right. and that may be what we re looking at today, if you re just projecting forward. nobody wins here, that colonel qaddafi controls essentially the west of the country, the rebels control the east of the occurring it s divided, a civil war situation a. hot civil war or cold war, in that case, the west faces really tough questions, do you arm the rebels to change the status quo which is not what the u.n. authorized, do you commit to a long term air patrol mission over libya to keep them in place, to preserve the stalemate essentially, do you provide humanitarian assistance on a big scale for the rebel-held areas of the country. none of those things have been addressed directly now because none are relevant but they might be before too long. jon: the president has said that qaddafi must go, yet as you point out, the remove of the removal of qaddafi is not part of the stated aim of the military action that the president has ordered, so your fourth scenario is that qaddafi waits it
of principle, but it may be the way the world works at this moment. gray area, howard, is basically the argument. susan and i are arguing over semantics. yes, you re agreeing thats disagree a bit. it s a doctrine of process. in the case of libya, he laid out about five or six different criteria for having made the decision that he d made. he didn t add cost, whereas later on in the speech he said, oh, by the way, it s also if we can afford it. so we have to have a coalition, we have to have support from the region, a call from the people, we have to have a severe humanitarian crisis, and we have to be able to afford to do it with the kinds of weapons that we have. the other thing that he said in the speech was in this case, our air power unique capabilities. we had unique capabilities. that s a phrase that s become oft used. very legalistic but very obama-esque kind of doctrine. the second question we posed, what s the end game for u.s. involvement? here s how the p
now done two short-terms $4 billion and $6 billion that gets us to $51 billion. i think it s up to us now to come up with something within the next two weeks. i hope it will be a long-term cr because i think that we make a mistake if we don t think that these short-term crs do not have adverse impact on families. we seem to be thinking only in terms of what s good for us up here in washington and what s good for us politically. the fact of the matter is we are fighting two wars. we have action going on in pakistan, action going on over in libya, and the families of these men and women need stability in their lives. so we ought to get serious about doing a long-term cr so that
blames everything on a proconspiracy see. protesters are calling for a regime change. in iran the army cracks down on demonstrators wanting reform arresting many protesters who took part in the protest. leland vittert reports live from skwrerlz. reporter: right now we are seeing some of these regimes learn from what they view as the mistakes that other arab regimes have made and therefore have lost ground. in syria we are seeing a lot of use of live ammunition from the security services as they are trying to put down these protests and deny the protesters the ability to take over any one town and then be able to raise a rebel army, something we saw happen in libya. that s why you re seeing these really violent crackdowns in syria. they are denying access in syria
response to an imminent threat. neither was the case here. turns out freshman senator paul agrees with candidate obama and president obama. what he left out of his youtube commentary last night is that 28 days ago senator paul voted for senate resolution 85, which was proposed by a bunch of liberal senators, including bernie sanders. that resolution, quote, strongly condemns the gross and systemic violations of human rights in libya, including violent attacks on protesters, demanding democratic reforms. calls on moammar gadhafi to decyst from further violence, recognize the libyan people s demand for democratic change, resign his position, and per a peaceful transition to democracy. and urges the united nations ty council to take such further action as may be necessary to protect civilians