Yes, he says that he would oppose October 2002 war resolution in hindsight, but his contention that "I didn't have access to the intelligence" that members of the Senate serving in 2002 had is a lame excuse... and he also appears pretty gullible.
First, read through this partial transcript from the interview, and then I'll explain why:
Tweety: Would you have voted in October of 2002 Mr. Webb to authorize the war?Jim Webb: I clearly would not have. If you read the Washington Post piece that I wrote in September 2002, I was saying don't do it.
Tweety: Mr. Miller, would you have voted to authorize?
Harris Miller: I didn't have access to all the intelligence that Senator Allen and other Senators had... [Tweety cuts him off]
Tweety: No, no, right now, looking backward, would you have voted to...?
Harris Miller: Looking back, no. Looking back, no. If I'd had access to the intelligence, no....
Tweety: Was it a mistake to go to Iraq, Mr. Miller?
Harris Miller: Yes, sir.
Tweety: Was it a mistake to go to Iraq? [to Webb]
Jim Webb: It was and I said so at the time.
....
Tweety: Is there any difference between your position and his, Mr. Webb?
Jim Webb: I arrived at it far earlier than Harris Miller did. I think this is recent for him.
Tweety: ... [to Miller] at the time that we went [to Iraq] were you cheering that decision or were you opposing it instinctively?
Harris Miller: I wasn't opposing it instinctively because I beleieved General Colin Powell when he said there was a plan to deal with the post war effort. In fact that was a lie. We were misled by the president, and it became clear within three or four months that it was a huge mistake.
Tweety: But I'm not clear then, did you think it was wrong to go to Iraq, or you just didn't like what happened when we got there? Did you think it was wrong to put American troops into a third world country where we would have to occupy it, just as a principle? Do you think that was wrong?
Harris Miller: Yes, that was wrong, but that wasn't what we were told. We were told there was weapons of mass distruction which was a lie. And we were told there was a plan to get out of Iraq within three months. Both of those were lies, Chris.
Tweety: But you believed them?
Harris Miller: Because I didn't have access to the intelligence.
Tweety: Did you have access to any history books?
Harris Miller: Yes, I had access to history books.
Tweety: Well, did you believe that the United States going into a third world country would be cheered? Did you believe that Howard Fineman was right when he was kidding about the happy Iraqis scenario? You believed it. You believed that they would cheer on arrival.
Harris Miller: No. I didn't believe that. What I believed was that the U.S. had a plan, and was briefed by people from the State Department who has clearance, that said there was a plan to get the Iraqi troops to control their own country after the war... [yada yada]
Tweety: Mr. Webb, let me ask you, did you believe that we were wrong to go in, regardless of what happened there?
Mr. Webb: I wrote in the Washington Post piece five months before we went in that this was not simply about WMD, it was about turning our troops into terrorist targets, and there was not an exit strategy, because the principal architects of this war did not intend for us to leave.
On the issue of not "having access to the intelligence," Miller shows us that he isn't thinking about, or maybe hasn't even had the curiosity to read about, the truth that has come out since the invasion. The intelligence briefings given to members of Congress were incredibly skewed -- they didn't mention that the Department of Energy experts on nuclear proliferation didn't believe that the famed 'aluminum tubes' were for uranium enrightment centrifuges, or that the Air Force analysts who know drone aircraft believed that the Iraqi drones were for aerial surveillance, and were not intended for delivering chemical weapons. As we know, those caveats were put in the footnotes of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and left out of the briefing given to members of Congress. Saying that you "didn't have access to the intelligence" that Senators did doesn't make much sense.
But the bigger issue to me is gullibility. I can understand how members of Congress voted for the resolution based on their perceptions of a WMD threat from an intentionally skewed intelligence briefing. But did Harris Miller really believe that the Bush administration could rapidly turn things over to Iraqis and get us out in short order??? Anyone with the most cursory familiarity with the history and politics of Iraq would know that it wouldn't be possible to put the country back together quickly. That was the reason Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft cited when people asked them after they left office why they hadn't "finished the job" in 1991 -- they knew that it would be a long occupation, and once we were in, we'd have an awful situation on our hands, and wouldn't be able to get out.
Jim Webb "got it" back in 2002 -- and understood that the plan that the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith crowd had in mind didn't need an exit strategy, because they intended for us to stay:
"Other than the flippant criticisms of our "failure" to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of Iraq, but it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay. This reality was the genesis of a rift that goes back to the Gulf War itself, when neoconservatives were vocal in their calls for "a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad." Their expectation is that the United States would not only change Iraq's regime but also remain as a long-term occupation force in an attempt to reconstruct Iraqi society itself."
Webb also knew that getting American troops bogged down in long-term occupation missions is generally something we should try to avoid, as he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in November 2001:
The key elements of a new doctrine seem obvious. We must retain our position as the dominant guarantor of world-wide stability through strategic and conventional forces that deter potentially aggressive nations. We must be willing to retaliate fiercely against nations that participate in or condone aggressive acts, as well as non-national purveyors of asymmetric warfare. But we should take great care when it comes to committing large numbers of ground forces to open-ended combat, and we should especially avoid using them as long-term occupation troops.
We've still got two full years of BushCo left after the next crop of Senators is seated in 2007. Who do you want up there on the Senate Foreign Relations or Armed Services committees questioning Donald Rumseld -- the guy who's got their number and not afraid to call them out and ask them the questions that get to their real intentions? Or the guy who really believed that the Bush administration had a plan to turn it over the the Iraqis in short order, and believed that was likely to happen?
That's the choice for Virginia Democrats when we vote in the primary next Tuesday, June 13th.
Watch the video yourself and decide:
And then Miller said he DID get briefed by State Dept people. Huh? He did or did not get briefed? And was it classified info - if so, why was he given access?
Sounds like he didn't have a leg to stand on and was fumbling around until Chris got bored with the topic.
But saying he believed that we would actually be out of Iraq quickly once we handed it over to the Iraqis makes him seem very naive.
The reality is that Miller is an inferior decision-maker. Webb has the background and courage to not make these mistakes.
Frankly, Webb's education prepared him to make these sorts of decisions. It was Webb who said,
"Unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake."
Where Webb was educated in history and experienced in war and defense policy, Miller has the credentials to be a masterful manipulator and political insider. I think that we can see whose abilities are most necessary from the debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan...
Just a gut feeling there. What do ya'll think?