consequences for harboring assad and allowing him to wage war on his own people. i think we need to ratchet up the pressure on russia. the main policy approach of the administration has been to pull back, allow assad to say in power and let russia work its will. we are seeing the consequences with the weapons attack as well as many others that have been perpetrated over the past 12 months. jeremy and dennis, thank you both, i appreciate it. we are going to fit in a break. coming up, how is russia responding to the air strike? putin is clearly unhappy. live in studio in new york, we have one of the world s foremost authorities on all things putin, journalist and author, my special guest, when we return. yeah, my dad says our insurance doesn t have that. what?! you can leave worry behind
i certainly think it was necessary to respond to the use of chemical weapons, not because of the importance within syria, but the message it sends more generally, that chemical weapons cannot be treated like any other weapon. there will be other dictators like assad and they shouldn t think using chemical weapons is a get out of jail free card. let me press on that for viewers. sometimes people wonder about that. there is a criticism of western powers as well that our policies result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including civilians, including collateral damage. why, from your perspective, you say as an obvious premise, why chemical weapons held out the international legal community as so horrific if all these other things that are going on also result in terrible loss of life. look, especially in syria,
account maintained by assad s department says it honorable cannot be humiliated. to go deeper, i was to bring in the author of the future is history. she is a known expert to our office as a putin explainer, even if you are more than that and that s not the only thing you want to do with your life. gives you plenty of fodder. you are an interesting thinker, independent thinker. you don t play for a team, so you bedevil people. you are critical of vladimir putin, but disagree with some of the american presumptions about him and what s going on. let s begin with the conventional wisdom that putin controls trump. that s what many people think, right or not, and that trump can t stand-up to putin, which i
unlawful, horrendous activity, assad waged war on his own people. i was struck, ari, i love dennis perspective on this, why the administration selected such a narrow approach to the fission. there was a phrase in the pentagon, don t waste a crisis. they could have expanded the target set to degrade assad s war making may sheen against his own people to try to change the balance of power and send a stronger signal to russia that hey, we need a different dynamic that erode s assad s power. ambassador? i think the administration was driven by concerns about escalation with the russians. they went to great pains to strike those targets where the russians and the iranians weren t nearby. so, i think this was a very deep concern within the pentagon was not to create a possible exchange with the russians or
i know assad is winning. when donald trump tweets mission accomplished, what does that tell you. the mission accomplished is to slap assad on the wrist to say we are not going to tolerate his killing of people with gas and things like that. he s killing 500,000 or 600,000 have been murdered. they have been slaughtered. i deal with syrian groups all the time. they tell me what s happening on the ground is horrific. while i think it s good to strike, to tell him this is unacceptable, so he ll kill people with other methods. that s not really anymore acceptable. to have a coherent plan, i think the president needs to come to congress and congress needs to give the authorization. that is the biggest story, i think, right now. the other story that would be big, if we hadn t began bombing another country is what looks