MTP Transcript for Dec. 17

Now, General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, had advocated hundreds of thousands of troops. That was rejected. It appears that you were on the side of Secretary Rumsfeld for a much smaller force, which turned out to be quite wrong in terms of securing Baghdad.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. Well, let, let me start with—that’s technically wrong. Doug Macgregor’s a retired Army colonel. He’s not a Navy admiral. But having—with that minor correction in the book, what I said was I thought it would take 135,000 to 150,000 men, I thought that—and I wrote a paper in August of 2002 called Operation Switch, which said you can only go in light if you hire the Iraqi Regular Army. But that you have to have a plan to have Iraqis patrolling the streets within two to three weeks—which, by the way, the British did in Basra. You had to have a plan that said you’re going to have an Iraqi interim government exactly like Afghanistan, which Khalilzad was prepared to do.

MR. RUSSERT: So we had too few troops going in.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. We—you—there were two strategies. Shinseki is exactly—if you’re going to appoint Bremer and have an American domination, you’d better send a half million to a million men. If you’re going to convert the Iraqi Regular Army, do what we did in Afghanistan—have a very light footprint, have no national resistance to us—then 150,000 was exactly the right number. The problem was we had a perfect strategy for a fast war, and then converted to deciding we were an American occupation. And from the day Bremer entered—and I’m not picking on Bremer as a person, because I assume he represented the president.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. A decision like that to eliminate the Iraq army couldn’t have been made just by him, it had to be supported by the secretary and the president.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I, I assume in the end the president’s commander in chief. But the point is, they had then adopted a strategy which would only work if you had a half million men. And, and that, that’s why, frankly, I went public in the fall of ‘03, because it was very clear that, that—the two things that were the most startling to me were that we had imposed American nationalism—I mean, Bremer was giving speeches on television. Made—it made no sense at all to have an American speaking to the Iraqis on television.

The second difference was it became startlingly clear that all of our civilian instruments of power are absolutely broken. I mean, I cannot overstate this. They are absolutely broken. They cannot function. And the Agency for International Development is an absurdity. The State Department is totally unprepared for this kind of war. And, and I’m not—these are not negatives. I think you need a 50 percent bigger State Department with a dramatic investment in information technology, with an entire new training program. So I’m not picking on the current State Department. I’m saying by any objective standard, none of our civilian instruments work. And this is a huge national problem. It’s not a Bush problem. This is an American problem.

MR. RUSSERT: But there were some fundamental judgments made that we would be greeted as liberators...

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...that we would need—we would not need hundreds of thousands of troops, that there were weapons of mass destruction, that the oil would pay for the reconstruction, that there wouldn’t be sectarian violence. Some of those fun—most of those fundamental judgments were just plain wrong.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: It de—it de—well, you and I have a disagreement here.

MR. RUSSERT: It’s a question.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No, well, you said it was a judgment.

MR. RUSSERT: A question.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: A question. Good. OK. Dave Petraeus in northern Iraq hired 15,000 Iraqi soldiers in six weeks. The U.S. Marine Corps had Iraqi generals teaching professional education courses about how they’d fought the Iraq-Iran war. There was a program under way in April or May that would’ve reintegrated that society probably by the end of summer. It required dealing with the sheiks, it required a whole range of things.

There’s, there’s a tragic package on the Internet, which, which I’m going to send you personally. I want to get—there’s a—I want to get this out, because there’s a Marine captain I want to name, name—I want to make sure I get his name right. I think it’s Patikian. And, and he, he was—he’s been killed, and it’s very unfortunate. I had the wrong paper. But Captain Travis Patriquin. P-A-T-R-I-Q-U-I-N. He did a stick figure briefing on how to win in Al Anbar and it will break your heart. Because he said, ‘Look, there are sheiks in Al Anbar who’ve been the local power structure for 1300 years and they know how to run the place. They know how to track down the, the, the bad guys. They know what to do. And a bunch of 26-year-olds come in with Bremer and write a law that said, “The sheiks are irrelevant. We now represent modernity.” And we’ve now spent three years not knowing what we’re doing, not knowing who the bad guys are, not knowing who the good guys are. And you, and you see this stick figure presentation by this young Marine who was killed just a few weeks ago and it makes you want to cry because we, starting in June of ‘03, violated virtually every principal I know about how to be effective in this kind of country. And we did—that was not true in April or May.

MR. RUSSERT: But that’s part of planning.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No.

MR. RUSSERT: That’s part of, that’s part of war.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. No. It was an absolute decision to change what we were doing. The army—the military had a plan. They were rapidly reintegrating the Iraqis. I discussed this with General Abizaid when he was the deputy commander in Qatar three weeks before the, the campaign. And that—ask Abizaid something, he’ll tell you, there was a clear path which we decided not to take. And when we didn’t take it, it has gotten steadily worse and I think that’s why I’m saying unless the administration’s prepared to say we need a new strategy with new resources, we need to fundamentally restructure our instruments of national power, they will not win in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the broader war on terror and some comments you also made in New Hampshire about the war on terror and the First Amendment. “This is a serious long-term war and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. ...

“And, my prediction to you is that either before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech. ...

“This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment.” Which freedoms, rights of speech would you curtail?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Well, let’s start with an incident recently in Illinois where the FBI sold hand grenades to a jihadist who wanted to go into a mall at Christmas and blow up himself and as many people as possible. The FBI now reports—and by the way, the local Muslim community thanked the FBI for trapping him, and the ACLU was worried that entrapment was involved. Just take those two standards. The local Muslims who are Americans and patriots and don’t want to be blown up in the mall thought it was terrific to arrest this guy for trying to buy hand grenades, and the ACLU thought there’s probably a real infringement of his legal right to be stupid.

MR. RUSSERT: But they’re Americans and patriots as well.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Yeah, Americans and patriots as well, but they’re suicidal in my judgment. So second, the, the FBI now reports that this jihadist almost certainly became a jihadist—he’s an American living in Illinois, and he’s getting on the Internet and he’s reading hate and he’s reading recruitment and he’s reading how to be a jihadist. Now, why would you tolerate that? I mean, in a free society that’s trying to survive? You know...

MR. RUSSERT: So close down Web sites.

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Oct. 12: Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., Rob Portman, economic roundtable Oct. 5: Paul Begala, Mike Murphy, Chuck Todd, David Gregory, Gwen Ifill, Peggy Noonan and David Yepsen Sept. 28: Fmr. President Bill Clinton, Steve Schmidt, David Axelrod, Rep. Mark Udall (D), Fmr. Rep. Bob Schaffer (R) Sept. 21: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, N.Y.C. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Steve Pearlstein, Steve Liesman, Erin Burnett Sept. 14: Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Bob Woodward, Chuck Todd Sept. 7: Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Tom Friedman Aug. 31: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), political roundtable Aug. 24: Caroline Kennedy, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), political roundtable Aug. 17: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gov. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), political roundtable Remembering Tim Russert Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: