MTP Transcript for Dec. 10

MR. RUSSERT: Why do you think it’s too late?

MR. RICKS: As the report says, the, the situation is deteriorating. We have fought the battle of Baghdad now for several months. We tried to put in U.S. forces in the belief that it would change the outcome. And the U.S. military was shocked to find, in October, that it did, did not. As they put more troops in, into Baghdad, violence increased.

Now I think we manned up putting another 20,000 troops into Iraq in a temporary surge, but the U.S. military doesn’t have a lot of confidence that that would do much good, either, in Baghdad.

MR. RUSSERT: Why not?

MR. RICKS: Because they were surprised at how little effect putting, I think it was 8,000 U.S. troops in, had. And really, 20,000 is about the limit you can get out of the U.S. military without doing serious damage to future deployments.

MR. RUSSERT: What’s diving the insurgency?

MR. RICKS: Right  now it’s an insurgency, it’s a civil war. It’s, I think, the pure Hobbesian state, the war of all against all at this point. It isn’t a—it’s worse than a civil way in many ways. It’s in a state of meltdown. The country is falling apart. What strikes me: Neighborhoods in Baghdad are now essentially little armed fortresses. People have put up barriers, walls, even just burned-out cars so that most neighborhoods only have one entrance and exit. And this is true across the city that sprawls for 30 or 40 miles. It, it essentially is a series of armed camps now.

MR. RUSSERT: Are Iraqis choosing their tribes? Their religious sect over their national government?

MR. HAASS: The short answer is yes. I think when, increasingly when Iraqis get up in the morning, they don’t look in the mirror and define themselves as an Iraqi, that too often now they’re defining themselves as Sunni or Shia or even far smaller units than that. They’re a member of this militia. In some ways, we’re seeing a civil war against the backdrop of a failed state. And that’s what explains what you might call the militarization of this country. It’s a real breakdown of central authority. And the problem with the report might simply be that it’s three years late, that it’s coming into a situation which is so deteriorated that, way beyond any questions of whether this report, Tim, can gain traction inside the beltway, the real question is whether it can gain traction in Baghdad, whether the situation on the ground has simply deteriorated beyond the point that, that the sorts of remedies put forward here can stick, or indeed whether any remedies can stick.

MR. RUSSERT: You write in tomorrow’s Time magazine something that I would describe as extremely pragmatic in approaching this. “Almost as important as what actually happens in Iraq is how it is understood. One possibility is that people around the region and the world would come to judge Iraq’s failure as largely the result of American policy. ... An alternative view is that the lion’s share of responsibility for what has taken place in Iraq over the past few years belongs to the Iraqis themselves. ... This narrative is more likely to take hold if the U.S. publicly sets clear benchmarks for what Iraqis must accomplish regarding political reform and security performance and what they should expect if they come up short.” Your point is: Set these benchmarks and if the Iraqis don’t do it, say “We’ve liberated you; now it’s your problem that you haven’t taken advantage of it.”

MR. HAASS: Pretty much. We set forth these benchmarks. This is what it will take to make Iraq a functioning country in the area of security, in the area of politics and economics. If Iraq can do those things, great. Then we will have a partner and we will have a basis to press on. But if Iraq can’t do those things, then I think it sets the stage for the president of the United States saying, “Look, we have done everything we could’ve done and more. And quite honestly, what’s missing is not another six months or six years of American effort. What’s missing is not another 20,000 or 50,000 troops.”

So I’m all in favor of giving the Iraqis a chance to show that they can make this work. But at some point, Tim, I think the president of the United States has to make a very sober assessment that what’s—what we’re trying is not working. And if we get to that point, he’s got to then look to how do we cut our losses, contain the damage and move on. At the end of the day, American foreign policy has to move beyond Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Is that fair to the Iraqis? Colin Powell said, “If we break it, we bought it.” If we went in, topple Saddam Hussein, do we not have a responsibility of at least creating security so that the Iraqis can govern themselves?

MR. HAASS: Well, it’s one of the reasons that people like me had doubts about the war from the get-go. I was not confident that we could make this work even if we had avoided many of the problems that Ken Adelman and Tom Ricks and others have, have documented. But at some point, we’ve got to say, “We have—we have done as much as we can reasonably be expected to do.” And also, at some point, we owe it to our troops and to the American people, where we have to say further investment of lives, further investment of dollars are not going to turn this thing around. We, we owe that, to ourselves, I would say, even more than we owe things to the Iraqis. We cannot, by ourselves, make Iraq a success.