he can t get britain to back him, can t get the u.n. to give an authorization or anything from congress. it looks like president obama all alone. so i mean, is he boxed in or what s his exit strategy? unfortunately, i don t think he thought those things through. i haven t sensed any strategy or any roadmap or idea as to what the next steps ought to be. he talks and he says things that box in the united states and drive us down a cul-de-sac. that doesn t mean that the only thing he can do now, it seems to me, is to do something that would make us look still weaker. i mean, this administration has said to the world that we are basically a country in decline. he manages the economy, modeling it after europe, which is a failed model. he has made pronouncements in the world that have proven in relatively short order not to be the case.
intelligence report was not the usual kind. that the president is rolling out to the public that would have given it a more total picture of what s happening inside syria. is that significant? i think it is. i looked at that catherine showed it to me. i hadn t seen it before. it s more a political document assessment than an intelligence assessment. just the way it s written. too much high confidence in this. and there is not enough of the counter avail views that you normally have in these assessments. that doesn t mean that it s not true. i happen to think that bashar assad did authorize the chemical weapons. i haven t questioned that at all. harris: real quickly, what s our exit strategy? well, if we can get the arabs to do it their responsibility and support them we don t have to have an exit strategy. if we have to have a exit strategy that s a very good question. once you start it, you get
precedence, you have the president of the united states who two years ago said assad must go. one year ago as charles krauthammer points out today he drew a red line in the sand and then he erased the red line in the sand and then drew another red line in the sand. the president is not being helped by these leaks that says oh, he just wants to send a message and yesterday another leak coming out, he wants to send a message that s just strong enough that he won t be mocked and ridiculed for not sending us. i mean, if he s going to strike syria, it has to be tactical. he has to limit assad s capabilities in the future as john mccain said yesterday, going after the air force or the defense. their air defense systems. if the president s going to actually do anything, he s going to have to do something fairly significant. if we ve learned anything from the past being pro log it s about the exit strategy not the entrance strategy.
afterwards i assume. yet on the other hand he can t get britain to back him, can t get the u.n. to give an authorization or at least not yet anything from congress. so it really does look, it s president obama all alone. is he box in? or what is his exit strategy? unfortunately, i don t think he s thought those things through. i haven t sensed any strategy or any road map or idea as to what the next steps ought to be. he talks, and he says things that boxed in the united states and drive us down a cul-de-sac. that doesn t mean that the only thing he can do now it seems to me is to do something that would make us look still weaker. this administration has said to the world that we are basically a country in decline. he manages the economy, modeling it after europe, which is a failed model. he has made pronouncements in the world that have proven in
we re talking about? well, as the clock continues to tick and we don t do something, putin, russia, iran, the key supporters of syria, and assad himself will assume that this is not quite a serious and frankly any strike that we do, anything we do will end up as a go rope, frankly. we shouldn t think somehow letting a few missiles fly to let him know that chemical weapons use is unacceptable that somehow that will resolve the problem. the problem here is, what is our plan or exit strategy? if assad goes, what happens? a thousand tons of chemical weapons end up in the hands of a mishmash of opposition groups. arthel: of course they re mulling those possibilities over there within our administration i would imagine but also you just made a good point too, mike, that is, listen, we re saying, making it clear to the international community s well as the people that our goal here is not to overthrow assad. it is simply to go in there