there and that ups the stakes. other thing we have to talk about here is when we ve done this in the past we ve all been through this before when the strikes start we usually say minutes before the strike happened the u.s. secretary of state called the following countries. we don t really have a u.s. secretary of state right now. so the stakes couldn t be higher. the question is if you send just a symbolic message that you can t use chemical weapons, you re not going to change anything on the ground. it is not likely anything is going to change on ground. if it is not decisive it just sends a signal that, oh, this is the u.s. sending air strikes again. a week or two after we said we wanted out. president bashar al assad has won this war. the russians supported him. they pushed the rebels out. seven years ago this month when we were talking about this it was a call for democratic reform. that changed. isis came in. the russians have backed up assad. there is very little that s g
balance of power in the region, which we re not going to do, it would be helpful to have some allies. so far, no allies have said definitively they re on our side. sort of implied if asked, they will help. we ve heard the same thing from theresa may in great britain and macron is backing up a little bit. we have to assume we re on our own. we can t wait forever. if you re going to punish somebody, it is best to be done immediately. this long-term drawn-out exercise where we re trying to figure out whether we re going to launch strikes doesn t do anything. we re going to keep a very close eye on this. it is worth noting, there are all sorts of different forces in here. those are the pro-government forces. opposition forces are fighting the government. then there are isis and kurdish fighters. let s take a quick look. jim mattis has arrived at the white house about an hour ago. he arrived at the white house. we don t know what that s about. we know he had a trip planned to the west
we started the show with, are there good answers. and this is a tough question. we ll all stay pretty close over the next few days as we prepare for what is anticipated to be a strike against syria. joining me now, retired army colonel jack jacobs. he s an msnbc military analyst and a medal of honor recipient. colonel, good to see you. not under these terms but let s discuss this for a little while. these are the areas we are talking about in syria. we don t look at syria a whole lot, but this is important to understand. this is an area of kurdish control. this red is where the assad regime controls things. and only these little spots of blue are where american-backed rebel groups control things. you can see that the assad regime controls most of syria. these brown areas are the isis areas. as president trump says, they re almost eliminated. but ultimately this is a war with the assad regime. yeah, it is.
rise to the level of getting into a war, but if you start putting munitions on top of syrian troop concentrations, i think that would get some kind of response from the russians. however, this is a broader map of syria. this is the mediterranean in which the strike group that would be launching this is right now. we have troops in qatar. egypt has said it is not interested in participating in this. iran obviously wouldn t be. turkey is a nato ally. not necessarily on our side. but they re not necessarily on our side because turkey doesn t like the fact that the kurds control this area. they are our allies in the fight against isis but they ve been bombing our allies, the kurds, all the time. so the question is, you can have france involved in this, you can get other european allies involved but do we not need greater support in this area it would be useful. if what you are doing is to punish assad, even if you re just going to punish assad and you aren t looking to chan
terms of military capability now and in the near future? because we do know that a number of vessels have left port at norfolk heading toward the middle east but there are some capabilities already in the mideast. if, for instance, the united states were to impose strikes very similar to the ones any did years ago. this will take at least at least a week to get there. they left probably a couple hours ago so they wouldn t arrive well into the next week. we don t even know if they re headed toward the mediterranean. we just know they re going to the 6th fleet. there is the the donald cook, the destroy in the eastern med. they have destroyers in the persian gulf and red sea. they ve got f-22s, b-52s. the number of assets and capabilities in the region, they have a big airbase there in turkey. they have a lot of assets, in part, for the fight gns eagains isis. the key word is proportional.