Transcript excerpt from Tim Russert's Meet the Press where he questions Lindsey Graham's statement that our 1st challenge in Iraq is al Qaeda:
>>MR. RUSSERT: But you also identified another problem. Here’s Lindsey Graham on Tuesday: “The current political leadership in Iraq is paralyzed. They’re incapable, in my opinion, of making the hard decisions they need to make. You need a change in people,” a “change in attitude.”
The director of the CIA is quoted in The Washington Post as saying in November, “The government in Iraq is unable to govern.” If, in fact, the Iraqi government, after four and a half years, is not capable of governing, is paralyzed, why are we asking American men and women to go over there and continue to fight for them?
SEN. GRAHAM: Because it’s in our national security interest to make sure that al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven. Lee Hamilton and...
MR. RUSSERT: But you keep mentioning al-Qaeda. Let me go back to the director of the CIA.
SEN. GRAHAM: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: This is Michael Hayden, again from The Post. “Michael Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, President Bush regularly listed al-Qaeda as first.”
SEN. GRAHAM: So did General Petraeus. General Petraeus says the number one enemy of America is al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Lee Hamilton in December said that our chief national security interest, in a sense, is al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Let me tell you why we have to beat al-Qaeda in Iraq before anything else falls into place. Number one, they’re an extremist group that have come to this country, Iraq, to destroy this effort at democracy. And they were able to thrive under the old strategy. They were able to occupy a territory in Anbar province. On this show in September last year, everyone said Anbar has—is gone. What did Petraeus do? He said, “Give me more troops, and I’m going to get out behind these walls, I’m going to live with the Iraqi army and police forces, and I’m going to try to align myself with people who reject al-Qaeda.” And it is working. I went to Ramadi on the Fourth of July, the 5th of July, I could not do that before. So the surge is al-Qaeda’s worst nightmare. They have been diminished. The biggest success of the surge is not that we militarily pushed al-Qaeda out of Anbar, it’s that the people who lived in Anbar have rejected al-Qaeda and aligned themselves with us.<
Read this latest dispatch from Iraq and the reporter verifies Sen Graham's remarks: michaelyon-online.com |
