Market Call

Gentlemen, its good to see you both with me once again, appreciate it.

(CROSS TALK)

SCHAFFLER: P.J., let me start with you. If you were in charge of writing this speech, what message would you deliver?

P.J. CROWLEY, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: The dilemma for the president is that normally presidential speeches explain policy. In these cases, these speeches may actually be re-creating policy. The president faces three questions that he really can’t answer tonight.

The first is, 37 days from now, who does he turn the keys of Iraq over to? What will the reaction of the Iraqi people be? And will it make a measurable difference in security on the ground?

Right now tonight the best the president will be able to say is, I don’t know, I don’t know and no. Whatever the transitions happens it’s not likely to have an immediate effect on the ground. And that is what poses the political problem for the president really in two countries, in both Iraq and the United States where he has declining poll numbers.

SCHAFFLER: Andrew, same question for you. What do you write in the speech?

ANDREW APOSTOLOU, FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES: Well, I am not going to write President Bush’s speech for me because he doesn’t employ me. But I think what he should say — lucky him — what he should say is that we have the elements of success in place. We have an interim constitution that creates a federal democratic Iraq.

We are creating slowly and very painfully, nonetheless, Iraqi security forces. We are getting some international involvement, but not in the right way, in my view. We’re not getting enough financial burden sharing. We’re crushing the Muqtada rising, which is important.

And we’re starting to bring the city Ba’athists in, again in a slightly faltering and erroneous way in some areas. But we’re doing that, so we’re starting to grapple with the issues. But we need to make solid progress and he needs to convince everybody, not just people in this country — it’s not just about your elections — it’s more important than that. That we’re going to stick this out and we’re going to win. That’s critical.

SCHAFFLER: P.J., as far as winning over the public relations battle, if you will. Does this not, at least for the president, give him an opportunity to, in his words, set straight what he feels is going on? The administration repeatedly said there are a lot of positives that are just not being reported.

CROWLEY: The dilemma is that he has no control over the picture. And, again, obviously today in Baghdad, another horrific explosion near the green zone on top of the suicide bombing that killed one of Salim, one of the leaders of the IGC.

So the dilemma for the president is, he can talk on this issue all he wants. But the pictures right now coming out of Iraq from abuse at Abu Ghraib to ongoing violence in Baghdad and in Iraq make it very difficult for him to make a persuasive argument.

I actually agree with what Andrew just said, the dilemma is that all of the problems that we’re facing in Iraq today basically are laid at the president’s doorstep because he failed to do adequate planning, building an international coalition a year ago. So, a lot of what we’re confronting here are based on mistakes the Bush administration made. I doubt tonight that he’ll admit that he made those mistakes.

SCHAFFLER: Andrew, at the same time we await this conversation with the president a little bit later today, the U.S. is present a new U.N. resolution on Iraq, U.N. Security Council meeting behind closed doors. Tell me a little bit, if you will, about the significance and timing of that.

APOSTOLOU: Well the resolution will aim to broaden the base of the international presence in Iraq and get yet more U.N. legitimacy for it. There is already U.N. legitimacy for what the U.S. is doing from U.N. Security Council resolution 1483. The problem we’ve got here is that some Iraqis are trying to undermine this process. Ayatollah Sistani’s representatives are trying to prevent any mention in that U.N. resolution of the interim constitution. They’ve been working with the French and the Russians.

It’s very important that the U.S. and the U.K have the interim constitution mentioned in the resolution so that we give legitimacy to the new government. Hopefully we will also have some sort of structure into which responsible countries will put forces in to help us in the easier parts of Iraq, such as South center and north. And we’ve to accept however that the fighting is going to continue in the Sunni triangle area. That is where you Americans have been doing a very good job but also taking terrible, terrible casualties.

SCHAFFLER: And P.J., in light of that, if the fighting does continue regardless of how often the president delivers his speech then, how will he get around that as you alluded to earlier?

CROWLEY: It is going to be difficult because what the president has really failed to do at this point it adjust his rhetoric to the reality in Iraq. There are still somewhat captive to the false perceptions from mission accomplished to we’ll be greeted as liberators.

The fact is we’re being seen as occupiers and that situation is actually going to get a little worse because even after you have a caretaker government in Iraq, we’re going to have 138,000 Americans on the ground who are not going to be answerable to that caretaker government.

So, you know, right now, he’s hoping that Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special representative, can help him pull a rabbit out of the hat. But the reality is there are very serious questions in our Iraq policy and those are questions the president will not be able to effectively answer tonight.

SCHAFFLER: P.J. Crowley, Andrew Apostolou, thanks for joining me. We’ll see you gentlemen again.