have or what his plans are and he walks out with nothing it sounds like. what s next diplomaticly? i m not sure diplomaticly there is much that can go on as long as assad sees no alternative outside of syria. you know he probably faces death if he continues to fight inside syria but without any commitment to give him immunity from prosecution, if he were to leave every incentive is to stay and roll the dice and see if he might yet survive. he is also i think worried about his fellow alawites an offshoot of shia islam. supporters like the drews and christians who might face a bloodbath if the opposition prevails. as long as his incentive structure remains to fight to the end i think that is what he is going to do. jamie: seems like fewer and fewer nations would be willing to take him in at this point. so you see a timetable of how much longer he can
capability. what does he have, what could he use and what does you have to lose? okay. the short story is that bashar assad has an army which has not divided yet. that is crucial. it is about 400,000. 300,000 are operational. within those 300,000 you have 80,000 who are hardcore, his revolutionary guard equivalent if you want. in the center of that he as minority alawite who will fight for him. he knows he can not go back to areas that he lost in the north, mostly sunni areas. he knows he can not go back to becoming dictator over syria as a whole. so what he is trying it do is maintain himself in damascus as long as he can and the price is bloodshed. if he loses damascus he has a fast way out side the country. he will go to his little homeland outside syria where his alawites are. i propose if we don t have fine tall solution for syria this will become an ethnic civil war in the future and
role at the republican national convention? i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. we begin with mitt romney s preparations for what may be the most crucial week of his presidential campaign. with several new polls out including our own showing him losing ground to president obama, romney begins a bus tour on saturday through four swing states he absolutely needs to win. but he s still traveling without a running mate. dana bash is here in the situation room taking a closer look. these are going to be huge days the next week. look, the day is young traveling without a running mate as we speak. you never know what s going to happen. regardless, mitt romney is going to have several vp-buzz generating news with him. but the campaign knows it first has to do some refining about the man on the top of the ticket, romney himself. oh beautiful, for spacious skies. reporter: if you turned on your television last month, there s a good chance you saw this brutal att
concerns his psychiatrist actually had about him. well, anderson, in the first ten days of june, a number of things were going on. i ll give you a timeline here to kind of set the scene. on june 7th, the suspect in these shootings was to take an oral exam. he s in the ph.d program, the neuroscience program at the university of colorado. he took this oral exam, was a preliminary oral exam and didn t do well on it at all. secondly, he had to find a mentor to continue in this neuroscience program. we re told it s unclear if he could find a mentor. on the 7th, june 7th, the same day he basically failed that test, he went out in the afternoon and bought an ar-15 assault rifle. it was in that afternoon that we know or around that period, he was certainly talking to his psychiatri psychiatrist, who was dr. lynn fenton. now, we don t know what those conversations were, but we know during that period, which seemed to be a very high-stress period for him, something that he said to
stockpiles are indeed secure. could assad use them against the rebels? could he use them against his own citizens as we saw saddam hussein do? i think it is entirely possible. i think that is the first risk that confronted with the collapse of the regime and a possible bloodbath by the opposition, against the alawites and other supporters of the regime that he might use chemical weapons as reported by amnesty international, his father used in the hama massacres of 1982. that is risk number one and risk number 2, as the regime authority collapses the stockpiles of chemical weapons, some of which are in motion now, could fall into the hands of terrorists, in the opposition or could be sold or taken by terrorists or other rogue states. so, i think this is a critical point for the united states, for the nato allies. israel and others, to start thinking about what we might have to do, to prevent that from