[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 112 (Friday, July 13, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9203-S9208]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I rise to speak for a while on the pending
business before the Senate this past week and next week, which is the
Defense authorization bill.
Now, constituents, people who have been watching the proceedings of
the Senate for the last week, might be a little confused because if
they know a little bit about how the Senate has historically done its
business, they know the Defense authorization bill is the bill we adopt
each year to set the policies and the spending priorities for the
Defense Department to ensure our national security will remain strong
for the next year.
However, this year, instead of talking about the acquisition of
equipment we need, the new aegis cruisers we are going to be sending
around the world--deploying to ensure we have a missile defense that is
not only on land but on the seas--instead of talking about the space
test bed--a research project that enables us, among other things, to
find out how to deal with antisatellite weapons that the Chinese, for
example, might use to destroy our satellites--or instead of talking
about the need to increase the number of our military--primarily, our
soldiers and marines--by about 90,000, so we have a more robust
military to have boots on the ground anywhere in the world--instead of
debating these various issues about our military posture, we have spent
almost the entire week focused on what, the argument about the Iraq
war.
Now, it is perfectly appropriate to debate issues relative to the war
against terrorists. Certainly, the main battlefield in that war against
terrorists today is Iraq. But it seems to me our focus is a little off
when, instead of looking at the things we could do to make the United
States more secure--by focusing on this Defense authorization bill and
the specific elements of it--we are, instead, focusing on arguments
about how quickly to withdraw from Iraq.
We have in place a new strategy in Iraq. At the end of last year,
after the election, when Secretary Rumsfeld left his position as
Secretary of Defense, the President said: All right, I believe we have
not had a successful strategy, and we are going to have a new strategy.
That strategy was announced in January, sometimes called the surge.
But what it involved was a combination of involving Iraqis more in the
defense and securing of their country and the application of a very
focused U.S. force of increased strength in specific areas of the
country, not just to take those areas but to hold them once they were
taken.
In the past, we would move into an area, we would clear it of the
enemy, and then, after a few days, we would leave. What happened? The
enemy would filter right back into the same areas, sometimes
establishing an even stronger presence than they had before.
That, obviously, did not work, and the President realized it.
Everybody in the country said: The election results show you need to
have a new strategy. So the President, working with the Iraqis, working
with General Petraeus--David Petraeus was confirmed unanimously by the
Senate to go over and develop and execute a new strategy. Working with
them, the President devised this new strategy of taking and holding the
key areas of Iraq so peace and stability could be brought to that war-
torn country. The opportunity for the Government then to grab hold of
the situation and do the things it needs to do would be given full
effect.
That strategy counted on five new brigades of U.S. forces, consisting
of over 25,000 on-the-ground servicemen, going in to join with about
twice as many Iraqi Army and police units to effectuate this strategy
of clearing and holding and maintaining control that I mentioned
before.
That strategy, finally, about 2 weeks ago, has been put in full
force, with the arrival of the last of the five brigades. They have
gone into both Anbar Province, which is almost a third of the country
of Iraq, largely controlled by--it is called a Sunni area, and largely
controlled by tribal leaders--and into Baghdad, which is, obviously,
the primary population center of the country, where a lot of the
previous Shiite and Sunni conflict was occurring.
What have we seen in the debate over the Defense authorization bill?
We have seen attempt after attempt after attempt from the other side of
the aisle to declare the war lost, the strategy a failure, and,
therefore, a commitment by the Senate to direct the President to begin
bringing the troops home.
Next Tuesday--I believe it is Tuesday--we will actually vote on an
[[Page S9204]]
amendment that has as its specific directive a mandate that we begin
bringing the troops home within a very specific time--I believe it is
120 days now--and that withdrawal be complete within roughly a year--
again, I have forgotten the exact date--clearly, predicated on the
notion that we have either lost or cannot win, that there is no point
in allowing this new strategy to play out to see whether it can
succeed, and to tell the entire world we are leaving Iraq.
Now, they put a little pink ribbon around it and said: Oh, we will
leave some forces over the horizon so we can ride to the rescue if
anything bad happens--as if there is not a clear common understanding
that a lot bad will, of course, happen or the need to maintain some
presence to help train Iraqi troops.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article by
Stephen Biddle dated July 11 that was carried in the Washington Post.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From washingtonpost.com, July 11, 2007]
Iraq: Go Deep or Get Out
(By Stephen Biddle)
The president's shaky political consensus for the surge in
Iraq is in danger of collapsing after the recent defections
of prominent Senate Republicans such as Richard Lugar (Ind.),
Pete Domenici (N.M.) and George Voinovich (Ohio). But this
growing opposition to the surge has not yet translated into
support for outright withdrawal--few lawmakers are
comfortable with abandoning Iraq or admitting defeat. The
result has been a search for some kind of politically
moderate ``Plan B'' that would split the difference between
surge and withdrawal.
The problem is that these politics do not fit the military
reality of Iraq. Many would like to reduce the U.S.
commitment to something like half of today's troop presence
there. But it is much harder to find a mission for the
remaining 60,000 to 80,000 soldiers that makes any sense
militarily.
Perhaps the most popular centrist option today is drawn
from the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations of last
December. This would withdraw U.S. combat brigades, shift the
American mission to one of training and supporting the Iraqi
security forces, and cut total U.S. troop levels in the
country by about half. This idea is at the heart of the
proposed legislative effort that Domenici threw his support
behind last week, and support is growing on both sides of the
aisle on Capitol Hill.
The politics make sense, but the compromise leaves us with
an untenable military mission. Without a major U.S. combat
effort to keep the violence down, the American training
effort would face challenges even bigger than those our
troops are confronting today. An ineffective training effort
would leave tens of thousands of American trainers, advisers
and supporting troops exposed to that violence in the
meantime. The net result is likely to be continued U.S.
casualties with little positive effect on Iraq's ongoing
civil war.
The American combat presence in Iraq is insufficient to end
the violence but does cap its intensity. If we draw down that
combat presence, violence will rise accordingly. To be
effective, embedded trainers and advisers must live and
operate with the Iraqi soldiers they mentor--they are not
lecturers sequestered in some safe classroom. The greater the
violence, the riskier their jobs and the heavier their
losses.
That violence reduces their ability to succeed as trainers.
There are many barriers to an effective Iraqi security force.
But the toughest is sectarian factionalism. Iraq is in the
midst of a civil war in which all Iraqis are increasingly
forced to take sides for their own survival. Iraq's security
forces are necessarily drawn from the same populations that
are being pulled apart into factions. No military can be
hermetically sealed off from its society--the more severe the
sectarian violence, the deeper the divisions in Iraqi society
become and the harder it is for Americans to create the kind
of disinterested nationalist security force that could
stabilize Iraq. Under the best conditions, it is unrealistic
to expect a satisfactory Iraqi security force anytime soon,
and the more severe the violence, the worse the prospects.
The result is a vicious cycle. The more we shift out of
combat missions and into training, the harder we make the
trainers' job and the more exposed they become. It is
unrealistic to expect that we can pull back to some safe yet
productive mission of training but not fighting--this would
be neither safe nor productive.
If the surge is unacceptable, the better option is to cut
our losses and withdraw altogether. In fact, the substantive
case for either extreme--surge or outright withdrawal--is
stronger than for any policy between. The surge is a long-
shot gamble. But middle-ground options leave us with the
worst of both worlds: continuing casualties but even less
chance of stability in exchange. Moderation and centrism are
normally the right instincts in American politics, and many
lawmakers in both parties desperately want to find a workable
middle ground on Iraq. But while the politics are right, the
military logic is not.
Mr. KYL. The reason I want to put this article in the Record is that
it very clearly points out the problem with the strategy of many of the
Democrats that I have just outlined, including the notion that somehow
you could reduce our forces by perhaps half or more and still achieve
this goal of defeating al-Qaida and training up the Iraqi units.
One of Biddle's key points is that the only way you can successfully
train up these Iraqi units is having relative stability in the country,
that if you have an out-of-control war going on, you have to be
fighting that war, and it is very difficult to at the same time be
training up these forces. The best way to train the Iraqi military is
to work in conjunction with U.S. units, as General Petraeus has
devised, go into an area, clear it, and then leave primarily Iraqi
units behind to continue to maintain control in the area. But if you
have constant fighting and you haven't been able to clear or hold the
area, those Iraqi troops never have that opportunity or the experience
of holding the area.
So, as Mr. Biddle points out, you can't have it both ways. This
compromise may satisfy some political requirements back home, but it is
totally unworkable in the place where it matters, and that is in Iraq.
You can't withdraw half or more of the troops quickly and have any
chance of success in maintaining peace and stability and in helping to
train up the Iraqi forces.
So why are people in the Senate focused on bringing the troops home
or otherwise micromanaging the way the President deploys the units to
achieve the mission's objectives? Well, it is either one of two things.
Now, from outside this body, I know there are a lot of people who have
a motive of trying to make the President look bad and undercutting his
authority and undermining the strategy he is following, I gather both
for partisan reasons and because they just don't think it can work. But
within the body, here in the Chamber, I know my colleagues do not want
any American life to have been lost in vain and that they treasure
every life that has been put on the line. That is why it is troublesome
to me to have to defeat amendments which have as their core point
undercutting the President's authority, micromanaging the war from the
Congress, and specifically calling for early withdrawal, and by early I
mean before the surge has even had an opportunity to play out.
In that regard, I would like to place in the Record a piece that was
carried this morning in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer, and
I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From washingtonpost.com, Jul. 13, 2007]
Deserting Petraeus
(By Charles Krauthammer)
``The key to turning [Anbar] around was the shift in
allegiance by tribal sheiks. But the sheiks turned only after
a prolonged offensive by American and Iraqi forces, starting
in November, that put al-Qaeda groups on the run.''--The New
York Times, July 8.
Finally, after four terribly long years, we know what
works. Or what can work. A year ago, a confidential Marine
intelligence report declared Anbar province (which comprises
about a third of Iraq's territory) lost to al-Qaeda. Now, in
what the Times's John Burns calls an ``astonishing success,''
the tribal sheiks have joined our side and committed large
numbers of fighters that, in concert with American and Iraqi
forces, have largely driven out al-Qaeda and turned its
former stronghold of Ramadi into one of the most secure
cities in Iraq.
It began with a U.S.-led offensive that killed or wounded
more than 200 enemy fighters and captured 600. Most important
was the follow-up. Not a retreat back to American bases but
the setting up of small posts within the population that,
together with the Iraqi national and tribal forces, have
brought relative stability to Anbar.
The same has started happening in many of the Sunni areas
around Baghdad, including Diyala province--just a year ago
considered as lost as Anbar--where, for example, the Sunni
insurgent 1920 Revolution Brigades has turned against al-
Qaeda and joined the fight on the side of U.S. and Iraqi
government forces.
We don't yet know if this strategy will work in mixed
Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods. Nor can we be certain that this
cooperation between essentially Sunni tribal forces and an
essentially Shiite central government can endure. But what
cannot be said--although it is now heard daily in
Washington--is that
[[Page S9205]]
the surge, which is shorthand for Gen. David Petraeus's new
counterinsurgency strategy, has failed. The tragedy is that,
just as a working strategy has been found, some Republicans
in the Senate have lost heart and want to pull the plug.
It is understandable that Sens. Lugar, Voinovich, Domenici,
Snowe and Warner may no longer trust President Bush's
judgment when he tells them to wait until Petraeus reports in
September. What is not understandable is the vote of no
confidence they are passing on Petraeus. These are the same
senators who sent him back to Iraq by an 81 to 0 vote to
institute his new counterinsurgency strategy.
A month ago, Petraeus was asked whether we could still win
in Iraq. The general, who had recently attended two memorial
services for soldiers lost under his command, replied that if
he thought he could not succeed he would not be risking the
life of a single soldier.
Just this week, Petraeus said that the one thing he needs
more than anything else is time. To cut off Petraeus's plan
just as it is beginning--the last surge troops arrived only
last month--on the assumption that we cannot succeed is to
declare Petraeus either deluded or dishonorable. Deluded in
that, as the best-positioned American in Baghdad, he still
believes we can succeed. Or dishonorable in pretending to
believe in victory and sending soldiers to die in what he
really knows is an already failed strategy.
That's the logic of the wobbly Republicans' position. But
rather than lay it on Petraeus, they prefer to lay it on
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and point out his government's
inability to meet the required political ``benchmarks.'' As a
longtime critic of the Maliki government, I agree that it has
proved itself incapable of passing laws important for long-
term national reconciliation.
But first comes the short term. And right now we have the
chance to continue to isolate al-Qaeda and, province by
province, deny it the Sunni sea in which it swims. A year
ago, it appeared that the only way to win back the Sunnis and
neutralize the extremists was with great national compacts
about oil and power sharing. But Anbar has unexpectedly shown
that even without these constitutional settlements, the
insurgency can be neutralized and al-Qaeda defeated at the
local and provincial levels with a new and robust
counterinsurgency strategy.
The costs are heartbreakingly high--increased American
casualties as the enemy is engaged and spectacular suicide
bombings designed to terrify Iraqis and demoralize Americans.
But the stakes are extremely high as well.
In the long run, agreements on oil, federalism and de-
Baathification are crucial for stabilizing Iraq. But their
absence at this moment is not a reason to give up in despair,
now that we finally have a counterinsurgency strategy in
place that is showing success against the one enemy--al-
Qaeda--that both critics and supporters of the war maintain
must be fought everywhere and at all cost.
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, what Charles Krauthammer, who is a very
knowledgeable analyst and writer on this subject, has said is that the
Petraeus plan has the makings of a successful strategy, it has already
begun to show some positive results, and that it would be folly to
declare it a failure before it even has a chance to play out.
Everybody knows General Petraeus is going to report back to the
Congress and to the President in September of this year, and he will be
accompanied by Ambassador Crocker, our Ambassador to Iraq, who will
give us a report on the status of the situation. Now, it has never been
contemplated that that is the end of the matter by any stretch of the
imagination since it will have only been a few months since the
strategy will have been in place, but at least he can give us an idea
of how it is working. Why anybody would want to set a different course
now, before he gives that report, is beyond me and certainly beyond
Charles Krauthammer.
Krauthammer points out that this new strategy has already begun to
show success. For example, in the Anbar Province, which was an area
that was almost exclusively controlled by al-Qaida--let me digress for
just a moment to make this point. We heard discussions several months
ago about a civil war in Iraq. It is true, there were elements of Sunni
and Shiite Iraqis who were fighting each other, and some were calling
that a civil war. But two things are important to know about that.
The first is that much of that fighting was instigated by al-Qaida.
Al-Qaida had come into the Sunni areas and had a declared intention to
start a fight between the Shiites and the Sunnis. When the fight didn't
materialize, al-Qaida went to Samarra, a holy place for Shiites, and
blew up one of their most revered shrines, the Golden Mosque. In fact,
it has been twice attacked, thus, in effect, poking the nose of the
bear to the point that the bear had to react, and the Shiites did
react. They said: If the Iraqi Army cannot protect our holy sites, by
golly, we will--or whatever the Iraqi phrase is--and they created
militias that began attacking Sunnis, and we did have a lot of Shiite
on Sunni and vice versa violence. But the first point is it was largely
instigated by al-Qaida, who knew precisely what it was doing and had a
declared strategy to begin that fight. We have the intelligence to
demonstrate that.
The second point is that al-Qaida, since that violence has to some
extent now subsided because of the surge--we have gone into these
Shiite neighborhoods, for example, and we have persuaded the Shiite
leadership to stop the militias from acting, stop the violence, and
calm the neighborhoods down so that life can return to normal, and in
at least half of Baghdad that has now been what is occurring.
In the Sunni areas, we went to the tribal leaders there and said:
Look, al-Qaida is causing you more problems than it is solving.
Eventually, these tribal leaders came back to our troops and to the
Iraqi leadership and said: You are right. We have now seen what life
under al-Qaida would be like as a Taliban kind of rule, where they
don't let us do anything; they impose this very harsh penalty on
anybody who isn't conforming to their way of life.
Most of the al-Qaida are coming into Iraq from other countries. They
are foreigners to the Iraqis, and many of these tribal sheiks, almost
all of them in the Anbar Province, said: We are tired of dealing with
these al-Qaida terrorists, and we want to join you in fighting them. By
the hundreds and thousands, young Iraqis began joining the police and
army to fight al-Qaida. And Anbar Province now, as Charles Krauthammer
details in his article and as our intelligence has also made very
clear, has become one of the strongest anti-al-Qaida areas in the
country. It has largely been pacified. It is a good example of how this
new strategy can work.
What Krauthammer says is: We don't know yet if this same strategy
will work in the next Sunni-Shiite areas, but we can see how it has
worked and how it could work if we allow time for the Petraeus plan to
play out. He points out that a month ago, Petraeus was asked whether we
could still win in Iraq. I am going to quote here:
The General, who had recently attended two memorial
services for soldiers lost under his command, replied that if
he thought he could not succeed, he would not be risking the
life of a single soldier.
That is a very important concept for us to remember back here because
when people talk about supporting the troops, it seems to me the first
type of support we should be providing is the moral support for these
soldiers, to support their mission, not only to provide everything they
need in terms of material support and training but to assure them they
are not risking their lives in vain, that we will continue to support
the mission we have sent them on that they think they can win and
believe they are winning. The worst thing we could do is to have
expressions here in the Senate that we think they have lost or that
they can't win, and therefore we want to begin declaring defeat and
leaving the battlefield. At that point, as it was back in Vietnam, it
becomes a question of who is the last man out and who is the last
person to risk death, for what? For a timetable? That cannot be why we
send young men and women into combat, into harm's way.
For those who believe it is already lost or that it is a failure and
that we cannot succeed, I say to them, you have an obligation, then, to
try to bring them home immediately because not 1 more day should pass
for people to risk life for nothing more than a timetable. I don't
happen to believe that. General Petraeus doesn't happen to believe
that. I believe we can allow the Petraeus plan to have the time it
needs to show that it can succeed, not just in Anbar Province but in
other places in Iraq as well.
Let me quote another couple of sentences from Krauthammer's article:
Just this week Petraeus said that the one thing he needs
more than anything else is time. To cut off Petraeus's plan
just as it is beginning--
[[Page S9206]]
Krauthammer says--
the last surge troops arrived only last month--on the
assumption that we cannot succeed is to declare Petraeus
either deluded or dishonorable.
Well, he is clearly not deluded or dishonorable.
I regret that some of my colleagues believe the only way to resolve
the situation in Iraq is to begin leaving now. That would be a strategy
for failure.
I ask my colleagues this: We have in this body made pronouncements
that we need to help people in places such as Darfur where there is
genocide occurring, and we have always tried to help people, whether it
be in Kosovo or Afghanistan or--and incidentally, isn't it interesting
that in two of those places, we are talking about largely Muslim
countries, and in places such as Somalia, also a predominance of
Muslims--we cannot as a nation ignore what would happen in Iraq were we
to leave prematurely. Almost all of the intelligence in the Baker-
Hamilton report which is cited by many of my colleagues confirms this
as well, acknowledges that if we leave Iraq before the Iraqis can
maintain peace and stability, the kind of genocide and killing and
terrorism that would ensue would be almost incalculable. Thousands, if
not hundreds of thousands and more, would die. Many believe that blood
would be on our hands if we are the ones who walk out before they have
the ability to prevent that kind of violence.
Al-Qaida clearly is the primary enemy now. As I talked about before,
the largely Shiite-Sunni violence has subsided to a significant degree,
and most of what is occurring against our forces and against other
Iraqis today is being perpetrated by al-Qaida--Al-Qaida in Iraq. If we
leave and al-Qaida in Iraq is allowed basically a free hand, most
predict that it will have created a situation where, like it did in
Afghanistan, al-Qaida will have the ability to train, to plan attacks,
and to have refuge from any kind of action to stop them from doing so.
They would also have access to the oil wealth of the country of Iraq
and to the other resources of the country. To the extent that anybody
in Iraq has tried to be a friend of the United States or cooperate with
the Iraqi Government--all of those people, remember, with the purple
thumbs--would be targeted by the thugs and terrorists who would reign
in Iraq. They would undoubtedly be executed.
Think of Saddam Hussein's regime. Think back when the North
Vietnamese came sweeping into South Vietnam and all of the boat people
fled and those who didn't get away were sent to the ``reeducation
camps'' or killed. Think of Cambodia, when we left there with 3 million
Cambodians killed.
Were we to leave Iraq, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
people will die--largely innocent people. That blood will be on our
hands.
Mr. President, that is not the worst of it. The U.S. security will
have been significantly jeopardized because we will have ceded the
central battle in the war against the terrorists to the terrorists. We
will have been defeated by the terrorists, much more than their sneak
attack on September 11 defeated us. It killed 3,000 Americans. It was,
like Pearl Harbor, the attack that awoke the ``sleeping giant'' to
finally recognize that after having been attacked, I believe, six times
previously by al-Qaida, we finally realized we are in a war with those
people. Whether we want to fight or not, they are going to attack us,
and we better fight back.
We began to do that. I fear that there is a tiredness beginning to
seep into some around the world--and even among some Americans--in
fighting this enemy that is very elusive and generally doesn't fight us
on the battlefield but, rather, waits and waits and, as soon as we
relax, engages in a sneak attack. They have tried to do it against our
allies. They have done it in Great Britain and in Spain, for example.
Other activities have been thwarted. We have been fortunate because our
homeland security has thwarted those attacks here at home.
We are not always going to have a battlefield on which to confront
them. What confuses me is the argument of some of my colleagues that we
should cede the one place where they have directly confronted us on the
battlefield in Iraq--cede that battle to the enemy by prematurely
withdrawing our troops and somehow reconfiguring our effort to fight
them in a different way at a different place. The argument that, if we
leave Iraq, we can focus on them in Afghanistan is a false choice. We
are fighting them in both places. If we need more elements of support
in Afghanistan, then we should send them there. That is supposed to be
a NATO exercise, and a lot of our NATO friends could be doing more
there to help us. I think we could use more help there.
It is a false argument to say we should not fight them in both
places, when the enemy has finally come out onto the battlefield and is
confronting us in the one area where we can defeat them with the U.S.
military. Nobody can beat our military, the best military in the world
and that has ever existed. Al-Qaida is no match for our military. When
they are willing to basically come out of their holes and confront us
in Iraq, for us not to directly attack, kill, or capture as many of
them as possible would be the ultimate in negligence and fecklessness
in fighting the war against terrorists. They are the terrorists; they
are there. We are able to kill them there. Why we would not engage the
enemy in the place where there are the most of them is beyond me.
Now, what that means is that we are putting our young men and women
in harm's way. They have volunteered for this mission in which they
believe deeply because they have looked into the eye of the enemy and
have seen the evil that is there, and they have been willing to lay
their lives on the line. Given that fact, and given the fact that we
have a brilliant commander with a strategy that appears to be working,
why would the United States Congress pull the rug out from under the
operation of General Petraeus and our troops when they have their hands
around the neck of the enemy and can deal a very severe blow to this
evil enemy? That is beyond my comprehension. It takes nothing from the
argument that we should be engaged in intelligence operations around
the world, that we should be trying our best to get Osama bin Laden,
and their argument suggests that somehow we are not. That denigrates
the efforts of our special forces and others who, believe me, are
trying their very best to get this guy and the other leadership of al-
Qaida. But to somehow suggest that we should leave Iraq because the
enemy exists in other places is not only totally illogical but, as I
said, would be a very feckless approach in trying to win this war
against the terrorists.
Another thing that bothers me relates directly to the bill we are
debating. We are going to see it next week, and we saw it this morning.
It is the notion that has begun to creep into the discussion that maybe
this is not really a war at all. One of the candidates for President
called this just a bumper sticker. Well, their effort to make this a
criminal enterprise--in other words, to criminalize the war rather than
treat it as the war that it is--is very troublesome to me.
This morning, we had an amendment that was drafted to provide that
instead of a $25 million reward to get Osama bin Laden, it upped it to
$50 million for the capture or information leading to the capture of
Osama bin Laden.
Mr. President, I was not aware there was a limit on time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is a 10-minute time limit on morning
business.
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 more
minutes.
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, how much time is left in total?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is a 10-minute limitation on each
speaker, and if it is not objected to, the Senator may continue to
speak.
Mr. KYL. I wasn't aware that Senator Brownback was here. I ask
unanimous consent to speak for another 3 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, this amendment was drafted to provide money
for the capture or information leading to the capture of Osama bin
Laden. Senator Sununu and others looked at that and said: Wait a
minute, this is a war. It may well occur that we cannot just capture
him, he may have to be killed. So we added the words ``or death'' to
[[Page S9207]]
the amendment by a second-degree amendment. That was adopted this
morning.
Next week, we are going to get right back to the argument about
criminalization versus war. There is in the bill--and we are going to
have to strike the language with an amendment--language that requires
us to send lawyers over to Iraq and Afghanistan to represent these
terrorists we capture on the battlefield. We would have to give them
legal representation in theater, and we would have to show them
classified information that may be used in their prosecution or
continued detention.
Mr. President, I have said that is nuts. I hate to use that kind of a
phrase on the Senate floor, but I don't think it represents good
policy. We are going to have to strike that language from the bill.
That is criminalization of the war. This is a war against evil people
who will kill us if they can. The sooner we recognize that fact and
deal with them, the sooner we will defeat the enemy, and the enemy will
no longer represent a threat to us. We cannot assume they don't really
mean it. We cannot assume we can negotiate with them. We cannot treat
them as if they are defendants in an American criminal trial. They are
evil terrorists who deserve to be dealt with on the battlefield, as we
have dealt with, historically, all of our enemies.
So I hope that next week we can turn from some of the amendments that
have been used here to primarily undercut the strategy in dealing with
the Iraq war and debate some key provisions of the Defense
authorization bill, which do need our attention--I have a couple of
amendments I hope we can deal with--and that we can also strike from
the bill the provision that would allow a new theory of criminal law to
intrude into the battlefield to deal with the POWs or detainees there
as if they are criminal defendants in an American court rather than the
POWs or enemy detainees that, in fact, they are.
I hope at the conclusion of the debate next week we will have
continued to defeat these amendments that undercut our efforts in Iraq,
continued to support the mission of the troops, and thereby the troops,
and strengthened the Defense authorization bill so that for the next
year we will have a bill that strongly supports the troops and provides
for the national security of the United States of America.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I want to make a few comments. I
appreciate the Chair staying here and facilitating this and allowing us
to speak about a very important issue--the key issue of our time--the
war in Iraq and what is taking place there.
I want to focus my brief comments on what we need to do on a
political solution. I think we are caught up with the idea that we need
to be on a military solution. A military solution is not going to
ultimately solve the situation in Iraq. You have to have a political,
durable solution. Unless we are willing to sit there for an indefinite
number of years with troops engaged in a very active military setting,
we have to get a political, durable situation in Iraq and on the ground
if we are going to be realistic about what we are going to do.
I have worked with Senator Biden on this proposal. I will talk about
a resolution that we have worked together on for a political solution.
He chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. I have been on that
committee for a number of years. I think we have to realize the
population we are dealing with. The situation is not dissimilar, in
some respects, to when we saw what took place in the former Yugoslavia.
We had a number of different populations where history had washed over
that place with different waves of different individuals' thoughts and
philosophies. After Tito leaves and you take off this big military
apparatus and intelligence apparatus that was willing to kill people to
enforce power, you are left with sectarian groups that don't get along.
Now Yugoslav has six countries in two autonomous regions after hundreds
of thousands of people were killed and multiple sets of civil wars that
took place. I think that is instructive from the standpoint of that is
what takes place when you take a big military apparatus off of areas
where you have nonuniform or a homogenous region. We are seeing this in
Sudan. You have in Sudan a north dominated by Arab and Muslim and a
south that is Black and Christian, by and large. They don't get along.
There were 2 million killed in the south. The south is going to secede.
You have genocide in Darfur by this government--a militant Islamic
regime in Khartoum. The world is growing in awareness of what is taking
place in Darfur.
I think we have to recognize the situation in Iraq and that you have
several different populations. The Kurdish population is separate and
distinct and operating in its own area and doing a nice job. There is
growth taking place there--not everyplace, but it is doing pretty well.
You have a mixed Sunni and Shia population in the rest of the country--
dominant Sunni in some areas and dominant Shia in others, and Baghdad
is a mixed federal city. I think we have to look at that situation and
recognize the mixture and the combustibility of that mixture and get to
a more durable political solution.
You are seeing now an ongoing migration of Iraqis inside their own
country, which I think suggests Iraq will eventually do what would be
called a soft partition. That is the logical thing that would take
place, and it is taking place today. There is an outcome of many
historical precedents--most notably in Bosnia in the 1990s. Senator
Biden and I introduced a resolution calling on Iraqis to reach an
agreement that would formalize a federal system in Iraq consistent with
their Constitution that would allow for Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia to
manage their own affairs, with Baghdad remaining a federal capital
city.
It is increasingly clear to me that we should start taking interim
steps now to facilitate a three-state, one-country solution in Iraq. We
should begin by acknowledging that many Iraqis whose lives are
threatened because of their sectarian affiliation are on the move. More
Iraqis are facing sectarian violence and are considering moving. As
tragic as these movements seem now, they are preferable to the mass
migration that would occur if Iraq were to implode.
There are steps we can take now to ease the process of internal
migration. We can start by authorizing our commanders on the ground to
help families who express a desire to relocate to areas where they
would join a sectarian majority. Relocating families will require
secure passage to safer areas and reliance probably on economic
assistance to reestablish them. Those who wish to relocate should be
assisted in this fashion.
I don't expect that the Iraqi people will create three completely
homogeneous regions. In fact, the level of Sunni and Shia marriage
would preclude such an outcome. We should be attentive to those who
believe security is enhanced by moving out of mixed neighborhoods,
where they do not face the danger of sectarian violence.
Indeed, there was reporting of people swapping houses who were Sunni
in a dominant Shia area, and Shia in a dominant Sunni area, so they
would feel more secure after one of their families had been killed or
kidnapped. I think that makes sense. As populations continue to move,
we also need to take steps to avert other aspects of an implosion. We
need to ensure that the Kurdish region, which has been a bedrock of
stability to this point, remains a stable area. Turkey is rightly
concerned about the threat of terrorism coming from across the Iraqi
border. We need to reassure them, and we should bolster
counterterrorism capabilities of Iraqi forces deployed in that region--
much as we have done in Georgia and in other nations where terrorists
tried to establish a safe haven and destabilize their region. Our
military strategy certainly depends on a stable Kurdish region. Our
political vision of Iraq also requires the Kurdish area to remain
strong, and I hope we can move quickly to address terrorism issues
there.
There are other steps we should take to prepare Iraq for a federal
political settlement. We must take additional steps to secure the Iraq-
Iranian border, which would be of great benefit to the troops executing
the surge, as well as mitigate any attempt Iran might make or thinks
that it has to exploit a future three-state, federal version of Iraq.
[[Page S9208]]
Last, we should place new emphasis on local and provincial elections
in Iraq.
I raise these issues because I do not believe we can precipitously
pull out of Iraq, nor should we. But I think we have to recognize the
situation on the ground for what it is and facilitate it before we see
more mass sectarian violence taking place. We can do this and, in a
civil fashion, save lives. That is what this is about. It is about
saving lives.
We have seen this play before. We have seen it recently in
Yugoslavia. We are seeing it today in Sudan. Why can't we see this and
say we are going to save lives by facilitating this rather than
creating a combustible situation that blows up on us later. This is
consistent with the Iraqi Constitution. It is a more robust political
solution which matches our need militarily on the ground.
I finally, say, Mr. President, I have traveled the country a lot. I
hear a number of people out there. They don't want to lose in Iraq, but
they don't see us on a track to win. What they are after is us coming
together here to provide that solution of how we can win. What I am
talking about is a political solution that is as aggressive as our
military solution. The military gives us space for the political side
to act. But we have to get it moving, and that is a situation where we
can win and we can go to the American people and say we are on track to
win and be able to pull our forces from the frontlines and reduce the
death loss we are experiencing as a country, that my State is
experiencing, that the Big Red One stationed at Fort Riley, KS, is
experiencing.
We can do this. We need to show some foresight and bipartisanship to
get it done. That is why I call, along with my colleague, Senator
Biden, for this proposal, and I urge other colleagues to join us as
well.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
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