Transcript for July 16

SEN. BIDEN: The first thing we should do is put this in perspective. We don’t even have the intelligence community saying they’re certain they have a nuclear weapon. They have nuclear capability in that they have fissile material, number one. Number two, the North Korean government’s like an eighth-grader with a small bomb looking for attention.

My worry about them is not that they’re going to be able to hit Seattle; they’re not even close, not even remotely close to being able to do that. What I’m worried about is that this totally isolated regime with a guy who doesn’t seem to understand anything, is going to do something very, very stupid that ends up in a shooting war in the Korean peninsula where they have 30,000 pieces of artillery—or, 10,000 pieces of artillery that can take out a significant chunk of South Korea.

It’d be nice if we went in there knowing that we had South Korea with us and Japan with us. They’re not—they don’t support this policy of Richard Perle, or this administration—talk, the tough talk about it.

The second point I’d like to make is, let’s put this in—again in perspective. What is the nature of the threat? This reminds me of the, of the—several years ago on your program, Vice President Cheney sitting here saying the Iranians have reconstituted their nuclear capability. That was malarkey then. I said it then. It’s malarkey now that they have the capacity to hit us.

Now, there is a value judg—a, a, a, a, excuse me, a judgment made whether or not to take out that missile on its pad based on whether or not it had any real—posed any real threat. A lot of us thought it did not pose a real threat, and it turned out it wasn’t much of anything at all. It’d be nice to know ahead of time that we had a president who is able to have a relationship with the prime minister of Japan and the prime minister of South Korea, so that if we did have to use force, which is a possibility, they’re on the same team as we were.

MR. RUSSERT: What would the North Koreans do if we, in fact, took out, pre-emptively, a missile in their...

SEN. BIDEN: If that—if we had reason to believe that missile was a nuclear-tipped missile—which no one thought it was—then I would not hesitate to take it out and not worry about—I’d worry about the consequences, but I would be prepared for the consequences. The possibility is that North Korea would use its artillery shells on South Korea and start a Korean war. The greater concern, though, is that what’s going to happen here is South Korea—understanding we have no real policy—is going to decide three years from now along with Japan, it need be a nuclear power. And you end up having a Korean peninsula that’s nuclearized, you have Japan a nuclear power, you have China going from 18 to 888 ICBMs, India following suit, etc. That’s my worry.

But let’s put this in perspective here. The idea that Iran and/or, and/or South Korea—or North Korea, presents a strategic threat to us from nuclear weapons now is not real, is not real. We have alternatives and plans—we should have plans to be able to deal with the isolation of them and, if need be, there can come a time when we will have to use all the force available to us. But it would be nice to straighten some things out in the meantime.

MR. RUSSERT: But if we do nothing and in five, six years they have 15--the capacity to build 15 nuclear bombs, they only need 14 for protection. Couldn’t they give one to somebody?

SEN. BIDEN: They could. They could, just like Saddam could have. But it’d make no sense for them. They are more paranoid about themselves and what would happen to them and how it would be turned on them than even Saddam was.

Look, I think we ought to look at a little bit of history here. What, what evidence is there of that? There is evidence that they transferred missile technology. There is evidence that they may transfer some of that material. But, in the meantime, it seems to me we’ve got to put ourselves in the position, Tim, that if and when we do act, we act with the world, if not with us, with their acquiescence. Not be in the position like we are now where we become the isolated party, where our judgment is viewed as having no capability of producing results.

And the concluding point I’ll make to you is this: Does anybody think we’re stronger now because we, in fact, have essentially going it alone around the world? Does anybody think we can wage a war now in—against Syria, against Iran, against Korea, and while we’re still bogged down in Iraq? We’ve got to get real here.

MR. RUSSERT: Speaker Gingrich, a lot of people have suggested it’s easy to talk tough, “Take out this missile.” But, in fact, if the North Koreans then decided to shell South Korea and send their million-man army into South Korea, you would lose a million people within a week. We would have a huge war on our hands. And the lesson from Iraq may be we know how to start a war, but—and it’s a lot easier to start a war than it is to finish one.

MR. GINGRICH: Well, you know, Tim, after 9/11, we had a big commission, you know, they had lots of congressional hearings. They all concluded there was a failure of intelligence, and they all concluded there was a failure of imagination. Now, I’m just sitting here saying, this is a dictatorship we don’t understand. Fewer than 10 percent of our intelligence analysts in Korea actually speak Korean because our intelligence community is so broken. And we’re in a situation where the ability to rely on our intelligence community to explain Kim Jong Il’s next step is virtually zero. If one morning there is a ship sitting in New York Harbor or Seattle Harbor or San Francisco Harbor, and that ship is of Panamanian registry, and it happens to have a nuclear device—because I concede right now, we don’t know whether or not they can build a missile-capable nuclear weapon. But they have more than enough fissile material to build a very simple nuclear device that would fit on a ship.

SEN. BIDEN: Agreed.

MR. GINGRICH: And at that point, we look around and somebody’s going to say, “Oh, my God, we could lose a city.” And they say, “You know, we’re totally insane, and if you don’t agree to withdraw from the peninsula and you don’t agree to turn over South Korea, we’re going to set off this weapon and eliminate Seattle.” My point is—and this is a core difference in how, in how I think we think about foreign policy. When in doubt, I want the United States to be very strong and I want us to be very clear with dictatorships. We’re sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things you’re doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you’ll get out of us is talk.

MR. RUSSERT: You’re talking about the Bush administration.

MR. GINGRICH: I’m talking about the policies of the United States today.

MR. RUSSERT: But that is such a condemnation of George W. Bush.

MR. GINGRICH: Well, it’s not a condemnation of George W. Bush. It’s a statement that—look what we’ve done in the last six weeks. I mean, I think we are in a very serious crisis in this country.

MR. RUSSERT: But what would you do? What would you do?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, you would say for North Korea, we are currently broadcasting I think it’s 90 minutes a week into North Korea. We’re currently broadcasting a trivial amount into Iran. You had riots in Iran—at Tehran University for weeks. You’ve had trade union movements that are upset, 49 percent of the country is non-Persian. And the amount of effort we’ve made to help those who would like to be free and would like to replace the current dictatorship is trivial. You have in North Korea a dictatorship with 300,000 people in concentration camps, a dictator so evil that he has literally shrunk the height of the average North Korean by three inches over the last generation through malnutrition. And we do nothing to say, you know, over the next five or eight years our goal is to have two countries we can have good relationships with because they become democracies.

And by the way, the Japanese were far more hard-line about the missiles than we were, and the Japanese were very disappointed that we turned to the Chinese, who failed.

MR. RUSSERT: Has the war in Iraq limited our options on Iran, North Korea?

MR. GINGRICH: Only in, only in our own minds.

MR. RUSSERT: Same question.

SEN. BIDEN: I, I think it has. But let me tell you, let me—a slightly different prescription. That, that bomb in the rusty hull of a Panamanian tanker, that is something that I talked about on your show three and a half years ago. What have we done? We’ve done nothing in terms of homeland security. We have $43 billion that the homeland security—that the 9/11 commission said in December we should be spending on areas we’re getting D’s and C’s. We haven’t spent it at all. Instead—we’ll disagree here—instead we decide to give a $53 billion tax cut to people making over a million bucks a year. Our priorities are backwards, Tim.

Number two, real simple message sent to the Koreans. This is—I worry about this eighth-grade mentality they have up there. “You do something like that, we will annihilate you.” We have the complete capacity to annihilate them, number two.

Number three, we should be talking about how we’re going to proceed here. John Kennedy—quoting a muscular Democrat—John Kennedy said we should never negotiate out of fear, we should never fear negotiation. We’re so big and so strong, the idea that we’re not sitting down having a come to the—an altar call with the leader of North Korea in a private meeting and saying, “Jack, let’s tell you what the deal is here.”

MR. RUSSERT: One-on-one?

SEN. BIDEN: One-on-one. I called for that three years ago. That’s not born out of weakness.

MR. RUSSERT: Should the, should the president invite Kim Jong Il to Washington?

SEN. BIDEN: No, that’s, that’s, you’re, you’re giving him a status he doesn’t warrant. But we should have a high-level negotiator sitting down, saying, “Here’s the deal.” This is what’s in it for you if you behave, this is when it’s not.” You know why these guys wouldn’t do that three years ago? They’re afraid the answer may come back, “OK, we’ll give you verifiable agreement on missiles and on nuclear, but you got to promise not to try to take us down.” That, for a neocon, is like me as a Catholic denying the existence of a trinity. We did that with the Soviet Union...

MR. RUSSERT: Would you give such an assurance?

SEN. BIDEN: Sure, I’d give such an assurance, and agree to—in fact, continue to take them on in every other activity, just like we did Russia, just send them in there. (Unintelligible).

MR. RUSSERT: Would you promise North Korea and Iran that the regimes could stay in place...

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