MTP Transcript for Jan. 14, 2007

MR. HADLEY:  The president made very clear in his speech that we want a democratic Iraq that is able to deal with the problem of terror, can be an ally in the war on terror in the region, and that if we fail to do so, and if Iraq fails, it jeopardizes our interests, and that means terror returning to the United States from the Middle East, and that means an emboldened Iran sitting astride the Middle East, maybe even a nuclear weapon.  That’s a, that’s a—something that none of us want to contemplate.

MR. RUSSERT:  And we will not leave until we achieve that?

MR. HADLEY:  We are—we are committed over the long term, obviously, to the success of Iraq.  And look, you know, once we do have this government that emerges, and the president believes following his strategy is the best way to ensure it, we’re going to have a—want to have a long term relationship with this, this country.  Of course we are.  The Middle East is in a very important part of the world.  We’re going to want to work out some kind of long term relationship with Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT:  But the secretary of state said that Mr. Maliki’s on borrowed time.  If he’s on borrowed time, how can we say we’re going to stay there until he can govern himself with a stable country?  It doesn’t make sense.

MR. HADLEY:  It does, because what she said is that the Iraqi people are insisting their government perform.  And if that government does not perform, the first person that, that the unity government is going to have to answer to is the Iraqi people.

MR. RUSSERT:  If Congress decides to cut off funds for the new troops being deployed to Iraq, will the president accept that decision by Congress and abide by it?

MR. HADLEY:  Tim, we’re not there yet.  We have funds in the ‘07 appropriations bill to deploy these troops.  I think once they get in harm’s way, Congress’ tradition is to support those troops.  I say we’re not there yet because we’re beginning a process to work through this issue.  I think members of Congress want us to succeed, they don’t want to fail.  They understand that means Iraqis are going to have to step up, and I think when they work through it, they will understand that the only way the Iraqis can step up and succeed is if we provide the reinforcements the president has talked about.  And we think, at the end of the day, they will—they will come to the same conclusion the president did, that this is the only path to success.

MR. RUSSERT:  But if they don’t, and they cut off the funds, what will—what do you do?

MR. HADLEY:  We’ll, we’ll get—we’ll see where we are at that point.  I think, at this point, we don’t think that’s likely.

MR. RUSSERT:  Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, at the hearing, said he supported the war, he had supported the administration, but that he has not been told the truth, and he can no longer support President Bush and the war in Iraq.  And people watching that, listening to someone like Senator Nelson, began to put forward the following, that if you were wrong about weapons of mass destruction, you were wrong about the troop levels necessary, you were wrong about the costs of the war, you were wrong about oil revenues paying for reconstruction, you were wrong about being greeted as liberators, you were wrong about the level of sectarian violence, why should the American people trust you now and think you’re right about a surge?

MR. HADLEY:  The president laid out Wednesday night, in a very candid way, the situation that we’re faced with.  And I think it’s, he understands that Americans are tired of this war, as I said, but I think it is also true the Americans don’t want to fail.  They understand the stakes.  They want a new policy in Iraq.  So does the president, and he spent the last two to three months developing a new policy.  That’s what he laid out on Wednesday.  And I think, in the end of the day, the American people understand that the consequences of failure are too high.  We’ll have a big—a debate.  That debate started this week in front of the American people, in the Congress, and the president’s belief is, in the end of the day, when people sort through this issue of the way we, we did and he did, that how—whatever the history and whatever the disagreements about how we got here and whatever the stakes that were made, which the president acknowledged and took responsibility for Wednesday night, this is the only path that has a prospect for success.

MR. RUSSERT:  The concern is about 10 days before the election, the president was out on the campaign trail saying, “We’re winning the war.  We are absolutely winning the war,” and then this appeared in The New York Times last week.  “Decisions on a new strategy were clearly slowed by political calculations.  Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.” A strong suggestion, an admission by Bush advisers that politics was at stake here.  Men and women dying on the ground in Iraq, and the president was calculating to say, “We’re winning, we’re winning, because if I say anything else, it would not help me politically.”

MR. HADLEY:  I don’t believe that.  And a number of reviews were begun quietly, because it became clear over the course of the summer that we were going to have to do something different in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT:  So the president knew at the end of October we were not winning?

MR. HADLEY:  The president knew that we needed to take a look at where we are, because let’s look at what happened.  I think we were doing pretty well in Iraq until February of ‘06, and the—and the bombing of the golden temple—Golden Mosque in Samarra.  And at that point—and I said at the time, and the president said at the time, the Iraqis looked into the abyss and stepped back, and they did.  The Iraqi army didn’t fragment, the government did come together two months later in terms of a unity government.  But it set off sectarian violence, concentrated in Baghdad, as the president said.  Eighty percent of it is within 30 miles of Baghdad.  But that sectarian violence, as the president said Wednesday night, got ahead of us.  It got ahead of the Iraqi army; it got ahead of our security forces.  And it became clear in the late summer into the fall that the political progress we hoped to see—agreement on the oil law, agreement on de-Baathification, all these other things were ground down and weren’t going to happen if we did not get security to the population in Baghdad.

MR. RUSSERT:  That was contrary to the public posture the president was communicating to the American people.

MR. HADLEY:  What was clear was we knew there was an emerging problem.  We had talked about sectarian violence; we’d talked about the significance of the Samarra bombing.  What we didn’t have in September and October was what we were going to do about it.  So we started a series of reviews.  Initially, separately, finally in November the president said, “Look, I want to have all this pulled together in a review that I will run and manage to develop a new strategy going forward.” It took some time.  Everybody expected him to speak out in December, and he said, “I’m not ready yet.” So where the president was, he didn’t know what new course he wanted to propose to the American people, and that’s what he laid out last Wednesday night.

MR. RUSSERT:  Suggestions that the administration is buying time, get through ‘07, get through ‘08, and then pass Iraq off to the next president.

MR. HADLEY:  The president understands that his obligation to the American people and to the men and women who have served in Iraq and died in Iraq is to get Iraq right.  It is not a question of passing off.  This president has said many other times, “our job is to solve problems and not pass them off to our successors.” And that’s what he was—did in this review.  We need a strategy to succeed in Iraq, and that’s what the president gave the American people Wednesday night.

MR. RUSSERT:  He raised eyebrows when he talked about Iran and Syria in his speech on Wednesday night, sending carrier groups, Patriot missiles, positioning supplies, weapons, ships into the area near Iran.  Are we preparing for a potential military conflict with Iran?

MR. HADLEY:  No.  The president has said very clearly that the issues we do—we have with Iran should be solved diplomatically in terms of the nuclear issue.  He did say that Iranians are active in Iraq, supporting people who are putting our American troops and Iraqis at risk.  He said very clearly we are going to deal with that, we’re going to disrupt those operations.

But that’s why I tried to say earlier, Tim, there’s a broad struggle going on in the Middle East between the forces of freedom and democracy, the forces of terror and tyranny, and Iran is behind a lot of that.  They’re behind Hezbollah.  They’re about—behind Hamas.  And the region is looking and watching and asking the question whether the United States is going to stay engaged in that region and be an ally of those countries who want to resist an effort by Iran to basically establish hegemony over in that region, and that’s why the president is taking those steps.

MR. RUSSERT:  What is the status...

MR. HADLEY:  To make clear that he understands the stakes, and we are committed, as every president has before, over the long term, to the Middle East.

MR. RUSSERT:  What is the status of the Iranians that were taken into custody from the liaison office in northern Iraq?

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