[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.

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  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.


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  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.

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