Transcript for March 19

REP. MURTHA: Let me, let me tell you how they mischaracterize these kinds of things. For instance, we’re caught in a civil war. What, however you want to look at it, first of all, they said there was no insurgency. Then they said it’s not a civil war. It is a civil war. Twenty-five thousand insurgents are fighting with each other inside the country for supremacy. That’s the definition of a civil war. There’s less than a thousand al-Qaida. And when he says turning it over to al-Qaida—and that’s what he means, he, he’s inferring it’ll be turned over to al-Qaida—I don’t believe that for a minute. The Iraqis will get rid of al-Qaida the minute that we get out of there. And 60 percent of the people in Iraq belive the sooner we get out, the more stable Iraq will be, and that’s what all of us want.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe that the president made some fundamental misjudgments about Iraq?

REP. MURTHA: Oh, absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: Such as?

REP. MURTHA: First of all, the intelligence that, that he used and mischaracterized got us into war. There was no threat to our national security. And then they didn’t have near enough troops to get it under control afterwards. The transition to peace—and they disbanded the army, all those mistakes were made.

And now, now let’s look at it politically, let’s look right today politically, OK? They supported Chalabi, you know, that’s the Defense Department, that’s their great, great guy. He got 1 percent of the vote. Allawi, which all of us think is a good guy, but that’s not the point, he got 8 percent of the vote. They have made mistake after mistake militarily and politically, and they’re trying to blame the military for their mistakes.

MR. RUSSERT: All that being said, John Murtha has also gone through an evolution in his thinking.

REP. MURTHA: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: You voted for the war, and two years ago in your book you wrote this, congressman: “A war initiated on faulty intelligence must not be followed by a premature withdrawal of our troops based on a political timetable. An untimely exit could rapidly devolve into a civil war, which would leave America’s foreign policy in disarray as countries question not only America’s judgment but also its perseverance.”

REP. MURTHA: Yeah. And, and I absolutely believed that at the time. And I suggested to the president at the time we should have 500,000 troops there. I suggest—a number of us wrote to the president, said, “We need 500,000 troops.” But as it evolved, I saw that, that there was no chance of this happening.

For instance, I’ll give you an example: In, in 1967, I came back from Vietnam. There was an election in Vietnam right after that, and the president of the United States said, “This is it, we legitimized the government. From now on, the, the Vietnamese can take it with their own government.” We lost 38,000 people after that. When I look at that experience, then I look at the mistakes and the mishandling and the mischaracterizations in this war, I changed my mind. I said to myself, “There’s no, there’s no way—six years from now, we could still be there, lose a lot of troops.” The, the troops themselves don’t understand what their mission is, the people in the periphery say we ought to be out of there, we’ve lost international support. At some point, you have to change direction. What I’m saying is we need to redeploy our troops because they’re caught in a civil war.

When I visit the hospitals and see these young people who’ve been damaged so badly, and for 8500 of them will not be returned to duty, I realize that, that we need to change course. And that—so I changed my mind, I said to myself, “This, this is a terrible, tragic thing. This is the president’s war and he’s got to change his mind. We’ve got to reduce our—redeploy our troops out of there.” They can go back in anytime they have to, but, but there’s no reason for them to be caught in--10,000 IEDs, and this is part of the problem that we have.

MR. RUSSERT: So your vote for the war was a mistake?

REP. MURTHA: It was a mistake. It was a bad mistake. And, and most of us believed that—and the first war with—the ‘91 war, I led the fight to go to war. President Bush understood, “I’m not going to go into Iraq.” He got a coalition together, the coalition paid for the war, and, and everything worked out as the way it should have worked out. We’d have lost that coalition if he’d gone into Iraq. He said, “I want a reconstruction—I want to rebuild it.”

Now, this, this president, we thought, “OK, we continue an inspection process, we give him a club.” And, and I, I believed we had a threat to our national security. When I found out we didn’t have a threat to our national security, we violated one of the principles I’ve always adhered to: You’ve got to have a national threat to our security before you go to war; then you’ve got to have overwhelming force, which we didn’t have; and then second, you’ve got to—third, you’ve got to have an exit strategy. We violated all those principles. So we have gotten to the point where we lost the hearts and minds of the people--80 percent of the Iraqis want us out of there, 47 percent say it’s OK to kill Americans. When it comes to that stage, it’s time for us to give them the incentive to take over their own country.

MR. RUSSERT: Professor Victor Davis Hanson write in the National Review, “Especially troubling are those who even before 9/11 demanded that President Clinton or Bush remove Saddam Hussein, but now consider such a move an abject blunder of the first order. Their advocacy helped us get in when there were dubious reasons to go, and their vehement criticism may well get us out when there are now better reasons to stay until Iraq is secure.” Is that you?

REP. MURTHA: Well, well, I, I, I, I, I take a lot of criticism. They usually don’t use my name, but they usually direct their criticisms to me. But, but, but the point is, there’s a time when you have to change direction, and this is the time to change direction. There’s no purpose. Even General Casey, who we just saw, said we’re occupiers, and that’s part of the problem. General Abizaid said part of our strategy is to withdraw from Iraq. Everybody realizes that we’re occupiers, we’re, we’re unifying them.

You know who wants us in Iraq, Tim? Iran wants us in Iraq, China wants us in Iraq, al-Qaida wants us in Iraq. Why? Because of our human resources that are being, being hurt so badly, and our financial resources. We will have spent $450 billion dollars in the war in Iraq and, and Afghanistan by the end of this year. And, and Afghanistan’s starting to slip because of the poppy-growing and because of the drug-growing. So we have diverted ourself away from terrorism by, by getting involved in a civil war. We made a mistake in trying to topple Saddam Hussein, and, and that—we should not go into a war unless it’s absolutely threatened our national security.

MR. RUSSERT: Would the world be safer with Saddam still there?

REP. MURTHA: The world would be safer if we kept him under control as we were keeping him under control all during the Clinton administration. And, and to use that as an excuse to go to war, we got, we got dictators in North Korea, we got dictators in, in a lot of different countries in, in parts of Africa. We can’t police the world, and we can’t nation build anymore. We cannot afford to do that. We discredit ourself and we destroy our credibility and our resources trying to do that.

MR. RUSSERT: When did you first write the president about your misgivings?

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