed to continue the use of force to bring down the
54:38regime. It was designed as a reaction against this horrible use of chemical weapons and designed
54:45to deter any further use.
54:48Some cite the risk of doing things. But we need to ask, what is the risk of doing nothing?
54:55It is also profoundly about who we are. We are the United States of America.
55:03President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world's most heinous
55:09weapons against the world's most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious and nothing
55:16is receiving more serious scrutiny.
55:19The president behind closed doors meeting with members of his national security team and already
55:24labeled the unhappy warrior by Time magazine.
55:27There is word tonight the Pentagon is drawing up military options to respond to this week's atrocities
55:33in Syria. The question is, what does that military operation look like?
55:37One Pentagon official told us if the president wants to send a message, we're good at sending messages.
55:42Iraq, Afghanistan, is America about to get involved in Syria?
55:47French President Francois Hollande said that his country is ready to stand shoulder to shoulder
55:52with the United States militarily.
55:54The chemical massacre that took place in Damascus cannot remain without a response.
56:01It's about chemical weapons. Their use is wrong and the world shouldn't stand idly by.
56:07We wanted to see all the options that we had. What could be most meaningful?
56:12What kind of an attack would we use? Where could we hurt him the most?
56:16I mean, just to attack Assad, that didn't make any difference. I mean, we wanted to do something that was meaningful,
56:23that would hurt him, that would affect him, his ability to continue what he was doing.
56:29The military options were discussed at the National Security Council. We gave the president those options.
56:35He chose one. We had it all set. It was ready to go. We had all agreed on it.
56:40That was good.
56:42We made it all. The National Security Council was a member of the National Security Councils.
56:47And we had to do it. We had to do anything crazy.
56:50We had all agreed on it and wanted to go. We had to do it.
56:52We were able to do it. We had to do it. It wasn't a few things.
56:54Transcription by CastingWords
Recomendado
57:10
|
A Seguir
59:28
59:30
1:55:04
1:33:55
1:00:44
1:34:14
58:13
1:15:40
1:17:44
1:38:33
1:29:09