(to view just the portions of the program in which
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SEN.
BARACK OBAMA, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: When it came to
making the most important foreign policy decision of our
generation, the decision to invade Iraq, Senator Clinton
got it wrong.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He's
attacked me continuously for having no hard exit date. And
now we learn he doesn't have one. In fact, he doesn't have
a plan at all.
SEN.
JOHN MCCAIN, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: They want to set a
date for withdrawal. I believe that would have catastrophic
consequences.
CLINTON:
Senator McCain has said that it would be okay with him if
American troops were in Iraq for 50 to 100 years. Well, it
is not okay with me.
MCCAIN:
Senator Clinton and Senator Obama said that we could not
succeed militarily. We have.
OBAMA:
I've got news for John McCain. He took us into a war, along
with George Bush, that should have never been authorized.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: The race for the White House,
the war in Iraq; the two are, of course, inseparable. Right
now we're fast approaching a historic presidential election
and at the same time, reaching a milestone in Iraq: five
years. Five years of fighting and nearly 4,000 Americans
killed.
Tonight,
we look back at the war, without the spin, just the facts;
from the run-up to "Shock and Awe" to Saddam's capture, the
search for WMDs, IEDs, and the so-called surge. All of it
as it happened.
The
battle continues to be the greatest challenge facing our
nation and the next president, be it Senators Obama,
Clinton or McCain, are going to have to confront it on day
one.
January 29, 2002
The State of The Union
GEORGE
W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Iraq continues to
flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an
axis of evil.
JOHN
KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It was clear even
during the transition from the Clinton administration to
the Bush administration that the new president thought you
needed a new approach to Iraq, a tougher approach to Iraq
that was much more skeptical about Saddam Hussein, his
intentions and his capability.
BUSH:
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a
murderous tyrant.
ARI
FLEISCHER:, FORMER WHITE HOUSE SPOKESPERSON: I don't
remember anybody in America, especially in the party that
now is so strongly opposed to the war, the Democratic
Party, saying you're wrong, Saddam does not have biological
or chemical weapons.
NIC
ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I
remember getting a briefing, an off-the-record briefing
before the war about one of the so-called suspected weapons
sites.
They
believe Iraq is embarking on a program to enrich uranium.
He
showed me the site on satellite imagery. He told me what
that site would have to require to have if it was currently
being used for certain WMD production. And the Iraqis,
amazingly enough, actually took us to that
site.
And I
remember looking around that site at the time before the
war and thinking, you know, I don't see these key telltale
factors, I don't see the high-power electricity coming in
here.
February 5, 2003
United Nations
COLIN
POWELL, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Given Saddam Hussein's
history of aggression --
KING:
For the administration, Secretary Powell's presentation to
the United Nations was it. It was the defining moment.
POWELL:
For Saddam Hussein, possession of the world's most deadly
weapons is the ultimate trump card, the one he must hold to
fulfill his ambition.
KING: It
was the credibility test of the Bush administration to the
world. And not only in making that case, but in making it
with the person in the administration who was viewed around
the world as perhaps one of the most, if not the most
credible voice in the Bush administration.
POWELL:
Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass
destruction for a few more months or years is not an
option. Not in a post-September 11th
world.
ROBERTSON:
I remember talking to some Iraqi officials and they said,
forget the rhetoric, we get the picture here. This is-- the
U.N. weapons inspections is just an excuse right now.
You're going to come in and attack us
anyway.
FLEISCHER:
I think what weighed on the president was, if you don't
make a decision like this, to take the weapons away from
him, what do you do when he later uses
them?
BUSH:
My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the
final days of decision.
KING:
One of the great subplots of the whole debate is that in
many ways Saddam Hussein sealed his own fate. In part by
perhaps misunderstanding global politics and U.S. politics,
but also in part because Saddam Hussein went out of his way
to try to convince people that he was hiding
something.
BUSH:
All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an
end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48
hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military
conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.
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March 19, 2003
"Shock and Awe"
ROBERTSON:
The gun battle stronger now, picking up, closer into the
city. Oh, very definitely the tracer rounds picking
up.
I had
got a suite on the top floor of the hotel for the exact
purpose of being able to film "Shock and Awe." It had 270
degree view of the city.
Oh,
huge flash, huge, huge, huge explosion. Get away from the
window, get away from the window!
It
looked right down over the main presidential compound right
on the river in the center of Baghdad.
Okay,
no need for panic, but a huge detonation there.
It was
the best place to film "Shock and Awe."
BUSH:
My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition
forces are in the early stages of military operations to
disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world
from grave danger.
GARY
TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This base is very busy. The
last 24 hour reporting period, 296 sorties; that's about 40
more than the 24 hours before that. So we're talking about
550 sorties out of this base alone. And there are at least
38 different locations where coalition warplanes are coming
from.
You
are looking at one of the many patriot missile
launchers.
While
we were doing this story, sirens started wailing. We all
ran into a bunker. I am sitting here with army men and
women with their gas masks, their chemical suits
on.
Those
first few days, there was so much tension because nobody
knew what was going to happen. Most people were convinced
that weapons of mass destruction were going to be
used.
DONALD
RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Our goal is to defend the
American people and to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction and to liberate the Iraqi
people.
Saddam
Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler,
Stalin, Lenin, in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators,
and the Iraqi people are well on their way to
freedom.
FLEISCHER:
I was standing next to the president watching the TV in the
outer Oval Office when it happened. I remember him saying,
"look at the crowd. It's not that big a crowd." He actually
noticed that as the statue fell.
ROBERTSON:
They are a people free at last to express what they really
think.
FLEISCHER:
When you saw Iraqis beating the statue with their shoes,
you just saw that sense of jubilation, the eruption of joy
against a tyrant.
ROBERTSON:
They really seemed joyful and happy. But, again, at that
time I was surprised there weren't more people out on the
streets. And I think perhaps the Iraqis themselves had an
inkling that this wasn't over.
This
office is typical of what we're finding around Baghdad in
the government buildings. Everything has been looted that
seems to have been of just about of any value to the
people.
The day
after the statue came down, I'm talking to somebody, an
Iraqi that I knew, and he said, "the troops, the American
troops have got to stop this looting because if they don't,
nobody is going to respect them."
Saddam
was a dog, this man screams. But if the Americans don't
help, we will revolt.
KING:
There was no question that it was not that long into the
war that you began to get reports from senior
administration officials that the president and others were
starting to ask where are the weapons?
UNIDENTIFIED
MALE: So far you haven't mentioned that any of them has
confirmed the existence of chemical and biological weapons.
Does that make you uneasy?
RUMSFELD:
No. I've believed all along we're not likely to stumble
over anything.
ROBERTSON:
The little that is left here does seem to support Iraqi
government claims that this site was nothing more than a
radio frequency testing and repair
facility.
RUMSFELD:
Nor did the inspectors stumble over anything. In good time,
in good time.
HANS
BLIX, FORMER HEAD OF THE IAEA: I had felt that the Iraqis
have stopped inspectors many times during the 1990s and why
would they do that if they didn't have something to
conceal? But in two months I was quite certain that there
wasn't anything.
MICHAEL
WARE, CORRESPONDENT: I was assigned to do a story delving
into the mystery of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. I
spoke to dozens and dozens of people. All of them told me
variations of the same story, that there were no WMDs to be
found.
KING:
The overwhelming majority of the people on the president's
staff and the president himself were wildly overly
optimistic about how long this would take.
May 1, 2003
USS
Abraham Lincoln
BUSH:
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle
of Iraq, the United States and our allies have
prevailed.
KING:
They thought the Iraqis would melt like butter and it would
be over quickly.
ROBERTSON:
I was very surprised when Bremer came in and replaced
Garner.
PAUL
BREMER: Respect for the rule of law and respect for each
other.
ROBERTSON:
He gave an impression of being autocratic. He gave an
impression as well of being a down-to-earth sort of guy, a
can-do guy, a will-do guy, a guy who brought energy and
enthusiasm. He wore those sort of desert combat boots with
his suit into the office.
His
decision to pull the plug on the Iraqi army, to disband the
Iraqi army in May 2003 is probably one of the most
significant events in the country. It essentially took away
a natural security force in the country and turned upwards
of half a million men loose who were trained in using
weapons, who were trained in fighting.
WARE: I
wanted to know where did all the troops go. They were
sitting in their homes, discontent, disenchanted, and in so
many ways disenfranchised. They'd lost their honor. They'd
lost their income. The military had been disbanded by the
Americans.
As one
of them said to me one day, can you imagine having an
American tank sitting in your street with foreign soldiers
telling you where you can go and cannot go and what you can
do? This is what led to the birth of the bulk of the
insurgency.
FLEISCHER:
There are pockets of violence. And most of those pockets of
violence come from the people who defended the regime, who
fought for the regime and are willing to die for the
regime. And if they fight the United States, that will be
their fate.
WARE:
None of them were fighting for Saddam or a return of
Saddam. They were fighting for their home, for their honor,
for a sense of revenge, to reclaim some power. I didn't
even see an expectation or a belief that they would reclaim
the country itself. But they were certainly fighting for a
seat at the table of power which they felt they had been
denied.
ROBERTSON:
A remote-controled explosive device set off by people
waiting for the U.S. Troops to pass
by.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: There were two people killed and three injured.
RUMSFELD: In those regions where pockets of dead-enders are
trying to reconstitute, General Franks and his team are
rooting them out.
December 14, 2003
Near Tikrit, Iraq
BREMER:
We got him.
ROBERTSON:
When the soldiers discovered Saddam Hussein, he came with
his hands up. He said, "I'm Saddam Hussein, I'm the
president of Iraq and I want to
negotiate."
I
climbed into that spider hole to see exactly what kind of
space he was hiding in. And it was tiny. It was six foot
long by a couple of feet high, a couple of feet wide. It
was just about big enough to lie down inside and to get out
you had to sort of squirm your way out through this small
hole.
WARE:
When the American Proconsul Paul Bremer gave that famous
press conference where he announced that America had got
him -- Saddam -- I was there watching it live with Baathist
insurgents. And the range of reactions and emotions that
moment elicited among these Baathist fighters was
extraordinary.
A few
just hung their heads and went quiet; mourning not so much
the loss of Saddam but the body blow on Iraqi and Sunni
pride that it represented. Others were angry; angry at
Saddam for being caught. Angry at their former leader for
not fighting to the death as his sons had done not so long
before.
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WARE:
Fallujah very much was a boiling point in the history of
the insurgency that marked and anointed Al Qaeda in its
ascendancy.
September 12, 2003
Fallujah
ROBERTSON:
We had gone to Fallujah to cover the funerals of about ten
Iraqi policemen. They were killed by U.S. troops, by the
82nd Airborne. It was a case of friendly fire, mistaken
identity.
We're
asking for revenge, he says. Fallujah is united. They all
want retaliation.
And just
as we were beginning to walk away from the center of
Fallujah, in this big crowd I saw a guy on a motor bike. He
had one of those red keffiyahs, red and white keffiyehs
wrapped around his face, you could just see his eyes. And
he had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with a
rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder and I thought,
that's an insurgent.
That was
the first time I had interviewed an insurgent. The first
time I had seen one, come face to face with one and I
realized that this crowd was beginning to
change.
WARE:
The flashpoint was in the spring of 2004 when four American
contractors in two separate vehicles were ambushed as they
were passing through the center of the city. And their
bodies were taken from the car, mutilated and burned and
two of them were strung up on one of the bridges leading
west out of Fallujah.
BUSH:
They want to run us out of Iraq. The violence we have seen
is a power grab by these extreme and ruthless
elements.
KING: To
have those pictures of the contractors hanging on the
bridge and to have the headlines that the United States
was, in essence, retreating from a place that it had been
in command and control of speaks for
itself.
WARE: I
remember one very senior Sunni insurgent leader telling me,
we know we cannot defeat America on the battlefield. No
way. It's the greatest military on earth, we cannot. But we
will defeat them and we'll defeat them on that, he said,
and he pointed to a television screen.
BUSH:
There is no justification for the brutal execution of
Nicholas Berg.
CHRISTIANE
AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: They were
very sophisticated, the way they played the media. I mean,
it was revolting. So it had that rolling effect of the
gathering storm of fear and
intimidation.
WARE:
Zarqawi gave birth to Al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi and others
went shopping for a new platform to create their new war.
And they found it served to them on a platter in Iraq with
the invasion.
Muqtada al-Sadr
ROBERTSON:
Muqtada al-Sadr, I think -- the so-called firebrand Shia
cleric -- is perhaps one of the defining figures for me.
Because here was a guy right back in 2003, he wasn't
selected for the governing council.
And when
he didn't make the cut for the governing council, he built
what he called Muqtada al Sadr's militia, rose up and
really showed their strength. He showed that he was a force
to be reckoned with.
April 28, 2004
Abu Ghraib
KING:
Abu Ghraib was the humiliation of prisoners that turned out
to be the humiliation of the United States of America. The
administration knew that. The administration knew this was
a horrible, heinous, reprehensible, inexcusable,
indefensible act.
RUMSFELD:
The actions of the soldiers in those photographs are
totally unacceptable and
un-American.
BUSH:
I want to tell the people of the Middle East that the
practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and
they don't represent America.
FLEISCHER:
The president called and he said to me we are making so
much progress, so many good things were happening until Abu
Ghraib.
June 28, 2004
Transfer of Power
KING: If
you go back through all of the time in Iraq where there
were so many times that the administration thought it had
found the reset button.
RUMSFELD:
The handover will happen and it will make a lot of people
very unhappy.
KING:
First it was when Paul Bremer went in, then it was first
the provisional government.
BREMER:
We welcome Iraq's steps to take its rightful place with
equality and honor among the free nations of the
world.
KING:
Every one of those turned out to be, no, it didn't deliver
the progress they thought it would.
LT.
GENERAL THOMAS METZ, COMMANDER, MULTINATIONAL CORPS:
Fallujah has been the cancer that when the cancer is
removed, it will impact other
places.
WARE:
The battle of Fallujah itself was the most horrid and
horrific affair on both sides.
RUMSFELD:
Success in Fallujah will deal a blow to the terrorists in
the country.
WARE:
Photographer Yuri Kozyrev and I went in there for "Time"
magazine with the only American army group that joined
thousands of marines to retake that city. We were in the
very first vehicles with the very first platoon to enter
that city the night the battle began.
What I
saw men do those days and nights in the battle of Fallujah
will live with me forever.
November 2004
Battle for Fallujah
Though
Fallujah fell as it was always going to, to the might of
the American military, the insurgents knew they could not
withstand that, but that was not the
point.
It was
using it while they could as a sanctuary to arm, equip,
train, recruit and organize that was its value. And in
defending it as they did, to the bitter end, was the great
symbolic gesture that's still celebrated to this day. Not
just in Iraq but elsewhere in the Arab world.
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January 30, 2005
Election Day, Iraq
BUSH:
Today, the people of Iraq have spoken to the world. And the
world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of
the Middle East.
AMANPOUR:
This was going to be the turning point. And to their
credit, the Iraqis played the game very
well.
Behind
me you can see people being searched before they enter the
polling station.
Sadly,
after that excessively hopeful and wonderful day, and the
true emotion of watching these people defy danger, and they
raised their two fingers and they, you know, had the ink
stains on them to say that we believe and we want to go
forward like this. And it was an amazingly emotional
day.
The
promise of that moment has not been fulfilled; until this
day it's still not fulfilled.
CANDY
CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: At the time,
it was what Republicans and certainly the Bush White House
saw as, you know, an example to the American people, you
see, here is what the sacrifice is for.
But once
it happened once and then it happened again, and in between
there was all of this bloodshed and there didn't seem to be
any political progress, it began to lose
power.
ROBERTSON:
I remember watching little humvees; unarmored, soft skinned
humvees running around the city. Then you would see flak
jackets hung over the side of the humvees to protect the
soldiers inside. Then you would see them with this light
armor protection bolted on, sometimes it was handmade by
the soldiers because they couldn't get the vehicles that
they needed to protect themselves.
November 19, 2005
Haditha
This
cemented for many Iraqis what they feared and believed in
some cases was happening in Iraq, that U.S. troops were
wantonly killing Iraqis. This was the worst of all images
to create for the Iraqis.
WARE:
The Golden Dome Mosque in the small city of Samarra just
north of Baghdad.
BUSH:
This senseless attack is an affront to people of faith
throughout the world.
WARE:
When those militants made their way into that lightly
guarded complex and set their explosive charges and blew
that golden dome into dust, it lit a fire that has yet to
barely go out.
AMANPOUR:
The Samarra mosque bombing unleashed more than a year of
the worst violence that Iraq had seen. Practically a civil
war between the Sunnis and the Shiite, unbridled violence;
revenge, revenge and counter-revenge.
ZAIN
VERJEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Today there were attacks on
three Sunni mosques.
WOLF
BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Another bloody day in
Iraq.
SOLEDAD
O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Three car bombs ripped through a
Baghdad neighborhood.
ROBERTSON:
That was exactly what al Qaeda and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
wanted. They wanted to create this civil war in Iraq. They
wanted to create the sectarian warfare. Why did they want
to do that? They wanted to do that because they wanted to
make it ungovernable for the United States and for the
Iraqi government. They wanted the United States out of
Iraq.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: Can you back the vehicle up? Pull it out. Son of a
---. Well, welcome to freaking
Iraq.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: We ran into some issues with IEDs. IEDs are just
all over the place here.
ROBERTSON:
This is the type of roadside bomb that soldiers say they're
finding a lot of now. It's made of plastic so it can't be
picked up with metal detectors. Just two of these bombs
here can almost destroy a tank.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: Still got a few miles to
go.
UNIDENTIFIED
FEMALE: I'm nervous all the time.
ROBERTSON:
They're putting the bombs on the roads because they don't
have the power and strength to come toe to toe with you and
they know that this is a good way to attack
you.
BUSH:
We will complete our mission in Iraq and leave behind a
democracy that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend
itself.
ROBERTSON:
Muqtada al Sadr's militia rose up and really showed their
strength. This was a very bloody and violent militia that
also began to play a part in the sectarian warfare, play a
significant part in the Shia politics.
When the
elections came along, Muqtada al Sadr won a significant
following and support. When the current prime minister,
Nuri al Maliki, became prime minister, he needed Muqtada al
Sadr's support to win the position of prime minister.
May 20, 2006
Iraqi Government Sworn In
KING:
The White House says this dramatic trip was about a month
in the planning.
The
picture that Bush wanted he got; a handshake with the new
prime minister.
President
Bush greeting the new Iraqi prime minister who was told
just five minutes before Mr. Bush walked in the room that
he would have a special guest from Washington.
He was
careful but optimistic that they had found the guy who
would be, as he would put it, the partner with the United
States. It didn't take long for people to say, wrong
again.
WOLF
BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR, "THE SITUATION ROOM": The most wanted
man in Iraq is dead.
AMANPOUR:
Everybody hoped that when Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in
Iraq was killed, that it would somehow kill off the
insurgency. It didn't. It didn't. It wasn't about one
person. It was about the permissive environment, to use a
military term.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: Two killed and 35 wounded. I shed a lot of tears
over it. My heart's broken.
CROWLEY:
There was no real picture of those coffins, which really
tends to hit Americans very hard. What we did have,
however, were continuing stories of the vets who came back
wounded, maimed, blind, severe head injuries. There were a
lot of stories we saw, and that brought home the price of
the war.
I think
that was a very powerful image that moved the American
people on the politics of the war.
November 5, 2006
Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death
BUSH:
Saddam Hussein's trial is a milestone in the Iraqi people's
efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of
law.
WARE: It
was the old Saddam again during the
trial.
SADDAM
HUSSEIN (through translator): I don't want you to call
them, I want you to order them.
WARE:
That infuriated some and inspired others. But his guilt was
never in question.
HUSSEIN:
Execution by hanging. Long live the people, down with the
traitors.
AMANPOUR:
Everybody hoped that once the Iraqis, especially the Sunnis
and the insurgents saw that their leader was actually well
and truly in jail and going to face judgment, their
insurgency would peter out. It didn't. It kept going.
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BUSH:
The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American
people.
January 2007
The Surge Begins
It
is clear that we need to change our strategy in
Iraq.
KING:
The president's critics call him this go it alone
cowboy-diplomacy, uncompromising idealogue. You go back and
look at his history as governor and as president, he on any
number of occasions has compromised.
GENERAL
DAVID PETRAEUS, COMMANDER, MULTINATIONAL FORCE, IRAQ: The
stakes are very high. The way ahead will be hard and there
undoubtedly will be many tough
days.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: It is tense right now. This guy is very
uneasy.
ROBERTSON:
There was a need to change the way that the war was being
fought and you needed to use counterinsurgency and General
Petraeus has been credited with a lot of that, sort of
drawing up a road map, if you will.
UNIDENTIFIED
SOLDIER: It's hard to trust people when you come down here
and you fight all the time. Some of those people are people
that you fought before.
WARE:
The key element of the surge is the deals; the deals with
the Sunnis. Letting the Sunnis arm themselves and protect
themselves; enlisting the insurgents instead of fighting
them, so that they are no longer attacking American troops
and many fewer American soldiers are dying. It's a part of
the surge.
What
would have happened to me on these streets when Al Qaeda
was here?
My body would have been fed into a meat grinder, this Sunni
militia commander tells me.
ROBERTSON:
Al Qaeda hasn't gone away. They're going to be there for a
long time to come. As long as there are U.S. troops, al
Qaeda is going to have a rallying banner to draw people to
come and fight for it. They'll probably end up fighting
whichever government is ultimately established in 10 or 15
or 20 years' time.
WARE:
We thread our way through rival militia checkpoints and
pass undetected through Iraqi army positions.
Segregating
the capital Baghdad into Sunni and Shia enclaves, literally
guarded by militia checkpoints on either side and hemmed in
by monstrous concrete blast walls that divides these
populations and keeps them apart from killing each other is
a key part of the surge.
Do
you think this government will ever be able to embrace the
Sunni groups?
The
government is not loyal to its country, says this
U.S.-backed Sunni commander.
Battering
Iraqi politicians' heads against each other to force them
to come to agreements, pass legislation and to stop
intoning the name of sectarian violence and promoting it is
a key part of the surge.
ROBERTSON:
There is an opportunity for the future to look better than
the recent past in Iraq. There is an opportunity for
compromise. But if it's not grasped quickly, then violence
could flare up again. The tensions exist beneath the
surface.
OBAMA:
The surge is a tactic and the broader question is, has the
strategy in Iraq been successful?
KING: To
the degree that people look at the surge and say progress
has been made, General Petraeus obviously is someone who
gets and deserves to get the credit for
that.
MCCAIN:
You look at what's happened over the last year, in the view
of most objective observers, it's a pretty remarkable
improvement.
KING:
Senator McCain visited the Shorjah market just up the road
a bit a year ago as part of a high-profile effort to
suggest security already was dramatically improving. But it
took more than 100 troops to escort him and provide
security for the visit. And a year later the neighborhood
remains highly volatile, unsafe for an American to visit,
and under the control of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr's
Mehdi army.
ROBERTSON:
Muqtada al Sadr is a player, he wants to be a player, he
believes in whatever means he needs to remain powerful and
the fact that his militia has been stood down, he's sort of
taking them off active violence and that has allowed the
situation to calm.
KING:
People always say that McCain is attached to Bush. I think
you could make the case that in some ways McCain is more
attached to Petraeus.
CLINTON:
Despite the evidence, President Bush is determined to
continue his failed policy in Iraq until he leaves office.
And Senator McCain will gladly accept the torch and stay
the course.
KING: If
the Democrats can succeed in saying this would be a third
Bush term, this guy may never bring the troops out of Iraq,
then McCain will lose.
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BUSH:
Five years into this battle, there is an understandable
debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the
fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it. The
answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power
was the right decision. And this is a fight America can and
must win.
KING:
Iraq is an issue in terms of what do we do about this war
that now roughly 2/3 of the American people think was a bad
idea?
The Race for The White House
CLINTON:
When that moving van finally pulls away from the White
House, America will be back.
OBAMA:
I'm running for president because it's time to turn the
page on a failed ideology.
CROWLEY:
What the Democrats most want is a candidate who will stand
up there and say, I'm going to get us out of Iraq. John
McCain made a comment not too long ago about how, well, we
may have to stay there for 100 years --
UNIDENTIFIED
MAN: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq
for 50 years.
MCCAIN:
Maybe 100, as long as Americans are not being injured or
harmed or wounded or killed.
CROWLEY:
He didn't mean in a battle but nonetheless, it was picked
up by the Democrats.
CLINTON:
On the very first day I would ask the Secretary of Defense,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and my Security Advisor to begin
working on a plan that I could start bringing our troops
home within 60 days.
OBAMA:
On day one, I will end this war. Not because politics
compels it. Not because our troops cannot bear the burden
as heavy as it is. But because it is the right thing to
do.
CROWLEY:
Whether it's John McCain, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama,
they all have made great pains to say, I'm going to tell
you the truth. I'm going to be the straight
shooter.
The
American public is hardened on the idea of this war. They
have decided this war wasn't worth it.
KING:
Any new president of the United States will find himself or
herself having to change some of the things he or she
promised in the campaign, based on simple reality or a new
political calculation. That's a fact. It happens to every
president.
The Future of Iraq
WARE:
Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki has extreme limits to his
power.
NURI
AL MALIKI, PRIME MINISTER OF IRAQ (through translator):
We've told the Iranians and the Americans, we know you have
a problem with each other, but we're asking you to please
solve your problems outside of Iraq.
WARE:
Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki is aware of the realities,
not just of history and shared ties between Iraq and Iran;
but the realities of this region and the realities of the
future.
AMANPOUR:
The only way for a future in Iraq is for the Iraqi people
and the Iraqi elected leaders to understand what it means
by democratic government.
If you
made the population satisfied, if you made the population
believe in you, if you made the population have a stake in
what was going on, because you were giving them direct
benefits for their daily lives, then it would have been
much more difficult for the insurgents to have that
sympathy and that area to operate and to work their violent
and terrible deeds.
PETRAEUS:
We would love to win hearts and minds, but the truth is
what we really want to do is help the Iraqis win hearts and
minds of their own citizenry.
TUCHMAN:
It's a different war now. Morale's changed. What hasn't
changed is the courage of the troops. They're really very
brave, back then, back now operating in environments that
are unknown, mysterious and scary.
WARE:
Soldiers, at the end of the day, when those bullets are
flying past their heads, where war is about nothing but
inches between those who survive and those who do not,
they're fighting at the end of the day for their brother
and their brother is the man right next to them. That's who
soldiers are fighting for.
It
doesn't matter who sent them or why they sent them or what
they're doing. Men will lay down their lives for each other
and that's the nobility of men in
combat.
And
there's a certain sense of responsibility to keep telling
the story. We're going to have to understand what happened
here. And if I've been able to bear witness to just moments
of that story, then I think I have an obligation to tell
it.
COOPER:
Michael Ware said the war will forever be a part of his
life. I'm sure many of those who have served feel the same
way. Iraq has changed our country, it's challenged it. Five
years ago, few people thought the war would last this long.
Where will we be five years from now? We can, of course,
only wait.
We do
know that the fighting in Iraq will still be here in
November when we vote for the next president, a president
faced with a war that is far from over.
I'm
Anderson Cooper. Thanks for watching.