post-apocolyptic nightmare of a city that has been bombarded for months. it s cold and they can t get food and water and are not being accepted anywhere. the obama administration essentially blames the assad regime, blames the russians, blames the iranians, but isn t what we are seeing right now, you called this five years in the making, isn t this catastrophe we are watching right now, wasn t it more or less predictable? doesn t the obama administration have to accept some responsibility for it? obama administration officials i have spoken to for years have been waiting for this day to come and been incredibly worried about what it meant. especially people who favored greater intervention in 2013, 2014, and you know, one of them even said to me look, we have to revisit who actually won the cold war. russia is bringing the eu to its knees and it only took dropping bombs on syria to cause a refugee crisis. i think what you see from the start is one side is all in. the syrian regime,
to fear for their lives. we never wanted anybody to leave aleppo because we didn t want the city to be under siege as it has been. we know the syrian military is going after all sorts of sites in aleppo, around aleppo. i ll ask what i asked fred pleitgen. what is the russian role as far as you know, john. right now, how much of a military offensive are they taking part in this assault? i think fred s reporting very much tracks with what we know and what information we have about russia s role. make no mistake, whether or not russian tech tackle aircraft are dropping bombs i know they claim they are not, we are still holding them responsible for that. they have influence over the assad regime they re not willing to stop the bloodshed and agree with fred s assessment, they have military trainers and advisers on the ground, they are
without grabbing the resources of those we defeated. and donald trump made a point of emphasis in this campaign, saying we should have kept the oil. so a couple clear shots there, but colonel jack, what did you make of that? one thing to keep in mind is that dropping bombs on people is exactly the strategy this president s used. doesn t make it a bad thing. it s been very, very successful, as a matter of fact. targeted strikes on the infrastructure of isis has paid big dividends and he said so himself. what we re relying on is the training of indigenous forces to hold on to what we give them. that s a tougher thing to do, and i don t think we re going to be successful unless we stay there a long, long time. what were you hearing, steve? two speeches came to mind listening to this one. one was president obama s speech at the front of his administration in cairo in which he talked to the middle east about how we valued the lives in the region, how they needed to
one is to signal that help is on the way. the other is to get some of the fighters out of there. yeah. i think there is a little confusion here on the distinction between tactical surprise which you don t want to give up. don t let an opponent know at this moment we ll start dropping bombs, this is where the s.e.a.l.s. come in, this is where the helicopter wave arrives. don t give up tactical surprise. strategic maneuvers, strategic dialogue to accomplish what you mentioned as well as to make the strategic communication point to the islamic state. we are coming after you. that has a chilling fekt on their recruiting. there is a little bit of a learning curve that needs to occur. general michael flynn writing in the hill was praising the leader of turkey erdogan and adopting his stance who has been
conflict. time to look to start helping these people instead of just bombing them. we have to start helping the refugees in jordan and turkey and bringing more refugees home. i mean, continuing this war fare is senseless. all we re doing, obviously, the russians are not going to go away. this is their client s state. i don t know why somebody hasn t realized that yet. but this is not going to end well in the united states if we keep on dropping bombs. the concern of helping on the ground is that you can t create safe zones because of where the russians are bombing. so, the military component is an essential facet of being able to make it safe on the ground, james. how do you handle that part? you reach an agreement where you re not going to be bombing them. you re going to send planes in that will air drop food and supplies. these people need food and they need supplies and they need places to live in a tent and so forth. so, these things can be air dropped in on planes that are