Hardball Transcript: The insanity of Bush

MATTHEWS:  Do you think that the war is going to get any better now that your son–I mean, you have paid the ultimate price?  And, by the way, thank you.  I don’t know what it means to say thank you for your service, except I mean it.  The courage of these young guys and some women over there is unbelievable.  And I guess everybody wonders about the conduct of the war, whether they’re being–these lives are being wasted or these lives are being put to good purpose.  

What is your feeling about that now?  

PALMER:  Well, I personally believe that, since it is not working, then we have to make a change, that it is not worth the sacrifice if it is just more bodies on to the heap.  

Like President Bush said, he wanted to stay the course and honor the memory of the ones who died by continuing to fight.  If it didn’t work before, why does fighting more–you know, you do the same thing over and over, that’s–expecting a different result is, I think, the explanation of insanity.

MATTHEWS:  That’s the question, Colonel Allard.  Do we get on television an unalloyed, honest answer when we ask, do you have enough troops over there?

ALLARD:  I’ll give you an unalloyed answer.  No, we do not right now.

And I will tell you that I’ve heard those kinds of comments from Mr.  Rumsfeld before, because we’ve probably had more meaningful discussions on MSNBC about the right level of troops than on anyplace else.  I remember specifically a comment the vice president made about retired military officers embedded in TV studios, going back two more years.  So, it is a long overdue discussion.  

But I have got to tell you that, when you’re involved in an insurgency, you have literally no choice but to make sure that you’ve got enough manpower to control that situation, because, if you don’t, you’re going to see lots more stories like we’ve been covering in the last 72 hour.  

MATTHEWS:  Do you believe that the military commanders throughout this campaign in Iraq have been able to tell honestly the civilian leadership if they need more troops?  

ALLARD:  I’m not really sure, because I’ve not been privy, obviously, to those discussions.  

But there’s an enormous presumption that when the former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki stood up and said, look, it’s going to take a couple hundred thousand troops to control that situation, and he was shouted down, because the deputy secretary of defense said, it’s unimaginable that we’re going to require more people to secure that country than it does to take it down.  

That’s in fact turned out to be precisely the case.  What we have not done is to figure out how we’re going to sustain that commitment over the long term.  And even more than that, Chris, if you take a look right now, most of that burden is being born by a disproportionate few in American society today.