Tony Blair: Acting in Syria Is ‘Difficult’; ‘Inaction Is a Problem’
BLAIR: “I think the motives of the Russians are absolutely clear, to protect their interest. That means protecting the regime of Assad. This is action designed to do that. And this is all about what happens after the conflict ends, when it ends, if it ends. And the purpose of what the Russians are doing is to increase leverage to make sure they get the outcome they want. Therefore, what's very important for us, because there is no future for Syria if Assad stays in place, is to signal our intent. And to increase our leverage to make sure the outcome of those negotiations is one which can stabilize the country and give us some prospect of the country being brought back together.”
CAMEROTA: “But now that Russia is bombing sites, what is the U.S. and British leverage?”
BLAIR: “Well, our leverage really depends on what we intend to do. Look, if you go back several years, it's been clear right from the very beginning, if we want to say in the outcome of what is happening in Syria, we have to be prepared to commit. Personally, the British parliament played a significant and, in my view, adverse, part in this two years ago when we didn't take action on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. For several reasons that I understand, it was more difficult to signal that we were prepared to I have a stake in the outcome. We can give greater weapons to the opposition that we support. People look at Syria and say why should we support anyone there? Aren't they all as bad as each other? The answer is that there is a majority of the country that probably does want a stable and religiously tolerant outcome to this. But they're caught between these twin evils, essentially, a regime that's barrel bombing and starving and beating its population into submission. And then ISIS and some of these other extremist groups who are trying to take as much territory as they can in order to establish some sort of caliphate there. What is important is that we arm those groups that are actually fighting on the side we wish to come out on top on this. We can do things like create enclaves where the Syrian opposition can congregate and where we can arm and train people. We can make it clear to the Russians that we're not prepared to tolerate a situation where they are bombing effectively, people that we are supporting because a lot of the air strikes that they've been doing so far have not been air strikes aimed at ISIS. They are air strikes that are specifically. We in Europe by the way, we can see what we got at stake in this. We've now got hundreds of thousands of refugees in Syria coming to Europe. We have a refugee crisis, we frankly don't really know how to handle. Turkey has 2 million refugees, Syrian refugees, inside its country at the moment. The surrounding countries are being destabilized. Acting is difficult but inaction is also a problem.”
