[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 43 (Thursday, April 6, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3245-S3249]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. KERRY:
  S.J. Res. 33. A joint resolution to provide for a strategy for 
successfully empowering a new unity government in Iraq; to the 
Committee on Foreign Relations.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, 39 years ago this week Dr. Martin Luther 
King gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York about the war in 
Vietnam. He began with these words:

       I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because 
     my conscience leaves me no other choice.

  His message was clear. Despite the difficulty of opposing the 
government's policy during time of war, he said, ``We must speak with 
all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must 
speak.''

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  I am here today to speak about Iraq. There should be humility enough 
to go around for a Congress that shares responsibility for this war. I 
believe the time has come again when, as Dr. King said, we must move 
past indecision to action.
  I have many times visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall, as many Vietnam 
veterans have. When you walk down the path of either side of that wall, 
east and west of the panels, you walk down to the center of the wall 
where it comes together in a V. That V represents both the beginning of 
the war and the end of the war because the names start at that V and go 
all the way up one end, east, and then they come back from the west.
  I remember standing there once after reading ``A Bright Shining 
Lie,'' by Neil Sheehan, Robert McNamara's memoirs, and many other 
histories of that war. One cannot help but feel the enormity of the 
loss, of the immorality that our leaders knew that the strategy was 
wrong and that almost half the names were added to that wall after the 
time that people knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then 
and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion with respect 
to our policy in Iraq.
  Obviously, every single one of us would prefer to see democracy in 
Iraq. We want democracy in the whole Middle East. The simple reality 
is, Iraqis must want it as much as we do, and Iraqis must embrace it. 
If the Iraqi leadership is not ready to make the changes and the 
compromises that democracy requires, our soldiers, no matter how 
valiant--and they have been valiant--can't get from a humvee or a 
helicopter.
  The fact is, our soldiers have done a stunning job. I was recently in 
Iraq with Senator Warner and Senator Stevens. I have been there 
previously. No one can travel there and talk to our soldiers and not be 
impressed by their commitment to the mission, by their sacrifice, by 
their desire to have something good come out of this, and by the 
remarkable contribution they have made to give Iraqis the opportunity 
to create a democratic future for their country. Our soldiers have done 
their job. It is time for the newly elected Iraqi leadership to do 
theirs. It is time for America's political leaders to do theirs.
  President Bush says we can't lose our nerve in Iraq. It takes more 
nerve to respond to mistakes and to adjust a policy that is going wrong 
than it does to stubbornly continue down the wrong path.
  Last week, Secretary Rice acknowledged ``thousands'' of mistakes in 
Iraq. Amazingly, nobody has been held accountable for those mistakes. 
But our troops have paid the price, and our troops pay the price every 
single day. Yet the President continues to insist on a vague and 
counterproductive strategy that will keep U.S. forces in Iraq 
indefinitely.
  I accept my share of responsibility for the war in Iraq. As I said in 
2004, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war, and I 
certainly wouldn't have done it the way the President did. My 
frustration is that many of us all along the way have offered 
alternatives to the President. Countless numbers of Senators, 
Republican and Democrat alike, have publicly offered alternative ways 
of trying to achieve our goals in Iraq.
  I have listened to my colleagues, Senator Feingold, Senator Biden, 
Senator Hagel, the Presiding Officer, and others all talk about ways in 
which we could do better. But all of these, almost all of them without 
exception, have been left by the wayside without any real discussion, 
without any real dialog, without any real effort to see if we could 
find a common ground. My frustration is that we keep offering 
alternatives.
  In 2003, in 2004, 2005, 2006, year after year, we put them on the 
table, but they get ignored and then we get further in the hole, the 
situation gets worse, and we are left responding, trying to come back 
to a worse situation than the one we were responding to in the first 
place. And we keep putting out possibilities, and the possibilities 
keep being left on the sidelines.
  Time after time, this administration has ignored the best advice of 
the best experts of the country, whether they be our military experts 
or former civilian leaders of other administrations or our most 
experienced voices on the Committee on Armed Services and Foreign 
Relations Committee of the U.S. House and Senate.

  The administration is fond of saying that we shouldn't look back, 
that recrimination only helps our enemies, that we have to deal with 
the situation on the ground now. Well, we do have to deal with the 
situation on the ground now, but we have to deal with it in a way that 
honors the suggestions and ideas of a lot of other people who have 
concerns about our forces on the ground and our families at home and 
our budget and our reputation in the world and our need to respond to 
Afghanistan, North Korea, and Iran.
  Frankly, accountability and learning from past mistakes is the only 
way to improve both policies and institutions. Let me, for the moment, 
go along with this idea, the administration's idea. Let me focus on the 
here and now and let's face that reality honestly and let's act 
accordingly.
  You have to live in a fantasy world to believe we are on the brink of 
domestic peace and a pluralistic democracy in Iraq. One has to be blind 
to the facts to argue that the prospects for success are so great they 
outweigh the terrible costs of the President's approach. And you have 
to be incapable of admitting failure not to be able to face up to the 
need to change course now. Yes, change course now.
  Our soldiers on the ground have learned a lot of terrible lessons in 
Iraq. All you have to do is talk to some of the soldiers who have 
returned, as many of us have. It is time those of us responsible for 
the policies of our country learn those lessons. It is clear the 
administration's litany of mistakes has reduced what we can reasonably 
hope to accomplish. Any reasonable, honest observer--and there are many 
in the Senate who have gone over to Iraq and have come back with these 
views--knows that the entire definition of this mission has changed and 
the expectations of what we can get out of this mission have changed.
  I, for one, will not sit idly by and watch while American soldiers 
give their lives for a policy that is not working. Let me say it 
plainly. Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq over the course of the year 
in a timely schedule is actually necessary to give democracy the best 
chance to succeed, and it is vital to America's national security 
interests.
  Five months ago, I went to Georgetown University. I gave a speech 
where I said that we were then entering the make-or-break period, a 
make-or-break 5-month, 6-month period in Iraq. I said the President 
must change course and hold Iraqis accountable or Congress should 
insist on a change in policy. And I set a goal then, back in November, 
that we should try to reduce American combat forces and withdraw them 
by the end of this year.
  The situation on the ground has now changed for the worse since then. 
In fact, we are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The 
first war was against Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass 
destruction. The second war was against Jihadist terrorists whom the 
administration said it was better to fight over there than over here. 
And now we find our troops in the middle of a low-grade civil war that 
could explode into a full civil war at any time.
  While the events in Iraq have changed for the worse, the President 
has not changed course for the better. It is time for those of us in 
Congress who share responsibilities constitutionally for our policy to 
stand up and change that course. We have a constitutional 
responsibility, and we have a moral responsibility not to sit on the 
sidelines while young Americans are in harm's way.
  That is why today I am introducing legislation that will hold the 
Iraqis accountable and make the goal of withdrawing the most American 
forces a reality. I personally believe that most of those forces could 
be and should be out of Iraq by the end of the year. This war, in the 
words of our own generals, cannot be won militarily. It can only be won 
politically.
  General Casey said, of our large military presence, it ``feeds the 
notion of occupation'' and it ``extends the amount of time that it will 
take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant.''
  That is General Casey saying that the large force of American 
presence in

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Iraq contributes to the occupation and extends the amount of time. 
Zbigniew Brzezinski put it:

       The U.S. umbrella, which is in effect designed to stifle 
     these wars but it is so poor that it perpetuates them, in a 
     sense keeps these wars alive . . . and [is] probably 
     unintentionally actually intensifying them.

  Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, breaking a 30-
year silence, summed it up simply:

       Our presence is what feeds the insurgency.

  The bottom line is that as long as American forces remain in large 
numbers, enforcing the status quo, Americans will be killed and maimed 
in a crossfire of vicious conflict that they are powerless to end. We 
pay for the President's reluctance to face reality in both American 
dollars and in too many lives. American families pay in the loss of 
limb and the loss of loved ones.
  I don't think we should tolerate what is happening in Iraq today. We 
can no longer tolerate the political games currently being played by 
Iraqi politicians in a war-torn Baghdad. No American soldier, not one 
American soldier, should be sacrificed for the unwillingness of Iraqi 
politicians to compromise and form a unity government.
  We are now almost 5 months since the election. What is happening is 
the daily game being played by Iraqis who listen to the President say 
we will be here to the end. There is no sense of urgency, there is no 
sense of impending need to make a decision. The result is they just go 
on bickering and they go on playing for advantage while our troops 
drive by the next IED and the next soldier returns to Walter Reed or to 
Bethesda without arms and limbs.
  Given the recent increase in deadly sectarian strife, Iraq urgently 
needs a strong unity government to prevent a full-fledged civil war 
from breaking out and becoming the failed state that all of us have 
wanted to avoid. I believe the current situation is actually allowing 
them to go down the road toward that sectarian strife rather than 
stopping them.
  Thus far, step by step, Iraqis have only responded to deadlines. It 
took a deadline to transfer authority to the provisional government. It 
took a deadline for the first election to take place. It took a 
deadline for the referendum on the Constitution. It took a deadline for 
the most recent election. It is time for another deadline, and that 
deadline is to say to them that they have to come together and pull 
together and put together a government or our troops are going to 
withdraw. And under circumstances over a period of time, we will 
withdraw in order to put Iraq up on its own two feet.
  Iraqi politicians should be told in unmistakable language: You have 
until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will 
immediately withdraw our military.
  I know some colleagues and other people listening will say: Wait a 
minute. You mean we are going to automatically withdraw our military if 
they don't pull it together?
  The answer is: You bet we ought to do that. Because there isn't one 
American soldier who ought to be giving up life or limb for the 
procrastination and unwillingness of Iraqis who have been given an 
extraordinary opportunity by those soldiers to take hold of democracy 
and who are ignoring it and playing for advantage. We all know that 
after the last elections, the momentum was lost by squabbling interim 
leaders. Everybody sat around and said, coming up to this election, the 
one thing we can't do is allow the momentum to be lost. Guess what. It 
has been lost. It has been squandered, again. We are sitting there with 
occasional visits, occasional speeches but without the kind of 
sustained diplomacy necessary to provide a resolution. It has gone on 
for too long, again.
  If Iraqis aren't willing to build a unity government in 5 months, 
then how long does it take and what does it take? If they are not 
willing to do it, they are not willing to do it. It is that simple. The 
civil war will only get worse. And if they are not willing to do it, it 
is because there is such a fundamental intransigence that we haven't 
broken, that civil war, in fact, becomes inevitable, and our troops 
will be forced to leave anyway.
  The fact is, we have no choice but to get tough and to ratchet up the 
pressure. We should immediately accelerate the redeployment of American 
forces to rear guard, garrisoned status for security backup, training, 
and emergency response. Special operations against al-Qaida in Iraq 
should be initiated on hard intelligence leads only.
  If the Iraqi leaders finally do their job, which I believe you have a 
better chance of getting them to do if you give them a timetable, then 
we have to agree on a schedule for leaving, withdrawing American combat 
forces by the end of the year. The only troops that remain should be 
those critical to finishing the job of standing up Iraqi security 
forces.
  Such an agreement will have positive benefits in Iraq. It will 
empower and legitimize the new leadership and the Iraqi people. It will 
expedite the process of getting the Iraqis to assume a larger role of 
running their own country. And it will undermine support for the 
insurgency among the now 80 percent of Iraqis who want U.S. troops to 
leave. In short, it will give the new Iraqi Government the best chance 
to succeed in holding the country together while democratic 
institutions can evolve.
  This deadline makes sense when you look at the responsibilities that 
Iraqis should have assumed by then. Formation of a unity government 
would constitute a major milestone in the transfer of political 
responsibility to the Iraqis. Even the President has said that 
responsibility for security in the majority of the country should be 
able to be transferred to the Iraqis by this time. If the President 
believes that it should be able to be transferred to the Iraqis by this 
time, why not push that eventuality and make it a reality? By the end 
of the year, our troops will have done as much as they possibly can to 
give Iraqis the chance to build a democracy. I again remind my 
colleagues, we are still going to have the ability to have over-the-
horizon response for emergency, as well as over-the-horizon response to 
al-Qaida. And we will have the ability to continue to train those last 
forces to make sure they are in a position to stand up for Iraq.
  The key to this transition is a long overdue engagement in serious 
and sustained diplomacy. I want to say a word about this. I am not 
offering this plan in a vacuum. Critical to the achievement of all of 
our goals in Iraq is real diplomacy. Starting with the leadup to the 
war, our diplomatic efforts in Iraq have ranged from the indifferent to 
the indefensible. History shows that effective diplomacy requires 
persistent hands-on engagement from the highest levels of America's 
leadership. Top officials in the first Bush administration worked 
directly and tirelessly to put together a real coalition before the 
first Gulf War, and President Clinton himself took personal 
responsibility at Camp David for bringing the Israelis and Palestinians 
together and leading the comprehensive effort to resolve the conflict 
in the Middle East. This type of major diplomatic initiative has proven 
successful in many places in American history.

  Most recently, in 1995, there was a brutal civil war in Bosnia 
involving Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Faced with a seemingly 
intractable stalemate in the midst of horrific ethnic cleansing, the 
Clinton administration took action--direct, personal, engaged action. 
Led by Richard Holbrooke, they brought leaders of the Bosnian parties 
together in Dayton, OH, with representatives from the European Union, 
Russia, and Britain to hammer out a peace agreement. NATO and the 
United Nations were given a prominent role in implementing what became 
known as the Dayton Accords.
  In contrast, this President Bush has done little more than deliver 
political speeches, while his cronies in the White House and outside 
blame the news media for the mess the administration has created in 
Iraq. We keep hearing: They are not telling the full story. They are 
not telling the story.
  Secretary of State Rice's brief surprise visit to Iraq a few days ago 
pales in comparison to the real shuttle diplomacy that was practiced by 
predecessors such as James Baker and Henry Kissinger. Given what is at 
stake, it is long since time to engage in that. I can remember Henry 
Kissinger going from one capital to the next capital, back and forth, 
engaged, pulling people together. Jim Baker did the same thing.

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There was a genuine and real effort to leverage the full prestige and 
full power of the United States behind a goal. That is absent here.
  Ambassador Khalilzad is a good man, and he has done a terrific job, 
almost by himself, left almost to his own devices. That is not the way 
to succeed. Given what is at stake, it is past time to engage in 
diplomacy that matches the effort of our soldiers on the ground. We 
should immediately bring the leaders of the Iraqi factions together at 
a Dayton-like summit that includes our allies, Iraq's neighbors, 
members of the Arab League, and the United Nations. The fact is, a true 
national compact is needed to bring about a political solution to the 
insurgency. That is how you end the sectarian violence. Our soldiers 
going on patrol in a striker or a humvee, walking through communities 
will not end this violence. Our generals have told us, it can only be 
ended politically. Yet where is the kind of political effort that our 
Nation has seen in history now, trying to effect what our soldiers have 
created an opportunity to effect through their sacrifice?
  Iraqis have to reach a comprehensive agreement that includes security 
guarantees, disbanding the militias, and ultimately, though not 
necessarily at this conference, confronting some of the questions of 
the Constitution. All of the parties must reach agreement on a process 
for reviving reconstruction efforts and securing Iraq's borders. Our 
troops cannot be left hanging out there without that kind of effort to 
protect them.
  At this summit, Shiite religious leaders must agree to rein in their 
militias and to commit to disbanding them. They also have to work with 
Iraqi political leaders to ensure that the leadership of the Interior 
Ministry and the police force under its control is nonsectarian. Shiite 
and Kurdish leaders must make concessions necessary to address Sunni 
concerns about federalism and equitable distribution of oil revenues. 
There is no way the Sunnis are going to suddenly disband or stop the 
insurgency without some kind of adequate guarantee of their security 
and their participation in the process. That was obvious months ago. It 
is even more obvious today. It still remains an open question.
  The Sunnis have to accept the reality that they will no longer 
dominate Iraq. Until a sufficient compromise is hammered out, a Sunni 
base cannot be created that isolates the hard-core Baathists and 
jihadists and defuses the insurgency itself. We must work with Iraqis 
at the summit to convince Iraq's neighbors that they can no longer 
stand on the sidelines while Iraq teeters on the edge of a civil war 
that could bring chaos to the entire region. Where they can help the 
process of forming a government, they need to step up. And for my 
colleagues who suggest that somehow withdrawing American forces will 
put that region at greater risk, I say ``no.'' I say that an over-the-
horizon deployment, a deployment in Kuwait and elsewhere, diffusing the 
insurgency, and an adequate effort to diplomatically pull together this 
kind of summit is the only way to diffuse the insurgency and ultimately 
strengthen the region.
  The administration must also work with Iraqi leaders in seeking a 
multinational force to help protect Iraq's borders until finally a 
national army of Iraq has developed the capacity to do that itself. 
Frankly, such a force, if sanctioned by the United Nations Security 
Council, could attract participation by Iraq's neighbors, countries 
such as India and others, that would be a critical step in stemming the 
tide of insurgents and of encouraging capital to flow into Iraq.
  To be credible with the Iraqi people, the new government must deliver 
goods and services at all levels. It is absolutely stunning--I don't 
know how many Americans are even aware of the fact--that today, several 
years later, electricity production is below where it was before the 
war. It is at 4,000 megawatts compared to the 4,500 before the war. 
Crude oil production has declined from a prewar level of 2.5 million 
barrels per day to 1.9 million barrels per day. We were told that oil 
was going to pay for this war. That has to change. Countries that have 
promised money for reconstruction, particularly of Sunni areas, haven't 
paid up yet. The money is not on the table.
  We can also do our part on the ground. Our own early reconstruction 
efforts were--now known to everybody--poorly planned and grossly 
mismanaged. But as I saw on a recent trip to Iraq, the efforts of our 
civilian military provisional reconstruction teams, which have the 
skills and capacity to strengthen governance and institution building 
around the country, are beginning to take hold. We need to stand up 
more of those teams as fast as possible. If we do that in the same 
context as we find the political resolution, then you have a chance.
  We must also continue to turn the job of policing the streets and 
providing security over to Iraqi forces. That means giving our generals 
the tools they need to finish training an Iraqi police force that is 
trusted and respected on the street by the end of the year. It also 
means finishing the training of Iraqi security forces with U.S. troops 
acting only on the basis of hard intelligence to combat terrorist 
threats.
  The withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is necessary not only to 
give democracy in Iraq the best chance to succeed, it is also vital to 
our own national security interests.
  We need to pay more attention to our own vital national security 
interests. We will never be as safe as we ought to be if Iraq continues 
to distract us from the most important war we need to win--the war on 
Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida, and the terrorists who are resurfacing even 
in Afghanistan.
  To make it clear, despite everything this administration has said, 
today, al-Qaida, and the Taliban, even, are more dangerous in northwest 
Pakistan and northeast Afghanistan than Iraq is to us at this moment in 
time. There is a greater threat from al-Qaida, which has dispersed 
cells and through its training and abilities to organize, in 
Afghanistan than in the place that is consuming most of America's 
forces and money.
  The way to defeat al-Qaida is not by serving as their best 
recruitment tool. Even Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's National 
Security Adviser, has joined the many experts who agree that the war in 
Iraq actually feeds terrorism and increases the potential for terrorist 
attacks against the United States. The results speak for themselves: 
The number of significant terrorist attacks around the world increased 
from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004, and it has continued to increase in 
2005.
  The President keeps talking about al-Qaida's intent to take over 
Iraq. I have not met anybody in Iraq--none of the leaders on either 
side, not Kurds, the Shia, or Sunni--who believes a few thousand, at 
most--and by many estimates, less than a thousand--foreign jihadists 
are a genuine threat to forcibly take over a country of 25 million 
people. And while mistake after mistake by this administration has 
actually turned Iraq into the breeding ground for al-Qaida that it was 
not before the war, large numbers of United States troops are not the 
key to crushing these terrorists.
  In fact, Iraqis have begun to make clear their own unwillingness to 
tolerate foreign jihadists. Every Iraqi I talked to said to me: When we 
get control and start moving forward, we will deal with the jihadists. 
They don't want them on Iraqi soil, and they have increasingly turned 
on these brutal foreign killers who are trying to foment a civil war 
among Iraqis. This process will only be complete when Iraqis have taken 
full responsibility for their own future, and resistance to a perceived 
occupation no longer provides them any common cause with jihadists.
  As General Anthony Zinni said on Sunday, building up intelligence-
gathering capability from Iraqis is essential to defeating the 
insurgency. He said:

       We're not fighting the Waffen S.S. here. They can be 
     policed up if the people turn against them. We haven't won 
     the hearts and minds yet.

  Once again, I remind my colleagues, the hearts and minds of the 
Iraqis will be more susceptible to being won when American forces are 
not there in the way they are now, in a way that can be used as the 
recruitment tool that it has been, when 80 percent of the Iraqi people 
suggest that American forces ought to leave.
  After the bulk of U.S. forces have been withdrawn, I believe it is 
essential to keep a rapid reaction force over the horizon. That force 
can be over the horizon within the desert itself, or it can

[[Page S3249]]

be in Kuwait, and that can be used to act against terrorist enclaves. 
Our air power--the air power we used to police two-thirds of the no-fly 
zone in Iraq before the war--will always ensure our ability to bring 
overwhelming force to bear to protect the U.S. interests in the region. 
The bottom line is that working together with Iraqis from inside and 
outside Iraq, we can prosecute the war against al-Qaida in Iraq more 
effectively than we are today.
  Withdrawing U.S. troops will also enable us to more effectively 
combat threats around the world. But winning the war on terror requires 
more than the killing we have seen from 3 years of combat. The fact is 
that just taking out terrorists, as our troops have been doing, is not 
going to end the flow of terrorists who are recruited, for all of the 
reasons that we understand. The cooperation critical to lasting victory 
in the region is going to be enhanced when Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, 
civil chaos, and mistake after mistake in Iraq no longer deplete 
America's moral authority within the region.
  This is also key to allowing us to repair the damage that flag 
officers fear has been done to our Armed Forces. I know my colleagues 
on the other side of the aisle--members of the Armed Services Committee 
and Intelligence Committee--have heard from flag officers in private 
about what is happening to the Armed Forces of our country. We know it 
will take billions of dollars to reset the equipment that has been 
lost, damaged, or worn out from 3 years of combat. In the National 
Guard alone, units across the country have only 34 percent of their 
authorized equipment, including just 14 percent of the chemical 
decontamination equipment they need. That is a chilling prospect if 
they are ever asked to respond to a terrorist incident 
involving weapons of mass destruction.

  The fact is the Army is stretched too thin. Soldiers and brigades are 
being deployed more frequently and longer than the Army believes is 
best in order to continue to attract the best recruits. Recruiting 
standards have been changed and recruitment is suffering. The Army fell 
6,700 recruits short of their needs in 2005--the largest shortfall 
since 1979. Recruitment is suffering today. Not only are American 
troops not getting leadership equal to their sacrifice on the civilian 
side, but our generals are not getting enough troops to accomplish 
their mission of keeping the country safe.
  The fact is that in the specialties--special forces, translators, 
intelligence officers, for the Marines, for the Army, for the National 
Guard--our recruitments are below the levels they ought to be.
  Withdrawing from Iraq will also enable us to strengthen our efforts 
to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Iran, the 
world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, is absolutely delighted 
with our presence in Iraq. Why? Because it advances their goals, 
keeping us otherwise occupied, and it allows them to make mischief in 
Iraq itself at their choice. Their President is so emboldened that he 
has openly called for the destruction of Israel, while defying the 
international community's demands to stop developing its nuclear 
weapons capability. Could that have happened prior to our being bogged 
down the way we are?
  North Korea has felt at liberty to ignore the six-party talks, while 
it continues to stockpile more nuclear weapons material.
  Any effort to be stronger in dealing with the nuclear threat from 
Iran and North Korea is incomplete without an exit from Iraq. It will 
also enable us to more effectively promote democracy in places such as 
Russia, which is more than content to see us bogged down while 
President Putin steadily rolls back democratic reforms.
  China benefits from us throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into 
Iraq instead of into economic competition and job creation here at 
home. Our long-term security requires putting the necessary resources 
into building our economy and a workforce that can compete and win in 
the age of globalization. We cannot do as much as we need to--not 
nearly as much as we need to--while the war in Iraq is draining our 
treasury.
  Finally, we have not provided anywhere near the resources necessary 
to keep our homeland safe. Katrina showed us in the most graphic way 
possible that 5 years after 9/11, we are woefully unprepared to handle 
a natural disaster that we know is coming a week in advance, let alone 
a catastrophic terrorist attack we have no notice of. Removing the 
financial strain of Iraq will free up funds for America's homeland 
defense.
  The time has come for the administration to acknowledge the realities 
that the American people are increasingly coming to understand--the 
realities in Iraq and the requirements of America's national security. 
Stop telling us that terrible things will happen if we get tough with 
the Iraqis, when terrible things happen every single day because we are 
not tough enough. If we don't change course and hold the Iraqis 
accountable now, I guarantee you it will get worse.
  Ignoring all of the warnings, and ignoring history itself, in a 
flourish of ideological excess, this administration has managed to make 
the ancient cradle of civilization look a lot like Vietnam. But there 
is a path forward if we start making the right decisions.
  As Dr. King said so many years ago:

       The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it 
     otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human 
     history.

  Now is the moment of choice for Iraq, for America, and for this 
Congress.

                          ____________________