[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 103 (Monday, June 25, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H7055-H7056]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        BRING THE SOLDIERS HOME

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, they say they care about the soldiers. 
The President and his administration talk a lot about the soldiers, but 
in Iraq, the situation keeps getting worse. There are another 18 months 
left in this administration, and unless the Republicans finally dig in 
and demand action instead of words, casualties will continue to rise at 
a horrendous rate. In the 18 months the President remains in office, 
1,800 more soldiers will die and 18,000 more U.S. soldiers will be 
wounded if they keep up at the present rate.
  We are suffering as mightily as we did in Vietnam, and the results 
are just as catastrophic and just as preventable. We have a choice, but 
this President chooses to spend more U.S. lives in Iraq, and he does so 
with the full support of the Republican Party, which is the only way he 
can survive.
  The American people have spoken, the Democratic Party has spoken, we 
all said the same thing: Set a timetable and get U.S. soldiers out of 
Iraq's civil war. Even the majority of Iraq's elected Parliament has 
demanded a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, but the President ignores it 
all.
  So far, the Republican Party has sat on its conscience and given the 
President every blank check he asks for. Too many Republicans in this 
House and Senate know the truth, but they remain silent and 
acquiescence and give up their congressional responsibility.
  The American people have submerged the President's approval rating in 
an effort to get his attention, but he keeps ignoring the fact, the 
evidence and the lessons of history. And it is be possible because 
blind allegiance has become the litmus test of the members of his 
party.
  Republicans used to give the President blank checks, now they give 
him a rubber stamp veto to keep Americans fighting and dying in a war 
he lost several years ago. U.S. casualties will continue to rise at the 
President continues to escalate his stay-the-course policy in Iraq.
  The President's stubbornness has nothing to do with taking new ground 
in Iraq, but it has everything to do with gaining rights to what's 
underground in Iraq, the oil wealth of the Iraqi people. That's why the 
rhetoric is already being planted by the administration with friendly 
media that September won't really matter when it comes to a progress 
report. As Frank Rich reported in the Sunday New York Times, the fix is 
already on. And I will enter this journalism into the Record.
       [From the New York Times, June 24, 2007]

                   They'll Break the Bad News on 9/11

                            (By Frank Rich)

       By this late date we should know the fix is in when the 
     White House's top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning 
     talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the 
     same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 
     2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members 
     and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam's aluminum 
     tubes. ``We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom 
     cloud,'' said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell 
     of the war in Iraq--the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear 
     threat to America--had officially begun.
       America wasn't paying close enough attention then. We can't 
     afford to repeat that blunder now. Last weekend the latest 
     custodians of the fiasco, our new commander in Iraq, Gen. 
     David Petraeus, and our new ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan 
     Crocker, took to the Sunday shows with two messages we'd be 
     wise to heed.
       The first was a confirmation of recent White House hints 
     that the long-promised September pivot point for judging the 
     success of the ``surge'' was inoperative. That deadline had 
     been asserted as recently as April 24 by President Bush, who 
     told Charlie Rose that September was when we'd have ``a 
     pretty good feel'' whether his policy ``made sense.'' On 
     Sunday General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker each downgraded 
     September to merely a ``snapshot'' of progress in Iraq. 
     ``Snapshot,'' of course, means ``Never mind!''
       The second message was more encoded and more ominous. Again 
     using similar language, the two men said that in September 
     they would explain what Mr. Crocker called ``the 
     consequences'' and General Petraeus ``the implications'' of 
     any alternative ``courses of action'' to their own course in 
     Iraq. What this means in English is that when the September 
     ``snapshot'' of the surge shows little change in the overall 
     picture, the White House will say that ``the consequences'' 
     of winding down the war would be even more disastrous: 
     surrender, defeat, apocalypse now. So we must stay the surge. 
     Like the war's rollout in 2002, the new propaganda 
     offensive to extend and escalate the war will be 
     exquisitely timed to both the anniversary of 9/11 and a 
     high-stakes Congressional vote (the Pentagon 
     appropriations bill).
       General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker wouldn't be sounding like 
     the Bobbsey Twins and laying out this coordinated rhetorical 
     groundwork were they not already anticipating the surge's 
     failure. Both spoke on Sunday of how (in General Petraeus's 
     variation on the theme) they had to ``show that the Baghdad 
     clock can indeed move a bit faster, so that you can put a bit 
     of time back on the Washington clock.'' The very premise is 
     nonsense. Yes, there is a Washington clock, tied to 
     Republicans' desire to avoid another Democratic surge on 
     Election Day 2008. But there is no Baghdad clock. It was 
     blown up long ago and is being no more successfully 
     reconstructed than anything else in Iraq.
       When Mr. Bush announced his ``new way forward'' in January, 
     he offered a bouquet of promises, all unfulfilled today. 
     ``Let the Iraqis lead'' was the policy's first bullet point, 
     but in the initial assault on insurgents now playing out so 
     lethally in Diyala Province, Iraqi forces were kept out of 
     the fighting altogether. They were added on Thursday: 500 
     Iraqis, following 2,500 Americans. The notion that these 
     Shiite troops might ``hold'' this Sunni area once the 
     Americans leave is an opium dream. We're already back 
     fighting in Maysan, a province whose security was officially 
     turned over to Iraqi authorities in April.
       In his January prime-time speech announcing the surge, Mr. 
     Bush also said that ``America will hold the Iraqi government 
     to the benchmarks it has announced.'' More fiction. Prime 
     Minister Nuri al-Maliki's own political adviser, Sadiq al-
     Rikabi, says it would take ``a miracle'' to pass the 
     legislation America wants. Asked on Monday whether the Iraqi 
     Parliament would stay in Baghdad this summer rather than 
     hightail it to vacation, Tony Snow was stumped.
       Like Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus, Mr. Snow is on 
     script for trivializing September as judgment day for the 
     surge, saying that by then we'll only ``have a little bit of 
     metric'' to measure success. This administration has a 
     peculiar metric system. On Thursday, Peter Pace, the 
     departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the 
     spike in American troop deaths last week the ``wrong metric'' 
     for assessing the surge's progress. No doubt other metrics in 
     official reports this month are worthless too, as far as the 
     non-reality-based White House is concerned. The civilian 
     casualty rate is at an all-time high; the April-May 
     American death toll is a new two-month record; overall 
     violence in Iraq is up; only 146 out of 457 Baghdad 
     neighborhoods are secure; the number of internally 
     displaced Iraqis has quadrupled since January.
       Last week Iraq rose to No. 2 in Foreign Policy magazine's 
     Failed State Index, barely nosing out Sudan. It might have 
     made No. 1 if the Iraqi health ministry had not stopped 
     providing a count of civilian casualties. Or if the Pentagon 
     were not withholding statistics on the increase of attacks on 
     the Green Zone. Apparently the White House is working 
     overtime to ensure that the September ``snapshot'' of Iraq 
     will be an underexposed blur. David Carr of The Times 
     discovered that the severe Pentagon blackout on images of 
     casualties now extends to memorials for the fallen in Iraq, 
     even when a unit invites press coverage.
       Americans and Iraqis know the truth anyway. The question 
     now is: What will be the new new way forward? For the 
     administration, the way forward will include, as always, 
     attacks on its critics' patriotism. We got a particularly 
     absurd taste of that this month when Harry Reid was slammed 
     for calling General Pace incompetent and accusing General 
     Petraeus of exaggerating progress on the ground.
       General Pace's record speaks for itself; the administration 
     declined to go to the mat in the Senate for his 
     reappointment. As for General Petraeus, who recently spoke of 
     ``astonishing signs of normalcy'' in Baghdad, he is nothing 
     if not consistent. He first hyped ``optimism'' and 
     ``momentum'' in Iraq in an op-ed article in September 2004.
       Come September 2007, Mr. Bush will offer his usual false 
     choices. We must either stay his disastrous course in eternal 
     pursuit of ``victory'' or retreat to the apocalypse of 
     ``precipitous withdrawal.'' But by the latest of the 
     president's ever-shifting definitions of victory, we've 
     already lost. ``Victory will come,'' he says, when Iraq ``is 
     stable enough to be able to be an ally in the war on terror 
     and to govern itself and defend itself.'' The surge, which he 
     advertised as providing ``breathing space'' for the Iraqi 
     ``unity'' government to get its act together, is tipping that 
     government into collapse. As Vali Nasr, author of ``The Shia 
     Revival,'' has said, the new American strategy of arming 
     Sunni tribes is tantamount to saying the Iraqi government is 
     irrelevant.

[[Page H7056]]

       For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory 
     has become ``anything they can get away with without taking 
     blame for defeat,'' said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, 
     a national security official in the Reagan and Carter 
     administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan 
     is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 
     20, 2009, no matter the cost.
       Precipitous withdrawal is also a chimera, since American 
     manpower, materiel and bases, not to mention our new Vatican 
     City-sized embassy, can't be drawn down overnight. The only 
     real choice, as everyone knows, is an orderly plan for 
     withdrawal that will best serve American interests. The real 
     debate must be over what that plan is. That debate can't 
     happen as long as the White House gets away with falsifying 
     reality, sliming its opponents and sowing hyped fears of 
     Armageddon. The threat that terrorists in civil-war-torn Iraq 
     will follow us home if we leave is as bogus as Saddam's 
     mushroom clouds. The Qaeda that actually attacked us on 9/11 
     still remains under the tacit protection of our ally, 
     Pakistan.
       As General Odom says, the endgame will start ``when a 
     senior senator from the president's party says no,'' much as 
     William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That's why in 
     Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John 
     Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give 
     political cover to other members of his party who want to 
     leave Iraq before they're forced to evacuate Congress. In 
     September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said 
     that Iraq was ``drifting sideways'' and that action would 
     have to be taken ``if this level of violence is not under 
     control and this government able to function.''
       Mr. Warner has also signaled his regret that he was not 
     more outspoken during Vietnam. ``We kept surging in those 
     years,'' he told The Washington Post in January, as the Iraq 
     surge began. ``It didn't work.'' Surely he must recognize 
     that his moment for speaking out about this war is overdue. 
     Without him, the Democrats don't have the votes to force the 
     president's hand. With him, it's a slam dunk. The best way to 
     honor the sixth anniversary of 9/11 will be to at last disarm 
     a president who continues to squander countless lives in the 
     names of those voiceless American dead.

  The truth about September will be that the President is still losing 
the Iraq war, but that's not what we will be told, nor will the 
President tell the American people that he has no plan to treat all the 
gravely wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. Already America has lost 
over 3,500 soldiers, as many as 53,000 more are gravely wounded. As 
many as 50,000 more may yet be afflicted with post traumatic stress 
disorder or traumatic brain injury.
  As the Associated Press reported over the weekend, our government is 
overwhelmed now in trying to care for our wounded, and the President 
has this Nation on course to see 20,000 more casualties before he 
leaves office. That's what will happen unless his own Republican Party 
finally tells him and the American people the truth about Iraq, and the 
urgent need to get their soldiers out of harm's way.
  The Vietnam Memorial in Washington is a place where we commemorate 
the soldiers who died during the last failed war. Had enough people 
gotten through to the President back in 1968, there would only be one 
side of that Memorial because we could have saved at least 25,000 
lives. That's why we have to get through to the President today. The 
American people can't, the Democratic Party can't, even the Iraq 
Parliament can't. That leaves own the Republican Party to stop the 
memorial to Iraq's fallen heroes from growing any larger than it 
already will be.
  We have a chance today to save U.S. lives by seeing the Iraq war for 
what it is and what it isn't. It is a civil war created by us, and it 
isn't in America's interest to be there.
  Bring the soldiers home, Mr. President.

                          ____________________