MTP Transcript for Jan. 7, 2007

SEN. BIDEN:  If that doesn’t happen we have full-blown chaos, you need plan B.  Then you disengage and you contain.  Then the question is, what do you do?  The reason why we should be talking to the neighbors, Tim, is not just the degree to which they may be able to positively impact, which is marginal.  What happens if this is a bad bet?  Nobody you’ll find, including my friend, will tell you there’s any good option left.  There’s options, but no good options.

MR. RUSSERT:  You said the other day that this is President Bush’s war, and there’s...

SEN. BIDEN:  It is.

MR. RUSSERT:  ...there’s really little Democrats can do.  Why not cut off funding for the war?

SEN. BIDEN:  I’ve been there, Tim.  You can’t do it.

MR. RUSSERT:  Why?

SEN. BIDEN:  You can’t do it.  It’s—what—because it made sense in the Constitution when you said you could cut off funding when you had no standing army.  We have a standing army with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars.  You can’t go in and, like a tinker toy, and play around and say, “You can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece and”—he—able—he’ll be able to keep those troops there forever constitutionally if he wants to.

MR. RUSSERT:  Why not have legislation then that would cap the number of troops in Iraq?

SEN. BIDEN:  Because it’s very difficult to—it’s constitutionally questionable whether or not you can do that.  I think it is unconstitutional to say, “We’re going to tell you you can go, but we’re going to micromanage the war.” When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces, when you authorize them, to be able to use the forces.  And so, look, what we have to be doing here is the president—the only way this is going to change, Tim, and I’ve been saying—I’m a broken record on this—is when a majority of Lindsey’s colleagues, Republicans, say to the president, “Mr.  President, enough.  We are not going to support you any more,” that’s when the president will begin to change his policy.  That’s when we begin to listen to bipartisan groups.  That’s when we bebin—begin to listen to the majority of the expert opinion in this country.

MR. RUSSERT:  If the surge doesn’t work, will Republicans senators then go to the president and say, “Enough”?

SEN. GRAHAM:  Well let’s talk a little bit about the—why he’s doing the surge.  Again, he’s trying to come up with a strategy for victory, and our Democratic friends have written the president a letter days before he makes a speech explaining what he’s going to do and why.  Every Democratic proposal that I’ve been privy to has one common denominator to it:  withdrawal.  He received a letter from the speaker of the House, from the majority leader of the Senate saying, “Bring this war to an end.  Redeploy in four to six months.” We...

MR. RUSSERT:  No, but my question, Senator—Senator, my question was, if the surge does not work...

SEN. GRAHAM:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  ...will Republicans then say, “We tried everything.  We gave it our last best hope.  Mr.  President, the war has been lost”?

SEN. GRAHAM:  I don’ think any Republican or Democrat should do anything right now to say the war is lost.  We should try to win this war.  And the day you say we’re going to withdraw—three months, six months, a year from now—the effect will be that the militants will be emboldened, the moderates will be frozen, and we will have sent the message to the wrong people.  Who started this...

MR. RUSSERT:  So we’re stuck there forever.

SEN. GRAHAM:  Well, you stay there with a purpose to win.  If we never had enough troops in the beginning, when did we start having enough troops?  We have paid a heavy price for the mistakes we’ve made in the past.  The biggest mistake we could make as a nation is to listen to Pelosi and Reid doctrine of withdrawing without wondering what happens when we leave.  My biggest fear, as a United States senator, as an American, is that we will make a political decision to leave Iraq without thinking about what’s left when we leave.  Nobody wants to talk about what happens when we leave.  I understand it’s not popular, but this war is not about the moment, it’s about the next decade and the decade to follow.  It’s about our national security interests.  It’s about the war on terror.  Moderates vs.  extremists.  If we leave the moderates and leave it to the extremists, if we tell the extremists through our behavior and our actions, “We’re leaving Iraq in a year.  It’s yours,” we will never know peace.  I hope we can rally around the president’s idea of putting enough troops in to make a difference.  I hope we can do what Joe says, push the Iraqi people to come up with the political model that will work.  But no politician in Iraq can possibly reconcile that nation with this level of violence.  A pre-condition—a pre-condition to political solution is security.  Security is absent.  We got to regain the capital.

MR. RUSSERT:  Senator Biden, you said on Friday that you’ve made a—you’ve reached a tentative conclusion that people in the administration believe that the war is lost, perhaps even including the vice president, and that they simply want to go along and try to keep the war at a point where they can pass it off to the next president.  Do you really believe that?

SEN. BIDEN:  Here’s what I believe.  I was referring to—I was being asked about the vice president and the former secretary of defense, Rumsfeld, and I said they’re two of the smartest people I’ve ever known in my years here in Washington, and they could not have believed what they’d been saying for the last three years that we’re winning.  They could not believe that.  So what is the explanation?  Why would they continue to say we’re winning when, as bright as they are, they know that was pure malarkey?  And the only conclusion I can—and I said I’ve tentatively concluded among—about those two people, that they concluded that the required change in, in, in, in approach to Iraq would be so radical that they don’t think it could work.  Therefore, keep it stitched together, pray for a Hail Mary pass and/or pass it off to the next guy.  Because, look, do you believe—rhetorical question, I acknowledge—do you believe Rumsfeld and Cheney believed what they’ve been saying for the last three years?  We’d come back, both of us, on this show, both of us together, and say, “Look, this is what we saw on the ground here.” How could they not know we were losing so badly?  So that’s why I was referring to those two men.

But I want to make a point about—that Lindsey just made.  My view is we have one chance to not lose Iraq, and it rests in not repeating the mistakes we’ve made.  It made sense to surge 60,000, 70,000, 100,000 troops before there was a civil war.  There is now a civil war.  You need a political solution before you can get a physical solution.  Unless Maliki is willing to deal the Sunnis in so they abandon the insurgency, unless the Sunnis are willing to allow, under the constitution, the Shia to control their local districts like the Kurds do, there is no possibility, none, with 500,000 American forces there.

MR. RUSSERT:  What did the hanging of Saddam Hussein and the circumstances of insults being hurled at him and he throwing insults back—it took on the form of a sectarian lynching.

SEN. BIDEN:  It, it was, it was Abu Ghraib again.  It had the same kind of just poisonous impact.  And that’s why, if I were Maliki’s adviser, I’d say, “Now is the time you have to make a dramatic move to hold accountable the Sunnis who engaged in that.” You, as the leader of a united country, have to stand up and publicly condemn it.  I don’t think he has it in him.

MR. RUSSERT:  Condemn the Shiites and all.

SEN. BIDEN:  Condemn the Shiites.

MR. RUSSERT:  What did the Saddam hanging do to the potential for reconciliation in Iraq?

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