He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community
in the next week.
Turn it over.
All of it without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that.
But he isn't about to do it, and it can't be done obviously.
But with respect to the credibility issue.
Look, I just answered that.
I just gave you real evidence.
Evidence that as a former prosecutor for the United States, I could tell you you can take
into a courtroom and get admitted.
I believe this man...
I personally tried people who've gone away for long prison sentences or life for less
evidence than we have of this.
So I'm confident about the state of the evidence.
You can go to whitehouse.gov, read the unclassified report and make your own judgements.
What does he offer?
Words that are contradicted by facts.
And he doesn't have a very strong record with respect to this question of credibility because
I personally visited him once at the instruction of the White House to confront him on his
transfer of scud missiles to Hezbollah, which we knew had taken place and had all kinds
of facts and he sat there and simply denied it to my face.
Notwithstanding the evidence I presented and what we showed him.
So this is a man who has just killed through his regime over 1,000 of his own citizens...
over 100,000 or about 100,000 have been murdered over the course of the last months.
He sends scud missiles into schools.
He sends airplanes to napalm children.
Everybody has seen that.
This is a man without credibility, and so I will stand happily anywhere in the world
with the evidence we have against his words and deception and his acts.
I would never claim personally to quote 'know better'.
There's a certain arrogance in that that I learned long ago in American elected life
is not... doesn't serve you very well.
But I would say that a lot of folks have a visceral reaction to public people presenting
evidence post-Iraq, where they have serious doubts without sort of seeing all of the evidence
that not everybody has or does.
And also, there's just an instant reaction by a lot of people to say 'woah, here we go
again.
This is going to be Iraq.
This is going to be Afghanistan' and I understand that.
I am very sympathetic to that feeling.
If I weren't in the administration, I didn't have access to what I have, I'm sure I'd have
the exact same reaction.
I'd be very questioning of public people.
That's why I'm standing up here today.
That's why I went to the European community.
That's why I will be briefing Congress together with other members of the administration.
That's why the president will talk to the American people.
Because our responsibility is to share what we know and to lead and to try to bring people
to the point where they can agree with us, hopefully.
Now, I believe that the aftermath of the Iraq experience and Afghanistan leave a lot of
people saying we don't want to see our young people coming back in a body bag and so forth.
But that's not what we're talking about.
And what we have to do is make it clear to people that we're not talking about war.
We're not going to war.
We will not have people at risk in that way.
We will be able to hold Bashar al-Assad accountable without engaging in troops on the ground or
any other long type of effort in a very limited, very targeted, very short-term effort that
degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for
Syria's Civil War.
That is exactly what we're talking about doing.
Unbelievably small limited type of effort.
Now, that has been engaged in previously on many different occasions.
President Reagan had a several hour effort to send a message to Gaddaffi in the wake
of Pan Am 103 and other terrorist activities.
Other times people have engaged in making it clear that you have to draw a line, and
that there are consequences for actions when people step over those lines.
If you don't draw those lines, and the civilised world is not prepared to enforce those lines...
You are giving complete license to people to do whatever they want and to feel they
can do so with impunity.
If you want to send Iran and Hezbollah and Assad a congratulatory message, you guys can
do what you want.
You'd say don't do anything.
We believe that's dangerous, and we will face this down the road in some more significant
way if we're not prepared to take some kind of stand now.
So that's our argument.
It's not that I know better or someone knows better.
It's an argument that we believe is based on fact, on evidence, on history and we ask
people to take a close look at it and make their own judgements.