triggering nerves across the region in cooperation with the pentagon. joining me are bloomberg view columnists and ken pollack, senior fellow at the brookings institution, former white house official and the middle east policy and the author of unthinkable iran, the bomb. it s september. your book is coming out, ken. it is. we look forward to reading that. i need a longer bio. your tweets are enough and funny. thank you. so here we have israel has been on the sidelines for the last couple of days. now it s very clear that israel views this in its interest to go after syria. what is the sort of view in the middle east of the way the administration has handled this so far. there s been a lot of confusion and a lot of perplex city as to what exactly the administration is doing. i m getting bombarded by calls
ken, we ve talked about how the gulf state leaders, how the saudis and others view what s been happening in washington. how does the ayatollah view it? just at the point where we were beginning to talk about bilateral negotiations with iran. i think this is a critical issue and i think we have to start by saying, we don t have a clue. we don t know what s going on in his head. one of the things we do know about the iranians, they think they are far more important and far more power full than the syrians. they think we think they re far more important and powerful than the syrians. they think we had they d do it to syria but not us. we have to be really careful about assuming that we know what s going on in his head. we really don t. we don t know what s going on in his head but we do know what president rouhani tweeted. i alluded to this earlier, as the sun is about to set here in tehran, i wish all jews,
out. he has important elements of the military and many opposition figures, the only thing they have in common is they want saleh gone. but they have big differences, some of them heavily in bed with islamists and al qaeda, others more traditional tribal elements and still others that are kind of free-floating actors. also a very uncertain situation. similar to the libyan opposition. that is all over the lot united only by dislike or hatred of gadhafi but not behind another principle. not at all. ken pollack, thank you very much. senator john mccain called america s decision to hand control over to nato and stand down on air strikes there in libya a profound mistake. this at a hearing yesterday. your timing is exquisite. at a time when the gadhafi forces have literally tragically routed the anti-gadhafi forces, that s when we announce that the
the rate of hearing loss is climbing among older adults. a johns hopkins university study found 63% over 70 had mild to severe hearing loss. surprisingly african-americans had only one-third the rate of hearing loss compared to white participants. i m andrea mitchell. coming up next on andrea mitchell reports, american companies are adding jobs. the fastest two-month pass since before the recession. behind the numbers of today s jobs report with labor secretary hilda solis. in the battle for libya. we talk to republican congressman duncan hunter who says it s time for nato to step it up and former analyst ken pollack on the roll the u.s. is playing to help the rebels against gadhafi. even as the president s overall approval rating has taken a bit of a hit, a poll out this week suggests he s as popular as ever with young
include funding the rebels against gadhafi with some of gadhafi s own seized assets. at the same time that she is trying to get the arabs to help fight gadhafi, she s also trying to get the saudis to back off from their intervention in bahrain. so this is a very complicated situation, and perhaps the most complex that clinton has faced since becoming secretary of state. savannah? and secretary of state clinton says a no-fly zone would require the bombing of libyan targets. ken pollack is the director of research at at sabine place. let s start with libya and the u.n. security council is voting on today. it s been interesting to watch the evolution of the u.s. response. in some ways, it feels like the u.s. is leaning more into not just a sanctions, but a no-fly zone or some kind of military response. at the same time, isn t it clear that there will be countries like russia and china that will always vote against this type of