Transcript for July 16

SEN. BIDEN: I agree with it completely, and I said that at the time, Tim, I said at the time that the road- -remember, the, the phrase was “the road to peace in the Middle East is through Baghdad.” My argument is the road is through Jerusalem, it wasn’t through Baghdad, number one.

Number two, look where we are right now. We’re in a situation where we have dug such a deep hole we have 10 of our 12 divisions coming or going in Iraq. Everyone knows the ability of us to mount a significant land war anywhere as a potential threat is not a real threat.

And thirdly, I would point out that we have an opportunity to intervene in a different way. There’s an opportunity now, if we had any credibility in that part of the world, to be able to bring together the Sunni powers that, in fact, with all the money—who are scared to death of Hezbollah and the increased influence of Iran. We should be uniting that part of the world to put incredible pressure and consequences on Syria without us having to go to war with Syria. Syria is essentially an isolated state. Syria can have its water cut off, figuratively speaking, tomorrow. But what are we doing? Are we sitting down with the Sunni powers and saying, “Look, let’s get smart here, Jack, we have a common interest here”? But people doubt our judgment. They doubt our judgment and, as a consequence of that, we have very great difficulty getting anyone to think we have a strategy and, therefore, great difficulty getting them to join us.

MR. RUSSERT: You just made your seventh visit to Iraq. Are we winning the war?

SEN. BIDEN: No, we’re not winning the war because we do not have a political solution to offer. There’s three things that have to happen, and they have to happen quickly. Number one, you have to get a Sunni buy-in. That is, you’ve got to have a reason for the Sunnis to say it makes sense to be part of this united government, and that remeans—means you’ve got to give them a piece of the oil, you got to give them a piece of the revenues. They’ve got nothing else.

Number two, you’ve got to disarm that militia. You’ve—and by the—particularly the Shia militia, particularly Sadr’s militia. I don’t see the will on the part of this new Shia-dominated government to go ahead and do that, and we’ve not offered any plan.

And thirdly, you’ve got to figure out a way, Tim, to deal with the civilian agencies that are moribund. They’re—I, I sat with one of the best generals I’m aware of that I’ve dealt with in my 33 years, Chiarelli, the former commander of the 1^st Cavalry, and he says to me, he said, “Don’t ever let me criticize a bureaucrat again. They need a bureaucracy here. They can’t even deliver the paychecks to their soldiers that we’ve trained.” They—we were sitting there with General Dempsey, the guy training the Iraqi forces, and he says, “Well, there’s this brigade out here,” and he described where it was, and he said, “It’s Friday afternoon, I find out there—that the Saudi contra”—I mean, excuse me—“the Iraqi contractor delivering food and water and etc. goes home. These troops have nothing to eat.” He said, “I’m on the phone at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the whole—and the, the whole”—the—say—they call the MOD, the, the Ministry of Defense has gone home. They, they don’t know how to stand up a government. And we have no plan. We have gone in there without a plan. And so unless those three things happen pretty quickly, Tim, I, I, I, I don’t see how we succeed there. Still possible, but I want to tell you, this administration’s failure to have a, a, a political strategy for Iraq has, has raised the bar higher and higher for our ability to, to call it a success.

MR. RUSSERT: We have Iran to consider, Speaker Gingrich. Richard Perle, a man you know well, wrote an op-ed piece in The Washington Post a few weeks ago, and this is how he described it. And we’ll put it on the screen. “So, after declaring that a nuclear Iran was ‘unacceptable,’ Bush blinked and authorized the E.U.-3 [Great Britain, France and Germany] to approach Tehran with proposals to reward the mullahs if they promised to end their nuclear weapons program.

“During these three years, the Iranians have advanced steadily toward acquiring nuclear weapons, defiantly announcing milestones along the way. At the end of May, with Ahmadinejad stridently reiterating Iran’s right to enrich the uranium necessary for nuclear weapons, the administration blinked again.” Do you agree the administration blinked?

MR. GINGRICH: Yes. Let me put this in a larger context. The United States said that there would be terrible consequences for Korea—North Korea if they fired their missiles. They fired their missiles. We then threatened that the Chinese would come visit them. The Chinese went and visited them, nothing happened. We then said we’ll go to the U.N., and on your show last week, we were told there was going to be a Chapter Seven very tough resolution. The Chinese said they’d veto it if it was tough. They passed a weak resolution, and within 45 minutes the North Koreans had repudiated the resolution. So there’s no consequence.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are watching. These two countries are watching. The, the Iranians watched the, the North Koreans basically stand us down. The North Koreans watched the Iranians basically get face-to- face talks. And these two dictatorships are playing us like a ping-pong game.

And I think this is part of why I said, you’ve got to see this as a larger global campaign. You’ve got to understand these dictatorships all talk to each other. There’s, there’s public footage from North Korean television of the Iranians visiting with Kim Jong Il the dictator, and a North Korean missile manufacturing facility. The North—the Iranians have now unveiled a statue of Simon Bolivar in Tehran to prove their solidarity with Venezuela. I mean, these folks think on a global basis.

And I half agree with Senator Biden, that we need—we need a plan comparable to the scale of the problem. We need to fundamentally reorganize our nonmilitary bureaucracies to be effective. I mean, part of the reason you don’t have an effective Iraqi bureaucracy is the American inability at the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department to provide any level of systematic competence is, is almost zero.

MR. RUSSERT: But people are going to ask specifically, what would you do? And here’s what you suggested involving North Korea. “The American public is being reassured we have a ballistic-missile defense that will work. No serious person believes this. ... Instead, we should destroy the missile on its site before it is launched. ... America’s actions must be decisive. ... The time for talk is over. Either they dismantle the missile or the United States should dismantle it.”

MR. GINGRICH: Let me give you two citations for that comment. Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who served both President Clinton and President Carter, who came out publicly and said the same thing.

MR. RUSSERT: And his deputy, Ash Carter...

MR. GINGRICH: No. And Vice President Mondale, who had been ambassador to Japan, who also said the same thing. And, and they said it for a practical reason. You don’t know where an ICBM is going when it’s sitting on the launchpad, and you don’t know what’s in that ICBM.

MR. RUSSERT: But with the war in Iraq going on the way it is, can we risk taking military action against North Korea, against Iran?

MR. GINGRICH: You know, before the show, we were talking about Seattle and the extraordinary port facility there. Can we risk losing San Francisco or Seattle? Can we risk—I mean, people don’t—if nuclear weapons and biological weapons didn’t exist, we would not be having this conversation. But people have got to come to a core grip here. When, when the Hart-Rudman Commission reported in 2001, it said, in March, “The greatest threat to the United States is a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city, probably from terrorists.”

The North Koreans today—and I think this has been a totally failed policy. We have been talking to the North Koreans through two administrations, and they have been building nuclear weapons while we talked, and I think we have to confront how really dangerous this is. In Iran, by the way, you’ve had riots in Tehran University, you’ve had 1200 people kicked off the ballot for being too pro-reform. If we had an intelligence system that worked, you’d know the first 1200 phone numbers to call in Iran. But, but that would mean you’d have to—you’d have to be in favor of democratizing Iran and, and replacing the current dictatorship, not finding a way to appease them and subsidizing them.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Biden, the number of nuclear weapons or potential nuclear weapons the North Koreans has has doubled since George Bush has been president. Should we dismantle a missile that they’re about to test?

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