Of isis that is now extending to far places in the middle east. We will degrade and ultimately destroy isil. Obama was elected to end wars, not begin them. Narrator tonight, obama at war. Frontlinis made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. And by the corporation for public broadcasting. Major support for frontliis provided by the john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information is available at macfound. Org. Additional support is provided by the park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The ford foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. At fordfoundation. Org. The wyncote foundation. And by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. Corporate funding for frontline is provided by. Whether its discovering an aspirin a day can prevent heart attacks worldwide, or creating cells that regenerate new heart muscle, our goal is developing treatments that save lives. Brigham and womens hospital. Martin smith syria, january 2011. The arab spring was sweeping across the region. Thousands of demonstrators. A huge step towards democracy. Smith a new u. S. Ambassador, robert ford, was just arriving in damascus. Democracy taking place in a lot of these countries. Demanding change, theyre fed up. Smith at the time, it seemed syrias dictator would be next to fall. Protesters in Tahrir Square drove Hosni Mubarak out of power. Mubarak actually left power in cairo the weekend after i got there. And in my first meeting with Bashar Alassad, i asked him point blank, looks like kind of a difficult time for authoritarian regimes. What kinds of steps are you thinking of to get ahead of the problem . And he kind of brushed it aside and said, itll never happen here. Not three weeks after that meeting, the arab spring started in the haria market in damascus. The uprising of the Syrian People was a secular one. One of its slogans was, wahed, wahed, wahed. Smith one, one, one . One, one, one. We are united. This is an uprising of the Syrian People against a dictatorship. Wahed, wahed, wahed smith within a matter of weeks, tens of thousands more syrians joined the protests. Ambassador ford, with washingtons backing, supported them. Right from the beginning, ford was out there trying to give them the encouragement of our senior diplomat on the ground saying, this is quite exciting. We were not backing any particular set of demands that the protesters were putting forward. We were simply supporting their right to demonstrate peacefully. I remember ford bravely traveling to the cities where this Sunni Revolution was taking place, at some danger to himself. The syrian protesters were just very surprised that i came. They surrounded our car. My bodyguard was very afraid. But when the people saw that the American Ambassador was coming, they came up to his car and were throwing flowers, they were throwing olive branches. They were excited. The americans were here, they were showing their solidarity. They were happy that the International Community was paying attention to them. They believed that my presence would deter the government from sending in Security Forces which they said would create havoc and violence. Smith but just a few weeks after ambassador fords visit to hama, where assads father crushed an uprising 29 years earlier, assad attacked. gunfire shouting smith in washington, president obama was watching. The Syrian Regime has chosen the path of murder and the mass arrests of its citizens. The Syrian People have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. President assad now has a choice he can lead that transition or get out of the way. Smith the question was, what was the president going to do next . The Syrian Government should stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests. President obama wants to use his moral power to the extent that he has some by calling for assad to leave, but he doesnt believe its americas responsibility to directly stop him. Smith there was also a feeling inside the administration that perhaps they didnt need to do much anyway. Youd seen what happened in egypt, in tunisia, in libya, and the feeling was that the popular demonstrations would ultimately bring down the regime. Everybody believed that. Everybody believed it. Look, the Israeli Defense minister said that assad was gonna go in a matter of weeks. The head of the Muslim Brotherhood said three months. Everybody, the turks believed it. Everybody thought this little assad minority, very narrow regime, was just gonna crumble as soon as people rose up. shouting chanting smith but assad did not crumble. gunfire the Syrian Regime had clearly decided that it could crush the protests, really using brutal force with impunity. gunfire allahu akbar and then people began to arm, because they didnt know what else to do. Smith assad countered the rebels with helicopter gunships. rapid gunfire longrange artillery. explosion . And eventually, bombers. explosions and the opposition leadership sent a message to the capitals of the west, that this is only going to get worse. The assad regime is not going to stop. explosion screaming smith back at the white house, they discussed their options. They listened to revised cia assessments about the regimes strength. Cia director David Petraeus noted that the regimes shia allies, iran and hezbollah, were rallying to assads side. There seems to be a process by which iran is airlifting aid into damascus. explosions you see the growing involvement of lebanese hezbollah. And you see the revolutionary guards corps, quds force leaders making a very, very important contribution to shoring up the regime forces. Smith as the fighting intensified, political pressure was building. After a year of bloodshed, the crisis in syria has reached a decisive moment. Its estimated that more than 7,500 lives have been lost. Smith senator john mccain was calling for u. S. Airstrikes in syria to create safe havens for syrian rebels. The United States should lead an International Effort to protect key Population Centers in syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes on assads forces. I told the president , i said, bashar assad is slaughtering people. We are watching genocide take place. And it is going to eventually destabilize the entire region. Smith this president looks out at the landscape and doesnt see reliable partners. Why should we be getting involved in this . Well, im not saying there are any real easy options, and im not saying its not complex. But i do not believe that we needed to end up in a situation that we are in today. Smith if Bashar Alassad was to be toppled, who would replace him . I think that would be a very difficult thing to sort out. Smith in the president s view, it would be very difficult to sort out. The u. S. Had just gone into libya months earlier and toppled qaddafi only to see chaos ensue. And mccains suggestion of creating safe havens in syria was a tall order. President obama asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, general martin dempsey, for a briefing. So dempsey gives a presentation, and everyones jaws drop. He basically says that its going to take roughly 70,000 u. S. Personnel, not boots on the ground, but total u. S. Personnel involved in this effort that would, you know, knock down syrian air defenses and be able to provide air cover for the rebels. And some began to suspect that he had inflated the figure because he didnt want to do it. Youre talking about taking down a country that has a very sophisticated, at that time, a very sophisticated, russianprovided, integrated air defense system. And it would have been a sizable undertaking. Smith the president was also briefed on legal issues involved in attacking a sovereign government. What was put forward was that it would violate international law, helping an Opposition Group to a government which was recognized as sovereign by the united nations. Smith the president was forced to think hard about the limits of American Power, and the limited appetite of the American People for more war. Look, the American People do not support action in syria. Smith and the president had other priorities. He had a terrible Economic Disaster that had gone off in america, and he needed to do obamacare. He had to focus on what he was trying to get done here. Smith but there was still pressure on the president to do something. Ambassador ford flew in from damascus and warned that there were other ominous developments. We were beginning to hear by the end of 2011 about groups coming in, especially from iraq, of extremists connected to alqaeda. And what concerned the more moderate opposition people with whom we were in contact were that these groups were very well financed and were gaining an advantage over the moderate elements. Smith and among these groups was what would eventually become isis. Funding them was an array of wealthy sunnis from saudi arabia, qatar, and kuwait. My team at the state department, and i think in the end, secretary clinton, agreed with this. We needed to make sure that the opposition, especially the armed opposition, was not dominated by extremists, but rather by more moderate elements. Smith but the moderates were very disorganized and outmatched. gunfire they were grossly outnumbered. President assad had 300,000 forces when this war started, and the rebels were in the hundreds. explosion and the one advantage that president assad has always had was airpower, something the rebels on the ground couldnt either fight or counter. explosion the problem was to identify at that time the socalled moderates who had the potential militarily to mount an effective resistance against the Syrian Regime. Smith in 2012, frontline sent a reporting team into syrias biggest city, aleppo. The ad hoc nature of the rebel militias was obvious. explosions smith very few had any real military experience. explosions smith president obama had to figure out which if any of these fighters could be trusted. He wanted to make clear that we had to be very deliberate and careful when it comes to Something Like providing military assistance to an Opposition Group. Do we know that those arms arent going to fall into the wrong hands and end up in the custody of a nusra front or an isil, for instance . Smith there was a lot of worry, was there not, about where would the weapons end up . There were very legitimate concerns. And what one tries to do in a situation like that is, again, gather as much information as possible, but recognize that at the end of the day, there are always going to be risks. There are no guarantees. There are no certainties. Smith there were no certainties, but in the summer of 2012, petraeus came up with a proposal. David petraeus, then the cia director, presents his plan that would be a cia covert action to secretly arm the rebels from bases in jordan. Smith petraeuss covert plan gave the administration plausible deniability if legal issues arose concerning the attempted overthrow of a sovereign government, or if the weapons turned up in the wrong hands. Petraeus pressed ahead. And he finds allies in Hillary Rodham clinton and leon panetta, who was his predecessor at cia and now the defense secretary. And they push this idea, and they say, its time for us to get involved. We cant stay on the sidelines. My view was if we really want the rebels to succeed, the only way we could do that, the only way we were gonna get credibility with those that were fighting on the streets and dying, was to be able to provide the weapons they needed in order to confront assad. Smith the administration was deeply divided. Recent history provided contradictory lessons. We were driven in part by our impulse learned in the balkans, about the necessity of u. S. Intervention in the balkans to help end a humanitarian emergency, to help deal with brutal dictators. But also very mindful of the lesson we took from iraq, where the insertion of American Power, the overextension of American Power in iraq brought tremendous hardship onto the people of iraq, on our country. Smith perhaps the strongest advocate for arming the rebels was Samantha Power, head of obamas newly formed atrocities prevention board, and author of the pulitzer prizewinning book a problem from hell america and the age of genocide. And one of americas responsibilities in the world, as she sees it, is to step in and help protect the powerless. To help in situations where people are being victimized by brutal and despotic regimes like that of Bashar Alassad. So for her, syria is the balkans all over again and rwanda all over again, and shes advocating a more robust response. Shes saying, we cant let this go on without stepping in. Smith but inside the president s inner circle of advisors, which included National Security deputy Denis Mcdonough, there was a lot of resistance. And she ran into a brick wall, primarily with Denis Mcdonough, one of the strongest voices in the administration for not, you know, getting directly involved militarily in syria. Smith throughout the summer and fall of 2012, officials in the white house met as often as twice a week, trying to decide who, if anyone, to back. Some people would say were simply not nimble enough to be engaged in these kinds of conflicts that the saudis, the qataris, the kuwaitis, the emirates, turks, were aiding other rebel groups. Thats absolutely true. Smith and we were sitting around, having an ongoing conversation that one aide described to us as groundhog day. Yeah, thats one of the challenges that we have, but its also one of the strengths of our system, is that we are a nation of laws, and that when it comes to providing particularly lethal assistance particularly to nonstate actors, we need to find a way that we can do that within the bounds of our laws. I think sometimes, we think that our ability to impose order and solutions on very complicated situations in the middle east causes us to act without necessarily thinking through the second, third, and fourthorder consequences of action. gunfire they want to help the good syrians who are getting massacred. Who doesnt want to do that . But when it comes down to responsibility for if you arm these militias and you say, im gonna make them win, you cant let them lose if theyre no good. You have to make them win. And then youre gonna get sucked in, and its a big slippery slope. gunfire and a slippery slope was defined as kind of dragging us down into where we might end up having to use u. S. Direct military action. Smith in the fall of 2012, aleppo was still up for grabs. But rebel forces were taking heavy losses. The president made up his mind. The message came back that the president was not convinced that the state department and the cia proposal was a good one, and he would not support it. Smith you felt youd failed to make the case . Yeah, i mean, we were disappointed obviously. Smith you were angry, i imagine . Frustrated would be a better word. Smith frontlimade repeated attempts to interview Samantha Power and other current officials in the white house. Our requests were denied. cheering smith in early 2013, assad appeared in public for the first time in six months to address his supporters. Smith as he said this, his air force was hitting schools, hospitals, and bread lines. Smith after two years of war, more than 60,000 syrians had been killed. shouting . And hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes. Refugee camps in jordan, lebanon and turkey were overflowing. Russia and iran were continuing to send arms to the regime, but very few governments in the west wanted to get involved in arming the rebels. Nobody cares about syria. Its got no gas, no oil, no riches of any kind. Everybody talks big, humanity, saving life, but were all aiding this terrible civil war. Smith with no one to stop him, assad initiated a new phase in the war the deployment of chemical weapons. The assad regime calculated that their use of chemical weapons would strike terror in the hearts of the civilians. gunfire and it would ultimately rob the rebel forces of the civilian populace which it needed to operate. So it was very calculated and it was very shrewd and it was very, very cynical. Smith a few months earlier, the president was holding a routine press conference about campaign finance, medicare, and afghanistan. Then came the last question of the day. Chuck todd. Mr. President , could you update us on your latest thinking on where you think things are in syria, and in particular whether you envision using u. S. Military . Smith in his response, president obama brought up assads prospective use of chemical weapons. We have been very clear to the assad regime that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation. That was not, apparently, a planned thing; he said it in response to a question from a reporter who was asking about the use of chemical weapons. And that there will be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front. Some of the aides, in fact, who heard him say this were surprised. They didnt know where that phrase had come from. Thank you, everybody. Smith but the president s impromptu threat pleased the Syrian Opposition. It was encouraging. The fact that you had the president stand up and make it very clear that any use of chemical weapons would be a red line for the first time indicated that there is a potential opportuni