Transcript for June 4

MR. RUSSERT: Whether you’re for or against military action, it’s quite interesting to hear the Iraqi prime minister talk about the United States and Iran.

SEN. BIDEN: Totally predictable, though, Tim. Totally, completely predictable. The notion that—remember, it was four years ago the president announced the axis of evil. He said there are these three countries—Iraq, Iran and Korea—and implied he had a plan how to deal with them by isolating them. Where are we now? Korea has 400 percent more nuclear capacity than it had when he announced the policy. Iran is—has eliminated the modulus at any democratic instincts: their parliament. There’s no democracy there in, you know, in waiting as there was four years ago. And now you have Iraq in a circumstance where the leaders of Iraq, who belong to two parties, the dominant parties, Dawa and SCIRI parties, who have relationships with Iran. So, I mean, so far for a policy that was going to make us safer—I mean, anybody who would think that there would be a welcome mat by the part of an Iranian—an Iraqi government to attack Iran doesn’t understand the region at all.

MR. RUSSERT: Does Iran have more influence with Iraq than the U.S.?

SEN. BIDEN: At this moment I think it does. And—well, let me back up. That’s not true. The United States has more influence because we still have 130,000 troops there. We have more influence with the Kurds. We have more influence with the Sunnis, although not much influence at all. I’m not sure I would argue that the Iranians have as much influence with the 60 percent of the population that makes up the majority of the parliament now, the, the Shiia, than we do.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to some comments that Maliki made. This is how The New York Times reported it on Saturday: “On Thursday, Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq condemned violence by the American-led coalition against Iraqi civilians. But Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said Friday that Maliki had told the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, that his comments were misquoted. ...

“In The New York Times, Mr. Maliki was quoted as saying that many troops in the American-led coalition, ‘do not respect the Iraqi people. They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. This is completely unacceptable.’ Accounts elsewhere quoted him similarly, and a review of the translation on Friday found the quotation accurate.

“In its translation, The Times also quoted Mr. Maliki as saying that the violence he was condemning had become a ‘daily phenomenon.’ The review of that quotation found that it was inaccurately translated. Mr. Maliki said the violence had become a ‘regular occurrence’ - not a ‘daily phenomenon.’” But here is the prime minister of Iraq saying the U.S. soldiers are mistreating his people.

SEN. BIDEN: Look, Tim. We put our U.S. soldiers in the most God-awful position they can be put in. We put them into a situation without any plan as to how to occupy a country. We put them in with too few troops, without the proper equipment, without the proper defenses. And now these poor guys and women are sitting in the middle of what is a sectarian war. It is no longer—you know, aside—remember that Carville quote back in the ‘92 campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid, it’s the economy”? It’s not the insurgency. It is the sectarian violence, stupid, sectarian violence. And so now you have the leader of a group that is 60 percent of the population feeling significant pressure from his constituency to take on—even though he wants us to stay there—to take on the existing military occupation in, in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, Senator, all politics is local.

SEN. BIDEN: You got it.

MR. RUSSERT: Whether it’s Wilmington or Baghdad.

SEN. BIDEN: You got it, man.

MR. RUSSERT: The prime minster of Iraq is criticizing the United States to shore up his political standing?

SEN. BIDEN: Absolutely. And by the way, guess what’s going on in Afghanistan? Same exact thing. Karzai. What’s Karzai doing?

MR. RUSSERT: Are these comments not encouraging hostility to U.S. troops?

SEN. BIDEN: Well, I think they do encourage hostility to U.S. troops, and I think what they do is they call for the administration to come up with a plan. Look, the president says, Tim, that it has been saying we’re going to stand down when the Iraqis stand up. But there’s no plan to help the Iraqis stand together. Now the whole notion here is what’s the plan? On one hand, you have the president with a plan how not to lose, but not to win by keeping us there interposed between these constituencies, and you have others calling for just pulling out. What are we going to leave behind? What do we do? That’s why I came up with the plan that I have. Come up with a plan that gives some sense of how you keep these three major factions within a country together so that you don’t have them blow apart, which is what I worry most about.

MR. RUSSERT: But neither the Republicans nor Democrats accepted your plan.

SEN. BIDEN: Well, no, but a lot of—mark my words, it’s going to get a lot more popular as we move down the road here.

MR. RUSSERT: A year ago, let me show you exactly what you said in one of your committee hearings. “My patience is running out. I’m not sure I could in good faith, a year from now” that’s today...

SEN. BIDEN: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: ...”if things aren’t drastically different, continue to support American troops being in Iraq.”

SEN. BIDEN: Well...

MR. RUSSERT: Are things drastically different?

SEN. BIDEN: They are drastically different. And I tell you what, it’s about at the end of the rope. That’s why in the proposal that I laid forward, which would take too long to lay out here, but the bottom line here is, we’ve got to give each of the parties a rationale to stay in the game, keep this country together. As I said repeatedly, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are not going to keep Iraq together if there’s an all-out civil war, and we’re moving closer and closer to that. And the administration continues to rely on, Tim, on something that’s not going to happen, and that is that a unity government is going to come along and all of a sudden all’s going to be well. The insurgency is going to be quelled and the militias are all going to go back to their neutral corners.

We’ve got to do something like we did in Dayton, Tim. What’d we do in Dayton when we settled the Bosnian war? We ended up with two distinct territories, we ended up with three different armies, and we ended up with three different presidents, and now they’re trying to pull together and become part of Europe. We gave them breathing room in order for them to be able to stay together. That’s what has to be done now. And if it isn’t, I just don’t see any—I don’t see any successful end in sight.

MR. RUSSERT: It’s time to get out.

SEN. BIDEN: It’s getting close.

MR. RUSSERT: This is what you said leading up to the war in ‘02. “He’s a long-term threat, a short-term threat to our national security.” (April 13, 2002)

“He must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.” (September 26, 2002)

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. ... This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.” (August 4, 2002)

“There was sufficient evidence to go into Iraq.” (May 25, 2003)

Looking back on all that, didn’t you help feed the appetite to go into Iraq and—which created our current situation?

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