My Thoughts on Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad interview with Charlie Rose

President Assad of Syria

First of all I hope that everyone has a good week, and last night I had started to write a post for today. However I went on the Huffington Post website and I saw that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad gave a interview to Charlie Rose, I had to put my original post for today on hold and I had to give my thoughts on the clips of the interview that I saw on Huffington Post. I've been on record on this blog and on my twitter account that unless Syria is a direct threat to the United States, that the United States should not involve ourselves in the Syrian Civil War, as we all know Syria is not a threat to the United States, the obvious reason is because Assad is fighting a Civil War for the last two years. Before I give my opinion on what Assad said on this interview with Charlie Rose, I would like to say that, I know that Assad is a brutal dictator and this civil war has killed over 100,000 people so far and I know that Assad will do almost anything to maintain his power in Syria. Now I think that Assad made some decent points in the interview that I would like to discuss.

First off Assad said that "We have the precedent of Colin Powell ten years ago when he showed the evidence [that Iraq had WMDs], it was false and it was forged." and that the "United States credibility was at an all-time low." In my opinion Assad is totally right, the reason why I say that is
because the United States did lie about Weapons of Mass-Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, even though was during the Bush years and the credibility of the US government is at an all time low, thanks to President Bush and Obama is not helping matters now. Assad also made another good point when he said "Americans don't want a war anywhere, not only against Syria." I personally think that the reason why Assad said this is because he cares what the American people think, but he's using this fact in order to try and stop the US government from attacking his country. Which I think was his main motivation for wanting to do an interview with Charlie Rose. He wanted to directly appeal to the American people in order to stop the US from attacking his country.

What I thought was the most interesting comments that Assad made during this interview was the threats that Assad made against the United States if they went through with the bombings against his country. Assad said that "You should expect everything... expect every action," and he also said "Not necessarily from the government." I'm pretty sure that the Republicans and Conservative pundits will try to use this as a excuse in order to justify a long drawn out invasion of Syria and they
will want to use the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike. However let's say that Syria came out and said that they wanted to bomb the United States because we had used Chemical Weapons, our government for sure would consider it an act of war and we will retaliate if Syria did attack us. Then if the United States would retaliate if Syria bombed us in my hypothetical, then what do you expect Assad to do when he threatened to retaliate against the United States. Anybody in Assad's position would make the same decision. I don't want to hear from conservatives and war hawks that we have to attack Assad just because he said that.    

Update: I had just finished my blog post for today when I saw a interesting story from the Huffington Post once again, and I saw people tweeting about it as well. Now in order to avoid an attack from the United States, Russia is now pushing Syria to give up it's Chemical Weapons to international control and then those weapons will be destroyed, and that way the United States will not attack Syria. This development is a good because as I said many times I'm against any action in Syria and if there is someway that the crisis can be ended with out the US bombing Syria and I'm totally in favor of it.    
Link to Huffington Post peice: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/russia-syria-chemical-weapons-international-control_n_3893951.html?utm_hp_ref=world