‘Meet the Press’ transcript for July 8, 2007

SEN. HAGEL:  That’s what Dick Lugar and George Voinivich and others have been talking about.

But we have to also recognize this, David, is there’s a difference between getting—continue to get bogged down in Iraq and taking our eye off the bigger issue here, which we have, in my opinion, last four years, and that, that is is extremism.  That’s terrorism around the world.  And the longer we stay bogged down in Iraq, it undercuts our ability to respond to this, and also it does great damage, as it is, to our Army and our Marines.

MR. GREGORY:  So you talk about being bogged down in Iraq, you talk about key Republican voices, and a growing number of them, beginning to call for a different strategy.  Do you now believe that it’s time to set a timeline for troop withdrawal?

SEN. HAGEL:  Well, it’s going to be forced on us.  We come back into session tomorrow, as you know, the fiscal year 2008, defense authorization bill’s going to be up.  We’re going to have a number of amendments related directly to Iraq.  One of those amendments is going to be withdrawal.  I have not seen—and a phase withdrawal.  I’ve said we need a phase withdrawal plan.  We need a redeployment plan.  But we also need, just as Baker-Hamilton said, engagement with Iran, with Syria.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

SEN. HAGEL:  We need to have a special envoy.  Hopefully, Tony Blair’s willing to put the time into it, and he’s got the mandate and authority to deal with the Israeli/Palestinian issue, internationalize Iraq.  These are all factors that have to play out with a larger, wider scope of policy.  We—we’ve not done that in the past.  If we don’t do that, we’re going to find ourselves in so much trouble, in such a deep hole that our influence will, as it is now, is negligible because we’re seen by the Iraqis in the Middle East as occupiers.

MR. GREGORY:  But, but you sound like you are getting closer to that fundamental judgment about trying to set some kind of timeline, a date to get troops either redeployed or withdrawn completely.

SEN. HAGEL:  I’m open to that, I want to look at that.  But it has to be more than just that.  It has to be more than just withdrawal and timelines and phased withdrawals, responsible phased withdrawals.  All these other things have to be dealt with as well.  That, that isn’t going to fix it.  Yes, you’ll pull your, your troops out, but the fact is we still have interests in Iraq. Iraq, the Middle East is more dangerous today, more combustible, more complicated than we’ve ever seen.

MR. GREGORY:  As you know, Senator Salazar of Colorado is suggesting full implementation of the Baker-Hamilton report, which speaks to a withdrawal, a timeline, as well as engagement regionally.  Is that something you’re prepared to support?

SEN. HAGEL:  Well, I’ve said from the beginning—I may have been the first senator to say it—the president missed a, a tremendous opportunity when he did not use the Baker-Hamilton report late last year to build a new bipartisan consensus on Iraq.  They, they chose not to do that.  They have been drifting toward many of those 79 recommendations.  I support those recommendations.  I was a strong supporter.  Still am.  It’s a safe harbor for many senators to be.  I mean I don’t know how you could not be for almost all of those recommendations.  But I think you’re going to have to go beyond that for all the reasons I mentioned and more.  We, we are not factoring in the larger arc of challenges and threats that face our country and the world today, and, at the same time, we’re weakening our military.  Any general—and I’ve had a lot of them talk to me privately, some still in uniforms and many out—will tell you that we’re doing great damage to our Army and our Marines.  I had three generals tell me two weeks ago it’ll take a generation to put that Army back together.  Now I’m not an Army general, I didn’t spend 35 years of, of my life in the Army like many of these people did, but that’s one component. Counterinsurgency—David Petraeus wrote the manual on it.  Counterinsurgency is all about hearts and minds.  It’s all about relationships.  It’s all about improving networks.  It’s improving conditions for, for people.  It’s trust and confidence.

Last point I’d make on this, David, the world wants America to lead.  It does not want America to impose or dictate, impose its wishes or dictate the terms. The world knows when America is weak and has lost influence the world is very dangerous.  We have got to recapture that.  Iraq is within that horizon, but it’s, it’s bigger than Iraq.

MR. GREGORY:  A top commander, Major General Rick Lynch, said this week it would be a mess in Iraq if U.S. troops were to, to begin to withdraw, that the enemy would regain ground, the insurgency would gain strength.  How worried are you about a withdrawal timeline fortifying the insurgency and al-Qaeda elements?

SEN. HAGEL:  Well, let’s, let’s be honest here.  We have a mess now.  I mean, who are we kidding?  We’ve got a mess now.  You’ve just put up on the screen before we started this conversation what the current casualty number is.  We have no good options in Iraq now.  There are no good options.  That’s just a fact of life.  So we deal with the facts as they are.  We’re not going to get out of this alone.  We’re going to require the regional component formalizing this in some way, as well as an international component to this.  I don’t know how this plays out in Iraq.  This thing may go on for a few years in the form of a civil war.  I don’t know.  If Maliki’s government goes down next week, that’s a whole new presentation to a, to a fact, a group of facts here that we’ve had to, to deal with that makes it far more complicated than what we’ve had in the past.

MR. GREGORY:  You’ve thought a lot about Iraq and about the war.  You served in Vietnam and thought about the history and where there are parallels.  And this is what was written in the New Republic in a profile of you back in June. “The first public inkling of Hagel’s changed outlook [on Vietnam] would come in a [Washington Post] profile of him in November of 2004.  Hagel described the learning process he was going through.  ‘I read everything I could about Indochina, about the war, about the French, about Vietnam, about our policy, what got us there.  ...  And the more I read, the more I understood.  ...  I got a sense that there was just so much dishonesty in it.’” This is you speaking.  “‘And it was chewing these kids up.  ...  So I started connecting all the deaths and all the suffering and the chaos and wounds.  I started to sense a dishonesty about it all.’ Hagel now saw the war in Vietnam, like the war in Iraq, as a war of choice—one that had been built on an edifice of lies.” An edifice of lies.  You believe that about this war as well in Iraq?

SEN. HAGEL:  Well, I certainly believe it was an edifice of distortions.  And we are finding out more and more about how we got into this war—the distortions, the manipulation, taking certain intelligence pieces to fit your policy.  There’s no question that this administration, certainly almost everyone at the top from the president and the vice president on down—I think Colin Powell was the only one that pushed back, and I had many conversations with all those leaders at the time—this administration wanted to go to war with Saddam.  They were not prepared.  They got us into a lot of trouble. They have done great damage to our standing in the world, to our military, to our own interests, to our influence.  But we’re not going to go back and unwind those bad decisions.  Yes, I see some parallels to Vietnam.  And maybe the worst of all is, when Johnson continued to confide in his friend Senator Russell from Georgia saying, “I know we can’t win, but I don’t want to lose this war, be the first president to lose a war,” so every day more American casualties.  That was immoral.  That was wrong.

No one can lead—no, no one can ever accomplish anything in life without trust and without confidence.  That is the only currency that counts.  And when the American people have no longer the trust and confidence they need in their leadership—and that’s why the poll numbers are the way they are today, David—then you can’t lead, you can’t make policy.  And that’s very dangerous for a country.

MR. GREGORY:  Are you suggesting that George W. Bush is guilty of that same sort of immorality, that fear of being the first president to, you know, to, to lose a war?  Although many thought that, that Johnson did at that time, but that fear of not losing this war?

SEN. HAGEL:  Well, I think that the president—and I’ve said this many times—believes in what he’s doing.  I, I don’t think there’s a question, at least in my mind, that he absolutely believes in what he’s doing.  I happen to disagree with a lot of those beliefs.  I have never accused him of duplicity. I’ve never accused him of immorality.  We’ll see where this goes.  I would say this:  If we do not see this administration take some initiative to make some changes, significant strategic policy changes over the next 90 days, then, of course, it will be forced on them, and that will lead me to believe that they are just holding on, hoping that they, they, they can, at the end, resurrect something out of this, at a great cost of our American men and women.  This country should always focus on, as I said earlier, a policy worthy of the sacrifices of these young men and women and their families.  We—I cannot say that today, nor could I the last four years that we have that policy.

MR. GREGORY:  You haven’t accused the president of duplicity, but you have leveled some pretty strong criticism at him, including this, back in the spring of this year.  “‘The president says, “I don’t care.” He’s not accountable anymore,’ Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter.’” This is in Esquire magazine.  “‘He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true.  You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment.  I don’t know. It depends how this goes.’” Certainly got you some criticism from fellow Republicans.  You still, still believe that’s the case?  And, in fact, as situation—the situation has deteriorated, do you think there’s more momentum for impeachment?

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