You've managed to miss a little bit of the speech.
Some have asked, given our collective war-weariness, why we cannot use non-military tools to achieve the same end. My answer to this question is: We have exhausted the alternatives.
For more than a year, we have pursued countless policy tools short of military force to try to dissuade Assad from using chemical weapons. We have engaged the Syrians directly — and at our request, the Russians, the U.N., and the Iranians sent similar messages — but when scuds and other horrific weapons didn’t quell the Syrian rebellion, Assad began using chemical weapons on a small scale multiple times, as the United States concluded in June.
Faced with this growing evidence of several small-scale subsequent attacks, we redoubled our efforts. We backed the U.N. diplomatic process and tried to get the parties back to the negotiating table, recognizing that a political solution is the best way to reduce all forms of threat. We provided more humanitarian assistance. And on chemical weapons specifically, we assembled and went public with compelling and frightening evidence of the regime’s use.
We worked with the U.N. to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing its people. We expanded and accelerated our assistance to the Syrian opposition. We supported the U.N. Commission of Inquiry.
Russia, often backed by China, has blocked every relevant action in the Security Council, even mild condemnations of the use of chemical weapons that did ascribe blame to any particular party. In Assad’s cost-benefit calculus, he must have weighed the military benefits of using this hideous weapon against the recognition that he could get away with it because Russia would have Syria’s back in the Security Council.
And on August 21, he staged the largest chemical weapons attack in a quarter-century while U.N. inspectors were sitting on the other side of town.
It is only after the United States pursued these nonmilitary options without achieving the desired results of deterring chemical weapons use that the president concluded that a limited military strike is the only way to prevent Assad from employing chemical weapons as if they are a conventional weapon of war.
I think that's a pretty tight analysis of what the US has been doing all this time, why it's not working, and why this next step is necessary.
You say they cut the inspectors short, but they worked for six months to get the inspectors in there in the first place. And Assad responded by staging his worse chemical attack yet while the inspectors were there. This is what I know: Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats I trust walked into a room with the United States' evidence for the August 21 attack and came out saying Assad did it. More and more countries are saying this as well. So I'm sticking with the guy that ended the Iraq War, is ending the Afghanistan War, and kept the American role in the Libyan conflict to the barest of minimums. YMMV.
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