Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/analysts-discuss-new-congress-iraq-violence Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Political analysts David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post discuss changes in the political landscape on Capitol Hill and the impact of recent insurgent violence in Iraq. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JUDY WOODRUFF: And now the analysis of Brooks and Dionne, New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. Mark Shields is off tonight.David, to you first. This new terrible spike in violence in Iraq — or I should say another — is this a new phase or is this just more of the same? How do you read it? DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: Well, I think the big implication, first of all, is that events in Iraq are happening faster than events in Washington. And what we're seeing is the disintegration of Iraqi society.I think about 10,000 Iraqis move every week back to their tribal homelands — Shia to Shia areas, Sunni to Sunni areas. And so you've had almost half a million people move. And so what's happening is society as an organism is pulling back into itself. And I suspect that American policy and world policy hasn't really caught up with that yet. JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you see it that way? E.J. DIONNE, Columnist, Washington Post: Well, you know, I mean, the administration wanted to wage this war in the worst way, and in the other sense, tragically, it did.I mean, from the very beginning, we have not — we were not able to establish order in Iraq, which was the thing that Iraqis expected us to do. And we let these problems fester and fester, and I think the administration didn't realize that there was a time limit on this, that the American people weren't willing to stay here forever.They didn't have all the time in the world, and that the forces on the ground, as was mentioned in the earlier segment, were going to begin to fly apart, if we didn't really establish order and some trust in our ability to provide order so the Iraqi government could have confidence.I think the problem now is that it's not clear how you put this back together. Once the china is broken, it's broken. And there are a lot of regional forces with both an interest, on the one hand, in avoiding civil war — and that's what we've got to count on, that we can get some of those regional forces together to say, "If this gets out of hand, we're in trouble."On the other hand, Iran does have an interest in its influence in the south, and I think Iran profits from the fact that we are in the middle of this mess. And Syria, whose help we need, is also a real problem for us, not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon. So this is a very, very difficult situation to solve.