what used to be syria and iraq and the middle east. and we need to think about how to e4reu78 nate isis in a way that minimizes the upside impact for assad, for hezbollah. for the baghdad regime and for iran. so this strike against assad s regime i think is very important for the beginning of constructing the post isis middle east. i think for the larger world i couldn t imagine anything being more convenient than this strike occurring while president trump was having dinner with president xi jinping. pete: certainly sends adversary. they play by the rules and they won t in this instance. whether it s the assad regime or the russians pushes out propaganda saying the u.s. killed civilians, they were reckless. this is an overreach. how do we win the narrative on this to keep it exactly where we want it. fackets are always helpful. we gave them advanced warning. we targeted a military base that we believed was the source of the strike that used
maliki turned out to be a disaster. you blame him? has the biggest part of the guilt, but there s plenty going around. should the u.s. be slying arms to the friends, the kurds,ed moderate sunnis in the anbar province. right now the u.s. is unwilling to do so. they still send all the weapons to the central government in baghdad and the baghdad regime disperses those weapons. that sounds like an awful decision. we ve got to decide what our long-term goal is. the long-term strategy to reach that goal if isis disappeared today right now, we would still have a terrible situation in that region. we ve really got to deal with that. i do have some sympathy for the idea that if you start to go around the central government you don t solve the problem, we saw it in afghanistan, you actually make it worse. but the central government looks like pretty much a wholly-owned subsidiary of the iranian regime next door. if we don t fix the central