[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 137 (Monday, September 17, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Page S11541]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, the other topic I wish to address is the
subject of the week, the Defense authorization bill, and especially as
it relates to the issue of the current ongoing military activity in
Iraq. I wish to briefly respond to a couple of comments that have been
said recently, particularly comments by General Petraeus and the
remarks the President made to us last week.
It seems to me the President said something very important to all of
America when he said the success of the surge in Iraq today offers us
an opportunity to be united as we have not had for some time. There are
people who want us to leave as soon as we can from Iraq. There are
people who want us to stay and complete the mission. And what the
President said was, regardless of which of these general positions you
have supported, there is an opportunity now for us to get together
because the reality is that as long as this mission does continue to
succeed, we can withdraw more and more troops which, obviously, we
would all wish to do. So I hope as time goes on and this surge
continues to succeed, we will have the opportunity to continue to
withdraw American troops.
I also wish to respond to a couple of comments made about the mission
in Iraq because there has been some criticism of the mission and a
suggestion that we should change the mission. I wish to make a couple
of points.
First, one thing we do not want to do is change the mission by
redefining that mission in the Senate based upon what kind of a mission
could get 60 votes in the Senate as opposed to what kind of a mission
makes sense militarily on the ground. Yet one of our colleagues has
even made that point, saying that the mission should be defined to
whatever will get 60 votes. That is the wrong thing to do.
The mission should be to secure Iraq, to have a stable country that
can be on our side in the war against terror, that has a chance to do
what the civilian government there needs to do, and to be secure enough
to enable us to withdraw our troops so Iraqi troops can take over. That
is the mission.
As the security is being established there, the mission can gradually
evolve less to providing security, as that is turned over to Iraqi
troops, and more to the continuation of the training of Iraqi troops
and focusing on the mission of getting al-Qaida. That clearly is our
No. 1 goal there.
But for those who say we can do that with a severely diminished
number of troops, General Petraeus himself commented on that point and
said you need the combination of troops that we have there today and in
fairly large numbers to perform the counterterrorism mission; that it
is not simply something you can say we are going to change the mission
to one of counterterrorism only and expect you can perform that with
just special operations troops.
As he said:
To do counterterrorism requires conventional as well as all
types of special operations forces, and intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance assets. If the goal is to
take away sanctuary from al-Qaeda, Gen. Petraeus said, ``that
is something that is not just done by counterterrorist forces
per se but . . . by conventional forces as well.''
The point is, those who talk about redefining the mission should be
under no illusion that can be done with a different mix of forces than
we have right now. It is one of the reasons we are being successful
against al-Qaida because we do have the kind of full conventional
forces at our disposal that enables us to succeed in that effort.
It will be very dangerous, indeed, for the Senate to define a
different mission based on how many votes it could get in the Senate
rather than what is necessary on the ground, or, No. 2, to restrict the
kind of troops that are available to perform that mission to those that
would not succeed. As General Petraeus has pointed out, we need the
kind of troops we have there today in order to succeed in the mission
we have there.
Finally, the whole question of whether we are going to be in Iraq for
a long time, there are some who criticize the prospect of a
relationship between the Iraqi Government and the United States
Government, as the President discussed in his speech. But the reality
is, as he pointed out, the Iraqi leaders have asked for that
relationship, and it should be one that we actually support. We need to
have a good, strong relationship with another country in the Middle
East, a country that can be on our side in the war against the
terrorists, that refuses to give sanctuary to the terrorists, and can
be a buffer against a nuclear-armed Iran, a fastidious Syria, and
others in the region, and whose interests are identical to ours.
This is one reason why it bothers me not in the least that Iraqi
leaders would ask to us have an enduring, ongoing relation even after
we have pulled out many of our troops, to the point that we may have
troops in Iraq for a long time. We have had troops in Germany now for
over 60 years, and we have had troops in Korea for over 50 years. There
may be a point in having U.S. troops in the region and even in the
country of Iraq.
Our hope--and I am sure this is shared by all of us on both sides of
the aisle in this body--is that as the troop surge continues to
succeed, we can draw down the number of those troops to a point that it
is not a strain on the U.S. military and the danger to the troops there
is greatly diminished. Clearly, this is the way we seek to resolve our
involvement in Iraq.
I hope the President's message, that this offers us an opportunity to
be united rather than divided, in fact, comes to pass, because not only
would that benefit the people of Iraq, it would help sustain our
national security interests and help to bring our country together
politically over this most difficult issue as well.
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