[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.

                          ____________________