Scarborough Country

And if the Americans shoot this man, Sadr, and there’s a bloody battle down there and Shiites are killed, he’s got a problem. So his interests are not the same as the American interests. And when they take power, the two are going to be in clear conflict, are they not?

PHARES: Yes, absolutely, Pat.

Let me propose this plan, because we have a lot of missing components here. I would suggest strongly to deal with the issue in the Sunni Triangle and in Fallujah first. And then because of a success that we may have in Fallujah, then the Shiite area will follow through. And in Fallujah, the major problem is this. We have to have an American ingredient, a neutral ingredient.

And I agree with Jack that we need to do it fast, even before June the 30th. But we also need to have an Iraqi ingredient. And let me explain that quickly. Certainly we need to isolate Fallujah on the one hand, to have those major axis within the city in the hands of the coalition. No doubt about that.

But stage two should have on the one hand an important media ingredient. We don’t have the equivalent of Al-Jazeera. We would be winning those military battles on the ground and Al-Jazeera would be — or the other Web sites of the jihadists would be winning the war at the same time.

BUCHANAN: All right.

Let me — Jack Jacobs, it seems to me the Marines — I mean, they killed apparently almost 500, 700, we don’t know how many, and they wounded about twice that many, which is a fairly bloody battle. But would it not have been better just to go in and get it over with and then deal with the politics afterwards?

JACOBS: Oh, I think so.

And, by the way, I think we’re a year overdue. We should have done this sort of thing a year ago. You know, there’s a big difference in the military between seizing and objective and securing an objective. We seized Iraq. But we didn’t secure anything. We sat back on our heels and we waited for the indigenous people to go sort things out for themselves. And we see exactly what happens when you don’t continue the attack to make sure that you actually have military control of each of these cities.

BUCHANAN: So we did not defeat them in the cities, and that might have been one of the problems attendant to not having the 4th Division come down from Turkey.

JACOBS: Well, that certainly was. And we certainly had too few troops in order to do it.

Right now the Marines are training their artillery men in the United States to be infantrymen because the objective is ultimately to bring Marines back into Iraq and have many more infantrymen than they have now, because they recognize — the command recognizes that there is not enough — there aren’t enough troops on the ground in order to do the job. Had we gone through the cities initially when we toppled the regime, house by house, taking everybody’s weapons away, we wouldn’t have had the problems that we have now.

Now, I can’t imagine why we would leave weapons in the hands of Iraqis.

BUCHANAN: OK, thank you, Colonel Jack Jacobs and thank you, Walid Phares. Appreciate it.

Coming up, a top Pentagon adviser, Richard Perle, is here to answer tough questions about his prewar predictions that didn’t quite pan out.

Then “The Passion” tops the box office again, but does it belong on network TV? We’ll debate that a little later.

Don’t you go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BUCHANAN: I’m going to ask one of the architects of the Iraq war why the plan was so flawed. Richard Perle joins me next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BUCHANAN: Many Americans are angry with President Bush and his administration because they feel they were misled by lines like this from my next guest — quote — “With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade. How close is he to nuclear weapons? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?”

That and other statements by Richard Perle, former chairman of the Pentagon’s prestigious Defense Review Board and author of “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,” now appear to have been false.

Richard, let me ask you, were you misled when you indicated that Saddam Hussein had uranium enrichment facilities operating in his country and he could have a nuclear weapon in one, two or three years?

RICHARD PERLE, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Well, it now looks as if that information was incorrect, yes.

You had always to face the question, when you have a variety of reports, how much risk are you prepared to take? It’s easy, in retrospect to say, well, that was wrong, we shouldn’t have taken it seriously. We didn’t take seriously other reports that turned out to be right and we paid a very heavy price for that.

BUCHANAN: Well, it certainly is true, if Saddam Hussein — and I was opposed to the war — if he were working on nuclear weapons, had an active program, and your statement were correct, I think the case becomes persuasive that you ought to go to war. Where did you get that information?

PERLE: Well, the information about his nuclear infrastructure was consistently reported by American intelligence. We didn’t know the exact state of it. But we knew that he had had a program, that scientists had been trained for that purpose.

BUCHANAN: So, at Defense Review Board, you had access to American intelligence?

PERLE: No, this has nothing to do with the Defense Review Board.

BUCHANAN: All right, let me cite you something else here. And it’s a statement by you, I believe, just a couple of months before that.

You cited Saddam’s bombmaker, Khidhir Hamza — and that’s the name of a book of his — in late 2001 as saying this. This is Hamza: “We began to build uranium enrichment facilities, many facilities, and we built 400 of them and they’re all over the country. Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You will never find them.”

He lied to you, didn’t he?

PERLE: Well, I don’t know whether he lied or the report of the activities of which he had personal knowledge was no longer valid at the point at which he said that.

(CROSSTALK)

PERLE: I have no reason to believe he lied.

BUCHANAN: But, Richard, uranium enrichment facilities, unlike, say, anthrax, which you can move out of the country, maybe he had it. You’ve got a uranium-rich facility and you’ve got materials there that you can pick up afterwards. He says 400 of them. They’re in classrooms. They’re in warehouses. They’re on farms and things like that. Our people went in there. They found zero.

PERLE: I understand.

I believe he was referring not to large installations, but to very small installations, a way of responding to the destruction of their nuclear reactor in 1981, where, as he related it, they built tiny little facilities in order to spread them around.

BUCHANAN: Have you talked to him after we went to war and said, listen, where the devil are these 400 uranium-enrichment facilities? I mean, they would have traces of uranium in them and everything.

PERLE: It appears that that information was incorrect. I’m not prepared to conclude that he lied simply because he was incorrect. Not all errors are lies.

BUCHANAN: Four hundred facilities, Richard?

PERLE: Well, 400 places in which enrichment was taking place or could take place.

BUCHANAN: Before the war, you said — quote — “I think there would be dancing in the streets if Saddam were removed from power, and the reaction of the Iraqi people would be reflected in the attitude of the Arab world generally.”

We now find America has, by most surveys, the Pew survey and others, has never been more hated there. And, of course, there may have been dancing in the streets that first day. But there certainly is no dancing in the streets that we’re there now. What happened?

PERLE: Well, there was indeed dancing in the streets at the liberation of Iraq. It was widely regarded as a liberation, except by those people who were in power with Saddam Hussein and clearly were facing a pretty bleak future.

We’ve been there too long, in my view. We have become an occupying power. We should have transferred authority before now. And in order to facilitate the transfer before now, we should have gone into Iraq with Iraqis at our side. And I regret that we didn’t do that. That was my strong preference.

BUCHANAN: Mr. Chalabi?

PERLE: Mr. Chalabi and others in the Iraqi National Congress.

BUCHANAN: All right, do you feel we should have gone in and transferred power quickly and then moved our forces out?

PERLE: No, I think there’s an argument for our remaining there alongside the Iraqis, but not in a position as an occupying power, the situation that will prevail when we do hand over sovereignty.

BUCHANAN: All right, but, right now, we have a serious uprising in Fallujah, obviously, and Ramadi, the Sunni areas, and a much smaller, but intense resistance from Shiites under this al-Sadr. And it’s got our people very much preoccupied and we’re going to have to put in two more combat brigades, 6,000 to 10,000 more troops, going to hold over troops coming back to the United States.

Should the United States — we went in to get rid of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction. Should we fight a war in Iraq to build a democracy when it’s quite clear this is going to be a long, extensive, bloody mess to do it?

PERLE: Well, I don’t know that it’s going to be a long, extensive, bloody mess. It’s certainly not easy. No one ever said it would be easy.

If the question is should we now pack up and go home and leave Iraq in an unstable situation, the answer is no. If you want to see dancing in the streets, you’ll see terrorists dancing in the streets if we are defeated in Iraq.

BUCHANAN: I think much of what the president said, if we were defeated, the consequences are exactly as he said them.

But I think there’s a feeling on part of the American people that they were sold a bill of goods, that this was about taking down Saddam, who’s a monster. And whatever he’s got, weapons of mass destruction, we can’t take the risk. And now suddenly we’ve got mission creep. We’re going to build democracy . And it looks like a bait and switch. Guys, they got us in there, and now they had another agenda and now they’re putting through third agenda and there’s nothing we can about it. Isn’t there some justification for folks feeling that way?

PERLE: No, look, I think there’s another way to look at this. And I suggest you look at it in this other way. And that is, we went into Iraq for all the reasons the president indicated and based on the best information that we had at the time.

Having gone into Iraq, having removed Saddam’s regime, we are now encountering issues that have to be dealt with.

BUCHANAN: All right.

PERLE: This isn’t bait and switch. There was no false reason put in front and a real reason behind it. We’re responding to circumstance.

(CROSSTALK)

BUCHANAN: All right, if there’s no bait and switch, who got it wrong? Who indicated that this would be a cakewalk, we would go in, get this done, you know, flowers in the streets — you saw the question the president was asked — and democracy would sprout in the Middle East and the Palestinians and Israeli would get together, all this hooey about all these wonderful things that were going to happen?

And now the Americans say, we’re in a hellish mess. And I think they might agree with you in saying, we can’t just walk out. Who made the blunder in Iraq?

PERLE: First of all, I don’t accept the caricature of the argument that was made before.

There were errors about what we would find when we got there. There’s no question about that. We did not find the weapons of mass destruction that we had every reason to believe Saddam had hidden. And the evidence for that came from the CIA and other intelligence organizations, not only ours, but those of our allies.

BUCHANAN: But weren’t we misled about the kind of resistance we would run into? When you take a look at right now, a year later, casualties are escalating. They’re running at about 160, 180 a month now in Iraq. No one predicted that.

Who made the mistake of thinking this would be a piece of cake?

PERLE: Well, I don’t know that — I certainly didn’t say it would be a piece of cake.

BUCHANAN: No, but I mean, who did? The president was

(CROSSTALK)

BUCHANAN: No, he was hammered the other night on this, Richard And people asked him, and he said, we’ve had — it’s been some tough weeks. Did he anticipate this?

PERLE: Well, you’ll have to ask him what he anticipated. But I don’t ever recall the president ever saying it was going to be a piece of cake.

BUCHANAN: Did you anticipate this?

PERLE: Did I anticipate that there would be resistance?

BUCHANAN: Like this?

PERLE: Yes.

Did I anticipate that we would have as many terrorists coming into the country and organizing their kind of suicidal resistance? I don’t think that could have been foreseen.

BUCHANAN: Well, let me ask you, how long do you think we’ll be in there fighting? How much treasure — I guess it’s $150 billion for Iraq now. How many lives will it take before we get — quote — “the job done”? I guess that’s build democracy and turn it over to the Iraqis and enable us at least to bivouac, go back to encampments and then pull out? How long?

PERLE: I can’t answer that.

BUCHANAN: What would be your estimation?

PERLE: I don’t know. I think that the handover of authority will significantly improve the situation, not on day one necessarily, but I think we’ll see a rapid political change.

(CROSSTALK)

BUCHANAN: If we were back, say, in December of 2001 or before 2002, would you — I mean, would you have recommended as enthusiastically we go to Iraq as you did at that time?

PERLE: Yes. I believe we were right to go to Iraq. I think we were managing a risk. The risk was very real.

And the fact that we did not find the anthrax that we knew he had created and that he refused to account for doesn’t change the fact that leaving him in possession of what we believed he had was simply too dangerous. We followed strong leadership.

BUCHANAN: Given the American people’s — the declining support for Iraq and the fact that Kerry’s moved ahead, solely, probably because of these two weeks, do you think President Bush is in peril of losing his reelection, at some peril in any event, because of the situation in Iraq, because he went to war in Iraq?

PERLE: I think the president’s going to win this election, and I think the American people will give their approval to his steadfastness and resilience. If he were to pick up and leave now, then I think he’d put his presidency at risk. And what does Kerry offer the country?

BUCHANAN: Not a great deal.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

PERLE: He did vote with the president after he didn’t vote with the president.

BUCHANAN: I know he did.

Thank you very much for coming, Richard Perle. We appreciate it. We hope you’ll come back.

PERLE: Thanks.

BUCHANAN: All right.