Page 8 - Ken Pollack News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Brookings institution center for middle east policy. his new book "unthinkable iran: the bomb and american strategy" com comes out on tuesday. ken, ayman was talking about the impact of a strike on syria on iran. you write extensively about the country and to what ayman was saying in his report. >> well, i think that obviously -- look, we've got to recognize there is the potential for some form of retaliation. by the same token, when you look at the main actors who would want to retaliate, iran, syria itself, hezbollah, each of them has a whole lot of other things on their plate. neither of th...

Publicly what it intends on doing, but in recent weeks, some of the comments that have come out from the organization's most senior leader have indicated that the organization is willing to defend the syrian regime by any means necessary. now, that has not been explicitly clarified. by many analysts and experts assessments, it could include the possibility of hezbollah fighting on behalf of the syrian regime, either in syria or attacking syria's enemies like israel in the region. obviously, that has great ramifications and concerns for officials here because they would certainly consider that ...

Americans are willing to strike the syrians, they're nothing, but they'd never do the same thing to us. >> if we failed to strike, wouldn't they definitely draw the lesson that if they're so much more powerful than syria, if we're not even willing to strike syria, surely when we're talking to them our word doesn't mean anything. >> possibly, but they could also interpret is the exact opposite way. they could say, the americans don't care about syria, it's not really that important. us, they care about. we're important. we matter in this world. and the israelis care more about us. again, there ...

Triggering nerves across the region in cooperation with the pentagon. joining me are bloomberg view columnists and ken pollack, senior fellow at the brookings institution, former white house official and the middle east policy and the author of "unthinkable iran, the bomb." it's september. your book is coming out, ken. >> it is. >> we look forward to reading that. >> i need a longer bio. >> your tweets are enough and funny. >> thank you. >> so here we have israel has been on the sidelines for the last couple of days. now it's very clear that israel views this in its interest to go after syria....

>> ken, we've talked about how the gulf state leaders, how the saudis and others view what's been happening in washington. how does the ayatollah view it? just at the point where we were beginning to talk about bilateral negotiations with iran. >> i think this is a critical issue and i think we have to start by saying, we don't have a clue. we don't know what's going on in his head. one of the things we do know about the iranians, they think they are far more important and far more power full than the syrians. they think we think they're far more important and powerful than the syrians. they t...