Murtha vs. Bush on Iraq: Plan vs. "No Plan"...

NBC June 18, 2006 at 09:03 AM
READ MORE: Iraq
From the June 18 edition of Meet the Press:

REP. MURTHA: Well, "stay the course" is "stay and pay." This is the thing that has worried me right along. We're spending $8 billion dollars a month, $300 million dollars a day. And to give you some perspective of what that means, Gates said, "I'm going to quit the corporation, or I'm going to--less time with the corporation." Well, you weigh $30 billion dollars. That's four months of the cost of this war. This port security, if you want to spend more money, it'd would take 47 years the way we're spending it. Education, the No Child Left Behind, a couple months of the war would pay for that. Whose going to, whose going to pay for this down the road? Our children and grandchildren are paying for this war. And then you have the, the, the emotional strain, the, the, the people who are being hurt.

On the floor the other day, you may have heard this, one fellow says, "We're fighting this war." We're not fighting this war. One percent of the American people, these young men and women are fighting this war, with heavy packs, with 70 pounds of equipment, with helmets on in 130 degrees. That's who's fighting this war. And they say "stay the course." There's no plan. You open up this plan for victory, there's no plan there. It's just "stay the course." That doesn't solve any problem.

It's worse today than it was six months ago when I spoke out initially. When I spoke out, the garbage wasn't being collected, oil production below pre-war level--all those things indicated to me we weren't winning this, and it's the same today, if not worse. Anbar Province. There's not one project been done in Anbar Province. Two million people live there. They have no water at all, no oil production, they have no electricity at all in that province where is the heartland of the defense. The first six months we went in there, no--there--not a shot was fired, so it shows you how it's changed.

It's getting worse. That's why I feel so strongly. All of us know how important it is internationally to win this war. We know how important. We import 20 million barrels of oil a day--we use 20 million barrels of oil. We know how important, international community. But we're doing it all ourself, and there's no plan that makes sense. We need to have more international cooperation. We need to redeploy our troops, the periphery. What happened with Zarqawi could have been done from the out--it was done from the outside. Our planes went in from the outside. So there's no reason in the world that they can't redeploy the troops. They've become the targets, they're caught in the civil war, and I feel very strongly about it.

MR. RUSSERT: Is it appropriate for the president's principal political adviser to accuse the Democrats of cutting and running?

REP. MURTHA: I think it's, it's, it's a, a name--they just use that. I say "stay and pay." And what I mean by stay and pay, and I'm talking about the hardship on the families, the hardship on the troops. And there's no plan, that's the thing. It's easy to say that. That's, that's an easy--the public is way ahead of this. The public is two-to-one against what we're doing, and they want a change in direction. That's the thing I see the most.

MR. RUSSERT: ...Do you believe any Democrat who seeks the nomination for president in 2008, who voted for the war in Iraq, should publicly say not just the war's been mismanaged, "I was wrong to vote for the war."

REP. MURTHA: Yeah, it's obvious. It was a mistake. And I've said this from the very start. I mean, you had no weapons of mass destruction, you had no connection with al-Qaeda, there was no danger to our national security. We don't put young people in harm's way unless we have a threat to our national security.

I'm in a hospital, young woman's standing there beside her wound--badly wounded husband, and she says he's been in Iraq twice, and he enlisted to fight for America, not for Iraq. We want stability; it's an international problem. But, but we, we, we can't achieve it in the direction they're going. These, these comments they make about cutting and running, so forth and so on, that doesn't, that doesn't solve the problem. What is their plan? They have no plan. And we're, we're recruiting terrorists against us, Tim. That's the problem.

MR. RUSSERT: They say their plan is, when the Iraqis stand up, we stand down. That, if given time, the Iraqis will produce enough of a military and security force to secure their country, put down the insurrection, and allow the Americans to go home.

REP. MURTHA: I, I believe when we redeploy, that will happen. I believe there's only 1,000 foreign fighters, 1,000 in al-Qaeda. Might be more foreign fighters, but 1,000 al-Qaeda in Iraq.

I believe they will get rid of them. Just like Zarqawi. It didn't come from us; it came from the Iraqis. The Iraqis know who these people are, and they'll get rid of them. I think there'll be less chaos than there is when, when we're there. Because we're the ones that are forcing--they're recruiting people. They're--when a person's willing to kill themselves, why? Because we're there. Eighty percent of the people want us out. The president, vice president of Iraq said, "Give us a timetable to get out." They know how important it is.

Internationally, who have we held responsible for this thing and accountable? Have we held secretary of defense accountable? Have we held anybody in the White House accountable? They promote people who're responsible for us going to war, rather than hold them accountable.

That's the first stage. And the second stage: Admit you made a mistake. President's admitted he made a few mistakes. It's more than that. We went to war on the wrong assumptions. We made a terrible mistake, and we need to talk to the international community, get their help, just like in the first Gulf War, where they paid $60 billion dollars, they had 160,000 troops involved in that, and we went to the border. Bush One said, "I'm not going to Iraq because I don't want to occupy it, I don't, I don't want to rehabilitate it. It would cost too much money and too many lives." And he was right. And a lot of right-wingers said, "Oh, no, we should've gone in." Well, they found out what it's like to go in now.

Read the whole transcript here.