By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer
On Thursday June 5, in his office, I watched Tim Russert lean back in his chair and carefully read over the excerpts of an interview he'd conducted with Vice President Dick Cheney more than five years earlier, just days before the Iraq war was launched. In one sense, nowhere was Russert's influence more clear than this: The very excerpts from “Meet the Press” he was reading were included in a widely awaited report released that day by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Committee's goal: Compare the public statements of the Bush Administration before the Iraq war against the actual intelligence produced by America's spies. Had President Bush and Cheney and others, as they publicly made the case for war, ever contradicted what the CIA was saying secretly?
So investigators with the Senate Intelligence Committee had pulled the transcript of Russert's classic interview with Cheney on March 16, 2003, in those heady days before the war, to examine what Cheney was saying and whether it matched the actual intelligence. When the report came out I alerted Russert that the committee had examined the interview, and he emailed back quickly: "I would like to see this... hold accountable on air."
Russert's famous question
Reading the interview, five years later, is still interesting. Famously, Russert asked, "If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the America people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?"
Cheney said he didn't think it would unfold that way, "because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
Then Russert challenged him on cost of the upcoming war, citing experts. "We should expect," Russert said, "as American citizens, that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement."
The vice president wouldn't confirm that. "I can't say that, Tim. There are estimates out there."
Remember that this interview was in 2003, well before people talked about civil war in Iraq. "Are you convinced," Russert pressed Cheney, "the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy?" Cheney said he thought they would.
These, and other predictions made by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, were not in complete accordance with the views of the intelligence community, the Senate committee found in its majority opinion. Statements by Bush and Cheney "did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products." In fact, the Senate report said rather dryly that the Intelligence community "did not directly assess whether U.S. personnel would be 'greeted as liberators.' " And the report said the real view of the intelligence community was that establishing a "stable democratic government... would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge."
After reading all this, so many years later, Russert still seemed fascinated by his questions and Cheney's answers in light of what happened since the invasion. "You've got to admit," he said to me later when I ran into him in the hall, "my questions were pretty prescient."
He was right, of course. They were.
