Duncan Hunter on New Hampshire Public Radio 7-5-07

YouTube ^ | 7-30-07 | YouTube

[Calpernia]

Duncan Hunter: So the answer to folks that say well how long, we have got a lot of the Iraqi Battalions now have extensive battlefield experience and we still have some work to do. And a lot of it depends again on the intensity of the opposition from the opponents of the Iraqi forces. But again I think the government will hold. I think the Army will hold. And I think we will be able to start rotating out soon.

Laura Knoy: Let’s take another call. This is Erin from Hanover. Hi Erin, you are on The Exchange with Congressman Duncan Hunter.

Erin: Yes, it is my understanding that we went to war with Iraq to find Weapons of Mass Destruction, win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and establish a model democracy. This cost billions of dollars and I’m curious what you would do differently from the President and if you can comment on how well the President did with this job.

Duncan Hunter: Thanks for the question. First, I think the job is a long hard difficult road and as I said, there is no smooth road to occupation. So the implication that somehow that we made these terrible decisions that we should have let Saddam Hussein’s army stay in place, I think that would have been a mess, or the idea that we should have stuffed more Americans in there earlier, I think that would not have necessarily been good. There would have given more targets and that certainly doesn’t give an Iraqi face to the security apparatus. Occupations are a tough, long difficult road. I think it is worth while, I think we have done a fairly good job to this point, and I think we are close to having success here.

Laura Knoy: To his question, what would you do differently?

Duncan Hunter: Well, here is what I would do differently. Here was my recommendation to the White House. That we take all the Iraqi Battalions, even in the quiet areas, and in about half of the Provences of the 18 Provences there about fewer than one or two attacks a day. They are very quiet. You have Iraqi Battalions there that have not been moved into combat rotations. Move those guys into combat rotations. Get them to prove up and be battle hardened so they can be an affective part of the Iraqi Army. That speeds up the hand off of the security responsibilities in Iraq. That is what I would do. I would excellerate that stand up of the Iraqi battalions in the quiet benign Provences of Iraq and get that done quicker.

Laura Knoy: And Congressman, I just want to go back just briefly to one more question about Iraq. And that is, when you talk about it, you use the word occupation a lot. That seems to be a word that has negative connotation. That some people don’t want to use. No we are not occupying Iraq we are helping the Iraqi government stand on its own.

Duncan Hunter: Well I use it because it’s an accurate description of what we are doing. I think the American people are smart enough that we can just talk straight to each other. And sure it’s an occupation. Whenever you have the 82nd Airborne, the 1st Infantry Division, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 2nd Marine Division, in a nation in a strategic or a tactical posture and they are undergoing battlefield operations everyday, that is an occupation. Of course it is. That comes from the administration too. They refer to it as an occupation. And it is an occupation. But occupations are good. I mean occupations, we occupied Japan after WW2 because we realized it was important to have a friend on that side of the Pacific. You know what is great? When we took Japan after we dropped the Atom Bomb, the Japanese warloads warned the people that we would be as brutal to them as they have been to other people. You know they killed 100,000 people when they took NanKing China in 1 night. Americans GIs walked down the streets of Tokyo passing out Hershey Bars and there were very few instances of violence against civilians. Americans were very good in that instance. And you know, we gave Japan a constitution. MacCarther taught them to have a democratic country. Today, they are a democracy. They are a free country. That is in our interest. They are also a strong economy. We gave them a lot of jobs after WW2. We stood them up. We helped them up. We helped up Europe. We gave freedom to countries like El Salvador. We gave freedom to South Korea. We protected them. We occupied South Korea. We occupied Japan. Today they are good friends of the United States. So why is it bad to occupy a country if you bring them freedom and then, the most important thing, then you leave. Americans will leave Iraq.

Laura Knoy: With Japan for example, you have a very homogeneous country. They have always been a country in of itself. With Iraq, Congressman, you know this better than I do, you have a country that was mushed together by the British…

Duncan Hunter: Artificial boundaries.

Laura Knoy: Artificial Boundaries, during the colonial era. You got three groups of people that don’t like each other very much. So it’s kinda different than the Japanese example.

Duncan Hunter: You have given a good reason for the West, United States, to never undertake a freedom initiative in the Middle East. The easiest thing to say in the Middle East is it’s a mess. It is always going to be a mess. There is nothing we can do about it. Let’s stay away from it. We learned after 9/11, that if we don’t change the World, the World is going to change us. This will be the only initiative for Freedom. I think everybody agrees, if the United States can’t do it there is no other nation in the world that can do it.

We have had those glimmers of hope. We had the free election where people held their fingers up in the air with the purple ink on it showing that they had voted. And interestingly, the Iraqi people take to voting. They take to politics. We have a chance to make this work.

So, just as any nation is different you can say El Salvador is different too. It has a different make up, different borders, and different demographics than Japan did. South Korea is different, it was split off from the North so it is half a country, right? On the other hand, they now have freedom. Every country is different. We have a chance to make this work. If we can have a friend, not an enemy in Iraq, a country that will not be a state sponsor of terrorism with those massive resources, and a country that has a modicum of freedom for people. And you saw this Laura, when we had those first elections all of a sudden you saw the people in Lebanon pushing back against the Syrian occupiers. Then you had Egypt announcing it would have its first elections in many years, remember that? Multiparty elections. So you had a little ripple that went throughout the Middle East for freedom. After they saw the Iraqi example.

Now people say, that is faded now. Syria has its iron fist back around Lebanon. And Egyptians are still clamping down, well that is true. But United States never stops trying. And I think we have a good opportunity to make this work. So let’s do everything we can to make this work rather than come up with 85 reasons why it probably won’t work and we should all come home and be fortress American.

Laura Knoy: Well Congressman, we could spend hours and hours on this subject. I would love to ask you follow up questions. But let’s go to our phones.

Part 4 later…..