i think it s fairly dangerous. leaving 10,000 troops in iraq, would that have made a difference in this circumstance? i actually do. do you really? yes, i do. because without american forces in iraq, two dynamics begin to take place, joe. number one, the different faxeses in iraq with the americans gone allow their worst fears to motivate their actions with regard to the other factions. you don t have the americans as a dampening effect. kind of a guarantor that the worst won t happen. since they don t have that guarantee, they all begin to look after their own interests, and we see what happens there. the second is, how different does syria look if we kept one or two fighter squadrons and maybe one combat brigade in iraq? for one thing, to prevent that iranian supply line by air from tehran into damascus. a lot of americans look at this, 2016, that will be 15, a
weapons and ammunition supplies during thinks eight-month massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, intelligence says he is running out of critcat items, hence the ammunition air bridge, loading planes from tehran international airport and flying with unsuspecting passengers to damascus where planes taxi to a military facility for unloading. it is a last-ditch effort by the iranians to cover their tracks as turkey recently intercepted a number of arms shipments using iranian cargo planes and since banned it from its airspace. there are about seven of these flights a week that head from tehran into damascus. we can tell you, jon, it is not just a couple of crates of ammunition they are offloading. from first-hand accounts passed to us by these intelligence sources we are now learning it is taking an hour and a half to two hours for them to unload these planes of all the weapons coming in there to syria. jon, back to you. jon: iran helping prop up bashar assad s regime?