can be muscular too. yes, there are times when unilateral intervention may be necessary but for the most part when the direct national security interests of the united states are not threatened, the u.s. has to work through global partners. you heard the president talk about that with respect to ukraine and dealing with russia, how the u.s. and its allies isolated russia because of its intervention in ukraine. you heard the president talk about how he wants to build these multilateral partnerships. he talked about this $5 billion counterterrorism partnership fund that will be used to help other nations train and, in some cases, perhaps, arm their military security forces to deal with terrorist threats in their regions. you also heard the president talk about syria. that is perhaps where a lot of this criticism began. when he drew that red line, the red line was crossed by bashar al assad, and then the president did not large air strikes. that what started this argument about whether or
steve: the president of the united states has a busy day, sitting down with all the tv networks, sitting down with chris wallace for seven minutes. brian: i don t know if he has an outfit yet. steve: he probably picked it out or his wife could have picked it out for him. going to sit down for seven minutes, talk about syria. the president really needs to convince the american people, but even more than that, he needs to convince democrats because right now if he had the vote in the u.s. house of representatives, the president would lose because of democrats and now a bunch of lefty groups, including things like code pink, moveon.org are coming out against the president. gretchen: moveon.org have spent five figures to run a new ad against an attack against syria and equates it to what happened to president bush in iraq. i think what would be more accurate is if they equated it to what happened in libya, which was still under president obama.
center for new american security. talk about syria and about leaks and about a lot of other things on the military and national security side. great to see you. first of all, the whole question of syria, a lot of criticism of the administration for not, mitt romney says we should be arming the rebels. where do you come down on this as to whether the rebels are well organized enough and trustworthy enough, transparent enough, to be armed and be an effective force? first of all, let me say i think everyone is horrified by the scale and scope of the violence and the targeting of civilians. but i think the focus right now is rightly on trying to engineer a political transition, a way to get assad out of power. he has lost his legitimacy. and to pursue a political transition plan. the concern about arming the rebels at this time is first of all, they aren t very cohesive as a body either on the ground or in terms of the opposition
leave voluntarily. kill the last person in the street. it is immoral, it is horrific, these are barbarians, but it seems to me this sends the wrong message to the people we are trying to peacefully get. this is what we do. not what we do, but this is our ally of 30 years. why hasn t the president talk about syria and assad and said he has to go. he said that about mubarak. he didn t say that about assad in syria or mahmoud ahmadinejad in iran back in 09. i don t understand. i ll make a counter argument. that justice to message says ju. nobody is above the law. good luck to state department officials trying to get assad or gadhafi peacefully out. we ll never get them out by
again, talk about syria, talk about yemen and bahrain where protests are planned later in the week. is it bigger than that? or is it just we feel that democracy and change is in the air? you think these, what we re seeing in the middle east can be enormously significant. it s remarkable that the problems of dictatorship. the problems that the dictators are having have spread from tunisia, to egypt, to bahrain, we now see in this morning s newspaper that the syrian regime which is a really awful government, very oppressive at home and has been a major problem for the united states in numerous arenas, is having major problems and one hopes that the people of syria will be able to move that regime aside as the people of egypt moved theirs. secretary, thank you, very very much. all right, we re just getting started here this morning.