WHILE THE MAIN focus of the Sunday morning talk shows was, of course, Iraq, a variety of other issues were discussed as well. This Week featured an interview with incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid. He passed on good news about Senator Tim Johnson; the South Dakota Democrat is recovering and “all members of the Senate are praying for” him. Johnson’s untimely illness has, for the moment, jeopardized the Democratic takeover of the Senate, but Reid is confident that his caucus will hold together. (Of Joe Lieberman, who recently returned to Washington as an “independent” after decades of service as a Democrat, Reid said “there is no question he’ll caucus with us and vote with us 90% of the time.”)
Reid also offered his thoughts on Iraq, grim as they were. He is in favor of a rapid pullout, telling George Stephanopoulos that “by the first quarter of 2008, American troops should be out of there.” He explained, “I have no military experience, but I have political experience–the American people will not allow this war to go along as it has.” In other words, if politicians want to save their butts they’ll end this conflict, and the Iraqis be damned.
This Week also had an interview with Jack Keane who, along with Fred Kagan, has set forth a plan for victory in Iraq. “We change the mission to the security of the people of Baghdad,” he told Stephanopoulos. The problem, he thinks, is that “we cleared out the insurgents and Shia death squads from the areas, but we never committed ourselves to phase two of the operation, which is significant, and that is to put a 24/7 force in the neighborhoods to protect the people.” He was accompanied by former admiral Joe Sestak, the new congressman from Pennsylvania, who reiterated Reid’s cut and run strategy: “We need to [cut our losses] . . . every day we’re in Iraq our overall security around the world keeps decreasing.”
The roundtable took a look at the Obama obsession sweeping the nation. E.J. Dionne said that the junior senator from Illinois “has nothing to lose if he runs,” and George Will added that “part of the message of Obamamania . . . is the queasiness Democrats feel about entrusting their nomination to” Hillary Clinton. Richard Stengel hesitated to crown Obama or Hillary just yet, saying that it’s more wide open than people think. The roundtable also talked about the booming economy, and George Will laid out why people are a little less thrilled about it than they might have been 10 years ago: “For two centuries, people have assumed that the process by which prosperity grew also caused personal security to grow. Now there’s a sense that the progress of economic growth (globalization and all the rest) makes us less secure and this sets us up for a big flinch . . . one in 13 American jobs disappears every quarter to be replaced by slightly more than that. But you have to be used to this churning, and people may be tired of that churning.”
Meet the Press focused on former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who reviews William S. Cohen’s Dragonfire in this week’s issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD). He summed up his analysis of Iraq thusly: “the president’s got to make a very hard decision, and that’s why I used the word ‘failure.’ This president is a very proud, very stubborn man, has to come to grips with the fact that the policy he has followed–with all good intention–is not succeeding. . . . I believe a Franklin Delano Roosevelt civil conversation corps designed to mop up every young Iraqi male who’s unemployed would be as big a strategic step in Iraq towards victory as whether you have more troops or fewer troops. The fact you have 60 percent unemployment among young males in Iraq is a disaster.” He also hopes that the war can be shifted away from a Bush-centric issue to a Congressional issue, thus defusing some of the tension brought about by Bush’s unpopularity: “I would send more troops if it was in a context of a new strategy with a dramatically new commitment, with a bipartisan resolution in the Congress. I mean, the center of gravity for American policy right now is the president finding a bipartisan agreement in the Congress in the first two or three months to send a signal to the world that it is America’s–this, this can’t be Bush’s war.”
Gingrich also brought up a story that didn’t get nearly enough play in the national media. “Well, let’s start with an incident recently in Illinois where the FBI sold hand grenades to a jihadist who wanted to go into a mall at Christmas and blow up himself and as many people as possible. The FBI now reports–and by the way, the local Muslim community thanked the FBI for trapping him, and the ACLU was worried that entrapment was involved. Just take those two standards. The local Muslims who are Americans and patriots and don’t want to be blown up in the mall thought it was terrific to arrest this guy for trying to buy hand grenades, and the ACLU thought there’s probably a real infringement of his legal right to be stupid.”
Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, both of the New York Times, were also featured guests of Tim Russert this week. Here’s what Friedman had to say about the current state of Iraq: “In some ways, Zarqawi won, the arch-al Qaeda Sunni terrorist. Iraq was always a long-shot, but I was of the view that, after the invasion, the Shia of Iraq–or the majority–were basically ready to work with the Sunnis. They were basically ready to write off the last 30 years as Saddam’s problem. And the Sunni al-Qaeda strategy was to provoke the Shia with murderous, really outrageous attacks on their mosques and on their markets until they finally rose up and said, ‘No more.'” He also made the most asinine comment of the week when he told the first lady and the former secretary of defense (who were complaining about the relentlessly negative coverage of Iraq by the national media) to “Get off of it. I mean, we’ve got a hero in our newspaper, John Burns. Another hero, Dexter Filkins, there’s a whole series of heroes over there.” That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, New York Times reporters: the real heroes!
Face the Nation had an exclusive interview with Colin Powell, and he shared his thoughts on Iraq. He sees this as the third phase of the conflict, and the most crucial, telling Bob Schieffer “the most serious phase began earlier this year, phase three, with the blowing up of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. And that turned it into sect-on-sect violence, communitarian violence, which I think has degenerated into what some of us are calling, anyways, a civil war. And it is very difficult to see how the American Army, the United States Armed Forces, can impose its will on this kind of conflict.”
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
