FOX "Interview With Senator John Barrasso" - Transcript

Interview

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MR. SMITH: Some big news today about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to White House officials, President Obama expected to announce he will pull all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq by August of next year. Did you hear that? All U.S. combat troops. I wonder what that means. I'll tell you in a minute. The move is intended to strengthen forces in Afghanistan. This news comes just a week after the president announced plans to send another 17,000 troops to the Afghan region; however, we're also expected to hear tomorrow about major budget cutbacks in defense spending.

With us now, Republican Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, who is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senator, good to see you.

SEN. BARRASSO: Great to be with you, Shep.

MR. SMITH: You know, I got to tell you, I love this concept of all combat troops being pulled out. I bet people will be stunned to learn that there will be 50,000 remaining who are not considered combat troops, I guess, they're from that, I don't know, that sort of passive wing of the military.

SEN. BARRASSO: Well, it makes you wonder, Shep, you know --

MR. SMITH: Fifty thousand --

SEN. BARRASSO: The surge worked. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan as well, so, clearly, the president has made his plans. I always worry in this country when somebody talks about raising taxes and cutting the military at the same time.

MR. SMITH: Well, I mean, I want to nail this down though because we're not ending in Iraq, I mean, there are plenty of people who think we ought to leave the levels really high and finish this thing off and there are plenty of people who think we need to end the thing, but I don't think anybody with half a grain of sense believes that they're going to listen to them and tell us we're getting rid of all the troops in there, the ones who are left over, those are just residual troops, non-combatants, 50,000 of them. It's crazy.

SEN. BARRASSO: Well, Shep, you know, there's fewer than that right now in Afghanistan.

MR. SMITH: True. True.

SEN. BARRASSO: You look at the numbers and you say what's the best way to do this, well, they've just had an election in Iraq, 14,000 candidates. Democracy is clearly on the move there and that's because of our involvement. Now, you look at Afghanistan, you know, the countries are very different; Iraq is a desert, Afghanistan -- you're really looking at a mountainous country, different issues.

I just want to make sure like the president does that there is no place that terrorists can hide and have a safe haven to plan for attacks on the United States.

So I encourage the activities that he's talked about for Afghanistan, but we're going to continue with our role in Iraq as well.

MR. SMITH: Republicans are concerned about defense spending, right?

SEN. BARRASSO: Absolutely, you know, I'm for limited government, lower taxes and a strong defense and what I heard last night, it seems to me like the era of big government is back with increased taxes, increased spending, but not for our military and that's not the way I like to go.

MR. SMITH: I guess there's some specific weapons, some munitions that are being cut out. I guess they were looking for places in waste or over-spending to trim. Was that the thinking or what?

SEN. BARRASSO: Well, you know, I think all Americans want value for their money. We want any sort of waste and fraud and abuse removed, whether it's from the military, whether it's from Medicare or Medicaid. We want to make sure American taxpayers get value for their money, after all, the money doesn't belong to the folks in Washington; the money belongs to the taxpayers of America.

So we need to look and I know that Secretary Gates said there are things that we can do better in the military in terms of purchasing and in terms of spending, but I want to make sure that our troops, our men and women on the ground have absolutely everything they need to protect themselves and to defend our freedoms.

MR. SMITH: Our equipment over there, billions of dollars worth of equipment has been running around in that sand in 130-degree weather for many years now and there's military folks with whom I speak say most of it really needs to be replaced, and I can't find the money in the budget set aside specifically for replacing all that stuff that got sanded up.

SEN. BARRASSO: Well, and Shep, you know, that's what we heard in the speech last night, you know, you listened to what the president had to say and there were a lot of spending proposals in there and a lot that the government -- that he would like to see the government do and you say, okay, how are we going to accomplish those things? How are we going to pay for them? That's really the issue. We're going to have to look at those details in the days ahead. We just finished with this very large, so-called stimulus package, very expensive and now a budget coming down, which was much larger than last year's. The spending continues to increase; I just don't want to see it cut from the military.

We need to make sure that our freedom is defended and our men and women have what they need to help us.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, sir, very much. Good luck.

SEN. BARRASSO: Thank you very much, Shep. Great to be with you.

MR. SMITH: You, too. Thanks.

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