'Meet the Press' transcript for Sept. 14, 2008

MR. BROKAW:  We're back, and joined now by Bob Woodward, author of the new book "The War Within:  A Secret White House History 2006-2008."

Before we begin, Mr. Woodward, we're going to share with our audience kind of your sweeping conclusions that you had at the beginning of the book...

MR. BOB WOODWARD:  Sure.

MR. BROKAW:  ...if we can.

"President Bush has rarely leveled with the public to explain what he was doing and what should be expected.  ...  The president rarely was the voice of realism on the Iraq War.  ...

"After ordering the invasion, the president spent three years in denial and then delegated a strategy review to his national security adviser.  Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate.  There was no deadline, no hurry.  The president was engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management.  He never got a full handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead."

This has brought a response, as you know, from the White House today.

MR. WOODWARD:  Certainly.

MR. BROKAW:  The "Afterword:  Mr. Woodward's Reporting vs. Mr. Woodward's Editorializing." This is what the White House had to say.  "In `The War Within,' Bob Woodward uses a prologue and epilogue, along with commentary scattered over a few other pages, to offer the opinion that the military was marginalized and outmaneuvered in the decision-making process that led to the surge.  Woodward's contentions are inaccurate."

Having read the book, it seems to me that there is kind of a mixed judgment here.  For example, in that August 17th meeting in 2006, he pulls everyone together to talk about the surge.  The president's fully engaged at that point.

MR. WOODWARD:  Yes.  But he's also saying publicly that he's got--he knows exactly where he's going, and, as you note, in that meeting he's kind of wringing his hands.  I mean, the, the--what so much of this White House response reminds me of, going back to Nixon and Watergate, if you remember, 34 years ago...

MR. BROKAW:  I have good reason to remember it, yes.

MR. WOODWARD:  ...Nixon--you sure do.  And Nixon put out that big telephone book-size transcripts, 1200 pages, edited, "This is the full story, this is true." And then he threw out was not--what he didn't like.  That's what the White House has done here.  They're--the president's own words are quoted in the prologue, which they criticize, in which the president says, "I knew it wasn't working, the strategy in Iraq.  So the question was, what to do?" It is the president, in the prologue, that is the focus, not any commentary by me.

MR. BROKAW:  Steve Hadley appeared on MEET THE PRESS with Tim Russert in December of 2006, after a lot of decisions had been made and after Don Rumsfeld had been fired, effectively, as secretary of defense, and this is the exchange that Tim had with Mr. Hadley at that time, who was the president's national security adviser.

(Videotape, December 3, 2006)

MR. TIM RUSSERT:  Some people suggest the president is just plain stubborn about Iraq.  He is going to do it his way no matter what other people advise. As he said, "If it's only just his wife and his dog, he is going to follow the course that's in his mind."

MR. STEPHEN HADLEY:  He is stubborn about Iraq because in, in the sense that the goal for him is very clear.  It is a goal that the Iraqis share, I think the American people share.  He's also stubborn about Iraq because he understands the cost that if Iraq fails, I think the American people understand the cost that Iraq fails--a base for al-Qaeda and terrorists to destabilize the region, planned attacks against us, use oil against the West.

(End videotape)

MR. BROKAW:  Stubborn about the goals, but also stubborn when the original plan goes off the rails.

MR. WOODWARD:  Yeah.  And, and again, there are top secret memos, which I quote, which have been authenticated, in this book telling the president that it's not working, telling him that the chances in Iraq of fracture are increasing, saying things like the violence is--doesn't need fuel, it's self-sustaining.  And then he goes out and says things like, "Oh, we're absolutely winning.  Absolutely winning." And again, there is this persistence, as you see in this response Friday night, to say we're going to select the part we like.  In doing this, I want to include the full story, not just a positive story or a negative story.  But when you look at it, over the years of this war--now, look, look, the war in Iraq is probably the most important thing going on right now.  We have a political campaign going on, which is indeed significant, but whether it's Obama or McCain who go into the Oval Office on January 20th, 2009 and sit there, topic one is going to be the Iraq war, topic two is going to be the Afghan war.  It is a giant deal, and they are going to feel it.

MR. BROKAW:  Let me ask you about what was going on in 2006 in that August meeting, especially the commander on the ground in Iraq was General Casey.  He was for a troop drawdown at that time.  So was his commander, General Abizaid, who was running CENTCOM out of Florida.  And Don Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, thought it was time to start pulling people out of there.  What would've happened in Iraq, in your judgment, if they'd had their way and the president had not gone forward with the surge?

MR. WOODWARD:  You, you know, that's history, but again, I, I sat in the Oval Office four months ago and asked the president about this meeting and said, "You're saying to them, `You may send more troops.'" And he said, "Yeah.  I think they got the message." And then I said, "Did you say to them, Rumsfeld, Don, General Casey, what's going on here?  Your idea is too optimistic." And the president got kind of churlish and said, "Well, I don't remember my interchanges with these people." This story here is where the rubber meets the road between the commander and chief, who's the boss, and the secretary of defense and the commanding general.  And there is this distance, odd detachment, time and time again, the failure to confront, the failure to deal with the reality.

MR. BROKAW:  We want to show a picture to our audience of a man that they probably not--do not know, but he's extremely well known in national security circles and certainly in the military, and that's retired four star General Jack Keane, who became kind of a subcontractor for the president and for Vice President Cheney.

MR. WOODWARD:  Yep, a, a shadow general.  And it got to the--he, he is one of the mentors for General Petraeus, the Iraq commander.  And he would go to Iraq and find out what's going on and then come for an hour or two and give a back-channel report to Dick, Dick Cheney in his home or his--in his office. And a year ago, things were so bad that the president used General Keane to send a message of support to General Petraeus.  I asked the president about this war.  You know, why did you do this?  You have a secretary of defense, you have a central commander who's in the chain of command.  And he said, "Well, I wanted Dave to know--Dave Petraeus--that he will have exactly what he needs." That was a year ago.  Bob Gates, 10 months, had been secretary of defense, did not know that this was going on.  One of the challenges the next president is going to have is to fix a very dysfunctional, broken relationship, tragically so, I believe, between the civilian side and the military side.

MR. BROKAW:  General Petraeus will be coming home next week.  He has had, as we showed to Mayor Giuliani, kind of mixed reviews for the surge at this time. He's always a cautious man.  He will not use the word "victory" or "winning" in describing what's going on.

MR. WOODWARD:  That's right, and there's a reason for that.  Look, go to 40,000 feet on this.  We have one of the biggest land--a massive land army in the middle of the Middle East, 140,000 troops.  We've had them there for five and a half years, numbers been more or less constant.  The general on the ground, Petraeus, says this war is not over.  Iraq always hands surprises, and you know, who knows where this is going?  And the idea that somehow there's victory here, when I asked the president and talked to him about this for hours, he used the word win a couple of times, and then he immediately pulled back, and, as you suggest, uses the word "succeed." And at the end, I said, "What are you going to say to Obama or McCain when they come in here as your successor?" And he paused, and he said, "I'm going to say to them, `Don't let it fail.'" Diminished expectation, a sense he has that it's on the right track.  But, boy, this war is so close to--General Petraeus says it--"fragile and reversible."

MR. BROKAW:  We're going to end up with a conversation the president had with Connie Rice on the porch at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, in December of 2006. "`I think you probably have to do it,' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice replied," but--talking about the surge, "`But this is going to be one of the most consequential decisions of all time.  You are probably, because of the things that you've chosen to do, one of the four or five most consequential presidents--maybe in our history, certainly in the last 100 years, but maybe in our history.  And you have to think about how you're going to do this and hold the country together.  Because consequential presidents cannot be divisive.'" Now, two years later, his poll numbers remain very low.

MR. WOODWARD:  And they remain low, I think, not because the war went badly for so long, but because the public realized they weren't getting the straight story.  They could see on television and read in the newspapers that it wasn't occurring.  And, you know, this idea of divisiveness is so important.  At one point, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who--she does not have a good relationship with Bush, but she actually, in private, March 2007, reached out to him and said, "Can't we reach some sort of common ground?  Can't we work together?" And he said, "My views are known, and I've decided."

MR. BROKAW:  Bob Woodward, thank you very much.

We're going to go across the table now and ask our political director Chuck Todd about the impact of the Iraq War and the status that it now has on this election at this point.

MR. CHUCK TODD:  I think it's most striking, where you have two nominees of both parties who got there because of the Iraq war, and now the Iraq war is not the focal point of debate.  Now, that's going to change.  The first of the, of the three presidential debates is going to be on national security issues, so I think we will see Iraq come back.  But it is amazing, I mean, the economy has just consumed everything.  And the irony of Obama wouldn't have gotten to where he got without having the position on Iraq that he had, and John McCain might not have had the hold-your-nose comfort level of conservatives to get where he got had he not been such a strong supporter of the surge.

MR. BROKAW:  As we all know, political campaigns have a half-life of about 20 minutes, and the half-life this week has to do with Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska and the impact that she's had on the McCain campaign, and bringing women voters--this is the Newsweek cover, this next week.  "What Women Want." In fact...

MR. TODD:  Very declarative of them.  They say it as if they have the answer.

MR. BROKAW:  As if they have the answer.  Good luck.

MR. TODD:  Yeah.  Well, what's interesting, we saw the shift in our poll, and it was--the question is, is it a quick shift or not?  Our Democratic half of our polling, of our polling firm, Peter Hart, said that 24 years ago, when Geraldine Ferraro was picked, they saw this bump.  Women flocked to the Mondale-Ferraro ticket, and they actually--for about a three to four day period, they actually thought they'd carry more states other than Minnesota. They thought they could do well in California, Oregon.  And it ended up deflating.  The interesting thing here is you have the McCain campaign, I think, worried that they could have a deflation of enthusiasm over time with this Palin pick, so they're doing everything they can to keep the enthusiasm up.  Next week, they're going to have joint town halls together.  We're going to see this ticket campaign as a team, probably more so than we have ever seen a presidential nominee and vice presidential nominee campaign together.

MR. BROKAW:  Do you think there's a Palin bubble?

MR. TODD:  Well, there might be.  The question is, like all--yes, there's a bubble.  The question is, is it going to have a soft landing, and it'll come in and still have a--have propped up the Republican base and the enthusiasm, which we've seen in a number of states, have been able to--McCain's been starting to putting them away?  Or does it collapse?  Is it amazon.com or drkoop.com?  You know, where it either disappears completely or levels off but still is a positive force for the Republican ticket.

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