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Woodward, this caught my eye in the financial times. this is it a president 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 the question is, what's going on ...

Rhetoric, though, is while he's saying the u.s. will take this military, we need to do this, you can see the subtext clearly his own reluctance to do so. it's not the normal commander in chief fare, our cause is just, our cause is righteous, we'll see it through to the end. instead you hear him saying, we'll be in and out. it's limited in duration. we won't be the ones enforcing the no-fly zone. won't be our ships enforcing the arms embargo. you see that reluctance shot through his rhetoric. >> tom ricks, we began the discussion this morning, richard engel reporting on the rebel, they're getti...

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 about this than most of us, bo...

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 unhappy with this. a lot of peop...

an advance by the rebels. if the air strikes stop, then the rebels will no longer be able to advance and this could become a long, drawn-out stalemate. >> in ajdabiya, richard engel with the very latest. as part of the president's effort to more explain the mission in libya, hillary clinton and robert gates sat down here with me yesterday, secretary gates, secretary clinton, welcome back to "meet the press." the president says this was days, not weeks, we're into the second week. has the mission been accomplished? >> i think the no-fly zone aspect has been accomplished. we haven't ...