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Those air strikes many president obama knew at the time and said at the time and you saw trump administration officials say last night that military action alone cannot remove the capability of syria to launch kept weapons attacks. the only way you can be absolutely sure they won't be able tdo these attacks is if those weapons are removed from the country. if we had taken strikes back in 2013, there's to guarantee first of all that those weapons would have been totally removed. in fact pretty close to a guarantee that military strikes alone would not have been able to do that. it required dipl...

Against his own people would constitute the crossing of a red line. in the summer of to 2013, assadd just that testing obama's red line. obama responded by essentially trying to punt the issue to congress. he said he didn't think he needed their approval to act, but he was asking for their input, anyway. congress, for its part, didn't seem too enthusiastic about getting involved. then before that could go any further, suddenly the obama administration announced that it had brokered a deal through syria's biggest ally, russia, in a deal called for syria to get rid of its chemical weapons stockp...

He had the weapons, he used them against his own people, there was a call for military strikes back then to try to prevent this from happening in the future. instead there was the diplomatic slight you're talking about but here's where we landed four years later. still had the weapons, still used them on his own people. so what is the lesson that comes out of that? >> i think one lesson, we've been firm believers in this, as president obama articulated, which is the combination of diplomacy and either force or the prospect of force reinforces diplomacy and makes it more effective. that's the r...

Mean, looking back, the last administration you we part of, the obama administration thought it had a deal that would mean what we saw this week wasn't going to happen. that the chemical weapons would be gone, assad would not be able to use them against his own people. is there a lesson here about the limits of diplomacy at all? >> first of all, steve, i want to take a slight issue with the way you characterized this situation in your run-up. you said president obama punted this issue to congress. what president obama did, and secretary kerry led the way on in implementing, was launch a diplom...