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December 07, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - December 7

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Thing I liked about the Baker-Hamilton report is it discussed the way forward in Iraq, and I believe we need a new approach and that's why I've tasked the Pentagon to analyze the way forward. That's why Prime Minister Blair is here to talk about the way forward, so we can achieve the objective, which is an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself and be an ally in the war on terror.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: An objective, by the way, shared by the Baker-Hamilton Commission. Some thoughts on this commission report and the president's reaction to it from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call; and Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio --FOX NEWS contributors, all.

Well, the president has said that he welcomes the report; he thinks it's got a lot of interesting ideas, he's not going to adopt it wholesale. Mara, what do you think about it. Is that the shrewd way to approach it or should he be trying to finesse this and seem to be grasp -- embracing it more fully or less or what?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: No, I don't think so. I think that he's treating this as something that has useful additions to the debate about how you turn what's happening in Iraq into more of a success story and he might end up adopting some of the recommendations, particularly embedding more trainers, which is something that you hear from almost all sides in this debate.

HUME: And apparently, to some extent, they're working toward that already.

LIASSON: Yeah, although the numbers the Iraq Study Group are talking about are many, many more thousands of embedded trainers. And you'd need support for those -- for those trainers too. He made it pretty clear from the beginning that he's not going to accept everything and he seems extremely cool to some of the diplomatic suggestions.

(CROSSTALK)

We talked about that yesterday. But I think he's responding appropriately, he's not dismissing it out of hand and I think that in the end there will be some of these recommendations about it.

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Yeah, and look, it's the politick thing to do, too. You -- this -- it's a high-visibility panel, every -- all the media has been all over it.

HUME: To say the least.

KONDRACKE: Yes. And so he can't very well dismiss it. He's got to be, you know, take it in and I haven't the slightest idea what he's going to do. I don't know that he knows what he's going to do because the Pentagon hasn't reported yet and the National Security Council hasn't reported, although he's -- probably knows a lot more than he's revealing.

I would suspect we are not going to have these negotiations with Iran and Syria. As I understand it, he almost flatly promised Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of Israel, when he was here, that there would not be an international conference that would involve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as this study group seems to anticipate.

So, you know, but the big question is what is he going to do about troops? And is he going to embed, is he going to increase, is he going to surge? I mean, that's all a big question.

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: That is a big question, but you know, it was the troop withdrawal stuff and the troop training and the troops embedding stuff that I think took the toughest beating today.

When the report came out yesterday, people got, you know, the first blush of it and said one thing, but the more they've had a chance to study it -- and I would recommend, particularly, and I don't recommend many pieces in the New York Times, but I would recommend the one on the front page today by Michael Gordon in which he talked to all sorts of military experts, including a number that were experts that worked with the Iraq Study Group, and they all said what is recommended, by the study group, can't work. That you can't train up an army. You can send in 100,000 trainers, but you can't change an army and build up an army that is a force like the American army or something like that, inject a culture that's need there, you can't do it in 14 months when the idea is that's when all the combat troops from the U.S. will leave, by the first quarter of 2008.

They all say it just won't work and that the worst thing we could do is withdraw the combat troops in the first place because they're the ones, if there's any hope of securing Baghdad and defeating the terrorists, you have to leave them there.

HUME: Let's assume that that's true, just for the sake of this...

BARNES: Well, that's a big part of the Iraq Study Group...

HUME: I understand that. But let's assume that that's -- I understand, let's assume that that's true and the thing unfolds in that way. Can the president sustain, politically, at home, the presence of a comparable complement of American troops to the one that's there now, 16 months out from now?

LIASSON: Not if the situation looks as it is today, not unless he can show some more success. Look Fred, they have been trying to train these Iraqi troops for three years. This isn't something they're talking about starting today.

BARNES: It takes a long time.

LIASSON: And, it takes a long time -- and the kind of successes that we once heard about turn out to be not so significant, like there's a battle and it turns out latter that the Iraqi troops actually didn't fight, that they don't have the motivation. They have more of an alliance or an allegiance to their own sect than they do to some kind of a national army and I don't know how he's going to be more successful at training them in the next 14 months than we've been in the last (INAUDIBLE)...

KONDRACKE: I was at the session today, with Baker and Hamilton and one of the things they said was that there are going to be a lot of troops left in Iraq. I think they may have been responding to the Michael Gordon piece, we're going to have a lot of troops left...

HUME: They said that yesterday as well. But they were talking to me yesterday about leaving 70,000 troops there, that would, apparently, not be in major combat roles according to...

KONDRACKE: I think that the idea there would be to diminish American casualties so that the heat would not be on as intensively to withdraw. I think withdrawal is based on the fact that there are Americans getting killed all the time.

HUME: Is the problem that Americans are getting killed or is the problem that Americans are being killed, even if it's historically a trickle, by historical standards, a trickle in a war which doesn't seem to be going well?

BARNES: Well, that's the problem. They don't have victory in sight...

LIASSON: That's the problem. I don't think the American people are rising up against casualties. I think that they're looking at Iraq and they don't see success. They see Iraqis killing each other, they don't see the government coming together, and that's the problem. I don't think it's the casualty level.

BARNES: Look, the Iraq Study Group endorsed the goal and objectives of President Bush to have this Iraq that's a free country that can defend itself and govern itself and even join the war on terror. You can't achieve that by withdrawing a lot combat troops and expecting the Iraqi army to take over early in 2008.

HUME: Next up wit the panel, we'll look at the political rivalry between Illinois Senator Barack Obama and New York Senator Hillary Clinton. This is getting interesting, stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN BARACK OBAMA (D), ILLINOIS: I think, you know, she could win if she ran and she is an extraordinarily able person. If I make a decision to run, it would not be based on, sort of, my assessment of Hillary Clinton, who I think is a excellent senator.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, maybe so, but a new FOX NEWS opinion Dynamics poll indicate that people are already, in some numbers, considering him the alternative. He has zoomed, shall we say, up to 12 percent among Democratic voters, that's a plus or minus five on a margin of error, so who knows. You can see Mrs. Clinton -- Senator Clinton is still way ahead by almost 3-1 over any of her nearest rivals. And if it came down to only the two of them in the field, look at that, 52-30, Hillary Clinton wins. Nonetheless, there has been very few phenomenon in recent years, with the possible exception of the Colin Powell phenomenon a few years ago, that have generated so much early political excitement. So, where does this really stand, Mara, is this just -- is this a boomlet or a boom, the Obama thing?

LIASSON: Well, I think it is a...

HUME: Barack Obama.

LIASSON: ...big boomlet, right now, and if he decides to run, which a lot of people think he will, because this is his moment to grasp, it might turn into a boom.

Look, I think that he signaled in that comment, that he won't be running an anti-Hillary campaign, although of course part of the boomlet is if all the Democrats think they need an alternative to Hillary and all of a sudden he's become the best-looking one around.

HUME: He's saying he doesn't buy the idea, which a lot of them buy, that she can't win.

LIASSON: That's right. That's right. But the whole basis of looking for an alternative to here is that, so many Democrats that, although she is a very able senator, and probably could easily get the nomination, she can't win a general election. Whether Obama could, after just two years in the Senate, with scant foreign policy experience, is also a question. But he is, as you showed in that poll, the only Democrat, right now, who gives her a run for her money, who almost blows away all of the other Clinton alternative hopefuls, if he does get in, and I think it's put a lot of pressure on her. She's started to show more movement, and more leg than I think she'd planned to do at this point.

KONDRACKE: Yeah, she -- I'm told by people on -- in her entourage that there is about a five percent chance that she won't run. That she's in to this now and that the Obama challenge, if that's what it is, has certainly made her speed up her schedule.

HUME: Have you heard about what she'd doing on Sunday -- he's going to New Hampshire, so she invites a bunch of New Hampshire Democratic bigs down here to her house off Embassy Road, there, for a session.

KONDRACKE: Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, it's like that. I mean -- you know, looking at this realistically and looking at some polls on this, you know, there are questions about the electability of either one of them. Our FOX poll indicated that only about -- you know, less than -- in single digits people said that they would think less of voting for either a woman or an African-American. But there was a Gallup poll that indicates that almost 40 percent of Americans think that this country is not ready for either a woman or an African-American.

HUME: That's what people think about what other people think.

KONDRACKE: Yeah. But you know, that's what...

HUME: That's not worth much.

LIASSON: It's impossible to get accurate polling on those kind of questions.

KONDRACKE: That didn't work out that way with Harold Ford race in Tennessee. He did not, apparently, suffer at all because he was an African-American, but the presidency is different. I mean, people might have voted for Colin Powell, if he'd -- he'd run for office, but he was a, you know, former general, Army chief of staff...

HUME: He wasn't as raw. Wasn't as raw...

KONDRACKE: Yeah, exactly. This, Barack Obama is 44 years old and looks even younger...

HUME: Yeah, he does look younger. He's a very youthful guy.

BARNES: Yeah, he's likeable.

HUME: He is likeable.

BARNES: And people think he can probably win where they think Hillary can't. I mean, a lot of Democrats do, as I think Mara pointed out, there looking -- there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who don't think she can win and are eager to find an alternative.

What amazed me about the polls, which don't mean that much, but all of a sudden Obama -- I think this was the first time -- what was the poll? Was it a Gallop poll? Wherever it was, it's the first time his name had even been put in there and he's...

HUME: It was our poll.

BARNES: Yeah. Oh, it's a FOX poll. Good. Even better.

HUME: It said so on the screen, Fred.

BARNES: I missed it. I was looking, but I didn't see it. Anyway, the fact is, he's ahead of these -- I mean, John Edwards is out running full-time...

LIASSON: And has been for the last four years.

KONDRACKE: I don't think John Edwards has been on the cover of Time magazine.

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