good evening and i'm sorry we can't get any pictures but i really want to start out with i have a letter that i just got today from one of the doctors that was on my mission and when i got it  in mail i was just it really affected me a lot i'd like to read that to you before i actually start out the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis by dan brown inferno bed number one eighteen month old girl was left lower leg amputated scared bad number two young man with left lower leg amputated still smiling bad number three seventeen year old young lady rocket landed on her house she was pregnant lost the baby last hours left leg bladder injury lost her vision lost her hearing in one ear staring in the ceiling into empty space her husband only twenty years old never left her bedside for the last two months i c u bad one young man with bi lateral above the knee amputation with right hand injury iraq atlantic close to him and all that he remembers until he woke up in i c u a few days ago fold determination but in pain in agony i c u bed to twenty three year old male was imprisoned by the air force security intelligence for several months the thugs who liquid on their cell floor which is very toxic fumes resulted immediate death of four of the prisoners he lost consciousness and was picked up last friday at the border the prison was liberated k eight point three  hundred cardio policy with e f fifteen percent recovering slowly after he finished the story he broke an agonizing cry which made everyone sobbing determine that there's no way back spinal cord injury unit bed number one thirteen year old beautiful girl with bullet through cheek ten pair police sniper attack bed number two thirteen year old girl like a flower bullet through t v eleven which was slain data two months ago paraplegic bed number three ninety year old young lady was sniper bullet through her right temper progress and slowly bed number four two year old old boy with a bullet through his right neck spinal cord hemorrhage recovering nicely so i keep going synopsis of what these criminals of the regime are doing to our innocent civilians they have just had genetically they don't belong to the human race when do we scream when do we become angry how long do we stay silent a message to everyone i know seeing is not the same as hearing or listening these are real people who lost everything if we don't stand by them now then i don't know when to me that was just very powerful and it really states a lot of everything that i see every two months when i go back and i wish the presentation would have worked because it shows you how when the when it first started in syria and people started crossing over the border you have to the camp which is the camp that everyone hears about and that was a camp that started out for five thousand people and each months it has progressed and ever since i've been going the numbers have mounted in march when i was there this last march it was a hundred seventy three thousand in this one camp which is the population of linwood  this time when i went it was two hundred and twenty thousand people it is the largest refugee camp in the world these are people that are all living in tents it's in the middle of the desert very low water supplies low on everything but besides the camps we also have over two hundred fifty thousand refugees that are living in the city of of i man and in outskirt lying areas these are the people that have their paperwork when they left home so they were able to intermingle with society but you know most people leave home thinking it's only going to be a month or two months two years later they have no money there's nothing the n g o s that are in the country are running out of money to keep people going totally it's very very difficult fifty percent of the population of refugees that are in jordan at this point are women and children and they are in dire straits i mean it's the stories that you hear every single day when we go away and i mean we this last group of doctors was thirty four doctors that went in with me and what we do is we take medications from here that are donated from different organizations or people like yourselves who had somebody that's passed away they have medicines in their cupboards they don't need and so we take those all then i usually go in with about ten suitcases full of medication with me and we end up then all the doctors bring in medications so we have about a perfect day so she wanted just look through it and these are just some of the kids these are our syria numbers that we have but these are the numbers from may so these numbers are changing on a regular regular basis tryna move it this is just showing you syria and the countries that are surrounding it so depending on where you live in syria is where you're going to run away too so if you're up in the north where i live to set up aleppo you are close to the turkish border and so usually it would be about an hour to get up there because of the situation now there are different patrol people we have no idea who they are from day to day if there are military from the government or they are some rebel group that we don't know and there are so many different rebel groups around that you have to keep your paperwork on you continuously if you have a card they will stop you and you don't know if you going to be killed if you're on the right side of the wrong side of the time if you're in damascus you can go off to lebanon if you want or you can try to make it to jordan usually from damascus to jordan it's a three hour trip but because of the conditions that are on now you now those things can take you three four five days to get over to jordan most people travel late at night so they're just walking they walk with whatever they have if they've been injured they are carrying their injured with them and just going through once they get to the border they're jordanians or aftab border and they have a process of checking people checking their id whatever day need giving them some blankets some water and then they will if they have no paperwork they are taken on a bus and they're taken to one of the camps once or edge of sirte in the camps they are given a tent blankets and some ration of food and water and that's it and then that will happen every day now if they have their paperwork with them they're allowed to go into the cities to try and find a place to rant to whatever they want  they're usually able to pay rent for up to about three months most of these people after that they can't there's no jobs there's no nothing these are the people they're living in the cities we call them you know of that  they're the forgotten souls because nobody goes after them none of the ngos go and try and find him everyone goes into the camps only so our group goes into the cities and we hear about it from one person tells another person about it so you will have a room that is about a quarter of the size of this room and you'll have forty people living in it with nothing else just have this room they might be lucky if they have some mattresses or anything else that goes on if they are sick if they're older they are nobody's there to take care of them they might just have it would be like an old people's home here in the states that is really big had nobody changing their diapers nothing you can come into these homes and you smell the cure and you smell everything and it's and you try and do whatever you can for these people to want to change it so the news there's been a lot of fighting on that border that's coming through it was it was controlled by the government one point and it was controlled by the rebels at another point there was a lot of bombing that went in which is on the border town between syria and jordan and so now turkey is having a real issue because they're running out of space also for taking people in lebanon is not really being that friendly with people because they don't want the same situation that happened with them like it happened with the palestinians so there is really not many n g o s that are working with them in lebanon at all most of them are sitting in the back out of valley area which is very close to the syrian border and those people have maybe tents but the water is really bad they're using water that they're washing and they're drinking in and they're cooking in it so you can imagine right now with this you move this is our ratio which is now changed because we have it almost now is higher females than we do have males that are going in and move it this is the  zod today that you can see and we'll just keep moving it through and you can see how it's expanded every month you know from from november five thousand to eleven thousand coast twelve thousand and the space just keeps going on all of these people all they have is just chance to live in that's it there's nothing else the conditions are very harsh in the winner lot of rain and snow and they just were you know most of them just ran out of their homes with bare footed having any clothing not having any shoes or anything so we were trying to get a lot of our first containers that when and was mostly clothing that we took in two people and we can do it again now these this is a new camp that was just opened back in january and these are what they call is these are containers almost like you shipping containers and those are incredible in the summertime because it's so i thought and there's nothing in these containers they're just an empty space that you go into they it was done by the qatari government to and you have bathrooms that are not in the containers not in those are separate so what they have is they've built these so that you have five hundred to a grouping and every five hundred will have two facilities of bathrooms and showers that take ten people in them that is that and all you can do is sleep in that in the home there's no kitchen there's nothing they just give it to you with blankets and you're lucky if we even give mattresses at all these things it started out for five thousand people it has now been expanded to twenty thousand people and it still needs to expand again same thing and moving these are the kids and just and the kids have the worst portion of this thing because a lot of the groups are dealing with the medical conditions of the kids but no one is actually dealing with the mental issues that are going on the trauma of the p t s d everything that's happening to these kids one kid that i saw that was  five years of age i tried to get the kids to come out to play for my house and the mother said he won't go he won't leave at all of this room and i says why and she says well at the beginning of the crisis he was always looking out the window and watching and seeing what was happening one day that he's out there he sees a truck pull in and what you have is the soldiers came and they have people in the truck and he saw us father and uncle and some relatives the military started throwing the bodies out of the truck and then they ended up jumping out of the truck and they started chopping him up and this little kid was looking at it he's never looked out a window again you have so many different atrocities that i don't i can't even call these people animals anymore because i think animals have more decency than what's actually happening at this point in syria another little girl that would come into the clinic because we have these clinics and they're called medical days two and a change it and we would go in to a village this is water that is being brought in on a regular basis as much as you can jordan is very poor country has very little water before we before this crisis the government would deliver water on a weekly basis to the different homes what happened now is that water is running so low when you have a million and have people that have sort of come into your country  you now the restriction is that its water is being delivered to time twice once every two weeks so this is going to start causing problems between the jordanians and the syrians at some point  when the iraqis came in to jordan during the gulf war they could rocky's came in with money and they were able to pay for things the syrians are coming in with nothing at all just whatever they can carry out of their homes and so at the very beginning the jordanians are very hospitable with them but at some point they say well we've got jordanians at the same time and they're taking away a lot of our resources so we're not sure how long it's going to last before something really happens between the two groups that goes on and change it these are the people at the entrance of saturday to come in it looks like a concentration camp in some ways you know the way you're just set up because once you get in you cannot leave they don't want you to run around the country since nobody knows who you really are and who you really support so that your day want to make sure that you don't have any of the government forces there some snuck in that said that they had deserted and some of the stories that you hear about the fires at the were started by some of the military people that when n number of the rapes that took place were also done in the camps by some of the military so what they've started to do is they have now a separate camp for the desert hers which they stay totally separate from the people  because a lot of people here still have family in syria and they're very very scared of you know the family end up hearing about it at all and something happening to their families and then mov are people waiting on the outskirts of the dot our border to try and get in into jordan and you'll see it's just women and kids and the stories i think every time i go i have to come back here just to decompress because it's just to hear everything that's going on young kid that tells me his mom can't stop crying she's always crying a boy that tells me that he was had to rape his sister in front of his family women that were raped by a nice being inserted inside them so that they just had there's nothing left of them totally people that just don't have a will to live again and they're just not going to be sure what's going to happen we have so many amputees that the whole country is going to have to change you and the middle east is not known as a country for handicaps you don't have the handicapped ramps or bathrooms or anything like you do here in the states so when this country gets to be rebuilt it's something's go after happen we're also as arabs or if there's something wrong or you're missing a limb or arm or something you know society usually says of well you're not a person anymore so we have to change that whole mentality of people so some of these young people that we visit in the hospitals they ask i'm i ever going to get married will i ever have a baby you know just normal questions that you have to deal with  any change in we can just flip through it you know this is just stuff that we've done to this point but it's just there's just too much stuff to do i mean we'll just never finish with everything that has to be done we'll just move it and we are at this is a meeting that the not this group the other group met with the jordy of with the american ambassador we were asking them for assistance and i never realize that the u s government does not have medical facilities that they'll take into a country except if it's a country that's in a war zone you have to be actually in war where they'll have the hash mash units type of thing that you see so the units that we have inside the camps or doctors without borders physicians for souce responsibility a moroccan group  group and that's it the americans try and help by giving you know money or aid but they don't have any medical units at all through their we are asking them for help to be able to get the syrian american or american doctors t with us to be able to operate and so they're working with that on it because what happens it's similar to if a doctor comes from out of the country for mainland comes to us yes to take exams before it can actually work in the hospitals here and jordan has that same principle so we're able to give medications see the clients but they still have to have operations by the jordanians a lot of the hospitals will not give pro bono work so it has to be paid for and that's money that we try and raise for some of these people with what's going on twenty this is the spinal cord clinic and  doctors and it's set up with regular bat you know there's nothing in there so we have been able to get hospital beds from here that have been donated we've been able to take a me and so they can use and we've got some rehab equipment you change in on that think so and none of these people that we see are fighters at all these are all people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were hit by snipers the snipers hit the people between the fifth in the seventh bird of prey i've been told by the doctors which will lead to making a paraplegic immediately and so they'll just never walk at all and we're talking about sixteen seventeen year old kids some of the kids i saw was a six month old baby that already had the legs amputated a three month old that had shrapnel in eyes and was told it was blind you know and we can just go on and on with some of this these are the ambulances that we ended up purchased scene and through show nations by a number of people and some people in this room that have actually  these donations to us so we were able to buy these in montreal and we got it shipped in to mare's scene into turkey and then from turkey we have people that come in and they drove the vans down into syria so we're right at the borders they come in it's very hard if you're from how many homes which is in the middle of the country which is really places that are being bombarded on a regular basis to be able to get in there because anyone we send in has been killed at some point so we've been able to find a way to get medicines in and that's been through the sewage lines that there are people that are willing to go through the sewage lines and get the medicine to get it into some of the hospitals the doctors that are working there are really risking their lives because the government is hitting hospitals or ambulances or anybody or doctors you know they're pinpointing  because if they're helping the people living this is the new spinal cord clinic and you can see we've got hospital beds for most of the patients at this point we were able to rent this whole building out for thirty two thousand dollars for the full year so it was a great deal and so it is three stories that we have that's been set up for anyone with spinal cord injuries we have just set up a place for women in the first floor that we're helping them survive and get going in that we supply them with materials and they do some of the handicrafts that you'll see inside and we pay them five hundred fifty jordanian dinars a month which is about four hundred dollars and they are really proud that they can go and say that they're working and helping the families instead of having their hands out in trying to just get money from being out in the street or selling their bodies we have a lot of prostitution that's taking place in my frock which is a village that is about an hour outside of jordan that in april we found one hundred eighty seven prostitution homes and that's in an area where you've never had prostitution but you know in times of war a lot of things take place that you just don't expect to take place at all there's a lot of families skew that that are actually selling their daughters not selling them but it's you know getting them married at a young age thirteen or twelve or fourteen where they don't really know but they figure that's the only way they can protect their kids from rape at all that's taking place in the country want to move in this is  our our warehouse here and buffalo where we have the donations the people bringing us from medical supplies we had hasbro toys donated to eleven thousand toys to us and that just  the warehouse space is donated a lot of the shipping containers we have a company in los angeles that actually donated a lot of the psych we pay for for  then the give us one free so it works out really well for us all the people that work with my organization are hundred percent volunteer so one hundred percent of the money that's given is all being used for the refugees totally and then this is just loading of the trucks we try an hour documentary everything we do all the paperwork all receipts all medicines everything that's going on  of the children i think the children are the ones that break your heart the most the once you go in you cannot not stop keep going back the doctors are going to are always crying when they see this i mean it's these are just innocent souls there's no reason that anything like this should happen to him these are next generation and we have no idea what they're going to be like what's going to happen to them i lived under is father's reign when i lived in syria from seventy three up until eighty four and i spent two weeks in there jails i know what it feels like my ex husband spent a year in jail at that time and this is the time when he came in and he level of the town of homes totally and killed ten thousand people it hasn't you know his son is worse than the father by one where pretty much the whole revolution started and all we did was hear the gunfire the bombs everything on a daily basis that was going on but we were there to meet the people and get as many people as we could out of there and into into jordan to move them to that so i mean i could keep on talking but did we want to question answers now or after after and so she brought these dolls over and on this trip i took a lot of we mailed in our container and some i took with us and we went out to the different villages and the raggedy an dolls were the biggest hit beat from the adults to the littlest kid everybody wanting this little raggedy ann and it was a little less face about this high and then she had him at different levels and stuff and you know so we're just looking for anything like that because it's like if you could imagine you know oklahoma city and their tomatoes that took place and you know people losing everything but we're in the u s so we can document and you can give it in syria there is no documentation once you've left there you have no way of proving who you are and these kids are your kids or getting passports or getting anything so we can't even bring the most serious cases like we did in iraq where we could bring him here in syria it's different we can't bring these kids to the u s because they have no paperwork the u s will not allow them in we can't get their paperwork out of syria you know the u the middle east is not have adoptions like you have here so we can't even bring the orphans or do anything for these orphans because a looks like they're going to be selling them so we're trying to open an orphanage or a place that you can put these orphans until we can find some extended family somebody or other to help them out this is a situation i can't see ending very soon i mean it's something that's going to really stay around quite a bit you know with our government and richard will talk about this more since i'm supposed to really stay away from politics with our n g o s status with the government here of the f b i that comes in and questions me about the work that i do and then the jordanian government also questions everything that i do at the same time of working with syri i'll leave that to richard to talk about at all but i think i just really want to thank you all for being here it's beautiful weather out there it's great that you're interested we need to get the word out more about syria i think there's just so many people that have left it in the back and it's not they're in the news much anymore you know but it's still going on and people are suffering every day and we have three two to three thousand people crossing the jordan syrian border on a daily basis and when you have a population of twenty three million people in syria and we already have a million a half in jordan three point five million people that are displaced in the country that are just living under trees or hallways or wherever else they can and i got still lots of family there that i i talked to but they're having a hard time but they don't want to leave you know nobody wants to leave their home if they can stay in it because once you do it's everything is robbed it's you're not sure you're going to get out of the country you're not sure if you're going to die on your way out and especially if your older person you know they say how can we live if we end up leaving you know we can live for a month or two months but we can't live for two or three years you know nobody has that kind of money sitting in in savings or whatever in savings it's in a bank that the you know the government has so we're sort of left here so thank you very much and we'll answer your questions later ok rita thank you we thank you we we are prepared to receive contributions for our readers work and i will ask joanne and betty and eugene matthew  if you would if you'd be so kind as to help pass the the plates the which are just over there so if we could keep moving concretely and so we'll ask richard to look at the other dynamics that are very revealing i want to start by thanking dick for serving as liaison with the church and helping us to get this facility for to do the event tonight and rita for being my partner in putting on the program and all of the local co sponsoring organizations i want to thank them all for supporting us in this important event in this important subject that we're trying to deliver an extemporaneous talk for thirty minutes without any notes but not me so excuse that right from the beginning i think we need to acknowledge that this is an impossible moral dilemma the conflict presents us two years ago in the spirit of the arab spring that swept through the middle east the syrian people rose up against the brutal corrupt  assad dynasty they used classic forms of nonviolent resistance they stream from friday prayer in the mosques and churches into the public square using religion as an expression of their moral opposition they rallied they shouted slogans they publish broadsides it was almost a classic lesson in civic participation this was the same force that toppled the tunisian and egyptian dictatorships and the syrians had every hope and reason to believe it might do the same for them instead of engaging in dialogue with the opposition proposing or implementing reforms bashar assad summoned his brothers command and brutalized these million unarmed civilian protesters they turned guns helicopters jet fighters artillery and missiles on unarmed civilians and mowed them down in their thousands and tens tens of thousands at that point the opposition had a fait fatal fateful choice it could continue on the path of nonviolence and suffer an ongoing slaughter or it can arm itself and fight the regimes fire with its own and it shows fire at first the arms reach the armed resistance was domestic and relied solely upon what it could muster inside the country in the way of recruitment and weapons but as the brutality of government forces increased the resistance responded in kind soon it was turning to outside forces for support as the majority of syrians are sunni while the assad us are shiite or alawite the opposition turn to other sunni countries to meet their needs their military needs that meant qatar turkey which had provided the lion's share of armaments for the free syrian army to be clear foreign intervention isn't a one sided deal assad has received major support from russia and iran for decades that includes advanced weaponry like anti aircraft and ground to ground missiles series other i lie hezbollah has also served as a useful proxy both in lebanon and syria so each side in this conflict is guilty of turning to outsiders for lethal support unfortunately a conflict that began as an act of civil civic protest turned into an increasingly ethnic conflict between shia and sunni and of course christian syrians are wedged into that as well and they're a smaller minority and probably suffer more as a result assad's shia allies are iran and hezbollah while the opposition's sunni allies are qatar and turkey so far the united nations estimates that nearly one hundred thousand have died there are at least we just saw the figure of one and a half million refugees it's probably much larger in four  neighboring countries and rita spoke so eloquently of her work in bringing them humanitarian relief and i'm hoping that we will raise as much money as we can to support her after we pay for some of the expenses of the event tonight going back to the conflict each side is playing a game of chicken they realize that if they violate the rules of the game and cross red lines the other side will do the same that's why russia hasn't yet supplied the s a three hundred anti aircraft missiles a contract to do to syria because israel has made clear that such a game changing weapon would likely be used by hezbollah against it israel would likely attack any weapons convoy in syria in order to take out such armaments and it has done this twice in the past few months as well i recently also made a critical choice to escalate the conflict by sending four thousand of it fighters into the town of qusayr this is an act of outside intervention that exacerbates the hostile feelings both inside syria and lebanon itself since many lebanese do not approve chemical weapons against his people it's likely that he has it's possible that other forces in syria have used chemical weapons as well but to my mind this w m d justification was an after the fact kind of situation in this conflict as in iraq to the seems as much a political as a military issue it's used by outside forces to justify whatever course of action they'd already decided upon bush did it in iraq and now obama looks like he's going to do it in syria our cia is already training syrian rebels in jordan and now we will be arming them as well and here's where we get to the other part of the dilemma should the u s intervene right now militarily my answer is no not because i'm a pacifist or believe the u never intervene in such situations there are times when i believe military engagement is morally justified rwanda kosovo places like that i believe the assad regime and its reader has proven  spades is evil and should be overthrown but i'm not prepared to do this as the united states citizen for the syrians themselves the reasons not to do this are obvious we can look at what happened in iraq we were going to overthrow saddam and hand a mock received to the iraqis on a silver platter but it didn't work out that way i wouldn't be opposed to some form of u s intervention if the syrian opposition had a unified political and military agenda if it could demonstrate that it had surmounted the ethnic rivalries and religious hostilities i would support a greater level of involvement but unfortunately the rebel leaders haven't shown that level of maturity or stability yet instead some of the strongest fighters on their side have been the on this refined and extremist sunni faction allied with al qaeda those fighting units which are more secular or more religiously moderate have not shown the same cohesion the same toughness of the extremists as a result if we now play a definitive role in determining the outcome we risk bringing to power the forces that will be the most hostile to democratic values and religious tolerance and these are ideas that will be sorely needed to rebuild syrian society after the civil war and and it willing hopefully sooner rather than later the syrians have to take control of their own destiny they have to determine who will govern them and what sort of government it will be i don't have a problem with other regional forces taking a role in this turkey as a neighbor is intimately connected to syria and stability there in syria is critical for turkey but the turkish government so far has taken a very measured approach and has enabled the rebels to decisively defeat assad in addition turkey itself faces massive civil disruption in the form of the taksim square protests and that will likely diminish the level of engagement of turkey in this for some time to come so of syria's arab muslim neighbors can't produce a coherent response to assad who are we as americans to do so on our own there are two other eight hundred pound gorillas on stage on the stage  is on the stage and one hovers just off stage the first one the one that is on stage is a rock assad's key ally it provides him with both financing and the weapons to pursue this butchery  till the end without assad iran's support for hezbollah would also be in jeopardy since weapons are transferred to lebanon on via syria by by iran without a compliant syria has well it would not aggressively confront israel and in this sense the lebanese militia serves iran's is interest should israel attack iran as bibi netanyahu has many times said that he would like to do not to mention the shia religious axis of iran syria hezbollah religious sell a deryni plays a strong role in motivating the conflict the longer the blood flows the more divisive this particular element will become as we all know benign conflicts can flare into raging conflagrations when religious hatreds are introduced let's not forget an important recent development in iran a relative moderate rouhani came from virtually nowhere to defeat seven candidates in the presidential election each of those candidates was more dour and conservative than the next and more loyal to the supreme leader ayatollah khomeini than the next rouhani is a little bit breaks the mold he's what in an american context we call a hard headed realist he puts iran's interest of course above all the rest he's a strong tough negotiator but he realizes when the proper moment to compromise has come and he has in the past created interesting creative compromises involving iran's nuclear program among other things expecting rouhani on the on the other hand to be iran's martin luther king and to bring about democracy in iran or to overthrow the clerical regime that is being very unrealistic  he's a product of the regime i'll be a pragmatic one now let's talk about the off stage grill and not so off stage and that's israel it has a deep invested interest in syria at least it villages on the israeli side of the border and on the syrian side israel maintains an interest in the villages the syrian jews villages that are on the other side of the border and it has sent its own special into syria itself in other words it has violated the sovereignty of syria by sending these troops in and what they do is they liaise with the syrian jews villagers there has been some really  fighting in the golan on the syrian side between syrian government forces and the rebels and some of the over those rebels have been the syrian druze villagers so israel if there is chaos and disintegration in the golan like there has been in other parts of syria it's conceivable that israel either will itself invade syria or occupy syria or use a proxy like the syrian  jews to cut off a slice of of syria cut off a slice of territory and have an autonomous kind of situation in the go on and that is what some analysts foresee possibly happening in all the different parts of syria where northern syria might be broken off and be one entity and the coast syria coast where the whites are might be a different entity that would be controlled maybe by the government and the golan could conceivably be controlled by proxy by israel and israel has done this before in southern lebanon where it had the christian south lebanese army as its proxy and used it to act as a cushion as a shield between hezbollah and the other anti israel forces in lebanon and this kind of act and badly as we could see in lebanon israel lost scores of don hundreds of troops  militia attacks and the same thing would eventually happen in syria if israel did this it would be a disaster of this kind of intervention by israel for the syrians because it would ensure that israel carved out this slice of territory it would fragment syrian continue the process of disintegration inside the country it would add years to the ewing process and rebuilding of the nation and just as the lebanese civil war has taken decades to recover from it would be disastrous for israel as well although its leaders on think that obviously it would cement israel's reputation as a meddlesome aggressive untrustworthy regional force iran could use the excuse of intervention to ratchet up pressure and its own military prop posture inside syria and it iran could even escalate its nuclear program in response the reason is really intervention in syria would be bad is the same reason the first president bush demanded israel not respond when saddam launched scud missiles that had to leave even the first gulf war the fight against saddam's forces was hard enough without adding the is really wild card into the mix what does that leave us with i'm afraid as i said in the beginning there are no easy answers the conflict is fraught morally and politically assad must go but how to make it happen the process must be done carefully and  y in terms of outside action but this need for caution unfortunately means that syrians will continue to die and that is only one part of this tragedy the onus is on the syrian opposition they must step up to the plate they must organize they must coalesce they must be worthy of sunni leadership the mantle of leadership the last thing syria needs now is a repeat of the saddam disaster in which a tyrant is violently overthrown and a vacuum allows the most intolerant violent forces to come to power though one hundred thousand syrians have died thus far millions have died in iraq in a decade of fighting there let's not let that be the fate of syria now i want to thank you for being patient and i have one last portion of what i'm going to say and i want to make clear that this is a dream a political dream that i have it may be an unrealistic dream but i i want to think positively and i'm sure that you do as well and so let me just you me while a real off this dream i have  let's put forward two leaders two national leaders barack obama and hasan rouhani let's put forward these two leaders who rise to the better angels of their nature leaders who realize that the interests of each of their country may be realized by a comprehensive settlement of all the outstanding issues now remember i said it was unrealistic but i'm still to come still want to be positive and optimistic i'm not just talking about iran's nuclear program i'm talking also about this intractable relationship it has with israel and its support for  iran let's in this dream of that i'm spinning out iran agrees to stop uranium enrichment beyond the twenty percent level it agrees to ship that enriched uranium that's above twenty percent to third neutral country like brazil or turkey the u s and allies agree to end sanctions and offer full recognition and trade relation to iran but let's not stop there iran persuades assad to step down and he's replaced by a caretaker kicker government appointed with the agreement of turkey and iran elections would be held in a specified time frame for a democratically elected government power would be shared among the various the groups iran also would agree to stop army hezbollah in return for u s pressure on israel to settle all outstanding issues between lebanon and syria the goal would be return syria lebanese territory returned and it's prisoners that are in israel the few that are left are for would be freed israel and syria would recognize each other for the first time since one nine hundred forty eight now let's turn really thorny part of the palestinians and this is where it may be even more unreal realistic than everything up until now but you me the u s would have to force israel to agree to a settlement there would involve withdrawal hundred sixty seven borders recognition of a palestinian state sharing jerusalem as its capital and return of refugees what would israel get it would get the u s and united nations as guarantors of the peace the saudi peace initiative would be sealed and arab states would end their hostilities with israel and recognize it and exchange a masters and trade and all the other things that would come along with that it does sound crazy i admit but remember there was a day in reykjavik a few decades ago when me gorbachev and ronald reagan sat together and they almost agree to nuclear disarmament they came this close it didn't happen but at least they talk seriously about it within a few years after that even though it didn't work that time the soviet union collapsed and it brought an end of the cold war and an end of the era of mutually assured destruction it fundamentally realigned the world and while it didn't end conflicts it did substantially reduce the danger of nuclear war what my dream requires is two leaders and perhaps other leaders as well who rise to the occasion like or which often reagan almost leaders will foresee a grand plan to resolve some of the worst most intractable conflicts in the region for the sake of all the peoples of the region think of abraham lincoln after the civil war as he contemplated reintegrating the confederate states in the union think of eleanor roosevelt as she gave the opening speech of the united nations in one thousand nine hundred six in san francisco think of belsen mandela as he left robben island after decades in prison and prepared to dismantle apartheid with his partner who had been his former enemy f w de klerk stranger things have happened d obama have it in them probably not i'm not foolish enough to believe that they really do they may be such creatures of their respective systems that they can't break out of them and seize such an opportunity but wouldn't it be grand to think what they could do if they appeal to those better any angels of their nature instead of nattering our respective countries instead of the nattering our respective countries have engaged in