“NewsHour” may not be quite as high-profile as “60 Minutes,” but the president’s interview with Jim Lehrer today was at least as interesting as Sunday’s appearance on CBS, if not more so.
LEHRER: Mr. President, do you have a feeling of personal failure about Iraq right now?
BUSH: I’m frustrated at times about Iraq because I understand the consequences of failure…. Look, I had a choice to make, Jim, and that is – one – do what we’re doing. And one could define that maybe a slow failure.
I’m curious when, exactly, Bush came to the realization that the plan he’s been defending for the last four years was marked by failure, albeit a slow one. As recently as three months ago, when Democrats running in the midterm elections characterized the policy this way, Bush described them as weak, wrong, and dangerous. Now, he’s come around to the same conclusion they did. I’m sure an apology will be forthcoming.
LEHRER: Is there a little bit of a broken egg problem here, Mr. President, that there is instability and there is violence in Iraq – sectarian violence, Iraqis killing other Iraqis, and now the United States helped create the broken egg and now says, okay, Iraqis, it’s your problem. You put the egg back together, and if you don’t do it quickly and you don’t do it well, then we’ll get the hell out.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, you know, that’s an interesting question. I don’t quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg…where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg.
I don’t want to belabor the metaphor, but isn’t a cracked egg already broken?
BUSH: The world will see – 20 years from now, it’s conceivable the world will see a Middle East that’s got Shia – radical Shia and radical Sunnis competing against each other for power, which will cause people to have to choose up sides in the Middle East, supporting ideologies that are the exact opposite of what we believe.
Secondly, it is likely, if that scenario were to develop, that Middle Eastern oil would fall in the hand of radicals, which they could then use to blackmail Western governments.
Thirdly, when you throw a nuclear weapon race in the midst of this, you’ve got a – you know, a kind of – a chance for radicals to use weapons of mass destruction in a form that would cause huge devastation. In other words, there would be a cauldron of radicalism and extremism that a future generation would have to deal with.
This one prompted Maureen Dowd to respond: “So after scaring Americans into backing the Sack of Iraq by warning that radicals could get W.M.D., now he’s trying to scare Americans into supporting the Surge in Iraq by warning that radicals could get W.M.D. So many deaths, so little progress.”
BUSH: I – the elections – you know, what made my determination that we needed to change policy was what was happening in Iraq; not what was happening in American elections.
Oh really? Two weeks ago, several White House aides acknowledged that “their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.” The elections weren’t a factor? Please.
BUSH: Success also means making sure al-Qaida doesn’t get a foothold in Iraq, which they’re trying to do in Anbar province…. [T]he final option is secure the capital and at the same time chase al-Qaida into Anbar. And what’s different is that there would be more troops this time and better rules of engagement so that the Iraqi troops and our troops, working side by side, will be able to go after the enemy.
As Digby noted, “He says that al Qaeda is trying to gain a foothold in Anbar and then says that the plan calls for the troops to chase Al Qaeda into Anbar. Assuming there’s some way of making sense of that — is it wise to say it publicly?”
And then there was my personal favorite:
LEHRER: Let me ask you a bottom-line question, Mr. President. If it is as important as you’ve just said – and you’ve said it many times – as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it’s that important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world, why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military – the Army and the U.S. Marines and their families. They’re the only people who are actually sacrificing anything at this point.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.
He didn’t appear to be kidding.
I can only hope Bush does a lot more of these interviews. No president has ever had an approval rating in the teens before.