Responding to the President’s Speech
Last night, after the President’s address, Senator Biden talked to CNN’s Larry King live:
LARRY KING: Senator Biden has been a strong critic of the administration. We’ll start with him. Did this speech impress you?
SEN. JOE BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: Larry, it was positive, but the president seems to have — let me put it this way: If we defeated every single terrorist in the world, we’d still have a war in Iraq. Americans would still be at risk from being killed in Iraq. There is a major, major conflict between three major groups trying to take control, or be the prominent force in that county, and we need a political solution. The next six months is going to determine that. Again, there is terror, that’s real.
But there’s also the so-called insurgency, Larry, which is made up for former Saddamist and Ba’athists, for the vast majority of the people, and we’d better figure out how to deal with that and we have six months to do it. That’s the time in which they choose a new government, in which they’ll have a constitution.
And if they don’t choose a government — for example, they very well choose a government — we don’t know what the election outcome is, it may be a Shia government, that is an Iranian style government that oppresses women. That’s still up in the air. We don’t know the answer to that. We better impact on what they do and we better impact on the kind of constitution they write to get everybody to buy in. In other words, it’s an all out civil war and there’s still possibility, but we have six months.
Read the transcript here.
