Face the Nation transcripts April 28, 2013: Syria and Boston - Graham, McCaskill, and Chambliss

(CBS News) Below is a transcript of "Face the Nation" on April 28, 2013, hosted by CBS News' Bob Schieffer. Guests include: Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., along with CBS News correspondents John Miller and Bob Orr. Plus, a panel featuring CBS News' Clarissa Ward, John Dickerson, and Norah O'Donnell, joined by Harvard's David Gergen and the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan.

SCHIEFFER: Today on Face the Nation, could the Boston bombers have been stopped? And what should the U.S. role be in Syria?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R) SOUTH CAROLINA: Boston is becoming to me a case study in system failure.

SCHIEFFER: But what to do about it? And what about the other story, reports the Syrian government used chemical weapons on its open people.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: To use potential weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line, and that is going to be a game changer.

SCHIEFFER: Does that mean greater U.S. involvement? We'll hear from three key senators on both stories: South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, and Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss. We'll get the latest from Boston from CBS investigators John Miller and Bob Orr. And analysis on all that and more from Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, Harvard University's David Gergen, CBS This Morning co-host Norah O'Donnell, foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward just back from Syria, and political director John Dickerson. Plus, the highlights of last night's White House correspondents' dinner. It's all next on Face the Nation.

ANNOUNCER: From CBS News in Washington, Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer.

SCHIEFFER: And good morning, again. South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham is in Cottonwood, Arizona, this morning. And, senator, thanks for coming. I want to start with the -- some of these details, more details now coming out on the Russian bombers and their family. It now turns out not only was one of them on a U.S. terror watch list, but also his mother as well. What do you make of this? And where are we on all of this?

GRAHAM: Well, I don't know if his mother was on the watch list, but the warning letters the FBI received in march of 2011 and the CIA I think in November 2011, included the mother as someone to be worried about. I think information sharing failed. The FBI investigated the older brother but never shared the information with fusion cell (ph) in Boston so people in the Boston area could be on the lookout. When he goes back to Russia in January 2012, the system pings at DHS, but DHS doesn't share the information with the FBI or the CIA. And when he comes back in 2012, he creates a YouTube channel of his own making where you've got radical extremist videos that he's watching and interacting with. So it's a failure to share information and missing obvious warning signs. We're going back to the pre-9/11 stovepiping.

SCHIEFFER: Well, what do we do? What needs to be done here?

GRAHAM: A postmortem. We need to find -- how could you miss the fact that the guy you were -- you were informed by a foreign intelligence service you have got a radical in your midst. We can't track him to Russia. We lose him going to Russia and coming back as far as an interview. And when he goes on the internet for the whole world to see to interact with the radical Islamic web sites, how do we miss that? So we're going to have to up our game. And when one of these guys goes into the system and they leave the country we have got to make sure we know where they're going and interview them and when somebody in the database like this begins to openly interact with radical Islamist web sites, an FBI agent should knock on his door and say, "you told us before you wanted to be an Olympic boxer, you love this country. What the hell is going on here? We're watching you."

SCHIEFFER: Let me turn to Syria and the situation there where there are now reports that the Syrian government was using chemical weapons on its open people. The president said last week this could be a game changer. Are you satisfied with the approach the administration is taking?

GRAHAM: No, I haven't been satisfied for a long time. But having said that, Syria's difficult. After the briefings with Secretary of State Kerry, which was powerful, four things are going to happen if we don't change course in Syria. It's going to become a failed state by the end of the year. It's fracturing along sectarian/ethnic lines. It's going to be an al Qaeda safe haven. The second thing, the chemical weapons, enough to kill millions of people, are going to be compromised and fall into the wrong hands. And the next bomb that goes off in America may not have nails and glass in it. The third thing I worry about is the king of Jordan. He's had 500,000 refugees flood his country from Syria. They could be up to a million to 3 million in the next six months to a year. And his kingdom could fall and he's a moderating influence, a good ally to us and Syria. And the fourth thing, if we keep this hands-off approach to Syria, this indecisive action towards Syria, kind of not knowing what we're going to do next, we're going to have a war with Iran because Iran's going to take our inaction in Syria as meaning we're not serious about their nuclear weapons program. We need to get involved. And there's a growing consensus, Bob, in the U.S. senate that the United States should get involved.

SCHIEFFER: Well, some of the things that are being suggested, a no-fly zone. That could be pretty dangerous for the United States, could it not, because we understand the Syrian government is setting up anti-aircraft weapons in those populated areas. This will not come without some cost.

GRAHAM: Yeah, there's nothing you can do in Syria without risk, but the greatest risk is a failed state with chemical weapons falling in the hands of radical Islamists and they're pouring into Syria. The longer this goes, the more likely you have a failed state and all hell's going to break loose in the region. It's a disaster for the region. It's going to be a disaster for the world. One way you can stop the Syrian air force from flying is to bomb the Syrian airbases with cruise missiles. You don't need to go deep into Syria to do that. If you could neutralize the air advantage the Syrian government has over the rebels, I think you could turn the tide of battle pretty quickly. As to arming the rebels, there are more radical Islamic fighters there than last year. And if it goes on six months more, there are going to be more. Let's give the right weapons to the right people. There are two wars to fight -- one to get Assad out of there. He's really a bad guy, dangerous to the world. The second war, unfortunately, is going to be between the majority of Syrians and the radical Islamists who have poured into Syria. So we need to be ready to fight two wars. You don't need boots on the ground from a U.S. point of view, but you sure do need international actions to bring this thing to a close quickly. If it goes on through the end of this year, the whole region is going to fall into chaos.

SCHIEFFER: All right, well, Senator Graham, thank you for being with us and sharing that this morning. I want to turn to two more key members of the Senate, two senators, Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the intelligence committee, and Democratic senator Claire McCaskill who serves on homeland security, both members of the armed services committee. Senator McCaskill what's your reaction to what you just heard from Senator Graham? Do you think there is a growing consensus that we've got to do something in Syria here?

MCCASKILL: Well, I think we're developing contingencies. I think the president, along with our military leadership, is working very hard right now to figure out the best way to keep Syria from becoming the fragmented state that could be a home and haven for terrorists. Russia's very important here, Bob. Russia, we've got to bring them around. Assad is leaning on Russia -- as much as we have to bring China around with North Korea. And I do think that people don't realize how much work is going on. The president met with the king of Jordan this week. The secretary of state is busy with all of our allies in the area trying to get help in figuring out what we can do surgically that will get the result we want without making the problem even worse.

SCHIEFFER: Well, Senator Chambliss, I mean Senator Graham pretty much underline in the understatement of the year, he said it's really hard and it's going to be very complicated. Who do you help? And how do you help them? I think that's the question that most people in government are trying to figure out.

CHAMBLISS: Well, Bob, we got better intelligence today than we had six months ago about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are in Syria. Unfortunately, one thing we're seeing is the bad guys are becoming more popular. They're the ones that we've got to make sure do not get their hands on these chemical weapons should Assad fall. They're the ones that we've got to make sure that if a decision is made to arm the rebels, that we don't arm them, that we arm the good guys. But, you know, it is very, very complex. Here's what concerns me, though. The world is watching. We've got 70,000 dead people in that part of the world as a result of Bashar al-Assad. We as America have never let something like that happen before. We've taken action.

Now, I don't have the answer, I doubt Claire does, as to exactly what we ought to do but the world is truly watching America right now, particularly with the president saying his red line of use of chemical weapons, use of chemical weapons is a game changer. Well, we now know he's used chemical weapons...

SCHIEFFER: Well, do we really know that, senator?

CHAMBLISS: We do.

SCHIEFFER: I keep thinking about Iraq and all these reports about weapons of mass destruction, and I remember Colin Powell going before the United Nations and it turned out none of it was true.

MCCASKILL: What we don't know is we don't have a conclusive chain of evidence at this point as to where the weapon -- where the order came from. Was this a rogue guy that decided to do this? Or was this truly a decision by the government in Syria to implement the use of -- and that's why I think we've got to make sure we know before we base our actions just on that.

SCHIEFFER: Well, is that -- should we only be our action on whether or not there was chemical weapons used? Or should it go beyond that, Senator Chambliss?

CHAMBLISS: Unfortunately, the situation in Syria has deteriorated to this point, to where it really does go beyond that. I would disagree, a little bit, with Claire in that we know where the order came from to use the weapon. We had another general defect just in the last couple of days who, again, has validated where the order came from. But even beyond that, look at what's happening inside of Syria. It is just a total chaos and a huge military conflict that has the potential to spread all over the Middle East. This is more than an Arab Spring uprising, more than people demonstrating in the streets. This is an out-and-out war.

SCHIEFFER: Well, what about the -- what are the things we can do, no-fly zones, more aid to the rebels, if we can figure out which rebels to give the aid to? What -- what are the things that are most likely to happen here, Senator?

MCCASKILL: Well, I think there's a variety of things that can be considered that I know that we are really working on the humanitarian part to help the king of Jordan and the problem that Lindsey referred to, in terms of the number of people that are fleeing Syria.

I think we can also help by providing things. We haven't gotten to lethal yet, but we sure are working with our friends in the area that may be providing more assistance to some of these -- the good guys, the opposition good guys. So it is a matter of resources and it's a matter of having contingency plans and making sure that we are ready if we need to take some kind of military action.

SCHIEFFER: Do either of you at this point think there's a chance that we would have to put U.S. troops in there or that we would want to?

MCCASKILL: I don't think you want to ever rule it out because I think this is, kind of, as -- as Saxby said, this thing has really deteriorated, and it's not really at a tipping point. So I don't think you ever want to say absolutely not. Obviously, we don't want to do that unless it's absolutely necessary.

CHAMBLISS: I would go even beyond that. I would say no. I think we can take affirmative action. Lindsey referred to cruise missiles. We've got F-22s and B-2s that can take out the anti-aircraft missiles that they have, and they are very sophisticated. If we did that, then it's still not up to the United States to engage in this from a military conflict standpoint. We don't need to put boots on the ground, but we need to enable their neighbors, the neighbors of Syria, to bring some sort of peaceful resolution to this. We can do it through a no-fly zone. I had a good conversation with King Abdullah just this week about that. I don't think we're at that point right now, but we're close. But the fact is, for America to sit on the sidelines and do nothing is a huge mistake because the world is watching.

MCCASKILL: And of course, if we do, if we take the bomber action, then that may lead to something else, and that's really what I'm referring to in terms of you don't ever want to say absolutely never any boots on the ground because, you know, Iran is busy here. Iran is very busy here. And so is Hezbollah. So it's just one of those things that we've got -- I think that we do need to be very cautious.

SCHIEFFER: You know, once Osama bin Laden was killed, we had people around here saying that the war on terrorism is over, the threat is over. I guess we found out in Boston that that's not entirely true. It does seem to be a different kind of terrorism that we're up against right now.

CHAMBLISS: This was our worst fear, and that is, a home grown terrorist, or a terrorist that was sent here to be ingrained within the community and -- you know, these guys, they flew under the radar. Certainly, the FBI had some suspicions because of contact by the Russians. I wish the Russians, Bob, had given us, in 2011, instead of just a cursory opinion of these guys, what they gave us...

SCHIEFFER: Do either of you have any information to suggest that they got training from somebody else some place else or in this country?

MCCASKILL: There -- there is no evidence at this point. The investigation continues. But there is no evidence at this point that these two were part of a larger organization, that they were in fact part of a -- some kind of terror cell or any kind of direction. It appears, at this point, based on the evidence, that it's the two of them.

SCHIEFFER: All right, well, I want to thank both of you for helping us on this, this morning. Thanks for coming by.

CHAMBLISS: Sure.

SCHIEFFER: Appreciate it. And we'll be back in a minute to talk to John Miller and Bob Orr.

SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with justice and homeland security correspondent Bob Orr and senior correspondent John Miller, the two people we leaned on so heavily through all of this -- this Boston story. Glad to have you both in one place. (LAUGHTER) Bob, you're generally here. John is in New York. Do either of you -- there is a report this morning that these people may have received some training from somewhere. Do either of you have any information on this?

MILLER: I would say that the trip to Russia, that's six months. And the FBI is actually on the ground with the FSB, which is actually pretty unusual to see them working together, but they're backtracking through that trip. We haven't heard anything at this point that they have found a time where there was training, but this is peeling back layers. That could change, but right now there's no indication of that.

ORR: The reason why they're suspicious, Bob, is that these bombs were somewhat sophisticated. If they used a remote trigger -- which now that seems to be the consensus in the investigative community -- it's very hard to imagine that two guys under the radar could buy all this stuff, build these bombs, carry off the attack and have all of it work perfectly. So where did they practice? And that begs the question did anybody help them train?

SCHIEFFER: What about these stories that are coming out of Russia now that it turns out the Russians may have been wiretapping the -- the bombers' mother?

ORR: In 2011, yes, the Russians now say -- they've now told the U.S. government that they had wiretaps up on the mother and they captured, among other things, a conversation between her son Tamerlan, the older son, and the mother talking about some kind of jihad. This was the underlying basis for the Russians coming to the FBI and the CIA and saying, in 2011, "We have concerns about this guy." The problem was, Bob, according to U.S. government officials, the Russians did not share that specific information at the time.

MILLER: And I'm not sure that that would have changed an awful lot. I mean, what you're seeing here is a shift in paradigm, which is basically the idea that it's not Al Qaida as much as it's Al Qaida- ism. And you have all these influences out there. In this case, the mother might have been one. There's certainly what you can find online. But the FBI is bound by law, the Constitution, a set of attorney general guidelines, and then a much stricter set of FBI domestic intelligence guidelines, how far can you go looking into Americans? And they did a 90-day assessment on this, which means they investigated this guy for three months. But after that, the rules say, if you don't find something that's not covered by the first amendment or that's going to lead you somewhere else, you have to close that out.

SCHIEFFER: What about -- let's talk about what's ahead. Anything new here?

ORR: Well, the investigators this week went through a landfill, for example, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, looking for specific information that might have explained what led up to the bombing. The younger brother went to school there, at UMass-Dartmouth, and there was a belief that perhaps he discarded something, notes, maybe a computer, maybe computer files. This would all help explain the why behind the bombing. Investigators, meanwhile, are still talking to all the associates, all the people that intersected both of these guys, to say when did you notice a change; did they ever give you any kind of hint that they were moving severely down the path of radicalization towards acting out? So the investigators are trying to, kind of, do the whole background, kind of, the back story, as to what led up to April 15th?

SCHIEFFER: Do we have any more information on whether or not there was anyone else involved, or that might have known about this, some contact, anything along those lines?

MILLER: So there are limits there, in that, once they Mirandized, or gave the Miranda warning to the surviving brother, he stopped talking. But there -- they had a couple of days with him, about 16 hours of questioning in full, and he said there was no one else involved. And he said -- basically, he said, my brother only got me involved with this a couple of months ago. So it doesn't fit, kind of, the London bombings or some of the other models where you have, kind of, a year-and-a-half planning arc. This seems to be have been relatively limited to them -- so far; that could change -- and relatively spontaneous.

SCHIEFFER: And the word "Manhattan" was mentioned by one of them during the episode with the person whose car they hijacked. Do we have any more indication of what that meant? Were they talking about going there to have a party or were they going there to do more damage?

ORR: Well, Police Commission in New York first said that the indication was they were coming to have a party. When he got more information he said, no, they were actually thinking of coming to Manhattan for act two. But you have to put all words into context, that word "Manhattan" was uttered at a time when the whole thing was falling apart. These guys were on the run. They were becoming increasingly desperate. And so they were making it up as they went. The fact is they never got out of Watertown. And I don't think anybody that looks at it seriously can say that an attack on New York was likely or imminent.

MILLER: But I think when you have a guy who -- what is he doing? He's not packing for a trip to the beach, he's gone from car to car, residence to residence. He's gathered up every bomb he has got left -- including a pressure cooker bomb. He's then hijacked a car, unlike his two broken down cars that's going to actually make it to New York City if you drove it there. He then filled the car with a full tank of gas, having robbed $800. I think what we saw was two very organized offenders who had plotting to bomb the marathon, seeing thing unravel very quickly and becoming disorganized offenders. But it does appear that they were getting ready to kind of make some kind of last stand. And if you could go to New York and set off your bombs in the media capital of the world, that sounds like a model.

SCHIEFFER: What about Lindsey Graham's allegation this morning that this was a system -- a study of a system failure.

MILLER: I think if you study the system, Lindsey Graham would have to come back on that. I mean, we have a system of agencies and databases that are searchable. And one of the things -- when I worked in the FBI, when I worked at the director of national intelligence stitching those databases together so that they would talk to each other, one of the things we concluded -- and we used to talk about this -- was we have now looked at so many people, so many potential suspects, so many people whose names surfaced in one case and then we spent 90 days looking at them, that some day, one of them's going to do something, And we don't know if it's good news or bad news that we have them in the files. I mean, it shows we were doing our job, but it also is going to bring on this conversation that we should have done more. That's part of the reality in the post-9/11 world.

ORR: I think that's right. And after the investigation has run its course, I guarantee you the political debate will continue, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, we seem to have no shortage of that around here. Thank you all very much.

MILLER: Hey, you need the business.

(LAUGHTER)

SCHIEFFER: We'll be back in a moment with couple of personal thoughts about this week.

SCHIEFFER: The president was hilarious at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night. He poked fun at himself and the press. It was also nice to see former presidents and officials from both parties to gather earlier for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas. It was the way Washington usually isn't but the way we all wish it was. But those episodes were just blips on a radar screen that reminded us just how toxic and how broken our political system is. Several days before the presidential library opening and just down the road from Dallas, the Texas attorney general Greg Abbott had opined that Democrats posed a greater threat to Texas than North Korea. And just to help us remember that money has become the all- powerful driving force in politics, the president found it necessary to hold a fund-raiser while he was in Dallas. He collected more than a million bucks. And as if to underline that Washington can always find a way to help itself, even if it remains gridlocked when it comes to helping others, when the congress realized late last week that those budget cuts from the so-called sequester were going to cause layoffs of air traffic controllers, which would cause delays that would inconvenience them, what happened to gridlock? Well, miraculously, it disappeared, and legislation to keep the planes running on time eased through both houses of congress like it had grease on it. How did members of congress celebrate the bipartisan breakthrough? They head out of town for another vacation. Back in a minute.

SCHIEFFER: And some of our stations are leaving us now, but for most of you, we'll be back with analysis on all this with Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, David Gergen of Harvard, our own Norah O'Donnell, John Dickerson, and Clarissa Ward. Plus, we'll have some highlights of last night's White House Correspondents' Dinner here in Washington. Stay with us.

SCHIEFFER: Well, welcome back to Face the Nation. We have a full house this morning, but since the White House Correspondents' Dinner was last night, we probably better check the role to make sure everybody showed up. CBS News foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward, who usually reports from inside Syria. Happy to have her with us here today. Peggy Noonan, who used to work for President Reagan, is now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. David Gergen, who worked for both Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and is now at Harvard. They must be studying you, David. Nobody's ever done that before.

(LAUGHTER)

"CBS This Morning" co-host Norah O'Donnell is back with us for a weekend work day. And last but not least, our longsuffering and hardworking political director John Dickerson. Clarissa, I want to start with you because you probably have been in Syria...

WARD: Just a few weeks ago.

SCHIEFFER: ... more than any other correspondent. You were the first one to get in there. You went in under cover, got pictures and got this story and got it out and brought us the first really eyewitness reports and photos of what was going on there. So what do you make of these reports now that the Syrians did use this nerve gas on their own people? The president says it's a game- changer. What does that mean?

WARD: Well, if you ask ordinary Syrians, they're not surprised at all. They have absolutely no doubt that the regime has been using chemical weapons against them. But I think they're very skeptical about whether this revelation, or whether the intelligence that we're seeing come out will impact America's policy with regards to Syria.

They have a very strong sense that in fact the U.S. doesn't really have an actual policy on Syria, that there is a lot of rhetoric about Assad must go; he must step aside, but there's very little muscle behind that rhetoric in terms of actually implementing something that would force Assad out of power. And what they would say is that, you know, President Assad is watching very closely here as we talk about red lines, and Iran is watching very closely as well. So I think, if anything, there's a hope that maybe this red line, game-changer rhetoric will actually force the administration to really, you know, say exactly what our Syria policy is once and for all.

SCHIEFFER: Well, what -- what could we do? I mean, there's talk about aid for the rebels, but nobody seems to know exactly which rebels. There's talk about this no-fly zone. Just tell us a little bit about what is being thought of?

WARD: Let's talk about aiding the rebels. So the U.S. has identified General Selim Idriss as the person who we should be doing business with, essentially, the -- the kind of rebel that we can talk to, that we can trust, who that we know is not involved with these radical Islamist groups that are popping up everywhere. Well, I've spent time with General Idriss, and he's sitting there telling me "I'm not getting anything. I don't have money. I don't have weapons. I literally have to travel under cover when I'm in rebel-held parts of Syria because nobody respect me on the ground," essentially. Because the reality is that, in Syria rebel-held areas now, money talks; weapons talk. Going in and saying, well, I have the backing of the U.S. and the west, if there's nothing behind that; if there's no muscle behind the rhetoric, then you're essentially leaving people like General Idriss really -- hanging them out to dry, almost, in a sense.

O'DONNELL: But it's very clear the Obama administration does not want to get involved. And so they were, sort of, pressed, if you will, to put this intelligence assessment out where -- in which they say it was very likely that they used chemical weapons. And the president said, and that does not constitute crossing this so-called red line. Now, obviously, there are others who disagree and say, yes, it does mean crossing the red line. This discussion of the red line, I think, is really a distraction. Because what does it then mean, right? And the -- the president has not said that crossing the red line means military intervention. So even when we reach where the president admits that we've crossed the the red line, it doesn't mean that we're going to get militarily involved. I spoke with a senior administration official this morning who said there are no good options. This is not like Libya. There is no advancing army to take out by putting jets there. There's nowhere to put boots on the ground. It's just a whole series of bad options.

DICKERSON: The notion of a red line is supposed to be that it exists and when it's crossed, a series of things happen. But when you talk to administration officials, they just pour more water and the line gets pinker and pinker...

(LAUGHTER)

... until it just dissolves. And so what -- and as Norah says, they say also -- you talk about a no-fly zone. That gets thrown around by a lot of people who become quick generals when these things happen. They say, well, what happens if -- you have to take out anti-aircraft batteries when you do that. That's a lot of activity. What happens if something goes wrong there? What happens is the administration starts to own a civil war it wants not to engage in and that the American people don't really want to engage in.

GERGEN: Bob, I appreciate the administration has a dilemma. They want Assad to fall. They want him to lose. But they don't want the rebels to win. And that puts you in an awkward place because they're really worried it will become an Islamist state. But, Norah, I respectfully disagree that the red line is a distraction. Once a president of the United States draws a red line, it becomes important to the world. Everybody else reads into how he responds to a red line. Is he serious about Iran? Is he not serious about Iran? He's drawn a red line on Iran. If he doesn't respect his own red line on Syria, there is no question that Israel and Iran will look at that and say, "Well, we can't trust the guy."

O'DONNELL: But even if we cross the red line, it's not clear that we're going to do anything further.

GERGEN: But to go back to John's point, the red line implies it should -- and he said it's going to be a game-changer. I mean, why did he draw the red line without knowing what he was going to do next?

SCHIEFFER: But, you know, back to what Clarissa said, and I want to go to Peggy on this, when she said the people in Syria are wondering do we have a policy...

GERGEN: Right.

SCHIEFFER: ... on Syria?

NOONAN: There is no discernible policy. I would say this is not only true -- I mean, I cannot discern the White House's policy on Syria. I have not for a while. But I am not sure even of what the Republican policy is, if you will. What's fascinating and troubling is that everybody agrees Syria is a very dangerous place for the world right now. Everybody, sort of, doesn't know what to do about it. They don't know what the strategy should be. And then they don't know what the tactics should be. Beyond that, all this takes place within a context of the past 12 years. America has twice been involved in the Mideast. It has not ended so well. The American people are not going to want to hear things like "boots on the ground" in Syria. I mean, that is just a political fact.

DICKERSON: And also, to pick up on Peggy's point about history, on the day that the president was down celebrating the opening of the George W. Bush presidential library, at the White House, senior officials -- this news came out on that day about chemical weapons -- they were bringing up the ghosts of Iraq and saying, "Wait a minute, we didn't have certainty about the evidence there; we want to have certainty here." And you started to hear a word associated with the first President Bush, which was "prudence" and caution, and so that the policy, to the extent there is one, is get your facts straight and right first before doing anything.

WARD: But is that the policy? Because I -- I, sort of, had the sense that, actually, the policy is we really want nothing to do with this.

GERGEN: I agree with that.

WARD: This is a hot potato.

NOONAN: So do I.

WARD: We don't know how to deal with it. And, you know what, that's -- I have respect for that. I understand that. But let's call it what it is.

GERGEN: I agree with that.

NOONAN: The policy is maybe the horse will laugh. (LAUGHTER)

You know that old story? The guy was going to be killed and he said, "Don't kill me now. I can prove to you that I can make a horse laugh. Within six months, if I don't do it, you can kill me at the end." Somebody said to the prisoner, at the end, "Why did you do that?" And the guy said, "Because maybe I'd get lucky. Maybe the king would die, or maybe the horse would laugh." That's what's going on here.

(LAUGHTER)

We're just hoping for the best.

GERGEN: But there is a...

NOONAN: I hope that made sense, what I just said. What I mean is, it's just hoping for the best. Thank you, Bob.

(LAUGHTER)

GERGEN: In this kind of environment, having said that this is a red line, having said he would take action, I think it's baffling why, when the evidence comes in, we'll say, well, let's take it to the U.N. and let them sort this out. Take it to the U.N.? I'm sorry? It implies a lack of seriousness. And I think it really implies they don't want to have anything to do with it, which I totally understand. The country does not -- I think Peggy's absolutely right. This country does not want to have another war. Barack Obama does not want to have another war. But, rhetorically, we are way out in front of what we're willing to do.

SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, this country did not want to have a war after World War I. And then we had World War II. And I think most people would agree, in retrospect, that was probably something we -- we had to do. And -- but it does underline, does it not, Norah, I mean, just how difficult these things are and the -- you know, when things reach the president's decision desk -- you know, people used to laugh about -- make fun of George Bush for saying, "I am the decider." But the president is the decider, and it's never black and white. It's never, oh, well, obviously -- it always looks, in retrospect, like -- you know, we always see things in retrospect as an easy decision. But they're never easy going in.

O'DONNELL: They're never easy, and I think, you know, Clarissa made a good point about which opposition groups do you arm? Which ones do you align yourself with? What do you give them? What do they want, other than communications equipment? Do you start flooding it with weapons? Do you let the Saudis do that? Do you let others in the region, sort of, do that? What do you -- what more can you do? And what are they asking for is, I guess, the question, without any, sort of, significant involvement?

WARD: And I just think it's well, while we're all, sort of, parsing through the minutia of incomplete intelligence about chemical weapons that may have killed a few dozen people, meanwhile 70,000 people have died in this conflict. We're looking at, you know, 100,000 by August if there isn't, you know, some type of action from the international community. But what I'm also seeing on the ground, when I talk to ordinary citizens, is people are becoming radicalized. They are so disenchanted with the international community, with the West, and particularly with the U.S., that they look at groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, which has been designated a terrorist group, and they think, you know what, these guys, at least they're trying to help us, you know; they're putting their hand out and they're coming and they're standing on the front lines with us, and they're, you know...

GERGEN: Is there a sense there are things we could do surgically that would not draw us in? I think that's what Norah is pushing on. What could we do as a response that is meaningful that will not draw us in?

WARD: Well, I don't want to sound like one of these five-minute generals you're talking about and I'm not an expert on these matters. But we live in an age of unconventional warfare. I find it really hard to believe that the U.S. could not be, you know, coming up with strategies or ways of dealing, maybe trying to act more as a deterrent, like, you know, bombing let's say the runways of a couple of -- their key airbases thereby maybe making Syrian pilots think twice before they get up in the air and start bombing villages and innocent women and children. So the ordinary people of Syria are not saying, "please give really big guns to Jebel al-Nusra." They're saying "please make the planes stop." And when I'm sitting there on the ground with these people and an entire village has been bombed and they are looking at me saying, "why isn't America helping us?" I don't really have a good answer to give them at the moment.

NOONAN: You said they were feeling disenchanted about America.

WARD: Yes.

NOONAN: And it's inability or not wanting to get involved. Why did they think we would or -- what was the faith they had in us? What is it that...

WARD: That's key issue here. It's a catch-22, because on the one hand, you see what's happening, of course, you want to help. On the other hand, we may have created a moral hazard in a sense with Libya, with other wars in the Middle East. When people first took to the streets in those peaceful demonstrations, there was a calculation -- a few of us maybe will die, but then the U.S. will step in and help us. And nobody, nobody believed for a second -- so they were willing to die in the beginning. And then suddenly they realized...

GERGEN: It reminds me-- to go back in history -- Hungary in 1956. They thought we would come in. They went into the streets. We didn't go. They got slaughtered.

NOONAN: Czechoslovakia in '68. Some of them thought we would come in.

SCHIEFFER: Let's all take a break here and we'll come back and we'll talk about some of the other issues on the plate.

SCHIEFFER: We're back now with our panel. Well, you know, I want to bring up the whole idea of what's ahead for the congress. Peggy, Senator Manchin, who was along with Senator Toomey, was the one who tried to get the background check legislation passed. I saw him last night and he said, "I want to tell you something, I'm not done with this. I'm still working on this." And he said, "I still think we'll get some kind of a bill out of this congress." What are you hearing, Norah?

O'DONNELL: He is. I mean, Senator Manchin is optimistic. He has promised the families of those 20 children who were killed in Newtown. His cosponsor, though, Pat Toomey, sort of says it's time to move on. I think there's still some momentum behind this.

SCHIEFFER: Do you think the White House is going to continue to push this, or will they also think we have to move on?

O'DONNELL: All indications are that they will continue to push it. I mean, the vice president is still actively engaged. The families have told us that they're going to continue to go to Capitol Hill. The problem, of course, is the House, and whether anything gets done. I still think we are where we are, there's just such a very narrow chance that anything gets done.

SCHIEFFER: John.

DICKERSON: And there's an air traffic control problem -- not to talk about the other story of the week -- but there's immigration out there. The president's also trying to get a big deal on the budget, and his -- his hour glass is losing sand in terms of his power as a president in the second term. I think the question now is whether those who support gun control can put pressure on lawmakers, the ones for voting the way they did, voting against background checks. And the problem with that is in the 2014 elections, if you look at the senate table, the 10 most vulnerable candidates out there are all democrats. So if you are in support of gun control and you want to punish those Democrats who voted against gun control, you're essentially helping Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader. You're helping him get towards his goal becoming a majority leader. So it's complex, punishing those who voted against gun control.

SCHIEFFER: What about that, Peggy? Did the president handle this right?

NOONAN: I --I i-- didn't feel he did from the first two weeks. I thought there had to be one simple, discreet small bill. Not everybody's wish list on gun control, but something small, move immediately after Newtown, barrel it through, claim win -- win by a little, claim you have momentum and do then part two and part three. I just thought, I really did, that the strategy was wrong. I think the president always thinks that if he speaks compellingly and movingly about something he will win the day. I think he's had to trouble learning the lesson you have to work the Hill. You have got to be strategically shrewd, you have got to work it.

SCHIEFFER: David?

GERGEN: I think that John put his finger on something that it is important, and that is what he called the air traffic control problem, and is all these other issues that are starting. And you know how the media works, it's like a search light. It moves from one issue to the next. And already the gun control debate is a little bit in the shadows. We've moved on to Boston. Now we're moving to Syria. We're going to move to immigration and so forth. And I just think it's likely that gun control won't go through. I think president's heart was in the right place on this. I think he spoke movingly about it. He started late. If he had moved quickly, hadn't had that idea of a commission, I think he would have had a better chance of getting it. But what strikes me -- and I'm really curious. You guys are really close to this. From the distance of Boston where I live now, it appears that air is going out of his presidency, that his capacity to control events, especially to lead the congress, is increasingly diminished. I think the hour glass is running out quickly to use your metaphor so that on immigration, it's eight senator moving independently of the White House and trying to keep the White House's fingerprints off of it to give some prospect of a bill. It's not the White House that's going to revive gun control. It may be Manchin and some other senators. On the issue of sequester this week, an overriding on the air control, that wasn't the president. The president didn't want to do that. But it was the congress who acted independently.

SCHIEFFER: Well, because it impacted on them.

GERGEN: Sure.

SCHIEFFER: Suddenly all the talk of gridlock that we have -- and I already said this in the other half the program -- suddenly it's just like the Red Sea parting. The Potomac River parts and we don't have gridlock because this is going to cause us inconvenience.

DICKERSON: You know what that is a problem in addition to the kind of shallow behavior that demonstrates, is that in this big conversation about a budget deal, when I talk to budget experts this week, Republicans they said the only way that there's going to build pressure for a big deal is if the sequester starts to hurt and people start to squawk. And what happened with this is that people squawked and it was fixed immediately, which undermines all the arguments when people said the sequester is going to hurt, people thought oh no...

SCHIEFFER: But it hurt the congress. And that's what they heard.

DICKERSON: That's true, but also the people who were hurt waiting in line had a kind of better access to their congressman than the people who are not getting Meals on Wheels, the people who are not getting their Headstart. So it did bite them. But it didn't stick around long enough. And so now there's no-- it doesn't offer a-- the pressure.

O'DONNELL: Or that congress acted quickly when some members of congress were forced to wait a couple hours on a runway, as oppose to the pay cuts that men and women serving in the military, where they won't get a 3 percent raise, they'll get a 1 percent raise where in bases across this country that the coordinates that are hired to take care of families when their loved ones go overseas, that those jobs have been cut and those people have been furloughed. These kinds of stories that are happening in small communities among the people who need the help the most, our military families, when those jobs are cut and that there isn't immediate action on that -- but when it saves your own behind from having to wait on the runway I think adds to the cynicism about government.

SCHIEFFER: Clarissa, how does Washington look from an overseas post? You watch all of this from far away through heavy lenses actually

WARD: Yeah, I have long since given up trying to explain the sort of paralysis in American politics to people who I meet in the international community. Because they're really baffled by it. They see a poll saying 90% of Americans support, you know, background checks on gun control expect then they see that congress is -- you know, that this bill is unable to pass. And they think to themselves, what is going on here? Why is, you know, America sort of gripped with -- by this political paralysis? And does that mean in the second term that we're going to spend all our time fighting about domestic issues and ignoring important international issues as a result?

GERGEN: But I wonder if it isn't changing a little bit. And that is, even as the president seems to be losing his capacity to lead the congress, whether there aren't people coming forward in congress saying, "we've got to solve some of these problems, like immigration. I mean, there are some people, like some adults who are saying..

WARD: Well, in speaking out of working out of self-interest, immigration is one issue where Republicans have some self-interest to move on that politically speaking because of their own poor performance among Hispanics in the last election. So that is driving them to some degree.

SCHIEFFER: And let me -- I just want to go to Peggy on this because I'm interested in your take. The Bush library -- I mean, this was such -- to me, I really enjoyed seeing that picture of all those presidents from both parties...

NOONAN: Yeah. Yeah.

SCHIEFFER: ... in one place, at one time, each of them talking about, you know, the respect they had for the other because nobody can understand what a president does except people who have been president, really. What -- what did you feel when you saw all of that?

NOONAN: Well, I'm afraid the first thought I had was, "Oh, the picture of five presidents. Everybody who got a copy is sending to the office of every former president saying, "Will you sign this?"

(LAUGHTER)

SCHIEFFER: Because you've been there. You know.

(LAUGHTER)

NOONAN: I have that picture from 20 years ago.

(LAUGHTER)

Look, I happen to -- I love celebrations and marks of greatness. I am less in love with trumpets, doing flourishes at presidential libraries, if you know what I mean. There's something -- Bill Clinton said it well when he said, "This sort of marks every president's all continuing hope to rewrite history." So there's a little bit of that going on. But, look, I think, the -- the Bush library opening was very interesting in that it came within a context of new polls showing President George W. Bush, whose presidency was controversial, to say the least -- his fans say it was consequential; others say it was a disaster. He left the presidency with 23 points on the approval ratings. He's now got 46 or 47. Boy, it means a lot when you leave for a while.

SCHIEFFER: All right, we have to leave for a while.

(LAUGHTER)

We'll be back in a moment with our "Face the Nation" flashback. Thanks, Peggy. Thanks all of you.

SCHIEFFER: We didn't have to go very far back in time for this week's "Face the Nation" flashback. We just went back to last night and the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. It's one of the few events where politicians, media and celebrities get together and take the night off from the partisan sniping and enjoy some partisan jokes.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There are other new players in the media landscape as well, like Super PACs. Did you know that Sheldon Adelson spent $100 million of his own money last year on negative ads? You've got to really dislike me to spend that kind of money.

(LAUGHTER)

I mean, that's Oprah money.

(LAUGHTER)

You could buy an island and call it "No-bama" for that kind of money.

(LAUGHTER)

Sheldon would have been better off offering me $100 million to drop out of the race.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

I probably wouldn't have taken it, but I'd have thought about it. Michelle would have taken it.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

You think I'm joking.

(LAUGHTER)

I know Republicans are still sorting out what happened in 2012. But one thing they all agree on is they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities. And, look, call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with.

(LAUGHTER)

Hello?

(LAUGHTER)

Just think me -- think of me as a trial run, you know.

(LAUGHTER)

See how it goes. One senator who has reached across the aisle recently is Marco Rubio. But I don't know about 2016. I mean, the guy has not even finished a single term in the Senate and he thinks he's ready to be president.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

Kids these days.

(LAUGHTER)

SCHIEFFER: All right, we'll be back in a minute.

SCHIEFFER: That's it for us today. Be sure to join us next Sunday for "Face the Nation," and thank you for joining us and watching.