Iraq War is Focus for Regent's Clash of the Titans

By Dale Hurd

CBN News Sr. Reporter

CBN.com – (CBN News) - People heard both sides of the debate over Iraq recently, as four leading analysts gave their views during Regent University's annual Clash of the Titans.

With polls showing Americans divided over the Iraq war, the four leading commentators took on the topic.

NBC News Anchor Forrest Sawyer moderated the exchange between liberals Wesley Clark and Paul Begala and conservatives Oliver North and Newt Gingrich.

The issue: Is the Bush strategy working in Iraq Former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Wesley Clark drew boos when he said the Bush administration should have not gone into Iraq without trying to bring along the United Nations and the French.

After the audience’s negative response, Clark said, “Now hang on. I want to ask you something -- which one of you believes that a single American serviceman should die before every possible other alternative has been exhausted?”

Gingrich replied, “I would also say to them, which of you believes there were any circumstances under which Jacques Chirac was going to undermine his covert alliance with Saddam Hussein and the billions of dollars France was making?”

But the debate also went to the very justifications for the war, with former House Speaker Gingrich saying that the media and the left continue to ignore the facts in the report by UN weapons inspector David Kay, that Saddam was dangerous.

“The Iraqi secret police were running 18 biological laboratories,” Gingrich explained. “That's a fact.”

Sawyer retorted, “Where's the citing of that? Where do you know this?” Gingrich responded, “That's in the part of the Kay report that no one in the media would read. Kay said on the record, in the Senate, that Saddam was more dangerous than we thought. That was Kay's personal summary judgment.”

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who covers Iraq for Fox News, says the media continues to fail to show the successes in Iraq, in part because Western reporters are not leaving the safety of the Green Zone in Baghdad:

“Today in Iraq, my network - that I'm going back out there for the seventh time in a few weeks - my network has nobody in the field, nor does anybody else,” North said. “They're all back in the Green Zone doing balcony shots using tape that they buy from Arab journalists. There's our problem. We don't have enough reporters out in the field.”

Clark ripped the Pentagon and the White House for conduct of the war, and for allegations that the U.S. military has used torture:

Clark said, “Now the American armed forces that I spent 34 years in didn't torture people, it didn't abuse them, it didn't punch prisoners when it captured them. It treated them exactly as the Geneva Convention required us to do, or we held people accountable.”

Both sides said now that the U.S. needs to win in Iraq, but former Clinton advisor Paul Begala said that Bush needs be more upfront with the America people about how the war is going.

“If the President wanted to sustain support for this war,” Begala remarked, “he should speak exactly the way Newt Gingrich was speaking. Instead of the usual ‘happy horseman’ we get from him, which is, all is great all is wonderful, he ought to sound like Newt. He ought to say this is a big, long bloody scary difficult deal, but we'll never flinch.”

And Gingrich drew a standing ovation with his Winston Churchill-like closing comments, that America has no choice but to win.

“We as a free people have to decide that our civilization is worth defending,” Gingrich said, “[that] our freedoms are worth fighting for, and that we'll learn what we have to learn, do what we have to do -- and we will win this war, whatever it takes, and that's the only future I know of. Thank you very much.”