CNN Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics - Transcript

CNN

SHOW: JUDY WOODRUFF'S INSIDE POLITICS 15:30

HEADLINE: Rumsfeld's Visit to Baghdad; Interview With Senator Pete Domenici

GUESTS: Pete Domenici, Bay Buchanan, Donna Brazile, Tad Devine, Matt Dowd, Chuck Todd

BYLINE: Judy Woodruff, Jamie McIntyre, Suzanne Malveaux, Bruce Morton, William Schneider

HIGHLIGHT:
What Donald Rumsfeld hoped to accomplish in his trip to Baghdad.; Interview with Senator Pete Domenici.; Interview with Bay Buchanan, Donna Brazile.

BODY:
WOODRUFF: All right. Suzanne, thank you very much. Suzanne Malveaux at the White House.

Well, just hours before Donald Rumsfeld left for Baghdad, he talked about Iraq and the mission's price tag before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Joining us now, a member of that panel. He is Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico.

Senator Domenici, good to see.

SEN. PETE DOMENICI ®, NEW MEXICO: It's great to see you, Judy. I haven't seen you in awhile. It's really a pleasure.

WOODRUFF: It's been too long. Senator, just let me start out with a very basic question. Are you on board with the Bush administration policy of promoting democracy in Iraq even against-even facing the resistance of many Iraqi people and the casualty of many American soldiers?

DOMENICI: Well, I'm strongly in favor of the United States' effort. We're already there. Now, let me say what I mean by effort.

I don't know that we will get democracy that we can define as such. But I believe we'll get a kind of representative government that is far better than anything they've had, and that it will be a government that will enforce four or five principals that we believe a government ought to provide: civil rights, equal protection, property rights, religious freedom. Those kind of things will be part of a government.

Will it be part of governance? Will it be a pure democracy with something like we've got? I don't know. But I think we're on the right track. The problem is, with all the things that have happened, and the opposition and their determination to stop it, can we succeed?

WOODRUFF: Well, Senator, one of your colleagues, Republican colleagues in the Senate this week is quoted as saying, "We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering, where the U.S. feels it's both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary."

DOMENICI: Well, I don't know who that was.

WOODRUFF: Pat Roberts. I'm sorry, Senator Pat Roberts.

DOMENICI: See, I don't believe what we did in Iraq is what Pat Roberts is talking about that he says we shouldn't do. There was a big problem in that country. There was something festering there that was well beyond something that we ought to be concerned about with reference to more countries being democratic.

There was a festering sore, a despot. That part of the world was doomed if we didn't do something. So I think our object was perhaps twofold, and we're not doing what Pat Roberts has said.

And I tend to agree with him. We can't do that all over the world. But democracies are coming in this world. Fast and furious, they're coming.

WOODRUFF: Senator, the administration is asking for $25 billion more to get Iraq through the first, we understand, few months of the 2005 fiscal year. What do you think the total price tag will be?

DOMENICI: I don't know. But look, I think it's a shame when senators vote for the resolution to go there and then they turn on it. And I will have to say, when it comes to money, there has been a spirit of making sure the troops got what they need that has been bipartisan. So I assume that will happen. And I don't know how much more there will be.

But I was very pleased yesterday. In fact, I would ask you as a competent reporter to take yesterday's response at the Armed Services Committee hearing and extract for the people the comments of General Myers about how we're going to have-what our exit strategy is as far as security. It was excellent, and I think it will work.

WOODRUFF: So when you said yesterday to Secretary Rumsfeld-you said, "I can envision that this situation will not work, that we won't have an organizational structure that will do anything other than have Americans fighting and us supplying those fighters with more and more money"...

DOMENICI: Yes, I said that because I have been very worried that the administration might not be doing the planning for the economic transition, the infrastructure-building transition. And we asked about it and got very good answers yesterday.

On the security part, I was worried that we wouldn't know how to merge the Iraqis in. I got a marvelous answer. We will see within two months a joint headquarters of the Iraqi and American military.

It will become pervasive in the system, and we'll be moving out of it. And the Iraqis will be moving into it. I think of anyone that will do it right, the military will do that part right.

WOODRUFF: All right. Senator Pete Domenici, pointing to some answers yesterday by the chairman of the joints chiefs, Richard Myers. Senator Domenici, thank you very much.

DOMENICI: Thank you.

WOODRUFF: We appreciate it.