NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said French President Francois Hollande “knows NATO will not respond” to the Paris attacks and so Hollande has reached out to Vladimir Putin to create this “unusual alliance of convenience.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday, Mitchell said, “NATO has been asleep. We saw NATO’s lack of response over and over again.”
Mitchell explained how “Hollande knows that NATO will not respond. That’s why he’s trying to create this unusual alliance of convenience with Russia and the United States.”
“And this is not easy, because even though there’s a common enemy and Russia now with the airplane knows that it has to show, Putin wants to punish them, and he said there will be no mercy at all. He wants to destroy ISIS,” said Mitchell.
“But even with that compelling impulse in Russia and France, getting these three countries together, Hollande coming here, then going to Moscow, is very difficult. As Jim Miklaszewski was saying, the Russians don’t bomb the way we bomb. They are carpet-bombing.”
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius added that Russia has “run out of high quality precision munitions long ago. They they are dropping old dumb bombs, and the problem is they’re killing so many civilians.”
Mitchell added, “There’s going to be huge blow back from that.”
“At some point, you have to get the sympathy of people, the Sunnis living in the Raqqah area, to support something new, and that terrible civilian casualties hurt that,” explained Mitchell.
“Europe may have been asleep, and France perhaps in the last six months since Charlie Hebdo didn’t respond aggressively enough, they did change surveillance rules,” suggested Mitchell.
“Where are the Arabs? They met in Riyadh this week, the Gulf Council, and they said, we sympathize and mourn with you. The Saudis have have not run any — the Saudis, the Jordanians, the UAE, our friends, our very good friends — none of them have run any bombing missions. The last was in August or September.”
“The Saudis haven’t done anything since February or March. They said they were in this. They were all in. The problem is that the Saudis are so tied down in Yemen that we are now having to resupply them. I read recently that we resupplied them, sold them $1.29 billion in more munitions for Yemen because they are running out of stuff,” explained Mitchell.