his handling of the crisis in syria. the president will be given the opportunity to talk to counterparts at the g 8 and let s see what happens. i do understand why they don t want to talk in a lot of detail about whatever they decided to do. joining me for why it matters, jim williams, msnbc contributor and senate insider. great to see you. want to remind the viewers, clinton s comments criticizing obama were made in a closed press event. nonetheless, not like former presidents don t criticize sitting ones. what s your take on that? it was a little unusual to see president clinton do that, and quickly this morning on morning joe he didn t really backtrack but gave full support for what the president s deputy national security adviser announced yesterday. he probably made good with the administration on that. i want to back up a minute. the whole idea of former presidents bashing or talking about sitting presidents, that s
fly over libya, no troops on the ground, but something to nudge gadhafi out of power. they got that. later, sorry, in 2012, attack on the embassy there. didn t have a huge footprint on the ground, troops defending an embassy, that became a scandal of its own. you could see the train chugging closer to greater involvement in libya. asking basically for the same in syria with less certainty. libya we have an agreed upon regime, syria, you have a host of different interests. the difference with syria being we would i think americans prefer any regime to an assad regime, at least we think so. saying we have a light footprint, respond to the chemical weapon attacks, we have been there before, we don t know how that involvement ends. when you talk about americans, do americans really know anything about the assad regime? we leave it up to our elected