syrian dictator bashar al-assad. last week we were sickened by the appalling images of children in syria gasping in air after the chemical attack. assad says he couldn t have gassed his own people, syria has no chemical weapons. definitely, 100%. we don t have arsenal, we re not going to use it. and there are many indications, if you don t have proof, no one has information or evidence. but you have indications. eric: joining us for reaction in washington, david tafore, former state department official. and defense of democracy. bazaar al-assad says he doesn t have chemical weapons, all of the images that we saw, donald trump said inspired his tomahawk missile attack, is all false. this is ho assad operates. he s in denial.
kashs, most who look at what s happening there and look at it realistically, think it s going to be a ten-year global hemorrhage of horror and death and ongoing civil war, so that s the downside. it really there are not a lot of options if that s the realistic solution. it s practically like genocide in some levels. but the tools to go in and do something are very limited unless you want to go to war against assad directly. and i know that the president is not suggesting that. and by the way, the chemical weapons component to all of this, it appears as if syrian regime now also dragging its feet on that. what more can you tell us about the delays there? well, i think that s more serious because russia is directly on the line with that. this would hamper russia s credibility on a lot of other fronts. remember, russia has a lot of other objectives in the world than protecting syria. so to a certain degree they are trying to highlight that again and basically tell russia, you
can t use the olympics as a way to hide your responsibilities for delivering syria on chemical weapons. that is the one thing if push came to shove, if there was a return, a lot of americans may not like it and members of congress won t be supportive, but if syria slips out of the track, then i think that the president might look at action again. steve, let s listen in again as president obama prepares to take another question. in that role, if so, why not extend to france the no spying agreement that you have with england after the big scandal of the nsa surveillance program. translator: mr. president, you praised the excellency of the cooperation, but on iran, are there differences in terms of analysis between france and america on the necessity to have
global attention on the chemical weapons deal. so assad is really gaming this. and i think it s going to be hard for the united states to automatically bring everybody back into a marshall position to try to compel syria to go a different thing. it s a real mess. and one can hope through diplomacy and maybe ships coming online and i don t think obama has any kind of appetite for coming back and pretending we might go to war again with syria. while you are talking, this is a live look inside the east room where president obama and president hollande are holding the joint news conference. steve, this is a rare sight for a lot of folks. we re talking about a state dinner here. i did not realize until this morning that state dinners for this administration have been fairly rare, no? well, this is the sixth one. i ve got the privilege of going tonight so i ll be there. in some cases the united states has been some sort of a bind recently in state dinners. the president of brazil rejecte
peninsula is on the rise. u.s. officials worry the government of yemen has failed to take action. aqap has already plotted against the u.s. with the 2009 underwear bomber attack. in syria concerns are at an all-time high that foreign fighters are there and could return to europe or the u.s. to conduct attacks. in excess of 7,000 foreign fighters have been attracted from some 50 countries, many of them in europe and the mideast. reporter: the u.s. intelligence community now calculates that al qaeda affiliates are active in at least 12 countries. syria remains a vital concern that militants there could use it as a staging ground to try and stage future attacks against the u.s. wolf? and today there was another u.s. warning to syria on chemical weapons. i thought the syrians had agreed to give up their chemical