syria is a secular state ruled by a secular arab nationalist party, the ba'ath party.iran is an islamic republic. so they don't seem to be a marriage made in heaven. but it's a symbiotic relationship that's based on strategic necessity. >> it's not a particularly natural alliance, if you will. but for reasons of common enmity towards iraq, towards israel and other regions, they did form this alliance that has been the strongest, the most enduring in the region. >> narrator: but back in the early 1980s, while assad was building an alliance with the new shiite theocracy in iran, he was facing resistance from fundamentalist sunnis at home. >> there was a very aggressive islamic fundamentalist opposition to the syrian regime. there were attacks against the regime. it was essentially almost a civil war. (explosions) >> narrator: the assad regime's response was to attack the stronghold of syria's muslim brotherhood, the town of hama. >> in 1982, the syrian regime launched one of the worst massacres in the history of the middle east. the regime used artillery to level large p

decisions made almost ten years ago today deba'h phii the cotry excludi se members of saddam hussein's ba'ath party, those who didn't have blood on their hands from future involvement in the country's government. those have had a lasting legacy in pushing these other groups out into the fringes. >> woodruff: what would you add about the government? >> a big problem is not merely the sectarian and ethnic divides but the prime minister nouri al-maliki has been increasingly authoritarian figure and he was a person that was picked by the american ambassador to run for the imeinister's post. but problemha a lot of communities have in iraq, the sunni, the kurds and even shi'a is that he is oversteping the bounds of his constitutional authorities as commander in chief. the obama administration made an effort before it took out the troops to curtail that and create a different governing arrangement. >> ifill: let me bring you to the u.s. side. michael, you talked to the military a lot. if how does the u.s. military view the war and what happened in iraq? >> well, you're never going to have anyne vieweven w

>>rose: so the republican army had been disbanded, the ba'ath party had been disbanded. >> this was in before that. clearly this notion that it was going to be a turnkey operations we'll hand over to them. don rumsfeld, doug feif-- his deputy-- all believed it, turned out to be utterly infeesable. then president bush brought in jerry bremmer and the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other. it went from we're going tofr hd this over to them, get our troops down to 20,000 or 30,000d within a matter of months. i was in baghdad when tommy franks went to brief his own mmanders on that. b i wasoutside the meeting roomrs in this big marble palace. it went from that to we're bringing in a viceroy. we're going to occupy the country. we're going to build it from the ground up. we're going to take apart their army, billed a whole new army. >> rose: and was in the change made by the president and everybody in washington. >> well, it was-- i b would says it's a change the president presided over, but i'm not sure he himself fully understood just how much the pendulum had swung. so what happene