Fox News Sunday scored the big interview of the weekend: Chris Wallace spent a half hour with Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney used his time to remind the American people of exactly what’s at stake in Iraq, and that this is not solely a sectarian civil war we are now involved in: “Remember what Bin Laden’s strategy is: He doesn’t think he can beat us in a stand up fight, he thinks he can force us to quit. He believes that after Lebanon in ’83 and Somalia in ’93, the United States doesn’t have the stomach for a long war.” He also pointed out that this has only recently metastasized into a sectarian conflict because of the action of al Qaeda influenced Sunni terrorists, telling Wallace “We went up until the spring of ’06, and the Shia sat back and did not respond to the attacks, they sat there and took it. But after they got hit at the golden dome in Samarra, that precipitated the sectarian violence we’re seeing now. . . . no war ever goes smoothly all the way, sometimes you have to adjust.”
On Democratic opposition to the president’s plan for a surge in troop strength, Cheney was somewhat detached. “You can’t run a war by committee. The Constitution is very clear that the president is in fact, under article two, commander in chief,” Cheney said, adding that the “Democrats have now taken control of the House and the Senate. It’s not enough for them just to be critics anymore. We have these meetings with members of Congress . . . but then they end up critical of what we’re trying to do, advocating withdrawal or so called redeployment of the forces, but they have absolutely nothing to offer in its place. I have yet to hear a coherent policy out of the democratic side with respect to an alternative to what the president’s proposed.”
Face the Nation featured interviews with two senators who happen to be frontrunners for their party’s nomination for president in 2008. John McCain spoke to Bob Schieffer on the need for more troops in Iraq and what the road ahead might look like. “I can’t guarantee it will succeed,” McCain said of the increase in troops, “but I can guarantee catastrophe if we fail or continue the present strategy–and that is that we will go in, and we will clear and hold and build. As most people know, we have gone in, cleared and left, and the insurgents have returned.” He also condemned the callow resolution being offered by Congress this week–the nonbinding resolution disagreeing with the president’s proposed troop increase. “Look, if these people are serious that oppose this increasing troops and change in strategy, then they should vote to cut off funding. And that way they can then say we tried to stop it. A motion of disapproval I view as purely a political ploy to do further damage to the president of the United States.”
Needless to say, Barack Obama disagreed. Here he is with his vision of the next few months in Iraq: “It is important for us, at this point, as Americans–not as Democrats and Republicans–to focus on how do we deal with what is a bad situation. I think everybody agrees that it’s a bad situation. The specific proposal that I put forward, that is echoed in the Iraq Study Group, does not call for an immediate total withdrawal, and I think Senator McCain and Vice President Cheney have been directing their fire at a straw man, suggesting the Democrats have called for a total withdrawal. What we have suggested is that we begin a phased pullout based on communications with commanders on the field to make sure that our troops can still provide logistical support, can still provide the training, can still provide the counterinsurgency activities that are necessary in Iraq.”
Meet the Press gave time to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who took on the notion that Americans trying to get things accomplished in Iraq, telling Tim Russert the president and his advisers “made a judgment that the Iraqis simply do not have the wherewithal to get it done. And therefore the president has made a judgment that, yes, the Iraqis have to be in the lead, it has to be their strategy, but we need to reinforce our troops so we that can be standing with them and to ensure that it succeeds.” He also repeated the vice president’s point about the relatively recent wave of sectarian conflict, and pointed out that most of the violence was occurring in a pretty small area (so small that a surge might do the trick in stemming the violence). “I think we were doing pretty well in Iraq until February of ’06, and the–and the bombing of the golden temple–Golden Mosque in Samarra. And at that point–and I said at the time, and the president said at the time, the Iraqis looked into the abyss and stepped back, and they did. The Iraqi army didn’t fragment, the government did come together two months later in terms of a unity government. But it set off sectarian violence, concentrated in Baghdad, as the president said. Eighty percent of it is within 30 miles of Baghdad.”
This Week also featured an interview with Hadley, and he again emphasized the fact that turning control of security over to the Iraqis would be a poor course of action at this point. “The alternatives are continuing to do what we doing now, which is stay the course, which everybody agrees is not working, or turning the whole thing over to the Iraqis now . . . and it’s simply clear that the Iraqis are not ready to take responsibility.” The roundtable was relatively bland, except for one little outburst between the Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Fareed Zakaria. Vanden Heuvel said “listen, let me just begin by saying that the people have been ahead of the politicians at every step of the way, the politicians are responding to people pressure,” before being cut off by Zakaria who, half laughingly, reminded her of the actual sequence of events: “Katrina, this is a fantasy: the people were in favor of the Iraq War, there was 65 percent support when Congress voted for it, there was support for the first year, this is the populist fantasy that the people are always right.” Not appreciating her point being so succinctly shot down, Vanden Heuvel responded in a tone one octave shriller than usual: “It is NOT a populist fantasy.” Point: Zakaria.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
