I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
said Tuesday, in an attempt to deflect criticism that the U.S. hasn't done enough to stem the violence there.
Under pointed questioning by a Senate panel he used to chair, Kerry said the scrubbed strike would have been limited, and would have been aimed only at preventing Syrian
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
The Scourge of Hama...
from delivering more chemical weapons to his forces.
"It would not have had a devastating impact by which he had to recalculate, because it wasn't going to last that long," Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Here we were going to have one or two days to degrade and send a message. ... We came up with a better solution."
That solution, Kerry said, was to negotiate an agreement with Russia to lean on Assad to ship out and destroy his government's chemical weapons stockpiles, considered to be one of the largest in the world. That agreement came after a frantic few days after President Barack Obama
I am the change that you seek...
initially threatened to launch a missile strike in response to the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack. Obama pulled back because he decided congressional approval was necessary first.
Obama had earlier threatened that Assad would face consequences if he crossed a "red line" by launching deadly chemical weapons against his own people. The U.S. says more than 1,400 Syrians were killed in the Aug. 21 attack, although human rights
...which are often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless...
groups have reported a lower corpse count of below 1,000.