chemical attack. here s what president obama said about it tonight. the situation profoundly changed, though, on august 21st, when assad s government gassed to death over 1,000 people, including hundreds of children. the images from this massacre are sickening. men, women, children lying in rows killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. on that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits, a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war. i want to bring in a syrian activist who for years was our voice from inside syria on ac 360 risking his life to talk
stand, huge victory or huge defeat? these things take time. arguments need to sink in. people need to take some of these facts into consideration. people have lives to live, they need to think about the stuff. this is a process. obama is beginning to make the we always forget on tv people not on tv actually have lives. lives, other things to do. you have a life? a country like this is 50-50 split on a war, are people motivated to watch this? that s an overwhelming shift. now look, that doesn t mean i think most americans want diplomacy to work. i think everybody does. that s the key thing. the one that didn t move and i think it s significant was the one about is this in america s national interests. it moved a bit. about syria, not chemical weapons. right. but the problem i think he faced it, a tension in his speeches, he s trying to make the case that this is an absolute urgent necessity to do something.
when will the regime agree? the regime has been lying about chemical weapons for the past four or five decades saying it never had them. only a few months ago they were just denying we don t have chemical weapons. now we have them and they have the biggest stockpile in the world. now they admit that. so now they re not lying about chemical weapons. just to clarify they re not lying now about having chemical weapons? no. they admit they have chemical weapons. so now it s good morning it s still morning. no. maybe. in this case yes. but because this was just a please listen to me. please listen to me. for you is this russian diplomatic initiative, this is very bad news. because it muddies the case? it buys them time? it diffuses the momentum for military action? how do you see it?
but what he s proposing is what he keeps saying is a very limited military strike. something his secretary of state called unbelievably small. i think that tension where you re trying to drum up a great deal of support, a lot of americans look at it and say yes, it s a terrible thing. yes, chemical weapons are bad, assad is bad. is this in our national interests? is this something that really americans should americans die for this? no americans are going to die for that, fareed. why is it we can t get off this straw man? there are no boots on the ground. enough already with this. that s my point that he s trying to say it s in our core national security interests but i m only going to do two days of strikes. but it will be enough. and he said critically that it will be enough. and this is what i want to ask david kay, because operation desert fox was a couple of days. i was there. saw cruise missiles going by me. hitting and it worked. what we re talking about here is a very
international humanitarian law, morality. the first principle of international law is you do not take military action except in self-defense unless authorized by the u.n. security council so the problems, christiane, that a lot of people have around the world is not with the cause, but the idea that the united states is prosecutor, judge, jury and hangman. that is the problem. i m not saying as somebody who [ overlapping speakers ] let him finish. okay. i m not saying this with any skepticism about the case. i think assad used chemical weapons, and he s a terrible person. they shouldn t be used. of course. around the world i was talking to a pakistani friend a couple of days ago. this is the issue. how is it that the united states when everybody else says no they say yes? there is a to use john kerry s phrase when he was