[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 39 (Tuesday, March 11, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H1739-H1741]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                DEALING WITH A DEADLY CHALLENGE ON IRAQ

  Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding, and congratulate him on a very fine and thoughtful statement.
  Mr. Speaker, there is a good possibility that our country will be at 
war in Iraq before the month is out. The President held out little hope 
for any alternative approach to disarming Iraq at his press conference 
last Thursday. Yet a majority of the American people continue to urge 
for more time for inspections while we are facing something close to a 
diplomatic meltdown with major allies. A failure to secure allied 
support will have major consequences for every American. Our citizens 
alone will shoulder the financial burden of this war and its aftermath. 
Our troops will need to be kept indefinitely in post-war Iraq, our 
country alone as an occupying force will be the target of hatred, 
resentment and hostility from many in the Arab world, and America will 
risk losing our standing among the world's democracies as one who leads 
by moral suasion and example as well as by military might.
  Pollsters here at home say they have rarely seen an issue where the 
public's reaction is more conditional or ambivalent. Tonight I want to 
suggest this is because the Bush administration has not answered basic 
questions about this war and has backed us into a situation where we 
seem to be choosing between equally unsatisfactory ways of dealing with 
what most agree is a deadly challenge.

                              {time}  2245

  The distinguished historian William Leuchtenburg citing Thomas 
Jefferson's maxim that ``great innovation should not be forced on 
slender majorities,'' recently contrasted George W. Bush's 
unilateralism to the behavior of previous wartime Presidents and found 
him ``unique in his defiance of so much international and domestic 
opinion.''
  Many of our constituents believe that the full range and intensity of 
public opinion has not been visible or audible in Congress. One reason 
is that, by our vote of October 10 which gave the President an open-
ended authorization for the use of force, this institution forfeited 
its coordinate decisionmaking role. Mr. Speaker, an up or down vote on 
a resolution authorizing force is at best a blunt instrument for 
checking the executive's constitutional dominance of foreign and 
military policy; but by granting unchecked authority months in advance, 
we made that instrument blunter yet.
  Still, I believe the questions and the challenges to the President's 
approach

[[Page H1740]]

emanating from the Congress, and from Democratic Members in particular, 
have been more persistent and more consistent than most media accounts 
have acknowledged. It is true, Democrats were divided on final passage 
of the October resolution. And, in fact, this is not an issue on which 
a stance of absolute opposition is called for. We all understand Saddam 
Hussein to be a brutal dictator who is implacably hostile to our 
country and what we stand for. There is near unanimity in this body and 
in the international community that whatever capacity he has to make or 
use weapons of mass destruction must be ended.
  But critical questions remain regarding alternative means to this 
end. Many Members of this body have raised these questions with 
increasing intensity in recent weeks; and unfortunately, the Bush 
administration has rarely provided satisfactory answers. What 
accounting do we have for the costs and risks of a military invasion? 
How are we to secure and maintain the support and engagement of our 
allies? Can Iraq be disarmed by means that do not divert us from or 
otherwise compromise equally or more urgent antiterrorist and 
diplomatic objectives? And do we have a credible plan for rebuilding 
and governing postwar Iraq, and have we secured the necessary 
international cooperation to ensure that this does not become a 
perceived U.S. occupation?
  Administration officials, for example, have persistently refused to 
put a price tag on a U.S. invasion which, unlike the Gulf War, would 
have almost no financial backing from allies. The President's budget 
omits any reference to an Iraq war. With deficits for 2003 and 2004 
already predicted to break historic records and $2 trillion slated to 
be added to the national debt by 2008, the addition of $80 billion to 
$200 billion in war costs could not come as welcome news. But it is an 
insult to this body and to the American people to submit a budget that 
absolutely fails to give an honest accounting, even within broad 
limits, of what those costs would be.
  Daily dispatches from Korea leave little doubt that North Korea is 
taking advantage of our preoccupation with Iraq to dangerously ratchet 
up its nuclear program, and that the administration's diplomacy has not 
been up to this challenge.
  And now we learn that the Bush administration, which, truth to tell, 
has never had its heart in Middle East peace-making, has rebuffed its 
so-called quartet partners, the European allies, Russia, and the United 
Nations, and insisted on yet another postponement in publishing the 
long-anticipated ``road map'' to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. 
Why? Because of the crisis in Iraq. President Bush in December demanded 
that release of the timetable for reciprocal steps and negotiations be 
delayed until after the Israeli elections. Now he is insisting again 
that the effort be delayed, this time until after we deal with Iraq, 
seemingly thinking that victory in Iraq will be the key to solving this 
and most other problems in the Middle East.
  As the New York Times editorialized last Sunday, ``The Bush 
administration has not been willing to risk any political capital in 
attempting to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 
but now the President is theorizing that invading Iraq will do the 
trick.''
  The fact is that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the 
Bush administrations's failure to do anything about it represent an 
enormous obstacle to enlisting the support we need to achieve our 
objectives in the region, including the war on terrorism. That is 
certainly the way the Europeans see it; and the President's rebuff has 
further poisoned the atmosphere, even as the administration struggles 
to gain allied support for military action against Iraq. Among the 
angriest allies reportedly is Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, who 
for months has pleaded with President Bush to become more involved in 
Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

  The administration's torpedoing of the Quartet initiative is also ill 
advised and ill timed with respect to Palestinian efforts at reform. It 
comes precisely at the time that President Arafat, under considerable 
pressure, has nominated Mahmoud Abbas, otherwise known as Abu Mazen, 
for the new position of Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. 
Abu Mazen, with whom the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis) and I had a 
cordial and useful visit in Ramallah in December, has been an outspoken 
critic of the militarization of the Palestinian uprising. How 
successful his appointment proves in reforming Palestinian governance 
will depend, among other things, on how much real authority he and his 
position are given. But President Bush could hardly have picked a more 
inauspicious time to throw cold water on the plans to get back to 
negotiations.
  ``There was a lot of dismay when the road map was put off before, and 
the dismay right now is even worse,'' one European diplomat told a New 
York Times reporter. ``Without hope, the power of extremists will only 
grow,'' added another.
  Such, Mr. Speaker, are the costs of allowing Iraq to trump everything 
else on our antiterrorist and diplomatic agenda.
  Mr. Speaker, the world welcomed the President's decision last fall to 
take the Iraq matter to the United Nations and, apparently, to give 
more extensive inspections and the supervised destruction of weapons a 
chance to work. But his rhetoric since that time has led many to 
believe that he has always regarded the inspections as foreordained to 
failure and war as the only recourse. Suspicions have deepened as 
administration statements about links between Iraq and al Qaeda have 
become less and less measured. Such statements have helped persuade 
some 42 percent of the American public that Saddam Hussein was 
personally responsible for the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks. But 
prospective allies examining the rationale for war have understandably 
been less impressed.
  Inspections, of course, are a two-way street. They will never work 
without Iraq's willing cooperation; and that cooperation, as Mr. Blix 
and Mr. El Baradei have made clear, has been far from satisfactory. No 
matter how numerous or how skilled the inspectors are, they cannot find 
what amounts to needles in haystacks without honest and complete 
information regarding the weapons and the material which the Iraqis 
claim to have destroyed and the whereabouts of any remaining 
stockpiles.
  Still, it does matter how we reach the conclusion that Iraq has 
effectively continued its defiance that the inspections have failed, 
and that war is the only remaining option. In fact, the report of the 
inspectors at the United Nations last Friday significantly undermined 
the American position, arguing that progress has, in fact, been made 
and discounting the dangers of any Iraqi nuclear program.
  It is essential that the world know and face the fact, as the 
President said last Saturday, that Iraq is still violating the demands 
of the United Nations by refusing to disarm. But we undermine our own 
credibility when we scoff at the destruction of a stockpile of Al 
Samoud missiles as a matter of no consequence, or insist on a U.N. 
resolution with so short a time frame as to make it seem merely a 
pretext for war.
  In fact, the U.N. inspectors themselves have specified the tasks 
remaining before them, and there is every reason to support the 
systematic pursuit of those objectives within a tight, but feasible, 
time frame. In the meantime, we must resist the notion that the 
alternatives confronting us are either to invade in the next few days 
or to appear to ``back down'' in a humiliating and dangerous fashion.
  It is true that the massing of 235,000 troops has created a momentum 
of its own, and they cannot stay in place indefinitely. But the risks 
and the costs of an invasion undertaken in the face of major allied 
opposition remain, and we need to give full consideration to options 
that avoid either leaving Iraq's weapons in place or inexorably 
marching to war.
  What might those options be? Michael Walzer has suggested 
intensifying what he calls the ``little war'' in which we are already 
engaged and challenging the French and the Germans and the Russians to 
become part of the solution. This could include extension of no-fly 
zones to cover the entire country, maintaining an embargo on strategic 
and dual-use materials,

[[Page H1741]]

and intensifying the program of inspections and weapons destruction 
under international control.
  If such a program succeeded in destroying or neutralizing Iraq's 
weapons capability, the U.S. and the U.N. could credibly declare their 
mission accomplished, and most of the troops could return home, having 
created the military pressure that helped prompt compliance. I realize 
that at present, prospects for such an outcome appear to be fading. But 
when we are in an untenable position, contemplating outcomes that are 
equally unacceptable, we have an obligation to press in new directions.
  Mr. Speaker, whatever course our President and our country take, we 
will give our men and women in uniform our full support, and I am 
confident that a unified Congress will provide whatever resources they 
need to succeed. I have been moved by the farewell ceremonies for 
National Guard units in my own district, and I have the utmost respect 
for the service and sacrifice that these men and women exemplify. The 
debates we have over foreign and military policy do not change that in 
the least. In fact, we owe them, and all of our citizens, this debate, 
so that we do not choose our Nation's course either impulsively or by 
default, but with due consideration of our Nation's interests and 
values, and consideration of how our vast power can be a force for what 
is just and right in the world. May God grant us wisdom and courage for 
the facing of these days.

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