From Monday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

Ahead of President Obama’s speech on Libya:

In a month no one will remember the speech or the tactics, they won’t remember the content of the U.N. resolution. They will look and see if we succeeded or not. That will depend on one event. Will Qaddafi be in power or not?
If he is, then the mission is a failure because it means that Libya will be partitioned, the civil war will be ongoing, and, because Qaddafi’s forces are stronger than the opposition that are quite disorganized, it means we will have to provide protection indefinitely as we did in Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991.
What the president has to explain is the gulf between the U.S. objective, regime change, and the U.N. objective, protection of the population. The problem is there is no way to square that rhetorically.
And in the end, we’re going to have to make a decision on the ground. The Libyan rebels are on the outskirts of Sirte. Sirte is the gateway to Tripoli. If they’re going to go to Tripoli, they have to conquer Sirte. The problem is that the population in Sirte is pro-Qaddafi, meaning if we support the rebels in a ground assault against it, we are not protecting a population, we’re attacking a population.
On the other hand, if our objective is regime change, we have to provide the air and ground support.
So the answer to the question — which is our objective? — will be answered on the ground. There is no alternative. Either support the attack on Sirte or not, Obama will have to decide. No matter what his words are, the answer will be what happens in the field.

On why we are not similarly intervening in Syria and on Hillary Clinton’s reference to Bashar al-Assad as a reformer:

Look, I think that is a straw man argument. There’s nobody seriously asking for an attack on Syria. What people are saying is that it is scandalous and incomprehensible that the administration is not at least expressing rhetorical support for the people out in the street in Damascus and in the other parts of Syria who are getting shot.
Syria is an enemy state. It’s a matter of strategic interest. …
For the secretary of state to actually speak of his [President Assad’s] credentials as a reformer and thus to undermine the brave protesters in the streets who are getting shot is truly scandalous. It’s like Obama in 2009 — when you had a revolution in Iran — not speaking out on behalf of the protesters and speaking respectfully of those who were shooting them in the street.
It’s as if if you are an archenemy of the United States, Iran and Syria, you’ll get a pass, a rhetorical pass by this administration. Completely incomprehensible. We ought to be supporting the revolutionaries at least rhetorically and not excusing the butchers who are shooting them in the street.