Chris Matthews: Obama’s Insistence on No Boots on the Ground ‘Is Political, it Seems’

“But this time around, the thing that’s concerning is the president’s reasons for not having as he calls it 'boots on the ground,' or sort of a combat ground game here is political it seems. I’m not sure it’s strategic. I’m not sure there’s a plan there to win this by air but simply to avoid doing it by land. And I keep thinking about this: we have certain constraints however, and that’s Iraq doesn’t want us in there again, pretty clearly. They don’t want anybody in there but Iraqis, even if they are losing. Syria - we have no way to get in there, they cover -- certainly they don't want us in there. The question is can we run a ground campaign. They hate us over there. By the way, the longer you occupy a country the more they hate you and we all know that. So you only have a limited amount of time to win a war. But my question is that you could [indecipherable] by beheading the two guys. They got [indecipherable], they now how to get our number. They weren’t like the Japanese, that said if we hit them on the Pearl Harbor they won't come into Pacific, they will yield it to us, that was conceded to us. They wanted us in there. So they pulled us back in there. Now when a flyer gets shot down you know it's going to probably happen. It's a terrible situation, but eventually they will grab some of our guys fighting in there, whether the special ops guys work with the tribes or whatever. They will grab our guys. Then what do we do? This is graduated response -- they called in Vietnam -- and it was a disaster. A graduated response -- [crosstalk] I'm sorry -- you keep reacting to the enemy what they do and they keep matching you.