MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Ruben Gallego

Interview

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Joining us now are Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona. He is a Marine Corps combat veteran and served in Iraq. And he`s a member of the House Armed Services Committee. And James Fellows is with us. Staff writer for "The Atlantic" and a former speech writer for President Jimmy Carter.

Congressman, let me begin with you. That setting, Richard Nixon`s library, which is where the worst crimes -- that`s the president who committed the worst crimes of the Vietnam War, that`s the place where Robert O`Brien decided to say we shouldn`t -- we weren`t going to have an evacuation that looked as bad as what happened in Vietnam because he somehow believes that he was going to figure out how to withdraw from a war that we lost in an orderly and safe way.

REP. RUBEN GALLEGO (D-AZ): Look, it`s just a fact, 20-year wars do not end well, especially wars where you liberate 5,000 prisoners right before the withdraw deadline and cut a deal with the Taliban that`s fairly favorable.

No matter who was going to be in charge, certainly this was not going to go well. The deal that, you know, President Trump arranged was certainly did not set up for it to go well.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is that we got out. No, I do agree could evacuations have gotten better? Maybe. I think there are certain things we could have done.

At the end of the day, we can`t deny that this war was always going to end badly. The real basis of what was occurring throughout the country for 20 years really fed into I think at the end of the day this mass evacuation of people who just did not trust the Afghan government to look out for them. And it really is, you know, incumbent upon all of us to recognize that.

And lastly, you know, the O`Briens of the world, the Petraeuses of the world, the McMasters of the world -- all these people are now trying to come up with these like alternative reality of how Afghanistan could be.

It should really be called culprit (ph) because they are part of the problem. They`re part of the reason why we`re here. They hid from the public how weak and frail the Afghan government was.

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GALLEGO: They continued to tell us that we`re about to turn the corner. When the fact is we never turned a corner, we just eventually just gave up. And I think that`s actually the best situation we could have found ourselves in unfortunately.

O`DONNELL: James Fellows, it was odd for me, as you can imagine, to see Robert O`Brien sitting in the Nixon library of all places talking about America`s evacuation from a war that we lost.

JAMES FELLOWS, STAFF WRITER, "THE ATLANTIC": Yes indeed.

I think that was -- as you and I discussed last week, the scale comparisons between the fall of Saigon and all the carnage that followed that and the evacuation of Kabul in the last month are entirely of different scales. I think it was interesting the way Mr. O`Brien would still make that comparison because as time has gone on and I think as President Biden was saying in his remarks yesterday, it is sinking in what the U.S. managed to accomplish in a terrible situation.

The terrible situation is losing a war. The accomplishment is being able to get as many people out as were gotten out and the contrast to the urban war that was going on in the streets of Saigon at the time is clear. And that hen you`ve pointed out many times.

O`DONNELL: Congressman, Jim Fellows and I, who were old enough to remember watching on TV the evacuation from Saigon, I was a college student at the time. We had reason to believe we would never see that again because the lessons of Vietnam, we thought or many of us thought were learned by 1975 and we would never go into a war like that again.

Turns out those lessons didn`t last long enough. What are the lessons that we should be learning now?

The most important lesson is that if you`re going to commit your country to war, you should actually commit your whole country to war. We actually did not really fight a war as a nation. We expected the one-tenth, the 1 percent of the American public, you know, that produces sons and daughters to the military to fight this war.

We hid the remainder of the war through Special Forces, and basically, you know, even the media ignored it basically until the last three weeks.

There was this unwritten alliance between I think a lot of the think tankers and, you know, more pro-war hawks that basically they thought they could just continue to have this silent war and not have to admit defeat until, you know, democracy caught up

And democracy said and people spoke out and said we want to get out of this war and they were shocked that, you know, politicians followed up with it. Well, you know, in the end if you want to have a long-lasting war, then you actually have to have people that want to commit to it.

But that is against the idea I think of the history of this country. That`s not in our nature. And in the future I hope we recognize that we`re not an occupying force.

And if you are and you really truly need to have a commitment from the public and not have this haphazard policy where we hope that, you know, the rest of the public forgets about these oversea adventures.

O`DONNELL: James Fellows, what are the lessons you think we should learn?

FELLOWS: So I could not agree more than I do with the Congressman`s remarks. You may remember, Lawrence, five years ago I published a cover story in "The Atlantic" called "Chicken Hawk Nation" about a nation that was willing to do anything for its military except take them seriously. That is salute the heroes and then have all the other -- the answers but not think seriously about the missions to which we are committing this small fraction of our population.

In the last 20 years it is fewer than 1 percent of the entire U.S. population that has served in any point in either Iraq or Afghanistan. And it is natural that when the costs are deflected from a country as a whole that the nation is not careful about how it uses its military force and we should be more careful.

O`DONNELL: James Fellows and Congressman Ruben Gallego, thank you both very much for joining us tonight.

FELLOWS: Thank you.

GALLEGO: Thank you.

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