is that objective? and up to what limit do we get to before putting troops on the ground? it s difficult, you re right, it s a difficult line to draw and as much as we like to think that cruise missile strikes are very precise, nothing in war fare is all that precise and we have to expect that we will hit the military targets. there may be civilian casualties as well. and you can never rule out the potential loss of american life even if we don t fly over syrian air space. these kind of exercise are dangerous for all involved. i think that we can draw the line in the right place. we can make this punishing and direct it to how they have carried out these attacks by degrading their missile capability, their air capability. it will be punishing, i think it will have an impact and it will be a deterrent but we need to make sure we define the mission carefully that we don t get drawn on into this civil war. when you look at the
specifically, what could the united states be doing here? we re not talking about sending troops in. what could the united states do that would actually have a measurable impact here? so, first your options are terrible. that s, that s always been the case, which is why sort of faced with a fork in the road, the president consistently has take on the fork. now, here we are with really bad options. what are they? the president will steer an option where he can somehow deter chemical attacks and not entangling the united states in another middle east war for just the reasons you indicated. you re looking at options like something coming from the two destroyers in the mediterranean right now that are equipped with tomahawk. the red line is something he said repeatedly over time. he feels pressure to do that, for that reason and then additionally another really important aspect, which i think is very important for president obama, which is that there is a norm of not using chemical weapo
explosive charges coming out yesterday there as well. john heilemann, let s talk about the president and the shift in policy and, of course, these revelations. we find out now that four americans have been killed and what does that mean for the president politically? not just with republicans but especially with his own democratic party on capitol hill? i think, joe, this has been an issue that has been getting increasingly contentious and taking a long time for the issue to come to a head. we talked about it many times on this show. there are obviously huge concerns for a lot of people about this program on both the left and the right. and this is one of these issues where because it goes to core issues around weighing, as ron said, the balance between security, liberty, issues of transparency, issues of a new kind of war fare that is going to be the way in which a lot of
obama and i think the idea that he would want the irs used for retribution we have no evidence of any such thing. i think we also got a look at all of these events in the last couple of days in terms of the poisonous hyperpartisanship and ideological war fare in washington that is making governance on both sides. that is not to say a real investigation of what happened in ben ghazi shouldn t take place, that a real investigation, including a grand jury investigation of what happened at the irs, ought to take place. but the politicalization of what goes for policy in washington is crippling us. we can t get anything done in terms of real governance in this country. you said before we know president obama, we can t make any connection. we are not saying because you like the guy that we should take his word that we should go unfazed. this deserves a full hearing. absolutely. look.
yeah. what are we going to do if it we are interested in peace? what is the big plan that we have in mind? what is the timetable that he is prepared to share? i ve gone back on a number of occasions and looked at the earliest days of huntley and brinkley. as long as i ve been in this business, 50 years. i ve been on that tarmac a number of occasions and spent a lot of time in that number of world and there is never more chaos than at the moment. what is going on in syria is in danger of spreading across the middle east. richard engel who is over there now says we have a new kind of war fare between the shiite and the sunni from lebanon across the gulf. times are extraordinarily