MTP Transcript for Jan. 7, 2007

MR. RUSSERT:  So General Casey said, as recently as Friday, “We don’t need more American troops.” So General Abizaid and General Casey are removed.  So if you give advice to the president and he doesn’t like it, rather than listen to the generals on troop levels, you remove the generals?

SEN. GRAHAM:  Well, I hope we will hold the generals accountable for their work product.  I respect General Casey and Abizaid, but the strategy they’ve come up with for the last two years has not worked.  Iraq is not more stable than it was when they took over two years ago.  Sectarian violence in Baghdad has gotten worse.  I’ve been there five times.  The first time I went there we went rug shopping.  The last time I went we were in a tank.  It is clear to me, I think Joe Biden and every other American including the president, now is a time for change.  If we don’t change now, we’re going to lose Iraq.  And if you come up with a new policy, do you let the same people who implemented the old policy come up with a new idea?  I don’t think so.  Petraeus, to me, I hope is Bush’s Grant.  It is now time for a change.  The old strategy is...

MR. RUSSERT:  General David Petraeus, who will now be in charge.

SEN. GRAHAM:  Absolutely.  He did a great job in Mosul, counterinsurgency doctrine worked in Mosul.  We’ve had a clear hold-and-build strategy.  We could clear but we could never hold.  We never had enough troops to begin with.  For two years I’ve asked these generals, “Do we have enough troops?” “Yeah, we’re fine.” “Is the Army OK?” “The Army is fine.” A month or two ago, we found out the Army is broken, and they agreed that General Shinseki was right.

Now’s the time to start over.  If we don’t start over and do what we should’ve done in the beginning—have enough people to win this war, have the Powell Doctrine implemented—we will pay a heavy price.  So I support a surge in troops with a purpose, co-joining with the Iraqi military and political leadership to control this country.  You can not have a democracy where you got militias stronger than the central government.  You can not, not have a democracy where the people don’t have faith in their central government to take care of them.  American forces going into Baghdad co-joined with Iraqi forces and a new political model is our best chance for victory.  It may not work.

But this idea that nobody has called for withdrawal is folly on the Democratic side.  John Edwards says pull out 40,000 troops now.  Reid and Pelosi sent a letter to the president:  “End this war, start redeploying in four to six months.” These Democratic proposals are, to me, a formula for defeat.  They’re nothing more than just a political way to get out of Iraq, and it will come back to haunt us for years, and they never talked one minute in that letter what happens to Iraq when we leave.  Is our national interest—security interest compromised with a failed state in Iraq, and does withdrawing lead to a failed state?  Somebody needs to talk about that.

SEN. BIDEN:  I’ll talk about that.

MR. RUSSERT:  In all honesty—in all honesty, are we losing, though?

SEN. GRAHAM:  In all honesty, we are not winning.  And if you’re not winning, you’re losing.  And now’s the time to come up with a strategy to win.  The reason President Bush is going to do this, because he understands that we have to win in Iraq.  The reason Senator McCain and Lindsey Graham and a few others are supporting this when 14 percent of the public supports us and 80-something percent is against us is we’re thinking about the consequences of a failed state in Iraq.  That’s more important than 2008.  We cannot let this country go into the abyss.  Now is the last chance and the only chance we have left to get this right.

MR. RUSSERT:  Senator Biden, I’m going to talk about the Democrats and give you a chance to respond to that.  There was a national poll done asking a simple question:  Did the Democrats have a clear plan for Iraq?  And this is what people all across the country said.  Yes was 8 percent, no was 82 percent.  The Washington Times, the editorial page, opined this way:  “The real goal behind [January’s] dog and pony show”—that’s your hearings—“is to raise enough of a ruckus to force the president to agree to some sort of phony compromise ‘surge’ of a small number of American troops for a few months—just enough time to assure that little is accomplished militarily, while [Biden] and his political allies can claim that the plan has been tried and has ‘failed,’ and that the only alternative is to cut a deal with Tehran, Damascus and the Iraqi jihadists.”

SEN. BIDEN:  I don’t know if I can respond to The Washington Times.  I’m not going to now.  I don’t understand what the devil they just said.  There’s been no one on your program in the last four years who’ve been more supportive of the president attempting to try to get it right in Iraq, number one.  Number two, no party out of power ever has a congressional voice that is a unified voice on a particular policy.  That’s, that, that’s a red herring.  Number three, if you take a look at what Lindsey just said about where the Democrats are, the Democrats are consistently in the place where we said we’d follow what was recommended by the vast majority of the experts.  Think about this.  Nobody, nobody has recommended what the president’s about to do.  They all say a need for a changed plan.  The Baker Commission, opposed to the position suggested.  The generals oppose the position suggested.  Even those who think we should surge troops, like the American Enterprise Institute, talk about it and they’re honest about it.  They say if we surge troops, then, he said, we have to go from one—we have to bring Sadr City under control.  He talks about—my friend talks about letting the Iraqi political establishment have some time to do something.  What’s the Iraqi political establishment here?  You have a guy who is heading up that government who is tethered to a guy who is one of the worst guys in the whole region, the new Hezbollah, the Mahdi army, a guy named Sadr.  You have the prime minister of the country unwilling to take a political chance to deal with what my friend talks about, the militia.

MR. RUSSERT:  So what do you do?

SEN. BIDEN:  What you do is you tell him what—exactly what everyone’s recommended.  “Look, Maliki, and look, government, we are, over the next year, going to begin to draw down.  You step up to the ball and make some hard decisions about getting the Sunnis in the deal through oil.  You make some hard decisions about implementing the constitution, which says we’re a loosely federated republic.  You let local areas have control over their local police forces.  You make the political compromise necessary in any emerging democracy.  But do not continue the process where your only objective is to hold together the Sunni—or the Shia coalition, wipe out the Sunnis and expect you’re going to have anything remotely approaching democracy.”

MR. RUSSERT:  And if that doesn’t happen, what happens?

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