MTP Transcript for Mar. 11, 2007

MR. KOPPEL: That’s the model that General John Abizaid likes best for the long war.

General JOHN ABIZAID: The best way to win the war is to train troops that are indigenous forces, that are capable forces, to have counterterrorist forces in small numbers available, to help them with targets that are beyond their capacity to deal with. And I think, ultimately, you need to get away from these very, very large number of occupation forces in the region, but, of course, you can’t do that until you stabilize both Iraq and Afghanistan.

(End of videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Sounds like a lot of American advisers around the world.

MR. KOPPEL: There are a lot of American advisers. That video that was shot was shot in Ethiopia. There is a—there’s a base, a U.S. base, in an old Foreign Legion post in Djibouti, it’s called Camp Lemonier. Seventeen hundred Americans there, most of them military, some of them intelligence, some of them diplomats, some of them U.S.A.I.D., and they are there operating in the Horn of Africa in Djibouti, in Ethiopia, and, yes, as we discovered just a few weeks after that video was shot, in Somalia. Those troops that we shot there ended up, just three weeks later, fighting in Somalia with U.S. special operations forces on the ground with them and with U.S. air support overhead.

MR. RUSSERT: You also mention that the—besides providing military assistance, health care for cattle and goats.

MR. KOPPEL: Well, the idea is—and, and they talk about, you know, in the old days, in, in Vietnam, they used to refer to it as winning hearts and minds. These days they talk about conquering human terrain. And the way they do that—and again, the, the, the notion is to use as few troops as you possibly can. You have those troops on the ground, they’re digging wells for people, they’re inoculating sheep and goats, they are building health clinics, they’re helping to build schools. And in the—in the course of that, they’re gaining intelligence, they’re winning over allies, they believe, to the United States, and they’re denying terrorists the ability to gain a foothold.

MR. RUSSERT: Is the military more comfortable with that kind of war than the occupational wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

MS. PRIEST: Well, they are, but the track record is not great on this. I mean, I wrote a book about this in, in, in 2003 where the military Special Forces were all over the globe trying to do exactly the same thing. They’re, they’re going to—they’re going to continue doing this. They’ve created a new command for Africa so that they can divide that from Europe and send more concentrated effort into Africa. But their—their record in, in Somalia has not been good. They had a whole—a whole MEU, a whole marine expeditionary unit, off the Horn of Africa to stop terrorists coming into Somalia, and, and then we turn around and see that the, the guys that we didn’t want in power have now really gained a lot of power.

One reason we rely on the military is because we don’t have the diplomatic corps and we don’t have the agriculturalist and the—and the engineers and the doctors and the educators that should really be doing this job. There’s a great saying in the Army, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the military’s the first to tell you that they are not the best at a lot of this—I’ll call it counterinsurgency, they would call it hearts and minds. It’s really the really difficult part of turning a population away from the alternative of terrorism.

MR. RUSSERT: Michael Duffy, as we speak, the president has been touring South America, Central America. Is there a change in the way this president is conducting foreign policy in terms of attitude towards reaching out to the world? Or is it still very much this, this is what America stands for, and we’re, we’re asking you to come along with us?

MR. DUFFY: Well, it looks like, in the last couple of, of months, they have begun to, to make, essentially, a quiet U-turn. They haven’t advertised it, they aren’t talking about it, but, starting with negotiations in North Korea, they have—they’ve inked a pact there with a country that was once a member of the “axis of evil.” As you noted, they’re talking to Iran both multilaterally, as we saw in the tape, but they’ve also opened the door to bilateral. I’m sorry—yeah, bilateral conversations hasn’t happened, but they have actually opened that door. And it, it looks to a lot of people that they are beginning to walk back from the “my way or the highway” approach that they had for so long. I think it’s partly because of the polls, it’s partly because of the allies, it’s partly because it wasn’t working and that they needed to make a change, and finally, it’s because they’re running out of time. It’s very difficult for a president to do anything in his last year in office diplomatically because you don’t have the same support at home, the focus changes. And, of course, your interlocutors overseas say, “I’ll wait for the next guy.” So you’ve got to—if you’re going to make a change, if you’re going to walk back from what you have accomplished and try to change it, you’ve got to do it now, and that’s what’s going on. The clock is part of the deal.

MR. RUSSERT: Michael Beschloss, people in Washington spend a lot of time reading these tea leaves—who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down. And the storyline now is that, with the resignation of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, that the Rumsfeld/Cheney access in terms of influence on the president’s in decline and that Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, more of a pragmatist, is in ascension. Are we reading too much into that, or what are you seeing?

MR. BESCHLOSS: No, I think it fits exactly with what Michael Duffy was just talking about, which is that you’ve got a president who sees that this is very much in his interest. Don Rumsfeld was essentially fired after the last election because the Democrats won Congress. There’s some talk, as you know, about Vice President Cheney stepping aside, resigning. I can’t imagine that that would possibly happen because George Bush knows that there was only one other vice president in history who resigned, which was Spiro Agnew, who did so to essentially avoid going to prison. I don’t think he wants to feel for his legacy that his vice president is in that kind of company.

MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, what do you see?

MR. KOPPEL: I see a lot of wishful thinking going on here in Washington right now. I mean, when Congress talks about, first of all, setting these, these milestones—and the irony is if the Iraqis successfully meet the milestones, the implication is we stay. If they fail to meet the milestones, we leave. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It ought to be the other way around. If they fail, we stay because they need us; if they succeed, we can start to pull out again. So I, I have this feeling that, on the one hand, the Democrats are making a great deal of hay out of—out of saying, “We have to get of Iraq,” and, indeed, we do at some point or another, but the notion that the war will be over when we pull out of Iraq and even after we pull out of Afghanistan, you heard what General Abizaid had to say, it’s not going to be over. It’s going to be a different war, but the war continues.

MR. RUSSERT: Our children’s children’s war.

MR. KOPPEL: Exactly.

MR. RUSSERT: Dana Priest, you wrote an extraordinary story a few weeks ago in The Washington Post about the care of our wounded and injured soldiers at Walter Reed. What has been the response in terms of people who’ve been contacting you?

MS. PRIEST: Oh. Well, I have to empty my voice mail every 40 minutes.

MR. KOPPEL: Hm.

MS. PRIEST: I mean, it’s been—it’s been unbelievable. I’ve been in journalism for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. People who want to call in with tips, people who want to call in with their personal sagas of trying to deal with the Veterans Administration hospital system—hundreds and hundreds of e-mails. I mean, obviously this problem of care of veterans is not—is, is not isolated to Walter Reed and—but because the political process has really come—really come up after this story came out and gave legitimacy, in a way, to the—to the allegations and to the stories of the—of the men and women who were not being treated right, I think I—I’ve just—we’ve just seen a flood—a flood of people saying, “Help us, help our hospital,” you know, “can’t you look here, can’t you look there?” And I don’t think it’s going to end with—you know, there are three commissions now that have been set up to deal with Walter Reed. The Army has its own—it’s brought in its own new brigade leaders, some combat veterans. This was one of the concerns...

MR. RUSSERT: The secretary of Army has resigned.

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Sunday's Meet the Press guest list Nov. 8: Casey, Barbour, Rendell, roundtable, Brokaw Nov. 1: Tim Geithner, David Plouffe, roundtable Oct. 25: Cornyn, Schumer, Burnett, Sorkin, roundtable Oct. 18: Jarrett, Dodd, Kyl, Shriver, Podesta Oct. 11: Levin, Graham, McCaffrey, Myers, roundtable Oct. 4: Ambassador Susan Rice, roundtable Sept. 27: Bill Clinton, Paterson, Kyl, Webb Sept. 20: President Obama, Sen. Graham, Rep. Boehner, roundtable Sept. 13: Durbin, Cornyn, Dean, Gingrich, roundtable Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: