[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 88 (Monday, June 4, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6995-S6996]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRATIONS
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, on May 24, I voted for H.R. 2206, but I am
disappointed that it took so long to complete work on this legislation,
while we have troops deployed and under fire fighting against an enemy
that, as few others have in history, seeks our total destruction.
For 108 days, the majority held up vital funding for our troops'
equipment and training. All this time, the majority was playing
politics with this funding, even sending to the President a bill that
they knew would be vetoed. And this is not my analysis; we know this
through the Democrats' own words. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic
leader in the Senate, said, ``We are going to pick up Senate seats as a
result of this war.'' And ``well, it doesn't matter what resolution we
move forward to. You know, I can count. I don't know if we'll get 60
votes. But I'll tell you one thing, there are 21 Republicans up for
reelection this time.''
So, with that in mind, we finally received the final version of the
security supplemental at 8 p.m., the last night before the Memorial Day
work period. While Democrats finally decided to listen to our generals
and not MoveOn.org and yielded to Republicans' demand to exclude an
arbitrary withdrawal date, this bill still has serious flaws. A policy
that would potentially restrict the very economic reconstruction funds
that are necessary to achieve the political and diplomatic solution
General Petraeus says we need represents bad public policy, to say the
least.
What's more, I am disappointed to see, yet again, that the majority
would use the needs of our troops as leverage to include extraneous,
and in many cases ill-conceived, spending and policy provisions. Among
these are a raise in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour; $22
million in Corps of Engineers funding specifically earmarked for Long
Island and Westchester County, and certain areas of New Jersey; $40
million in agriculture assistance specifically earmarked for certain
areas of Kansas affected by the recent tornadoes; $10 million for
radios for the Capitol Police; several new provisions to give certain
labor unions and Continental and American Airlines relief from their
employer pension plan contribution obligations; and a provision that
mandates that the Secretary of Health and Human Services approve a
state's request to extend a waiver for the Pharmacy Plus program,
making Wisconsin the only state to benefit from this provision.
The delay in passage of the security supplemental caused by the
majority party created significant disruptions for the Department of
Defense and for our men and women deployed in the war against
terrorists.
Since the emergency request was submitted by the President, the
Department of Defense has realigned significant funds internally and
submitted to Congress approximately six reprogramming requests driven
by the delays in the supplemental.
Secretary Gates stated in an April 11 letter to the Senate
Appropriations Committee, ``[i]t is a simple fact of life that if the .
. . [supplemental] is not enacted soon, the Army faces a real and
serious funding problem that will require increasingly disruptive and
costly measures to be initiated--measures that will, inevitably,
negatively impact readiness and Army personnel and their families.''
Then, Secretary Gates in a May 9 letter to Senator McCain wrote:
[i]n submitting the FY07 supplemental request in early
February, the Department planned on these funds becoming
available by not later than mid-April. Accordingly, starting
in mid-April, the Department began a series of actions to
mitigate the impact of the delay in the supplemental on our
deployed forces by slowing down spending in less critical
accounts. In addition, funds budgeted for fourth quarter Army
operations and personnel costs have been or are in the
process of being moved forward and expended to partially make
up the shortfall.
These actions have resulted in the Army having to take a
series of steps including deferring repair of equipment and
restraining supply purchases. In short, these steps, while
necessary to account for the delay in the supplemental, have
already caused disruptions within the Department.
Mr. President, here are just a few specific examples of disruptions
that have occurred within the Army:
Facility maintenance and purchases for barracks, mold
abatement projects, and dining facilities has been deferred.
As a result, there is a risk of troops returning from combat
tours to sub-standard barracks and facilities that had been
scheduled for renovation or updates while soldiers were
deployed;
Orders of supplies have been reduced. Deferring orders for
major repair parts and unit level maintenance items creates
system lag and an accumulation of backlogged orders waiting
to be placed. Units can sustain operations for only a limited
time by consuming existing inventory.
In his May 9 letter to Senator McCain, Secretary Gates also made
clear that these disruptions would have effects on the war effort:
[T]he lack of timely supplemental funds has limited the
Department's ability to properly contract for the
reconstitution of equipment for both the active and reserve
forces. This situation increases the readiness risk of our
military with each passing day should the nation require the
use of these forces prior to the equipment becoming
available. In other cases, the funding delay negatively
impacts our forces in the field by needlessly delaying the
accelerated fielding of new force protection capabilities
such as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle
and counter-IED technologies developed and acquired by the
Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). Finally, the ongoing
delay resulted in the depletion of funds necessary to
accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces.
Multinational Force-Iraq spokesman, Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell,
on April 4 said, ``At the current moment, because of this lack of
funding, MNSTC-I--Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq--is
unable to continue at the pace they were in the developmental process
of the Iraqi security forces . . . It is starting to have some impact
today, and will only have more of an impact over time.''
While I firmly believe that the manner in which Democrats managed
this legislation reveals their misplaced priorities, it is absolutely
necessary that we get this funding to the men and women on the front
line without further delay. That is why I voted for this supplemental.
Having forced our troops to wait 108 days for this needed funding,
there is no other choice but to accept this legislative blackmail.
I would also like to speak to a larger point, Mr. President. My
friends on the other side of this issue in both houses talk about a
failed strategy, and about a war that is lost. How do they know the
Petraeus strategy has failed? It isn't even in place yet. The fifth
brigade of the surge isn't there yet, and the fourth has only just
arrived.
Even commentators like Joel Klein of Time magazine, no friend of this
administration or this policy, have been forced to admit that progress
is being made. While pointing out the many struggles that remain, Mr.
Klein said:
There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It comes
from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the
Sunni insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in
recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has
been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign
fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me--confirming
reports from several other sources--that there have been ``a
couple of days recently during which there were zero
effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the
province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one
round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and
opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young
men to serve in the police and army units there.'' The
success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-
dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for
similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as
Time's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the
Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda
as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like
a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi
insurgency.
What is now happening is an attempt to reconsider the vote of four
years ago
[[Page S6996]]
when, by large bipartisan majorities in both chambers, we authorized
this war. In an effort to appease far left-wing groups, some are
attempting to distance themselves from their votes to authorize this
policy, and from their own statements acknowledging what the
intelligence information told us: Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat
to America's national security.
What they're not doing is talking about the consequences of defeat.
It is clear from respected national security figures like General
Anthony Zinni that ``This is no Vietnam or Somalia or those places
where you can walk away. If we just pull out, we will find ourselves
back in short order.''
Additionally, even the Brookings Institution released a study that
argues:
Iraq appears to have many of the conditions most conducive
to spillover because there is a high degree of foreign
``interest'' in Iraq. Ethnic, tribal, and religious groups
within Iraq are equally prevalent in neighboring countries
and they share many of the same grievances. Iraq has a
history of violence with its neighbors, which has fostered
desires for vengeance and fomented constant clashes. Iraq
also possesses resources that its neighbors covet--oil being
the most obvious, but important religious shrines also figure
in the mix. There is a high degree of commerce and
communication between Iraq and its neighbors, and its borders
are porous. All of this suggests that spillover from an Iraqi
civil war would tend toward the more dangerous end of the
spillover spectrum.
We cannot forget that Iran and Syria are fostering instability in
Iraq. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both active there as well.
As I have mentioned before, but have not heard answered from the
critics, we know that chaos in Iraq could draw in others in the region.
For example, Saudi Arabian officials have threatened ``massive
intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering
Iraqi Sunnis.'' A Kurdish secession would likely cause Turkish
intervention.
Does anyone in Congress disagree that failing in Iraq would be a
dramatic setback in the war against terrorists? Iraq must not be
divorced from its context--the struggle between the forces of
moderation and extremism in the Muslim world. After all, al-Qaida has
been in Iraq since before the U.S. invaded and has dedicated itself to
fomenting sectarian violence there. Osama bin Laden referred to Iraq as
``capital of the Caliphate,'' arguing that ``[t]he most . . . serious
issue today for the whole world is this Third World War . . . [that] is
raging in [Iraq].''
Terrorism expert Peter Bergen has told us that a:
[U.S. withdrawal] would fit all too neatly into Osama bin
Laden's master narrative about American foreign policy. His
theme is that America is a paper tiger that cannot tolerate
body bags coming home; to back it up, he cites President
Ronald Reagan's 1984 withdrawal of United States troops from
Lebanon and President Bill Clinton's decision nearly a decade
later to pull troops from Somalia. A unilateral pullout from
Iraq would only confirm this analysis of American weakness
among his jihadist allies.
Failure in Iraq will encourage further attacks against the United
States and provide a base from which to plan and train for attacks.
I will remind my friends who pushed so hard for this legislation, and
who cheered for votes on an immediate withdrawal, and the passage of
the first security supplemental which the President correctly vetoed,
if you are going to advocate a strategy for failure or a precipitous
withdrawal, you have the responsibility to tell the American people
what the consequences would be, and to tell them how you would respond.
These are the burdens of leadership.
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