We have been very clear to the Assad regime
that a red line for us is
we start seeing a whole bunch chemical weapons
moving around, or being utilized.
That would change my calculus.
The Syrian Civil War was never a war
that the president wanted to become involved with.
When Bashar al-Assad actually used chemical weapons,
he realized that it was on him
to stop Assad from doing that again.
And that's when the crisis really began.
Once the attack occurred on the 21st of August,
the president believed at the time that he was
going to go carry out a punitive strike.
The notion that everybody was discussing
was an attack on the army units,
air force units that were doing
the delivery of these weapons,
so that a message would be sent to the Assad regime
that you can't do this.
As previous storms in history have gathered,
when unspeakable crimes
were within our power to stop them,
we have been warned against the temptations
of looking the other way.
Various administration officials are making speeches,
most notably John Kerry making a very kind of
robust speech calling for intervention.
It is directly related to our credibility and whether
countries still believe the United States
when it says something.
Obama is thinking all this week:
I have to do this,
I promised to strike against Assad.
A message needed to be sent to Bashar al-Assad
not to violate the international norm
prohibiting the use of chemical weapons.
The huge national-security apparatus
started moving toward a war footing.
The idea was that the U.S. and Britain
would be doing this strike together.
Russia and China say no to war.
So do I and most people in this country.
Parliament, to everyone's surprise, rejected.
They were having an Iraq hangover like everybody else,
and they told Cameron:
No, they're not going to support a strike.
And Cameron then was out.
I don't know what that phone call was like
between Cameron and Obama,
but it could not have been pleasant.
This was the day that Obama really became
plagued by doubts.
Even as the apparatus,
even as the national-security apparatus
was moving toward a kind of strike posture,
he was thinking to himself:
This is not where I want to be going.
At a certain moment in the afternoon,
he took Denis McDonough, who is his chief of staff,
for an hour-long walk across the South Lawn.
Obama essentially rehearses some of his arguments,
he recounts some of his doubts.
He tells McDonough essentially that
if he launches some missiles at Assad,
and Assad emerges the next week
from the rubble of a bunker,
and declares victory over United States,
victory merely by surviving,
then where is the United States?
Do you then escalate and keep going?
Or do you cede Assad the narrative?
The strike was going to happen the next day,
so it was a pretty climactic moment when he
comes back from the South Lawn into the Oval Office,
gathers the national-security team,
and tells them of his feelings,
and there was a long back-and-forth.
The president felt that his whole administration
had not thought through some of the consequences
of what they were planning to do,
and that's why at a very, very late moment,
he put the brakes on.
I will seek authorization for the use of force
from the American people's representatives
in Congress.
I think it's devastating to the United States,
its credibility.
You do not want to establish
an issue with regards to the
credibility of the United States.
What is left of the president's credibility
is in tatters right now.
The whole story of the red line
is completely improbable.
After he makes his about-face,
and comes under intense criticism for the about-face,
he and John Kerry somehow manage
to negotiate with the Russians,
a deal in which
most of Syria's chemical weapons are removed.
What the president is telling me
over the last couple of months is that
not only was this not a screw up,
as is commonly understood,
but it's actually for him a very proud moment,
because he did something without war
that could not have been achieved with war.
The big debate, and the debate to this day,
is how much damage did that do to
America's credibility in the world?
And this is not a debate
that's going to be settled anytime soon.