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Novak, Begala Discuss U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Aired June 19, 2003 - 15:33   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Two more hot-tempered, opinionated guys -- "CROSSFIRE"'s hosts. On the right, Robert Novak. And on the left, Paul Begala.
We're glad you're both with us to weigh in on the subject matter. I can imagine the two of you have been talking about this amongst yourselves.

ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": No.

PAUL BEGALA, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": We have?

PHILLIPS: Now, we caught you off guard there. We got into that segment a little quickly there, didn't we?

NOVAK: Yes.

PHILLIPS: All right, guys. We got a number of e-mails. Let's get right to them and get your response.

This one comes from Jade in Pennsylvania: "Iraq 2003 is starting to look like Beirut 1982. There is a good reason to leave Iraq now, and that's to save lives."

PHILLIPS: Why don't we start -- who wants to weigh on that first?

NOVAK: I'll start off.

As you know, if you listen to me -- and I know you always listen to me -- I was not too keen about this intervention in Iraq. But these are the burdens of empire. If you're going to be -- if you're going to have an American imperialism -- imperiam -- you can't say, "Oh, boy, we've lost a few people."

These are not -- I feel very sorry for the families of these men and women who have died, but they're hardly less than the police forces in the United States we're losing any week in this country. So if you're serious about trying to help the people of Iraq, which I think was a big purpose of this intervention, you've got to stay there.

PHILLIPS: Paul, what do you think? Is it starting to look like Beirut?

BEGALA: Well, you know, Kyra, the problem is what's probably best articulated by those great foreign policy adviser Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash, who had that song back when I was in college, "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" Right? Because if I stay, there will be trouble, but if I go, it will double.

The president has a difficult set of options here. None of them are good. If he stays, American troops will continue to serve in a hostile environment, in a hostile climate, with people shooting at them every day. But if we go, we're likely to see a radical Islamist dictatorship. So I don't think leaving is an option. The problem is we should have never gone in the first place if we didn't have a sensible plan for occupation, and clearly we didn't ever have one.

PHILLIPS: Paul, I think I still have that album tucked away somewhere in a box.

This e-mail comes from Gerry in -- from Washington. "We started this war and we should finish it. War still goes on and we should beef up our troops to prove to the people of Iraq we are there to stay until we fix everything we destroyed."

There is a lot of fear -- you know, spending timing in the Middle East, a lot of the people are afraid -- you know, the troops have come in, and wondering if, indeed, they will stay this time around -- Bob.

NOVAK: I don't -- I think this is a phony debate, with all due apologies. There's no debate going on whether they should -- they're going to leave or not. They're going to stay. And the question is not really beefing up the troops, sending a few more divisions. It's just not a division kind of war. What they need is more military police, more occupation troops, need a little better planning.

I think Jerry Bremer, who is a very good man, is getting a handle on it. But the American people are such weanies, if they say, we're going to have a few casualties, and, Oh, dear, we've got to go back home/ These are professional soldiers. They signed up as professional soldiers. They're not draftees. And they got to suck it up and stay there.

PHILLIPS: All right, Paul. Bob says weanie. Is that fair?

BEGALA: No, it's not fair. In fact, what they are is suckers. They believed the president. He told us something. We took him at his word. That's always a mistake with George W. Bush. The "W," of course, standing for whoppers.

He told us before the war that it would be quick, that this would be easy, that we would be welcomed with roses in the streets. And when General Shinseki, who is the army chief of staff and knows a lot more about occupation -- he, after all, led peace-keeping in Bosnia -- said it would be 150,000 to 200,000 troops for 10 years, Mr. Bush's Pentagon leaders, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz publicly attacked General Shinseki.

Well, it turns out the general was right and the Bush administration was misleading us. People would not be so upset about this occupation if going into it, the president and his top advisers had leveled with us and told us that this would be a constant hostile environment.

NOVAK: Paul, I know you always try to be accurate, and I'm an admirer of General Shinseki. He said hundreds of thousands. He said hundreds of thousands. It was indefinite. He didn't say 10 years.

PHILLIPS: Well Joanne from Tacoma, Washington brings up this point: "Bush has no exit plan and never did. How many Americans must be murdered in Iraq before we can get out. Pandora's Box is open."

Is there an exit plan, guys?

NOVAK: There's no exit plan. There was no exit plan. Where was Clinton's exit plan for Kosovo? Where was the exit plan for Bosnia? They don't have exit plans for these things. You -- that's the whole problem. Once you get in, you're going to be stuck there. We've been stuck in Korea for 50 years. We've been stuck in Europe for 55 years. So if you're going to be a world power and you're going to say, We have business all over the world, this is one of the burdens of empire.

BEGALA: Bob is right, Kyra. But the thing is, the president should have leveled with us. When President Clinton led us into Kosovo, he -- first in Bosnia, he made the very mistake Bob points out. He said we would be out in a year. That was wrong. And he learned that lesson. So the second time around in Kosovo, he didn't give us a particular date that we would be finished.

But President Bush did lead us to believe that this would be about a two-year commitment and then soon some Jeffersonian democracy would flourish in Iraq.

NOVAK: When did we say two years, Paul?

BEGALA: I think at the American Enterprise Institute.

NOVAK: I don't think he said two years. Well, we'll check that, won't we?

PHILLIPS: All right, guys. Irene in Kansas City, Missouri: "I am the grandmother of a soldier that is fighting in Iraq and I believe that our soldiers should be brought home and let them run it the way they want. The oil is not worth it."

Oh, boy. There comes the "O" word.

NOVAK: Tell her grandson to get a job as a floor worker in a department store.

If he's going to go in the army, he's going to have to take orders and he's going to have to stay there as long as they want. I don't like grandmother saying to the military, bring my little sonny boy home.

BEGALA: Kyra, that's a rather stunning thing to say to a woman whose grandson is over there risking his life. For what? Those troops were sent over there to serve our country to, defend our country from a risk that the president said was real. Well, so far we've been there for months and haven't found that risk. There are no weapons of mass destruction that have been found so far, and yet they are going to have to stay.

People don't like it here at home, and I can certainly say as a former political adviser to the last president, this is an enormous political risk for Mr. Bush. He goes into this next election and he doesn't have a clear plan for bringing some sort of freedom and democracy to Iraq and ending this occupation, he's going to be in a lot of trouble.

NOVAK: Paul, if you think this army should be run like Students for a Democratic Society? You belonged to the SDS in school, didn't you?

BEGALA: Actually, I never belonged to SDS. I never hear of it.

But the country is a democracy, as Mr. Novak knows, and it's civilians who run the military, and those servicemen and women deserve our honor, our respect and so do their families.

NOVAK: They have to take orders too. They can't go around going to Paul Begala saying, I want to go home, Paul.

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIPS: You two. You're actually being pretty well-behaved.

All right. Final thoughts, gentlemen, from Virginia. Eunice says, "If our troops pull out of Iraq, everything they fought and died for would be for nothing. Who knows that Saddam would not rise up again?"

Final thoughts?

BEGALA: It's hard to say whether Saddam would. He may well be dead.

But the problem is if we do pull out immediately as some -- apparently of your e-mailers are suggesting. I think there's very little doubt that you would have a dictatorship, probably pretty closely modeled on the Iranian dictatorship next door, which is a disaster for the United States.

Hard to imagine anything worse for us than Saddam Hussein was. But if we were to pull out tomorrow, we would probably get something worse.

NOVAK: Yes, Paul's exactly right. I would have to agree on that point. And I also believe that this country, I think, has been in the state of a prolonged nervous breakdown. But the e-mailers are not determining military and foreign policy, thank God.

PHILLIPS: Bob, Paul, gentlemen, thank you so much. And in less than an hour, these guys are back, battling it out over Gore TV. It's time for a liberal talk show. I don't know. Well, the gloves come off at 4:30 Eastern right here on CNN.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired June 19, 2003 - 15:33   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Two more hot-tempered, opinionated guys -- "CROSSFIRE"'s hosts. On the right, Robert Novak. And on the left, Paul Begala.
We're glad you're both with us to weigh in on the subject matter. I can imagine the two of you have been talking about this amongst yourselves.

ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": No.

PAUL BEGALA, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": We have?

PHILLIPS: Now, we caught you off guard there. We got into that segment a little quickly there, didn't we?

NOVAK: Yes.

PHILLIPS: All right, guys. We got a number of e-mails. Let's get right to them and get your response.

This one comes from Jade in Pennsylvania: "Iraq 2003 is starting to look like Beirut 1982. There is a good reason to leave Iraq now, and that's to save lives."

PHILLIPS: Why don't we start -- who wants to weigh on that first?

NOVAK: I'll start off.

As you know, if you listen to me -- and I know you always listen to me -- I was not too keen about this intervention in Iraq. But these are the burdens of empire. If you're going to be -- if you're going to have an American imperialism -- imperiam -- you can't say, "Oh, boy, we've lost a few people."

These are not -- I feel very sorry for the families of these men and women who have died, but they're hardly less than the police forces in the United States we're losing any week in this country. So if you're serious about trying to help the people of Iraq, which I think was a big purpose of this intervention, you've got to stay there.

PHILLIPS: Paul, what do you think? Is it starting to look like Beirut?

BEGALA: Well, you know, Kyra, the problem is what's probably best articulated by those great foreign policy adviser Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash, who had that song back when I was in college, "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" Right? Because if I stay, there will be trouble, but if I go, it will double.

The president has a difficult set of options here. None of them are good. If he stays, American troops will continue to serve in a hostile environment, in a hostile climate, with people shooting at them every day. But if we go, we're likely to see a radical Islamist dictatorship. So I don't think leaving is an option. The problem is we should have never gone in the first place if we didn't have a sensible plan for occupation, and clearly we didn't ever have one.

PHILLIPS: Paul, I think I still have that album tucked away somewhere in a box.

This e-mail comes from Gerry in -- from Washington. "We started this war and we should finish it. War still goes on and we should beef up our troops to prove to the people of Iraq we are there to stay until we fix everything we destroyed."

There is a lot of fear -- you know, spending timing in the Middle East, a lot of the people are afraid -- you know, the troops have come in, and wondering if, indeed, they will stay this time around -- Bob.

NOVAK: I don't -- I think this is a phony debate, with all due apologies. There's no debate going on whether they should -- they're going to leave or not. They're going to stay. And the question is not really beefing up the troops, sending a few more divisions. It's just not a division kind of war. What they need is more military police, more occupation troops, need a little better planning.

I think Jerry Bremer, who is a very good man, is getting a handle on it. But the American people are such weanies, if they say, we're going to have a few casualties, and, Oh, dear, we've got to go back home/ These are professional soldiers. They signed up as professional soldiers. They're not draftees. And they got to suck it up and stay there.

PHILLIPS: All right, Paul. Bob says weanie. Is that fair?

BEGALA: No, it's not fair. In fact, what they are is suckers. They believed the president. He told us something. We took him at his word. That's always a mistake with George W. Bush. The "W," of course, standing for whoppers.

He told us before the war that it would be quick, that this would be easy, that we would be welcomed with roses in the streets. And when General Shinseki, who is the army chief of staff and knows a lot more about occupation -- he, after all, led peace-keeping in Bosnia -- said it would be 150,000 to 200,000 troops for 10 years, Mr. Bush's Pentagon leaders, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz publicly attacked General Shinseki.

Well, it turns out the general was right and the Bush administration was misleading us. People would not be so upset about this occupation if going into it, the president and his top advisers had leveled with us and told us that this would be a constant hostile environment.

NOVAK: Paul, I know you always try to be accurate, and I'm an admirer of General Shinseki. He said hundreds of thousands. He said hundreds of thousands. It was indefinite. He didn't say 10 years.

PHILLIPS: Well Joanne from Tacoma, Washington brings up this point: "Bush has no exit plan and never did. How many Americans must be murdered in Iraq before we can get out. Pandora's Box is open."

Is there an exit plan, guys?

NOVAK: There's no exit plan. There was no exit plan. Where was Clinton's exit plan for Kosovo? Where was the exit plan for Bosnia? They don't have exit plans for these things. You -- that's the whole problem. Once you get in, you're going to be stuck there. We've been stuck in Korea for 50 years. We've been stuck in Europe for 55 years. So if you're going to be a world power and you're going to say, We have business all over the world, this is one of the burdens of empire.

BEGALA: Bob is right, Kyra. But the thing is, the president should have leveled with us. When President Clinton led us into Kosovo, he -- first in Bosnia, he made the very mistake Bob points out. He said we would be out in a year. That was wrong. And he learned that lesson. So the second time around in Kosovo, he didn't give us a particular date that we would be finished.

But President Bush did lead us to believe that this would be about a two-year commitment and then soon some Jeffersonian democracy would flourish in Iraq.

NOVAK: When did we say two years, Paul?

BEGALA: I think at the American Enterprise Institute.

NOVAK: I don't think he said two years. Well, we'll check that, won't we?

PHILLIPS: All right, guys. Irene in Kansas City, Missouri: "I am the grandmother of a soldier that is fighting in Iraq and I believe that our soldiers should be brought home and let them run it the way they want. The oil is not worth it."

Oh, boy. There comes the "O" word.

NOVAK: Tell her grandson to get a job as a floor worker in a department store.

If he's going to go in the army, he's going to have to take orders and he's going to have to stay there as long as they want. I don't like grandmother saying to the military, bring my little sonny boy home.

BEGALA: Kyra, that's a rather stunning thing to say to a woman whose grandson is over there risking his life. For what? Those troops were sent over there to serve our country to, defend our country from a risk that the president said was real. Well, so far we've been there for months and haven't found that risk. There are no weapons of mass destruction that have been found so far, and yet they are going to have to stay.

People don't like it here at home, and I can certainly say as a former political adviser to the last president, this is an enormous political risk for Mr. Bush. He goes into this next election and he doesn't have a clear plan for bringing some sort of freedom and democracy to Iraq and ending this occupation, he's going to be in a lot of trouble.

NOVAK: Paul, if you think this army should be run like Students for a Democratic Society? You belonged to the SDS in school, didn't you?

BEGALA: Actually, I never belonged to SDS. I never hear of it.

But the country is a democracy, as Mr. Novak knows, and it's civilians who run the military, and those servicemen and women deserve our honor, our respect and so do their families.

NOVAK: They have to take orders too. They can't go around going to Paul Begala saying, I want to go home, Paul.

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIPS: You two. You're actually being pretty well-behaved.

All right. Final thoughts, gentlemen, from Virginia. Eunice says, "If our troops pull out of Iraq, everything they fought and died for would be for nothing. Who knows that Saddam would not rise up again?"

Final thoughts?

BEGALA: It's hard to say whether Saddam would. He may well be dead.

But the problem is if we do pull out immediately as some -- apparently of your e-mailers are suggesting. I think there's very little doubt that you would have a dictatorship, probably pretty closely modeled on the Iranian dictatorship next door, which is a disaster for the United States.

Hard to imagine anything worse for us than Saddam Hussein was. But if we were to pull out tomorrow, we would probably get something worse.

NOVAK: Yes, Paul's exactly right. I would have to agree on that point. And I also believe that this country, I think, has been in the state of a prolonged nervous breakdown. But the e-mailers are not determining military and foreign policy, thank God.

PHILLIPS: Bob, Paul, gentlemen, thank you so much. And in less than an hour, these guys are back, battling it out over Gore TV. It's time for a liberal talk show. I don't know. Well, the gloves come off at 4:30 Eastern right here on CNN.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com