you do have this movement and you have overt orders from the syrian government to many areas from the military installations for civilians to evacuate. so, yeah, they are using these days in a run-up to a possible u.s. strike to prepare themselves, greta. greg, thank you. earlier, secretary donald rumsfeld went on the record. senate foreign relations committee has now voted in favor of giving the president authority, it will be have to be further debated. but what s your thought on this? my thought is that secretary kerry has been dealt a very tough hand. what he has, as a new secretary of state dealing with, are decisions that were made over a period of time. red lines were drawn, comments were made by his predecessor
president seems to say that even if congress says no to him that he has the authority to do it anyway. which i believe he does. if you look at successor presidents that can be debated. that s a lot of people have a very different view of that, whether the president has authority. but in light of the fact that if our military service does limited strike, sends off 150 cruise missiles, 24 hours goes by, what do we have? well, that i think is the question. i think the president used the phrase before he went to play golf, something to the effect firing a shot across the bow or punishing. what have we achieved if that s what we do? it seems to me you either have to decide that there should be a regime change and make a opposing the assad regime e and killing the 100,000 people that have died or you don t do something.
but i think the point ought to be, we ought to make the president credible, give him the authority but then he ought to do something that is going to affect the situation on the ground in syria. yes, we want end the killing and the threat that syria and what is happening in syria will destabilize lebanon, iraq, and turkey and we also need to end the possibility that it s going to empower al qaeda and in order to do that you need something on the ground that is going to challenge the balance of force between the regime and between the opposition and you need to follow it up by arming the opposition so that they have a chance to show assad that his days are numbered and set up for a negotiated outcome in which democratic regime elements and elements of the assad regime without assad who want to be part of a new syria can come together, can form a government and then can take on al qaeda so
but i think the point ought to be, we ought to make the president credible, give him the authority but then he ought to do something that is going to affect the situation on the ground in syria. yes, we want end the killing and the threat that syria and what is happening in syria will destabilize lebanon, iraq, and turkey and we also need to end the possibility that it s going to empower al qaeda and in order to do that you need something on the ground that is going to challenge the balance of force between the regime and between the opposition and you need to follow it up by arming the opposition so that they have a chance to show assad that his days are numbered and set up for a negotiated outcome in which democratic regime elements and elements of the assad regime without assad who want to be part of a new syria can come together, can form a government and then can take on al qaeda so