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01/11/2007
The Iraq Debate
[Posted before President Bush’s speech on Iraq.]
Following are a few excerpts from a debate on the issue of Iraq
between Sen. Lindsey Graham (Rep–SC) and Sen. Joe Biden
(Dem–DE), as moderated by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,”
Jan. 7, 2007. I have taken the liberty to slightly edit the
transcript.
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Graham: If Iraq fails and you have open civil war and it creates a
regional conflict that would follow us for decades, that’s
something every American should hope never happens and work
together to prevent. I hope we can agree with this, that the
current strategy is not working, hasn’t been working for quite a
while. I think the president has looked at it from that point of
view, “I cannot let Iraq fail because our national security
interests are very tied to what happens in Iraq.” And when you
talk about withdrawal, somebody needs to answer the question,
what happens when we leave? And he’s also very much focused
on the idea that we’ve got to give the Iraqi people the ability to
find a political solution. A surge of troops is a result of the
current strategy not working, and it, by itself, will not lead to a
successful outcome. But a precondition to political stability and
economic recovery is security. So I will support the idea of
putting more American troops on the ground in Iraq with a
purpose, to join up with Iraqi forces to bring about security in
Baghdad that is missing, try to stop the sectarian fighting in
Baghdad to give the political leadership in Iraq a chance to do
the things they need to do to bring about a stable government.
To me, it is a strategy that is based on the needs of the moment.
Even though it may not be politically popular, I think it is in our
best interests long term.
Biden: We agree on two basic premises: A failed state would be
a disaster to the United States of America, and two, the current
strategy isn’t working. But nobody’s calling, that I’m aware of,
for pulling all of our troops out. That’s a red herring, number
one. The question is do we continue with a policy that is failing?
We’ve tried this policy twice in the last 12 months, surging
troops into Baghdad. Unfortunately, my friends have got this
backwards. We need a political solution before you can get a
military solution. What has changed from three years ago when I
sat on this program with you and said we need to surge 60,000
troops then is we now have a civil war. All the king’s horses and
all the king’s men will not put Iraq together again absent (Prime
Minister) Maliki making some very hard decisions about what
he’s going to do.
Think of this, we’re going to surge 20-, 30-, whatever the
president says, thousand troops into Baghdad again, a city of six
million people where civil war is raging. We’re going to have
our troops go door to door in 23 neighborhoods. We’re going to
keep them out of Sadr City where, in fact, we’re told hands off
because Maliki is dependent upon Sadr and his Mahdi army.
This is a prescription for another tragedy. If we want to make
sure we don’t lose Iraq, don’t use the last bullet in our gun here,
prove ourselves to be impotent, and embolden every sector of the
Iraqi population to conclude we are incapable of affecting
outcomes there. That’s my worry about doing the same thing
again.
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Tim Russert played a videotape of President Bush from July 7,
2006:
Bush: General Casey will make the decisions as to how many
troops we have there. He’ll decide how best to achieve victory
and the troop levels necessary to do so. I spent a lot of time
talking to him about troop levels, and I told him this, I said, ‘You
decide, general.’ [End of tape]
Russert: So General Casey said, as recently as Friday, “We don’t
need more American troops.” So General Abizaid and General
Casey are removed. So if you give advice to the president and he
doesn’t like it, rather than listen to the generals on troop levels,
you remove the generals?
Graham: Well, I hope we will hold the generals accountable for
their work product. I respect General Casey and Abizaid, but the
strategy they’ve come up with for the last two years has not
worked. Iraq is not more stable that it was when they took over
two years ago. Sectarian violence in Baghdad has gotten worse.
I’ve been there five times. The first time I went there we went
rug shopping. The last time I went we were in a tank. It is clear
to me, I think Joe Biden, and every other American including the
president, now is a time for change. If we don’t change now,
we’re going to lose Iraq. And if you come up with a new policy,
do you let the same people who implemented the old policy
come up with a new idea? I don’t think so. (Gen. David)
Petraeus, to me, I hope is Bush’s Grant. It is now time for a
change .
Russert: In all honesty, as we losing?
Graham: In all honesty, we are not winning. And if you’re not
winning, you’re losing. And now’s the time to come up with a
strategy to win. The reason President Bush is going to do this is
because he understands that we have to win in Iraq. The reason
Senator McCain and Lindsey Graham and a few others are
supporting this when 14 percent of the public supports us and 80-
something percent is against us is we’re thinking about the
consequences of a failed state in Iraq. That’s more important
than 2008. We cannot let this country go into the abyss. Now is
the last chance and the only chance we have left to get this
right .
Biden: Think about this. Nobody, nobody has recommended
what the president’s about to do. They all say we need a
changed plan. The Baker Commission opposed the position
suggested. The generals oppose the position suggested. Even
those who think we should surge troops, like the American
Enterprise Institute, talk about it and they’re honest about it.
They say if we surge troops, then we have to bring Sadr City
under control. He talks about letting the Iraqi political
establishment have some time to do something. What’s the Iraqi
political establishment here? You have a guy who is heading up
that government, who is tethered to a guy who is one of the worst
guys in the whole region, the new Hizbullah, the Mahdi army, a
guy named Sadr. You have the prime minister of the country
unwilling to take a political chance to deal with what my friend
talks about, the militia.
Russert: So what do you do?
Biden: What you do is tell him, “Look, Maliki, and look,
government, over the next year we are going to begin to draw
down. You step up to the plate and make some hard decisions
about getting the Sunnis into the deal through oil. You make
some hard decisions about implementing the constitution, which
says we’re a loosely federated republic. You let local areas have
control over their local police forces. You make the political
compromise necessary in any emerging democracy. But do not
continue the process where your only objective is to hold
together the Sunni or the Shia coalition, wipe out the Sunnis and
expect you’re going to have anything remotely approaching
democracy.”
Russert: And if that doesn’t happen, what happens?
Biden: If that doesn’t happen we have full-blown chaos, you
need plan B. Then you disengage and you contain. Then the
question is, what do you do? The reason why we should be
talking to the neighbors, Tim, is not just the degree to which they
may be able to positively impact, which is marginal. What
happens if this is a bad bet? Nobody you’ll find will tell you
there’s any good option left. There’s options, but no good
options.
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Graham: I don’t think any Republican or Democrat should do
anything right now to say the war is lost. We should try to win
this war. And the day you say we’re going to withdraw – three
months, six months, a year from now – the effect will be that the
militants will be emboldened, the moderates will be frozen, and
we will have sent the message to the wrong people. Who started
this
Russert: So we’re stuck there, forever.
Graham: Well, you stay there with a purpose to win. If we never
had enough troops in the beginning, when did we start having
enough troops? We have paid a heavy price for the mistakes
we’ve made in the past. The biggest mistake we could make as a
nation is to listen to the Pelosi and Reid doctrine of withdrawing
without wondering what happens when we leave. My biggest
fear, as a United States senator, as an American, is that we will
make a political decision to leave Iraq without thinking about
what’s left when we leave. Nobody wants to talk about what
happens when we leave. I understand it’s not popular, but this
war is not about the moment, it’s about the next decade and the
decade to follow. It’s about our national security interests. It’s
about the war on terror. Moderates vs. extremists. If we leave
the moderates and leave it to the extremists, if we tell the
extremists through our behavior and our actions, “We’re leaving
Iraq in a year. It’s yours,” we will never know peace. I hope we
can rally around the president’s idea of putting enough troops in
to make a difference. I hope we can do what Joe says, push the
Iraqi people to come up with the political model that will work.
But no politician in Iraq can possibly reconcile that nation with
this level of violence. A pre-condition to political solution is
security. Security is absent. We have got to regain the capital .
Biden: I want to make a point that Lindsey just made. My view
is we have one chance to not lose Iraq, and it rests in not
repeating the mistakes we’ve made. It made sense to surge
60,000, 70,000, 100,000 troops before there was a civil war.
There is now a civil war. You need a political solution before
you can get a physical solution. Unless Maliki is willing to deal
the Sunnis in so they abandon the insurgency, unless the Sunnis
are willing to allow, under the constitution, the Shia to control
their local districts like the Kurds do, there is no possibility,
none, with 500,000 American forces there.
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Russert: If a year from now the situation on the ground is similar
to what it is today in terms of violence, in sectarian violence,
what will you say then?
Graham: What I say is, a year from now or five years from now,
what would be the consequences to an Iraq in open civil war with
sectarian killing where Iran tries to take over the southern part of
Iraq, in the northern part the Kurds break away and Turkey gets
involved; what would we do if we left a year from now and
there’s open civil war and Iran tries to occupy, through a puppet
government, the south of Iraq? What will we do if Turkey
threatens to go to war with the Kurds? We’v got to think about
these things now, and we need to adjust now. We’ve made
mighty mistakes. We’ve never had enough troops in the past.
Let’s don’t repeat the mistakes of the past .The biggest mistake
we’ve made is we’ve never put enough troops on the ground to
secure this country. We’ve never had a strategy for economic
and political power to be successful because security was never
there to make it successful .The Iraqi people have to step up.
Listen to the president Wednesday. He is not blind to the fact
that eventually the Iraqi people have to solve their political
problems. But until we put the right combat power in place with
the Iraqis, we will never have a political solution.
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Also on “Meet the Press” was New York Times reporter Michael
Gordon, author of “Cobra II.”
Gordon: The Bush administration made a big mistake a couple of
years ago when it didn’t act in 2004 to enlarge the size of the
military, and we’re paying the price now. But I have to tell you,
when I was in Iraq, in July, and when I was there in October, on
the ground, at that level, I heard a lot of people say, “We don’t
have enough troops. We’re putting too much stress on the Iraqis
being able to shoulder the burden for the security. We need to do
more.” So there is a body of opinion within the American
military that more assets are needed and that some positive
outcome can still be salvaged from the Iraq operation.
Russert: If that was the recommendation of the generals on the
ground, it had to be signed off on by Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld and the president.
Gordon: Well, I didn’t say this was the recommendation of the
generals on the ground, I said this is the view from the soldiers
on the ground. And I’ve noticed over the past year a difference
between some of the statements made by General Abizaid and
General Casey and some of the perspective of the troops on the
ground. What you generally hear, and I think we saw it when
Secretary Gates went to Baghdad, he sat down with a soldier in a
mess hall and asked him what that soldier thought was needed,
and that soldier said, “More troops.” So there is that element.
Russert: Is there a suggestion that the generals pulled their
punches on troop levels because they wanted to give the right
answer to Secretary Rumsfeld or the president?
Gordon: No. I think General Casey and General Abizaid are
honorable people who genuinely believed in the strategy they
were pursuing. I think they concluded the insurgency couldn’t
be beaten in the short run, that the best proposition we’d had was
to transfer our responsibilities to the Iraqis, let them fight the
insurgency forever. The problem is they put too much stock in
this program to transfer responsibility to the Iraqis that quickly,
and it just didn’t work. And the result is, if you look at the
Pentagon’s report to Congress, you see an increase in Iraqi forces
and an increase in sectarian violence. What it suggests to me is
there has to be more of a U.S. role.
Hott Spotts will return Jan. 25 or sooner.
Brian Trumbore
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