‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Aug. 19, 2007

MR. GREGORY:  But do you feel responsible for its current state?

MR. ROVE:  Well, look, every, every person who identifies with the Republican Party ought to, ought to, ought to feel some responsibility.

MR. GREGORY:  You, you do more than just identify with the Republican Party. You’ve been a key figure in shaping the party’s agenda.

MR. ROVE:  Our party has a positive and optimistic—think about what we’ve been able to achieve.  Our party, when this president came in, we faced a recession, we had corporate scandals, we had an attack on our, on our homeland on 9/11 that devastated our economy.  A million people lost their jobs in the aftermath of 9/11.  This president and Republicans in Congress cut taxes and have given us four years of very strong economic growth.  Our economy is dynamic and powerful, providing jobs and increases in real income for people. This president, when he came into office, came in at a time of apparent peace. But on 9/11 we realized we’re at war, and this president has put us on a war footing in a, in a, in a dangerous new kind of conflict that will shape this new young century.

You look at education reform, you look at energy, you look at higher education, you look at welfare, and you look at the compassion agenda, you look at faith-based, you look at AIDS in Africa, you look at trade—on a whole range of issues, this president has been able to offer a bold and optimistic agenda and get it done.  He’s also had the courage, because he understands the responsibility of a president to take on big challenges where it isn’t so easy to win—immigration and Social Security reform.  American people don’t want a president to be sitting there wetting their fingers, sticking it in the air and saying, “You know, I’m only going to go for issues for which it’s an 80/20 winner or a 90/10 sure thing.” They want presidents to take on big challenges, and the challenge of entitlements and the resolving this thorny situation of immigration is vital for the future of the country.

MR. GREGORY:  You list your accomplishments.  A prominent Republican, close to this White House, I spoke to this week, said, “The issue for us was not vision and ideology, it was one of performance on the issues that mattered most, like Iraq, like Katrina.” You agree with that?

MR. ROVE:  I, I—look, every president gets judged by their vision, by their accomplishments, by their record, by their performance.  I—the—we’re in a tough war, no doubt about it.  I remember, though, just a year ago...

MR. GREGORY:  It’s not about it being a tough war.  It’s the handling of the war.

MR. ROVE:  May I finish?  I understand, and I’m going to get to your question, if you wouldn’t interrupt.

MR. GREGORY: OK.

MR. ROVE:  Think about a year ago.  We had the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate say Anbar province is gone, the war is lost.  And today we know from every report that Anbar province, because of the—this president saying, “Let us implement a new strategy that will deal with this issue,” that Anbar province has made a tremendous turnaround, where the Sunni tribesmen have aligned themselves with the central government and have turned on the, on the, on the, on al-Qaeda and, and the terrorists.  So, yes, OK, fine, judge us by our performance.  But let’s not get in a society—let’s not be a society that says, “We’re going to judge these things instantaneously from moment to moment to moment.” Let’s have the ability to stand back and understand that wars are difficult.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. ROVE:  Could you imagine sitting there and saying, reading the reports about the bungled U.S.—when the U.S. went into North Africa, which is heavily criticized, we had our, our—in World War II.  What would’ve happened if we’d said, “Oh, you know what, our tanks were mauled there in Tunisia. FDR, you’ve done a lousy job of managing the war”?  American troops go, go aboard, go ashore in Italy in World War II, suffer horrific casualties.  What would’ve happened if, if we’d said at the end of D-Day, “Oh, you know what? We’ve suffered too many casualties.  Let us, let us, let us step back from this important battle”?

MR. GREGORY:  You talk about taking a wider perspective on the war.  Then former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney spoke about the decision not to go into Baghdad during the first Gulf War, and he did this back in 1994, and I’ll put it up on the screen so our viewers can see.  This is what Dick Cheney said.  “Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place?  If you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.

“It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.  And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?  And our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.” That was the former secretary of defense back in 1994.  It seems like he’s...

MR. ROVE:  And you know what?  And you know what?

MR. GREGORY:  Hold on one second.  It seems like he’s describing Iraq of 2007.

MR. ROVE:  And you’re right, 1994.  He, he was describing the conditions in 1994.  By 2003 the world had changed.  It changed on 9/11, and it became clear—it should be clear to every American that we live in a dangerous world where we cannot let emerging threats fully materialize in attacks on our homeland.  Between 1994 and 2003 Saddam Hussein ignored a total—between 1991 and 2003, 16 UN resolutions that said “live up to the agreement that you made in the aftermath of the first Gulf war to disclose your weapons of mass destruction and to account for them.” He didn’t.  He was thumbing his nose at the international inspection regime.  He was taking money from Oil For Food and putting it into programs to maintain his state security apparatus.  He was funding terrorists.  He was supporting terrorists, harboring terrorists.  He became a dangerous threat, and people are entitled over time to look at the conditions and change their mind, and that’s exactly what Dick Cheney did...

MR. GREGORY:  But were his words...

MR. ROVE:  ...between 1994 and 2003.

MR. GREGORY:  ...words, which don’t have to do with whether he’s a threat, it has to do with what you encounter when you take Saddam Hussein on and remove him from power, was that part of the debate about going in and taking over the government?

MR. ROVE:  It—look, there, there are all kinds of contingencies that are discussed and, and, and evaluated and planned for and thought about.  And—but look, the world changed.  Again, I repeat, it is fine to have a 1994 mind-set in 1994.  It is not longer acceptable to have a 1994 mind-set after September 11^th.  America needs to think and act differently.  We face a brutal enemy who will kill the innocent for one purpose and that is to gain control of the Middle East and to use the leverage of oil to bring down the West, and to attack us again.

MR. GREGORY:  And what—when you, when you think about how the war was executed and you look at misjudgments:  WMD, there were none; we’d be greeted as liberators, we were not.

MR. ROVE:  Can we—could we just—let’s, let’s take them one at a time.

MR. GREGORY:  Let me—if I can just...

MR. ROVE:  Can we take them one at a time?

MR. GREGORY:  Let me, let me just lay it out.  The cost of the war was misestimated, the level of sectarian violence was wrong, the, the depth and, and the force of the insurgency, the idea that oil revenues would be used to pay for the war.  Would you acknowledge there were fundamental misjudgments in the execution of the war?

MR. ROVE:  Let’s take these—let’s take these one at a time, if we could. Could you start the list again and give them to me one at a time?

MR. GREGORY:  There were no WMD.

MR. ROVE:  Absolutely.  Absolutely were not.  But you know what, the whole world thought there was.  In fact, Saddam Hussein’s own commanders, we know now, in the moments—in the days after the invasion, thought they had weapons of mass destruction available to be deployed against our troops.  Think about this.  This man was under an onerous regime of inspections by the United Nations because he refused to cough up what he had in the way of WMD.  He could have gotten out of that regime of inspections and restraints on his government and on his people if all he’d done is said, “I don’t have any anymore.” But...

MR. GREGORY:  But, Karl, I’m asking you a specific question about whether misjudgments were made and whether you acknowledge those.

MR. ROVE:  I understand.  I understand, but I want to deal with each one of these because I want to acknowledge, I want to acknowledge the reality behind each one of them.  You say, for example, you make the assertion that oil revenues are not being used to pay for reconstruction.  You’re absolutely wrong.

MR. GREGORY:  The predication was they would pay for the war.

MR. ROVE:  The Iraqi—let me finish—the Iraqi government has a capacity $41 billion budget, $10 billion, most of which comes from oil revenues, $10 billion of which goes to reconstruction.  And so are they using their own resources to reconstruct the country?  You bet.  But, look, it’s one thing to rattle off all of these, and it’s a nice tactic.  I appreciate—I applaud you for doing so.  But if you take a moment and look at each one of these you’ll find that in each one of these there is a reasonable—you know, look, was everything done perfectly?  No.  But it—was this the right thing to do?  You bet.  And has the policy worked out exactly as people planned?  Look, Napoleon said that your battle plan doesn’t survive the first contact with the enemy, but you still have to have a plan.  And did everything work out like people expected and hoped?  No.  But is it the right thing to do and is it vital for the security interests of the United States?  If we were to leave Iraq with the job undone, we would be running the risk of seeing the entire region plunge into violence.  We would see Iran emboldened.  We would see Hezbollah, Hamas and the al-Qaeda emboldened.  We could see a terrorist state emerge in the heart of the Middle East.  Not in Afghanistan with no natural resources, but in the very heart of the Middle East with the third largest oil reserves in the world.  And we could see an increasing danger for our friends and allies in the region from Turkey to Lebanon to Jordan to Israel to Egypt to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

MR. GREGORY:  Let me move on to Iran.  One of the things you said this week in, in some of your interviews was that one legacy of the Bush administration would be the Bush doctrine that would be—that would live on.  This is how The Wall Street Journal reported it in Paul Gigot’s column.  “On foreign affairs, [Rove] predicts that [part] of the Bush doctrine will live on:  the policy that if you harbor a terrorist, you are” “culpable as a terrorist.”

And then we think about Iran.  The State Department’s called Iran the world’s most active sponsor of terrorism.  Just this week the administration sought to designate Iran’s revolutionary guard as a global terrorist organization. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell has talked about Iran helping terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.  How does this square with the Bush doctrine?

MR. ROVE:  It—you confront...

MR. GREGORY:  When, when at the same time there are conversations, talks going on, between this administration...

MR. ROVE:  Because...

MR. GREGORY:  ...and Iran?

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