Transcript for July 16

MR. GINGRICH: I, I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you’ve been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you’d have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Biden, is it our war?

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN (D-DE): Indirectly, it’s our war. It seems to me it’s partially our responsibility. I don’t, I don’t agree with the World War III analogy, but I do believe that here we had Israel get out of southern Lebanon. I was there for that election, I was “an official observer.” All the talk from everyone in the parties in Lebanon, that they had to get rid of Hezbollah. The, the U.N. Resolution 1559 said that the—that as, as Israel got out, the, the army of the Lebanese people were going to move and take over that responsibility, they didn’t.

But I might add that we didn’t do anything to help them. We didn’t do anything at the time to help train them. We didn’t do anything at the time to give any attention to it. And now we are, because of our lack of a prevention strategy, we’re left with no option here, in my view, but to support Israel in what is a totally legitimate self-defense effort. How can they, in fact, sit still when they have all these rockets that are very sophisticated sitting on their border, knowing they’re being—going to be fired at them and expect to stand there and the rest of the world sitting around?

And the last point I’ll make, Tim, is I find it fascinating people talk about has Israel gone too far. No one talks about whether Israel’s justified in the first place. Let’s assume Israel’s overreacting. I want to see the world stand up and say, “By the way, this in fact, is an unprovoked effort on the part of a terrorist organization supported by two countries to undermine the democratic state.” Until they say that, I think it’s awful—I think it’s a secondary question whether Israel’s gone too far.

MR. RUSSERT: Did the president pay enough attention to the Middle East? Or was he, as some would suggest, preoccupied with Iraq?

SEN. BIDEN: I don’t believe the president has a Middle East policy. Three years ago the president announced the “axis of evil,” the implication being he had a plan to deal with that “axis of evil.” The truth of the matter is in every respect it’s gotten worse. You now have in Iraq, you have more of what people worry about in that region, the so-called Shia crescent. The Iranian influence is more profound in Iraq today than it ever was. There’s chaos still in Iraq today. We’ve got a long way to go to get out and leave anything stable behind. North Korea, there is really no red line drawn anywhere, nor any real capability of drawing a red line. And Iran is more emboldened. They eliminate their modulus—that is, their parliament, which wasn’t pro-Western, but it was democratic at its instincts.

And so there—there’s not been a plan. This idea that we go in and behead the monster named Saddam, somehow things are going to fall in place I think was naive in the extreme, and we’re paying a very heavy price for it.

MR. RUSSERT: Speaker Gingrich, President Bush, should he try to intervene in this latest Middle East crisis, seek a cease-fire?

MR. GINGRICH: No. I mean, I think it is explicitly wrong and I think Senator Biden and I are basically in agreement on this. It is explicitly wrong to bring pressure on the victim. I mean, Israel did everything it could to withdraw from south Lebanon, and the result was terrorist missiles. Israel withdrew from Gaza, creating an opportunity for a self-governing Palestinian people to create a place of prosperity, and they’ve created a place of terror. And I think for us to now say—imagine that was Miami. Imagine Miami had missiles being fired at it every day. Remember that when Israel loses eight people because of the difference in population, it’s the equivalent of losing almost 500 Americans. Imagine we woke up this morning and 500 Americans were dead in Miami from missiles fired from Cuba. Do you think any American would say, “Now, we should have proportionate response. We shouldn’t overreact”? No. We would say, “Get rid of the missiles.” And, and John F. Kennedy, a Democrat who understood the importance of power in the world, was prepared to go to nuclear war to stop missiles from being in Cuba.

I don’t, I don’t think that, that any realistic person who’s being fair about this is going to focus on Israel. That’s why I don’t want people to think of this as a five-day war. As Senator Biden said, there has been a continuing failure of opportunity to strengthen the Lebanese government. There’s been a failure of opportunity to train and, and, and reinforce the Lebanese Army. There’s been a failure to say, “Look, we are ultimately going have to get—we’re going to have to defeat Hezbollah, and if that means in the long run we have to do something about Syria and Iran, then we need to face up to this.” Ahmadinejad, as recently as yesterday, the leader of Iran, said...

MR. RUSSERT: What do you mean do something about Syria and Iran?

MR. GINGRICH: I mean do whatever it takes—look, let’s say that tomorrow morning the Syrians decide to engage Israel. Let’s say the Iranians decide that they’re going to reinforce their 400 Iranian guards.

MR. RUSSERT: What do you do?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, the first thing you do is say they’re not going to have any over-flight privileges.

MR. RUSSERT: Isn’t it...

MR. GINGRICH: The second thing you do is you say to the Syrians, we have great capacity to pressure the Syrians if we want to. I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute three years ago and said that the State Department approach of trying to deal with this dictatorship would fail. I think by any reasonable standard, trying to be nice to the Syrians, trying to understand the Syrians, is a dead loser as long as this dictatorship is there, because the planning meetings with Hamas and Hezbollah occurred in Damascus with the Iranian and Syrian ministers.

MR. RUSSERT: But an attack by Syria or Iran on Israel would be considered an attack on the United States?

MR. GINGRICH: I think it should be, it should be an action that we would reinforce the Israelis and others in doing what is necessary. And I think we have—clearly have the capacity to do something. I’m not describing going—widening a war. I’m saying the first step has to be to understand, this is an alliance- -Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas—and you can’t deal with it in isolation.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Biden, I want to show you the front page of The Wall Street Journal from Friday and here’s the article as written. “The growing conflict [in the Middle East] could become a significant setback for the Bush administration’s vision for the region. Mr. Bush and many of his neoconservative strategists said in the months leading up to the Iraq invasion that toppling Saddam would make Israel and secular Arab states safer ... [by allowing] democratic governments to flourish, while depriving Palestinian terrorists of one of their major sponsors in Baghdad.

“Today, many Middle East analysts say the Iraq war has made Israel significantly less safe. Iran has used the conflict to project its influence across Iraq. ... Al-Qaeda ... has developed a safe haven in western Iraq.” Do you agree with that?

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