- 30/06/2025
Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? (2024)
America's unwillingness to act after a chemical attack causes Syrian rebels to despair. Obama concludes that there is no scenario where intervention in Syria would give a desired outcome.
America's unwillingness to act after a chemical attack causes Syrian rebels to despair. Obama concludes that there is no scenario where intervention in Syria would give a desired outcome.
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00:00The minute that you walk into the White House Situation Room,
00:07you immediately recognize that you've got a collection of imperfect people
00:12with imperfect information about what's going on,
00:16facing imperfect choices,
00:19and in an imperfect process,
00:21where it's hard to actually draw in all the right people to contribute to the decision.
00:25So it shouldn't come as any surprise that you end up getting imperfect results.
00:32Every solution you propose or present or pursue almost necessarily creates new problems.
00:40So even when you think you've done the right thing,
00:44you have generated a whole set of additional decisions
00:48that themselves put you back in this loop of imperfection.
00:55The Western world has been freed of the evil forces.
01:04We're the nation that liberated continents, concentration camps,
01:08and the death camps still bear witness that evil is real and must be opposed.
01:14Decent people must never remain silent and inactive in times of moral crisis.
01:20The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans
01:25unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights
01:31to which this nation has always been committed.
01:35It is easy to say never again, but much harder to make it so.
01:41The Northern nation has made the advancement of human rights and dignity so central to its foreign policy,
01:45because it's central to who we are as Americans.
01:50America truly is the world's indispensable nation.
01:54The one indispensable nation in world affairs.
01:57A shining city on a hill where all things are possible.
02:02We can make a difference and we will do it.
02:05We are Americans.
02:08Never forget. Never again.
02:12There is word tonight the Pentagon is drawing up military options
02:27to respond to this week's atrocities in Syria.
02:30Some sort of U.S. airstrike is something that's being hotly debated
02:33inside the administration right now.
02:35Iraq, Afghanistan, is America about to get involved in Syria?
02:38It doesn't sound to me as if it's a matter of whether or not to attack, but when to attack.
02:43What do we wait for now?
02:46In August 2012, President Obama told the world that in the Syrian conflict,
02:51the use of chemical weapons would be a red line for us.
02:56Eight months later, intelligence finally confirmed that the Assad regime was using them.
03:02Washington prepared to respond.
03:06We get ourselves in a position to begin moving out airstrikes against the Syrian regime.
03:12And a couple things quickly intrude.
03:18The UN decided that it was going to send a team in to investigate chemical weapons use.
03:25Now this was the most ridiculous deployment. Why?
03:28Because everyone in the world, including the Syrian government, the Russian government,
03:34the Iranian government, knew that chemical weapons were used.
03:37The only dispute was over who used them.
03:40And the UN inspectors didn't have a mandate to decide who used.
03:45So, these inspectors go in.
03:50Our military operations are put on pause.
03:55And their deployment goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on.
04:00The first time I saw Obama have what I thought were second thoughts was the middle of the week,
04:10and he's calling Angela Merkel, asking her not for troops or planes,
04:14just political support, just a statement in support of bombing Syria.
04:18And she said, look, Barack, I think you need to let the UN process run,
04:23establish it with sarin gas, bring it to the Security Council,
04:26the Russians will veto, and then we can support you.
04:30And Obama said, Angela, I need you on this.
04:33I mean, you know, he made like a forceful plea.
04:35Our moral, there's a moral case, there's a strategic case.
04:38And she said, Barack, and I remember, you know, she said it with some feeling,
04:44because they were very close, you know.
04:46Barack, you want to go through this process.
04:49I'm telling you this as a friend.
04:50If you go in now, Putin's going to say, you know, you made this up,
04:55and there's going to, the support's not going to be there.
04:58And I remember him hanging up the phone,
05:00and it was the first time I saw some doubt creep in,
05:03and he said to me, you know, something along the lines of,
05:08like, people really, nobody wants to do this.
05:22The Russian basically said, you have no basis or right to do this,
05:26because it wasn't the Assad regime, it was the opposition.
05:29We asked them for any evidence that they could put forward,
05:31and they had nothing.
05:32Were they embarrassed?
05:34No.
05:35One of the hallmarks of Putin's statecraft
05:38is a perfect willingness to look you in the eye
05:40and absolutely lie to you.
05:44Step by step, over the course of that week,
05:46events begin to intrude.
05:48The nose habit.
05:50The British Parliament votes to prevent Cameron from joining us.
05:55It is clear to me that the British Parliament,
05:57reflecting the views of the British people,
05:59does not want to see British military action.
06:02I get that, and the government will act accordingly.
06:04Yeah!
06:06While we're in a meeting with the leadership of the U.S. Congress
06:09that is telling us that they will only support it
06:11with congressional authorization,
06:13I still thought we were going to do this.
06:17I remember I was in a meeting in Dennis' office,
06:20and Dennis gets kind of a tap on the shoulder,
06:23you know, boss wants to see you.
06:25After several hours of meetings
06:27with his national security council
06:29that day and the previous day,
06:32I walked down to the Oval,
06:33and then we took a long walk on the South One.
06:36And the issues really were,
06:38should he seek congressional authorization
06:42before using force?
06:43That's like a war in Iraq,
06:44where we're going to have hundreds of thousands of...
06:46I have a view that Congress declares wars
06:50and raises armies,
06:52that the Founding Fathers had a view
06:53that Congress should have a role,
06:55has a responsibility to have a role,
06:57and the use of force internationally.
07:00That's my view.
07:05Dennis comes back,
07:06and then I get a tap on the shoulder
07:07saying,
07:08you need to go to the Oval Office.
07:12I get in,
07:13and Obama stands up from behind the Oval Office
07:16and there's nobody else there.
07:19And I notice he looked
07:21totally different than he had in days.
07:25He looked relaxed.
07:26He looked at ease.
07:27And I knew that whatever decision he'd made,
07:29he had made that decision
07:31by his demeanor, his appearance.
07:34Then he said,
07:34I believe I need to seek
07:36congressional authorization for this.
07:39Like, if we bomb Syria,
07:40this is something we're going to be doing
07:41for a long time.
07:43And I can't sustain this politically
07:45without congressional authorization.
07:50And then he's getting into the fact
07:52that the same dysfunction
07:54in the U.S. Congress
07:56is present internationally,
07:59which is all the Europeans say,
08:00you've got to do something about this,
08:01but then when the question is called,
08:03literally the only people
08:03ready to line up with us
08:04are the French.
08:05And he said,
08:06and you know the French will come in
08:07on the first wave of attacks,
08:10but are they going to be there
08:11in a year or two years or three years?
08:13And then he said to me,
08:15you know, Syria now,
08:16it'll be Iran next,
08:17and where does this all end?
08:19I couldn't argue with that logic.
08:30And I remember there's a picture
08:33of this meeting
08:34where I'm just slumped over
08:36and I look like a balloon
08:38that has been deflated
08:39because I was accepting something
08:42I didn't want to accept,
08:43which is I had operated
08:45under the belief that
08:47for two years
08:48that we could do something in Syria
08:49to fix it,
08:51to save lives.
08:53And then I have the President
08:54of the United States
08:54kind of laying out for me
08:55why that's not going to work
08:58unless we get
09:01congressional authorization.
09:05It was kind of obvious
09:06that he was in some respects
09:07pulling back the throttle.
09:14How do you make decisions?
09:16Are you thinking about
09:17an action today
09:18or its consequences
09:19in the next year?
09:21How much weight do you put
09:22on an issue like credibility?
09:24And if you believe that
09:25issuing that red line
09:26was a mistake,
09:27do you then have to compound
09:28that mistake with another mistake
09:29in order not to lose credibility?
09:33I think for President Obama,
09:34credibility was the reason
09:36the U.S. had made more mistakes
09:37in its history
09:38than virtually anything else,
09:39Vietnam being one of them
09:41and continuing with wrong policy.
09:45So human factor,
09:46what kind of person are you
09:47when you confront those decisions?
09:49I think that's what it's all about.
09:53The one thing you have
09:54as President is credibility.
09:57And once you give your word,
09:58once you say you're going
09:59to do something,
10:00then people expect
10:01that you will follow through
10:03on your word.
10:05And if you don't,
10:06if you don't,
10:07then that will be read
10:09as weakness.
10:10And people then will think
10:12they can take advantage of you.
10:13Because regardless
10:14of what you say,
10:16they don't really believe
10:17you're going to act
10:18on your word.
10:20And that,
10:21more than anything,
10:23can weaken your ability
10:24to deal with crisis.
10:25This week,
10:33when I addressed the nation
10:33on Syria,
10:34I said that,
10:35in part because of the
10:36credible threat
10:37of U.S. military force,
10:39there is the possibility
10:40of a diplomatic solution.
10:43Russia's indicated
10:43a new willingness
10:44to join with
10:45the international community
10:46in pushing Syria
10:48to give up
10:48its chemical weapons.
10:50But if there's any chance
10:51of achieving that goal
10:52without resorting to force,
10:53then I believe
10:54we have a responsibility
10:55to pursue that path.
10:56Some say the agreement
10:57emboldens Russia.
10:59This is a Russian plan
11:00for Russian interests.
11:01President Obama
11:02trying to downplay
11:03the notion
11:04that this is a win
11:05for America's
11:06historic geopolitical foe.
11:08It was a mistake
11:17to go to Congress.
11:18And while we made
11:20the best of a bad situation
11:21in negotiating the end
11:23of Syria's chemical weapons
11:24program,
11:25it was clear
11:25they were always going
11:26to keep some
11:26for a rainy day.
11:28And it was clear
11:29that after that,
11:30the threat of the use
11:31of force inevitably
11:32was going to mean
11:32less than it had met before.
11:33The situation in Syria
11:38will continue
11:38to grow worse
11:39by the day.
11:40The death toll grows.
11:42Nearly 75,000.
11:4490,000 people
11:46have been killed.
11:48Millions have been
11:48displaced internally.
11:50More than 100,000
11:51Syrians have died.
11:52And hundreds of thousands
11:53more have been forced
11:54out of their homes,
11:55across borders,
11:56straining all
11:56of Syria's neighbors.
11:57Part of my job
12:02was to engage
12:03with actual Syrians.
12:07I think finally
12:08it settled in
12:09among many of them
12:10that that cavalry
12:11is not going to come in
12:12and that they were
12:13on their own
12:13and the United States
12:18was just not going
12:20to be part
12:20of their salvation.
12:21And looking at their faces
12:22and seeing
12:23the utter hopelessness
12:25I couldn't tell them much.
12:32And actually
12:33what I told them
12:34was they need
12:35to really count
12:38on each other
12:38and God.
12:47They had no one else.
12:55A new force
13:03had emerged
13:04in Syria.
13:07It had been born
13:08in neighboring Iraq,
13:10taking shape
13:10amid the fires
13:11of the war
13:12Obama had taken
13:13credit for ending.
13:17The American invasion
13:18of Iraq
13:19had unseated
13:20the ruling Sunnis
13:21and put the Shia
13:22in power.
13:22America had
13:25overthrown Saddam,
13:27unleashed a civil war
13:28and then
13:29quickly departed.
13:33Now,
13:34increasingly
13:34the Sunnis
13:35sought protection
13:36from a motley army
13:37of Islamic extremists,
13:39radicals
13:39and ex-Baathist officers
13:41who took
13:41to calling themselves
13:42ISIS,
13:43the Islamic State.
13:47ISIS
13:48had brought
13:49a new level
13:49of brutality
13:50to Iraq
13:51and soon
13:51its foot soldiers
13:52were pouring
13:53into Syria.
13:55They warned
13:56the locals
13:56not to wait
13:57for the Americans
13:57or the international
13:59community
13:59to help them
14:00for they would
14:01never come.
14:05Part of their
14:06mortis operandi
14:07is to shock
14:08the international
14:09community
14:09to bring about
14:10that clash
14:11of civilization
14:11and so they
14:13used to great
14:14effect
14:14social media
14:16and these videos
14:17that were,
14:19you know,
14:19done in high definition
14:21with English
14:22narrations.
14:24The entire
14:25operation
14:25was really
14:26meant at
14:27instigating
14:28a religious war
14:30between
14:31Christianity
14:32and Islam.
14:33in June 2014,
14:46Islamic State
14:47fighters swept
14:47into Iraq,
14:49seizing the
14:49vast city
14:50of Mosul
14:50and occupying
14:52huge areas
14:53of the north
14:53and west.
14:57Among their prizes
14:59was Mount Sinjar
15:00and the territory
15:01surrounding it.
15:03This was the
15:04ancient home
15:05of the Yazidi people
15:06whom fundamentalist
15:08Muslims regard
15:09as infidels.
15:11The Islamic State
15:12fighters were brutal
15:13to the Yazidis.
15:15They executed
15:16the men
15:17and seized
15:18the young women,
15:20forcing them
15:20into sexual slavery.
15:23ISIS presented
15:25the Yazidi women
15:26as prizes
15:27to their fighters.
15:31They're striking
15:32all of the minorities.
15:34If the international
15:34community
15:35will not step in,
15:36all of us
15:37will be destroyed.
15:38It's actually
15:55the only time
15:56I remember
15:57seeing the word
15:58genocide
15:58in an intelligence
16:00report
16:00because essentially
16:02they said
16:02that ISIS
16:03is preparing
16:04to commit a genocide
16:05against Yazidis.
16:07What I remember
16:07thinking is amidst
16:08this complete
16:09catastrophe,
16:11the Iraq war,
16:13the Syrian civil war,
16:14ISIS,
16:15you know,
16:15here are these
16:16poor people
16:16just caught
16:17in the middle
16:17of all this.
16:19If we can just
16:20save these people
16:20like amidst that.
16:22manslaughter,
16:29Our children
16:29want to
16:30hold on
16:31to human
16:32You
16:33want to
16:33violence
16:35in human
16:35strength.
16:36We
16:36will
16:37take us
16:37in
16:38to
16:39go
16:39to
16:39ask
16:39to
16:40die
16:41alone.
16:41In recent days, Yazidi women, men, and children from the area of Sinjar have fled for their
17:04lives, and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, are now hiding high up on the mountain with
17:09little but the clove on their backs. Earlier this week, one Iraqi in the area cried to the world,
17:15there is no one coming to help. Well, today America is coming to help.
17:21American forces back in action in Iraq. 14 airstrikes on ISIS militants holding the
17:25country's longest. A combination of bombers, fighter jets, and drones. Early today, U.S.
17:30planes were loaded to make a second airdrop of food and water for thousands of Yazidis. The
17:35desperation of the refugees on Mount Sinjar as Iraqi government helicopters tried to deliver
17:40some supplies. A very kind of interesting operation was set up where we would airdrop humanitarian
17:50assistance to the people trapped on this mountain while bombing the ISIS fighters giving siege to
17:55the mountain down below while arming the Kurds who were going to come take that air.
17:59By using its warplanes and its Kurdish allies, the Obama administration had managed to save
18:08thousands of Yazidi lives. But the Islamic State militants struck back, using terror and television cameras.
18:17I was on Air Force One. I was traveling with Obama to his vacation at Martha's Vineyard. And
18:26Lisa Monica, who's the president's counterterrorism advisor, called me. And there was this video they'd
18:36gotten of James Foley. And she's watching the video and kind of narrating it to me. And it was really
18:44a haunting experience because I'm on a plane. There are other people in the room. I'm just listening.
18:47And she's describing he's in an orange jumpsuit. He's kneeling down. There's a man with a knife.
18:55So any attempt by you, Obama, to deny the Muslims their rights of living...
19:00And then she just starts sobbing on the phone. And I knew, you know. And so I said to her,
19:06has he been beheaded? And she said, yes. And so then I had to walk into Obama's office and Malia was
19:13there. And I had to say, hey, Malia, I'm sorry. I need to, you know, talk. And so I had to tell him,
19:23you know, this beheading happened. And I had to tell him that the ISIS message with the beheading
19:31was, this was in response to the action we'd taken in Sinjar to save the Yazidis.
19:39To have to tell someone that this person has been beheaded and the person who did it is blaming you
19:43because of the thing you did, you know, that was not, um, that was one of the low points of my,
19:50uh, my time in the White House.
19:52I knew immediately then, you know, we'd be going to Syria, you know, because, yeah.
20:03Awful tragic news from overseas late today. It's about an American journalist named James Foley.
20:08The group said that the murder was a warning to the U.S. after airstrikes.
20:11Foley's murder has sparked widespread outrage and disgust for the ultra-violent group responsible.
20:16Tonight, I want to speak to you about what the United States will do to degrade and ultimately destroy
20:26the terrorist group known as ISIL. We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country wherever they are.
20:34Americans had shown little appetite for sending their warplanes to defend Syrians,
20:38even when thousands were dying from Assad's chemical weapons.
20:42But the televised beheading of an American journalist had raised a sudden appetite for revenge.
20:50This stark act of cruelty and injustice on a single young American,
20:55kneeling in an orange jumpsuit in the desert, awakened a bottomless anger.
21:01We have long memories and our reach is very wide and people will be held accountable.
21:06The horror perpetrated by ISIS has today prompted world leaders to warn of the global threat it poses.
21:12ISIS is also a threat that is beyond anything seen before.
21:21I remember Obama saying to me he was almost frightened by the kind of, you know, scale of hysteria about ISIS.
21:27He could have done anything, you know, he could have nuked, you know, Raqqa.
21:31I mean, when it was an American killed by a terrorist, it's like, let's go get him, you know.
21:36Now you have a crisis now that got the attention of the president.
21:42But this is the frustrating part about it, is because the international community now was shifting all of its resources and efforts towards combating
21:50while completely ignoring the root causes of what created it in the first place.
21:55We went from not bombing Syria to bombing Syria every day against ISIL.
21:59We had a tremendous amount of military capability in the region.
22:05We could have used some of that to try to get some leverage over Assad to perhaps bring about a better outcome.
22:11We didn't do that.
22:13That was a debate that others came in a different position.
22:18They were worried about escalation.
22:19They were worried about who is they.
22:20The president, the U.S. military, the uniformed military, was still, they didn't want any part of Syria.
22:26We are here to fight ISIL.
22:27We are not here to do something different, which is to go after Assad.
22:31The Syrian civil war has caused 100,000 deaths in a country of 23,000.
22:52and 130,000 people dead after more than one-third of the Syrian population has been driven from their homes.
22:59This apocalyptic disaster in Syria, thousands and thousands and thousands, 192,000 dead, 3 million refugees.
23:08And we're not going to do anything about Assad.
23:10In 2014, we were fighting ISIS.
23:39We were just building the coalition, U.S. embassies under siege, U.S. journalists being beheaded.
23:44The emphasis was on the lives of Americans.
23:48But at the same time, to be just reminded again and again of the inadequacy of what we were doing commensurate to our stated objectives.
23:57Our stated objectives were alleviation of suffering, not happening, suffering's getting worse.
24:03Stemming refugee flow, refugee flow getting worse.
24:05It's preventing the rise of terrorist groups ISIS is taking.
24:10I mean, on every axis.
24:11And so, but the suffering one is the one that makes you feel potentially, certainly I felt this way, at a different level, but guilty.
24:23It makes you feel like you're not, you know, that you're letting innocence down.
24:28And Obama would be very clear-eyed.
24:30He'd have no alibi for himself.
24:31He knows that the only hope they have is America.
24:35I was in Istanbul.
24:40And one of the Turkey-based opposition members asked to meet with me and my colleague.
24:51We met him at a McDonald's.
24:53And he proceeded to open his laptop and to go through thousands of horrific images of dead, emaciated, what looked like prisoners.
25:11And there were thousands of pictures on this laptop.
25:19To me, it looked like a modern version of the Holocaust pictures.
25:24They were identical.
25:26Skeletal bodies bearing torture marks, you know, burn marks.
25:31I engaged immediately the White House and our, at the time, Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Labor, and Human Rights, Tom Malinowski.
25:47I thought that after the Ghoulta chemical weapons attack, there would be a response.
25:51I thought, if there is no response to these photos, there will never be one.
26:01I got an urgent call from my friend, Tom Malinowski, and his voice was shaking.
26:10And he said, have you seen the photos? Have you seen the photos?
26:13And I said, what photos?
26:15He kept saying it over and over again.
26:18It's like the Holocaust. They had serial numbers.
26:21They had serial numbers.
26:24I quickly went about looking at the photos and understanding just the scale, just the numbers.
26:31And then the clinical, cold way in which they're recording torture and murder.
26:40And he said, what are we going to do about it?
26:47And I said, you know, will this make a difference?
26:51We were sort of just talking out loud.
26:53Can this make a difference? Will this make a difference?
26:55Already in that first call, as breathless as Tom was, and as shaken as he was, and as shaken as he made me,
27:03already then I had a sense of, I'm skeptical that this is going to change Obama's calculus,
27:10because he'll still say, okay, but tell me how it ends.
27:13What is the tool in the toolbox that will help us prevent people from being tortured like this?
27:19One man has been sounding the alarm, risking it all.
27:32His codename is Caesar.
27:34Reportedly taken by an unnamed Syrian military police photographer.
27:38Almost 55,000 photos he risked his life to bring out of Syria.
27:42Perhaps when the administration does complete its forensic analysis of the evidence provided by César,
27:50President Obama will decide that it's finally time to take action in Syria.
27:54I have to tell my colleagues, I'm not hopeful.
28:02I couldn't sleep after I saw some of the photos.
28:05But the president had been through years of debate about whether we could take military action to respond to
28:16and try and stop this kind of brutality, and had consistently decided that we couldn't.
28:23There's a tendency in government, if you can't provide a principal with a remedy,
28:28you know, what good does it do to provide him with documentation of the nature of the problem?
28:39You know, often, if you miss the moment to be moved by it at the beginning,
28:44it gets perversely harder, not easier, to shake people up at a later stage,
28:49because they get used to these factors.
28:52And so it really was the proverbial boiling frog who was kind of, you know,
28:58just the water was getting gradually hotter, gradually hotter.
29:00And then, you know, I made that point so many times in the Situation Room,
29:03but I was just a broken record, because I was just stating that we were having trouble doing proper risk management.
29:12I wrote a two-page memo to the Secretary of State
29:17and the National Security Advisor copying the President and Vice President
29:23and saying, essentially, we have no Syrian policy.
29:27I have been asked for a year by our NATO allies and other allies,
29:30what is our policy?
29:32And I couldn't give them an answer, because I didn't know what our policy was.
29:35Of course, we talked about it all the time in National Security Councils and so on,
29:38but that is not getting to the point.
29:40I can tell you that I did not get a response to my memo,
29:43which is a little unusual, but nobody wanted to deal with it.
29:48But basically, you're saying that the President, if I understand...
29:51What I'm saying is that we did not have a Syrian policy.
29:54The President said there's no good outcome, and I've heard him say that, too.
29:57That's not a policy.
29:59I can't take that back to our peers and say,
30:02well, there's no good option.
30:04Next question.
30:06They say, what?
30:07What does that mean, Mr. Secretary?
30:10Well, there's no good option.
30:11What do you mean?
30:12From the beginning, Obama ruled out fighting another war in the Middle East.
30:21Only belatedly and grudgingly was he willing to support the rebel groups operating in Syria.
30:27Given Assad's desperate will to survive,
30:30and the determination of his Iranian and Russian allies to see that he did,
30:34the eventual outcome became clear.
30:37For three years, the Americans resisted entering the conflict.
30:40And finally, seeing Obama's hesitation, Vladimir Putin decided the Russians would.
30:48From the Caspian Sea, a Russian warship launches the next move in Syria's war.
30:55It was the day that Russia's air force entered the war in Syria.
30:59Now, U.S. officials say the Russians gave them just one hour of warning before those air attacks.
31:08Syria had been Russia's longtime ally,
31:11hosted its only naval base in the Mediterranean.
31:14Putin entered Syria not only to bolster a loyal client,
31:22but to show that Russia was willing and able to project its power.
31:25To intervene in Syria would be to take a vital step in returning Russia to the position of world leadership
31:36it had lost at the end of the Cold War,
31:38and that Putin had vowed to reclaim.
31:40Amnesty reports suggest Russia is violating international humanitarian law.
31:48Amnesty reports that homes and a hospital were hit,
31:51as well as a market and a mosque.
31:52Syria was a litmus test for, particularly Russia,
32:12to study in practice the United States and the Western reaction
32:17to certain atrocities, violations of international law, and norms.
32:23They have been able to work with the Syrian regime
32:26to weaponize the refugee crisis.
32:32To use mass displacement into Turkey and then into Europe.
32:35To sow fear and discord within the European countries.
32:51To undermine European unity and the EU project.
32:59Brussels wants to inonate us with third world immigrants.
33:05And that, my friends, will be a disaster.
33:08To undermine NATO unity.
33:10To prop up populist governments.
33:12Do not come to Europe.
33:15It is all for nothing.
33:17By instigating fear of, you know, the Muslim hordes taking over Europe
33:22and undermining the liberal Western order.
33:26And I believe that that fear actually contributed to Brexit.
33:29Brexit now! Brexit now!
33:32And perhaps even, aside from their interference,
33:36sowing fear of Muslims and brown people in general,
33:40among many Americans, to vote into an office somebody like Donald Trump.
33:44I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration.
33:52That if I win, if I win, they're going back.
33:55They're going back.
33:56They're going back.
33:57I'm telling you.
33:58They're going back.
33:59This has been a strategic nightmare.
34:03It was an insane period for all of us, and it placed enormous physical, mental and emotional stress on our minds, our bodies, our souls as we were watching death and destruction and feeling like we weren't doing enough to stop it.
34:29It's really hard to describe the kind of toll that can take on you.
34:33Once in the White House, there was a discussion on Syria, and Samantha was pushing back on what we needed to do, and she was getting frustrated, and the president was getting frustrated.
34:45After the meeting, he goes up and he turns around and says, Samantha, come with me to the Oval.
34:50I don't know what they said, but to me, as I read it, she was always his bad conscience.
34:57She was the person who reminded him of the side of him who was idealistic.
35:01He respected her enormously.
35:03There were very few people that he would have a back and forth with in the Situation Room.
35:08He would have back and forth with her because he respected her views, because he knew she disagreed.
35:12There were a lot of layers in the dynamic between President Obama and myself on Syria.
35:19He wouldn't let a Syria meeting end without saying, Sam, what you got, you know?
35:27And he'd say, I see that look of skepticism, because I'd often be on the screen on the civets, and I could, you know, sometimes I would speak and I could just see him getting impatient and not liking the message.
35:40And, you know, one time it was, we've all read your book, Samantha.
35:44In other words, we don't need to be reminded of the human consequences of bystanding in the face of mass atrocity.
35:52Like, we get it. Like, spare us, kind of.
35:56He heard moral judgment in what I said, no matter what I said.
36:01And my view to this day is that he heard moral judgment because that was the voice in his head.
36:08No matter how I articulated what I was saying, he heard me saying, you're a bystander.
36:17Realistically, how close are we to any sort of real resolution to stop this?
36:23We've got to get a political solution, not just for Syria.
36:26It's because of a failed policy which has allowed this situation in Syria to deteriorate to the point where people just have to leave.
36:35I'd had a warm relationship with Senator McCain, so when Tony Blinken, a colleague of mine and friend of mine, was up for being Deputy Secretary of State and McCain was placing what's called a hold on his nomination, I said, Tony, I got this.
36:50So I called Senator McCain, he took the call.
36:53I basically got about two sentences into my pitch just to vouch that Tony was very concerned about the Syrians.
37:00But McCain, he just cut me off and he just says, how can you live with yourself?
37:06How? You know, you're going to make the policy better?
37:10This policy is a disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people are being killed.
37:14And you, the author of A Problem From Hell, are part of this administration.
37:18You're complicit in this.
37:19And he just went on and on.
37:23You know, I had the phone initially here and then it was so loud.
37:26But I kept trying to kind of reroute it to Tony and saying, look, I think if he's in the room, there'll be another voice.
37:33And he's like, please, another voice. Like, yours was a voice?
37:37You know, this president is not, he's, he's feckless, you know.
37:42And so I said, but, but, but Tony, and, and he said, look, you know, not only should Tony Blinken not be confirmed, but you should resign.
37:51And then the line went dead.
37:57A number of newspapers were calling on me to resign.
38:00Even close friends from Bosnia would say, have you thought about, so I, I did think about it.
38:07I could have expressed the, the sort of searing mark that Syria left on me by leaving.
38:18But who would that have helped?
38:21And who?
38:22Tell me one person that would have helped other than me in this interview.
38:25I'm in the room with the president.
38:28Barack Obama is not cold to what is happening to the Syrian people.
38:34What was very challenging was figuring out what is the pathway that is going to do more good than harm.
38:39And he made a judgment, not one I agreed with, but a reasonable one.
38:43At the same time, he gave me power to try to get more refugees into the country, getting political prisoners out of jail,
38:52to ending an Ebola crisis even though everyone in America wanted nothing to do with West Africa.
38:56Those are consequences.
38:58And to go back to teaching and writing and hoping somebody reads my op-ed,
39:02compared to the ability to do something for someone on a given day, it just wasn't a close call.
39:10All sides, including the Iranians and Russians, could come together in the cause of fighting ISIS,
39:16which by now had lost almost all its territory.
39:21It had all come down to Aleppo, Syria's first city.
39:25The Russians and Syrians bombed mercilessly from the air.
39:40And on the ground, the rebel forces fought back desperately with small arms.
39:46Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled.
39:49Tens of thousands died.
39:52It was the longest, deadliest battle of the Syrian civil war.
39:57To win Aleppo was to win the war.
40:00These heartbreaking pictures, I guess we're talking about over 400,000 Syrians killed.
40:1414 million people that have been driven out of their homes in Syria.
40:17Wave upon wave of Russian and Syrian airstrikes starting from the crack of dawn until night.
40:22Almost 100 children have been killed since Friday.
40:24It's an ethnic cleansing strategy in eastern Aleppo.
40:27Don't believe anymore in the United Nations.
40:31Don't believe anymore in the international community.
40:35Russia doesn't want us to go out alive.
40:39They want us dead.
40:42Assad is the same.
40:46I hope you can remember us.
40:48I don't know. Thank you very much.
41:01How can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations,
41:07institutional constraints, and above all, a lack of imagination?
41:12How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?
41:16George Bernard Shaw once wrote,
41:19The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
41:21The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
41:25Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
41:28The mistakes were allowing our fear of the unknown to prevent us from doing what is right, to confront the evil in front of us.
41:41There's always going to be unknown in foreign policy and in national security decisions, of course, but if you're going to seek zero margin of error, you have no business being a superpower.
41:54We've spun ourselves around the axel on this. Just over-thought, over-analyzed, over-played out the scenarios to a point of paralysis.
42:08It was a dark, it was maybe the darkest meeting I'd ever been in, to see Russia's impunity playing out in Aleppo, and to be left talking about some kind of disaster.
42:24Secretary of State call to the foreign minister, just some kind of weak diplomacy. It just, it just felt like it was all there. You know, just the frustration of the last years, and somebody else proposed, let's get the president on record condemning what was happening.
42:42In Aleppo, I just went off and I was like, this isn't going to work. They have no shame.
43:03Dramatic new drone video tells the tale of destruction. Anti-Assad government rebels held in East Aleppo were hit hard.
43:11Security Council resolution calling for a new pause to the fighting was vetoed. And so the Russian-led airstrikes continue.
43:20Here's what is happening right now in Eastern Aleppo. Syrians trapped by the fighting are sending out their final appeals for help.
43:33This is what is being done by member states of the United Nations, who are sitting around this horseshoe table today, to the people of Eastern Aleppo.
43:54Aleppo will join the ranks of those events that define modern evil.
44:01Kalabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Aleppo.
44:08Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? No execution of a child that gets under your skin that just creeps you out a little bit?
44:31This is, uh, this is not leading from behind. This is hiding from behind. I mean, we have Samantha Power, you know, attacking Iran, Assad, Russia, saying, have you no shame?
44:44What about the administration? The thing about Syria and the Obama policy is that this tiny country has caused so much destabilization, not only for its neighbors, but for Europe and so forth.
44:57Despite the lofty words of the United Nations responsibility to protect, the veto power of the five permanent members often made it an empty promise.
45:10In conflicts where one of the five was willing to veto international action, as the Russians were in Syria, nations retained the right to murder their own citizens at will.
45:23Unless, that is, other nations were willing to intervene to stop them.
45:30So, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, protected by its Russian allies, dropped its bombs and massacred its citizens who had nowhere to flee.
45:43Syrian soldiers and militias pounded East Aleppo and other rebel stronghold, leaving corpses and destruction in their path.
45:55Anyone who had any responsibility for Syria and for our policy there has to look themselves in the mirror and see failure staring back at you.
46:06On one level, it's as simple as that.
46:09We didn't stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.
46:15We didn't prevent millions of people being forcibly displaced from their homes.
46:20We look at that bottom line, and you can't but conclude that we failed.
46:32What's happened in Syria is absolutely heartbreaking.
46:39And there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about it.
46:42It's natural to want to blame someone for a terrible outcome.
46:51And I get that. I think the president gets that.
46:54When you're president, you don't get good choices.
46:58Those are taken care of by somebody else. You get the hard choices.
47:01You know, I wish there were an available alternative to us to fix that situation in Syria.
47:13But we looked at all the alternatives, and there was not one that worked.
47:26I'll be honest with you sitting here today.
47:40Like, I don't know how much of that I had to rationalize the inaction, you know?
47:45Because I knew after 2013 that I was going to be living with this inaction.
47:50And so to this day, I'm torn by it's a complicated thing.
47:56This gets back to your tugging at your conscience.
47:58Do you construct arguments to rationalize something that you used to feel passionately differently about, you know?
48:08I think there's something like that that's been going on with me.
48:13To be a liberal and to deal with these questions, you know, probably never really leads to that.
48:23I could feel almost over time, not only the US government, but the world kind of losing confidence that you could prevent mass atrocities.
48:33You know, you could feel that it wasn't just in Syria that people lost faith in the ability for diplomacy to work or for sanctions to pay off over time.
48:46You could feel just more of a sense of, you know, it's a cruel world out there.
48:50People's faith that there even was a responsibility to protect.
48:53You know, that the great powers of the world could agree on even modest measures.
48:58You know, people started to just, you know, Syria, it was like Syria came to define the land of the possible in a way that then I think was a bit of a doom loop.
49:08I'm very troubled, not only by what's happening in Syria, but by the failure of the international community to act on what's happening in Syria.
49:20If that's not mass murder and genocide, I don't know what it is.
49:26And yet the international community has not responded in that situation.
49:32And that's very troubling to me, not only in Syrian terms, but in terms of what it says about the international community's sensitivity to and willingness to respond to gross atrocities.
49:47It's going to happen again. We're going to find situations in the world where those animosities that exist between and among peoples are such that they're going to commit violence against each other.
49:59And sometimes that violence is going to reach a scale that we will regard as being mass atrocity and genocide.
50:06And I'm sad to say we are not going to prevent that from happening in every instance around the world.
50:12There will always be genocides or war crimes because human nature hasn't changed.
50:20If you look around the world, you can see how the forces of selfishness and barriers and of denial of rights are growing because the democratic institutions that were put in place 70 years ago are all under assault.
50:39And in too many countries they are losing, including the values themselves.
50:46Every nation of the world agreed that the international community has a responsibility to protect people against genocide and war crimes.
50:55And then find practical ways not to implement it.
50:59One of the lessons of history is that memories are short.
51:03People forget the sacrifices that were made and the mistakes that were made.
51:08The challenge of leadership is making sure that people never forget the lessons of history.
51:18And that never again means never again.
51:22I believe that the United States bears responsibility to try to rally action in response to genocide, mass killings, mass atrocities, so that the world does not descend into darkness and madness.
51:41Does it mean if no one else is coming along, America's got to go in and do it by itself?
51:46I would say when you put the principle to the test in individual circumstances, then the question gets a lot harder.
51:55I don't think constructive solutions can happen if the United States just withdraws.
52:03Somebody has to give some leadership.
52:07The United States has had a lot of hits as a result of our leadership effort to try to create a better world.
52:17And a lot of people want to say, because we've taken some hits, we shouldn't do it.
52:22I don't agree with that.
52:24Decades have passed since America triumphed in the Cold War,
52:33and George H.W. Bush proclaimed the birth of a new world order.
52:39In this new order, the American president declared,
52:42the world's historic brutality would finally be tamed by nations acting in concert.
52:48States would resolve their differences at the diplomatic table.
52:52Citizens would be protected.
52:54And over this peaceful world, America, the indispensable nation, would preside.
53:01It was an idealistic vision, long central to the American psyche.
53:08But what followed in the real world was massacre and genocide.
53:14In Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Syria, men with guns and sometimes only machetes murdered millions while the world looked on.
53:28In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, America's military swept away dictatorships and left chaos and ruin in their place.
53:38Never again.
53:41The responsibility to protect.
53:44The phrases are inspiring.
53:47Statesmen around the world were happy to echo the high ideals of the Americans.
53:51But they lacked the power and the interests to do the dirty work on the ground.
53:58When someone had to act, the world sat back and left it to America.
54:04And it was then that America showed it had the power to destroy.
54:09But not the patience and the will to rebuild.
54:13And soon, for all its power, America found its limits.
54:19After decades of lost wars, Americans gazed into the vast destruction and carnage that was Syria.
54:31And no matter how horrific the killing on their television screens, they had no appetite for another war.
54:38The world had proved indifferent, immutable, and Americans had had enough.
54:49Today's New World Order is a much darker place.
54:54Democracy is in decline.
54:57Authoritarian regimes are on the rise.
55:00The universalist creed of human rights is drowned by a flood of nationalism.
55:07On the black list of atrocities, the Ukrainian town of Bucha takes its place with Srebrenica and Aleppo.
55:14In the ranks of cultural destruction, Xinjiang joins Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur.
55:23If the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall have shown anything, it is that evil can appear anywhere.
55:32That the human longing for domination and savagery will never disappear.
55:38This world will not follow a rules-based international order by itself.
55:44Someone must lead and rally the democracies.
55:48That means a strong nation that can show the discipline to follow those rules itself,
55:53and can summon its power to persuade others to help enforce them.
55:59Only America can do that.
56:04But proclaiming a New World Order is not enough.
56:09America's leaders need to convince their own people and their democratic allies
56:14that it is in their interest to help them in this cause.
56:18That it is worth the blood and treasure it will cost.
56:22They need to reshape international institutions, especially the UN Security Council,
56:28so that they support rather than obstruct it.
56:33Until the indispensable nation musters the statecraft and the wisdom and the will
56:40to lead the world to that new era, the proud vows of never again will remain empty slogans,
56:49too often uttered over mass graves.
56:55The cleanest people will give it to you among the forces.
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