In an interview today at the “Google+ Hangout,” Secretary Kerry answered questions on the response to his so-called “rhetorical” remarks on Syria turning over “every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week – turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting (of it)…”
Co-hosting the interview with Lara Setrakian (the co-founder of Syria Deeply, an independent news website focused on covering the Syria crisis) was Nicholas Kristof, op-ed columnist with The New York Times, and joining the two was Andrew Beiter, a social studies teacher at Springville Middle School in Buffalo, New York. (Andrew is also a regional educational coordinator for the U.S. Holocaust Museum)
Since the interview and discussion are rather extensive, only selected excerpts are quoted here. For the full text of the interview, please go here. Note Kerry’s insistence on “verifiability” and accountability and his extended response to Mr. Beiter’s question on how we got here.
MS. SETRAKIAN: Thank you. Now, jumping right in, you’ve said that Syria could stop a U.S. strike if it hands over all of its chemical weapons within a week, and you’ve also said that you’re waiting for a proposal from Russia. We understand you’re just off the phone with Foreign Secretary – Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. What did he say?
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, Foreign Minister Lavrov had some interesting observations about the ways in which he thinks we might be able to achieve this. He is sending those to us. They’ll be coming in formally in the course of the day. We’ll have an opportunity to review them, and as the President has said, if we can in fact secure all of the chemical weapons in Syria through this method, clearly, that’s by far the most preferable and would be a very significant achievement.
MS. SETRAKIAN: What specifically do they need to do? What does Russia, what does Syria need to do when we’re talking about dozens of chemical weapons sites across a war-torn country?
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, for better or worse, the fact that Assad has been running a highly controlled and very hierarchical process has forced them to contain all of these weapons in the regime-controlled areas. As a result of that, it is our argument that they therefore can control access to these sites. And so we believe that they need to show us an entirely verifiable, completely accountable, and ongoing verifiable process by which we know we have all of the weapons, access to any sites in question, unlimited access, investigation, verifiability. This cannot be a game, and that we have made very, very clear to the Russians, and I hope – and I think so far, there are indications we will at least be able to have a serious conversation. Whether we can meet what is necessary for President Obama to make the judgment that the objectives are being accomplished, we’ll just have to see.
MR. KRISTOF: Sure. Secretary Kerry, thanks so much for joining us. Now you say we have to be sure this is not a game. What specifically is our bottom line here? That – Russia has said that the U.S. – for a deal to work, that the U.S. will have to renounce the use of force. It has said that a Security Council resolution under Chapter 7 is unacceptable, and that it wants a presidential statement instead. Are these acceptable to you, or do we need – in fact, need a Chapter 7 Security Council resolution to make this go forward?
SECRETARY KERRY: No, we need a full resolution from the Security Council in order to have the confidence that this has the force that it ought to have. That’s our belief and obviously, right now, the Russians are in a slightly different place on that. We’ll have to see where we get to. I mean, obviously, I’m not going to negotiate this out in public now.
SECRETARY KERRY: But I am – what I am giving you is a very clear sense – I think every listener, I think everybody listening, common sense tells us we don’t want to buy into something that isn’t going to get the job done, then we’re right back where we started from. So this has to be a transparent, accountable, fully implementable, and clearly verifiable process, and we’re going to have to work at how that’s going to be achieved.
But it also has to have consequences if games are played or if somebody tries to undermine this, and I think the whole world needs to invest in that. I believe the world is ready to invest in that. It is clearly preferable to sending a message that– by use of force, which, in the end, wouldn’t in fact contain all of the weapons. So hopefully, we can make this work, and this is something we’ve been discussing for a little bit of time, for some period of time. And my hope is with good faith, it could be brought to fruition. But I don’t want to raise expectations because there are some big hurdles in terms of the verifiability and implementation that we have to cross.
MR. KRISTOF: And Secretary Kerry, if I can just follow up on that, so you’re skeptical of what may be unfolding. Now what happens if indeed the negotiations continue for the next week, two weeks, and nothing – and it turns out that Russia is playing games, Damascus is playing games? Now at that point, the wind has gone out of the sails of the Congressional authorization and yet we are no further along in terms of control and getting access to those chemical weapons in Syria. What happens then?
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, first of all, we’re not planning to drag it on that long. We’ve made it very clear in our conversations with the Russians this has to be done quickly. That’s what I said in London. That’s what I repeated yesterday and again today. And the President of the United States, I believe, will make that clear in the course of the next couple of days. But the President retains his authority as President always to do what is necessary to protect the security of our nation. So I think the Russians and the Syrians understand that full well, and no matter what happens with respect to Congress, the President is the President, and he has that power.
MS. SETRAKIAN: You said in a House committee hearing this morning that you wouldn’t let this become a stalling tactic. How long will you wait? How long is long enough? And also, you touched on how – that this has been in conversation for some time. Tell us the genesis for how this plan came about.
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’s up to the President as to how long we wait. I mean, the President makes that decision. We will dig into this as rapidly as possible. We’re already having conversations. We’re trying to exchange some ideas which we – not trying, we are exchanging some ideas to put this to the test, and we will see. But the President will decide what he thinks is the timeframe that he’s prepared to live with.
MS. SETRAKIAN: And when did this plan really come about? Because there’s not too much clarity about that at the moment.
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, we’ve had conversations about chemical weapons for some period of time, and we have talked about the issue of trying to gain control of them both at the United Nations as well as in bilateral conversations with the Russians. But most specifically, we discussed this last week. Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia, and I discussed it. President Putin discussed it with President Obama in St. Petersburg. And President Obama instructed him that both – that we would take it up at the foreign minister level and see if it, in fact, had any life in it, if it could be real. I obviously mentioned it in public in London on Monday, and we are where we are today.
But we have always been talking about the necessity to hold the Assad regime accountable for its possession of chemical weapons, which up until right now, but for the threat of the use of force, they have never even admitted they have. Now, they’re not only admitting they have them, but they say they’re prepared to try to live up to some international standards. That is only happening because we have shown them that we are prepared to do what is necessary to hold them accountable.
MR. BEITER: … With that in mind, while everyone gets the major issues associated with the use of chemical weapons, why is it that there’s such a concern now, and not for the past year and a half in which the death toll has gone to six figures? So if you could address that, I think that gets right to the heart of the matter.
SECRETARY KERRY: Absolutely, Drew. And thank you for what you do in terms of your work with teachers and efforts to help make this kind of event happen. And Joe, let me just answer you directly and your students. We are deeply concerned about the overall loss of life in Syria. It’s now over 100,000 – somewhere around 100,000 people. And we have consistently spoken out against Assad’s slaughter of his own people using Scud missiles, using airplanes, which – against civilians, dropping napalm on children in schools. I mean, these are war crimes almost by any standard, but there hasn’t been a will in the global community, let alone in our own country, to get involved in Syria’s civil war. And that’s the way people see it, that it’s that kind of internal struggle.
He has used small amounts of chemical weapons, but our intelligence community was only able to make the judgment – a judgment – that he had in fact done it with a level of confidence that I might choose to believe it, the President might choose to believe it, but we wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable taking that publicly and arguing for the whole world that we ought to have a military strike about it. The President did, after that line was crossed, decide he was going to provide assistance to the opposition, the military opposition in Syria. And without putting American boots on the ground, without becoming directly involved, he decided we would support the opposition as a consequence of the earlier use of the levels of chemicals that we determined had been used.
Now, on August 21st, all of those prior levels and prior incidents were eclipsed with this one incident in which about 1,400-plus people died that we know of – that we were able to actually account for – more than that for certain, 400-plus children. And they died because of an attack that we had much more evidence in order to be able to prove it to the world.
That’s when the President decided that that was straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak with respect to his usage. And the President decided that it needed a response from the world because chemical weapons were suddenly being used as a tactical weapon in a civil war, and any use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.
That’s why we’re here where we are today. There’s a moral imperative to this, there’s a strategic imperative to this, there’s a practical military imperative in terms of sending him a message that his infrastructure, militarily, and his capacity to wage war could be affected if he continues to use these prohibited, outlawed, and outrageous weapons.
MR. KRISTOF: Sure. Well, Secretary Kerry, given how important you say this is, given the stakes, then while cruise missile strikes may be on pause for the time being as a deal may or may not be negotiated, what about other alternatives to gain leverage with the Russians and the Syrians and also to make a difference on the ground? I’m thinking specifically about, for example, arming the rebels – giving more support to them, intelligence support, for example, but doing more with moderate rebels. Also perhaps cyber-offensive operations in Syria? Is there more we can do in those ways?
SECRETARY KERRY: Nick, I’m not going to go into all the details of what we’re doing because I’m not allowed to, but I will tell you point blank: The President has issued instructions several months ago to raise the level of American support for the moderate opposition, because the moderate opposition is very important to us in order to have a barrier, a bulwark against the very bad elements that are out there that do want to attack the United States of America. So we are supporting them as a matter of humanitarian concern for the people of Syria. We’re supporting them as a matter of our own strategic national security interests. And the President has decided and will continue to increase the support to that moderate opposition.
MS. SETRAKIAN: And my very last question to you, Mr. Secretary: Walid Muallim, the Foreign Secretary, Foreign Minister of Syria has just said he plans on having Syria join the Chemical Weapons Convention. What would you tell him? What would you tell his government, his President Bashar al-Assad, taking this opportunity to address him here?
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, I know Walid Muallim. He has hosted me previously in Syria before all of this began a number of years ago. And I would hope that he and Bashar al-Assad would take advantage of this opportunity as a moment to try to make peace in Syria, to genuinely reach out, live up to what they’ve just said they would do with respect to the chemical convention, go further, help us in the next days working with Russia to work out the formula by which those weapons could be transferred to international control and destroyed, and even further demonstrate the way in which they will try to help make the Geneva process work, so that Syrians can choose a peaceful future that protects the rights of all people in Syria, end this civil war, help us be able to reach for peace. And I hope that perhaps in the next days they’d be willing to try to make that concrete.
Image: State Department
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.