they would have been had it had vice president biden at least kept the options open or at least to send them the fighters because vladimir putin has committed war crimes nilly. i mean, you know, there every day, every day and there have been zero consequences. the white house keeps saying, you know, we have responded to everything he s done. yeah. with financial sanctions. but the war clearly is still going on . and the question is where is the red line on this? right, john? where s the red line? is it chemical weapons? is something more ? we don t know where that is now. and president biden has signaled weakness and an unwillingness to raise the price to the russians. the russians have made it very clear by their actions that they re very concerned about casualties and losses, which is why you saw the dispersal of a lot of that convoy wasn t willing to attack positions. it was to minimize casualties further, you see the russian reliance on missiles, artillery and airstrikes, things do
if it s iran, if it s all of them together, we will figure it out. and we will know the answers quite soon. we are looking at that very strongly and very seriously. the president mentioned vladimir putin by name, reinforcing a message delivered by jim matus at the pentagon this morning. he spoke before a prescheduled meeting with the emir of qatar, he also indicated russia for responsibility. the first thing we have to look at is why a chemical weapon is still being used at all when russia had the framework of moving although it chemical weapons. working with our allies and partners, we are going to address this issue. the pentagon has been working all weekend to draw up options for the president. right now the u.s. has no
countries who can figure it out. so fast forward 10 20 years to a world where russia is flying weaponized drones and china and iran and north korea and who knows who else. imagine and it is not hard to imagine that the technology becomes more sophisticated that that s drones become smaller, smarter, deadlier. that is the way technology works. think about that word world. and i think at least we ought to consider before we rush down this route i think we ought to consider whether this technology should be thought of the way we thought of chemical warfare for example after the first world war. and it was just decided that, you know, gee we are two countries, we don t like each other but as much as i might hate you and you hate me we re not going to do wit chemical weapons. there is a line we re not going to cross. right. i wonder if we imagine the possibilities, 20 30 years out
yes, it s is sectarian war and there are allies and other forces behind the curtain like iran and hezbollah. and putin is in there up to his ears. we know all that. my point is we need the commander in chief to explain to us how he weighed those considerations. and i realize that his credibility was on the line because he did say red line chemical weapons, but the truth is little children have been getting shot in the face in syria in front of their parents months ago. and that was not a red line for us. so we drew it where we drew it, but there was a lot of criticism about why was the torture of children not the red line, why was this it chemical weapons. and months went on and al qaeda kept joining the forces and now we don t know who the rebels are. we have reports of cannibalism, of dead bodies and so on, putin saying i m not so hip on your
in 2020 hindsight, at the time congress wasn t behind him. the american people in multiple polls were not behind him. we were war weary, no one wanted to put boots on the ground, no one wanted to use force. even the brits voted down a resolution to join us in taking force against syria. it s a very different time then and now of course everyone is jumping on president obama. well, you re absolutely right about that. he did not have the support from congress. he had some support. i supported his actions to use military to stop the use of chemical weapons. that s something which is the international community needs to respond. but you re absolutely correct, it was not the support in congress, there certainly wasn t the support in europe. and remember, we thought with russia s help we were able to get all t chemical weapons out of syria. we thought that was accomplied. obviously it was not. we were misled by russia and the consequence is that the syrian civilian population today is at