Transcript for March 19

REP. MURTHA: Well, it was two and a half years ago I wrote to him, and I said, “Mr. President, you only have a few months to get things straightened out. We need more troops over there and, and you need to train the Iraqis sooner. You, you need to energize,” meaning you need to start the process of getting people working, “and, and you need to internationalize. You need to go to, to the other countries and get them to support us.” Seven months later, I got a reply back from the assistant secretary of defense. Now that’s frustrating that, that I would get an answer back that long. The last letter I sent to him, saying that I was disappointed in, in what was going on, two weeks later I got a letter back from another assistant secretary of defense.

So, so I’m, I’m disappointed the way this war has been run, I, I—the biggest thing is the rhetoric. They keep saying we’re going, we’re going to have victory, we’re going to stay for the end. It’s, it’s open-ended. They can’t be open-ended. We have to give the Iraqis the incentive. They met the other day for a half-hour. I, I mean you got to say to them, “OK, Iraqis, this is your country, you got your elections, you didn’t elect the people we like but you elected who you want. What—you’ve got to take over your country.”

MR. RUSSERT: The president picks up the phone and calls you up, and says “Jack, come on down. You voted for this war, you now think it was a mistake, but we’re in a fix. And if I get out right away, we could leave behind a civil war, we could leave behind a haven for terrorism. Tell me specifically Mr. Murtha, what should I do today?”

REP. MURTHA: Here, here’s what you should do, Mr. President. First of all, you should fire all the people who are responsible for that, which gives you international credibility.

MR. RUSSERT: Including his secretary of defense?

REP. MURTHA: Well, he, he should—well, let’s say he should offer his resignation, because he certainly...

MR. RUSSERT: And it’s sure to be accepted?

REP. MURTHA: I would accept it, that’s exactly right.

MR. RUSSERT: What about the vice president?

REP. MURTHA: Well, you can’t fire the vice president, so I think he’ll, he’ll have to handle this himself.

MR. RUSSERT: Should he offer his resignation?

REP. MURTHA: Yeah. Well, certainly the vice president has been the primary force in running, running this war, and many of the mischaracterizations have come about. You and I talked before the show about some of the things he said on your show, right before the war started. None of them turned out to be true. This is why the American public is so upset.

OK, I say fire some people, that’s the first thing.

MR. RUSSERT: Who should he fire?

REP. MURTHA: Well, he, he, he’s got to make that decision himself. Anybody that’s been responsible, first of all, for the intelligence-gathering; second of all, for the characterization; and third of all, for the maintaining and running the war. For instance, from the national security office down to the secretary of defense’s office. I mean he’s got to make that decision.

But then, then, then we go to, to how do we get our troops out of there? You redeploy to the periphery so that we, if we have to, we can go back in. The terrorism—there was no terrorism in Iraq before we went there. None. There was no connection with al-Qaida, there was no connection with, with terrorism in Iraq itself. So we went in and they keep saying terrorism, and, and we’re diverting ourself away from terrorism. That’s the thing that probably worries me the most.

Mr. President, let’s go back to fighting the war on terrorism. Let, let’s reduce our presence in Iraq, let’s start to rebuild the Army, because the Army’s broken as far as I’m concerned. And the military commanders know this.

I talk to the military commanders all the time. I know what’s going on in the military. And, and most of the military in Iraq, 70 percent of our troops say we want out of there, and 42 percent say they don’t know what their mission is for heaven’s sake.

MR. RUSSERT: Does the Pentagon support what you’re saying?

REP. MURTHA: Well, the Pentagon doesn’t support it publicly, obviously, because of what happened to General Shinseki.

MR. RUSSERT: Have they told you privately?

REP. MURTHA: Oh, absolutely. I mean, so many of them have said, “Keep saying the truth, keep telling the truth.” All kinds of military commanders have said that to—they know. They don’t even have to tell me.

And the troops in the field are the ones that I feel so confident—I go to the hospitals, I see—I saw this one young fellow the other day who had been in a coma for almost a year, and his mother’s sitting beside him, and I thought of the long-lasting impact on these, these young people who have been involved in this war and how it’ll impact at least 8500 of them, and, and emotionally maybe 50,000 of these troops will be affected. So the price of this war has been very high, and, and we’ve gotten to a point where there’s no alternative.

At first, if we’d acted quickly—it’s just like Katrina. If he’d have acted quickly, he’d have made some progress. If he’d have kept the, the military, the Sunni military there, he, he had been all right to get it under control. But when he didn’t do that, he lost control. We, we weren’t liberators anymore, we became occupiers, and so 80 percent of the people want us out of there. That, that’s the simple answer.

MR. RUSSERT: The administration will say yes, maybe there’s no direct link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, but there were contacts between the Iraqis and al-Qaida.

REP. MURTHA: Oh, well, come on. I mean, that, that’s just an excuse to try to justify the war. They’ve changed their position six times on, on this war, why we went to war, and the public’s not buying it any longer. The public doesn’t want rhetoric. They want this president to go back to the White House, they want this president to sit down with the leaders of the world and the leaders in the United States, some of the former commanders, not call the secretaries of defense—and you know, after I made my statement, they called in 13 or 14 former secretaries of defense and, and, and state and so forth. They gave them each a minute or two to talk to them. That’s not what I’m talking about. You’ve got to get some people in that know what they’re talking about and let them get some advice privately about what’s going on and what should be done. They’ve got thousands of people in the White House, hundreds of thousands of people in the Pentagon. In the Congress, we’ve got a small staff where we have an obligation if we disagree with the president—my, my obligation is not to the president of the United States. My obligation is to the public, my obligation is to the Constitution and to the country and to the troops.

MR. RUSSERT: If we got out quickly and left behind a blood bath, what would we do? Just watch the slaughter?

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