puts russia as the vice president said, i agree with him, on the wrong side of history in this matter. general, one more question, people often look at the situation. they see from the u.s. side appears to be a relatively positive assessment of what happened. if you think assad is a bad guy, gassing his own people and we could go in and take out chemical capacity to do that and not cost many or any lives according to the early assessments. as you know, general, one of the questions, why didn t we do this a long time ago? what is the answer for that? well, again, look, back off what s going on in syria. straight lines on the map. you bag together throughout the middle east people who despise each other. assad is a shia muslim, minority. 12% of the population, shia, 75% sunni muslim. they have been oppressed,
as a cool of warfare, particularly against innocent civilians where they have a devastating impact. the impact of that strike, politically, may be significant in the assad regime, we are about to find out in the coming days and weeks. there could be an asymmetric response by the iranians or the russians or the syrians, for that matter. if you sort of back off the issue and say, look, syria is devastated, it s come apart. assad is about to win a half million dead, maybe 80 or more chemical attacks since the war started. by the way, other people used chemicals in the middle east. the iraqis, the iranians, the egyptians in yemen. i m not too sure it changed the ground situation. u.s. military power is not going to fix syria. before i turn to the ambassador, when you look at this operation, does it, based
what i want to do now is turn to andrew, a fellow at the washington institute for middle eastern policy and studies syria and these issues. thanks for joining me, andrew. my pleasure. when you look at what is happening in the region, obviously, we begin with what did the u.s. do and what happened in syria proper, that s where the strikes were. when you look at iran, what do you take from it? iran s reaction is going to be interesting. assad hasn t been winning the war on his own steam. he did so through a military int intervention with russia and iran. so, iran has militia, thousands of ma liilitiamen. they are backing assad. these strikes focused on chemical weapons sites.
will be ready escalate, if indeed, assad calls their bluff. that, i think, is the true test of whether this is successful or not. remember, they did this a year ago and there were multiple uses of chemical weapons between that attack and this one. we need to be prepared to react, i think, more quickly if there s another chemical weapons attack. on that, let me play from a sort of diplomatic counter part of yours on the other side, the russian ambassador to the u.n. on all of this. russia condemns in the strongest terms the attack against syria, where russian military personnel are assisting the legitimate government in counterterrorism efforts. there its actions, the united states makes an already catastrophic situation worse and brings suffering to civilians. in fact, the u.s. panders to the terrorists tormenting the syrian people for seven years. one, what do they mean? what are they getting at when
security as a whole. when you look at the wider activities in syria, you look at what s happening this weekend. does bashar al assad have a reason he continues to resort to chemical weapons if there is at least a risk of this kind of retaliation each time he does it? why do it? yeah, good question. there are two reasons historically in the syrian war. one is lack of manpower. assad s army, like i said, didn t win the war on its own effort, it did so through other interventions. it needs these weapons to hold position. that s one. two, they have more military capacity than they had in the past. now, they are using it to spread sheer terror among the opposition to get them to submit. these two trends haven t stopped in the syrian war. the question is, will u.s. strikes deter us from using it.