[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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