Transcript for Sept. 17

MR. WEBB: We don’t have the troops. I think that you, you, you heard from—you’ve heard from other military observers on that. We, you know, we’ve got people now in the Army and the Marine Corps pulling their, their third and sometimes their fourth tours into Iraq. We’re burning out our people. It’s one of the things I was warning about early on when I said that this was a, a double strategic mouse trap. First of all, a mouse trap with—that was going to burn out our conventional forces, and second of all, a mouse trap in the sense that we have gotten so engaged in fighting the Sunni insurgency that we have allowed the Shia to get more power inside Iraq.

Now, we need, we need to make a couple of clarifications here. Saddam Hussein was not aligned with al-Qaeda, they were natural enemies. And this came out in, in the Senate Intelligence report—Committee report of last week, where we, we were being told that by our, our intelligence advisers, whether it filtered through this administration to get to the Senate or not.

And I agree on one thing, let’s be clear: We made a strategic error in going into Iraq, but we have a responsibility to, to reduce our presence in Iraq in a way that will stabilize the region. What I’ve been saying for two years is we need a commitment from this administration that we, the United States, do not want to be in Iraq as a permanent presence and a long-term presence. But secondly, that we have to get these other countries involved, the other countries tangential to Iraq, the countries that have cultural and historical interests in Iraq, involved in an overt way to move toward a diplomatic process.

I know what it’s like to be on the ground. I know what it’s like to fight a war like this. And there’s—there are limits to what the military can do.  Eventually, this is going to have to move into a diplomatic environment. Now, that’s where this administration seems to have blinders. They’re not talking to Syria, they’re not talking to Iran. And there are ways that we can do this, move this forward.

If you look at what we did after Afghanistan, in the invasion of Afghanistan, we actually brought the countries around Afghanistan to the table—including Iran, by the way. Iran was cooperating at that time, before President Bush made his “axis of evil” speech and they stopped cooperating. The eventual way out of this—and it can be done soon, with the right leadership—is for us to get something similar to what we had with the, the Madrid conference in 1991 after Gulf War I, get these countries to the table, and have them work out a formula. Sooner or later, we’re going to leave. And when we leave, the countries that are tangential to Iraq are going to be players. We should overtly push that now.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask one...

MR. WEBB: Well, all...

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask one question on troops. When you were last on this program in 1985, you said that conscription, the draft, was good for the military, the country, and the individual. Would you vote to reinstate the draft?

MR. WEBB: I don’t believe that this—right now, this country needs a draft.  What I’ve done—one of the things I’ve done is I’ve proposed a 5 percent tax break for all people who serve honorably in the military. And one of the reasons that I have done that...

MR. RUSSERT: How much would that cost?

MR. WEBB: If, if you go to the, the typical income of a veteran, it’s about $30-something-thousand, so it’s not a high-cost program. And it’s targeted to people who’ve served. And one of the things that that would do, by the way, in my view, is to bring more people from across class lines into the military.  One of the, one of the great problems we have right now in, in, in discussing this war is that very few people who have brought us this war have served and very, very few of the children of these people who have brought us this war have served. And if you have to wake up every morning wondering about a loved one, you will look at, at words like this much differently.

MR. RUSSERT: But you did say that “We have a lot of cleaning up to do:

Number One is to end the war” and that you think that we can be out of Iraq within two years. How would you do that?

MR. WEBB: Well, I—you know, here’s—the problem that we have with, like, this Karl Rove approach is every time you put a date on it, people are saying, “Oh, you’re trying to give a deadline.” I go back to what President Eisenhower said during the dark days of the Korean War when he said, “First of all, the administration that created this disaster is not the administration that’s going to repair it.” And then he said, “Anyone who can give you a date certain for the end of a war is—has not, does not know war.” But...

MR. RUSSERT: But how do you get troops out?

MR. WEBB: Here’s—you, you, you get, you get the other countries in this region overtly involved in the diplomatic process, you can get our conventional forces out. Some of them could come straight home. Some of them could be relocated to bases in the region. And you can still have the capability to fight international terrorism. Iraqis don’t like terrorism inside their country, either. You should—we should remember that when we got Zarqawi, we did not get Zarqawi by—from troops based inside Iraq. This was a unit that was based outside of Iraq. And you could do that. You could retrograde some of these troops to places like Kuwait and Qatar until we’re sure that the region is stabilized, and then bring them back.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Allen, you said we’re making process. This was the picture on Tuesday when the prime minister of Iraq went to, where? Iran.  There he is, meeting, hugging, kissing, the president of Iran. The speaker of the parliament in Iran—Iraq. The speaker of the Iraqi parliament, the Dennis Hastert of Iraq, this is what he said, “The speaker of [the Iraqi] parliament accused ‘Jews’ of financing acts of violence in Iraq in order to discredit Islamists who control the parliament and government so they can install their ‘agents’ in power. ...

“‘Some people say, “We saw you beheading, kidnapping and killing,”’ said the speaker. ‘These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew. I can tell you about these Jewish, Israelis and Zionists who are using Iraqi money and oil to frustrate the Islamic movement in Iraq. ... No one deserves to rule Iraq other than Islamists.’”

That’s the speaker of the parliament. Have we created a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iraq?

SEN. ALLEN: No, we have not. I deplore those words, the fact that the elected leader of the unity government in Iraq meets with the leader of Iran, a, a country that is a state sponsor of terror who is providing rockets to Hezbollah, their surrogates in southern Lebanon, to rain in on Israel.  There’s a concern; however, what, what my opponent was saying...

MR. RUSSERT: And the...(unintelligible)...leader of Iraq also refused to say Hezbollah is a terrorist group.

SEN. ALLEN: Yes, and they—and that—and they are a terrorist group.

MR. RUSSERT: So what have we created?

SEN. ALLEN: What we have created and helped create in Iraq is indeed, I think, a much freer and more just society than what they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein, who was, as I said earlier—and please remember—was paying families $35,000 to send their sons and daughters on, on these suicide missions, killing people in Israel. They do have freedom of religion in their constitution where rights are not enhanced nor diminished on account of religious beliefs. They do have the right of women and men to express themselves without fear of retribution. They do have a judicial system that they’re trying to put together.

It is a fledgling representative democracy. It is like an infant. We’re trying to help them learn and just normal things, like procurement and budgets. And they—because all the decisions previously were centrally decided by Baghdad, by Saddam Hussein, and there wasn’t any decision-making or discretion at the provincial level. But, but they are trying and we’re trying to stand them up.

And the key, there’s two or three key issues of matrixes of, of where you can see advances in Iraq. Number one is the training of Iraqis, their military forces and their police forces. The military forces are getting stronger every single day. And in fact the Iraqis, again, are leading those forces, not the U.S., and leading operational endeavors. The police need to get more, more up to speed.

The other aspect of this that I’ve, I’ve asked Maliki, I’ve said it to Jafari and all the ministers, is the key for that country, for their economy is oil.  And I think that their oil ought to be a national asset, and they ought to create something like the Alaska Permanent Fund where everybody in Iraq, regardless of where they live, regardless of their ethnicity, has a share in that oil. They’ll care about building up the oil capacity, upgrading it—and they’ll certainly care about anybody who’s blowing up the pipelines, because that would be money out of their pockets. Alaska they get a dividend. Every citizen ought to get a dividend in Iraq as well.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. Let, let, let me ask you one, one final question on Iraq. In your mind, in your judgment, could the $300 billion we spent on Iraq had been better spent in other aspects of the war on terror: homeland security, port security, airline security, securing Afghanistan? Was this the best expenditure of $300 billion?

SEN. ALLEN: We have spent money on all those things. In homeland security, we just passed a port security bill this past week. And...

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah, but, but my question is $300 billion in Iraq. Could it have been better spent?

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