Meet the Press
MSNBC
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq. This is what Newt Gingrich said back in 2002, when Congress was thinking about voting for the war, and this is how he approached the issue: “The question is not, ‘Should we replace Saddam?’ The question is, ‘Should we wait until Saddam gives biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to terrorists?’ We should not wait until Saddam has the full capacity to create terror around the planet and is able to blackmail with nuclear weapons. Waiting is not an option.”
And then about a year later you were on MEET THE PRESS, I asked — six months into the war — and I asked you about it, and this is what you said:
(Videotape, December 22, 2002):
FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE NEWT GINGRICH: Those people are truly evil, and we have to finish hunting them down. And until we finish that, we shouldn’t say another word about an exit strategy. We are there to stay till the job’s done.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Two years later, in ‘05, this is what The New York Times said you — reported your quotes: “Any effort to explain Iraq as ‘We are on track and making progress’ is nonsense.”
And then in your book, “Winning the Future”: “We should be clear: There are a lot of problems. Iraq is a mess. It is going to remain a mess for a long time.”
And then last month: “Gingrich … claims to be ‘mystified’ by the Bush administration’s incompetence since Baghdad fell in 2003.”
And then in South Dakota in one speech: “It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003. … We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it.” Later that day you said that we have to — we’ll be there for a long time. Knowing what you know now, do you believe going into Iraq was the right thing to do?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, let me start with the, the South Dakota quote, which, in fact the newspaper retracted the headline on. What I’ve said is very consistent. Saddam was very dangerous. If you ask me is America safer with Saddam in jail than it was with Saddam in charge of the government, I think we’re much safer today than we would have been, because it’s very clear from United Nations reports, and as you know I co-chaired with Senator George Mitchell a task force on, on reforming the U.N., it’s very clear from the United Nations information that sanctions were breaking down. The French and the Russians, basically, were, were being increasingly bribed to allow all sorts of loopholes. So if, if Saddam were still in power today, there’s no doubt in my mind the sanctions regime would be gone, and the Middle East would be in much worse shape than it is.
Second, the initial war was, was a brilliant campaign. Tommy Franks’ campaign, in 23 days, eliminated the government, the dictatorship, created the opportunity for us to do exactly what we’d done in Afghanistan, which is turn the country back over to an interim government. We did it in Afghanistan in three weeks. The ambassador, Khalilzad, who is today the ambassador in Baghdad, did a brilliant job in Afghanistan. For reasons which — this is why I said I was mystified — I cannot, to this day, tell you why Ambassador Bremer thought it was his job to create an American-centered system to give speeches on Iraqi television, to be clearly seen as the guy in charge. Ambassador Khalilzad did it exactly right in Afghanistan. We’ve had a much less difficult problem. It has been much more successful. We are very slowly getting back to that position today. It’s exactly where General Abizaid wanted us to be all along, and I think we will eventually win the campaign in Iraq. But it has been much longer and much harder than it needed to be, largely I think because of the mistakes that were made when Ambassador Bremer was in charge in Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: And the president?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, the president’s commander in chief. I mean you can’t…
MR. RUSSERT: But…
MR. GINGRICH: …say the president’s commander in chief except when it goes wrong.
MR. RUSSERT: …but knowing no weapons of mass destruction, knowing the level of insurgency resisting — resistance, knowing the sectarian violence, knowing the cost, do you believe it was still worthwhile and do you believe it was a war of choice or necessity?
MR. GINGRICH: Look, I believe that the president was exactly right in the State of the Union in 2002 to say there is an “axis of evil.” I think he was exactly right to say North Korea, Iran and Iraq are very, very dangerous. I think historians are going to look back and say that they are more troubled by what we have not yet done to figure out North Korea and Iran, both of which have made progress towards getting nuclear weapons in the following four years, than they are going to be by Iraq.
Iraq has been painful, we have learned some very difficult lessons, we are better prepared today if we have to do something than we were four years ago. But if you were to say, again, because all of history is looking forward. I would — I read the — as you know I’m on the Defense Policy Board — and I went — I read the initial report, the 100-page report the president got. Knowing what the intelligence community — not in the U.S., in Russia, in France, in Italy, in Britain — knowing what they believed in 2003, it would have been irresponsible not to have eliminated Saddam’s regime in 2003.
MR. RUSSERT: War of choice or necessity?
MR. GINGRICH: It was, it was a war of choice in the sense that we believed that sooner or later he was going to hit us, and therefore I would argue that the only question was timing. But I believe it’s much harder to make the case that the United States would be safer today with Saddam Hussein in power.
MR. RUSSERT: Because…
MR. GINGRICH: But, by the way, remember Saddam was paying $25,000 dollars to the family of every suicide bomber. Saddam had a direct relationship with al-Qaeda, and if you read the recent joint forces command report, which is declassified and has been published, which goes through all the information we’ve learned from the Iraqi generals, it’s very compelling that this was a dangerous dictatorship and that we had a very good reason to be worried about it.
MR. RUSSERT: Has our involvement and presence in Iraq and the difficulties in that war, and the costs of that war, limited our options with Iran?
MR. GINGRICH: I think we’re only limited by our own psychology. I think we clearly have the capability if we need to, to replace the regime in Tehran. We clearly have the power and capacity in the region. I — it’s hard for me to understand why people think that an America too timid to take on Saddam would have had more support from the Arab world against Iran, that an America which has shown enormous endurance and enormous courage in doing what it has to do. And I think that Iran is, in fact, the centerpiece of our future, and Ahmadinejad, the current dictator, clearly intends to defeat the United States and to eliminate Israel from the face of the Earth. And people who are watching us ought to really think through what those words mean and ask yourself, “Do you prefer to wait until we lose Tel Aviv and Jerusalem or do you prefer to wait until an Iranian nuclear weapon is in New York harbor?”
MR. RUSSERT: So what do we do?
MR. GINGRICH: I think — first of all, I think Senator Santorum has the right approach, which is a bill which says we actively support every dissident element in Iran. We have an explicit goal of replacing the current dictatorship and we do it as — if it is at all possible over the next two or three years, we do it — we do it, you know, with, with, with the kind of things we did for example in, in Poland where we very — or in Ukraine or in Hungary or in Romania where we’ve been very successful allying with the people. Remember this is a very…
MR. RUSSERT: But if that doesn’t work, will you…
MR. GINGRICH: Ultimately, if you have no choice there may be a morning you have to replace the regime militarily. That’s the last step, it’s not the first step. But you can’t read what Ahmadinejad says — and this is not a CIA analyst problem. He says this stuff publicly on television.
MR. RUSSERT: Do you think the American…
MR. GINGRICH: You can’t read that and not…
MR. RUSSERT: …people would support another war? And do you — how would the world respond to the U.S. invading another Muslim country?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I mean, you just jumped past two or three years of trying to replace the regime peacefully.
MR. RUSSERT: No, but these are options that people policy…
MR. GINGRICH: I believe if, if the world under — is forced to confront the degree to which Ahmadinejad — first of all, why is the, why is the United Nations still allowing Iran to vote? Here you have a regime that says publicly, “We want to eliminate a fellow member of the” — you know. And he talks about “eliminate from the face of the earth.” He talks about catastrophic attack. He’s the — this — Ahmadinejad is very clear, and he’s a religious fanatic, and there’s every reason to believe he means this. This is not idle bluffing, that the morning they get nuclear weapons if he — if it’s — if he gets his say, he’s going to use them.
Now, if the American people come to believe that’s true — and all you got to do is, one, watch his speeches, and, two, watch the nine-minute cartoon they ran on television recruiting 10-year-olds to be suicide bombers — this is on Iranian public television — I think the American people faced with that would say, very sadly, “Get rid of that government. We hope you do it peacefully, we hope you do it diplomatically, but we will not accept you coming back and telling us you didn’t do it.”
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