‘Meet the Press’ transcript for May 20, 2007

SEN. DODD: ...succeed here where these countries literally expanding their opportunities. We’re bogged down in this matter. The war on terror’s being neglected. We don’t have enough troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent here, Pakistan seems to be weak on the issue here. All of our attention—president goes to Latin America, he almost has to hide out for a week and a half. He’s losing the public relations battle to Hugo Chavez. This is incredible to me. And literally, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there’s no willingness to consider alternatives in a different mission in Iraq. If we have a different mission, if you’d listen to your military commanders, listen to the diplomatic people, listen to Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton and their report—which I know you were highly critical of—but frankly, their suggestions make a lot of sense to people.

MR. GINGRICH: Look, there, there, there are two fundamental differences here. The first is the Baker-Hamilton Commission suggested that we engage Iran and Syria, who are our enemies in the region. The fact is the Iranians want us defeated. The Iranians are providing weapons, training and money to defeat us. The idea that the answer is—this would be like saying, “Why don’t we turn to Nazi Germany to help us manage fascist Italy?”

SEN. DODD: Well...

MR. GINGRICH: But let me...

SEN. DODD: All right.

MR. GINGRICH: ...say a second thing. I reject totally the idea that the Iraqi campaign is at the heart of the war on terror. The Iranians killed American Marines in Lebanon when we weren’t in Iraq. The, the Iranians killed Americans in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia when we weren’t in Iraq. Al-Qaeda killed, bombed two U.S. embassies when we weren’t in Iraq. Al-Qaeda bombed Yemen when we weren’t in Iraq. Al-Qaeda bombed New York City when we weren’t in Iraq. We’re in a war against people both on the Shia side, funded by the Iranians, and the Sunni side, largely funded by the Saudis, who are determined to destroy freedom as we know it. We have yet to come to engage in how serious this is. We have yet to mobilize—we...

I want to repeat this. We won the entire Second World War in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. We’re now five and a half years into this war. We are rope-a-doping. We are playing domestic political games. We have—and I’m not, I’m not in any way defending the Bush administration. We have no grand strategy. We have no sense of a mobilization of national will. And I think someplace down the road we are in grave danger of losing one or more American cities to a nuclear or biological attack. And we ought to, we ought to take it seriously now, not afterwards.

SEN. DODD: Well, I agree with that. No, listen, I’m taking it seriously. And, and, and part of this is sort of labeling people, that, that we don’t concern about the security of the country because we’re willing to accept there’s a, there’s a winner or a loser. There is a winner or a loser in the war on terror. I agree with that totally. And we have an obligation in this generation to do everything in our possible. It’s a, it’s an, it’s a, it’s an international, multinational problem here—London, Madrid, Seoul, Tokyo...

MR. GINGRICH: Right.

SEN. DODD: ...where these bombs go off. It’s global in perspective. It requires cooperation. The idea that we’ll have no talks with people we disagree with—Ronald Reagan, who you’ll be talking about in a few moments here, he would call the Soviet Union “the evil Empire.” He’d meet in Reykjavik to talk about arms control. Richard Nixon, certainly as strong an anti-communist as existed in the latter half of the 20^th century, would meet with Mao Tse Tung, not because of the end in itself, but to explore and to examine whether or not we can reach some commonalty of common interest here. The idea we don’t talk to the Syrians, we don’t talk to the Iranians in a moment like this, I think, is terribly naive and dangerous for the country, in my view.

MR. GINGRICH: First of all, I’m perfectly happy to talk to Syrians and the Iranians. We’ve had a number of secretaries of state who’ve gone to Damascus, several of whom have been snubbed. Our secretary of state was snubbed the other day by the Iranians. I just want us to understand who we’re talking about. Reagan had no doubt that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. He had a clear vision of the Cold War. He said, “We win, they lose.” He had—and here’s what he did what you’re calling for. He had a grand strategy that involved the pope and the prime minister. They, they unraveled the Soviet empire, starting in Poland, largely without firing a shot, except for the Afghan campaign.

But, but there’s, there’s a step deeper here. President Uribe is our ally against terrorism and against narcotrafficantes in Colombia, but the Democratic Congress finds him inappropriate. Prime Minister Maliki is doing the best he can in a chaotic environment, and he’s not a very strong person, but if—imagine we were the French in the 1700s, debating the American Continental Congress and saying, “Well, should we really send aid to these guys? I mean, they can’t even hold—you know, they’ve retreated to Lancaster. They’re not even in Philadelphia. They’ve lost New York. George Washington’s lost all these campaigns. This guy Washington has no major victories. I mean, why are we sending money over there? This is just bad money after good.”

SEN. DODD: But, but, but equating, equating the American Revolution with a civil war in Iraq today, please, with all due respect.

MR. GINGRICH: No, it’s exactly the same point.

SEN. DODD: This is—no, no. It’s very different circumstances entirely here. And, again, I’ll come back to the point earlier, this is, this is where Iraqis have got to make a decision. They have to decide whether they want to be a country or not. And it’s a legitimate issue about whether or not they want to. They’re talking about separating off of the three different federal zones: the Kurdish, a Shia, Sunni zone. They—they’re uncertain themselves as to whether or not they want to be a nation.

MR. GINGRICH: We went...

SEN. DODD: Here they’re asking us to decide that for them, Newt, in a sense.

They have to make that decision.

MR. GINGRICH: We went—wait a second, we went from 1775 with the first Continental Congress to 1789 when we adopted the Constitution. We had 14 years of confusion. Now, if you were advising the French how—in late 1776, Washington has been defeated in New York, he’s been defeated in Brooklyn Heights, he’s been defeated crossing—all, all the way across New Jersey, what would you have said then? Why would you have said, magically, the Americans are better?

SEN. DODD: Well, the fundamental issue, I’ve got George Washington, not Prime Minister Maliki, and I’ll go with Washington every day of the week. Now, we’ve got a lot of other people sitting around, people in Massachusetts, Connecticut and elsewhere, in Georgia, who are sitting there who knew what they wanted in the end. The Iraqis don’t apparently at this point.

MR. GINGRICH: But that’s the...

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