MTP Transcript for Nov. 25

GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, we’re about to find out. You know, I think going in, taking down Saddam clearly was a good idea. I thought so then, I still feel that way. There’s also probably no question that the Iraqis under his regime were a threat to the region, to oil stability, to their own people. So, you know, the goal, clearly, though, Tim, has morphed. The whole notion of democracy and an island, a beacon of hope for the Middle East, has come later and certainly may not be achievable.

From our perspective, though, we’ve got to leave a viable state with an operating security institution. We’ve got to make sure that U.S. troops get out of there. You know, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are not adequately sized to sustain the current national security process. So we are going to withdraw. We’re going to draw down to at least 10 brigades, I hope by next summer. The, our goal right now, though, we’ve passed so many off-ramps, Tim, it’s hard to see a simple solution.

MR. RUSSERT: General Downing, is there a possibility of a military victory?  Or should the American people brace themselves to say, “OK, this is not going to be clean, it’s going to be rather messy. We’re going to get out and leave something behind far different than we had hoped for.”

GEN. DOWNING: Tim, there’s not a military victory. That is not in the cards. It’s primarily not in the cards because this an insurgency that we’re fighting. The insurgency has been, been, been, I think, well described by the two congressmen. This is political in nature. This thing is being waged for political stakes. The politicians are going to solve this thing.

The, the, the diplomatic, the economic, the social ramifications of a counterinsurgency campaign are what drives it. You have to have security, and that’s going to be important, but this security that is so important is going to have to be derived from the Iraqis. More Americans are not going to solve this problem; in fact, they’re, they’re going to make it worse.

The, the Iraqi army, I was back over there for my seventh trip back in September, they’ve made tremendous gains in the last year. There are leaders emerging in the Iraqi army which are outstanding men who really are, are, are patriots. Their—they’ll not describe themselves as a Shia or a Sunni, and in fact, one brigade commander became very insulted when a member of my party asked him what religion he, he was from. He said, “I’m an Iraqi army officer.  My job is, is to defend this country.”

What’s really fallen down, Tim, has been the police. We reconstituted the Iraqi police pretty much in their old image; they are corrupt, they are feared by the people, and we recognize this and we’re starting a program now, we started it about three months ago, to revamp the Iraqi police, because it does us, it does us no good to conduct these operations in places like Baghdad where we clean up a neighborhood—it takes six to eight weeks to get everything out of there, get things back to normal. We turn it back over to, to the Iraqi police, Tim, and within weeks it’s right back to the way it was before. So we’ve got to have the police, but not only the police, we’ve got to have rule of law in Iraq, which we don’t have, which means you need a court system, you, you need prosecutors, you need defenders.

MR. RUSSERT: But why should the insurgents participate in any of these kinds of diplomatic outreaches? They can just sit there, bide their time...

GEN. DOWNING: But...

MR. RUSSERT: ...continue their campaign of chaos and mayhem and wait for the United States to leave.

GEN. DOWNING: But the, but the insurgents want something, too, Tim, they want a stake in this political process. Now, al-Qaeda sits out there, and the, the, the al-Qaeda sympathizers, the, the radical Salafist jihadis, they want something entirely different, they want the ninth-, 10^th-century Islamic state. But the majority now of, of this insurgency has political stakes, and that’s why I go back to the comment that I made earlier. This is why Maliki—and if Maliki can’t do it, some Iraqi leader has to stand up and bring the people to the table and solve the issues. You know, we haven’t talked about the Kurds here, that’s another big piece. Are we going to divide this country in, in, into three separate federations? A lot of people don’t want that to happen, a lot of people are very concerned that the Sunni piece of this thing, even though this is remote right now, could at some point morph into a Taliban state right in the center of the most strategic area, I, I would say, in, in the world right now.

MR. RUSSERT: That could happen?

GEN. DOWNING: Yeah, that, that, that could happen. But we need the—when I say “we,” that’s a misnomer—the Iraqis must take charge of this thing.  There’s about five key political issues, constitutional issues that are out there that must be resolved. If they can get those things resolved, that’s going to go a long way to satisfying these insurgents that they have a political role to play in this process.

MR. RUSSERT: The—we have some photo—pictures this morning of this very morning in eastern Baghdad, another attack on a U.S. military installation.  It appears, Congressman Hunter, that the insurgents can strike at will. Back in March when we went to war, you said, “I believe we will win this conflict in overwhelming fashion.” In hindsight, you were very, very, very overly optimistic. Fair?

REP. HUNTER: Yeah. No, Tim, I think we are going to win this conflict. We won the military piece in taking Baghdad, and we’re now trying to stand up a free government. And, Tim, we’ve been here before. You and I were here in the, in the 1980s when the—when we were trying to, to bring freedom to Europe and bring down the Berlin Wall. We had the Russians ringing our allies in Europe with SS-20 missiles, and we responded with, with strength, that is Ronald Reagan started to move Pershing 2 and ground-launched cruise missiles into Europe. Lots of critics said, “We’re in the biggest mess we’ve ever been in in this century. We’re going to have a World War III, and the president’s got to back down, and we’re in a huge mess.” We persevered, we freed hundreds of millions of people in eastern Europe.

In our own hemisphere, and you were there as well, in El Salvador, that was going to be a Vietnam where we bogged down. We provided a shield for that little fragile government as it stood up, and Salvadorans today are fighting side by side with us in, in Iraq.

So the Middle East never will be a neat package. You’ve got hundreds of issues and sub-issues and problems that will spring up, you’ve got all of the problems of a fledgling democracy. But you have two institutions in Iraq that have both Shiites and Sunnis in them, where people have come together. One institution is the government; although unevenly, you have Sunnis and Shiites in the government, and secondly in the military, as General Downing said, you have Sunni and Shiite leaders in the military. So you have two institutions where there has been some conciliation. I think we’ve got to build on it.

And, and I understand that there’s lots of doom and gloom to spread around, but we’ve been in these tough positions before, we persevered when we had endurance. We need to have endurance, this is not an easy thing to do. And we, we brought freedom to hundreds of millions of people in this world by hanging in there. When we were, when we were up against the Russians, we were trying to bring down the wall. This is a different type of wall. It’s a different type of world. I think we’re going to be successful.

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