BICOM

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry has said Syria is an ‘open wound’ left behind by the Obama administration and is an issue that he thinks about every day.

Extracts of Kerry’s forthcoming memoirs ‘Every day is extra’ are being serialised in Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In the book Kerry writes extensively about the debate within the Obama administration on how to react to President Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people in the summer of 2013. Kerry says he, and most of the senior national security officials, supported a military strike against Assad, in line with President Obama’s definition of chemical attacks as a “red line.” But Obama hesitated – especially after it became clear that Congress would not provide overwhelming support for military action.

Kerry also describes a 2009 visit to Damascus to meet President Assad for the first time. Kerry writes that: “In our first meeting, I confronted him about a Syrian nuclear power plant that Israel had famously bombed,” referring to the Syrian nuclear reactor at Deir Ezzor that the Israeli Air Force destroyed in September 2007.

“The fact that this was a nuclear facility had been well established publicly. It was beyond dispute,” Kerry explains. Yet Assad, according to Kerry, denied those facts, even when the two men were left alone. “Assad looked at me in the eye and told me it wasn’t a nuclear facility, with exactly the same affect and intonation with which he said everything else. It was a stupid lie, utterly disprovable, but he lied without any hesitation. I remember hearing that Assad was continuing with exactly the kind of behaviour on Hezbollah that we told him needed to stop. It was disappointing but unsurprising. A man who can lie to your face four feet away from you can just as easily lie to the world after he has gassed his own people to death.”