ALEX CHADWICK, Host:
From the studios of NPR West, this is DAY TO DAY. I'm Alex Chadwick.
MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
Coming up, NBC News is number one on TV and suddenly cutting jobs like crazy.
CHADWICK: First, the lead story, Iraq and violence. Suicide bombers have killed or wounded about 100 people there in the last 24 hours.
BRAND: At a press briefing in Baghdad today, the U.S. military spokesman, Major General Bill Caldwell acknowledged that the two month effort to control violence just in Baghdad is not going well.
CHADWICK: It's not meeting overall expectations, is how he put it, and it's gotten worse during the Muslim holy month.
BILL CALDWELL: The enemy knows that killing innocent people and Americans will garner headlines and create a sense of frustration.
BRAND: The elections and Iraq were the subject of an interview on ABC last night with President Bush. He responded to a column in the New York Times by Tom Freedman. Freedman compared the violence in Iraq to the famous Tet offensive, a turning point in the Vietnam war.
GEORGE W: He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election.
CHADWICK: The Vietnam analogy also occurs this week to Les Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, a journalist and government official for decades.
BRAND: In the 1960s, at just 30 years old, he was Director of Policy and Planning for the Department of Defense. So when DAY TO DAY saw what he wrote for Time magazine this week, we called him.
CHADWICK: What do you think defeat in Iraq would look like?
LES GELB: Defeat in Iraq scares me because I believe that there will be very bad consequences, just as I believed the dominos would fall after our defeat in Vietnam. In fact, you know, just to listen to what President Bush says about defeat and what most foreign policy experts say made me think back more than 35 years to what happened to us in Vietnam, because we were all afraid of exactly the same thing - I know I was - that the dominos would fall throughout Asia. Every foreign policy expert I knew thought the dominos would fall.
CHADWICK: But they didn't.
GELB: But there are things we can do in Iraq right now that would really blunt the worst effects if we end up being defeated in there, in that country, in one way or the other.
CHADWICK: And those are?
GELB: And thirdly, we've got to move with regional diplomacy. However you feel about doing anything else, we've got to do that now to see that the neighbors don't pick at the carcass of Iraq and create a regional war.
CHADWICK: Les, thank you again.
GELB: Okay. Take care. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
