♪ ♪ ♪ [Radio chatter] ♪ [Airplane engine] [Explosions] ♪ [Footsteps] [Indistinct conversation] Paul Wolfowitz, voice-over: When I think about the Holocaust and what came after World War II ended and how many times people said, "Never again, never again," and it happens over and over again, after a while, you wonder, "Is this just hot air?

Are these just words?"

♪ I can tell you for sure, too often there are cases where we make a mockery of this idea of "never again."

♪ Henry Kissinger: If you look at human history, you have to say that genocide has occurred much too frequently.

Yes, we should oppose it, but you cannot simply say the United States has an obligation by military force to oppose evil wherever it exists in the world.

Are we then willing to stay involved in getting an outcome that we... Anthony Lake, voice-over: With power comes responsibility, and if you have huge power and there are problems in the world that you could fix and you don't fix them, then you're being irresponsible.

Lake: Conflicting impulses out of this phenomenon from abroad... Colin Powell, voice-over: We can't go everywhere.

We are not the world policeman, although, as has been famously said, guess who the world calls for whenever there's a mugging.

Bush: We will have a continuing responsibility... James Baker, voice-over: When the body bags start coming home, if you don't have a significant national interest at stake, you will lose the policy, and you won't be able to sustain it.

The human toll shows... Albright, voice-over: There are always people in the room that will argue and say, "Oh, well, you know, why should we care?

What does it matter to us?"

I believe in peace, but I'm not a pacifist, and I believe that there are times when using force can actually bring stability in the long run and save a lot of people.

Barack Obama: Change doesn't come from on high.

If you're waiting for Congress... Sandy Berger, voice-over: "Never again" is a moral statement, but is it a guiding operational principle?

Does it help answer whether to go into Bosnia or not, whether to go into Syria or not, whether to go into Rwanda or not?

♪ I don't think so.

I think it is a moral statement by the world that it should not stand by and watch mass atrocities.

It is not neither legally binding or politically binding.

[People cheering] ♪ Good evening.

These are the sights and sounds of the continuing celebration.

The Berlin Wall, once it divided East from West, now on its way to becoming an artifact of history.

♪ Woman, voice-over: In the last few months, the reign of communism ended in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

The U.S.S.R. that controlled Eastern Europe with an iron fist for 4 decades is now dissolved by Mr. Gorbachev.

At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. stands as the only global superpower.

Powell, voice-over: My whole adult life to that point was participating in the Cold War.

Everything that I had trained for, every tactic that I had mastered was now gone because they're gone, you know, and Gorbachev said to me one day at one of the summit meetings-- and his eyes were twinkling-- he said, "Ah, Generale, Generale, "I'm so very, very sorry.

You will have to find a new enemy."

♪ Bush: A new world order can emerge, a new era, an era in which the nations of the world-- East and West, North and South-- can prosper and live in harmony, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice.

[Chanting] [Explosion] [Artillery fire] Woman, voice-over: Fighting raged anew in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina today.

Albright, voice-over: With the end of the Cold War, all the different kind of worms started crawling around in terms of the ethnic dislikes that people had of each other, and that was true in the Balkans.

♪ People wanted a new world order, but I think instead, it became a new world disorder.

Man, voice-over: The Serbs are trying to reverse the decision to establish the independent Muslim state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

[Speaking Serbian] Woman, voice-over: The Serb logic of the conflict is to create areas that are ethnically cleansed from Muslims.

Man: [Speaking Serbian] [Explosion] ♪ [Explosion] ♪ [Dog barking] ♪ Samantha Power: When I graduated from college, I actually moved to Berlin first.

While I was living there, thousands of refugees were pouring in from the former Yugoslavia, and, I mean, they were the picture of desperation, and here I, a sentient 20-something, I'm seeing these people, and all I wanted to do was run away.

In other words, you know, I just was sad for them in the abstract, but it was not my problem.

♪ [Child crying] ♪ I think for a lot of people, the sense of what one ought to do derives a lot from what one feels one can do, and when you think that you're a 22-year-old liberal arts graduate who has nothing to offer these people, your internal reflexive mechanisms almost seem to say to you, "Then don't bother learning more "because it's going to break your heart "and you won't be able to do anything about it, so, you know, just go check out the soccer game."

♪ Man, voice-over: While shelling continues today in Sarajevo, the news focused on reports of Nazilike detention camps being run by Serbs.

Power, voice-over: I moved back to Washington, and I was an intern working for a man named Mort Abramowitz, who had been in government for 35 years.

He was consumed with what was happening in Bosnia, and my job as his intern just was to basically prepare him for his speeches, his op-eds, edit what he did, and then, because it was my job, I began learning, and, honestly, I don't know if it was my head or my heart that nearly exploded, but I just could not believe what was being done.

♪ Once I'd had this inconvenient knowledge, then I was off to the ra-- then I had to figure out-- oh, my gosh-- what was I going to do to help, so I went to Bosnia to cover the conflict.

[Explosions] Arriving for the first time in Sarajevo, I was most struck by a sense of claustrophobia just by this topography.

The hills all around were just lined with gun positions, and, whether that was snipers or actual artillery positions where they were just raining artillery and shell fire onto the city, you just had a sense of vulnerability.

[Gunfire and explosions] [People screaming] [Gunfire continues] [People shouting] Aah!

Aah!

Bush, voice-over: I am very concerned about it, and I'm concerned about ethnic cleansing.

I'm concerned about attacks on Muslims, but it isn't gonna be solved by sending in the 82nd Airborne.

[Applause] Governor Clinton, you have one minute.

We can't get involved in the quagmire, but we must do what we can.

It's enormous responsibility to step into the White House, to take over the world in terms of your responsibility.

In Clinton's case, we were running against George H.W.

Bush, who'd spent his life in foreign policy.

Clinton: There are things that can be done... Berger, voice-over: Here's this governor from Arkansas, and our goal was to make sure that Clinton lost no votes because of foreign policy.

We weren't going to beat Bush on foreign policy.

Clinton: I would begin with air power against the Serbs to try to restore the basic conditions of humanity.

History has shown us that you can't allow the mass extermination of people and just sit by and watch it happen.

♪ Man: Ladies and gentlemen, let us all join together in welcoming the next President of the United States of America.

[Cheering and applause] Clinton: On this day, the American people have voted to make a new beginning.

[Cheering] ♪ Leon Panetta: Every president goes through a learning process.

You suddenly walk in the Oval Office, and you're having to deal with national security issues, and you suddenly get a group from the Joint Chiefs of Staff-- all in uniform, all with their medals-- all telling you something that should or should not be done, and, very frankly, it's intimidating because, you know, you may have been a senator, you may have been a governor, but you never had to make decisions that involve life and death.

Gore: Or at least that's what all the managers believe.

Leon Fuerth, voice-over: There was a peculiar situation as the Clinton administration took over.

It inherited the possibility for a different world order because the old world order was gone, and so the question was what the Clinton administration's attitude going to be about the use of force as an instrument of national policy.

Yes, you were trying to come up with a policy solution for a given country, like Bosnia, but at the same time, it had to somehow fit into another equation that related to American power almost anywhere in the world.

[Explosions] [Siren] Power, voice-over: At the beginning of the war, the Bosnian people had such hope with President Clinton that we were going to act, and that's their sense of curiosity, and, I mean, they knew everything.

They knew McCain, Biden, you know, who was up, who was down, who's up for re-election.

I mean, when your life depends on it-- And I was struck in the most remote parts of Bosnia how knowledgeable people were who were just desperate for salvation.

[Indistinct conversation] Berger: There remain areas of fundamental difference.

Berger, voice-over: Beginning of '93, there are a series of meetings in the White House, and there were sharp disagreements, particularly about the use of force.

The military was strongly against it.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that point, General Powell, national hero, was adamantly opposed to it.

Albright: We were all new, and Colin Powell had just won the Gulf War.

He was the hero of the Western world, big, handsome man with medals all over...

Minimum loss of life... Albright, voice-over: and he was the best briefer ever.

We would ask him, "So what can we do?"

and he would always say, "Well, we can take this mountain, and we can do this," and ultimately, he would say, "But it would take several hundred thousand troops and then many billions of dollars," so he would walk us up a hill and say we could do it and then drop us off the other side, but he was the expert.

Powell: I never intended to intimidate anyone.

I always intended to give them straightforward military advice as to how force could be used, and it was theirs to make the political decision.

What Madeleine overlooks in that is that, even though my uniform is very lovely and I know how to brief a group, there was no enthusiasm within that group to send military force into the former Yugoslavia because it looked like it was coming apart.

Albright: I have to admit in my case, that I was deeply moved by what I had seen of people being killed or ethnically cleansed not for anything that they had done, but who they were, and I thought, we "We have to do something."

I actually got into an argument with him over this, and I finally said to him, "Colin, what are you saving this military for?"

and he got really mad at me, and he said, "Our soldiers are not toy soldiers."

"Why can't we use this wonderful army you're always talking about?"

and I just made the point to her, "We can use it anytime you ask if you have a clear purpose of what you're trying to achieve"...

I want to have a strategic force capability that still preserves... Powell, voice-over: and I don't know what objectives would have been set or what political goals the president might have articulated at that time.

He didn't articulate any.

Look.

You know as much about this as I do right now.

We'll just have to look into it, and we'll see, but meanwhile... Lake, voice-over: I think the president's instincts were always for stronger action, but I think by temperament, while he was always prepared to act, he also always wanted consensus, and that, I think, for the first year, certainly, of the administration was a particular problem because then he was always looking for the compromise, the consensus.

He wasn't making the hard decisions and saying, "Sorry.

I'm going with this and this."

♪ [Indistinct conversation] [Dog barking] ♪ Power, voice-over: When you would go into so-called Republika Srpska, you knew you were entering the heart of darkness.

You would drive down a road in this little ethnically cleansed statelet run by Bosnian Serb nationalists, and you would see the home lights.

You could imagine the hearth inside, windows intact, and then the very next house would have on it graffiti that would say, you know, "Muslims go home"... [Dog barking] and then 4 houses down, you'd see another bright, warm house where people were just going on with their lives.

♪ The sense in the air that evil had transpired is-- I mean, the air felt thick with that recent history somehow.

[Whimpers] [Insects buzzing] ♪ Weixiong Chen: Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, I thank you for giving CTED the opportunity to brief the Council on the 14th report... Albright, voice-over: As U.N. ambassador, I saw on a daily basis other members of the Security Council, as well as the representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, [Indistinct], would come to me every day and say, "Your president said he was gonna do something.

You're not doing anything.

Do something"... ♪ and I could judge what was going on in Sarajevo because I went a number of times... [Explosion] and driving through Sarajevo, I was just stunned that this kind of a thing could possibly happen.

We're talking about the 1990s.

♪ Then the question is, how do you go back and not sound like a blithering idiot, emotional?

And I went back to the White House, and I said, "I was in Sarajevo, where buildings had been bombed, "where there were fires still burning "and smoke coming still from a variety of buildings and people huddled on the street."

[Gunfire] Man: This--if this-- ♪ Albright, voice-over: "Why should we not help people "that also were living in a war zone that didn't need to be a war zone?"

and I said something like, "Gentlemen, history will judge us on this."

They would say, "Don't be so emotional, Madeleine."

[Gunfire] Woman: [Wailing] ♪ [Gunfire and wailing continue] ♪ [Gunshot] Man: [Speaking Serbian] Girl: [Crying] Woman: [Speaks Serbian] Girl: [Speaks Serbian] Elie Wiesel: Treblinka, Birkenau, Auschwitz-- these names and others were known to officials in Washington.

The Pentagon knew.

The White House knew.

Most governments knew.

Mr. President, indifference is a sin, and I cannot not tell you something.

I have been in the former Yugoslavia.

I cannot sleep since.

We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.

[Applause] Man: In response to the bloodshed in Bosnia, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel asked you yesterday to do something to stop the fighting.

Is the United States considering taking unilateral action such as airstrikes against Serb artillery sites?

Well, first, let me say, as you know, for more than a week now, we have been seriously reviewing our options for further action, and, to be fair, our allies in Europe have been willing to do their part.

I do not think we should act alone unilaterally, nor do I think we will have to.

Berger: We finally agreed to a position that we would use NATO air power to strike Serb positions if they continued to shell indiscriminately.

We took that to the Europeans, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

We discovered how boxed in we were by the Europeans.

♪ The Europeans said, "That's not acceptable because "our troops are on the ground "trying to keep the peace "and you can't start a war "with our troops in the middle of this.

"You Yanks, you just don't understand.

"You're not willing to pay the price, "you're not willing to come in here on the ground, "don't talk about lift and strike.

You don't get it"... [Gunfire] so there was friction between us.

They were taking losses.

Soldiers did die.

Man on television: [Speaking French] ♪ [Gunfire] [Men shouting] Lake, voice-over: Being a superpower does not mean you can put up a little sign on your desk saying, "We are the superpower," and then there are buttons you can push and you push a NATO button and the NATO will do what you want, et cetera.

You know, superpower means that you have leadership, and that leadership involves bringing along coalitions, bringing along your allies and others, or you're gonna fail.

Man: For 22 months, the world has watched and often tried to ignore the bloody civil war in Bosnia.

It is hard to watch and impossible to ignore what happened there today.

At least 60 civilians-- men, women, and children-- were killed, at least 200 injured when a market full of Saturday shoppers was shelled.

Man: Very concerned about the efforts by some elements...

Different man: In Africa today, a plane carrying the presidents of two African nations has apparently been shot down in the capital of Rwanda, where a civil war formally ended a few months ago.

Woman, voice-over: After the death of the two presidents, the racial tensions between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority might spark again into an ugly ethnic war.

[Birds chirping] Nancy Soderberg: I was sitting in my office, which was just off the Situation Room, and the Situation Room brought me a alert, which back then, a really serious alert had two red dots on it, literally two red dots, and that was like, "Pay attention to this right away," so I read it, and I had the CIA brief, and I said, "Well, what's the worst-case scenario with these two presidents gone?"

and they said, "Another round of violence, maybe 20,000 killed," and I thought, "Well, what should we do to stop that?"

and they didn't really have an answer.

That's not the CIA's job.

Prudence Bushnell: When the airplane went down, I sent the memo up saying that the peace agreement is at risk.

You know, there's chaos in the streets, and worst-case scenario, if we don't do anything, hundreds of thousands of people could be killed.

Man on radio: [Speaking Kinyarwanda] ♪ [Indistinct conversation] ♪ Man, voice-over: Massacres continue in the Central African nation of Rwanda.

The killing is a calculated attempt to exterminate the minority Tutsi that makes up 10% of Rwanda's 7 million people.

♪ Lake: I can recall the first time this really came to my attention, and I remember explicitly asking afterwards one of the people there from the Defense Intelligence Agency, "What's going on?

Who's killing whom?

Why?"

and his basically saying, "Don't know," and I should have when I got back to my office said, "I want to know more," and insisted on getting more involved, and I was at the time arguing about whether to intervene in Haiti and Bosnia and all kinds of stuff, and I didn't, and that was-- that's on me, and I'll regret it forever.

Clinton: There are about 250 Americans there, and I'm very concerned about their safety.

Man: ...is clearly part of the threat that we have to deal with.

George Moose, voice-over: I think it's fair to say that Africa tends to fall to the bottom of the list in terms of our American priorities.

You're talking about a lot of factors that lead to that.

Some of them have to do with how we calculate our national interests.

Some of those are, I would say, racial and racist.

All of those things, though, result in the fact that Africa and Africa's concerns and African interests and needs tend to fall to the bottom of that list of priorities.

♪ [Indistinct conversation] ♪ Bushnell, voice-over: Within 24 hours, there were two things that I learned almost simultaneously.

One was Madame Agathe, the prime minister.

[Cheering] I cannot tell you how she was slaughtered, but she was slaughtered-- she was pregnant-- in front of her husband and her children.

At the same time, we were learning that the Belgian peacekeepers who had been there to provide protection for her had been kidnaped and taken to the airport and killed.

Oh, my gosh, we knew if they started killing white people, it would be over.

We in African Affairs did not have the rose-colored glasses and thinking that, yes, this is a continent like any others and we look upon African people as we look upon European people.

John Shattuck, voice-over: The fact that they decapitated the Belgian peacekeepers so gruesomely and that the killings were so violent in that sense, one has to assume that the genocide planners very carefully said, "Let's really kill "some representatives of the international community early in this process to get them to withdraw," and they succeeded.

Clinton: I have had extended conversations about the situation in Rwanda, and I just want to assure the families of those who are there that we are doing everything we possibly can to be on top of the situation, to take all appropriate steps to try to ensure the safety of our citizens there.

♪ Laura Lane, voice-over: I remember when the order came that we were gonna start evacuating nonessential personnel and then move eventually to closing down the embassy.

♪ We were focused on how we would get Americans to centers and then move them overland to Burundi and negotiate the ceasefires so that those convoys wouldn't be fired on.

[Radio chatter] ♪ Bushnell, voice-over: The deal we made was that in return for safe passage of diplomats-- not only Americans, but diplomats of other embassies-- we would not take any Rwandan citizens with us, and we left our U.S. government employees, colleagues, to fend for themselves.

♪ Lane, voice-over: We could have, you know, any host of other nationalities join our convoy, just not the Rwandans, and I remember thinking at that moment, "How can that be?

"The orders that I'm being given, "I get to live because I was born in Evanston, Illinois, "but that woman that just brought her child "to the embassy begging that someone take that child, we're going to condemn that child to death?"

[Radio chatter] ♪ You saw images.

♪ The bodies that I saw, I couldn't make sense of it, right?

As you're driving along, you just think how out of place it is to see the bodies laying by the roadside.

You didn't know how to-- Like, conceptually, I knew that someone had been killed, and I guess I tried to just keep moving on and focus on the task at hand.

♪ Bushnell, voice-over: As soon as the Americans were out of Rwanda, the interest of the White House evaporated.

Point of fact, the president had come to State Department for an official dinner and stopped by the crisis group to say thank you and congratulations for getting Americans out, and that was the last I heard about Bill Clinton's interest in Rwanda.

Man: They authorized war crimes.

Richard A. Clarke, voice-over: It's very easy in hindsight to say that the United States should have dropped the 82nd Airborne into Kigali, but remember the time.

The Clinton administration had just suffered enormous political problems by the American people waking up one day and finding out that we had troops in Somalia and that some of those troops got killed, and the American people, the American media, the American Congress asked, "What the hell are you doing in Somalia?"

[Helicopter whirring] Man, voice-over: What started as a humanitarian intervention to feed starving people turned into a nightmare.

18 U.S. servicemen were killed today when two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down.

They were dragging him by ropes, and they paused every once in a while to allow people in the crowd to abuse the body by kicking it or stomping on it and spitting on it.

Berger, voice-over: A horrible thing to watch because they kept running the film of our soldiers being dragged through the streets.

It was horrifying to watch, horrible, horrible day.

It was one of the worst days for me in the White House.

Clarke: After that experience, everybody in Washington and everybody around the country said, "Let's not do that again.

"When American interests are not at stake, "Let's not put American forces in a situation where they can be killed."

♪ Bushmill: We saw the United States government take the lead in removing peacekeepers in the face of a genocide.

I will never ever forget the look on the face of team members, including our desk officer from Rwanda, when I was notified that we were going to remove the peacekeepers.

He looked at me and he said, "Do you know what's going to happen?"

It was a look of utter horror because both of us knew what was going to happen, and it did happen.

[Distant siren] Clarke: Rwanda was discussed.

President knew about it.

The senior leaders of the government all knew about it.

People were aware.

What I'm saying is that no one of all the senior leadership in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House-- no one ever said, "Gee, let's drop in the 82nd Airborne."

Nobody cared.

That it was the only way I can--I can put it.

Nobody wanted to hear about it.

Nobody wanted to do anything about it because the decision had been made we would not.

[Helicopter whirring] [Radio chatter] ♪ Shattuck, voice-over: I wanted to actually go and see for myself what was happening.

I was the first person in the government to actually fly over Rwanda.

I had the plane fly as low as possible, and the most vivid example of what I saw was on the border area between Tanzania and Rwanda, where there was a river.

From several thousand feet, it looked as if there were these little logs that were flowing in the river down toward Lake Victoria.

I said, "I don't understand this.

Let's go down."

♪ These were not logs.

These were bodies, and there were many of them.

They were flowing down the river, and that's why they looked like logs, there were so many.

♪ The physical elements of the genocide, it's just something that stays with you that you can't ever get out of you.

♪ Sometimes when I'm in a small river, I think I see bodies floating in the river.

♪ I went from this trip to Geneva, and in Geneva, I gave a press conference in which I said, "Genocide is going on in Rwanda," and then I was told by Washington, particularly by the Legal Advisor's Office of the State Department, that that was not the policy.

We don't call this genocide.

It was against policy.

Ha ha!

The U.S. policy was that we haven't determined yet that this is a genocide.

It was unbelievable.

♪ Frankly, a lot of us, especially after John Shattuck's visit out there, that question was answered.

If anything could be called genocide, this was it, and the next step was, "OK. "If you acknowledge "it's genocide, "then what are you going to do about it?"

right?

If you say it's genocide and we have a genocide convention, what's your obligation?

♪ Alan Elsner: Does the State Department have a view as to whether or not what is happening could be genocide?

Well, as I think you know, the use of the term "genocide" has a very precise legal meaning, although it's not strictly a legal determination.

There are there are other factors in there, as well.

Before we begin to use that term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation.

How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?

Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer.

♪ Moose: The case of Rwanda revealed our bureaucracy at its very worst.

♪ It took us forever to get a paper up to Secretary Christopher that would make the case that this was genocide and we had to declare it as such, even if it meant we did not know what the next step was.

♪ Clinton: I have come today to pay the respects of my nation to all who suffered and all who perished in the Rwanda genocide.

During the 90 days that began on April 6 in 1994, Rwanda experienced the most intensive slaughter in this blood-filled century we are about to leave.

It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world, there were people like me sitting in offices day after day after day who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.

I did feel, even though I think his apology was genuine, that it was a very hollow moment.

It was hollow because, heh, 800,000 people had perished and nothing had been done.

The fact is, where there is a political will, there is a political way.

I cannot imagine that the President of the United States could not have influenced the policy process, and he did not, and to say later on it was because of ignorance is, to me, unbecoming of the leader of the free world and the American foreign policy, unbecoming.

♪ Power: Walter Laqueur, the Holocaust historian, had a line that I will never forget.

He wrote, "By 1943, the vast majority of Americans "knew that more than a million Jews were no longer alive, "but that did not necessarily mean that they knew that they were dead," and, to me, this horror of a concept really speaks to the two kinds of knowledge that people can have, you know-- a sort of surface knowledge where you're processing clinically, cognitively, but nothing is really reaching you and then a different kind where you're, you know, "They've been killed.

They're--" and this idea of no longer alive versus dead, I feel, really speaks to a lot of the numbing that bureaucracy can facilitate.

Man: Good evening.

More than 3 years after the beginnings of the hostilities, the war in Bosnia is still charging a bloody toll on the civilian population.

The Serb army is reinforcing its forces positioned around the Muslim enclaves of Zepa, Gorazde, and Srebrenica and is slowly closing in.

♪ The town of Srebrenica was the first of 6 areas in Bosnia that the United Nations Protection Force vowed to actually protect.

♪ Power, voice-over: In the summer of 1995, we began to get word that the Serbs were moving toward what had been declared a safe area.

Thousands of civilians did what civilians all around the world do in times of crises when the U.N. is around.

They see that blue flag, and they go toward it.

That's all they got.

Woman, voice-over: From positions less than a mile south of Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb tanks and several thousand soldiers overran a battalion of 400 Dutch peacekeepers.

[Speaking Serbian] Power, voice-over: Srebrenica was special to the Serbs, special in the sense that it was atop the list of places where it wasn't just territory they wanted.

They wanted to inflict a degree of harm that made it impossible for these people ever to live in this territory again, and the way you do that is genocide.

[Indistinct conversation] Power, voice-over: I watched from Sarajevo on Serb TV as Ratko Mladic went, was patting the heads of children, offering them candy.

"Nobody will be harmed.

Women and children this way, men this way," and you just saw the faces of these people.

They knew.

Like, we didn't know, but they knew.

Mladic: [Speaking Serbian] Peter Galbraith, voice-over: Ratko Mladic was just-- He was a psychopathic murderer.

I think that's the only way to describe him, a man of extraordinary cruelty who directed the ethnic cleansing.

[Speaking Serbian] Shattuck, voice-over: General Ratko Mladic and his Bosnian Serb forces basically rounded up all of the people of the town, separated men from boys and women and children and old people, sent the women and children and old people on busses out of the town, and basically began to go after the men.

♪ Man: [Speaking Serbian] ♪ Galbraith, voice-over: At this point, everybody is focused on the women and girls who were being bused out and the fact that, you know, the women are being robbed and a few of the girls are being taken off the busses and raped, and so that's the human rights story, and I'm trying to get people to focus on the missing men and boys.

[Speaks Serbian] ♪ [Distant machine gun fire] Man: [Speaks Serbian] [Speaks Serbian] [Speaking Serbian] [Distant machine gun fire] [Birds chirping] ♪ [Speaks Serbian] Man: [Speaks Serbian] [Cocks rifle] [Gunshots] [Gunshot] Man: [Speaks Serbian] [Machine gun fire] [Machine gun fire] [Gunshots] [Gunshots] [Gunshot] [Distant gunshot] [Machine gun fire] [Indistinct conversation] ♪ [Gunshot] [Gunshots] ♪ Shattuck, voice-over: Nobody knew quite what had happened to these missing men, and at that stage, I said, "I've got to go."

♪ I went to Tuzla, and I was able, with the help of the local U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Office, to identify half a dozen men who had escaped from Srebrenica, and we interviewed them... ♪ and they told this extraordinary story about how they were forced out and marched to these open pits, and there, 7,000 of them were executed, and later on, two young CIA officers came up with the actual photographs of the sites with mass graves before the graves were dug, and then afterwards, men standing in a field, and then they were shot.

♪ You know, I said, "It's-- This is genocide again."

[Distant siren] Shattuck: Let me tell you, from the perspective of my participation in the trip... Shattuck, voice-over: When I came back from Srebrenica, I was asked to describe literally what I had seen and heard, and there was deathly silence.

You could almost hear a pin drop.

♪ Panetta: Now you have another massacre taking place.

It's happening today, not 40 years ago.

It's happening now, and in many ways, the blood of those who are dying is on your hands, and you've got to deal with it.

It's the third year of his presidency, and he's finally saying, "Excuse me.

"This is my presidency.

"It's my legacy, and history will say "whether or not Bill Clinton did the right thing "in this situation, and, you know, I'm prepared to take that risk."

♪ Lake: I think, frankly, what changed him was, one, he was moved by what he saw happening, and secondly, the political calculus changed also because we got closer to the presidential election in 1996, and the president's political advisors, I think, changed from, "Be careful.

Let's not get too involved," to, "You really need to resolve this before 1996."

♪ Clinton: My fellow Americans, in this new era, there are still times when America and America alone can and should make the difference for peace.

♪ The United States led NATO's heavy and continuous airstrikes.

Those airstrikes, together with the renewed determination of our European partners, convinced the Serbs finally to start thinking about making peace.

♪ Warren Christopher: The agreement saved countless thousands of lives by ending the fighting between the communities in the Republic.

Serious obstacles remained... Lake, voice-over: When we got the signing of Dayton, it was just-- I just felt sad at all the bloodshed, all that had gone before this.

They were all so somber.

It was, uh-- Bosnia was just sad, I'm afraid.

I would love to say that it was a moment of euphoria, but it had been so painful.

[Helicopter whirring] ♪ Power, voice-over: When I left Bosnia, being a young correspondent, I felt part of a world that hadn't done enough.

♪ You know, I just had a sense of how many lives could have been saved sooner, you know, had the decision that was belatedly made been made before, and that was a question that long ago as a much younger person I had asked myself about the Holocaust.

♪ My high-school understanding of the Holocaust could be reduced to, "Hitler was exterminating the Jews, and, therefore, we went to war," and I would later learn that the issue of the extermination of the Jews just didn't rise within the system in the way that you would have expected-- or that I would have expected.

The idea that the fate of an imperiled people when it came to refugee admissions, bombing the train tracks to just make it a little bit harder, it just was striking to me that those issues in and of themselves just didn't rise.

♪ As somebody who believed in America and the idea of "never again," I just was struck by that because that wasn't ever part of kind of the history lessons that I got in this country.

♪ What I was struck by when I came back from Bosnia was the extent to which our culture was having a surge of commemoration and remembrance related to the Holocaust... ♪ and yet I had just come from this experience where the Bosnian Serbs had attempted to wipe out a people in Europe 50 years after the Holocaust, and the connections weren't really drawn.

♪ It was at that point, then, that I go to the library and, you know, thinking maybe there would be books on the decision makers, on the bystanders.

I'll never forget being at Harvard's huge library and it just being very, very clear that question, at least as I was understanding it, had not been posed and the question had not been answered, so initially for a paper for a class, because I was in law school, I began sort of exploring, going back over the cases that I didn't know a lot about-- like the Armenian Genocide, Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge, what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds-- and then coming up to the present and my own recent experiences... ♪ and so that paper, then, it became clear there was kind of something there, that this fulsome consensus about applying the lessons of the Holocaust, that was living in great tension with what policymakers were doing, and yet the tension seemed one that was not being grappled with.

[Typing] ♪ [Mouse click] ♪ [Typing] ♪ When I was working on my book, "Problem from Hell," what was clear was that there is a sense in many circles that promoting your values is somehow discordant with your interests.

My own view is that more often than not that that's a false dichotomy.

♪ The most powerful rendition of this, I think, came when I looked at the Iraq-related cables from the eighties where the cable actually read, "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, comma," our interests run parallel to those of Iraq"... ♪ and so it's right there.

You know, they're just saying that really crummy things are happening through chemical weapons use and horrible human rights abuses, but our interests are divorced from all of that.

♪ Traditionally, our conception of our national interest would include preventing chemical weapons use, and yet here it was, "Chemical weapons use aside, we're good.

You know, we've got trade to do."

Reagan: Our countries share common interests in developing practical solutions to the problems... Clarke: We certainly knew to some degree what was going on, and we knew that Saddam was using chemical weapons inside his country against Kurds and others.

I don't think the Reagan administration, or later the Bush administration, could ever claim that they were unaware of it.

They were aware of it... and two administrations were willing to put up with a fair amount of obnoxious activity by Iraq in order to contain Iran.

...our instructions to our ambassador to give him some negotiating room.

Dror Moreh: Doesn't it undermine America's credibility when you have relationship with someone like Saddam Hussein while you know that he is engaging in a chemical warfare against the Kurds?

You're acting as though anytime you see something you don't like, you pick up and leave, and basically, that would leave you outside of most parts of the United States and in no place in the world.

I don't know where you would hold up.

It would certainly not be Washington, D.C. Maybe it would be Santa Barbara, California, but there are hardly any places where there's nothing-- where there's nothing wrong... ♪ so problems are everywhere.

You got to deal with them.

It's the ultimate alibi, right?

It's, the interests are just an infinitely elastic concept, so if you want to do something, you say it's in your interests.

I can make an argument for why cutting off aid to Saddam Hussein after he gasses his people is in our interests.

It's in the interest of U.S. soldiers for chemical weapons not to be used in the battlefield... [Explosions] ♪ and in this instance, this ally ended up invading Kuwait, and the same individuals who thought it had been in our interest to work with him were in a position of having to mobilize vast expenditures, put a huge number of U.S. lives on the line in order to counter his aggression.

♪ [Indistinct conversation] Man, voice-over: Saddam Hussein's tanks and soldiers poured over the Kuwaiti border.

Within 24 hours, Saddam came in control of 1/5 of the world's oil reserves, and the Iraqi army is within reach of the Saudi oil fields.

♪ Bush: We see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.

Summary executions, routine torture, Hitler revisited.

♪ Moreh: How come all of a sudden, your ally Saddam Hussein turns into "Hitler revisited"?

Baker: Well, the occupation was extraordinarily brutal, so if we do have informing our foreign policy, which we do, the concept that we're against human rights violations and war crimes and ethnic cleansing and so forth, then when it happens, that's another justification for doing what we did, and so we reversed it, but I'm also here to tell you, one of the reasons we reversed it was because of the threat to our secure access to the energy reserves of the Gulf.

That was a fairly serious national interest.

People didn't want to talk about it.

"Ooh, you're just fighting over filthy oil.

That's so because of money, money, money, money."

Well, money's-- money's worth fighting over, in my views.

Sanctions were tried, and we included the sanctions.

Charlie Rose: Samantha Power is here.

She is a lecturer in U.S. foreign policy.

Her new book, "A Problem from Hell" examines America's response to genocide in the 20th century.

Woman, voice-over: In her Pulitzer-winning work, Samantha Power outlines how all administrations throughout the century have shied away from action.

Different woman: Her book is a passionate, normative judgment about what U.S. foreign policy should be, in her view.

The system is broken, and we all have to put our heads together to try to fix it.

Instead, I'm going to try to inspire you to become, shall we say, upstanders in a world that is sadly crowded with bystanders.

♪ Power: When I first met Barack Obama, it was my book "A Problem from Hell," I guess, that had caused him to reach out.

I met him at some steakhouse up on Capitol Hill, you know, should have been an hour-long meal, but it was, like, 4 or 5 hours or something, was just a great meeting of the minds.

The fact that there was an American politician who had read a 600-page book on genocide, it seemed, who came away from that book wanting to understand how we could do better at integrating human consequences into our decision making, wanting to understand what is it about all these people of good faith who go into public service to try to make the world better and then somehow this conception of national interests-- this stoic, kind of cold and clinical conception of what we are in government to do--takes over and we forget about the people who might have drawn us into this enterprise in the first place.

Foreseeable replacement forces coming in.

Power, voice-over: By the end of the dinner, I kind of found myself volunteering to go and work with him in a more official capacity, and I moved down very soon thereafter to Washington, and I advised him day to day.

♪ People of the world, will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe?

Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur?

[Cheering and applause] People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment.

This is our time.

We needed a new infusion of energy into our politics.

We needed somebody with a different message and a different story who can turn over a new page and bring something new and different to American politics.

[Cheering and applause] Obama: This moment-- this moment, this election, is our chance to keep in the 21st century the American promise alive.

[Cheering and applause] Crowd: Yes, we can.

Yes, we can.

Yes, we can.

Yes, we can.

Jake Sullivan, voice-over: Barack Obama and Michelle Obama become the President and First Lady of the United States in my lifetime, it said that our country has a special capacity to redeem its highest values.

Even though we screw up, even though we're imperfect, we can also reach very high and very far in service of our highest ideals, and that's what it said to me.

[People shouting] Woman, voice-over: December 17 in Tunisia, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, sets himself on fire in a protest against government policies, becoming the catalyst for a Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring.

Within months, demonstrations arise in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria.

Man, voice-over: Anger erupted onto the streets, riot police rushing a crowd carrying banners reading, "Yes, we can."

Woman: The regional experts say the process will remain a challenge for U.S. presidents.

[Shouting continues] Man, voice-over: In Libya, after almost 4 decades of ruthless dictatorship, huge crowds demonstrated in the streets of Benghazi.

[Gunfire] It's been a wild 24 hours in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi has made it clear he's not going without a fight.

Man: ♪ Man, voice-over: If it's an internal or an external conspiracy, we'll erase it.

Sullivan, voice-over: We began to get reports of protests in many different cities in Libya, including Tripoli and Benghazi, and then we began to get reports that those protests were being fired upon.

[Gunfire] Sullivan, voice-over: As soon as that happened, it was added to what became the daily agenda of events in the region.

"OK. Now we got to talk Libya."

[People shouting] ♪ [Gunshot] Gaddafi: [Speaking Arabic] Anderson Cooper, voice-over: What is happening there is a massacre?

Alex Crawford, voice-over: There are large-scale deaths.

They are women.

They are children.

They're old people.

They're not fighters.

Power, voice-over: I remember the feeling we had Gaddafi's own words, just very explicit-- "I'm gonna hunt them down," so it was really more just, "Whoa."

This is just one of those moments that you're on the front end of something.

You can't predict it.

[People shouting] ♪ Very frankly... ♪ Sullivan, voice-over: Secretary Clinton went to the Elysee Palace and sat down one on one with Nicolas Sarkozy, and he was extremely agitated about what might happen in Benghazi and about the absolute, unshakable, undeniable need for France and the United States and the United Kingdom to go do something about it right away.

The French and the British viewed Libya as a direct threat to them-- chaos, genocide literally on their doorstep.

♪ Sullivan, voice-over: The time pressure was enormous.

We started that process thinking we've got some time, and then town after town fell fast, really fast.

Within days, Gaddafi's forces were knocking on the doorstep of Benghazi.

[Shouting] Man, voice-over: Colonel Gaddafi's forces are pushing east.

They seem unstoppable.

Different man, voice-over: The regime claims that within two days, these troops would be in Benghazi.

[Gunfire] We are still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.

Power, voice-over: On March 15, the president convenes his national security cabinet and a few backbenchers like myself.

The president opens up the meeting, and he's not in a good mood.

David Petraeus: The fact is that... Rhodes, voice-over: The meeting begins with a briefing from the intelligence community, and there's a map in front of everybody, and there's a dot on the map--Benghazi, a city of several hundred thousand people, and then you can see the progression of Gaddafi's forces, and they're in a town called Ajdabiya, and it is explained to us that this is kind of the last stop on the way to Benghazi, and from this position, they can move in and just-- Gaddafi'd said they were gonna go door to door and kill people like rats, and I remember, you know, going around the table, and Obama is literally asking people, "Should I take action "to save these people in this city "that we all know are going to be killed, or should I not?"

Clinton, voice-over: I laid out all of the factors, including the Arab support, not just rhetoric, but commitments for military assets and action, and our major allies in Europe, you know, we historically are always asking them to support us, but now they were asking us to support them.

I don't see why that's... Denis McDonough, voice-over: I argued against intervening.

The main concern was that it was a set of responsibilities that were beyond what I thought was prudent, given the other demands on the United States at the time.

I thought we should avoid another military conflict.

Rhodes: Biden says, "No.

You'd be crazy to get another war in the Middle East."

Bob Gates says no.

The military is saying, "We have too much to do "in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can't afford to move all these resources over here," and I remember I could feel it working its way around to me, and my argument was essentially, "If you don't do this "and these people all get massacred, "how will you explain this?

"I mean, how can we tell the world "everybody was ready to act, and what would it say if we don't act in this circumstance?"

Antony Blinken: It really went to the fact that we had a unique situation, that there was a responsibility but also an opportunity to demonstrate that the international community could act effectively to stop atrocities, could do it in a way that was grounded in international law, and the failure to take action would contribute potentially to the further unraveling of the international system.

Rhodes: Obama described this decision to me as kind of a 51/49 call in his mind.

He had to weigh both sets of arguments, and he decided to do it.

Woman, voice-over: The question looming over the Security Council today is how Russia or China will vote.

In the past, the two superpowers constantly vetoed interventions inside the sovereign state.

Man, voice-over: We see China abstaining, Russia abstaining, and here comes the vote total, all necessary measures to protect the civilian population as Gaddafi's forces move in on Benghazi.

Obama: The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Arab states agree that a ceasefire must be implemented immediately.

If Gaddafi does not comply with the resolution, the international community will impose consequences.

♪ [Beeping] ♪ Woman, voice-over: U.S. F-15 and F-16 fighter jets have flown dozens of sorties alongside British, French, and Danish jets.

The Italians and Spanish are providing... Man, voice-over: France and Britain going to be taking the lead on the airstrikes, with the U.S. playing a key role.

♪ [Explosion] [Man shouts] [Siren] Moreh: Basically, you manage in two weeks to stop him marching to Benghazi, so why did it continue afterwards?

These things, they have-- they have a momentum and an inertia and a scale of size and weight.

It was very clear that was the main mission, stop Gaddafi, and then the evolution of what happens after that wasn't overly clear.

So you didn't debate what will be the next steps after the war?

You didn't debate that?

No.

Experienced men-- Gates, you--how?

It wasn't like we didn't put it on the table.

They weren't interested.

[Shouting] ♪ Panetta, voice-over: Underneath it all is a recognition that ultimately, you're not going to change things without regime change and that, while you don't say it, the reality is that you know the only way you're going to achieve some kind of end here is to end the regime.

[Shouting] ♪ [Machine gun fire] [Shouting continues] ♪ [Indistinct conversation] [Shouting] Man: [Shouts in Arabic] [Call to prayer on P.A.]

Sullivan, voice-over: Libya's only hope was to have some kind of stabilization force that could tamp down violence and engage in some kind of demobilization of the militias.

Secretary Clinton posed the question very directly to the Europeans-- "You know, this is on your doorstep.

"What are you gonna do about this?

What role are you prepared to play?"

and European leaders from France and the U.K., from Italy all said, "We intend to have a significant hand in the shaping of the aftermath of any military action."

[People chanting] ♪ McDonough, voice-over: President Obama negotiated with Prime Minister Cameron, President Sarkozy his view that steps post action will be as important to the successful outcome in Libya, and he sought their assurance, and they gave it to him, that they would take the lead on post-action efforts in Libya.

Unfortunately, they just were not in a position to deliver.

[Gunfire] Man, voice-over: Libya has become increasingly unstable, with rival militias engaged in some of the fiercest fights.

Woman, voice-over: Some say it's the worst violence in Libya since the revolution in 2011.

[Men shouting] [Gunfire] Rhodes: Obama would call me in and, you know, get frustrated because Cameron and Sarkozy just couldn't do that.

He expressed increasing frustration that anybody who says that the United States is not gonna have to end up doing all this ourselves is not acknowledging what we're learning from history but also from Libya, which is that everyone will say, "Sure, we'll do all these things," but on the back end, it was like, "OK. "What is the U.S. gonna do to put this place back together again?"

[Distant gunfire] Mullen, voice-over: We'd invaded, if you will.

We'd intervened, and then we all left, not just the U.S. Everybody left, and--Colin Powell said this, you know-- if you break it, you own it, and we broke it, and we didn't own it.

What stunned me is, having learned some version of that lesson in Iraq, we didn't do it in Libya.

I mean, it stuns me to this day.

Biden: Tell me what happens.

He's gone, what happens?

Doesn't the country disintegrate?

Sullivan, voice-over: The minute that you walk into the White House Situation Room, you immediately recognize that you've got a collection of imperfect people with imperfect information about what's going on facing imperfect choices and in an imperfect process where it's hard to actually draw in all the right people to contribute to the decision, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that you end up getting imperfect results.

Biden: 200,000 300,000 or 150,000 troops... Sullivan, voice-over: Every solution you propose or present or pursue almost necessarily creates new problems, so, even when you think you've done the right thing, you have generated a whole set of additional decisions that themselves put you back in this loop of imperfection.

Obama: The United States can't get in the middle of somebody else's civil war.

[Chanting in Arabic] Man: [Rapping in Arabic] Man, voice-over: Huge demonstrations today throughout Syria calling for more freedom and dignity.

Woman, voice-over: The Syrian government made it very clear today that it will tolerate no dissent.

[People shouting and whistling] [Machine gun fire] Man: [Shouting in Arabic] [Shouting continues] [Machine gun fire] Power, voice-over: In Syria, it was so clear that Assad was employing a how-to manual of how to basically be the most savage leader in the Arab world, the most savage responder to peaceful protests.

You're seeing him use incendiary weapons.

Into 2012, he's using napalm.

We're already hearing the reports of what snipers are doing and how people are being tortured with acid and electric shock in the prisons.

♪ I got the sense that Syria was going to be a problem from hell in early 2012, when the Russian Perm Rep to the U.N., Vitaly Churkin, told Susan Rice, who was our ambassador to the United Nations, that the Russians would go along with the resolution.

They called for a halt to the violence, and then Secretary Clinton had a meeting with Sergey Lavrov to talk about the resolution before the vote, and Lavrov basically told her, "It ain't happening.

We're not supporting it.

We're backing Assad," and at that moment, it became clear to me that you now had great powers pitted against each other in Syria and with that, the conflict was going to be very difficult to manage and Assad was going to be empowered to slaughter even more of his own people.

♪ [People wailing] ♪ Derek Chollet, voice-over: We saw the situation in Syria unraveling.

It looked that either Assad was going to do something to use the chemical weapons or there would be a loss of control of some kind, and so the question would always come back to, "Well, what happens with the chemical weapons?

Around one of those moments with the president, he's asked a question-- "Well, what would happen if these chemical weapons were on the loose?"

Chuck Todd.

Do you envision using U.S. military, if simply for nothing else the safe keeping of the chemical weapons?

We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized, that's a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons.

Obama violated one of the core tenets of press conferences, which is, you never answer a hypothetical question, so he answered a hypothetical question.

That would change my calculus.

That would change my equation, all right?

Thank you, everybody.

At that moment, it became this kind of line in the sand.

If chemical weapons were used, the full force and fury of U.S. military power would be used against Assad.

♪ Woman, voice-over: The images you are about to see are so important because they're being held up tonight by Syrian rebels as evidence of what may be the worst chemical weapons attack anywhere since Saddam Hussein gassed the Iraqi Kurds in 1988.

The United States government now knows that at least 1,429 Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children.

We know where the rockets were launched from and at what time.

Power, voice-over: You have these families who were just sleeping, minding their own business.

The gas comes in.

It's very clear from where the regime fired it into opposition villages.

I mean, the question of who did it is a nonissue.

With our own eyes, we have seen the thousands of reports.

All of them show and report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with spasms, coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth, unconsciousness, and death.

♪ Power, voice-over: Looking at those photographs of those kids lined up, those little kids, you just see the size of them, the size of my own kids at that time, and just lines, just rows of them.

You know, I mean-- Man: Oh... [Crying] [Speaking Arabic] So the primary question is really no longer what do we know.

The question is, what are we-- we collectively-- what are we in the world gonna do about it?

Man: The composition of... Power, voice-over: I went into the first meeting with the president after the strike with my arguments lined up, ready to make the case for how this is an existential threat in the sense that it's a chemical weapon that can kill so many, and I didn't need to make any argument.

President Obama knew exactly what he was going to do.

10 days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women, and children were massacred in Syria in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century, and after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.

...ban against the use of chemical weapons and prohibitions against other weapons of mass destruction.

Chuck Hagel, voice-over: We wanted to do something that was meaningful, that would hurt him, that would affect his ability to continue what he was doing.

The military options were discussed.

It was the National Security Council.

We gave the president those options.

He chose one.

We had it all set.

It was ready to go.

We had all agreed on it.

We have options to deal with chemicals, long-range rockets and missiles... We must come together as... Rhodes, voice-over: The first time I saw Obama have second thoughts was the middle of the week, and he's calling Angela Merkel asking her not for troops or planes, just political support, Just a statement in support of bombing Syria.

Obama said, "Angela, I need you on this."

I mean, you know, he made, like, a forceful plea, how it was a moral case, there's a strategic case, and she said, "Barack"-- she said it with some feeling because they were very close, you know--"Barack, you want to go through this process.

"I'm telling you this as a friend.

"If you go in now, Putin's going to say, "you know, you made this up.

Support's not gonna be there," and I remember him hanging up the phone, and it was the first time I saw some doubt creep in, and he said to me, you know, something along the lines of, like, "People really-- Nobody wants to do this, you know?"

Sullivan: The Russians did not want us to attack, and they basically said, "You have no basis or right "to do this because it wasn't the Assad regime.

It was the opposition."

We asked them for any evidence that they could put forward to justify their claim, and they had nothing.

Kerry: ...chemical weapons to the international community.

Step by step over the course of that week, events begin to intrude.

The British Parliament votes to prevent Cameron from joining this...

It is clear to me that the British Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action.

I get that, and the government will act accordingly.

While we're in a meeting with the leadership of the U.S. Congress that is telling us that they will only support it with congressional authorization...

The bloodshed is gonna end.

Rhodes, voice-over: and so this question became, "What do we do?"

I remember I was in a meeting in Denis' office on Friday afternoon, and Denis gets kind of a tap on the shoulder, you know, "Boss wants to see you," ...and we've wrestled with this issue very... McDonough, voice-over: After several hours of meetings with his National Security Council that day, we took a long walk on the South Lawn.

I have a view on these matters, which is that Congress has a responsibility to have a role.

The Founding Fathers had a view that Congress declares wars and raises armies.

That's my view, that the American people have the confidence that the institutions of the government, including the Congress, are involved in that decision.

♪ Rhodes: Dennis comes back, and then I get a tap on the shoulder saying, "You need to go to the Oval Office."

♪ I get in, and Obama stands up from behind the Oval Office, and there's nobody else there, and he says, "I've got a big idea," and I knew that whatever decision he'd made, he had made that decision just before he even told me what it was by his demeanor, his appearance... Obama: Think that on issues like this, it's important... Rhodes, voice-over: and he said, "I believe I need to seek "congressional authorization "because I don't believe that this will be a one-off.

"Like, if we bomb Syria, "this is something we're gonna be doing for a long time, "and I can't sustain this politically without congressional authorization," and then he's getting into the fact that the same dysfunction in the U.S. Congress is present internationally, which is, "All the Europeans say, "We got to do something about this," "but are they gonna be there in a year or two years or 3 years if this thing goes like I think it's going to go?"

and then he said, "You know, if it's Syria now, It'll be Iran next, and where does this all end?"

and I remember there's a picture of this meeting, and I look like a balloon that has been deflated because I was accepting something I didn't want to accept, which is, I'd operated under the belief that-- for two years that we could do something in Syria, and then I had the President of United States, who happens to be my boss and someone who I know very well, kind of laying out for me why that's not gonna work unless we get congressional authorization.

I mean, it was kind of obvious that he was, in some respects, pulling back the throttle.

♪ Kerry: ...because a lot of other countries whose policies challenged these international norms are watching.

They are watching.

They want to see whether the United States and our friends mean what we say.

It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something.

They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk.

It's about choices that will directly affect our role in the world and our interests in the world.

It is also profoundly about who we are.

We are the United States of America.

♪ Robert Malley: How do you make decisions, and are you thinking about an action today or its consequences in the next year?

How much weight do you put on an issue like credibility?

If you believe that issuing that red line was a mistake, do you then have to compound that mistake with another mistake in order not to lose credibility?

♪ I think for President Obama, the credibility was the reason the U.S. had made more mistakes in its history than virtually anything else, Vietnam being one of them, and continuing with wrong policy, so human factor, what kind of person are you when you confront those decisions, I think that's what it's all about.

Panetta: The one thing you have as president is credibility, and once you give your word, once you say you're gonna do something, then people expect that you will follow through on your word, and if you don't--if you don't, then that will be read as weakness, and people then will think they can take advantage of you because, regardless of what you say, they don't really believe you're going to act on your word, and that, more than anything, can weaken your ability to deal with crisis.

This week, when I addressed the nation on Syria, I said that, in part because of the credible threat of U.S. military force, there is the possibility of a diplomatic solution.

Russia has indicated a new willingness to join with the international community in pushing Syria to give up its chemical weapons.

If there's any chance of achieving that goal without resorting to force, then I believe we have a responsibility to pursue that path.

Woman, voice-over: Some say the agreement emboldens Russia.

Man, voice-over: This is a Russian plan for Russian interests.

Woman, voice-over: President Obama tried to downplay the notion that this is a win for America's historic geopolitical foe.

♪ Power: It was a mistake to go to Congress, and, while we made the best of a bad situation in negotiating the end of Syria's chemical weapons program, it was clear they were always gonna keep some for a rainy day, and it was clear that after that, the threat of the use of force inevitably was gonna mean less than it had meant before.

♪ Man, voice-over: The situation in Syria continued to grow worse by the day.

John McCain: Thousands and thousands and thousands, 192,000 dead, 3 million refugees, and we're not gonna do anything about Assad?

[People shouting] Power, voice-over: 2014, we were fighting ISIS.

We were dealing with U.S. embassies under siege, U.S. journalists being beheaded.

The emphasis was on the lives of Americans, but at the same time, to be just reminded again and again of the inadequacy of what we were doing commensurate to our stated objectives, our stated objectives were alleviation of suffering-- not happening; sufferings getting worse-- preventing the rise of terrorist groups, stemming refugee flow, refugee flow getting worse, I mean, on every axis... ♪ but the suffering is one that makes you feel potentially-- certainly, I felt this way at a different level-- but guilty.

It makes you feel like you're not-- you know, that you're letting innocents down, and you're the only-- and Obama would be very clear-eyed.

He'd have no alibi for himself.

He knows that the only hope they have is America.

Across the globe, lot of people think something should be done, but nobody wants to do it, and that's not an unusual... Malley, voice-over: Once in the White House, there was a discussion on Syria, and Samantha was pushing back on what we needed to do, and she was getting frustrated, and the president was getting frustrated.

After the meeting, he goes up, and he turns around and says, "Samantha, come with me to the Oval.

It's not gonna be something that the United States... Malley, voice-over: I don't know what they said, but to me, as I read it, she was always his bad conscience.

She was the person who reminded him of the side of him who was idealistic.

...hitting hospitals, hitting refugee... Malley, voice-over: There are very few people that he would have a back-and-forth with in the Situation Room.

He would have back-and-forth with her because he respected her views, because he knew she disagreed.

We had rules in place dealing with... Power, voice-over: There were a lot of layers in the dynamic between President Obama and myself on Syria.

You know, he wouldn't let a Syria meeting end without saying, "Sam, what you got?"

you know.

Because I'd often be on the screen, he'd say, "I see that look of skepticism," and I could-- You know, sometimes I would speak, and I could just see him getting impatient and not liking the message.

You know, one time it was, "We've all read your book, Samantha.

"In other words, we don't need to be reminded "of the human consequences "of bystanding in the face of mass atroc--" like, "We get it," like, "Spare us," kind of... ♪ and my view to this day is that he heard moral judgment because that was the voice in his head.

No matter how I articulated what I was saying, he heard me saying, "You're a bystander."

Geir O. Pedersen: Let me express the gravest concern that the violence is, so far, not abating.

No one... Stephanie Ruhle: Realistically, how close are we to any sort of real resolution to stop this?

We've got to get a political solution not just for Syria.

It's because of a failed policy which has allowed this situation in Syria to deteriorate to the point where people just have to leave.

Power, voice-over: I'd had a warm relationship with Senator McCain, so when Tony Blinken, a colleague of mine and friend of mine, was up for being deputy secretary of state and McCain was placing what's called a hold on his nomination, I said, "Tony, I got this," so I called.

Senator McCain took the call.

I basically got about two sentences into my pitch just to vouch that Tony was very concerned about the Syrians, but McCain, he just cut me off, and he just says, "How can you live with yourself?

How?"

you know, "You're gonna make the policy better?

"This policy is a disaster.

"Hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, "and you, the author of "A Problem from Hell," "are part of this administration.

You're complicit in this," and he just went on and on.

McCain: ...strategy, there is no success.

Power, voice-over: You know, I had the phone initially here, and then it was so loud, but I kept trying to kind of reroute it to Tony and saying, "Look.

I think if he's in the room, there will be another voice," and he's like, "Please.

Another voice.

Like yours was a voice?"

because he had thought, you know, when I got confirmed, I'd be in the cabinet.

I'd be a voice.

"You know, this president is not-- "He's feckless," you know, and he would go on, and he said, "Look.

You know, not only should Tony Blinken not be confirmed, but you should resign," and then the line went dead.

♪ A number of newspapers were calling on me to resign.

Even close friends from Bosnia would say, "Have you thought about--" so I did think about it.

♪ I could have expressed the sort of searing mark that Syria left on me by leaving, but who would that have helped, and-- Who?

Tell me one person it would have helped other than me in this interview.

I'm in the room with the president.

Barack Obama is not cold to what is happening to the Syrian people.

What was very challenging was figuring out what is the pathway that is going to do more good than harm, and he made a judgment, not one I agreed with, but a reasonable one.

At the same time, he gave me power to try to get more refugees into the country, getting political prisoners out of jail, to ending an Ebola crisis, even though everyone in America wanted nothing to do with West Africa.

Those are consequences, and to go back to teaching and writing and hoping somebody reads my op-ed compared to the ability to do something for someone on a given day, it just wasn't a close call.

Man, voice-over: Dramatic new drone video tells the tale of destruction.

Anti-Assad government rebels held in East Aleppo were hit hard.

Security Council resolution calling for a new pause to the fighting was vetoed, and so the Russian-led airstrikes continue.

Power, voice-over: Here is what is happening right now in Eastern Aleppo.

Syrians trapped by the fighting are sending out their final appeals for help.

[Indistinct conversation] ♪ Power, voice-over: This is what is being done by member states of the United Nations who are sitting around this horseshoe table today to the people of Eastern Aleppo.

♪ Aleppo will join the ranks of those events that define modern evil-- [Coughs] Power, voice-over: Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Aleppo.

[Shouting] Woman: [Shouting in Arabic] ♪ Are you truly incapable of shame?

Is there literally nothing that can shame you?

♪ This is not leading from behind.

This is hiding from behind.

I mean, we have Samantha Powers, you know, attacking Iran, Assad, Russia, saying, "Have you no shame?"

What about the administration?

The thing about Syria and the Obama policy is that this tiny country has caused so much destabilization not only for its neighbors, but for Europe and so forth.

♪ Power: How can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations, institutional constraints, and, above all, a lack of imagination?

How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.

"The unreasonable one persists "in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

♪ What's happened in Syria is absolutely heartbreaking, and there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about it.

♪ It's natural to want to blame someone for a terrible outcome, and I get that.

I think the president gets that.

You know, I wish there were an available alternative to us to fix that situation in Syria, but we looked at all the alternatives, and there was not one that worked.

♪ I'll be honest with you sitting here today.

Like, I don't know how much of that I had to rationalize the inaction, you know, because I knew after 2013 that I was going to be living with this inaction, and so to this day, I'm torn by-- It's a complicated thing.

This gets back to your tugging at your conscience.

Do you do you construct arguments to rationalize something that you used to feel passionately differently about, you know?

I think there's something like that that's been going on with me.

To be a liberal and to deal with these questions, you know, probably inevitably leads to that.

Anyone who had any responsibility for Syria and for our policy there has to look themselves in the mirror and see failure staring back at you.

On one level, it's as simple as that.

We didn't stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.

We didn't prevent millions of people being forcibly displaced from their homes.

We look at that bottom line, and you can't but conclude that we failed.

♪ Mark Lowcock: You in this Security Council have ignored all the previous pleas you have heard.

You know what is happening, and you have done nothing.

♪ Malley: Syria is a core example of that inability of the international community to come together to try to stop mass atrocities, and this is one of the worst mass atrocities, but they they existed before Syria.

They've existed after, and we haven't been able to answer that question.

The whole theory of responsibility to protect, which has never really been implemented, you know, it's not the international consensus today.

♪ Sullivan: I believe that the United States bears responsibility to try to rally action in response to genocide, mass killings, mass atrocities so that the world does not descend into darkness and madness.

We have an obligation to play a central role, but not a singular role.

Murray McCully: The draft resolution has not been adopted owing to the negative vote of a permanent member of... Power, voice-over: Great power politics don't go away just because of the responsibility to protect.

The Security Council gave 5 permanent members a veto, and for any of the permanent 5 to be a sole arbiter of whether you can kill your people or not, that's not what the founders, you know, had in mind.

♪ Man: Mr. President, the General Assembly by unanimous vote affirmed that genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns and for the commission of which principals and accomplices are punishable.

[Applause] ♪ Lake, voice-over: There will always be genocides or war crimes because human nature hasn't changed.

If you look around the world, you can see how the forces of selfishness and of barriers and of denial of rights are growing, and they are growing, I believe, because the democratic institutions that were put in place 70 years ago are all under assault and in too many countries, they are losing, including the values themselves.

Man: World peace, world justice... Lake, voice-over: Every nation in the world agreed that the international community has a responsibility to protect people against genocide and war crimes, et cetera, and then find practical ways not to implement it, and so the lesson that wasn't implemented is a lesson not taken.

George Clooney: We were brought up to believe that the U.N. was formed to ensure that the Holocaust could never happen again.

This genocide will be on your watch.

How you deal with it will be your legacy-- your Rwanda, your Cambodia, your Auschwitz.

♪ ♪ ♪