as much as i like being on your show, that we should make on sunday morning cnn television, but it is something for nato to decide. but i think if this looks like it s going to be stalemated which it s beginning to look like that s not a good result and president obama, everybody else, has said that from the beginning. a stalemate is unacceptable. therefore i think nato has got to start thinking about whether they want to more directly target gadhafi and his family. that s the best the surest way, of course, to end the violence against the civilians of libya, the people of libya. i want to put up on our screen a cbs news/ new york times poll that came out this week, the president s approval rating on libya. it shows in april it was 29% aplof of the way the president is handling libya. in march 50% approve. so it s dropped 11 points. what do you think accounts for
a lucky air strike. and beyond predator drones which now we have put into this fight, what do you want the u.s. to do and supply? well, right now nato is running this conflict by committing. by taking u.s. leadership and u.s. air assets out of it we ve really reduced our ability to pro vail on the battlefield. we need the ac-130s and a-10s back in, we need the american assets back in this a heavier way. look, the british and the french, i thank them, but they are running short of some of these precision weapons. the fact is that it s the united states that s nato. we ought to recognize that and we ought to continue our leadership role. that does not mean boots on the ground. so you want the u.s. to step back up into a leadership role in nato instead of this sort of support role that the president
will this be my last. the military commanders in tripoli supporting gadhafi should be pounded. so i would not let the u.n. mandate stop what is the right thing to do. you cannot protect the libyan people if gadhafi stays. you cannot protect our vital national security interests if gadhafi stays. the long drawn-out protracted engagement is not good for the libyan people. a lot of people are going to die unnecessarily. let s get this guy gone and the way to get him out of libya is to go after him militarily through the air. you don t need ground troops to do that. you know, nato, within the countries within nato, there are not a majority of countries participating in this to begin with. the u.n. was reluctant even to do what it did. but you re saying that you think, regardless of what and you re going to get backlash from this. if the u.s. goes in and takes out the leader of a nation, however illegitimate we consider him to be, there is going to be a lot of backlash.
assad personally, sanctions against his family, that kind of thing does make sense. and i think making sure that we re very clear that we want these demonstrators to succeed. we want to see reform in syria. that will weaken iran. candy, the big game sheer iran because we need to block iranian influence and weaken that government. one way to do that is to weaken the syrian government. in iran, also, general, as senator lieberman pointed out, i mean syria, was a conduit for putting soldiers into iraq and killing american soldiers. so this is not a friend. no, it is not a friend. and it is we need to understand that we need a wider strategy by saying how are we going to address the middle east in total here. because i see that lacking. and i think iran will be part of that. syria would be part of that. yemen would be also part of that strategy. i want to get you both on yemen in less than a minute that i have. that is it now looks as though maybe president saleh will go
envisioned. do you have any sign from the president that he is willing to do that? i don t know. i never wanted us to step down, as you know, because the united states is nato. that s the reality. but, candy, one of the very bad results here could be a stalemate. a stalemate between both sides, it s divided some places in the middle of libya. and then you would open the door to al qaeda to come in and hijack this very legitimate government and people that are seeking freedom. they didn t rise up against gadhafi because of anything al qaeda did. they rose up because they wanted freedom and democracy. we should do what we can to assist them. senator mccain out of cairo after his trip to libya, thank you so much for joining us. thank you. up next, we ll get perspective on libya and much more from senator mccain s independent colleague joe lieberman of connecticut.