To do the right thing, making the best judgments we could. Maybe they were wrong, history will judge. But where i disagree just to come back to the start of this is question us for our judgments, absolutely, lets have that argument, but talking about menacity, youre looking in the wrong place. Tina brown, create of women in the world. For years and years, we keep hearing about the same old same old. There have been womens meetings forever about pay, about Sexual Harassment, about, you know, protecting womens reproductive rights but now finally people are thinking, wait a minute, this is really getting old. Its not changing. All the massive breakthroughs have happened but look at whats happening at fox news, the Sexual Harassment is rampant. At uber, lets took whats happening at google when you find the women are paid less than the men. There are so many things that you kind of wonder what is it going to take to change . Rose we conclude with Philip Gorski, his book is american covenant a history of civil religion from the puritans to the present. One of the p big messages im really trying to get across in this book is to help secular people understand that religion doesnt poison everything. As the late Christopher Hitchens said any more than secularism purifies anything. I want to help people understand there is darkness and light in both secular as a man and as religion. Rose tony blinken, bret stephens, tina brown and Philip Gorski, when we continue. And by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose we begin this evening with our continuing coverage of the events in syria. The Trump Administration has accused russia of an attempt to confuse the world about who is responsible for last weeks chemical weapons attack. The u. S. Maintains there is no doubt that the Syrian Regime was behind the assault which provoked americas retaliatory airstrikes. The charge of a russian coverup comes as secretary of state Rex Tillerson is on a visit to moscow where his goal is to convince russians to stop backing president Bashar Alassad. The u. S. Airstrikes have revived the debate about president obamas leg is i on syria and the Trump Administrations policy moving forward. At a Pentagon Press conference this afternoon, secretary of defense jim mattis says i. S. I. S. Remains a top priority for the United States. Joining me now from washington tony blinken, the former deputy secretary of state and Deputy National security advisor for president obama. Here in new york, bret stephens, Foreign Affairs columnist for the wall street journal. I am pleads to have both of them on this program. I want to begin with a column thats gotten a lot of attention certainly in terms of people i know who care about these kinds of issues called the price of obamas men dasty where you talk about the the debate to have the wisdom of obama to forgo a similar strike under similar circumstances in 2013. Said mr. Obama will never outrun justifications for their actions in syria and cant outrun their lies. After john kerry engineered the agreement by which syria was supposed to relinquish its stockpile of banned chemical weapons, information began to emerge pretty quickly thereafter that the syrians were cheating on the agreement. It started filtering out in 2024. The wall street journal had a frontpage story on the fact in 2015 and in 2016 jim clapper former director of National Intelligence acknowledged it to a congressional committee. Throughout the entire period, however, leading figures to have the Obama Administration of the Obama Administration including the president and secretary of state and National Security advisor susan rice kept insisting that the Obama Administration, that the deal had gotten 100 of the chemical weapons out, creating an illusion, which by the way the Trump Administration seemed to share, at least in its first few months, that assad had been defanged of his most dangerous weapons. What weve just seen in Northern Syria with the sarin attack on this village is that that was untrue and that he maintains the stockpile, and i have to ask mr. Blinken, how is it that the Obama Administration kept going on saying 100 of the weapons without qualification, when they knew from their own intelligence reporting and in fact publicly available sources that that was not the case, that assad was keating on the deal, that he maintained this stockpile and of course the ability to use it. Rose the second part is the russians should have known about this and there was complicity. Of course the russians were complicit. One of the things thats most disturbing about this attack is you have russians on the same air base, it seems, where these weapons were being stored. But the question about russian mendacity is not even interesting. The russians lie. I dont think any of us would raise an eyebrow about that. What distushes me is why the Obama Administration offered a story about this deal which simply wasnt simply true but which they should have known or did know was not true. I very much admire a lot of what bret has written recently in defense of the truth but here i think hes barking up the wrong tree. Lets rewind the tape for a second. We faced an horrific situation in 2013 with a chemical weapons attack in syria. We prepared to use force. We went to congress to see if we could get the authority to do it. That got bogged down in debate. The russians came in and decided to broker a deal by which the syrians declared all the chemical weapons they had which they had never done before, agreed to give them up and destroy them in a verifiable way. They declared 13 tons of chemicals. A year later the o. C. P. W. , the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons, said they had in fact destroyed their declared weapons, and heres where the discrepancy is we knew all along and said publicly, repeatedly we were concerned there were gaps between what they declared and what they actually had and went repeatedly to the ocpw, to the United Nations, to the russians to try to press the syrians on those gaps to make sure we had gotten everything we could. But if you go back and look at virtually all the statements, we were treferght the declared capability they had and repeatedly raised concerns about the gaps. Imagine we had not done this deal, we could not have struck the chemical weapons. That would have created the chemical cloud that would have poisoned the people we were trying to protect. Instead we were able to get the everything we knew about that was declared out of the country. Every single country in the region was better off and said so. Israel had been giving gas masks to its people before the deal afraid of a strategic chemical attack by syria. The they said what we achieved strategically was far more effective than if we had used force against not the chemical weapons but the airfields and airplanes. If we had not done the deal 13 tons of chemical weapons would have been floating around syria and not only in the assad regime but the Islamic State and nusra and other various groups. Was it a perfect deal . No. Are we manifestly better off because we did it . Yes. The imperfections of the deal are apparent in the deaths of innocent victims in Northern Syria. But, look, the president said we got 100 of the weapons. He didnt say we got 100 of the declared stockpile and, by the way, we have concerns. I dont remember and you probably dont remember the president going to congress and ringing alarm bells that Bashar Alassad was in violation of the agreements that covered him. John kerry said 100 of the weapons. Now, every now and then you would hear second Tier Administration officials like Samantha Power raise alarms and use the word declared which was a very lawyerly way of acknowledging that they knew that there were these discrepancies. But does anyone watching this show, can anyone say we seriously remember that a major theme of the Obama Administrations second term was pointing to the discrepancy between what was declared and what was what we knew about . Now, mr. Blinken might be right, that theres an argument to be had that getting out those 1300 tons of sarin, vx and other gas and other poisons was worth the price. But im and i say this explicitly in the article, theres one argument to be had about the wisdom. I think it was a very unwise deal which sent a signal that american red lines were useless and that also prevented us from carrying out retaliatory strikes once we knew that assad was violating the deal. What im questioning here is the honesty. The simple fact is that the Obama Administration cannot say with a straight face that, except in press releases that nobody noticed, that it was trempting the disprep si between what assad was supposed to have done and actually did. The administration allowed the deal to be violated and the question is why. I suspect and i would love to hear mr. Blinken talk about this, i suspect it is because achieving a deal with syrias patron state iran was so important to the Obama Administration that it did not want to rock this particular boat, thats an allegation thats been aired not simply by me but in the atlantic, other publications. I would love to learn more about the influence that the thinking about the iran deal, the importance of reaching that deal for obama had on his unwillingness to expose the extent to which assad was violating his commitments. First of all, the iran deal was a good deal, it was the right thing to do. But apples and oranges, one had nothing to do with the other. There is no relationship between what we did on syria and our ongoing support for that agreement, even as we tried to close the gaps and find the disprepcies, and doing the iran deal, period. Thats the truth. Look, i come back to this basic proposition continue compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. At the time the choice before us was to use force against the will of congress and apparently against the will of the american people, we were in the midst of that debate, not strike any of the chemical weapons given the danger that would have represented to the people we were trying to protect, and use diplomacy without firing a shot to get far more to have the chemical weapons out than we could have had we used force. That was a good deal and put us in a materially better place. Well, its not because you had an option to destroy the syrian air force. You had an option, even if the chemical weapons were not destroyed, to destroy the means by which assad would be capable of delivering those weapons and later, by the way, after 2013, weapons like barrel bombs, chlorine gases, responsible for a level of destruction that i think is so vast that the u. N. Has stopped counting how many people are dead in syria, and thats also the consequence of the refusal to act in syria. So what youre suggesting is that our only military option would have been some deadly, dangerous chernobyl type event on syrian air bases. What the Trump Administration of all administrations just showed is its quite possible to destroy the means of delivery and therefore neutralize the threat without putting civilians at risk by destroying those weapons. I think its such a shame that, four years ago, 100,000 deaths ago, the Obama Administration failed to act that way. Rose tony. As you know, bret, early on in the war, before they started using their air force, 90 of the victims of the Syrian Regimes aggression were coming from rockets, shells, mortars, et cetera, including those filled with chemical emissions. Had we been able to take the entire air force out of the sky, and we can certainly debate that proposition, they simply would have gone back to that. Then we would have had to stop that. That would have drawn us in further and further. Its a reasonable argument to say we should have gone in whole hog, but that was the judgment we made and that would not have stopped them from using chemical weapons. Rose isnt that the heart of the matter that the president did not want to be drawn into a civil war in syria . I think that does go to the heart of the matter, but the specific issue before us in 2013 was chemical weapons. A norm that had been violated, a norm that was established after world war i, a sacred norm that went beyond syria and has or risk as everything that happened in syria was, this went a step further in violating something that the International Community said simply couldnt happen after world war i. It was important to uphold that, norm, and we did it and did it diplomatically. You failed to do so. The president made a clear military threat which he then failed to honor, and that caused consternation in the region and around the world and frankly created the perception that president obama was a guy who, in the event of the use of chemical weapons, would give an eloquent speech and find some kind of facesaving solution. Rose let me bring us to where we are now. Robert ford, a former ambassador, was a guest on the show last night and here is what he said. My own sense is the war in syria that involves bars bars is basically finished and assad won. So were not going to get into a new iraq kind of war or a new afghanistan kind of war in syria. Rose the civil war is essentially over . Essentially over there. May be fighting for another year or two. The opposition is not going to give up, but theyre not going to win. Assads going to win. Rose assads going to win . First of all, im not sure im going to agree with ambassador ford that if assad remains in power that the fighting eventually stops. In fact, i think, as long as assad remains in power, sunnis will rise up to oppose him. Hes not that strong, even with the help of the russians. What i am convinced of is that, as complicated and anthony, by the way, is right as corchlcated assyria is, there is no solution in syria while he remains president of the country. Heres the challenge if i could how do civil wars end . Weve looked at this intensely. One of three ways. Either one side wins, but, as i agree with bret and i disagree with robert ford, i dont think thats likely to happen anytime soon, whenever one side gets the advantage the outside patrons of the other side come in and prop them up. Second, they fight to exhaustion. That will happen eventually except historically, at least, its taken ten years and were now in year seven of this war and there are multiple parties involved, not just two. And heres where the judgment comes, in and there are legitimate differences in judgment, third, some kind of outside intervention that comintines some element of military force and diplomacy, and i think a legitimate criticism of our administration is there may have been moments when we could have married more leverage to the diplomacy. But no one, not russians, not the iranians, not us, not any of the outside patrons were willing to go in on our own enough to actually win the war for one side or the other. That was not going to happen, its not going to happen. Part of the problem with our thinking about syria is that we keep insisting that syria ought to remain in the end game a unitary state. If we had insisted that yugoslavia emerge from its wars as a unitary state, w probably would be fighting there or people would be fighting there today. It makes no sense for anyone to contemplate a future of syria in which theres one syrian state. Why . Because as long as its just one syria, it will always be a zerosum struggle for power. It will be one side winning and the other side losing. That neednt be the case in syria. There is a perfectly credible case that, in a messy way, you could have an alawite state centered and the coasting cities, the me mediterranean she of syria. Rose assad led alawite state led by Bashar Alassad. Led by any other than Bashar Alassad or the assad family, that ought to be a condition. You should be able to take part of the kurdish areas and create another autonomous zone protected as we protected the kurds in northern iraq, by the way the most successful experiment in nation building in the middle east, all thanks to a no fly zone, all thanks to american limited but decisive American Military intervention. Rose thats a longterm solution but you seem to be agreeing with general mattis who said our first strategy is to eliminate i. S. I. S. I think thats a mistake. I. S. I. S. Is a terrible look, i. S. I. S. Is evil incarnate, right, but i. S. I. S. Is not the kind of strategic threat to the United States or to our allies in the region that assad is or will be if he remains in power and creates an axis between tehran, damascus, beirut with hezbollah and moscow. Rose people continue to say that you cannot have negotiation, tony, unless you have leverage on the ground and where is leverage on the ground coming from . Well, look, i think we actually do have some leverage now in part due to the strike President Trump took and they are prepared to use that. Rose is that the history of strikes, whether the Clinton Administration or where it is, that these oneup strikes create that kind of shift in behavior or shift in oneoff no. Charlie, youre right, oneoff doesnt. You have to have a