State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf condemned President Bashar al-Assad Monday, but left the door open for portions of the government to remain in place if Assad were to be removed from office.
The State Department believes this is best way to proceed while Syria is dismantling its chemical weapons in order to avoid a ‘complete political implosion.’
Below is a transcript of the exchange:
Q: -- even more so. So if you begin to dismantle that in this crucial time where you want to make sure that the chemical weapons really will not get out to anyone else, isn't it dangerous to suddenly remove Assad from the picture or even the regime from the picture?
MS. HARF: Well, it's a good question. And what we've said is, as we move towards a political transition, we actually don't want to disassemble the political and governmental structure of the entire regime for exactly that reason and others, quite frankly, because we don't want to have complete political implosion in Syria. We need some political structure going forward for a democratic transitional body, or whatever we'll call it, to take -- to take the lead there in the place of Assad. So there's a reason that we think it's important to keep some of those institutions intact.
And it's important for the Assad regime to maintain control of these weapons and to tell the inspectors where they are, to fully cooperate so we can, in fact, destroy all of them so they don't fall into -- you're absolutely right, we don't want them to fall into unknown hands or terrorist hands, certainly.