0 if he does use chemical weapons again, are you prepared to hadity him again. so those are the type of questions going on at this point. but there's also the second track that you brought up. let's not forget the call the president made overnight in australia. so there is clearly an engagement going on of trying to put together a coalition of the willing to borrow a phrase that was familiar to us back in the day. of countries that without a u.n. mandate, they want another mandate somewhere else and you brought up the arab league. that is the other tract here. if there's a debate that's left being had internally, it's about what type of strike to do, how hard to hit, how long to do it, and how are you willing to do it again if somehow assad uses chemical weapons again. >> and chuck, brought up that phrase coalition of the willing. anything that reminds people of iraq shows you why people seem so le reluctant on this issue. i want to read you what john accountability, again, the administration seems reluctantly to have come to the conclusion they have to do this. congress or the politics of it put aside. >> well, i mean, look at the media campaign that's going on here. joy, are this is not necessarily for the american public. this is for the world community. it started with john kerry yesterday. you had chuck hagel sitting down with the bbc. around the world, is there any other more watched english language network in the world than the bbc? there's chuck hagel? then you have the vice president of the united states putting his signature on this. so this clearly, there is a little bit of a concerted effort here to build international support for the action that it looks very much like the united states government is about to take. >> all right. nbc's chuck todd. thank you. >> you got it. >> all right. i want to bring in our panel now. steve clements at the new america feds ration and david corn of mother jones magazine. and steve, this does feel like deja vu all over again. we hear talk of coalition of the willing, talk about strikes inside of syria. what we are not hearing is the idea of boots on the ground and regime change. >> i think that's right. this is a very different response that the obama administration gave just basically six weeks ago when there was an action to help begin trying to supply and support rebels inside syria because of chemical weapons, red line being crossed. this is a much more serious deployment of chemical weapons and the administration is calling it right by differentiating between the civil war inside syria and the fact that a key international norm has been very very badly violated and calls for a different kind you have response. that's what they should have done before and they kind of screwed that up. this is the right response this time. >> what steve is talking about is a very cautious president. he came into office with a reputation of having been against account idea of dumb wars and not wanting to speed into another iraq-like situation. was there overcaution in your view? >> he took his time with egypt and with libya and probably ended up with a good policy positions. he wasn't overly cautious when it came to the bin laden raid. he took his time there. i think here the key thing here is whether you can have a punitive military actioning that doesn't get you into a war that you don't want to be in. and i understand to protect international norms against chemical weapons and to maybe prevent assad from using them in the future, other people from using them in the future, there's an arguments to be made for a punitive strike. can you do that without having too many unintended consequences that gets you more drawn in that may end up with civilian deaths or something going wrong. you should do something but maybe you know, you can't see exactly what it's going to lead to. so that's a good reason for caution. i think the president's probably struggling with a very difficult decision on what type of action sends a message but doesn't do what he doesn't want to do which is to get in irk in this war to become responsible for what happens next. >> steve, i think that is the real question here. if you do strikes in syria, what do you get for that? again, we're not doing regime change. if the strikes are punitive, what does that get the united states and the international community? >> it sets up a line and creates a punishment, a cost for what the regime did. there was confusion before about low yield chemical weapons use in which that punishment wasn't delivered to the players. and the view is now among the interrogation community that the failure to create a cost for the use of chemical weapons before or whether no matter which side used them the failure of the regime to keep control has led to the escalation of their use. the view is today if you don't put some hard punishment on the regime, they will take it further. you'll begin to see the chemical weapons spread to other parts of the northeast, the middle east, northeast africa region. so that is the concern. i think that's why the administration feels it needs to -- there's a legitimate case though that they may not have the ability. what chuck todd just said, they're going to hit hard one time. we don't have a lot of cruise missiles in this area. we've got four dozen, five dozen cruise missiles. if you have to come in a second time, if you have to come in a third time and if there are unintended consequences what happens. >> it depends what impact the strike will have. you can't take out his chemical weapons facility. the depots, you can't strike them. it's too disbursed. you can't physically stop them. the question whether you create a psychological punishment that he abides by or whether you cause him to do other things or whether it spins out of control in a way that -- so in theory, is the ability to punish the attempt to punish sounds justified. and sounds good. you know, but as you know, every plan that meets the battlefield often goes in a different direction. >> we eventually have to talk about the political consequences in this country. you heard chuck todd say the republicans are essentially going hands off. i wish we had more time, steve, david corn, thank you both. coming up, on the eve of a historic day at the lincoln memorial, we'll look at the great expectations facing the president. ...so you say men are superior drivers? 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