regime and russia s failure to live up to their international commitments to remove all chemical weapons from syria. sean, your colleague focused on this, but the turning point for him and his inability to call to the vladimir putin, meaning the way that the president and administration talks about russia, i think for hawkish republicans, particular lay on this capitol hill moment that this is something that hopefully convinces president trump to take a harder line and in policy to warn the rush
snuff. what do you mean of assad refuting the strikes? he released video of himself showing up for work as usual? look, dara, i was been on the ground many times when the u.s. was attacking tyrants. and what i have learned over the years is that what doesn t kill them makes them stronger. and if you kill them, you could wind up with a disaster like libya. and then if you try to bring order to the situation, you can wind up with a disaster like iraq. so all of these measures are of dubious words, and particularly limited strikes. they always make the dictator stronger than they were before. president trump tweeted yesterday in the words, mission accomplished. what would you say that these strikes accomplished? i think the headline in the new york times or the washington post was exactly right, what mission? we don t know what the mission is. a couple weeks ago the mission was to get people out of syria.
christopher, great to have you here this morning. a total of five sites were targeted. how viable is it that they struck the heart of the syria chemical weapons program? well, the first thing we need to know is what chemical weapons program? the most the we used most frequently in syria is chlorine. chlorine is an industrial chemical. chlorine is what is in laundry bleach, it s what is in swimming pools. if you cops trait i concentrate release it as a gas, you can kill a lot of people, which was the case in ghouta and in douma. but we haven t seen much evidence, solid evidence, that there s any sophisticated chemical weapon being used. so to say you have attacked and eliminated the heart of the chemical weapons program does beg the question, what do we know about that program? and very little evidence has been presented about that. well, pentagon officials took
term. but mission accomplished is a tricky term to use right now. and this is continuing. i don t think this is really going to end. and there is clearly tension ramping up between the u.s. side, the french, the british, ending with iran and syria. bashar al assad released a video of him walking carefully into the government attacks yesterday. so i didn t see that happen so we ll see how that depose. russirussia s desperate atte at deflection cannot change the facts. the pictures of dead children were not fake news. they were the result of the syrian regime s barbaric in humanity. and they were the result of the
there are about 2,000 american troops in southeastern syria. so is that the mission by attacking these sites? no. is this going to get rid of bashar al assad? no. the only mipgs is to keep him from using chlorine as a chemical weapon. if that s the idea. it is kind of irrelevant. he doesn t need to use chlorine, he s winning the wall already. real quick if i can ask you, christopher, what has this done before the relation schiff