Welcome to Rumble Strip, this is Erica Heilman.

I believe in government, behind closed doors.

You owe it to your bosses to tell them what you think, but it's up to your bosses, in this case, the

president of the United States, to act on that advice or not.

That's Robert Ford, the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria.

Ford arrived in Syria right before the protests began there in 2011 and he was

witness to the very beginnings of the civil war there until the Obama

administration pulled him out over security concerns in 2012.

He continued to work on the crisis in Syria back in D.C. until 2014, when he left the foreign

service.

Now Robert Ford lives with his wife Allison in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont,

and he describes it as pretty much as far from the Middle East as you can get.

We spoke in his living room on a rainy day last week, after the chemical weapons

attack in Syria and before Trump's military response. He fit me in between

calls with CNN and Al Jazeera to talk less about policy and more about his

personal experience in Syria and the role of diplomacy in the Middle East.

Here's Robert Ford.

When you were called and it had been five years since there had been an ambassador in Syria, why then and why you?

I was the deputy ambassador in Iraq and it was my third assignment

in Iraq during the war and after my second assignment, I got a really nice job.

I was the American ambassador in Algeria, in North Africa.

And Algeria is a really great country.

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