[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 105 (Wednesday, July 16, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H6993-H6995]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     BE HONEST WITH AMERICAN TROOPS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, this week U.S. deaths in the war in Iraq 
surpassed the number of lives lost in the first Persian Gulf War, 220 
Americans have died, another today, with over 740 wounded. If you 
recall back in February, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, a soldier's 
soldier, testified to this Congress that several hundred thousand 
soldiers might be necessary for the occupation of Iraq.
  He was immediately attacked by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul 
Wolfowitz, who termed General Shinseki's assessments as wildly off the 
mark. Wolfowitz said, ``I am reasonably certain that the Iraqi people 
will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements 
down.''
  Secretary of the Army Thomas White sided with Shinseki, not 
Wolfowitz, sealing his own fate. White announced his resignation 2 
months later. General Shinseki himself stepped down as Army Chief of 
Staff and retired from the military about 5 weeks ago, June 11; and 
neither Secretary Rumsfeld nor Mr. Wolfowitz attended the ceremonies 
honoring General Shinseki for his lifetime of service to our country. 
Then last week, Secretary Rumsfeld admitted that the Bush 
administration does not know how long the occupation of Iraq will last. 
Secretary Rumsfeld also was forced to admit he does not know how much 
the occupation will cost. Indeed, the costs have doubled from $2 
billion a month now to $4 billion a month, and the costs are rising 
daily.
  There are approximately 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Secretary 
Rumsfeld would say only that they may be there for the foreseeable 
future and the number could be increased if necessary. Mr. Wolfowitz 
has not been heard to say that Secretary Rumsfeld's estimate is not 
wildly off the mark, even though it is very close to what General 
Shinseki predicted.
  As far as the Wolfowitz prediction that Americans would be greeted as 
liberators and that would keep the force level low, it bears noting 
that more than 30 Americans have been killed in Iraq, with more 
casualties every day, since President Bush landed on that flight deck 
and said that peace was at hand.
  A close look at the record will reveal that Secretary Rumsfeld's 
predictions about U.S. force levels in Iraq are skyrocketing. As 
recently as 2 months ago, he was predicting that our force levels could 
be reduced by 30,000 by the end of the year; but a Time Magazine 
article I will include in the Record tonight shows that the idea 
appears to be shifting closer to what General Shinseki told us 
initially, and today General Wesley Clark warned that our U.S. Armed 
Forces are overstretched because of Iraq and we need to take measures 
to take care of our men and women in uniform. Reserves need to be 
called up and we need a rotation plan because, let us face it, we are 
going to have to sustain the force in Iraq for some time. And I would 
add, sending Marines trained for aggressive combat to do policing is an 
absolutely inappropriate deployment.
  We can look back to the date of May 1 when our soldiers were led to 
believe that they would be coming home in June. Then they were told on 
May 24 that maybe they would come home in August. And then Secretary 
Rumsfeld said last week they would be home by September. And then Major 
General Buford Blount said today that troop levels must remain at the 
current level and all bets are off.
  This is not the way to treat the men and women who are giving their 
lives in the interest of this country. I have a very simple statement 
and that is: stop jerking our forces around. Treat them with the 
respect that they are due.
  It is very odd to me that General Tommy Franks announced his 
retirement with 160,000 men and women under his command in the field.

                              {time}  2115

  I can remember back to Vietnam, when General Abrams stayed the course 
right to the very end; in World War II, when our generals stuck it out 
through thick and thin.

[[Page H6994]]

  Strange things are happening. Maybe we do not know all the facts, but 
I want to voice my concerns tonight about the safety of our men and 
women in uniform and the importance of rotation and a definite time 
when they can take a break. They deserve it. If that requires a draft 
in our country, so be it, but no General or any President or any 
Secretary of Defense or any Under Secretary of Defense should have our 
men and women in harm's way without the rotation that they are due for 
the absolutely incredible job that they have done for us.
  In the Record tonight I would like to place several articles that 
document the statements of many of our soldiers who are in Iraq today, 
and I would commend them to my colleagues and say God bless those who 
are in the field for us. We are thinking of you every minute that we 
hold these positions here in Washington. We want to bring you home as 
quickly as possible. We want to meet our worldwide obligations, but, 
absolutely, you deserve a break, especially those who have been there 
in the Persian Gulf for over a year now. It is long overdue.

                   [From Reuters.com, July 16, 2003]

              U.S. Soldiers Complain of Low Morale in Iraq

                            (By Sue Pleming)

       Washington.--Fed up with being in Iraq and demoralized by 
     their role as peacekeepers in a risky place, a group of U.S. 
     soldiers aired their plight on U.S. television on Wednesday 
     and said they had lost faith in the Army.
       Told several times they would be going home only to have 
     their hopes dashed this week, a small group of soldiers from 
     the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq spoke of poor morale and 
     disillusionment with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
       ``If Donald Rumsfeld were here, I'd ask him for his 
     resignation,'' one disgruntled soldier told ABC's ``Good 
     Morning America'' show.
       Asked by a reporter what his message would be for Rumsfeld, 
     one said: ``I would ask him why we are still here. I don't 
     have any clue as to why we are still in Iraq.''
       About 146,000 U.S. troops are serving amid mounting 
     security threats in postwar Iraq. The death toll has now 
     equaled the number killed in the 1991 Gulf War.
       Sgt. Filipe Vega said they had expected to return home soon 
     after the fall of Baghdad on April 9. ``We were told the 
     fastest way back home is through Baghdad and that's what we 
     did. Now we are still here,'' he complained.
       The 3rd Infantry Division was the first U.S. unit to enter 
     Baghdad after driving through southern Iraq through Kuwait.
       Sgt. Terry Gilmore described a phone call with his wife 
     Stacey when he told her he would not be coming home soon.
       ``When I told her she started crying and I almost started 
     crying. I just felt like my heart was broken. I could not 
     figure out . . . how they could keep us here after they told 
     us we were coming home.''
       In Washington, a Pentagon spokeswoman said she understood 
     the frustration, but said morale was still high. ``It's 
     obviously a frustrating situation for some of them, but it 
     does not represent the entire 3rd Division.''
       She added: ``When you get down to the individual soldier 
     level, you can clearly see the dedication.''
       The wives of two of the soldiers appeared on the same show. 
     ``Just send my husband home--send all the soldiers home. They 
     have done the job they were supposed to do,'' said Rhonda 
     Vega from Hinesville, Georgia.
       Stacey Gilmore said U.S. troops were ill-prepared for the 
     post-war phase. ``They were told after the fighting ended 
     they were coming home. All I know is that morale is low and 
     they are just hanging in there, sticking through it.''
                                  ____


                  [From Time Magazine, June 26, 2003]

                       Iraq: When Can We Go Home?

                            (By Tony Karon)

       President Bush faced a call this week from a senior member 
     of his own party's foreign policy establishment to ``level'' 
     with the American people about Iraq. Senate Foreign Relations 
     Committee Chairman Richard Lugar was not harping on the 
     whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass 
     destruction; he was urging the president to give the 
     electorate a more realistic picture of the scale and duration 
     of the U.S. occupation mission in Iraq, and to impress on 
     them the importance of staying the course. Fresh from a visit 
     to Baghdad, Lugar warned: ``The idea that we will be in just 
     as long as we need to and not a day more--we've got to get 
     over that rhetoric. It is rubbish! We're going to be there a 
     long time.''
       A similar warning came from Thomas Pickering, who had 
     served the first President Bush as UN ambassador and had 
     headed up a Council on Foreign Relations study on Iraq which 
     concluded that the U.S. mission had lacked ``vision and 
     strategy.'' Pickering, too, urged Bush to make clear that the 
     current U.S. deployment of some 200,000 troops in and around 
     Iraq would have to be maintained for a long time to come. Or, 
     as General John Abizaid, who will assume command of the Iraq 
     mission from the retiring General Tommy Franks next month, 
     put it in congressional testimony this week, ``for the 
     foreseeable future.''
       For obvious domestic political reasons, the Bush 
     Administration going into the war had downplayed the scale 
     and duration of a post-war occupation mission. When then-Army 
     Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told legislators that 
     such a mission would require several hundred thousand U.S. 
     troops, his assessment had been immediately dismissed by 
     Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as ``wildly off the 
     mark.'' Wolfowitz explained that ``I am reasonably certain 
     that (the Iraqi people) will greet us as liberators, and that 
     will help us to keep requirements down.'' Six weeks ago, 
     Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still suggesting the U.S. 
     force in Iraq could be reduced to 30,000 by the end of the 
     year. But the prevailing assessment in Washington appears to 
     be shifting to the idea of a figure closer to Shinseki's.
       The changing assessment in Washington is being spurred by 
     the realization that the security problem confronting U.S. 
     and British troops in Iraq is not simply maintaining order in 
     the face of looting and lawlessness, but instead that 
     coalition forces are facing what appears to be an escalating 
     guerrilla insurgency. And that means the occupation mission 
     is costing not only American treasure--currently an estimated 
     $3 billion a month--but also American lives. U.S. forces come 
     under attack every day in Iraq, and they have suffered combat 
     casualties at a rate upward of one death every other day. Six 
     British MPs were killed near Basra on Tuesday and eight were 
     wounded in a second incident; a U.S. Marine was killed en 
     route to help ambushed comrades Wednesday; two U.S. troops 
     were reported missing overnight Thursday in Baghdad, and 
     later in the day Centcom announced that a Special Operations 
     soldier had been killed and eight wounded by hostile fire 
     during an operation southwest of Baghdad. Two Iraqis employed 
     to help restore Baghdad's electricity supply were among those 
     killed in a rocket attack on a U.S. convoy Thursday, while 
     saboteurs blew up two important oil pipelines earlier in the 
     week, apparently recognizing their ability to disrupt power 
     supplies by targeting some of the country's 4,000 miles of 
     oil and gas pipelines.
       The coalition body count is mounting steadily in the 
     postwar insurgency, despite two large sweep operations north 
     of Baghdad last weekend designed to eliminate resistance. 
     U.S. commanders have begun to acknowledge that they're facing 
     an organized insurgency, blaming remnants of the old regime 
     and jihadists from other Arab countries who had come to Iraq 
     to fight the U.S. More worrying are the attacks that have 
     occurred this week south of Baghdad, in predominantly Shiite 
     areas. An insurgency confined to the Sunni minority is more 
     easily contained than one whose base extends to the Shiite 
     majority.
       Average daily temperatures in Baghdad now are upward of 110 
     degrees, and U.S. troops who had hoped to be home in time for 
     July 4th cookouts instead find themselves facing an enemy 
     indistinguishable from the (often hostile) civilian 
     population. And the enemy's strategy is to avoid ever 
     presenting himself as a visible target, hoping to sap 
     American morale and alienate the U.S. from the local 
     population through hit and run attacks, and sabotage of 
     reconstruction efforts.
       Washington is hoping to lighten the load with an infusion 
     of some 20,000 troops slated to be sent--in small 
     contingents, mostly at U.S. expense--from those NATO 
     countries that supported the war. But the number that 
     actually arrive in Iraq may shrink somewhat if it turns out 
     they're headed into a counterinsurgency mission rather than a 
     more pedestrian peacekeeping affair. This week's British 
     casualties, in what had ostensibly been the most tranquil 
     part of Iraq, won't help Washington's recruitment efforts. 
     Britain's own force levels in Iraq had been reduced from 
     45,000 during the war to around 15,000, although following 
     the latest incident the government faces conflicting 
     pressures to both increase and reduce its exposure in Iraq.
       More robust contributions have been asked of India and 
     Pakistan, but while the leaders of both countries are 
     inclined to comply, both face strong domestic opposition. The 
     U.S. is also embarking on a plan to train and equip a new 
     Iraqi national army comprising some 60,000 men, although that 
     project will likely take years to complete. In the short 
     term, despite local recruitment and the planned deployment of 
     more foreign troops, most, if not all of the heavy lifting 
     will remain the preserve of the U.S. and British forces.
       Iraq, of course, is not the only peacekeeping mission 
     requiring the attention of the U.S. and its allies. Some 
     11,000 coalition troops remain deployed in Afghanistan 
     against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, while peacekeeping duties 
     are the preserve of the 4,800 foreign troops grouped under 
     the banner of the International Security Assistance Force, 
     whose small numbers confine its work to the capital, Kabul. A 
     number of U.S. legislators and South Asia experts are quietly 
     warning that the security situation there is in danger of 
     unraveling in the face of Taliban resurgence and internecine 
     warlord conflicts, and that turning the situation around 
     requires either expanding the terms of the U.S. deployment to 
     stabilizing Afghanistan, or else significantly expanding 
     ISAF. (ISAF has one advantage in that it has drawn on major 
     troop contributions from NATO members that had opposed the 
     Iraq war--Turkey, France and Germany.)

[[Page H6995]]

       The U.S. exit strategy from Iraq has always been to install 
     a stable, friendly Iraqi government whose oil revenues would 
     give it financial independence and withdraw the bulk of the 
     force that had overthrown Saddam's regime. But the scale of 
     the challenge of remaking Iraq forced Washington to adapt its 
     plans. When U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer arrived to take the 
     reins from the hapless Jay Garner he chose to keep political 
     authority in U.S. hands rather than betting prematurely on 
     any Iraqi group. To the chagrin of most of Iraq's many 
     political factions, Bremer has put talk of a transitional 
     government in the deep freeze, and instead plans to draw 
     Iraqis into a much slower process of consultation over a new 
     constitution. That, of course, leaves the occupation 
     authority without an Iraqi face, which further inflames 
     nationalist passions--but managing an occupation mission such 
     as Iraq invariably throws up mostly lesser-evil choices.
       It was clear from the moment Bremer took over that the 
     process of achieving the Bush administration's political 
     objectives in post-Saddam Iraq might take years of patient 
     nation-building. But what has become equally clear, in recent 
     weeks, is that it may also require winning a second war, of 
     counterinsurgency.

                          ____________________