white,. he's able to cling to power with a small degree of, almost no, but a small degree of legitimacy left. the rebels, in turn, are arguably forfeiting some legit maas is i by some of their excesses, by allowing extreme islamists to take a prominent role in their ranks. and so, you know, the conflict is stalemated. but this is, you know, this is a classic insurgency and counterinsurgency which i suspect at the end of the day will end as a victory for the insurgency. the problem is what's the country going to look like afterwards? that's what we really have to worry about. governments are not that hard to overthrow. what's hard is to establish security afterwards. that's the big challenge. that's where we've struggle inside iraq and afghanistan, and we're going to struggle even more in syria. >> gentleman right here. >> thank you very much. my name is tyler o'neill, i'm a freelance writer with the washington freebie con, and i worked on the romney campaign in the fall. and i was wondering, mitt romney talks in his book "no apology" about soft power, and he mentioned it's a weapon we can use against al-qaeda. we send a lot of money to foreign countrie