Bob's Blog: No slow summer in Washington

It's rare these days for a Chief of Staff to appear on Sunday shows, but this Sunday there's just so much news to cover. On the broadcast this week, I'll sit down one-on-one with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and get the latest on Syria, the NSA leaks, and more.

This week, we found out that the U.S. is going to start providing military and political aid to rebel fighters in Syria. And now the debate in Washington in the Senate is heating up over whether we can really help by sending arms.

We now know that 93,000 people have been killed in this Syrian civil war. What we're not hearing is--and this is the part that sort of concerns me--what is the strategic plan here? What do we want to see happen? Obviously we want to see Bashar al-Assad taken down, but what happened when Saddam Hussein went down? When we took Hussein down, people said "Well, we've won the war in Iraq." As it turned out, that was just step one. So, let's say that Assad does go down, what happens after that? Who will be in his place, and where do we go from there? How will this look 5 years from now?

I want to see exactly what kind of military assistance we're going to give. And I want to know what we hope to gain by that. It may slow down this war just a little bit, but is that enough to ensure the kind of situation there that we would favor in the West? I think we're just at the beginning of this.

We don't get much information about what's going in to the thinking of the administration. There's a new Secretary of Defense who recently moved in, there's about to be a new National Security Advisor. We don't know who is driving this discussion in the White House. We know that we're providing some kind of military aid, but exactly how much, to who, and to where?

Hopefully we'll get some answers on Sunday when I sit down with White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough. Plus, we'll talk to House Intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers who will talk about the latest on the NSA leaks. What is the program? How did it get approved?

This is supposed to be summer, when the news sort of slows down, but instead it's like they put it on steroids. I can't remember a time when we've had more complicated issues all at once to hit the headlines. We've got a lot cover, so I hope you'll join us Sunday on "Face the Nation."