Face the Nation transcripts January 5, 2014: Reid, King, Salmon

BOB SCHIEFFER: Extending minimum wage, same thing--

BOB SCHIEFFER: You don’t--

SENATOR HARRY REID: I mean they’re just not-- they are out of touch with what’s going on in America today.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this, Senator: I think most people would say that last-- the last meeting of Congress was probably the least productive, maybe in history. It's certainly the least productive that I can remember. What you seem to be saying to me is, listen, we are in for the absolute same thing, nothing much is going to change here.

SENATOR HARRY REID: Bob, unless the Republicans in Congress decide they should do something for the American people, I am sorry to say that’s true. Rating of Congress is down. If somebody called me on a poll I would vote with them. This is awful what's been going on. And that’s-- that’s the reason, Bob, that we had to change the rules. They were even opposing people who were part of Obama’s team. Never in the history of the country to show you how outline this has gotten. My predecessor, one of my predecessors, Lyndon Johnson was leader for six years. He had to overcome one or two filibusters; me, four hundred and thirty filibusters. Things are gotten way out of whack and that’s why we change the rules, and now we say, majority-- majority of them not such a bad word is it, majority is going to determine who can be on President Obama's team. The Founding Fathers, you know, this-- this filibuster that they so love is not part of the Constitution. It’s not a privilege, it’s a right.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you this.

SENATOR HARRY REID: I mean, I'm sorry, it’s a privilege not a right. And-- and, Bob, just-- also I want to just say this, the Founding Fathers they decided what should be a super majority, you know, impeachments and stuff like that. One of them wasn’t improving nominations-- approving nominations.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this: I mean listening to you this morning if the Republicans continue to throw up the kind of opposition you’ve been receiving, you say you’ve been receiving, do you have plans to extend this ban on filibusters? Right now you’ve-- you’ve worked out this rule which they vehemently oppose that-- so they-- it’s very difficult for him to filibuster nominations. Would you be willing to just go to a Senate where just majority rules and that’s it?

SENATOR HARRY REID: Well, Bob, I think it’s something that we have to understand.

BOB SCHIEFFER: So you’re thinking about that?

SENATOR HARRY REID: But that-- that’s-- that’s-- that’s this. We cannot have a country that’s paralyzed because of a group of people, the group of people who are like Tea Party-driven Republicans in Congress, not Republicans. I'm not here to bad mouth the Republicans around the country. I get a lot of support from Republicans in Nevada, and always have had. But they are mainstream Republicans. They’re not driven by this craziness that we have in American today. So the answer is this: We-- we-- we should pass raising the minimum wage. We should extend unemployment benefits. We should get rid of these tax loopholes and create jobs so the middle class can-- can start growing, not shrinking.

BOB SCHIEFFER: But would you do away with filibusters entirely?

SENATOR HARRY REID: Well, I’m-- we’re-- we're not there yet. I think that we-- we--

BOB SCHIEFFER: I mean are you even thinking about that?

SENATOR HARRY REID: No, I’m not thinking about it today. But I-- I think--

BOB SCHIEFFER: You’re saying you’re holding that out. Is-- that is a possibility?

SENATOR HARRY REID: I-- I-- I think everyone should understand that the country cannot continue on the road that it’s on. It cannot have-- you cannot have when you have vacancies in the judiciary as we’ve had, DC Circuit, some say it’s more important than the Supreme Court. But it’s, at least, the second most important. They said we’re not going to fill these spots because we don’t want to. You can't. That’s not the way we legislate.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you think that the minimum wage will pass? Can you get the votes to pass in increasing the minimum wage?

SENATOR HARRY REID: I think that the-- there are five Republicans, five Republicans--Dean Heller plus four Republicans. Remember, Dean Heller is not some maverick that is out spewing socialism. Here is a guy who is really a conservative person and he wants to extend unemployment benefits. I admire him for doing that. And can’t we get four Republicans agree with the American people that we should do that? I would certainly hope so.

BOB SCHIEFFER: So you’re saying that that’s still very much in doubt because you can’t get four Republicans?

SENATOR HARRY REID: Well, I am saying hopefully.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Hopefully, you can get them.

SENATOR HARRY REID: Hopefully, we can get four more Republicans, gee, whiz. I mean this is--

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me--

SENATOR HARRY REID: --something we’ve never stopped unemployment benefits.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you quickly. Getting back to the budget agreement we talked about that you all made in December. You have just two weeks to get those funds appropriated and allocated to get the whole package through the Congress again. Do you think that that’s going to happen?

SENATOR HARRY REID: Bob, the answer is, yes. But let me just say this as a cautionary--

BOB SCHIEFFER: Because if you don’t--

SENATOR HARRY REID: Let me-- a cautionary note.

BOB SCHIEFFER: If you don’t raise the debt ceiling--

SENATOR HARRY REID: Yes, I understand it. Cautionary note. What was done by Congressman Ryan and Senator Murray was historic. It’s wonderful that these two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum got together and did good work. I will always admire them for that. And we should get the appropriation. Now we got Mikulski. She’s doing a great job and she’s working with the counterpart in the House. But, Bob, I’m afraid. Why am I afraid? It was just matter of a couple of months ago that two-thirds of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to keep the government closed and default on the debt. So I-- I hope we can get this done. But I have really-- I am-- I am really concerned about what’s going on with Republicans in Congress. Repeat to that your-- your viewers. Two-thirds of the people in the House of Representatives are Republicans, voted to close the government, keep it closed more than sixteen days and default on our debt. That-- I mean I-- I want this to pass. I hope it does. It should. That we have an Omnibus Appropriation Bill, but I don’t know.

BOB SCHIEFFER: What do you think about the future of Obamacare? Republicans were willing to shut down the government in an effort to kill it. They didn't do it. Then it had this disastrous roll out when this is an election year for a bunch of your Democrats in the Senate, twenty-one of them-- twenty-one seats.

SENATOR HARRY REID: Twenty-one of us, fourteen of them.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

SENATOR HARRY REID: Bob--

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, the-- well, Democrats run--

SENATOR HARRY REID: Yeah.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --as proud sponsors of Obamacare or will they run away from him?

SENATOR HARRY REID: It’s interesting. I-- I can’t come here and say the rollout was great, it was awful. But look, let-- let’s-- look where we are today. The website has been fixed. Perfect? No. But right now, as we speak, there’re nine million Americans--nine million Americans who have health care that didn’t have it before. We have-- we have-- as you know, we have three million Medicare. We have three million on their policies because they haven’t reached-- reached-- they haven’t reached age twenty-six. They stay on their parents' policy. And we'll have more than two million. They’re coming. I talked to President's Chief of Staff a day or two ago, Denis McDonough. They’re coming on at the rate of thirty thousand a day. We’re-- well, I think we're going to have some staggering numbers even more than this come April first. So I-- you know, we’re at nine million already. It’s the law. Is that important? Of course. Women are no longer considered a preexisting disability. Seniors, the donut hole is being filled. They can have their checks. They can do Pap smears, all this stuff that women couldn’t do before. We-- insurance companies can’t cancel you for no reason. We have--

BOB SCHIEFFER: So anyway, you think it's going to work.

SENATOR HARRY REID: Yeah. It’s-- it’s already-- it’s already working.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right.

SENATOR HARRY REID: And-- and Republicans should get a life and start talking about doing something constructively.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right.

SENATOR HARRY REID: They-- all they talk about is how bad Obamacare is. They don’t talk about doing anything to improve it. Let’s start working together.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, we've got a couple of them in the wings here and we’ll see what they say about it. Mister Leader, thank you so much--

SENATOR HARRY REID: You bet.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --for joining us. We appreciate having you.

And now how it looks from the other side of the street? We do have, indeed, two Republicans. Congressman Peter King is in New York and Congressman Matt Salmon joins us from his district in Phoenix. So let me just go to you. I’ll go to you first, Congressman King. What’s your reaction to what you heard from Senator Reid here this morning?

REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING (Intelligence Committee/R-New York): Actually, Bob, I was very disappointed because I thought the days of government shutdowns were behind us, and just the whole implication with Senator Reid is when you basically said--are you going to pass the Omnibus Appropriation Bill. And he sort of hesitated, somehow sending out a threat of maybe shutting down the government or slowing down the process. That’s the wrong attitude to have at the beginning of the year. We can have disagreements but I think we have to find ways to compromise on-- on all the issues he was talking about. I think there’s a possibility for compromise. But if he’s going to be talking from day one implying that there could be shutdowns, to me that-- that’s the wrong way to start, it’s the wrong message to send, and if something does happen, it will-- I think it can be traced right back to the show this morning what-- basically what Senator Reid said.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, Congressman Salmon, what’s your reaction?

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON (Foreign Affairs Committee/R-Arizona): Well, I think it’s interesting that Senator Reid spent his entire time just blaming Republicans for everything, every calamity in the world, and not really offering any solutions. I think that's why the American people think that Congress is so dysfunctional because it’s just partisan politics. Honestly, I think we deserve better. And if Senator Reid is that interested in improving the economy and in helping us get jobs again, maybe he could just take up at least one of the thirty-nine bills, jobs-related bills, that we’ve sent from the Republican House to the Senate which language is in his drawer. The fact is these giveaway programs, government programs, don’t create one job, not one job. If we want to energize the job market, we need to get rid of back-breaking, job-breaking regulations and our tax policy that is-- is hurting our economy.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, let me-- let me just ask you, Mister Salmon, what about this extending the unemployment benefits? He does make the point and economy has backed this up that-- that some of this unemployment insurance that is paid out does go back into the economy. It’s-- it’s not all a giveaway. I mean, when you-- obviously, it’s a-- it’s a big cost, a big ticket item, twenty-six billion dollars for a year. But some of it does get back into the economy. Will you-- will you support that in some fashion?

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: If the senator comes up with any kind of a reasonable idea to offset the twenty-six billion, I think that he might find some people that are willing to talk to him. But I think that we need to focus our attention more on not what the-- the--the-- the-- the out-- the problem itself, but focus on the root cause. And that is unemployment. Let’s get people back to work. Let’s approve the Keystone Pipeline. Let’s deal with one of the thirty-nine jobs’ bills that we’ve sent him to try to get our economy going again and people working in the private sector.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, let me--

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: The answer isn’t government, the answer is the private sector, and let’s get it going again.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Congressman King, do you see any way, any kind of a compromise that could be struck to continue at least some part of this unemployment insurance for these people?

REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING: Yeah. I agree with Matt said about cutting back on the regulations and trying to unleash the economy in the private sector. I would, however, want to support the extension of unemployment benefits at least to some extent for brief period of time. And only speaking for myself, I am-- I’m not saying it's be offset dollar for dollar, but there has to be some compromise coming from the Democrats. I don’t want to have this permanent state of unemployment insurance where you end up like Europe. On the other hand there are people who are looking for work, who need some help. So I would like to find a way to get a compromise to extend unemployment insurance, at least, for a brief period of time. But at the same time the Democrats should make compromise as far as some, you know, burdensome regulations that attempt to unleash the economy because the ultimate answer is not unemployment insurance, the ultimate answer is more jobs. But for a temporary period of time I could see an extension of unemployment benefits, but again with restrictions on it so we don’t have a permanent class of people on unemployment insurance and it doesn’t become an impediment to jobs.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me--

REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING: And it doesn’t create a state of dependency.

BOB SCHIEFFER: And let me ask both of you, is-- do you think there is any chance that raising the minimum wage will happen this year, Mister Salmon?

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: Well, first of all, I think that the raising of the minimum wage actually hurts the very people we’re trying to help. If the Obama administration wants to the raise minimum wage to ten bucks an hour, I-- I don’t believe, again, that’s the government is the answer. I believe that the answer is to strengthen our economy.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, can I-- can I just stop you and just ask you an obvious question?

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: Yeah, please.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Why, does it hurt someone to pay them more money? Because that’s what you just said.

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: Well, I’ll tell you how it hurts them. The people that are mostly on minimum wage are the folks that are eighteen to twenty-eight. And those folks right now have the highest unemployment rate in the country, by far, not even close. And history has shown us that when the minimum wage rises those companies that are paying minimum wage jobs end up laying people off and they end up hiring less people.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay. All right.

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: And that’s what I mean by them actually being the people that are hurt.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Got you. Mister King, what do you think about, have you-- do you think we ought to raise the minimum wage?

REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING: I’ve supported it in the past. For the last several years I have not because when the economy is down the way it is, I think it-- it’s an extra burden that you’re imposing on employers as they try to come out of the recession. I would again consider an increase in it but it has to be coinciding with a cutting back on some of the burdens that are on employers because otherwise as-- as Matt was saying we can increase the minimum wage but it would mean more people being laid off. To me we have to-- again, we can get to compromise, we can get things on the table where the Democrats are willing to give up some of these restrictions and burdens that are on businesses, then I’d be willing to consider somewhat of an increase in the minimum wage. But again the ultimate answer is to allow the private sector expand and we're not going to do that so long as we keep adding regulations on top of regulation and people like Senator Reid, you know, refuse to talk about lifting any of those regulations.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you, Mister Salmon.

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: A lot of-- Bob, a lot of the--

BOB SCHIEFFER: Go ahead.

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: Yeah. I was just going to say that I-- I have conversations with a lot of the Democrats on the floor, a lot of them very, very difference than mine and they’re as frustrated as I am with leaders like Harry Reid that just want to continue to push partisan agenda. They, like us, believe that there are answers that we can cross the aisle and work together but I think that the leadership has to come from the top. When I was in Congress before we served with Bill Clinton as President, in fact, Peter King and I both served together during the nineties and we were able to do all kinds of things. Trade policies that grew our economy, reducing the deficit, in fact, we balanced the budget for the first time in forty years in '98.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay.

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: This president is a polarizing figure that does nothing but address a "my way or the highway" attitude.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right.

REPRESENTATIVE MATT SALMON: And until we have a President that’s willing to reach across the aisle, it’s going to be very, very difficult.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. We have to stop at there. The clock just ran out.

REPRESENTATIVE PETER KING: Okay.

BOB SCHIEFFER: We’ll be back in one minute with a look at the history of FACE THE NATION.

(ANNOUNCEMENTS)

BOB SCHIEFFER: “It seems like only yesterday.” People always say that, but actually it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like about sixty years ago, because it was November 7, 1954, that CBS launched FACE THE NATION. Contrary to the belief of some I have not been at FACE THE NATION the entire time. I have only been at CBS forty-five years, the last twenty-three at FACE THE NATION.

(Begin VT)

BOB SCHIEFFER: face, as we call it, was the brainchild of the late Frank Stanton, who ran the network in the early days. When I asked him some years ago why he started it, he said simply, “Because NBC had MEET THE PRESS,” and I thought we needed a program like that. Today the two broadcasts are the oldest programs on television. The first guest was Joe McCarthy. Producers were apprehensive; he had shown up at another network packing a pistol, but he came to CBS unarmed. Over the years, everyone from Nikita Khrushchev and a parade of foreign potentates--

YASSER ARAFAT: Against our rights.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --to the cream of the crop of American politics--Presidents, candidates, diplomats, civil rights leaders, war leaders and revolutionaries--

RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI: I am their leader.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --authors and opinion makers, all came to FACE THE NATION.

GEORGE MEANY: To tell these unions their business.

BOB SCHIEFFER: AFL-CIO chief George Meany was one of the few who showed up late. When moderator George Herman chided him by saying, “Don’t you know I am a good union man?” Meany responded, “Yours is not much of a union.” In the early days FACE THE NATION included a live report beamed to New York all the way from New Jersey. Now we can speak to newsmakers at any point on the globe. For all the technology, the remarkable thing about FACE THE NATION is how little it has changed. We still do exactly what they did in the beginning: We sit down the key newsmakers of the week, turn on the lights, and ask them about the news of the day.

(End VT)

BOB SCHIEFFER: You, our viewers, have seemed to appreciate that over the years, so in case you’re wondering, we’ll try to get better, but basically we’ll celebrate this sixtieth year by doing just what we’ve been doing. We won’t change much.

Back in a minute.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, the President is talking about income inequality. I mean we-- we get word from Hawaii that that’s what he’s coming back to Washington to talk about. What does that mean to you, Peggy?

PEGGY NOONAN (Wall Street Journal): What it means to me is that he does not want to talk about Obamacare. It is widely assumed that in 2014 the bad news of Obamacare, the dislocations, the lost coverage, the price hikes, the premium hikes, et cetera, et cetera. That all of this will continue. It’s not the website. The website is the old story. It is the program. It will unveil over the next two years and it’s going to be problematic. The President does not want to talk about it. The Democrats do not want to talk about it. Therefore, income inequality, minimum wage, et cetera, et cetera. They need to change the subject.

BOB SCHIEFFER: David, how did this go so wrong? I mean when you stop and think about it, I mean the fact that people ought to have health insurance, and if poor people can’t afford it they ought to be able to get some relief on that. I mean that would seem to be kind of a universal truth.

DAVID IGNATIUS (Washington Post): You know and a-- country and corporate America was--

BOB SCHIEFFER: And yet this thing is most tangled up. I’ve never seen anything quite like the way this thing has unfolded.

DAVID IGNATIUS: Historians will-- will-- will write memorable books about-- about how this got so messed up. How the President left the details to people who couldn’t execute them is the biggest mystery of all.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

DAVID IGNATIUS: There was a consensus back in 2008 that something needed to be done about the delivery of health care services. It cost too much. What we monkeyed with instead is how health care is financed which I think was a-- was a mistake.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

DAVID IGNATIUS: And I think you look back on debate in 2009, President really didn’t have the votes, he had to jam it through with some sort of legislatives maneuvers because the Congress wasn’t quite-- quite ready and the country wasn’t quite ready. So we’re living with the after affects of that now. You know thinking about this year ahead, the election of a new mayor in New York, very liberal replacing the defining figure of centrism and-- and moderation Mayor Bloomberg. I wonder whether this is going to be a year in which these liberal themes, even Obamacare, but you know, minimum wage, income inequality will move to the front for Democrats and for the country.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

DAVID SANGER: Well, the President’s got an opportunity in that regard because, you know, he ended the year with the stock market at an incredible high and with this termination of some of the unemployment benefits. And that's quite a division that the President can sort of run through when he gets to the State of the Union. Now whether or not he manages to do that without further polarizing on already polarized system, that's the hard question.

JOHN DICKERSON: That's right because income inequality is a real big issue. It's not like he’s off finding some phony little side issue. What will be interesting, though, is what the solution is. If Republicans and Democrats can roughly agree that inequality is a problem, the question is how do you fix it. And one interesting figure is in the course of health care and the fight over affordable health care now Gallup says that fifty-six percent of the country doesn’t believe everybody should have insurance. That used to be a majority opinion. So the question is, if everybody thinks inequality is a problem, how does once we get through this big fight, who wins the argument and what the solution is. And does that warp and change the way people think about inequality because people do feel like things have gotten out of whack. The question is the President will be framing it one way, Republicans will be saying, well, this is about jobs.

PEGGY NOONAN: The funny thing about inequality is it's as if everybody has just discovered this problem of the rich are really rich and the poor are really poor and the middle is not gaining.

BOB SCHIEFFER: That they’re getting-- the argument, though, is that they’re getting more so the rich are getting a lot richer.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yes. And normally this administration used to brag about how well the-- the-- the stock market was going and in a way it’s almost the negative side of-- of one argument. But the answer so far to inequality is being presented now even in New York, brand new mayor, progressive, lefty, former Sandinista-- what he’s saying essentially is the old answer.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Former Sandinista? And I didn’t know that part.

PEGGY NOONAN: Sorry. Former-- I beg your pardon, that is not true, former enthusiast for Sandinista like political movement in Nicaragua. But what he’s saying, essentially, is the old playbook, not the new playbook. The old playbook is inequality, I will raise your taxes and I will raise spending. Well, there’s nothing revolutionary about that. That’s the old playbook.

JOHN DICKERSON: I think that’s why Obama people are so nervous and are saying on unemployment and minimum wage, it has economic growth benefits. You hear them talk a lot about the number of jobs and the GDP effects. That’s all about saying this is about growth, business, and-- and shrinking the deficit.

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.

JOHN DICKERSON: It’s not about redistribution in these old arguments.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Let’s take a little break here and we’ll come back and talk-- I’m want to talk about the United States overseas and what’s going on there when we come back.

(ANNOUNCEMENTS)

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, we are back now with our panel. And I want to talk to David Sanger a little bit about this. You know I thought one of the saddest pieces of news last week was what’s happening in Iraq now, where in Fallujah, this is a place, Anbar province, where one-third of the Americans who were killed in the Iraq war lost their lives in-- in that province. It now looks like it’s in the hands of anti-government forces, if not will soon be. What’s happened there?

    DAVID SANGER: It is. What’s happened here is that as America left Iraq and as leaving Afghanistan and as many perceive the U.S. to be pulling back some from the Middle East, something I think a contention that John Kerry would-- would argue with as he’s there now, you have seen a power vacuum develop. And power vacuums get filled in that region by extremist groups. And in this case the extremist group is the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria which is basically an al Qaeda-Sunni affiliate that wants to not only take back Ramadi and Fallujah but the erase the barrier, erase the border between Iraq and Syria, make the Syrian conflict into a trans-national one. The big question is what could President Obama have done differently? And so we went in to Iraq with the concept that we would somehow change the state, and I think we’ve all concluded that there was a fair bit of hubris to that. But when President Obama came out his view was that a light footprint strategy could keep fighting back against al Qaeda and its affiliates. And I think what we’re seeing now, Bob, is that the light footprint which was basically the use of Special Forces, of drones, of cyber, these weapons that don’t involve Americans to go in on the ground very much or stay very long that’s running out of gas.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, David, what happens now? What can we do? What should we do?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, someone, some-- someone, some group of people is going to have to take on al Qaeda in the Euphrates Valley in Syria and Iraq both. And the danger is that we’ve had coalescence of al Qaeda forces that’s being done now by the Maliki government, the Shiite-led Iranian-backed Maliki government of Baghdad. In Syria it’s being done to the extent it’s being done at all by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and elements of-- of the opposition we’ve been trying to back. I mean while I understand David’s point about the big Spenglerian themes of American decline. As I look at the story, I-- I see little mistakes. It wasn’t inevitable or essential that people would stop paying the Sons of Iraq, the tribal fighters in Fallujah which was just overwhelmed this week, in Ramadi, in these cities to stand up against al Qaeda. That was-- it happened because Maliki let it happen and we basically acquiesced. Same thing in Syria. Secretary Clinton, General Petraeus, Secretary Panetta, all of our top National Security officials said in mid 2012, we've got to get started backing rebels who can suppress al Qaeda. We’re going to have a huge problem. The President decided not to do it. It was a-- it wasn’t a huge mistake, it was a small mistake but today that’s what we’re living with. And there’s going to be a new war against al Qaeda in that part of the world. That’s coming.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, I mean will the United States go back to Iraq?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Not in the, as David said, not in the large footprint way, but, you know, we are already providing, Iraq is the only country in the world asking for NSA surveillance technology. We are providing every kind of-- of-- of, you know, tool we can give them to help them go after al Qaeda, find out who they are and go after them.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Will that be enough, David?

DAVID SANGER: That’s the big question because every time that President Obama has chosen this method of trying a small arm shipments, whether it’s in Syria or whether it’s in Iraq, it’s proven not to be up to the job. And the problem that he faces right now is that in-- in President Maliki in-- in Iraq, he has allied himself or has found himself stuck with somebody who has not been willing to make any kind of compromise or concession and so that's opened up this Sunni-Shia divide. In Afghanistan we haven’t done a whole lot better with President Karzai and I think the big question is if you don’t have leaders on the ground who you can trust to take this on and do it in a smart way, what do you do short of re-engaging, and I'm in complete agreement with David, there is no way that President Obama is going to send back American forces on the ground into places that he staked his presidency on-- on coming out of

JOHN DICKERSON: And that's particularly true of a year where one of the bright spots he hopes for him is being able to celebrate the return of troops from Afghanistan, even though, some are staying--seven to ten thousand. He’s going to champion the fact that forty-some thousand are coming back and that that’s a promise fulfilled from his original campaign.