[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 100 (Monday, July 19, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8413-S8415]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    SUPPORTING U.S. EFFORTS IN IRAQ

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, on July 7, 2004, the Senate Select 
Committee on Intelligence issued an important report regarding flaws in 
our prewar intelligence on Iraq. Last week, Lord Butler issued a 
similar report on British intelligence. In a related vein, the 9/11 
Commission will issue its report this Thursday.
  Each of these reports either already has, or no doubt will, shed 
light on how we can improve our ability to protect this country and our 
allies from future terrorist attacks.

[[Page S8414]]

  Coming almost 3 years after 9/11, it is important to note that many 
reforms have already been implemented by Congress and the 
administration without waiting on a committee or a commission report. 
Still, the recommendations of each of these reports ought to be 
carefully considered and debated by Congress.
  If this were not a Presidential election year, we might be able to 
even undertake this important work without playing the blame game in 
order to score political points. My hope is that we will, to the extent 
humanly possible, strive to do so. If not, we risk politicizing the 
process to the detriment of long-term solutions to our intelligence 
problems.
  Some have used the occasion to criticize our Nation's policies in 
Iraq and the broader war on terror. Some say, on the one hand, that our 
leaders did too little before 9/11 to stop the horrible events of that 
day. Some say, on the other hand, that our leaders did too much in 
removing Saddam based in part on the remarkable clarity that comes with 
20/20 hindsight.
  I did not say, and consciously so, President Bush's policies but, 
rather, our Nation's policies because our policies in Iraq and in the 
broader war on terror have generally been a consensus policy authorized 
by the Congress and ultimately implemented by President Bush. In fact, 
the policy of regime change in Iraq was shared by the Clinton and Bush 
administrations and is now being criticized for political gain by some 
who voted for those very policies.
  It is important that we set the record straight. The Senate 
Intelligence Committee report in particular directly rebuts some of the 
more outrageous claims that administration officials, including the 
President himself, intentionally misled the American people. Indeed, 
due to systemic flaws in our intelligence apparatus, it appears that it 
was the administration itself that was misled to some extent. But that 
does not mean we were wrong to remove Saddam Hussein from power. There 
were many good reasons for the regime change in Iraq in addition to 
those which have at least so far turned out to be mistaken.
  There is no question that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein 
in a prison cell instead of remaining in his royal palaces. There is 
every reason to believe he is precisely where he belongs.
  When the Senate voted overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis in October 
2002 to authorize military force to defend the national security of the 
United States and enforce all relevant United Nations security council 
resolutions, the resolution this body passed noted that Iraq, in 1991, 
entered into a United Nations-sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant 
to which Iraq unequivocally agreed among other things to eliminate its 
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to 
deliver and develop them and to end its support for international 
terrorism.
  That resolution also noted that the efforts of international weapons 
inspectors, U.S. intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the 
discovery in 1991 that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons 
and a large scale biological weapons program and that Iraq had an 
advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to 
producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously 
indicated.
  That resolution also said that Iraq in direct and flagrant violation 
of the cease-fire attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors 
to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and 
development capabilities which finally resulted in the withdrawal of 
inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998.
  That resolution went on to note that the current Iraqi regime at that 
time under Saddam Hussein has demonstrated its capability and 
willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations 
and against its own people.

  Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist 
organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and 
safety of U.S. citizens.
  It was on this last point that Acting Director of Central 
Intelligence John McLaughlin said just yesterday in an interview:

       We could, through intelligence reporting, say with some 
     credibility that there had been meetings between senior Iraqi 
     officials and Al Qaida officials. We could also say that 
     there had been some training that had flown back and forth 
     between the two sides. And we could say that there was some 
     degree of safe haven that Al Qaida-related people had 
     obtained in Iraq for a variety of reasons. We could also say 
     with some assurance that operating from Iraq, someone like 
     Abu Musab Zarqawi had arranged the assassination of an 
     American diplomat in Jordan.

  Saddam dared the United Nations Security Council and the free nations 
of the world to act and act we, the coalition, did. Congress expressly 
recognized in the authorization it gave President Bush that ``the 
attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the 
gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass 
destruction by international terrorist organizations.''
  We knew that Saddam had them but we did not yet know what he did with 
them. Why he kicked out United Nations weapons inspectors in 1998 and 
never accounted for them, all the while defying resolution after 
resolution of the United Nations Security Council we may never know for 
sure.
  I once thought that no one would question whether America was safer 
and that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam but some, 
during this political season, have come awfully close. Put another way: 
Does any reasonable person truly believe that America and Iraq were 
better off with Saddam Hussein in power? Surely not. Surely not. But 
you simply can't have it both ways. You must choose, and choose we did.
  I believe the Senate made the right decision in supporting our 
efforts in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nothing we learned 
since then has changed my mind. It has been our official consensus 
policy since 1998 under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, under both 
Democrat and Republican leadership in the Senate. For example, in the 
Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, we said:

       It should be the policy of the United States to support 
     efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from 
     power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic 
     government to replace that regime.

  Everyone, Republican and Democrat, knew that the dictatorship of 
Saddam raised the prospect of a dangerous and irrational government in 
the Middle East. Everyone knew that the Iraqi people were living under 
a brutal and murderous tyrant. And at that time everyone knew that 
Saddam was armed with weapons of mass destruction.
  It was in a speech to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon 
staff generally that President Clinton eloquently described the 
consequences of inaction. He said:

       What if [he] fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we 
     take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more 
     opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass 
     destruction. . . . He will then conclude that he can go right 
     on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating 
     destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, 
     he'll use the arsenal.

  That was President Clinton in 1998.
  Our intelligence community told us before the Iraq war that Saddam 
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs--chemical, biological, 
and possibly nuclear. Now in the past, in 1991, our intelligence had 
sometimes underestimated Saddam's capabilities; so there was no 
question that there was reasonable cause for concern for an armed 
Saddam, ready to lash out, without warning, against Israel, Kuwait, or 
other countries in the region. We also feared that because of his 
hatred for America, Saddam might give the weapons he was developing to 
terrorists for whom he provided sanctuary. These concerns were nearly 
universally shared, as articulated in the quote I read from President 
Clinton.
  At the outset of our military operations against Iraq in December of 
1998, President Clinton described the risks of leaving Saddam in power. 
He said:

       The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, 
     he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his 
     region, the security of the world. The best way to end that 
     threat once and for all is with the new Iraqi government, a 
     government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a 
     government that respects the rights of its people.

  Again, a statement by President Clinton in 1998.

[[Page S8415]]

  We should all be glad Saddam Hussein is out of power. Iraq's 
fledgling government is taking the first steps toward freedom and 
democracy. Neither we nor they have to fear Saddam's regime cooperating 
at any level with al-Qaida or other terrorists who wish to do violence 
against the American people or our allies. But it is also true that the 
weapons programs we found in Iraq were not what our intelligence 
information predicted before hostilities broke out in 2003. Saddam 
Hussein had the capability and the raw resources to do many things, but 
he did not at that time have the fully operational weapons systems we 
believed he possessed.
  So why, it is logical to ask, did we have this problem with our 
intelligence? We know, as the unanimous, bipartisan report of the 
Select Committee on Intelligence said, that despite the insinuations of 
administration critics, the intelligence we had was not rigged or 
interfered with in any way. The same conclusion was echoed by Lord 
Butler's report in Great Britain which found no evidence of deliberate 
distortion of the intelligence material or of culpable negligence. It 
is clear that any such allegations to the contrary are baseless, 
partisan, and have no foundation in the truth.
  The Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate found in 
conclusion 83:

       The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration 
     officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts 
     to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass 
     destruction capabilities.''

  In conclusion 84, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said:

       The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President's 
     visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to 
     pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure 
     analysts by those who participated . . . Or did pressure 
     analysts to change their assessments.

  And in conclusion 102:

       The Committee found that none of the analysts or other 
     people interviewed by the Committee said that they were 
     pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links 
     to terrorism.

  How did we get here? How did we know that Saddam had these weapons of 
mass destruction, defied resolution after resolution of the U.N. 
Security Council, defied every request that he open his country to U.N. 
weapons inspectors and reveal what he had or, we might say, what he no 
longer had?
  Consider in 1993 we saw the first successful terrorist strike by 
radical Islamists on U.S. soil--a car bomb that exploded in the 
basement garage of the World Trade Center, killing 6 and wounding 
1,000. Then in 1996, there was another attack on the Khobar Towers 
barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding 515 
Americans and Saudis. In 1998, the United States embassies in Kenya and 
Tanzania were attacked by al-Qaida suicide bombers who killed 234 
people and wounded more than 5,000. And in 2000, al-Qaida attacked the 
USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors and wounding 39.
  It was during these same years that Congress made dramatic cuts in 
funding for the Government agencies most involved in the fight against 
terror, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency. These cuts were 
significant, including letting go nearly 40 percent of those recruited 
to spy for America's interests. The number of officers in the 
clandestine service was downsized by roughly 25 percent and nearly one-
third of our overseas offices were shut down. All of these cuts 
seriously hampered the intelligence community's ability to monitor and 
analyze the rising threat posed by terrorism. Again, Acting Director of 
the Central Intelligence Agency, John McLaughlin, said yesterday, 
because of these cuts, we were almost in Chapter 11 in terms of our 
human intelligence collection. This much seems clear: Our early warning 
system was blinded by a self-inflicted wound.
  There is simply no way that President Bush's administration could 
have filled all the holes of an underfunded and demoralized 
intelligence community in a mere 8 months after it had been dismantled 
systematically and deliberately during the preceding years. So when 
President Bush came to office, he inherited an intelligence community 
that was ill prepared to meet the challenges of the war on terrorism.
  We should not make this merely a game of election year ``gotcha.'' We 
must debate the causes of our intelligence flaws in a way that commands 
the confidence of the American people and in a way that makes them 
safer and freer. We must also remain committed to our task in Iraq, to 
finishing that task and not allow election-year politics to create a 
climate that undermines the morale of our brave troops in the field.
  Let us finish the task we have undertaken in good faith and with the 
noblest of aspirations on behalf of free people around the world. Let 
us not let partisan politics lead us into the trap identified by 
Winston Churchill when he said:

       Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the 
     temperamental atmosphere of the Gallup Poll, always feeling 
     one's pulse and taking one's temperature.

  September 11 forced the civilized world to realize that the terrorist 
foe we had been fighting for years sought a more deadly goal than we 
ever suspected. Once Congress and the administration came to grips with 
the horrible truth of this new breed of terrorism, we knew what had to 
be done. We knew we had to take action. Under President Bush's 
leadership, we resolved that our aim was to defeat terrorism as a 
threat to our very freedom and our very lives.
  Nor could we achieve our aim merely by maintaining a defensive 
posture. Fighting terrorism on American soil is not enough. That is 
merely a holding pattern and a capitulation of our responsibility. When 
it comes to confrontation with terrorists, we must either change the 
way we live or we must change the way they live. We chose the latter, 
and I believe we chose wisely. It is a policy of action rather than 
inaction, and one clearly warranted by the new reality of our post-9/11 
world.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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