Transcript and Comments: Jim Webb Faces the Nation

SCHIEFFER:  And good morning again...Our first guest this morning, Virginia Senator Jim Webb, fought in Vietnam as a Marine. His son is in Iraq today, and he opposes this war, as many Americans heard when he made the Democratic response to the State of the Union speech.

Senator, you came home to protest from the war you fought. How did you feel about these demonstrations yesterday?

Senator JIM WEBB (Democrat, Virginia; Armed Services Committee): I have a strong belief that in--that in this country, you know, one of our greatest strengths is that we have the right to stand in front of the people in power and state our views. And, just very quickly, I think one of the differences between right now and what was happening when you--in 1969, when you were first covering this, I was a company commander as a Marine in Vietnam. The turn--the turmoil in that period was a different sort of turmoil than it is here. That--you had the civil rights movement combining with the anti-war movement and the--sort of a revolutionary spirit. And a lot of it, quite frankly, had spilled over into the--to the area of irresponsibility. And, at the same time, the people who were supporting the Vietnam War--and I was one of them--believed strongly in the reasons that they were there. Eight years after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, in 1972, the American people still agreed, by a--by a margin of 74-to-11  percent that it was important that South Vietnam not fall to the Communists.

What we have today is a specific situation, the Iraq war. And I do not oppose the Iraq war specifically. What I said, here, four years ago, almost to the day, I was sitting with you, basically saying this was a strategic error, and I and a number of other people with long military background were saying that this was not good for the United States, that all these things that are happening now were going to happen. So what we have today is an American public by polling, by percentages that has turned strongly against this strategic effort, the lack of wisdom in the strategic effort. It's a different situation.

Webb's reference to those poll results has stirred up a bit of controversy at TPM Cafe ("Get Your History Straight, Senator").  As it turns out, though, Jim Webb is absolutely correct. I dug into the New York Times archives and I found the poll Webb was talking about.  According to a Louis Harris poll from September 12, 1972, 74% of voters said they "supported President Nixon's contention that 'it is important that South Vietnam not fall into the control of the Communists.'  Eleven percent did not support it."  The poll also showed that 64% of voters supported mining North Vietnam's harbors, with just 32% against. Finally, 55% suported continued "heavy bombing" of North Vietnam, with just 24 percent disapproving.  Fascinating...I would have thought by 1972 that more Americans would have been opposed to all of these things, but the fact is, they weren't.  Lesson?  Don't argue with Jim Webb! :)

SCHIEFFER: In your response to the State of the Union, you said that, unless the president moves to end this war, and these are your words, Democrats will be showing him the way. Give us some details.

Sen. WEBB: Well, I think that the most important thing for a lot of people who I am aligned with on this to make clear is that we're not opposed to any specific plan, we're not opposed to the president's plan. What I object to is the fact that there isn't a plan, that there hasn't been a plan for four years. And this is almost just like a tipping point for a lot of people who are basically saying you cannot continue to give the administration a free hand in the manipulation of troop numbers without a clear end point to a strategy. I think one thing that I've seen over and over again here is that, when things go wrong, they go to the American military, that when all else fails, we decide we're going to throw more military people in, rather than trying to go into the political solutions, which are going to be the way that this is going to be resolved. I'm on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. We've had extensive hearings. And the preponderance of evidence among the experts is that this is going to be solved from the outside in with strong diplomatic overtones. And this administration's not going there. They refuse to go there.

Interesting formulation that we're not opposed to the President's plan, we're opposed to the fact that there isn't a plan. I think what Webb is getting at here is the utter lack of a coherent strategy from the Bush Administration for the post-invasion period in Iraq.  I'm reading Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco" right now, and it's quite clear that the Administration had absolutely no clue what it was going to do after it defeated the Iraqi army in the spring of 2003, except possibly to be greated by rose petals and by grateful Iraqis with open arms.  Even once it became clear that this wouldn't be the case, we never came up with a coherent strategy to deal with the situation. And today, Bush just says throw a few thousand more troops at the problem, rather than go through the rigorous, disciplined excercise known as "formulating strategy."  Apparently, that is an alien concept to the Stupid Administration.

SCHIEFFER: Well, what are the political solutions that you see?

Sen. WEBB: I've been saying for nearly three years, since April of '04, that we must get some sort of a Dayton-like accord, a regional accord, not simply inside Iraq, where the countries in the region can be brought to the table and assume ownership of the future of Iraq as it relates to the ethnic groups and communities inside Iraq, to which they have been historically allied. That is an approach this administration will not take. It continues to overly use the military side of it.

I'm not sure I've heard the phrase "Dayton-like accord" used before, but it's an interesting one.  Dayton, of course, refers to the deal reached in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995 between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, with the involvement of the United States, Russia, the EU, the UK, Germany and France.  The full name for the deal was the "General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina."  According to Jim Webb, that's exactly what we need now in Iraq, and that will require the involvement of regional actors.  Look, if we could negotiate with a war criminal like Milosevic, we can certainly deal with actors in this conflict.  Whoops, just one problem; last time, the Clinton Administration was in charge, but today we've got the Dumbya administration bumbling along.  Time for Congress to assert itself, because we can't expect anything serious from the Bush bozos...

SCHIEFFER: The new secretary of defense says criticism of this policy emboldens the enemy, and Vice President Cheney made very clear the other day that your criticism of the president's policy is hogwash. What would you say in response to that?

Sen. WEBB: Well, I al--I already did respond to Vice President Cheney's comments. I mean, if you can look--go back and look at his record of  comments all the way through this war, all of it has been off, all of it has been wrong. I think it is--I think it's wrong for the secretary of defense to say that what we're doing emboldens the enemy. First of all, who's the enemy? Who they talking about? Are they talking about Iran? Are they talking about the insurgents? Are they talking about al-Qaeda? This is a situation that's similar to what we saw in Lebanon when I was over there as a journalist in the '80s. This is a five-sided problem now, and the way that you deal with a five-sided problem is boldly stepping forward and bringing them to the table so no one is on the outside and forcing some sort of a solution. At the same time, we continue to fight international terrorism, the terrorism that wasn't in Iraq before we started but that is there now, and terrorism outside of Iraq. We have lost the place in the world that we had when we began this because of what we did. And, you know, sometimes that takes a deep breath by national leaders to try to move things in a different way.

Excellent point on this vaguely defined, apparently monolithic "enemy."  Another sign of this Administration's muddled, fuzzy, erroneous thinking - if there's any thinking at all - on Iraq.  Can the Bush crowd even conceptualize a "five-sided problem," or are they stuck in one, possibly two ("good" and "evil") dimensions?  I fear the latter.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me ask you this. Number one, you're going to pass a resolution in the Senate--that seems to be what all the thinking is these days--criticizing in some way the president's policy to expand the force in Iraq. Should Congress, after that passes, if it has no impact on the president and he says he intends to go forward, should Congress begin to think of taking stronger actions like containing or putting limits on funding for this war in some way?

Sen. WEBB: I think--I think you will see other congressional actions. I think what you're going to see first of all is a sense of the Congress that they are in disagreement with the leadership of the administration, having given this administration four years to try to come up with a strategy where there's a clearly articulable end point, which we don't have now, that's the problem so many people have. I'm very concerned about how reconstruction funds have been used, more than $30 billion. A lot of it's gone to sweetheart deals to American companies. A lot of it's unaccounted for. I've said very clearly I'm going to start putting my lamp shade on, or whatever they call those things...

Time to rev up that modern-day Truman Commission, it seems to me, to investigate the gross waste, fraud, and abuse we've seen on no-bid contracting deals in Iraq.  Can we say Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old company?

SCHIEFFER: Eyeshade.

Sen. WEBB: ...eyeshade and going after these programs. I spent four years on a defense resources board, you know, breaking down these sorts of things. And we're going to really go at it. Now, I would like to say one other thing, because I think it's really important to the debate. Before these hearings began, Senator John McCain is a long-time friend of mine, I have great respect for him, pulled me aside, and he basically said, `We have to conduct this debate in a way that does not impugn the patriotism of either side.' And I hope Senator McCain and others will remember that. Because what I have been seeing over this last week is something from the other side on this that--that--that borders on irresponsibility. I don't believe that there is any politician who has the right to say that he or she is speaking for the troops, for the military. Our military is as diverse politically as our country is, and it's--it's wrong to say we're going to let--let our military people down in terms of winning if we start taking this in a different direction. What we're doing is trying to define specifically how this could be a win.

Labeling ones' political opponents as somehow demonstrating less patriotism than others is disgraceful and unAmerican.  The fact is, Jim Webb, John Warner, and all the others who question and oppose an escalation in Iraq are highly patriotic, and to suggest otherwise - especially coming from guys like Bush and Cheney who pulled strings to get out of Vietnam - is beneath contempt.

SCHIEFFER: All right. Senator, I want to leave it right there...

Another interesting, thought-provoking interview with Jim Webb.  I'm sure there will be many more to come. Rock on, Senator Webb!

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