i talked in this place in two thousand and two around the issue of going into iraq and it seems sort of eerie to me in a way to be talking here tonight about a similar kind of issue we hear that there is a proposal that we go in to have a limited strike in syria to show the world that we as americans are an accepting of the idea of the use of chemical weapons and that the world must know that that's not a civil way to relate to one another in war or anything else and yet the consequences of a limited strike i think  and the wider war that may come from that are troubling a lot of us murphy's law of unintended consequences is well known and often when things start off in a certain direction they wind up in another you may remember iraq we were going to be in and out in sixty days and lo and behold ten years later we were still  and i think that for someone like me who represents seven hundred thousand people like you it is it is a heavy responsibility to try and decide what one ought to do and for that reason i wanted to have this meeting and i appreciate all of your coming the president made his proposal several weeks ago after the events that occurred in damascus suburbs and was prepared really i believe to go by himself he thought that he is the president could make the decision and would move forward but some of us immediately raised the issue as we had done before with george bush you have to get authorization from the congress to make this kind of step forward and after three days of thinking about that the president did decide that he would wait until he hid approach the congress and let the congress take a vote on this issue now winston churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government until you consider the alternatives it's messy it's loud it's noisy it's a lot of things but it is developing a consensus among the people about what we as a people should do ten to seven in committee to authorize the president's moving forward the original proposal made from the white house was a very war i had broad sweeping one somewhat like what we were asked early to vote on in iraq i remember very well when we came to that vote there were fifteen or so of us standing in the back of the hall or only one person voted no barber leave voted no but there were another fifteen of us or so standing around saying how my going to explain when i go home that i voted no i mean here they've been attacked in new york should we do something and even though this seems like a very broad authorization for the president we we were back and forth about it and that is where we are again we know that there's something that we do not accept a heinous act in a mask but the question is what should you do about that now my belief is that what will happen when we go back i'm leaving tomorrow morning eight o'clock be back in washington d c this week the senate will be dealing with this issue they will be debating what has come out of committee on the floor of the  senate there's possibilities for filibusters there's possibilities for multiple amendments by various people who want it to go further because there are certainly some people who think that the resolution that passed in the senate is too narrow and there are holidays beginning on sundown on thursday and so it'll be a short week so they won't get done this week then will move to the next week the senate will either take its vote this week or next week or early and then the house blocking on his name at the moment that the chief of staff mcdonough he called for beatty with the progressives and we talked to him on the phone there about thirty of us talked to him on the phone and said you know we had a lot of feelings about listen we don't want this and this is i suggested to him that the president ought to go to the united nations on the twenty third and the twenty third of september the united nations all the heads of state in the world congregate in new york city for the opening of the general assembly and i said he should go and confident it he should make its presentation to the world and we shall see how the world reacts to this because if you go on your own in new laterally it looks it hasn't it has no no support from underneath but if you have support from the world or you have support from the congress you then have a basis on which to move forward and it puts the president a much stronger position and i think that they are now considering this the saudis have even suggested that this be brought to the general assembly the argument about using diplomacy because right now this issue's framed as we will either do an airstrike or nothing people say well we can't do nothing well is there anything else besides an airstrike yes it's called diplomacy now  the argument the argument the ministration makes in that and i've talked to samantha powers and i've talked a lot of people in ministration about this thing they say well the soviet the russians have killed everything in the united nations we can't get anything done there because ages stop everything no no no veto veto veto and the general assembly does not have the power to authorize action it only has the power to make a recommendation to the security council that such and such a thing be done so moving from the morass of the security council and moving to the floor of the general assembly is really to get around the obstructionism of the soviets and it's my view that this is an issue that should be argued on the highest level i think that we as a as a world have got things that trouble us all and they must be resolved and we we say we believe in a democracy we say that but the question is whether we really want the people to decide what ought to happen and that's that's really what's at issue here is are the people going to have a say in what happens or is it just going to be a few people at the very top who make make the decisions as we move forward and i personally i'm uncomfortable with that i believe in a democracy i believe that even though i have to listen to a lot of people and i have to listen to some i don't agree with or some i don't think are very smart or whatever or whatever i think i have to listen to them because as a representative of them i have to know what who the people are and what they're thinking about it and that's really the reason for having this meeting tonight and i i would just say b brief just one line and i suppose i could say it later but i can say it now i'm leaning against voting for it very strongly reading the press the press immediately ass well is there any circumstance under which you would change your mind well i'm a physician and i know that you never know everything about a patient you never know everything about a condition and you keep gathering information because sometimes you're wrong sometimes you made a mistake sometimes you didn't pay attention you didn't see something i believe you have to keep an open mind until the time comes when we have to have a vote we will have that vote probably i would think in the last week in september and i'm really here tonight to let people tell me what they think about the options what they think about a limited strike options whether they think it's in the national interest there are all kinds of issues that have been raised and people said well we're doing it for this reason or we're doing it for that reason or we're doing in our national interest our work we're doing it because we have to make a statement or we have a moral high ground or there's all kinds and i would i'm really here to open the way i can i think there's a mike someplace around here and stand up jason jason got a mike walker you can start walking down the aisle and of people would like to make statements let me just say one thing about this i hope to each we in the house try to limit one another to three minutes ok i know you may have in mind to make ninety seconds  well we're going to use ok we would like you if you if you want to ask a question that's one thing or if you just want to make a statement either way but please try and remember that they're all bunch of sweating people in here who might also want to talk so when you get the microphone or your hand hold it for ninety seconds at pass it on ok ready to go pick anybody start we'll come to the back ok and if there's some of you in the balcony who would like to ask questions you may come down and we'll try and deal with you in the aisle here yet those are there we go into a lock and then we make a mess in iraq and then we go into libya and then we make a mess in the libya now we want to go into syria and make it so what exactly are we trying to achieve in the middle east that's number one number two is how do we know that ok the question the gentleman asked what is a very common one how do we know what actually happened and i must confess that i am receiving information in the same way you are from the press from various e mails from you tube from every imaginable source and my staff is and we're getting phone calls and we're getting e mails and so forth we don't know some of the answers to that and one of the reasons why i wanted to slow this process down was what i saw happen in two thousand and two when we had inspectors in iraq examining whether there were weapons of mass destruction there and the administration was so eager to go to war they wanted to go before the bri poor ever came in and i there is now a group on the ground making  studies about what has happened and the best information that can be had and their report will come out in the next week or so i think wording is not a bad thing one of the interesting things and one of the things that made me the president when he decided to move to have the congress vote quoted general dempsey as saying this is not a time sensitive issue it does not have to be done tomorrow or on tuesday or on thursday it can it can take some time for us to actually figure out what we're doing and what we think we're going to have as a result my question always has been in this is not what will it look like on the day we have an airstrike as you'll see smoke and things flying around and whatever the question is what will you have in five days or ten days and where will we be at that point and that's really why i want to go slowly if we're going to do it for it's going to happen then we ought to all understand because we send our troops out to do that we take responsibility for what they do and it's the high it's the highest decision that i have to make i can i can make decisions about taxes and about health care and about a lot of stuff very easily by comparison to sending people to war and creating collateral damage and all of what ha policy i think i understand your question and i guess the problem with that question is that there are a whole lot of actors in that play that we have not listened to or talked to and nobody's laid it all out and what we're presented with is one narrow item at a time and that's we often wind up with a with this kind of question being put before the congress the  broader issue of what we want in terms of peace so what we want in terms of stability or what we want in terms of democracy is much more muddled i mean if you look at our behavior what's going on in afghanistan and iraq you have to ask yourself what was the purpose of that and i don't think that's clear and we could have a whole evening's discussion about that issue we're talking tonight about whether or not we go into syria with bombs and whatever yes hi jim i'm i'm hearing a lot of political calculation in response to humanitarian issue and so that's disappointing that there's this calculation or that calculation meanwhile these people are dying women and children and everybody and this is a democracy but we aren't all sitting in those intelligence briefings and maybe you are our representatives are and so you're kind of the experts in that regard so you may be called on to make an unpopular decision because you have information that we don't have been finally i'll just say that i'm leaning towards pretty strongly favoring a strike but i'm not one hundred percent but i'm really disappointed also in the certainty that so many people have they're absolutely opposed to a strike are absolutely for it this is a very complicated situation so i think we all would do better to just yet you know think more about it not be so certain because i think it's very important that we listen to one another and understand there are serious concern people who disagree with us i i have to do that all the time as i said earlier and i think all of that should do  it the answer to your question is that or my response to your question because there really is no answer but the response is you're right it is a very complicated issue one cannot lie those youtube videos the senator feinstein released of youngsters dying from from inhaling gas you can't look at those and not as a child psychiatrist you can't look at it or a father and not be terribly upset by them the question still remains what do you do about that and that's the question that i think that were really struggling with i i we operate emotionally and i certainly operate emotionally but i think that you have to stop and think and say how can i make it better and that's really would the with the strikes make it better is really my question thank you for having us and thanks the church for having us as well as a syrian american all the way i look at it syria is sick and bashar assad has cancer he needs to be stopped at all cost for those who are questioning the use of chemical weapons by assad regime someone who killed hundred twenty five thousand of you scud missiles these are ballistic missiles against his own people someone who is using napalm most prosperous shells and jet fighters against arms of i guess innocent civilians someone who kill innocent civilians for eight months if he is incapable of delivering such chemical weapons hold on a second there is the only capability of delivering such missiles and syria has one of the largest depots of chemical weapons in the world you may ask why the u s or to intervene the u s should not list syria become a failed state like afghanistan and somalia and we all know in order they're going into universities and schools and chill out refugees and you know refugee camps and they're hiding there they're hiding in their tracks and civilian areas so just the threat of the strike have helped save a lot of people's life if you guess take out ten jet fighters that will save a lot of children thank you go back in the crowd we can't have everybody in a frog is now going to come and stand in the aisle and stand in line maybe that might work better i don't know if that makes sense ok i think that there is no that i was tentative if we really care to children and the women and the people why don't we use all this money and all these energy to take care of the refugees and jason why don't you bring them forward it's easier for me to hear exactly what people are saying in answer to or in response to the ladies i agree absolutely agree i think this country can do minute tarion things that would make very good sense in terms of helping jordan which is you dealing with a million refugees and the turks are dealing with refugees and i think that there are things that we ought to be doing rather than spending our money and weapons yes actually no if it is there one in a balcony ok yeah great channel i want to give you a group good one for you to check out so here's my concern of american history major and i'm actually learning a lot about american history a lot more out of school then when i was in school actually thanks to you too now one of the things that i've been learning through this youtube thing here is the involvement of these banks now to kind of address the earlier question there but what's the u s foreign policy and i really do think it actually is connected to syria and what we're talking about tonight what is it what exactly is the involvement i mean coming from somebody who stays a lot of time on the hill there of these international banks and how does that really play out in the end in foreign policy here in the middle east and are we really a proxy for something that we don't really know about like you said earlier to kind of diagnose the situation there thank you so much what are the one of the things that you raise is the speech made by david eisenhower as he left office in which he talked about the military industrial complex and the problems that will will perhaps create for us we have been almost continuously at war since korea if you look back at our history and the military industrial complex is very tough to deal with and when an issue like this comes along in fact that i don't think people would be safe to say they didn't want to go into iraq because they couldn't figure out how they could win that one but they did they are now poised again to be drawn into this and the people who make money from this are the military industrial complex the merchants of death the people who make bombs and weapons of all sorts and there is that problem in all of what we have as a foreign policy it is it is sort of nobody talks about that but in fact it's part of what some of us look at this situation and say we're just step into it again and we don't know what the next one will be i put this map up here just because i wanted to remind people how big a rock is and who their neighbors are and there's iran next to them and jordan south their little country and is are in there in lebanon is in there and the turks are up there and you are stepping into a situation where you do not know what next friday will troubles me most is that map that's why i put that map up i put that map up to ten years ago in syria my staff found it in a file and i said let's bring in the law again and put it up again because it says what is at least a part of what we are struggling with so next question just a  producing stockpiling in the use of chemical weapons and or destruction we and i agree with you about going to the united nations to lobby them to get up and do something about the chemical weapons tra a horrible by the assad regime the rebels aren't as saints there may not be by the media if they had chemical weapons themselves and they have the capability to use them they will use them in a heartbeat and this war has morphed into a   the issue though is that we're not debating whether or not chemical weapons actually exist they do exist and if we look at iraq and we wonder why we didn't need to go into iraq in two thousand and three it's because iraq no longer had its chemical sentence structure the reason they didn't have that infrastructure is because in the mid ninety's bill clinton used air strikes to take out the iraqi chemical weapons and the structure could you explain why this would be different than the usage of air strikes in the mid ninet by clinton to take out the chemical weapons in iraq but i will have to admit that i have to go and look and see if historically you're correct that bill clinton did i know that we armed we gave weapons or gave the precursors for weapons to saddam hussein to use against the iranians and i and i i'm not sure how that how that ended again the interesting thing about the last man's com your coming is it you always keep finding out that somebody did something before the led to this which led to that which led to this which led to that and the question is should you do another one or should just stop and say no we're not going to we're not going to get into that one of one of the things i find most difficult here is that everybody talks about what a terrible man assad is yes ok let's take them to the international criminal court and try him there we haven't signed  the united states did not sign the bill clinton signed us into the international criminal court and george bush took us out and so it my view is that we have to sometimes you have to look at yourself and say well know what or what are we actually doing here you remember pogos said we have found the enemy and they is us sometimes looking at ourselves and what we're doing makes us a better image for the rest of the world because we're actually walking the talk that we want others to follow it's a very difficult problem clinton authorized us to go into somalia and to take out a warlord and the operation failed and it killed a lot of excuse me george bush it killed a lot of people and that sucked and we became isolationist and we became very scared of going into another country and we came very scared of trying to effect change and the crisis after that was rwanda and i think actually rwanda is a much closer analogy to what we're facing now we're facing a regime that wants to kill its own people that has been very very successful at killing its own people and our choices are not so much diplomacy or action or nothing our diplomacy choices are really action or nothing assad has no region no reason to negotiate he's winning we've shown that we're not going to do anything we've shown that we're not willing to use military force when we have tried to use international sanction international condemnation it has failed we've seen it fail in iran we've seen it fail in north korea diplomacy is a great idea but it just doesn't work in a modern world where you have serious supported by russian regimes it's the choices are essentially we can go to the u n and we can ask them for authorization and they may give it or they may not but either way russia is not going to  are not going to get security council authorization so we can choose that as a reason to stand back and say well now we can't go in you know what people are going to get slaughtered and that's ok because we don't have u n authorization or we can say you know what we've learned from history we learned that when a citizen population is getting slaughtered and we don't go in we were get it years later that it's often not a huge sacrifice in rwanda we didn't need that much to shut down a lot of the killing we can choose not to go in but we do have to bear the moral consequences of allowing women and children to die because we don't want to one in the year i take your point but let me say this about that somalia is a good example of not knowing what kind of a situation you're getting into we had the idea that we were going to move in and take out whatever his name was and we would sweep it install a government in somalia we didn't know what we were getting into and we got caught and got a blackhawk down was the result of it now that is the problem in every situation that you go into and why you should go in carefully and think about it right now there is a real question as to who the opposition is the opposition is not all good guys and there are some bad guys in it or if you don't think al qaeda is a bad guy i guess you could say they're good guys too but you've got s good guy opposition and bad guy opposition and the idea that you want to turn the country over to the good guy opposition you don't know whether this side is stronger than that side and so you are stepping into a situation where you have enormous questions about who we would be actually supporting we can we can assad so that they can win or they can win the question is is that good w friday it look like when these people are now running the country if these guys are running it that's wonderful we love these good guys whoever they are and that's that's the decision we have to make if we're going to if we're going to just say well i don't care i just want rid of assad that will make it better not necessarily not necessarily that's  good evening congressman mcdermott as one who adamantly opposed the debacle in the desert of iraq i strongly support president obama's decision and this most closely resembles although hardly a carbon copy clone not somalia but more kosovo and the recent action in libya because we joined an international community and used our air power by stopping the genocidal slaughter of milosevic and by stopping the slaughter of his own people we save not only dozens not hundreds not thousands but literally tens of thousands of lives of innocent men women and children and i thought you supported our action in both those cases the number of fatalities suffered by americans zero the number of ground troops entered zero now i believe president obama when he says he's not going to enter a single ground troop and the likely although no one has a crystal ball we will also likely suffer no fatalities no i don't expect in those two cases that a will be gone quickly and i don't expect the civil war to stop but i think it's reasonable to assume that assad will be less likely to unleash chemical weapons on innocent men women and children not more likely if we take this action so we won't have to see those flickering images of men women and children gasping for breath and write and writing and a guinea in a most horrific death and even though we disagree on this one i just want to say yes i hear your point and i i understand i mean the problem here in analogies is always is this like that or is it sort of like that are partially like that and i somebody called me and said hey wait a minute this is not like going into iraq iraq had nothing this war and we know what they've done so we've got a much stronger case to go in and i that's all part of what's going through my head in trying to figure out how we as a congress decide what we should be doing and representing this country absolutely correct in saying that the first step should be to go to the united nations general assembly we have to get to pinion of the world with us and a free and open debate and we have to do that in order to give to the united nations now people here are hearing the word airstrike it's more than an airstrike it's an air war that cup that administration spokesman on television have said that they intend to destroy the command and control the rich air defenses the planes on the ground the airfields the arsenals the depots and then they're going to find out that in world war one poison gas was delivered by artillery canisters and so they're going to have to go after the artillery and tanks as well it is really all war on the syrian government and i think the casualties to be grossly disproportionate to those who have already been lost now in the long term i would take another analogy we got involved in one thousand nine hundred fifty two when iran when most addict was trying to manipulate to power and he was trying to create a dictatorship and we helped him overthrow and put in the shop one of their people welcomed it but in a few years the shah became a ruthless dictator and the next generation hated us for and to thank you you know i also just thank you for being here tonight thank everybody i think everybody in the audience is being you know largely the he's civil to a lot of different opinions so thank thanks to the audience as well  i also just want to speak out in favor of whether or not it's airstrikes or something else taking action i do not think it's appropriate or the right decision for america to stand by while five thousand people die every month but we create endlessly more refugee crises i do also agree with the people who have spoken about the analogies to kosovo and knowing that those limited strikes helped a forcible oaths of each to the negotiating table and helped also lead to prosecutions at the criminal court so two questions for you really quickly as you seem to be leaning towards the iraqi analogy so i'm wondering why you have maybe ruled out or maybe you haven't the kosovo analogy and then also knowing that you know i also agree that we should seek international cooperation on whatever we do how can the congress and whatever they authorize give the president the strongest possible position to go to the u with having a little bit of trouble hearing exactly what your question but as i understood it you're saying why not go in as we did in kosovo and  yes i hear you i i got the question the but the the issue is in in my mind the situation that faces us in this map behind us where you have  one place and you have the ring is over here and you have all this stuff and it is not clear that going in and taking out the assad government will make it a better situation that's  simply not clear it is not black and white so at that point you have to make a decision about how much more may him you want to begin creating in the area i could give another analogy which i know very well when i was in the state department i lived in congo and seven thousand people a month die and have died for the last ten years all seven million people have died in central africa and we haven't done a thing so you when you come to the question the first question was asked what is our foreign policy it becomes very murky we let we did not go into rwanda as was suggested because we were kind of burned in somalia and and we have continued to let that situation fester in ways that are awful but so then we come to this one and we say this one we're going to step on this one we're going to respond to well i i would like to have a discussion about on what basis is this one what's the goal what are we going to have at the end of the line what will we say we've accomplished and that's that's where i come out is what what are we doing i put a little provision in the bill  regulation for banks on conflict minerals trying to stop conflict minerals from central africa winding up in your cell phone and my cell phone and as a way of cutting off the money and there there are these issues are extraordinarily complicated when you start in two of them and i wish there was a simple answer for this one there isn't yes representative mcdermott i'm here because you already know and you need it emphasized to you that of the zero point seven million you represent i am far from the only one to figure that the only goal rationally pursued by let us not mince words making war on syria is showing that we are a capable aggressor state please respond well you know you raise a very complicated question what would it is our national image what do we see we say we're a democracy but then we like to flex our muscles and show the world that we control or we can control or we can stop or we can start so we have a somewhat conflicted view of who we are and we often i think err on the side we got into i mean i am here because of vietnam i was in that war not over there i was here dealing with casualties coming back we got into that war because the french got blasted d n b n food and america said well you know the french they can and will anything will fix it and so we got in and lo and behold there we were and we now have a wall in washington with fifty six thousand people's names on it as as a testament to our belief that our power can always solve everything and i don't believe that that's why i believe in the diplomacy for those of you who like to read books there's a book called endless enemies written by a guy named jonathan quittner who work for n p r and he talks about how america picks its leaders around the world and then back some forever until they're not worthless and then we throw put another one in i was given that book by people when i was going off at the state department they said you should read it because the first seven chapters are about mobutu and what he did in the congo and how we backed him gave him billions of dollars just so we could use the congo for whatever purposes we wanted to use it and there is a very serious question a deeper the deepest question here is our foreign policy but unfortunately right now it is a question of shall we buy they are and nets that's why it is it is a very tough thing to sort out which factors one should of when you're making a decision it's called endless enemies it congressman as my congressman i would ask could you do more than just lean against military intervention into syria i would i would ask i would ask that you use congress's power of the purse to open up that black budget black ops budget and find out what kind of money we've been sending into by way of our cia by way of saudi arabia and all our others to orchestrate this problem and for who's at whose say i have a hunch like some of the previous speakers it's about money people with big money it's about it's about us again being a useful idiot for every scoundrel in the world my syrian brothers and sisters back here compassionate individual passionately so and i feel for their people what i don't think is i don't think while we're taking away food stamps from poor children are enriching the richest one percent of this country which is ultimately at the goal of the military industrial complex you mentioned i don't think these things allow us to go in there first of all second of all i remember a guy a couple thousand years ago that said let you be without sin throw the first stone so let's you know let's make sure that we're clean before we go cleaning up somebody else thinking do i have a lot i want her syrian people who have escaped syria then we can for those in syria and i think we can do it without endangering the united states interests thank you how representative mcdermott and it is on this martin you asked us a question how do we solve the syrian problem i do not want to see the assad regime remain in power however i'm here to tell you that military strikes are not a solution to the syrian problem first of all the idea of a limited strike such a strike is not sufficient to contain chemical weapons on the ground for the us to attempt to influence the syrian situation through military force would require a full scale invasion and if we do i think that is dangerous for syria it is dangerous for the us that is dangerous to the region that is not good for the syrian people i made while there are secular fighting forces on the ground within the free syrian army by and large they have not been military is no literally effected there are not fighting forces but the u s can effectively aid which will solve the problem in syria additionally this represents a dangerous ramping up between russian and american tensions the positioning of the u s and russian fleets in the mediterranean recently is frankly frightening i want to encourage you to stay strong in your decision to vote no on the war in syria although i have a short statement i'd like to read much discussion over whether we should intervene in syria is based around this polarization of militarized loyalists of assad versus violent rebels with links to al qaeda i want to make sure that everyone is aware that there is much more to the rebellion than this there is a huge network of nonviolent resistance groups in syria actively working for peace and self determination the syrian nonviolence movement made an interactive map that can be viewed online outlining labor unions are coalitions youth and student groups town councils public education campaigns etc that are working to end the killing and allow the syrian people to reform the government as best serves them aside from that obama's push for punitive military strikes disturbs me military strikes too often result in the death and displacement of civilians as we've seen in iraq and afghanistan furthermore if the goal is to punish or oust assad this likely won't in itself resolve the syrian people struggle for true democracy remember egypt where mubarak was replaced with morsi and we know that turned out simply ousting mubarak without altering his regimes institutions did not result in true democracy fear the same thing could happen in syria i don't feel the u s has tried enough diplomatic solutions to the crisis my proposal as an alternative to military strikes is to provide aid to the syrian refugees pressure russia to allow the syrian people to determine their own future and push for assad to be tried by the international criminal court thank you shall make a good member of congress she rotors speech down to keep it your head my name is phil well i live locally and i'd also like to say that i'm very proud to have you as my representative and have been for many years i'd like to think that i am an ethical person and feel for the suffering of others also as a father of a young child i shudder whenever i see pictures of children needlessly killed without any any reason on the other hand i am a believer in foreign politics in something called real politic i think there are a lot of bad actors in the world and i think that the us to get where it wants and what it wants in the world what i want in the world long term has to think in its interests precisely for that reason i am very against this strike in syria as i was against the involvement in iraq and as i was against the involvement in afghanistan i formed that opinion but then i read an article by a man you may know named ryan crocker and people who are interested can find this on the web it global syria and ryan crocker is a retired embassador to six count em six of the countries on that map pakistan lebanon kuwait iraq syria and most recently he came out of in retirement to be in bas to afghanistan and what ryan crocker does in this short article is he does compare the situation to bosnia and he compares it to other situations he further points out that this conflict between the assad government and the people who are there has been going on since the eighty's this is precisely the conflict that caused one hundred forty marines to lose their lives in a bombing in one thousand nine hundred eighty three and i commend to people that article and i believe that the people closest to the situation have the best insight about what to be done and when a band of that tenure and without experiences and ambassador says this is crazy to do i pay a lot of are entirely clean that our motives are totally pure that this has nothing to do with iran let's assume that we can have a military strike that will only kill guilty people let's assum that this would all work that assad would be removed that everything would be sunshine well that's the thing we can't make that assumption because violence is a terrible teacher if you want to get a message across to the whole wide world about chemical weapons violence is a terrible teacher history shows us history shows us that the only way that these cycles of violence are broken is with compassion somebody mentioned rwanda somebody remeasured rwanda the reason we haven't seen rwanda in the news since is because they became aware of that and they put forward in a real effort at reconciliation so there really aren't any good options today there really aren't and the bottom line is that if the american government through its continual use of violence has kind of poisoned the well in the middle east there's not a whole lot that the american government can do but there's a lot that americans can do i think the government's job is to stand back and let people work for  i don't disagree with you i think the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth is one that leads to two blind men that's really what happens and i really think that that's why you're  absolutely right and the question is if you decide not to do an eye for a night a tooth for a tooth you do you gas the people so we're going to blast you with our munitions if you're not going to do that  then what is the next step and perhaps the steps proposed by people in terms of dealing with refugees and some of these other issues are much more kid in to the way we as americans think of ourselves and we actually o  the united states government has no moral authority to tell anybody to do anything as martin luther king said the nine hundred sixty seven is riverside speech the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is the united states government this government is going around the world to dominate the world for the economic interests of its large corporations that's what the foreign policy of the united states government  is i would invite you and i would bite everybody here to become an opponent opponent of the u s empire not to say what should the empire do should it do diplomacy should it do war should it do this should it do that we should be opposed to this empire and try to get rid of it thank you very much for coming tonight