Koppel and Brokaw Agree: Clinton Would Have Gone Into Iraq, Too

By E&P Staff

Published: December 28, 2005 12:15 AM ET

NEW YORK Appearing on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert this week, two broadcast veterans, Tom Brokaw of NBC and Ted Koppel, agreed that the press shouldn't be faulted too harshly for not questioning more deeply the claims of WMD in Iraq -- and declared that Bill Clinton would have gone into Iraq just like George Bush if he was still president after 9/11.

Along with Russert, they also argued that it was a "uniformly held belief" that Saddam Hussein had WMD when the Iraq war began.

Here is the relevant excerpt from the transcript.

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KOPPEL: Do we have a right to ask critical -- not just a right; do we have an obligation to ask critical questions? And did we fall short of that prior to the Iraq War? That's a perfectly legitimate point, and I think we all have to plead guilty, to one degree or another, to having been, you know, a little bit soft on the administration beforehand.

But in large measure, when the president and his top people tell you, as they did, "Here's our perception of what exists. Here's our perception of the danger to the United States. Here's our perception of a relationship between this guy who has weapons of mass destruction and the group that just blew up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center," I don't know that reporters as a whole can sit there and say, "Oh, hokum. You know, it's just not true." We can raise questions, and I...

BROKAW: Given the absence of hard evidence.

KOPPEL: Hard evidence. Right.

BROKAW: There was not -- you know, the French intelligence were sharing the same conclusions with the administration. I thought -- I agree with you that I don't think that we pushed hard enough for vigorous debate. I think that on Capitol Hill that the debate was anemic, at best. You had -- Ted Kennedy and Senator Byrd, really, were the only ones speaking out with any kind of passion in the Senate, the people who...

RUSSERT: And they were not questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

BROKAW: No. No. No.

RUSSERT: That seemed to be a uniformly held belief.

BROKAW: Right. Yeah.

KOPPEL: Nor did the Clinton administration beforehand.

BROKAW: No.

KOPPEL: I mean, the only difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration was 9/11.

BROKAW: Right.

KOPPEL: If 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch, he would have gone into Iraq.

BROKAW: Yeah. Yeah.,,
*

Later, Koppel addresses what he sees as a legitimate, and the true, reason for the war:

KOPPEL: What's intriguing to me, Tim, is we're still talking about the war as though it were in a vacuum, and we're still talking about victory and what is to be achieved as though it were in a vacuum. And the one thing that we are not talking about, because it somehow seems indelicate or unpolitic or even inappropriate, is the simple fact of the matter that, while we did not go to war because of Iraq's oil, we did, in fact, go to war because it is absolutely essential to the national interest, not only of this country but also of the Europeans and of the Japanese, that the Persian Gulf remains stable....

As long as we had the shah of Iran there, he was our surrogate. In fact, you may remember the Nixon policy was that the shah would be our surrogate in the Persian Gulf. When the shah was overthrown, we shifted our chips onto the Saudi board, and then it became the House of Saud that became our representative. The Saudis are, indeed, troubled. The royal family of Saudi Arabia is in deep trouble.

Therefore, we need to have a stable Iraq in order to guarantee a stable Persian Gulf, and the name of that game is oil. Nobody talks about that....

But the point--the one issue I would add, Tim, is the mousetrap that is waiting for the Democrats is if they do not publicly acknowledge that U.S. national interest is just fundamentally involved in a stable Iraq and a stable Persian Gulf, if they simply come after the Republicans, and take the cheap shots on the war, and say, "You gotta bring the troops home at all costs," they might even win the election, but if they win the election, they're going to find themselves confronting the same issues of national interest that the

Republicans are facing right now. The simple fact of the matter is it is in America's national interest that there be stability in the Persian Gulf, and if we precipitously pull the troops out of that area now, there'll be hell to pay.

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