personnel carriers in syria, so kind of ratifying something that had already happened but said, let s work together to fight isis, but putin never had any intention of fighting isis. he wanted to fight the rebels rs who in the western part of the country are approaching and in fact have made some gains in assad s strongholds. so that was what was threatening the 20-25% of the country that assad, the client of putin, actually controls. now, you re exactly right, the key question is, if russia is with impunitiy go going to strike our allies, he would like to see obama would like to see running the country, what is obama going to do about it? we have a lot i was just looking at the picture, very nice shot of the state dining room but no president. putin is striking their very people we would like to see in a post assad syria, and we re allowing them to do so. when are we going to stop that?
begins. here s the point. the point is simple. if we go in and do everything exactly as we want everything to do, and everything comes out the way we want it to come out, what just happened? in other words, we don t want assad as the leader. the president said they that. okay, poof, assad is not the leader weapon don t want isis to take over. okay, let s say there s no isis. we don t want the russians to take over territory. let s say the russians don t take over syria. who takes over syria? and what do those people do? and where do they come from? and how do they fight all the terror groups operate fog the region. what is our goal? do we have a goal here? we have military in place. we have spotters. we have people we support in a civil war that is ongoing for four years, during which 250,000 people are said to have died. we are fighting. we have taken sides, but we don t have a goal. no one has expressed a goal.
look chat area the russians have been dropping their bombs. you can see they hit some areas which fall under the control of the islamic state group and the al qaeda affiliated is nusrafrot but some are the rebels fighting against the government of bashar al-assad that murdered hundreds of thousands his own people. let s bring in chris wallace who is with us from washington. i am still not of the understanding, if everything you want to happen happens, what is left? who runs syria and how does it work. you know? well, in an ideal world, the president would say, he would like the moderate syrian rebels there were a lot more of them back in 2011 when he civil war started then there are now you want them to be running the country. assad would be out and there would be in effect a coalition,
about the alternative, and is it possible that russia is offering i don t know something that might be of some sort of assistance? keep aindiana there to keep everything keep the chaos from exploding and at least you have at bit of calm in one region on crisis. well, except i mean, that s one way of putting it. on the other hand do we think the situation in syria is good at this point? i mean you have had a quarter of a million people killed, you have had four million people who have fled the country. now you have hundreds of thousands of. the overrunning europe, as refugees, and you have had the growth of isis. so i m not sure that cementing assad with his 25% of the country is and trying to preserve or increase the status quo is as much of a solution. okay. if the solution is a moderate rebel, my understanding is we trained five of them and then they gave away half their weapons to the other side.
right. nice to see you. we re waiting to hear from the president. the schedule is that he will take questions at 3:30. and i say the schedule is because that and a buck-85 will get you starbucks, i know that because i stand here and wait for the president every day. they tell us 3:30 eastern daylight time so you can just kind of guess for yourself. but everybody sitting there just in case, and you can bet the press will be asking about how he plans to deal with rut vladimir putin inserting himself into the civil war in syria, and maybe they ll ask him, mr. president, if everything goings exactly how you want it to go, 100%, what would that mean syria looks like afterward inside who would be in charge? and what would it look like? bet he has an answer? i bet you he does not.