MTP Transcript for Jan. 28, 2007

SEN. SCHUMER: Because our job is not to interfere with the president’s chain of command. I voted for Gates as well. Our job is to send a message in our constitutional prerogatives. Not just a message, but take some action and change the course when we deal with the president. That’s how our Constitution works.

SEN. VITTER: Tim, I think it’s an important point. The Senate voted to confirm David Petraeus 81-to-nothing. More than that, everybody who has spoken about him has expressed supreme confidence in his ability. He says directly this resolution can hurt our troop morale, can embolden the enemy. I think for the time being we need to respect that judgment. He has also said, “If this plan is not working, cannot work, I will say so. I will report that not just to the president, but to the Congress.” Again, this isn’t an open invitation forever, this is a final chance. And I think, in that very constrained context, we should give General Petraeus what he needs for the next few months.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you regret your vote for the war?

SEN. SCHUMER: I don’t regret it, Tim, because I always believe in giving the commander in chief the benefit of the doubt. After...

MR. RUSSERT: But knowing what you know today?

SEN. SCHUMER: Knowing what I know today, of course. He has botched it.

MR. RUSSERT: You’d vote no?

SEN. SCHUMER: I will never—right, exactly. I would never give him—the whole point is, I don’t give him the benefit of the doubt again given how he’s botched this policy so dramatically. Even if we can limit our damage right now, the damage will be there for decades.

MR. RUSSERT: Michael Gerson, the logic of voting for General Petraeus but voting against the troop surge?

MR. GERSON: Yeah. I, I think ultimately it’s not responsible to say—which I think many Democrats do—this is the president’s war, he’s failed, and he has to live with the consequences. In fact, we all have to live with the consequences, moving forward here, and there’s a plan on the table, a realistic plan on the table which General Petraeus calls hard but not hopeless, and I think it needs to be given a shot.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you another poll number from The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. When the U.S. leaves Iraq, what will we leave behind? A stable government, 27 percent; no stable government, 65 percent. And look at this party breakdown: Republicans, 42 percent believe we will not leave behind a stable government; 70 percent of Independents; 82 percent of Democrats. That looks like a real erosion in Republican support for what the president promised would be a democratic shining city—country in the Middle East.

MR. GERSON: Yeah, I think there is a real Republican decay in support, there’s no question. And I think it is a last chance. And there’s a real tension for the administration here. A successful counterinsurgency strategy doesn’t have a lot of immediate results. It involves a lot of getting to know local leaders, living in the neighborhoods, drinking tea, you know, with, with local officials. So there’s—that’s the approach they’re taking. But the political situation, their timelines are much shorter, so there’s a real tension there.

MR. RUSSERT: Ken Pollack, let me show our viewers something that you have written, “Things Fall Apart,” share it with our viewers on the screen here. “With each passing day, Iraq sinks deeper into the abyss of civil war. The history of such wars is that they are disastrous for all involved. ... Unfortunately, we may soon be forced to confront how best we can avoid ‘losing’ an Iraqi civil war. ...

“Spillover from an Iraq civil war could be disastrous. ... It is imperative that the United States develop a plan for containing an all-out Iraqi civil war. ...

“It was arrogance in the face of history that led us to blithely assume we could invade without preparing for an occupation, and we would do well to show greater humility when assimilating its lessons about what we fear will be the next step in Iraq’s tragic history.”

MR. POLLACK: Well, the basic point that we’re trying to make is that the president wants this one last shot, it’s obviously very late in the game, there is no guarantee that it’s going to work out. I think that even the administration would say that the likelihood of it working is probably less than 50-50. If it fails, we are going to find Iraq even worse than it is today. It will probably slide into a Bosnia or Lebanon-like all-out civil war. That’s going to be disastrous not just for Iraq and the Iraqi people, but potentially for other countries around it, perhaps even for the entire region.

MR. RUSSERT: If it does fall into an Iraq—or to a Bosnia or an Afghanistan, what do we do?

MR. POLLACK: Well this, of course, is the great problem, because all options at that point in time are much worse than any we would have had in the past. What we outline in that report is a strategy of containment. Could we contain the civil war, the violence and the spillover effects within the borders of Iraq, prevent it from affecting other countries that we care a lot about, like Saudi Arabia, like Kuwait, like Jordan, like Turkey? And we lie—we lay out a strategy to do that, but we’re very sober about it, because we looked at a lot of the history of other civil wars like this and what we found is it is very hard to do.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator, Senator Schumer...

SEN. VITTER: And I—and I think this is very important...

MR. RUSSERT: That’s why I want to talk about it, Senator Schumer, because if we pull out, and all civil war breaks out, all-out civil war...

SEN. SCHUMER: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: ...Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds...

SEN. SCHUMER: Yeah. Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: ...perhaps Turkey gets involved, Iran gets involved, the—who knows? And it becomes a haven, a la Afghanistan...

SEN. SCHUMER: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: ...what do we do?

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, there is no good alternative, as Ken said, because things are so bad. And this new surge, this new escalation is no change in strategy at all. That’s the problem with it. It’s not a surge and a change in strategy, it’s just a surge under the present strategy, which I think everyone agrees has failed. So what do we do? Well, we have proposed a—that 2007 be a year of transition where we change the mission, change the strategy, Tim, away from policing a civil war and focusing on counterterrorism, focusing on force protection. During that year, you move a large number of the troops out of harm’s way—because they won’t be policing a civil war, they won’t be going down the streets of Baghdad—and try to contain the damage. It’s very similar to...

MR. RUSSERT: Where do you put them? Where do you put the them?

SEN. SCHUMER: Hmm?

MR. RUSSERT: Where do you put the troops?

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, you put them out of harm’s way, either in bases in Iraq or in Kuwait or nearby, many of them would come home. It’s a very similar strategy to the Baker-Hamilton Commission. Most of the middle-of-the-road, down-the-road, sober, nonpartisan experts have agreed that this is the best way to go. Only the president in his bunker, and a very few people around him, seem to think we should keep policing this civil war.

MR. RUSSERT: Is it...

SEN. SCHUMER: It’s not going to change after our troops leave.

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