of talent they have and if they re willing to fight, they re certainly trying to judge how much time is left in terms of how much reserve ordnance does the resistance have they re preparing for military intervention if the president chooses to do that. reporter: the clandestine aspect make some uncomfortable on capitol hill. will we become a nation which plots in secret to wage war? reporter: defense secretary robert gates remains clear it s opposed to the military joining the intelligence officers. there will be no american boots on the ground in libya. deposing the gaddafi regime, as welcome that eventuality would be is not part of the military mission. reporter: gates said if mr. obama decides to send weapons to retreating rebels, the u.s. troops should not train them. lawmakers are going further. personally, i think arming the guys is a bad idea. but because we don t know who they are. militarily putting u.s. or nato boots on the ground in libya to overthrow gaddafi
time now to bring in the panel. steve hayes of the weekly standard. a.b. stoddard from the hill. and syndicated columnist charles krauthammer. so it s flashed all over the news media today that c.i.a. operatives have been on the ground for several weeks to help with airstrikes and to learn more about the rebels. steve, good idea? well, yeah. i think it would be news if the cia wasn t on the ground in libya given what is going on there. part of the problem that we face in libya, with respect to our intelligence is that we have, we had an atrophied intelligence operation in libya before this, throughout the last part of the last decade. we document have strong human intelligence assets on the ground in libya, so what we re doing now is making up for lost time. i think they are trying to flood the zone as it were. send a lot of people in. learn as much as we can. find out who is on our side and who is not and try to win the war that way. chris: we find in out the paper today about the
chris: less than two minutes left. steve, one other thing to bring up. the other big development, i want to ask how big it is, two top libyan officials, the foreign minister and the former foreign minister both defected. how significance that? it could be significant because it shows there is a nervousness around muammar gaddafi if there is not if gaddafi is not nervous himself. the troubling thing for united states is we re not doing the things by sending the mixed signals that charles mention and signs that we may be timid or not committed to actually winning and removing gaddafi. we are sending signals to him that he doesn t have to be that worried. think about if we sent signals say weg i ll do whatever it takes to win the war. we ve seen muammar gaddafi collapse before. he did it after the iraq chris: but then doesn t the international coalition splinter and that means they didn t get support for that, any more than back in 91 they
seriously. otherwise he should not enter his country into war. chris: take a break there. after the break, the panel discusses the battle over the presidential primary calendar in the meantime, tell us what topic you want us to discuss in the friday lightning round by voting in the poll in the home page at foxnews.com/specialreport.
didn t get support to oust saddam hussein? at a point you have to take a risk that the coalition will splinter. if keeping the coalition is more important than winning the war, you have priorities back. if you take that, what you talk about that may have been overstated in terms of arming rebels if we lead the fight to topple gaddafi, then we really do, pottery barn rule all over again. if we help them depose gaddafi and run him out and including his son and nothing less than that, we own helping them be nothing. they re fighting in their cars, firing in the wrong direction with toy guns. chris: all right. we already own the war. obama decided we were going to. the war. he s the one who organizes the coalition. he crowed about it. it s now his war. he thinks he can pretend it s a nato war or u.n. war, arab league war. of course not. coalition is a means. not an end. person has to decide what the end is and pursue it