Anne-Marie Slaughter is a former State Department official and author of "The Chessboard and the Web". Slaughter has famously spoken out against how the US has handled Syria. In this clip she explains the biggest mistake that was made and where things stand now.
Less than two weeks after this discussion, a suspected Syrian government chemical attack killed at least 58 people, including 11 children.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: The biggest mistake we made was not understanding right away, early on, that a ruler who was prepared to torture children and prepared to shoot unarmed people was going to stop at nothing and that if we did not draw a line and stick to it, he would destroy his country to stay in power, that's exactly what he's done and we did not stop him. We could have early on. We could have, once he used chemical weapons, we could have taken a strike. He concluded we would do nothing and he has destroyed his country and he's destabilized the region and we're going to deal with the ramifications of this for decades.
Sara Silverstein: Is there anything we can do now to better the situation?
Anne-Marie Slaughter: I mean, stopping the fighting at any point will help. I mean, at this point, regardless of what I think we should have done, whatever, right now, I'll cut whatever deal I have to cut to get this fighting to end. And that will help but it will be, to say fragile peace — it will be essentially kind of freezing everybody in place and it's going to take generations because you have tens of millions of Syrians who are displaced, who — they're going to look at us and think "oh yeah, that's the country that set aside Moscow and did nothing."