MSNBC Buchanan & Press - Transcript

MSNBC  
SHOW: BUCHANAN & PRESS 18:00

HEADLINE: BUCHANAN & PRESS for September 9, 2003

BYLINE: Pat Buchanan; Bill Press

GUESTS: George Joulwan; Chuck Grassley; Tom McClintock; Conan O'Brien

HIGHLIGHT:
Interview with former NATO Supreme Allied Commander George Joulwan. Then, President Bush pushes Congress for more money to rebuild Iraq. Finally, Peter Ueberroth drops out of California recall election.

PRESS: That was Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz today defending the price of the war on terror. But will Congress give President Bush the almost $90 billion he's asking for? Let's find out. Joining us from Capitol Hill, the man who controls the Senate's purse strings and does a good job at it, Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Senator, welcome. You know you and I have had several debates before. You're a Republican. I'm a Democrat. We don't agree on much, but I always admire you because you are a fiscal watchdog and I like that, Senator. Now tell me, you're not going to roll over and give George Bush this $87 billion, are you?

SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY (R), IOWA: We're going to vote this amount of money because you don't go to war only as a last resort. If you go to war, you go to war to win. And if you win the war, you don't want to lose the peace. That's the practice of several engagements the United States has been involved in and it's proved successful most of the time. And I think it'd be wrong to not finish the job once we've done it...

PRESS: Senator...

GRASSLEY: Go ahead.

PRESS: Well on Sunday night when the president addressed the nation, he included in his speech, was this one sentence Senator. "We have conducted a thorough assessment,"—key words—"thorough assessment of our military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and also in Afghanistan." Certainly, Senator, before you vote that 87 billion you're going to ask to see this thorough assessments the administration has prepared, aren't you?

GRASSLEY: We'll have a chance to see it, but I don't know whether it means a whole lot, Bill, and I don't say that flippantly. It's just very difficult to predict what's going to happen on the battlefield or even in peacekeeping over the next year. I think it's reasonable to expect that they ought to have pretty sound judgment of what the $20 billion for reconstruction ought to be used, but I'm one of those that believes that the money for reconstruction should be alone and under the Hague Convention 197 (ph).

We've got an opportunity to use the riches of any nation to rebuild it. In fact, we have a responsibility under that convention to so do. So, it seems to me that they ought to be able to pay that back. We can't recover our military expenses under the Hague Convention, but it's part of our effort to win the peace and to compare that $51 billion to what it would be if we didn't have the supply of oil flowing from the Middle East and what that would do to our economy it'd be much more costly.

BUCHANAN: All right. Senator, Pat Buchanan here. You are correct, obviously, if we go into war, you go in to win and whatever it cost, you pay that cost. But if you had known it was going to be 87 billion for openers and maybe a good deal more and this could be a war that goes on for a number of years given the levels of terror over there now, would you have voted for the president's tax cut if you had known this?

GRASSLEY: As far as the tax cut was concerned, it was very directly related to getting the economy moving after what happened in the war on terror in New York on September the 11th. And I think it's very essential to have a strong economy if you're going to go to war. You can't go to war with a weak economy. And in order to do all the things we're doing, we have to have a strong economy. So, that's why we had the tax cut.

BUCHANAN: Would you vote now to make the tax cuts permanent...

GRASSLEY: I would vote to make the tax cuts permanent. Why? Because the level of taxation that we have right now is in the band that we've had for the last 50 years of 17 to 19 percent of the gross national product. And remember in World War II the taxes - percent of the gross national product was under 21 percent. We reached 21 percent in peacetime here two years ago.

BUCHANAN: But Senator, you're a fiscal conservative and we are looking at a 525, $550-billion deficit this year and heaven knows what it's going to be down the road if we make the tax cuts permanent and we have this gigantic or rising war expenditure. Does that not alarm you?

GRASSLEY: Well, it alarms me enough that I don't think our country has a deficit because we're in war or because the country's under taxed. It's because in a large area of the government the 30 percent is—that's non-defense discretionary we spent at nine percent increases each of the last three years and they're unsustainable even in the time of a good economy. So, I think you've got to consider the whole budget and not just the amount that's going for the war in Iraq, because, remember, the war in Iraq is not a recurring expense, but our domestic expenditures are.

PRESS: All right, now Senator, we're not talking—the war is over, OK. Now we're talking about this building the peace or bringing democracy as the president says. I hate not to join your parade here, Senator, but that $87 billion is only a down payment and as Jim Miklaszewski pointed out today on our network, that's 25 times the budget of the CIA. That's nine times the budget of the State Department. Why should we Americans pump out that kind of money on this dream of building democracy in Iraq?

GRASSLEY: How do you know it's only a down payment? How do you know that a year from now that...

(CROSSTALK)

PRESS: ... you don't think they're not going to come back and ask for more money, Senator? How long have you been around that Senate?

GRASSLEY: Well, listen, how long did we spend—we reduced, our efforts in Afghanistan an awful lot when the international community got involved, and we expect the international community and the U.N. to get involved in this one as well. It's their obligation. They benefit from the world supply of oil being very liberal to keep the price down. They have an investment there as well as we do.

BUCHANAN: A quick final question and a yes-or-no answer, Senator. If the U.N. doesn't give us the authorization, the French veto or oppose it, would you agree to send more U.S. troops into Iraq?

GRASSLEY: I would vote to do whatever it takes to win the peace as long as we've shed the blood that we have and invested what we have in that...

BUCHANAN: Senator...

GRASSLEY: ... region.

BUCHANAN: Senator Grassley, thank you very much.

PRESS: Thanks Senator.

BUCHANAN: We appreciate it.

GRASSLEY: Thank you.