“If you really want to end the bloodshed over [in Syria], I guess there’s two ways,” Former American General Wesley Clark told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

“You could let him finish the job,” Clark said, creating millions more refugees, expanding the violence and sectarian warfare, and giving Iran more power, as he put it. “It’s a very short-sighted way to think you can stabilize the situation.”

The other way, Clark contended, is to “put the pressure on Assad.”

Clark has some experience forcing a strongman’s hand.

In the late 1990s, as supreme allied commander of NATO, General Clark led the bombing campaign of Kosovo that forced Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table.

Now, as Assad shows little sign of abating his fight to hold onto power, Clark says that it’s critical the U.S. use all the leverage it can get out of its plans to arm Syria’s opposition.

“Assad should want to negotiate while he’s winning. Right now. Before the leverage has any effect on the battlefield,” Clark told Amanpour. “So for the United States, it’s about putting the leverage in now, and then keeping the leverage going in, torqueing it up, while the negotiations are on.”

Watch the above video to hear why Clark thinks it’s smart for President Obama to play his Syria strategy close to the vest.

General Salim Idriss, chief of staff of the opposition Free Syria Army, hopes that promised American weapons will be enough to bolster his troops.

“It is very important now to strengthen the moderate FSA fighters,” Idriss told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

In an interview with PBS that aired on Monday, President Barack Obama voiced the concern many skeptics harbor about heavily arming Syria’s opposition.

“Some of the most effective fighters within the opposition have been those who frankly are not particularly towards the United States of America,” Obama said. “Arming them willy nilly is not a good recipe for meeting American interests over the long term.”

Idriss said that the extremist groups about which Obama worries are fighting less in the major cities of Western Syria, and instead are vying for control of the “oil fiends and gas fields” in the Eastern part of the country.

“We need really support from our friends in the United States to be powerful,” Idriss said, “to put an end to the regime and not to allow these groups to have an important role in the future of Syria.”

Timothy Edgar has been on both sides of the debate over government surveillance, and he says that the protections in place work.

He was a lawyer at the ACLU holding the government's feet to the fire at the American Civil Liberties Union and then he became, in his own words, a reluctant insider advising both Presidents Bush and Obama on this very issue.

“Certainly Congress has been briefed repeatedly numerous times over the years,” Edgar told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “But it's very different when you're having a public debate than one in which you're just getting briefed by intelligence officials.” 

The public debate should have happened earlier, Edgar believes.

“We did have a good public debate about the surveillance issues involved in PRISM,” – the National Security Agency surveillance program – “but we haven't had a good debate about the call records program,” Edgar said. “I think that should have been affirmatively disclosed in a broad outline and not waiting for some leak from a 29-year-old Booz Allen employee. That's not the way to do it.”

Edgar is an openness advocate, but now finds himself in the administration watching the watchdogs.

He says the system works.

“There are safeguards that are basically designed to make sure we're targeting foreigners overseas. And there are safeguards that are designed to make sure we're not mistakenly collecting innocent Americans' communications,” Edgar said. “For the call records, the safeguards are that the analyst needs to have reasonable suspicion that there's a connection to terrorism before he or she can query them. And all of these are overseen by the Justice Department and by the Director of National Intelligence. They do periodic audit reports that are supplied to Congress and the court.”

Between 1979 and 2012, the FISA court received more than 33,000 surveillance applications and rejected just 11.

“It did bother me a lot on the outside, because those numbers make it sound like a rubber stamp. But in reality, they take their job very, very seriously.

“Part of the reason for those numbers is that it's very difficult to get your applications for surveillance through the Justice Department. There's an office there that really views themselves kind of as neutral arbiters between the intelligence community and the courts,” Edgar said. “ So they go back and forth with the intelligence agencies a lot. And then if they think they're going to get a denial, they'll usually withdraw it and try to create a more narrow application. So if you see how it works, those numbers, you know, don't really tell that story.”

Want proof that Iran’s president-elect wants to change Iran’s foreign policy?

“Literally every diplomat that Ahmadinejad fired for favoring engagement with the U.S. was later on hired by Rouhani in his think tank,” Vali Nasr, a former member of Obama’s foreign policy team told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Monday. “So he’s been working on this.”

Add to that the fact that Rouhani has a track record on the international stage, as a former chief nuclear negotiator, and Nasr is convinced that diplomats around the world have been given the gift of “breathing room” by the election of the new Iranian president. 

“Rouhani was the architect of probably the most forward-leaning position Iran ever had on the nuclear issue back in 2003,” Nasr said. “And he’s held onto that view.”

At the time, Rouhani led the voluntary suspension of Iran’s nuclear program. Ultimately, the program was started back up. It could be difficult, opined Nasr, for Rouhani to repeat such a step.

“He’s once-bitten, twice-shy,” Nasr told Amanpour. “In other words, he’s not going to stick his neck out for it to be chopped off.”

The United States and its allies have been given the opportunity to “try something new with Iran.” It is Nasr’s hope that the Obama Administration takes the plunge.

“Rouhani can’t come to the table seriously unless the indication is that he can deliver more than Ahmadinejad,” Nasr said.

In order to “sell a deal back home,” Nasr continued, he must show that he can make progress on the issue that most Iranians really care about: economy-crippling sanctions.

In exchange for the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program, he said, the United States has offered little more than aircraft parts and “modest permission” to trade gold and silver.

“Rouhani has to be able to show Iran’s supreme leader and revolutionary guard that the reformists can actually get the United States to offer these things,” Nasr said. “That’s how you build momentum for reform in Iran.”

AMANPOUR: New Day for Iran and the United States?

One thing is clear in Iran, at least according to an adviser to the president-elect's campaign: The people have rejected the policies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The election of reform-minded Hassan Rouhani is an indication of the mood of the Iranian people, Sadegh Zibakalam, who advised the campaign of the next president, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.

“The most important issue is not to continue with the policies that have been running and guiding Iran during the past, particularly four years,” Zibakalam said. “Moving towards a better conciliatory, realistic, and pragmatic policy – I mean, that is the main issue.” 

In a press conference on Monday, Rouhani also struck a conciliatory tone, while reiterating that he would defend Iran’s sovereign rights.

“We don't want to see more tension,” Rouhani said. But the talks with the United States must be based on “mutual respect and interest,” with America acknowledging that “they will never interfere in the domestic affairs of Iran.”

Zibakalam summed up Rouhani’s press conference succinctly.

“He is sending this simple message to the world,” Zibakalam said, “that there has been a real election in Iran, and hopefully, Inshallah, there will be new foreign policy, as far as Iran is concerned.”

Iran’s president must ultimately answer to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, but the president-elect’s adviser warned not to underestimate the importance of Rouhani’s victory.

“You must realize that although the Supreme Leader has tremendous power according to the construction, but he doesn’t take the decision in a vacuum,” Zibakalam said. “Obviously he has seen that … the people are more or less tired of the hardline policies that have been governing Iran.”

AMANPOUR: New Day for Iran and the United States?

You can watch the nightly international affairs program "Amanpour." on CNN International or in its entirety here at the Amanpour.com website.

The stunning election victory for reform and moderation in Iran this weekend takes me back 16 years to the mind-boggling election upset I covered in 1997, when the moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami won. I covered him on the campaign trail and dubbed him the Mullah with the smiling face, and in fact his was a new and different face of Iran. He was the first since the 1979 Islamic Revolution to call for reform at home, and for a type of detente (his words to me) with the West and the rest.

As word of Khatami's landslide victory swept through the country back then, I remember as if it were yesterday, an elderly, religious, working-class woman, tug my sleeve and ask me with a shy and toothless smile: "Will America make friends with us again now?" My heart skipped a beat, and it bled a little too. Iran had spoken, and it has spoken and spoken and spoken for the past 16 years. 

WATCH AMANPOUR'S DOCUMENTARY ONLINE: A Nuclear Iran – The Expert Intel

This time too, heading for the polls, the Iranian people said they wanted their next president to improve the dire economy that has plunged approximately half the country into poverty. But they also say they want better relations with the rest of the world, including the United States. They are tired of sanctions, isolation, and lurching from crisis to international crisis. Dr. Hassan Rouhani's election platform called for more moderate policies inside Iran, and for constructive engagement abroad. He is a close ally of former Iranian Presidents Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Both swung their support behind Rouhani, after the system banned Rafsanjani from running. Before he was disqualified, sources told me internal polling had shown Rafsanjani would have won by a landslide too.

Why is this important? Because Rafsanjani is known as a pragmatic conservative and in an exclusive interview with me the last time he ran for the presidency in 2005, he said he wanted to close the U.S. file and establish a relationship with the United States but only if it were mutually beneficial, and based on mutual interests and respect.

When it comes to the nuclear program, no Iranian president will give up the struggle to have the country's right to enrichment recognized, but Rafsanjani's top advisers told me this time around that as president he would have worked to ensure transparency and reassure the west that Iran was not building the bomb. It is reasonable to expect Dr. Rouhani to take a similar approach.

But gone are the days when any American or Western government might expect Iran to capitulate or cry "uncle" under pressure. Even under crippling sanctions that have devastated the majority of the people, though not the regime, Iran has not buckled.

In a discussion with veteran U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering at the Asia Society here in New York in February, Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazzaee, said talks with the United States were not a red line for Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But he also said Iran would not engage in dialogue under ultimatums and constant threats of military action.

"As long as pressure is on Iran, as long as there is a sword on our neck to come from a negotiation, this is not a negotiation," Khazzaee said. "So therefore the Iranians cannot accept that."

Khazzaee also said Iran could agree on the level of its enriched uranium. "As much as the Iran-U.S. negotiation or dialogue or conversation is not a red line for us, the level of enrichment or the stockpiling 20 percent enrichment is not a red line for us too," he said.

Pickering sought to convince Iranians that the United States is not after regime change there.

For the 34 years since the Islamic Revolution of Iran, relations between the two countries have been locked behind a massive and growing wall of mistrust and deep suspicion.

Although periodic feelers are extended by both sides to try to break the impasse, they never get anywhere, breaking down at the first sign of resistance. For instance President Obama came into office extending a hand to Iran and offering direct negotiations. But many analysts believe that absent Iran immediately leaping to take that hand, the outreach was more a way to show willingness and thus differentiate from the Bush administration, and to better convince allies to go along with what are now the toughest sanctions ever imposed.

Despite 34 years of dysfunction between Iran and the United States, this remains the most important relationship never engaged. Look in any corner and Iran looms large: rising influence in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria backing the Assad regime, and of course the ever-menacing possibility of direct conflict unless the differences over Iran's nuclear program are resolved. And so far, years of on-again-off-again talks have failed to do that. Iran wants to see the endgame and meaningful sanctions relief, while the U.S., Europe and Israel want the nuclear program stopped or severely limited. But it will take political courage on all sides. So far the small incentives the West has offered are "just peanuts," as Hossein Moussavian, a member of Iran's nuclear negotiating team under Dr. Rouhani, told me. "They want diamonds for peanuts" he added.

And so today, I am struck by an incredibly timely lesson from the past. Fifty years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy delivered one of his most important speeches ever.

It was about the Soviet Union and arms control, at the height of the Cold War. The New York Times described in great detail how the speech was crafted by the president's master wordsmith Theodore Sorensen, a month in the making and needing to be delivered in 1963, not the highly politicized election year of 1964. And preparation of the speech was kept secret from the Pentagon lest the military balk at the idea of any deals with the USSR, its fiercest enemy.

The speech contained themes that today are prophetic for many reasons.  As illustrated in this article, President Kennedy talked about an entrenched fear of Armageddon that had taken root among the American people, who were unable then to even contemplate a time of peace with Moscow.

"Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal," President Kennedy said. "But that is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

If the Soviet Union was the United States' mortal enemy back then, Iran has assumed that position for the past 34 years, ever since the 1979 Revolution ushered in Islamic theocracy-slash-extremism-slash-terrorism-slash-anti-Americanism around the world. This is perhaps America's most important and dysfunctional strategic relationship of our time.

And so especially today, after this election result in Iran, and after 22 years of reporting from there, I am convinced that there are mutual interests that could be negotiated, just as the U.S. did with the USSR for decades. As the New York Times reminds us, President Kennedy's speech quickly led to a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and a limited nuclear test ban treaty.

President Kennedy took political risks to stake out this new position between Washington and Moscow. We can all agree that in 34 years no U.S. president has invested anything like that political capital, making a case for why it can and must be different between Washington and Tehran. Just as the United States found Soviet Communism repugnant but dealt with it, and eventually saw it off into the sunset, it has just as consistently refused to do the same with a system it finds equally repugnant, and yet so vital to manage.

People will be tempted to shrug off Rouhani's win as mattering little in a system where the Supreme Leader - and perhaps even more so the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps - have the last word. But consider this: back in 1997, I called Khatami the mullah with the smile, and his public countenance did make a difference.

He gave me his first interview as president, arriving fists unclenched, hands outstretched. For a full hour on CNN, before the whole world, he became the first Iranian leader to apologize for the 1979 hostage crisis that had so poisoned the chalice of U.S.-Iran relations. He denounced terrorism and the killing of civilians including Israeli civilians, addressed the nuclear program and much more.

Afterwards, international diplomats who had been closely watching told me he had in fact delivered a sweeping manifesto for a new Iran with a more freedoms at home, and much better relations abroad.

Unfortunately watching in Washington, the Clinton Administration at the time could not see the forest for the trees, could not read this new language and dismissed it as more of the same, and so responded with more of its own same, "... actions not words" etc., etc., etc.

A couple of years later though, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered an important speech in which she expressed regret to Iran about the 1953 CIA coup that ousted Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh and re-installed the U.S-backed Shah (leading in great part to the 1979 revolution – see the book "All the Shah's Men"). She also announced the United States would lift sanctions on, wait for it, pistachios, carpets and caviar! But it was a gesture and indeed, a senior Iranian official later presented Albright with some pistachios, caviar and a carpet! This was progress at a certain level. Could it lead to more?

After 9/11 it did. The Iranian people distinguished themselves by being the only citizens of that region to pour into the streets and hold candlelight vigils. President Khatami sent condolences  to the American people. Later when President George W. Bush sent forces into Afghanistan to despatch the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran did much more, playing a crucial role for the United States in pulling together the political solution for the new Afghanistan. (See James Dobbin's book "After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan".)

Pickering told me this week: "That was quite remarkable. And it is an interesting testament to the fact that even after years of mistrust and misunderstanding, on some things we have been able to work together like Afghanistan and that still holds open promise."

But right after that mutual co-operation came President Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, lumping Khatami's Iran with Iraq and North Korea. There is no way to describe what a setback this was for President Khatami and the reformist camp. It played decisively into the hands of Iran's powerful hardliners who then were determined to scuttle Khatami's reforms and reach-outs.

Blowback came in the form of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2005 election, and the past eight excruciating years. Again, I was the first to interview him as president, and he bullishly laid out for me the direction Iran would be taking henceforth, accelerating its nuclear program (as nuclear negotiator back in 2003 it was Dr. Rouhani who had agreed to a temporary suspension of the program as a confidence-building measure). In our interview I remember telling President Ahmadinejad that he sounded very aggressive. I think it is fair to say that no post-Revolution Iranian President had taken such a belligerent public stance to the world, and thus brought such backlash and hardships on his country and his people. Overnight Iran went from the president with the smiling face to the snarling president baring his fangs.

Now there is a new day, and a new chance. The Iranian people have been remarkably consistent in their desires. Will the Ayatollahs recognize Dr. Rouhani, who is one of them after all, as a face-saving agent of detente or will they clip his wings as they did Khatami's? Will the United States decide that this is a strategic relationship worth resolving with all the political courage and determination that will take?

WATCH AMANPOUR'S TRIP BACK TO IRAN: A Revolutionary Journey

"How many times have you and I seen high-ranking officials, frankly, unfortunately, in uniform as well as out, that will tell all the reasons why we can’t effectively intervene," he asked CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Friday. "And the one question that needs to be asked is, ‘What happens if we don’t?'"

Watch Amanpour's full conversation with McCain in the video above.

The Obama Administration says that it provide military support for the opposition on a "different scale and scope."

But will it make a difference?

In the video above, Christiane Amanpour speaks with the head of the Free Syrian Army, General Salim Idriss.