MTP Transcript for Feb. 4, 2007

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Joe Biden, another opponent in the Democratic race for the White House, had some things to say about your Iraq policy in the New York Observer. “ ‘I don’t think John Edwards knows what the heck he’s talking about,’ Mr. Biden said, when asked about Mr. Edwards’ advocacy of the immediate withdrawal of about 40,000 American troops from Iraq.”

“ John Edwards wants you and all the Democrats to think, ‘I want us out of there,’ but when you come back and say, ‘OK, John, ... what about the chaos that will ensue? Do we have any interest, John, left in the region?’ Well, John will have to answer yes or no. If he says yes, what are they? What are those interests, John? How do you protect those interests, John, if you are completely withdrawn? Are you withdrawn from the region, John? Are you withdrawn from Iraq, John? In what period? So all this stuff is like so much Fluffernutter out there. So for me, what I think you have to do is have a strategic notion. And they may have it - they are just smart enough not to enunciate it.”

SEN. EDWARDS: Fluffernutter, huh?MR. RUSSERT: Did you ever have one?

SEN. EDWARDS: Oh, I, I think—I,I actually saw Senator Biden talking about this interview on television a few days ago. I think this is, unfortunately, I—part of the same interview where he criticized Senator Clinton also, and also talked about Senator Obama, which has gotten so much attention. I think he just—I think he had bad information. He misunderstood, based on what I heard him say, what I was saying that we should do in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: But you are calling for an immediate withdrawal of 40,000 troops.

SEN. EDWARDS: That I am, yes. What I think we—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you.

MR. RUSSERT: No, that’s OK, excuse me, because, because that’s an important point. The, the National Intelligence Estimate came out last week...

SEN. EDWARDS: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: ...which talked about the grave situation in Iraq, but it also addressed the issue of an immediate withdrawal of a sizable number of troops.

SEN. EDWARDS: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: And this is what the intelligence community said. “ If Coalition forces were withdrawn rapidly ... we judge that this almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict in Iraq, intensify Sunni resistance to the Iraqi Government, and have adverse consequences for national reconciliation.

“ If such a rapid withdrawal were to take place, we judge that the [Iraqi Security Force] would be unlikely to survive as a nonsectarian national institution; neighboring countries ... might intervene openly in the conflict; massive civilian casualties and forced population displacement would be probable; [al-Qaeda in Iraq] would attempt to use parts of the country - particularly al-Anbar province - to plan increased attacks in and outside of Iraq.”  They’re talking about your plan.

SEN. EDWARDS: Well, can we step back? I, I...

MR. RUSSERT: Please.

SEN. EDWARDS: I’ll respond to that specifically. If we can step back for a minute, because we really haven’t talked about what I think, as president of the United States, we should do—if I were president today—what we should do in Iraq. I think everyone recognizes that what’s happening on the ground in Iraq is a direct result of the Sunnis, the Baathists having been in, in power for a long period of time under Saddam, and now—as a minority—and now the Shia and the Maliki-led government are in charge, and they feel excluded. They think they’re on the outside, which they largely are, legally and constitutionally. And that feeds the violence. It is the foundation for the violence. There are other contributors, which everyone recognizes. Certainly the foreign fighters, the terrorists, the Shia militia are all contributing to the ongoing violence. But the basic foundation for the violence is very clear, which is why I and others, the Baker group, determined that the only solution is not a military solution, but a political resolution, a political reconciliation. So the starting place for me in analyzing what we should be doing in Iraq, to create the—create the greatest chance for success—and I’ll caveat what I’m about to say with what you just read and what is in the rest of that N.I.E. report from, from this week, which is the conditions are horrendous in Iraq. Not—and there—what’s basically happened is there’s a political track and there’s a security track, and they’re terrible on both fronts. So everyone recognizes this place could go chaotic no matter what you do, and I’d be the first to say that.

But the question is what do we do to try to get the Maliki, Shia-led government to bring the Sunni in, so as to have a buy-in to a long-term, stable government? What do we do to get the Sunni, disorganized as they are, leadership to try to contribute to a buy-in to the—to, to a political reconciliation? And the president’s plan is we put 20,000-plus more troops into Iraq. I think all that does is enable the continued bad behavior, political bad behavior that we’ve seen over the last few years. What we need to do instead, in my judgment, is to shift this responsibility to them. It is the most likely way to create this political reconciliation.

Now, the argument by Senator McCain and others would be as long as the condition on the grounds—and that’s what you—on the ground is as bad as it is—and that’s what you just read from the N.I.E. report—is as bad as, as it is, political reconciliation is impossible. I think they’ve got it exactly backwards. I don’t think there’s any chance that these two groups are going to reach any kind of reconciliation until they feel imminent responsibility. We cannot continue to prop them up.

Now, I would add that I think it would be foolish for the president of the United States, if we go through this process—I mean, what I think the process should be is withdraw, as you pointed out, one piece of it, 40-, 50,000 troops now from the more secure areas of Iraq, continue to draw down American troops, combat troops over the course of the next 12-plus months, make it clear to the—to the leadership, both the Sunni and, and Maliki and, and the Shia that they’re going to have to take responsibility for this. And finally, engage not just our friends in that region of the world—the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians—but engage directly with Iran and Syria, because both Iran and Syria have an interest in Iraq not going totally chaotic. I mean, if you just look—for a moment, just think about Iran. They’re in a situation where—and by the way, we—it should be pointed out that Iran has actually participated in support—while they have done some bad things, they provided supplies, equipment to these Shia militia. On the other hand, they have been fairly supportive of the Shia-led government in, in Iraq.

So what is Iran’s interest in this? Iran’s interest is first of all in not having, you know, a million-plus refugees coming across their western border, which could clearly happen with an all-out civil war within Iraq. Their, their second interest is they are Shia, Shia-dominated country, Iraq is a Shia-dominated country in a Sunni-dominated Muslim world. They’re about 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim world. So if this thing were to actually go completely to pot and to spill over, and it became a broader Middle East conflict, they are very much in the minority. And I can assure you they understand that. So we have leverage in dealing with Iraq. Similar leverage, leverage with Sunnis. They don’t want to see the refugees coming across their border—Syria, I’m sorry. They don’t want to see the refugees coming across their border; they’re Sunni not Shia. But they also have an interest in not seeing this thing go chaotic. But they will never participate in stabilizing the country as long as we are the occupying force there.

RUSSERT: If, in fact, you withdrew 40,000 troops and the situation was, in your words, “ totally chaotic,”  would you have the option of bringing the troops back into Iraq?

SEN. EDWARDS: I can tell you exactly what I’d do as president. I’d start drawing the troops down. I’d bring out the 40,000 to begin with. I’d continue the process in a very thoughtful, orderly way with, with the suggestions of my military commanders on the ground. The second thing I would do is I’d have very close, 24-hour-a-day monitoring of what’s happening with the situation on the ground to see if it’s, in fact, deteriorating. As we reduced our presence over time, I think we’d need to keep troops in the region. The redeployment, I believe some, some American men and women should come home, some should go into Kuwait, some should go into Afghanistan, which we haven’t talked about, which is moving south, unfortunately. The Taliban’s resurging, heroin trade is way up. So those are the things I would do. The troops, I’d keep—I’d keep an able presence in the Persian Gulf, and then I would watch and monitor what’s happening.

And I—at the—simultaneous with that, I would be working with both my intelligence leaders and my military commanders to develop a policy about—a plan, not a policy, about what we would do in the case this thing blows into total civil war. Hard to predict. You don’t know how, how, how bad it would be. But you clearly would have to have some mechanism for containing so that this thing doesn’t spill over. You’d want the Syrians and the Iranians to be involved with that, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, everybody that, that borders, borders Iraq. And there’s some obvious things to do. In fact, I thought—I saw that Ken Pollack discussed this on your show last week. But you need to plan for every possibility. Because the overwhelming message from this N.I.E. report, you know, the Democrats will pick out their stuff that they want to argue and the Republicans will pick out their stuff. The overwhelming message, though, is we are in a terrible place in Iraq, and the choices are bad and worse, and we have to prepare for, for the worst possibility.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think that the Bush administration is planning for a war in Iran?

SEN. EDWARDS: I don’t know. I don’t know. I hope not. I don’t know. I think that there’s a legitimate concern about Iran getting a nuclear weapon. We should be concerned about that for a lot of reasons, including the possibility that, first, that they would use it; second, that it could, could nuclearize the Middle East, the most volatile place on the planet. But what’s disturbing is that we’re not dealing with this in a smart way at all, in my judgment. Here—what we’ve got is a radical leader, Ahmadinejad, who’s bellicose in his rhetoric about America, bellicose in his rhetoric about nuclear weapons and about Israel, but he is not politically stable in his own country. He is—first of all, the political elite have largely left him, there are religious leaders who have left him. He was elected on a platform of economic reform and strengthening the middle class and lifting people out of poverty. He hasn’t done anything about any of those things. What he’s doing instead is he gives speeches and he travels around the world drawing attention to himself. And what this has done is it has begun to isolate him from his own people.

Now, what would strengthen him? A military strike by America against Iran would strengthen him. They would rally around this guy. On top of that, we would see retaliation. It’d be hard for them to get to us, except through terrorists, but they—we got 100,000-plus American men and women right next door, and there—a lot of us believe that there’s an infrastructure for retaliation if that were to happen. What—what’s much smarter for us to do, certainly now, for the time being—no American president should ever take any option off the table—but what’s smarter for us to do now is to continue to tap into this growing isolation between this radical leader and his own people.

And what should be done, in my judgment, is we ought—we ought to work with our friends in Europe. You know, actually, the banking institutions in Europe have been pretty good about being tough on Iranian banks. The governments have been less good. But we ought to put an offer of both sticks and carrots on the table. We ought to make it clear that there are things that America and the Europeans are willing to do—it’d be great if we could get the Russians and the Chinese to participate—but certainly the Europeans, they have economic leverage with Iran. And those things include making the nuclear fuel available to them, controlling the cycle—this has been offered before—but combining that with a set of economic incentives that will be very attractive to the people in, in Iran who’re already feeling an isolation from this president. And then on the stick side say, ‘But there will be consequences if you don’t give up your nuclear program. And the consequences are the economic decline that you’re seeing within your own country will be accelerated, and it will be accelerated because the bank—the banks in Europe and the European governments will not continue to do economic business with Iran.’

MR. RUSSERT: Would President Edwards allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon?

SEN. EDWARDS: I—there’s no answer to that question at this moment. I think that it’s a—it’s a—it’s a very bad thing for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. I think we have—we have many steps in front of us that have not been used. We ought to negotiate directly with the Iranians, which has not, not been done. The things that I just talked about, I think, are the right approach in dealing with Iran. And then we’ll, we’ll see what the result is.

MR. RUSSERT: But they may get one.

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