‘Meet the Press’ transcript for July 22, 2007

MR. WOODWARD:  ...about where we are on this war.  Those people are going to move at some point, and they’re going to say, “We have to, we have to end this.” And what, what is absent in all of this is some sort of effort to achieve political consensus between the, the president and the Democrats to come up with some sort of glide plane so it—we don’t have in January 2009 helicopters leaving from the roof of the embassy.

MR. RUSSERT:  Is there any way to achieve, in Washington, a bipartisan consensus on what to do about Iraq?

MR. BROOKS:  It’s based on this unknown.  I don’t think there’s any possibility that within five years that we’re going to see a drastic diminution of violence.  So we could be losing 125 Americans every month for five years.

MR. WOODWARD:  I mean, that’s just...

MR. BROOKS:  On the other hand...

MR. WOODWARD:  ...politically impossible.

MR. BROOKS:  But, but—so you think OK, get out.

MR. WOODWARD:  No.

MR. BROOKS:  On the other hand, if we leave...

MR. WOODWARD:  Glide plane.

MR. BROOKS:  Well, if we leave, we could see 250,000 Iraqis die.  You had the John Burns’ quotation earlier in the program.  So are we willing to prevent 10,000 Iraqi deaths a month at the cost of 125 Americans?  That’s a tough moral issue, but it’s also a tough national interest issue because we don’t know what the consequences of getting out are.  And the frustration of watching the debate in Washington, very few people are willing to, to grapple with those two facts, that there’s—that the surge will not work in the short-term, but getting out will be cataclysmic.  And you see politicians on both sides evading one of those two facts.  But you’ve got to grapple with them both.

MR. HAYES:  And, and one of the things that the president said at this discussion that David was at, and I was at as well, was that he intends to make the case that, “Look, this is going to be a disaster if we get out.” He didn’t say it in exactly those terms, but he’s going to start making, in many cases, the negative case.  “Look at what Iraq will look like if we leave.  We have a moral obligation to the Iraqis to stay.”

MR. WOODWARD:  And the problem, though, is, we don’t know.  People can say, “Oh, it’s going to be a disaster.”

MR. BROOKS:  Uh-huh.

MR. WOODWARD:  I mean, you cite numbers which you have pulled out of the air of 10,000 dying.  I mean, that’s—that—where does that come from?

MR. BROOKS:  Well, A, it comes from John Burns.  Second, it comes from the national intelligence...

MR. WOODWARD:  Well, no, he doesn’t say 10,000.

MR. BROOKS:  Well, no, no, but it talks about genocide.

MR. WOODWARD:  Yeah.

MR. BROOKS:  So I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.

MR. WOODWARD:  OK, but that—we’ve got...

MR. BROOKS:  The National Intelligence Estimate says that—well, most people, as Burns reports, say it will get much, much worse.  So that’s the, that’s the dilemma.

MR. RUSSERT:  But, David Brooks, you, you will hear a lot of people will say, you know, “The administration has made misjudgments before about WMD, about the level of troops needed, about being greeted as liberators.  They could be wrong about what would flow from a redeployment of American troops.”

MR. BROOKS:  Absolutely they could be wrong.  And, and so we’ve—and, and it could be that peace will break out.  But I think, if you look at Iraq, you see four or five civil wars going on at once.  You see Shia fighting each other. You see the Sunni-Shia thing.  It could be that there’s—this is just a process they need to go through, and there’s no way we can stop it in any case.  Joe Biden was very honest this week.  He said it’s a moral failure if we leave, but we’re going to have to do it.  That at least is grappling with the issue.

MR. RUSSERT:  Steve, I want to read a quote from your book in a second.

But, Bob Woodward, last week on this program I cited a piece you wrote in The Washington Post about the head of the CIA, General Hayden, ranking threats to Iraq security, and had al-Qaeda last.  Senior intelligence officials sent us a statement saying, “He was not rank ordering the causes of violence.  He does not list al-Qaeda last.”

MR. WOODWARD:  Well, he list—at that moment, he listed it last.  And that’s, and that’s all I said.  And clearly there’s a debate about whether it’s al-Qaeda, is it sectarian violence, is it criminality, is it all of these things.  The point is, in, in that report, it was General Hayden saying late last year that the situation of the government governing seems irreversible. Now, that is a giant word.  Irreversible, meaning we can’t change it whether, he said, in the short run or in the long run.

MR. RUSSERT:  Did he walk that back at all in his congressional testimony?

MR. WOODWARD:  Well, he’s tried to, he’s tried to walk it back.  But he was being incredibly candid in that session with the Iraq Study Group.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you believe the administration has begun to emphasize al-Qaeda much more than sectarian violence in dealing with Iraq?

MR. WOODWARD:  Well, sure, because it—the president regularly says, “Look, we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” And if you were to ask Admiral McConnell about that, you know, there is, there is a kind of loose connection, but there’s no evidence.

MR. RUSSERT:  Well, that’s what he said.

MR. WOODWARD:  That somebody is on—over there in Iraq getting ready to go here.

MR. RUSSERT:  Steve Hayes, in your book “Cheney,” you write this:  “Cheney’s real influence is unseen.  It lies in his ability to work the levers of power at the highest levels of the U.S. government and, more directly, in his private conversations with George W. Bush.

“For more than 200 years, vice presidents, generally an ambitious lot, sought more power and craved more recognition.  Cheney, who certainly does not want for influence, dislikes the attention that comes with it.  So he does his best to avoid it.

“‘Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?’ Cheney said in 2004.  ‘It’s a nice way to operate, actually.’

“To many, Cheney is a man almost devoid of passion.  His admirers find his demeanor reassuring; it says he is contemplative, unshakable, discreet.  To his critics it registers as scheming, uncaring and secretive.” That’s the man you found.  Which one?

MR. HAYES:  I think, in some ways, both, actually.  I mean, I tend to think that he’s more unshakable.  He, he—the things he says in public are typically the things he believes in private.  And in that way, he’s, he’s not terribly complicated.  In other ways, he is quite complicated.  I mean, I think he does have—he is able to work the levers of power behind the scenes, and I think the caricature that we’ve seen of him painted thus far, through almost seven years of the Bush administration, in some ways is the polar opposite of the man that Dick Cheney really is.

MR. RUSSERT:  But he was asked about the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, and you say in the book that he was prepared to go on television, if asked, and say he opposed the president in that firing.

MR. HAYES:  Yeah, and it would have been an extraordinary moment.  He has, he has publicly taken a different position that the president one other time, with respect to, to his daughter Mary on the issue of gay marriage.  But he was preparing, in a, in a murder board session before another Sunday show, he was asked...

MR. RUSSERT:  He was, he was not asked.

MR. HAYES:  And he was not asked on air.

MR. WOODWARD:  But he never does anything in terms of operating or working behind the scenes bureaucratically, which he’s very, very effective at, that the president does not either direct him to do or approve of.  Is that correct?

MR. HAYES:  I agree with that entirely.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you—is he aware, conscious of the negative ratings he has?

MR. HAYES:  He is.  I mean, in, in some ways, it seems not to bother him at all.  But he does pay attention to it.  At one point, we were discussing a book that had been really critical of, of him.  And he said to me, “I did the index flip, and looked, and there it was, and there were these accusations, and I found them not credible.” And, and at another point he talked about watching Jay Leno on Valentine’s Day of this year and seeing Jay Leno make fun of the shooting incident from more than a year ago, and, and the vice president said, “It never ends, never goes away.”

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you think president and vice president, in their minds, it’s full speed ahead on Iraq?

MR. BROOKS:  I think it is.  I would say about Cheney, I think it’s been incredibly destructive to the process that Cheney has his own secret channel with the, with the, with the president, that you have these political discussions, Cheney sits in the meetings silently, and then it’s a secret back channel between the two.  I think it’s disrupted the entire White House.  The other thing that’s interesting...

MR. WOODWARD:  But it’s, it’s what the president wants.

MR. BROOKS:  That’s true.

MR. WOODWARD:  He wants that sort of, “OK, Dick, what do you really think?”

MR. RUSSERT:  If the president didn’t want that channel, he could close it.

MR. BROOKS:  Obviously.  The other interesting thing, there’s a parlor game about has Cheney changed.  I think we see from Steve’s book he hasn’t changed that much.  He’s always been this way.

MR. RUSSERT:  David Brooks, Bob Woodward, Steve Hayes.

We’ll be right back, and we’ll continue our discussion about this subject and ask these reporters what’s it like to cover the Bush administration and the Iraq war, our MEET THE PRESS Take Two Web extra on our Web site this afternoon, mtp.msnbc.com.  We’ll be right back.

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MR. RUSSERT:  That’s all for today.  On this Tuesday on MSNBC, it’s Super Tuesday all day, political coverage only on MSNBC, msnbc.com.

We’ll be back next week.  If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

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