James Jeffrey: “That's the horror scenario that's going to turn the whole region into a Shiite Sunni civil war.”

Well, first of all, we did not bring it. The Iraqis wanted it. And in the end, they have a constitutional democratic system.

There's a fundamental difference that we do not make clear as a country, let alone an administration, between putting troops under treaty obligations to defend territory and people against somebody else and the troops that we had in…

A political solution is highly unlikely with a government acting the way the current Assad government acts.

Whatever it takes--well, whatever political process and diplomatic process is necessary to get that government to behave differently toward its own population and to its neighbors, that is an absolutely essential precondition for a…