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Matter is the president is spentding most of his time these days on these national security issues. >> tom, you're a little bit more sanguine about this analytically. you said off camera there is a natural flow to libya from the president's cairo speesh where he tried to refashion america's image in the rest of the world. >> yes. last week the white house was talking about the slaughter in former hugo slauf area. if he had let that happen, stood back, this would be an enormous blot on the presidency worse because the president would be seen as partly encouraging it. u.s. military is very unhap...

Wing as opposed to the old hands, and the president is obviously not happy with his set of choices. one person told me in a meeting he called this military action in libya a terd sandwich. but he was quoting an aide who likes that term. >> ted koppel, you spent time with henry kissinger in the earlier days who knew something about the big ideas for the world. is this administration getting the big ideas right in the tumult in the middle east? >> i don't think anybody has the big ideas right yet. first of all, let's take a look at what happened not so many years ago, and tom would know more abo...

Intervention in rib area. >> as bob reported -- >> you can see it. the irony that of course obama in 2008 was the antiwar candidate and for him to be the person who has brought us into a third conflict in the middle east, i think that is why you see that anguish. he does not want to be in these circumstances but he feels that his hand has been forced. i think it is going to a concern on the left. but what's interesting about what you see in congress is the objections seem to be mostly about process, hey, we weren't consulted, less about substance. that seems to be kind of the bipartisan grumbl...

History, this sort of action. this is really just obama going back to an eisenhower-like approach of not trying to get stuck in something but try to affect it. >> but bob you've chronicled this throughout the bush years and now the obama years. the point that you had made before, which is what if things don't go as planned? isn't the legacy of iraq to question the government's best hist case scenarios? >> and i've heard obama say things like, war is hell, it is managing chaos. he clearly does not like war and in his noble acceptance speech he said war is never glorious, it's a manifestation of...

Around. there is this receiticencretice woodward, this caught my eye in the financial times. this is it a p would could still run in 2012 on the grounds that he got out of two wars. he's not going to do things to distract us from afghanistan and that's totally consistent with what i call the obama doctrine, that other countries are going to have to do more in a more diverse international order. >> but this is war. uf can you can't extinguish our knowledge about war. this idea that you can have a limited video game, it just isn't the way it is. no one knows more about this than tom ricks. and t...