[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 20 (Thursday, February 1, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1470-S1473]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ROLE OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY
Mr. BUNNING. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader and the
minority leader for their nice words. They might disagree on certain
issues, but I am glad they agree on one thing--that I finally made it
to the U.S. Senate after spending 12 years in the House and did have a
private and professional life prior to service here in the Federal
Government. I thank both Senators.
As we prepare to discuss the war in Iraq, I would like to take a
couple of minutes to discuss the issue of personal responsibility,
civility, and the role of American diplomacy.
Since the founding of our great Nation, we have had a long and proud
tradition of international diplomacy. Our diplomacy has taken many
forms, whether it is through official state visits or through less
formal channels, such as congressional delegations traveling to
individual countries. What we all need to remember is that when we are
on a trip to a foreign country, we act as American diplomats. This is
something which I would like my colleagues to remember, especially when
[[Page S1471]]
they speak on American foreign policy in public international forums
and settings. Most of our colleagues take this role seriously and act
in a manner that is consistent with the advancements of our Nation's
foreign policy. We should not use the international stage as an
opportunity to denounce our own country by making irresponsible
comments that endanger our foreign policy by sending the wrong messages
to our enemies.
We currently face a critical turning point in our Nation's foreign
policy.
As representatives of this Government, we need to be responsible with
our remarks on foreign soil and to show some form of civility when
airing our grievances about our President, our country's stand on
diplomatic issues, and the war in Iraq.
While we do have our disagreements on how this country should
proceed, I believe we need to iron out these problems at home rather
than taking them to an international stage and using that opportunity
to make politically offensive comments towards our country.
Saying our country is shameful at an international forum only hurts
our standing among world leaders we are trying to negotiate with on
important trade deals and other foreign policy issues such as
preventing further international conflict.
We need to help build up America on the international stage, not
shoot ourselves in the foot by tearing ourselves down with statements
used for political gain.
Most Americans do not belong to the ``Blame America First'' crowd.
Most Americans don't support bashing our country on the international
stage. Most Americans agree that politics ends at the water's edge.
The ``Blame America First'' crowd spreads negative sentiment about
the United States, and then wonders why the rest of the world has a low
opinion of America. They are feeding the very beast they claim they are
trying to tame.
Most Americans are proud of what this country stands for.
The United States is one of the largest contributors in economic aid
to developing countries.
We continually work as a Nation to extend a helping hand to those in
need.
Funding for bilateral and economic assistance has increased
consecutively over the past 6 years, reaching unprecedented levels in
the international community.
We have also taken the lead in the fight against the spread of HIV
and AIDS.
We recognize that this pandemic is destroying lives, undermining
economies, and threatening to destabilize entire regions.
The President's emergency plan for AIDS relief is the largest
commitment ever made by any nation to combat HIV and AIDS.
The number of people benefiting from this program has grown from
50,000 to 800,000 in 3 years.
It is an extremely successful program and continues to grow in
support every year.
We also continue to provide lifesaving drugs to fight malaria to
those in need in Africa.
Through the President's malaria initiative we have been able to
provide millions of lifesaving treatments in order to prevent the
spread of this debilitating disease.
These international successes often go largely unnoticed and are
overshadowed by the current debate on the war in Iraq.
I ask my colleagues to take a moment this week to reflect upon our
foreign policy successes as well as our current challenges.
I believe that we can build upon our mistakes and learn from them.
We must work collectively on advancing our national interests instead
of splintering off and playing into the hands of our enemies.
Some of the proposed resolutions on Iraq send a terrible message to
both our troops and allies and only hurt our national interests.
Even more importantly, I believe they send a dangerous message to our
enemies.
I do not support these kinds of nonbinding resolutions that criticize
our plans for Iraq and I plan to oppose them.
They are counterproductive and will not make our problems in Iraq go
away now or in the near future.
I support working to find real solutions to the problem at hand, not
politically motivated attempts that offer little or no alternative.
I will not participate in this empty political posturing.
My main focus is on providing moral and material support for our
troops.
We must not forget our commitment to our troops and in turn the
commitment they made to our country and the mission in Iraq.
I believe they deserve our full support, not criticism and idle
threats to cut their funding.
Like many of my colleagues, I was initially skeptical of sending
additional reinforcement troops to Iraq, but I believe that we must
give the President's new strategy a chance to succeed.
Abruptly cutting and running is not a viable option.
This would only further hinder our efforts in the war on terror and
endanger our regional allies in the Middle East.
I will support our commander and chief in his new way forward in Iraq
and will support General Petraeus, our new commander of the
multinational forces in Iraq, in his efforts to carry out this plan.
I believe that General Petraeus is a key component in this new
strategy.
He is a friend.
He has spent many years of his fine career stationed at Fort
Campbell, KY.
I have the utmost respect for him and confidence in his leadership
skills and judgment.
His service in Iraq has equipped him with an expertise in irregular
warfare and operations and a true understanding of the enemy we face.
In his 27 months in Iraq, he led a division into battle, oversaw the
reconstruction and governance of Iraq's third-largest city, and built
up from virtually nothing Iraq's army and police force.
He managed to do this all by earning the respect of the Iraqis--all
Iraqis--the Kurds, Sunnis and the Shias.
General Petraeus and I talked, just the two of us, for nearly an hour
in my office this week.
I asked tough questions. And he responded with realistic answers
about what it takes for us to succeed in Iraq.
He knows that Iraqis have to live up to their end of the bargain.
Now we must show General Petraeus that we will live up to our end of
the bargain and give him the opportunity to carry out his mission.
Some of our colleagues support General Petraeus but do not support
his mission.
Many of our colleagues that unanimously voted to give General
Petraeus his fourth star last week will likely vote in favor of
proposed resolutions that question the very mission that General
Petraeus testified in support of before the Senate Armed Services
Committee.
This does not make sense to me. Right now we cannot afford to
distinguish between the two.
I am not asking my colleagues for an open-ended commitment, just a
little more patience--patience to see if this new strategy works,
patience to see if Iraqis will hold up their end of the bargain and
meet the benchmarks set by both our countries, and finally, patience to
allow our troops to complete their mission.
Our troops are committed to their mission. Now we owe them our
commitment.
This is our last best hope for progress in Iraq.
In his confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee,
General Petraeus offered to provide Congress with regular reports on
the progress of his mission and on the performance and cooperation of
Iraqis.
I plan on taking him up on this offer.
We must keep up to date on the situation in Iraq as it changes so
that we can best help our new commander address the situation at hand.
I wish General Petraeus the best of luck in this mission.
It is a daunting task but I have faith in him and his leadership
capabilities.
I ask my colleagues for their support.
We must show a united front and give this plan a chance to succeed.
The cost of failure is too great. We cannot afford failure in Iraq
and the international community cannot either, so I ask my colleagues
to reflect on these serious issues before we begin debating the
resolutions concerning the war in Iraq next week.
[[Page S1472]]
Let us show both our allies and our enemies that we can be united
behind our Nation's foreign policy.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Arizona.
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, first let me compliment my colleague, Senator
Bunning, for a fine statement. I endorse his call for unity. In a time
of war, a country needs to be unified, especially when we send our
young men and women into harm's way. They need to know we support the
mission that we put them in harm's way to try to achieve.
I remember years ago I used to see bumper stickers that said, ``Give
peace a chance.'' Today we need to dust off some of those bumper
stickers, write a couple of extra words in, and give the President's
plan for peace a chance. We are going to have a debate next week among
those who believe the President's plan deserves a chance to succeed and
those who disagree. I believe the latter position is dangerous, and it
would be dangerous to express that point of view with a vote of the
Senate in support of a resolution to that effect, especially since it
appears people whom we have relied on in the past for advice are also
now saying give the President's plan a chance and because events on the
ground are beginning to suggest that his plan is already beginning to
work.
There has been a great deal of discussion about the Baker-Hamilton
report. Critics of the President's plan have frequently held that
report up as evidence that we need to take a different course of
action. But yesterday, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, former Secretary of State James Baker and former Member of
the House of Representatives Lee Hamilton both argued that the
President's plan should be given a chance to succeed.
Maybe that surprised the chairman, but here is what they testified.
Representative Hamilton:
So I guess my bottom line on the surge is, look, the
President's plan ought to be given a chance. Give it a
chance, because we heard all of this. The general that you
confirmed 80-to-nothing the day before yesterday, this is his
idea. He's the supporter of it. Give it a chance.
That is Lee Hamilton.
Former Senator and Secretary of State Baker said:
. . . the study group set no timetables and we set no
deadlines. We believe that military commanders must have the
flexibility to respond to events on the ground.
And he said, in response to a Senator:
Senator, one of the purposes of the surge, as I'm sure you
have heard from General Petraeus, when you confirmed him, is
to give the Iraqi government a little more running room in
order to help it achieve national reconciliation by tamping
down the violence or pacifying, if you will, Baghdad.
That is the purpose of this strategy.
As I said, there is already evidence, even though the strategy has
certainly not been implemented in full, that even the prospect of its
implementation is beginning to have an effect. It is clear the Iraqi
Government, in its pronouncements, has already begun to sound a lot
different to these terrorists than they did in the past, when the Iraqi
Government didn't always back up the U.S. efforts. When we would go
into an area, we would capture these killers, and a couple of days
later they would be back on the street because somebody with political
influence in Iraq would see that it happened.
The idea is the Iraqis are now going to take charge and not allow
that to happen. And in addition to U.S. troops, there will be twice as
many new Iraqi troops helping to make sure it does not happen. Here are
a few excerpts from the news media.
From the Washington Post, February 1, 2007:
Shiite militia leaders already appear to be leaving their
strongholds in Baghdad in anticipation of the U.S. and Iraqi
plan to increase the troop presence in the Iraqi capital,
according to the top U.S. commander in the country.
He said:
We have seen numerous indications Shia militia leaders will
leave, or already have left, Sadr City to avoid capture by
Iraqi and coalition security forces,'' Army Gen. George W.
Casey Jr. said in a written statement submitted to the Senate
Armed Services Committee as part of his confirmation hearing
today to be the Army chief of staff.
Already beginning to work. The article continues:
Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has ordered his militia
not to confront U.S. forces and has endorsed negotiations
aimed at easing the deployment of American troops in his
strongholds, according to Sadrist and other Shiite
officials. This is the idea. In Anbar Province, where the
pressure from al-Qaida has been very strong, there is now
news that the sheiks in Anbar Province are beginning to
work with us. Just one report from the Washington Post of
January 27:
With the help of a confederation of about 50 Sunni Muslim
tribal sheiks, the U.S. military recruited more than 800
police officers in December and is on track to do the same
this month. Officers credit the sheiks' cooperation for the
diminishing violence in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar
province.
We have just mounted a big offensive with the Iraqi military in
Najaf, and I quote from a Washington Post story of January 29:
Iraqi soldiers, backed by U.S. helicopters, stormed an
encampment of hundreds of insurgents hiding among date palm
orchards in southern Iraq in an operation Sunday and set off
fierce, day-long gun battles during the holiest week for the
country's Shiite Muslims. Iraqi security officials said that
the troops killed scores of insurgents while foiling a plot
to annihilate the Shiite religious leadership in the revered
city of Najaf.
There is also political movement in the country. Let me quote from a
story from the Los Angeles Times of February 1:
Sunni and Shiite Arab lawmakers announced plans Wednesday
to form two new blocs in Iraq's parliament they hope will
break away from the ethnic and religious mold of current
alliances and ease sectarian strife.
There has also been a lot of talk about whether the mission of our
forces should be one of which is to help secure the borders. This is
something else that the Iraqis have pledged that they need to do,
particularly in their relationships with Syria and Iran. Quoting from
the same Los Angeles Times story:
Iraq indefinitely halted all flights to and from Syria and
closed a border crossing with Iran as the government prepares
for a security crackdown, a parliament member and an airport
official said Wednesday, the Associated Press reported. The
airport official said that flights to and from Syria would be
cancelled for at least two weeks and that service had been
interrupted on Tuesday. Hassan al-Sunneid, a member of the
parliament's defense and security committee, told the AP that
``the move was in preparation for the security plan. The
State will decide when the flights will resume.''
So it is already beginning. No resolution passed here in the Senate
is going to stop this new strategy. It appears to already be having
some success. My only concern is the disagreement of some of our
colleagues that it can't succeed will become a self-fulfilling
prophecy, merely because it could embolden our enemies and cause our
allies to wonder whether we still have the will to continue until we
have achieved our mission in Iraq. But perhaps the message I am most
concerned about that these resolutions would send is not only to the
enemy and to our allies, but to our own troops and to their families.
There has been quite a bit of discussion of a news report on the NBC
Nightly News last Friday, Brian Williams reporting, who specifically
called upon Richard Engel, who was in Iraq, to report on what he had
found there. I will work through his report, but here is what Engel
said:
It's not just the new mission the soldiers are adjusting
to. They have something else on their minds: The growing
debate at home about the war. Troops here say they are
increasingly frustrated by American criticism of the war.
Many take it personally, believing it is also criticism of
what they have been fighting for. Twenty-one year-old SP
Tyler Johnson is on his first tour in Iraq. He thinks
skeptics should come over and see what it is like firsthand
before criticizing.
Here is what SP Tyler Johnson then said on the TV news.
Those people are dying. You know what I'm saying? You may
support--``Oh, we support the troops,'' but you're not
supporting what they do, what they share and sweat for, what
they believe for, and what we die for. It just don't make
sense to me.
Richard Engel then said:
Staff SGT Manuel Sahagun has served in Afghanistan and is
now on his second tour in Iraq. He says people back home
can't have it both ways.
And now Staff SGT Manuel Sahagun is on the camera and says:
One thing I don't like is when people back home say they
support the troops, but they don't support the war. If
they're going to support us, support us all the way.
And then Engel says:
SP Peter Manna thinks people have forgotten the toll the
war has taken.
[[Page S1473]]
And SP Peter Manna says:
If they don't think what we are doing is a good job,
everything that we have done here is all in vain.
Engel concludes:
Apache Company has lost two soldiers and now worries their
country may be abandoning the mission they died for.
We cannot send that message to our troops and to their families, that
we disagree with the mission we are putting them in harm's way to try
to achieve. As these three young men, our finest, have said, speaking
to the American people: You can't say you support the troops if you
don't support what we are trying to do here, what we might die trying
to accomplish.
That is why we have to be careful about resolutions in the Senate.
Every Senator has an immense capability of expressing his or her point
of view. We have all done that. We all continue to do it. We can get
before the cameras any time we want to. We can let our folks back home
know what we feel. And I dare say there are probably 100 different
opinions in this body of 100 people. We all have a little different
view of it. And we can tell our constituents what we think.
We certainly can communicate that to the President and people in the
military. What we don't have to do is to go the next step and pass a
resolution that first of all is nonbinding and has no effect on the
implementation of the strategy, which is already beginning and will go
forward, but can have a very detrimental effect on our enemies, on our
allies, and on our own troops.
When General Petraeus was here testifying before his confirmation, he
was asked a question about the resolutions to the effect of would it be
helpful, and he said: No, it would not be helpful. Then he went on to
talk about the object of war being to break the will of the enemy. He
said: This would not help us--it would hurt us--break the will of the
enemy, especially in a war like the one we are fighting with terrorists
around the globe today--a war of wills.
It is important for us not to send the signal that our will is
flagging, that there is great disagreement in our country about the
desire to continue. In this war of wills, we should be unified and in
support of the mission we are sending our troops to try to accomplish,
and in support of the general whom we have confirmed to carry out that
mission.
So I hope my colleagues will think very carefully about the words
they speak, the actions they take, and reflect on what others will
think of what we do here in this body. We are not simply speaking to
the President, trying to send him a message. Everyone else in the world
will get that message. And as much as we might manipulate the words in
a resolution to try to bring 60 Senators all in consensus to what the
resolution says, we all know what the headlines the next morning are
going to say all around the world if a resolution like this were to
pass: ``Senate Declares No Confidence in President's Strategy.'' ``U.S.
Senate Goes on Record as Opposing Bush Plan.'' You can write the
headline. Those are the words that will resonate around the world.
Let's not make any criticism of the President or his plan become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Let's be as united as we can in supporting
our troops by supporting the mission we are sending them on, hoping it
will succeed; if we want, expressing concerns we have about that, but
doing so in a way that doesn't undercut the message. We can do both of
these things in this great open society. People expect us to have
debate about important issues such as matters of war and peace, and we
can do that without undercutting the mission here.
I go back to where I started in quoting former Representative Lee
Hamilton, cochairman of the Hamilton-Baker commission in his testimony
yesterday here in the Senate:
So I guess my bottom line on the surge is, look, the
President's plan ought to be given a chance. Give it a
chance, because we have heard all of this. The general that
you confirmed 80 to nothing the day before yesterday, this is
his idea. He's the supporter of it. Give it a chance.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
____________________