Hardball - Transcript

MSNBC
SHOW: HARDBALL 19:00

September 16, 2004 Thursday

TRANSCRIPT: # 091600cb.461

HEADLINE: HARDBALL for September 16, 2004

BYLINE: Chris Matthews

GUESTS: Bill Burkett; Marie Cocco; James Moore; Rick Davis; Lindsey Graham; Richard Holbrooke; Todd Purdum

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

A classified national intelligence estimate prepared for President Bush this July takes a pessimistic outlook on Iraq for the next year. According to "The New York Times" today, the worst-case scenario has Iraq embroiled in civil war and the most favorable outcome describes Iraq's check and political stability as tenuous.

News of this intelligence estimate comes on a day when two American and a British man were abducted at dawn in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood.

Richard Holbrooke served as ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton. He is now a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign. And Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is a member of the Armed Services Committee.

Senator Graham, I want to start with you, sir.

What do you make of this new intelligence estimate that has leaked out which says that we may be facing a civil war in Iraq?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM ®, SOUTH CAROLINA: Well, I think that is accurate in regards to how difficult it is going to be to create an emergency-an emerging democracy in Iraq.

I hope we don't. The Sunni Triangle has been very difficult. We've made progress in the south. The goal is to have every group to buy into an emerging democracy. The people who are doing the killing have as their agenda a Taliban-type government for Iraq. The people who are dying, the ones who want to be policemen and join the army, are trying to fight for their country to create a new democracy in a place where we don't have any.

So I'm hopeful that the forces who want to change their country will win out over the forces who want to drag Iraq back into the dark. It is going to be a real battle of wills.

MATTHEWS: Mr. Ambassador, is that how you see it, as a battle between the old and new?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Or is it in fact a civil war among factions, the Sunni, the Shia, etcetera, and they all don't want to be part of the same country perhaps?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO UNITED NATIONS: Well, an NIE is the most solemn assessment the United States can come up with. I agree with Senator Graham. It looks to me from what we've read in the "New York Times," it is very accurate.

But the real question I must ask here is, how come it is at such sharp variance with what Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, Vice President Cheney and President Bush have been saying since it came out? What do they believe? Do they believe what they're telling us publicly? Or do they accept their own national intelligence estimate?

MATTHEWS: Gentlemen, is this like 1964, when we had a president, a moderate on the war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, who said he was going to bring us peace and, within a year, he had us a half-million troops in there? Is that the situation? Is this another Vietnam, Mr. Holbrooke?

HOLBROOKE: What we now know, Chris, from the Lyndon Johnson tapes is that at the same time Lyndon Johnson was saying things were going well in Vietnam publicly, privately, he was saying to people like Senator Richard Russell and Senator Fulbright and others that things were going badly.

That level of deception-politics always involves a little deception. But that level of deception when you're talking about the lives of young Americans at stake in a war, a war like Vietnam that doesn't have end, is troubling. So I think the question here tonight is whether or not the administration accepts its own NIE.

MATTHEWS: Do you think we're in Vietnam?

HOLBROOKE: There are disturbing similarities to the quagmire in Vietnam. And the NIE lays them out very much the same way. We're never going to get to the casualty levels of Vietnam; 1,000 dead is awful, but 55,000 dead in Vietnam was worse.

However, the dilemma that the U.S. government and whoever is elected president will face on January 20 of the next year is very deep and very real. And, by the way, Chris, I mention this because when I last said this, I was criticized for comparing Iraq and Vietnam on another program. I served in Vietnam for three years. I know how tough it was. And I don't want to see that tragedy repeated.

MATTHEWS: Let me go to Senator Graham.

Do you believe that? Do you see the same troubling connections between Vietnam and Iraq right now in the sense that we went in there for a good reason? We went into Vietnam for a good reason, to liberate the country, protect her from being taken over by the communist north. But after a while, nationalism began to show its face, resistance to our very presence. Are you worried that people in Iraq will gradually and perhaps some day reach a majority status where most of the people want us to go?

GRAHAM: Nationalism would be a good thing in Iraq. That means you've bought into being an Iraqi more than just being a part of Iraq.

I've been to Iraq twice. I haven't-obviously, I didn't go to Vietnam. I respect Richard. He is a smart guy. He has got a lot of insight. I've been there twice. I've been to every part of Iraq. And I see a buy-in to the idea of democracy by lots of groups, the Sunnis, the Shias, the Kurds, the Arabs. There are lots of people who you don't hear about or read about or see on TV that are buying into the idea of Iraq being a democratic country.

When they kill a policeman or blow up-excuse me, Chris-and blow up a police station, they have more people volunteering the next day. When they attack an army proving station, people continue to want to volunteer. To me, that's the hope for Iraq. The people who are doing the killing, they're not communists. They're foreign fighters. They're old leftover people from the regime. They're people who do not want a democracy. And those are the two factions, the people who want a democracy vs. the people who want more forces of darkness.

And it is going to be a tough sled. And we need to be more direct and more honest about how difficult it will be. But I am hopeful that if the Iraqi people keep joining the army, keep joining the police force, and keep doing the things necessary to become a rule-of-law nation, that we will win this over time.

MATTHEWS: Let me just interject something from Senator Joe Biden today. At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday-that was yesterday-Senator Joe Biden of Delaware said-quote-"The president has frequently described Iraq as the central front of the war on terror. Well, by that definition, success in Iraq is a key standard by which to measure the war on terror. And by that measure, I think the war on terror is in trouble."

Mr. Holbrooke.

HOLBROOKE: Well, I would agree with Senator Biden on that point.

But I want to go back to what Senator Graham said a moment ago and put in it perspective, because I don't think Senator Graham and I are in basic disagreement here. Here is the dilemma that the next president of the United States is going to face, whether it's George Bush or John Kerry. And it is very serious. There is now a classic mismatch between resources and mission in Iraq. That's the real similarity to Vietnam.

You, I hate to say it, are just old enough to remember what I'm talking about.

MATTHEWS: Right.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: But, in Vietnam, we had a half million troops in country.

HOLBROOKE: But the U.S. military will tell you now-and Colin Powell wrote this in his memoirs-we were not given-we were given a mission, but not enough resources to do it.

Now, the administration has said from the beginning that 135,000 troops are enough, although the Army chief of staff, Shinseki, said we need 300,000. The administration is going to tiptoe past the election on this one. But after the election, I would guess, given that NIE you just quoted, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are going to go to the president-elect, whoever it is, and say, listen, if you keep us with the current mission, the one Senator Graham correctly outlined a minute ago, promote democracy, we can't do it unless you give us more troops. But we don't have the troops.

I put that forward not with an answer, Chris, and not-I hope not in a partisan way, but to stress the enormity of the dilemma that the United States is now facing in Iraq.

MATTHEWS: Senator, are you concerned that we're holding back from going after some of those very troubling, very dangerous areas both in the Basra area in the south, not just the Shia area, rather, but also up in the Sunni Triangle. or lot of places, we're saying, we'll get to you later. We don't want to have a lot of blood spilled between now and November 2.

Does that concern you, we're creating a bigger problem down the road by not acting now?

GRAHAM: Well, after having been there twice, the dynamics in the south are definitely different than the Sunni Triangle. We had a senior cleric intervene and kind of help resolve the problem in the south, at least temporarily, without a major assault on the sacred mosque. There is a political dynamic in the south that is more hopeful.

The Sunni Triangle, Fallujah and other places, it is just going to take a show of military force at some point in time to stabilize that region. Whoever wins in January in Iraq is going to have part of the country they can't govern because they don't have the security apparatus to take over places like Fallujah.

So I agree with Richard Holbrooke on the following. I think the American involvement in Iraq in the short term, in the next year or two years, is going to be greater, because the security environment is not what you need to have a stable rule-of-law government. We're going to have to be more aggressive in dedicating the resources to provide better security, accelerate training of the police. We're spending $3.8 billion that was going to infrastructure is now going into security.

And I've been saying for a year and a half we don't have enough troops. I think we need more troops, a better skill mix. And if we will make the investment now, it will pay off later.

MATTHEWS: OK. We're going to come right back and talk about politics, because the polls are showing now-maybe it is Iraq that is causing this-but the polls have tightened up again, no more bounce. It has gone flat. These two guys are running even, President Bush and Senator John Kerry.

And don't forget, sign up for HARDBALL's daily e-mail briefing. Just log on to our Web site, HARDBALL.MSNBC.com.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Coming up, two new polls show the presidential race is once again dead even.

We're coming back with Senator Lindsey Graham and Richard Holbrooke when HARDBALL returns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: We're back with former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

By the way, we just got this in late this afternoon. Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican of Nebraska, said about Iraq today-quote-"The worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning. Right now, we're not winning. Things are getting worse. Measure that by any measurement you want, more casualties, more deaths, more pipeline sabotage. You pick the measurement standard and it's worse than where it was six months ago or 12 months ago."

Do you buy that?

HOLBROOKE: And it's going to be worse on Election Day, I regret to say. And on inauguration day, it will be worse than it is on Election Day.

I'm not trying to talk down our effort. I'm referring to a consensus I've heard from every official and every visitor I've been-who has been to Iraq recently.

MATTHEWS: Have you heard any authoritative word, Mr. Ambassador, that the military have been pulled back to avoid major bloodbaths between now and Election Day?

HOLBROOKE: No. I'm not. I'm a private citizen. I would defer to Senator Graham on that. He's on Armed Services.

MATTHEWS: Senator Graham, do you have any sense that the military is trying to hold off any major, some sort of, well, Fallujah-type situation where we go into a city and it is terrible for our men and troops, or going into Najaf, a place like-we're trying to put those type of terrible firefights off until after November 2? Have you heard that?

GRAHAM: No, sir, I have not. But let me echo sort of what Richard and Chuck Hagel are saying.

I think you can expect the violence between now and our election in Iraq to increase dramatically. I think you can expect the violence to increase up and through their election in January. What they have been able to do, the terrorists and the people who are trying to defeat democracy in Iraq, they were able to get the Spanish to quit. They were able to get the Philippine government to withdraw. And they're trying to kidnap folks. They're creating as much chaos as possible to break the will of the Western nations who are trying to help Iraq become a democracy.

And we need to tell our people more directly about it. I think, in the short term, we do need to put more resources into security, including troops, because we can't afford to lose this battle. One thing Richard and I agree on, that the worst possible outcome for those who love freedom is for Iraq to go into the abyss and the terrorists win.

MATTHEWS: But if the war is going badly in Iraq, should the American voters vote for the war?

GRAHAM: I think the American voters need to understand the war on terror has a lot of roots to it and that the people who attacked us on 9/11 have a different way of doing business than we would like for our own country or for others and that Iraq is a battle between the forces of democracy and the forces who attacked us on 9/11.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I have got to go ahead with these two new polls and get your reaction, gentlemen, two new polls of likely voters. These are people that are expected to vote based on their voting pattern, show that the presidential race is now back to being neck to neck.

A new Pew Foundation poll has President Bush at 47 percent, John Kerry at 46. That's just one vote apart-one percentage point apart. And the Harris poll has the president at 47 percent and Kerry at 48, which is a very similar vote there on likely voters.

So we have got an absolutely dead even. Is this because of the news from Iraq?

HOLBROOKE: Isn't this exactly what you always expected? We're in a dead heat between two candidates and Iraq is moving to the center stage. We're in the final phase of the campaign and Iraq is the dominant issue. We've only had elections four times in the last century and a half during wartime.

In 1944, there was a consensus on the war. But '52, Korea, '68, Vietnam, and now today, we had controversial wars. It should be a central issue. Senator Graham and I have very little disagreement.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Well, do you buy his argument that the other side, whether they're insurgents over there or al Qaeda internationally, are ginning up this activity over there to hurt the president in the election?

HOLBROOKE: I don't think it is tied to our election. I think it is an attempt to destroy the legitimacy of the Allawi government. I notice Allawi is going to address a joint question of session this week.

May I just ask Senator Graham one question? He said more troops. And I respect his views. Does he have any sense of how many troops would be needed?

GRAHAM: Well, what I see us being short in critical areas like civil affairs folks, civil engineers. I'm not so sure much that you need combat troops as much as a better skill mix; 40 percent of the people by the end of the year are going to be Guard and Reservists. So I would like to have more troops on the ground to do the things necessary to stabilize the economy and the country.

But, no, Richard, I don't know the answer to the number question, but I have believed for over a year and a half that we do not have enough people to repair the infrastructure and provide security and we need more. And I don't-I'm supportive of President Bush, but I've seen it firsthand that you're relying too much on the Guard and Reserves. And we need to pump up our security and our reconstruction efforts in Iraq with more troops.

MATTHEWS: Senator Kerry has said he'll have our troop out within four years. That's certainly a long commitment anyway. Do you think we need troops there for four years?

HOLBROOKE: I think that, right now, given what the President Bush laid out as the goals in his acceptance speech in New York, we're going to have troops there indefinitely. There's no light at the end of this tunnel unless we either send more forces to do the job, as Senator Graham has suggested, or there's a fundamental change on the ground.

MATTHEWS: Senator Graham, how long will we need troops over there?

GRAHAM: Well, the danger with saying we'll be gone in four years, that the terrorists will say, if we kill enough American, maybe they'll go in two.

Never put a deadline because the terrorists react in the wrong way. It is an admission that you are not going to stay there as long as the job takes. The key to getting out of Iraq is to have Iraqis who can maintain an army and a police force and become judges and lawyers and all the things necessary to become an emerging democracy. That may take a year. That may take four years. It may take 10 years.

But the goal is to allow the Iraqi people to win this war. The people who are killing the Iraqis today are folks who don't want a democracy. We're over there trying to create one. It's a very simple proposition. If you want a democracy to take hold in the Mideast, one thing we've learned, you're going to have to fight for it. You're going to have to bleed for it. We're bleeding. The Iraqi people are bleeding. Stay the course. Don't put an artificial date. Admit that we made mistakes. Send more people and win this thing. A lot is at stake.

MATTHEWS: OK, thank you very much, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, member of the Armed Services Committee, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke.

Up next, "New York Times" correspondent Todd Purdum on the national intelligence estimate that just came out last night and the pessimistic prognosis for Iraq.

And don't forget, you can keep up with the presidential race on HardBlogger, our election blog Web site. Just go to HARDBALL.MSNBC.com.