Transcript for Sept. 10

MR. RUSSERT: But again, wasn’t your judgment overly rosy? “Greeted as liberators.” Now we’re not...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: You, you gave me a choice, Tim, “Will you be greeted as occupiers or liberators?” and I said we’ll be greeted as liberators. And we were.

MR. RUSSERT: But I said what about a long, costly, bloody battle, and you said it’s unlikely to unfold that way.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: And that’s true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly. It was over in a relatively short period of time. What obviously has developed after that, the insurgency, has been long and costly and bloody, no question.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, Tommy Franks, when he landed in Iraq, had a meeting and said, “All right, stop making plans, we’re going down to 30,000 troops at the end of this year in 2003.” There was a view of the administration that you were going to walk in, topple the government, and that was it. And now, three and a half years later, we are in Iraq for a long, long time, with 2,500 deaths, 20,000 wounded and injured. There were some fundamental misjudgments made.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think there’s no question, but what we did not anticipate an insurgency that would last this long.

MR. RUSSERT: Three hundred billion dollars spent so far. The Congressional Budget Office says if we stay in Iraq through the end of 2009, it’ll be a half trillion dollars. In all candor, could that $300 billion we’ve spent so far in Iraq not have been better spent securing Afghanistan, improving airline security, having technology for gels and liquids so people can get on without being nervous? Our cargo in our ports. Could that $300 billion have not been better spent securing our nation against terrorists rather than in Iraq?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt...

MR. RUSSERT: But could it have been better spent?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I’m not sure that it could have been. I don’t know how much better you can do than no, no attacks for the last five years.

MR. RUSSERT: But the Commission on 9/11 says that we get D’s and F’s.

People with...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well...

MR. RUSSERT: People with radios in police departments can’t—in D.C. cannot talk to Alexandria. Four-fifths of the mayors say they can’t communicate with their localities. People can’t carry toothpaste and shampoo on planes. The administration cut $6 million—or tried to—out of funding to screen those kind of things...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim...

MR. RUSSERT: ...and—rather than spending the money in Iraq.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We have spent billions on homeland security. You can always find more you can spend funds on. But the fact of the matter is, I think we’ve done a pretty good job. And I don’t know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of, of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans. You’ve got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right.

I think we did. I think we did a lot right. And I think part of what we did right was to take the fight to the enemy, to treat this as a war, not a law enforcement problem, which is the way these kinds of things have been treated before we arrived; to actively and aggressively go after the state sponsors of terror, as we did, for example, in Afghanistan and Iraq; to aggressively go after those places where the terrorists might be able to lay their hands on that deadly technology they’d like to use in that next attack. So I think we got it right. Now, I can’t say it’s perfect, obviously, you can always look back and find things you’d like to differently or do better. But on a broad, overall strategic sweep of what we did, what we set out as our objectives, the strategy we pursued to get there, I think we’ve done a pretty good job.

MR. RUSSERT: But ambassador—U.S. ambassador to Iraq said it’s not foreign terrorists that are the biggest threat in Iraq, it is a sectarian war, Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites killing Sunnis. And we are now...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Remember how we got there, though. You know, the way we got to the sectarian strife in Iraq was because of Zarqawi, who was the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq...

MR. RUSSERT: But...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: ...who went and pursued a deliberate policy of attacking the Shia in order to try to foment strife between Shia and Sunni and, I must say, he had some success, obviously, with the bombing of the, of the mosque at Samarra earlier this year. Now, we got Zarqawi. He’s dead. But we’re still having to deal with the legacy of the al-Qaeda strategy that they put in place inside Iraq, to in fact go after the Shia and the Sunni.

MR. RUSSERT: But Mr. Vice President, the president of the United States said Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization than al-Qaeda. The largest demonstration in favor of Hezbollah was in Iraq.  Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on the street supporting Hezbollah. I asked the foreign minister of Iraq, “Is Hezbollah a terrorist organization?” He said, “I can’t make that judgment.”

The parliament, the speaker of the parliament, Dennis Hastert of Iraq, Tip O’Neill of Iraq, said it was the Jews that were causing the violence. What are we creating in Iraq? I ask you again, what is victory? What is staying the course? What is winning?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, victory in Iraq will be a situation in which there is a viable government representative of the people of Iraq, elected under their constitution. We’re part way there. It’ll be an Iraq that is not a threat to the United States in terms of being a safe haven for terrorists.  It’ll be an Iraq where al-Qaeda has been pretty well eliminated, where in fact the Iraqis are able to govern and deal with the difficult political situations, obviously, that exist inside Iraq, given their history. Those are all things that need to happen, and, but I think we’re well on the way to doing it. And we’re better off there because of what we’ve done to date.  We’re less likely to have a threat emerge against the United States from that corner of the world than would’ve been the case if Saddam were still there.

MR. RUSSERT: Have we, have we created a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iraq?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.

MR. RUSSERT: The prime minister of Iraq is going where tomorrow? Iran.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Mm-hmm. It’s a neighbor.

MR. RUSSERT: If, if you go to southern Iran, Richard Engel, our correspondent, has been there for three years, they answer the phone in the hotels in Persian. Iran has built an airport in Najaf. They built a railroad in Najaf in Iraq. Who has more influence with Iraq? Iran or the U.S.?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I think the U.S. does today, but there’s no question but what the new government of Iraq has to get along with its neighbors. It also visits the Saudis. It also has had sessions with the other governments in the region. Their people need to work with the Turks, with the Syrians, with the Jordanians and with others. We have encouraged the states in the region to come together to help the new government in Iraq. It is a Shia government, no question about it. They’ve got close ties. Iran was the place where most of the leadership took refuge during the period of time when Saddam Hussein was in power, because it was the only place they could go.

But the fact of the matter is, you’re a lot better off today. You don’t have a government in Baghdad that’s pursuing weapons of mass destruction, you don’t have a government in Baghdad that is a state sponsor of terror. You don’t have a government in Baghdad that is doing all those things that Saddam Hussein did for so long. So we’re safer.

MR. RUSSERT: But you’ve also lost—you’ve also lost a buffer to Iran, and that’s what I’m going to come back and talk about, if I could.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: A quick break with the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, right after this.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: More with Vice President Dick Cheney after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

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