[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 140 (Thursday, September 20, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11841-S11848]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008--Continued
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I have been listening to my colleagues on
the other side of the aisle, and sometimes I think we are talking past
each other and about different legislation.
The proposal in the Levin-Reed-Kerry and other Senators legislation
says nothing about precipitous. I don't know how one interprets
``precipitous'' when we leave the President the discretion to decide
how many troops he is going to have there for training, for prosecuting
the war on terror against
[[Page S11842]]
al-Qaida, and for the job of protecting American facilities and forces.
The fact is that for many people in the country, this is inadequate.
It is not precipitous. To have a debate about buzz words that excite
the base does not serve our troops well, and it certainly does not
serve our national security interests very well.
We keep hearing these words ``surrender'' and ``choose to lose,'' and
so forth. It is insulting to a lot of people who have spent a lifetime,
some who served in the Armed Forces, being told this by people who have
not, that they are somehow choosing to put a strategy in place
purposefully that is to surrender on behalf of America or to lose on
behalf of America. Come on. It happens that a lot of people in the
Senate and the country believe there is a better way to defend American
interests.
I will tell you, if you take a real measurement by facts of where we
are with respect to American security interests--let me give them to
you: Iran is stronger than Iran has ever been in recent years. Iran
loves the fact that we are bogged down in Iraq. Iran is strengthened by
the fact that we are bogged down in Iraq. Our own national intelligence
agency has told us we are now experiencing more terrorism, not less,
because of our policy in Iraq. That is our intelligence community
telling us that, that there are more terrorists, not less. Osama bin
Laden is free and doing what he does out of Pakistan, talking on the
Internet to the world, attracting terrorists, and plotting to attack
America. Hamas is stronger than it has ever been. They took over the
Gaza and are creating havoc in the West Bank. Hezbollah is stronger
than it has been. Al-Qaida is reconstituted.
Those are all facts. Do you know what they add up to? They add up to
a weak foreign policy, to a weak defense policy and, in fact, those who
claim and talk about surrender and about choosing to lose are losing
today when measured against the real interests of our country. They are
not making America safer. Interestingly, one of the most important
things General Petraeus said in that hearing, in answer to a question
from the Republican former chairman of the Armed Services Committee,
somebody respected and revered by people on both sides of the aisle,
Senator Warner, are we safer?--General Petraeus couldn't say. He said:
I don't know.
So I have had enough of this gobbledygook talk about ``precipitous''
and ``surrender'' and ``walking away from responsibility.'' The
responsibility here is to get this policy right for America and for our
troops.
Where is the accountability? We were told by the President of the
United States last January, when he stood up and he talked to the
Nation, one of those big televised ``We are going to talk to the
Nation,'' he said to America: The Iraqis are going to do the following.
Here is what they are going to do: A, B, C, and D. Then he said: And we
are going to hold them accountable.
Then after the Iraq Study Group reported, everybody said: OK, we are
going to wait and give General Petraeus an opportunity to report; we
are going to wait for September, and we will see whether we are going
to change the strategy.
What did General Petraeus talk about when he finally gets here at
this long-awaited moment that everybody is waiting for to measure the
strategy with respect to Iraq? He talked about tactics, about military
tactics that do not amount to a strategy for how you resolve the
fundamental problems of Iraq.
The Senator from Alabama, Mr. Sessions, a moment ago pointed out this
complete contradiction where they are claiming: Well, the streets are
safer and they have been safer for, what, 7 months, 8 months now
because General Petraeus's own chart shows the vast preponderance of
the violence went down before our troops even got on the line.
One of the reasons it went down is because there has been a massive
amount of ethnic cleansing because the militias have done their dirty
deed across the country, and Baghdad, which used to be 65 percent
Sunni, is now 75 percent Shia. That tells you the story.
There is a total mythology here about al-Qaida, not mythology in the
sense that they are dangerous and they are real. We all understand
that. Al-Qaida is a threat. Al-Qaida is a serious challenge to all of
us in both parties, to the country, to every citizen. But al-Qaida is
not the principal problem in Iraq.
It was again interesting that General Petraeus, in answer to a
question in the Armed Services Committee, was asked about Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaida in Iraq, whether they were there at the beginning,
and he said no. There is no connection between al-Qaida in Iraq and 9/
11, none whatsoever, despite countless, countless references by the
President, the Vice President, and a bunch of folks on the other side
to try to link them together and confuse Americans, grab their
emotions, get them in the gut, and somehow that is going to excuse a
policy that cannot find another excuse.
It is a disgrace, and it doesn't serve our national security
interests. I repeat, we are not safer in the grander sense of strategic
interests of our country. When you measure what they have done with
respect to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, they have
a failed national security policy for this country--a failed national
security policy for this country. The measurement is given to us by our
own intelligence agency, which tells us al-Qaida is reconstituted and
capable of attacking from anywhere.
It is obvious for everybody to see how we have lost leverage and lost
credibility and lost influence in the world. That does not make our
Nation safer, not in the least.
While we have waited for General Petraeus to report, a lot of young
Americans have died. Meanwhile, today in the Senate, we were distracted
by this much discussed, much condemned ad in a newspaper 2 weeks ago.
Some saw a chance to score cheap political points on the floor of the
Senate. Instead of joining with everybody to condemn all those kinds of
ads and involvements in American politics that people do not like, the
other side could not bring themselves to do that. But they have to have
their singular targeted, one-entity specific, not even affiliated party
entity, and go on and attack it. Frankly, it is as insulting as it is
illuminating that in a week-long debate about Iraq, in which both sides
have just five amendments to try to affect the policy, the Republicans
took one of those amendments to try to, instead, play pure politics.
Mr. President, all of us opposed any kind of personal attack on the
distinguished general, and we said so at the time. I think I was one of
the first people to speak out and say so. But I am not going to join in
some kind of hijacking of the Senate for political purposes to score
points and create 30-second advertisements as a consequence of votes.
It is a disgrace, and it does a disservice to what we are trying to do.
We have had a lot of colleagues who have referenced the fact that the
escalation of sending more troops into Iraq was to give Iraqi
politicians the chance to be able to make up their own minds about
their political future. And we have heard a lot of people talk again
and again and again about how there is no military solution. I know
what happens in the sort of ``speech-ifying'' that goes on here, and
the repetition, I guess, of some of these facts. They kind of get
glossy. They just sort of slide by people and people don't really focus
on the real meaning or the impact of what is being said as a result.
But the fact is, the President very clearly told America the rationale
for sending more troops was not to go out and secure a whole bunch of
communities for the sake of having a general come here and say we know
how to secure a community.
A lot of us, in discussing the so-called surge, said at the time that
this is not going to be the thing that changes the fundamental dynamics
that are now ruling Iraq absent an increase in significant political
diplomacy and political strategic thinking. And in that, we have been
proven 100 percent correct. The Iraqis have not made fundamental
decisions.
Let me ask you, Mr. President, what is the relationship between more
security and making a decision about how you distribute oil revenues?
Are you telling me they can't get into a room and figure out the Kurds
have this much, the south has this much, the Sunni triangle doesn't
have any? The Sunni are 20 percent of the population, so we have to
have some revenue going to them from a national basis. Do you
[[Page S11843]]
need security to make that decision? There is a complete disconnect in
what is being talked about here.
Do you need security to decide whether you are going to allow people
who were formerly members of the Baath Party, but who were there
because they were coerced or because it was the only way to stay alive
but who never took part in the excesses of Saddam Hussein, do you need
security to make the decision--and I am not saying you can get them all
to go into the mainstream of the life of Iraq--but to make the decision
as to whether you are going to let them go in? You need security to do
that? No. You need a political will.
I will tell you why they are not making the decision. It is not
because of the absence of security. It is because of the fundamental
reality of their constituencies. The Shia have spent 1,300 years being
basically subjugated by Sunni, and they have now been given at the
ballot box what they could never achieve in any other way. They have
been given the right to run the country. And guess what. After what
happened in 1990, when President Bush, 41, excited the notion they
could take on Saddam Hussein and encouraged them to revolt, and they
did, and then we pulled the rug out from under them, tens of thousands
of them were brutally murdered, and they remember that. That is the
freshest massacre in their memory. That memory says to them, we are not
going to let go of this power very easily, especially when we now have
an opportunity to have a Shia Islamic state, which is what they want.
That is what the constituency wants.
The Sunni constituency, which has been running the place for most of
those years--not every single one of them but most of them--has now
been emboldened in the notion that they have to reject this notion of a
Shia Islamic state, and Iran and Iran's influence, and they have the
sense that they can return to power. In that struggle is written the
history of the IEDs and most of the ethnic cleansing and most of the
violence we have seen. Now, not all of it. Yes, al-Qaida has been
involved in brutal incidents; and, yes, al-Qaida is trying to stir
things up; and, yes, al-Qaida was involved in the Samarra mosque and
other things. We all understand that. But my colleagues are dead wrong
when they come to the floor of the Senate and they tell us, or tell
America, that al-Qaida is the principal problem that keeps us doing
what we are doing in Iraq. It is not true.
Al-Qaida will not survive in Iraq, in any kind of Iraq, if we are not
there. The Sunni have made a decision. And, incidentally, the Sunni
didn't make a decision that was based on security. The Sunni made a
political decision to work with the United States, and then the
security came as a consequence of the political decision. The political
decision came first, and the Sunni made up their minds, and now they
are, indeed, being armed, being trained, and fighting back against al-
Qaida because they got tired of al-Qaida's cruelty.
The Shia will never get along with al-Qaida because al-Qaida and al-
Qaida's beliefs and its attempts to establish a caliphate in the region
and out of Iraq does not include Shiism. You are better off as a
Christian or a Jew in the eyes of al-Qaida than Shia are in the context
of Muslim and the faith of Islam. So the Shia, and particularly Iran--
and I heard my colleague from Alabama turn to Iran as the reason to
somehow talk about what is happening with Iraq and al-Qaida. Iran is
not going to tolerate al-Qaida, not for an instance.
The Kurds are not going to tolerate al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is not in
Kurdistan, and al-Qaida doesn't do so well down there where the Shia
are, and it is not doing so well right now where the Sunni are. The
jihadists, as opposed to the former generals of Saddam Hussein--al-
Qaida in Iraq is made up of a number of different entities, and the
worst, obviously, are the jihadists. Those are the foreign fighters who
come in across the Syrian border or across the Iranian border, but they
are the first who are going to find a massive unwelcome in Iraq because
they are foreign and because there is no way that either Sunni or Shia
or Kurd is going to allow the jihadists to get a foothold of any kind
of consequence.
The Baathists are using al-Qaida in a way because it serves their
interests to foment some of the problems because they are targeting us
as well as the Shia, and they want to create this disruption. The only
way to resolve that is through this political issue, and that raises
the question of, how you do solve it? There are some very smart people
who know more about Iraq and its history than I do who suggest it may
not be possible, for the time being, because of what has been
unleashed--the opening of Pandora's box, or the genie out of the
bottle, or whatever you want to say. It has changed the possibilities
now so that you may not be able, for the time being, to achieve any
kind of legitimate central government or pluralistic society. You may
have to have this federalism that has been talked about for some period
of time because they may have to live apart before they can live
together again in order to prove you can get over these hurdles and
create some governments.
Even today, we had a meeting with the French Foreign Minister here,
and he mentioned how there is a growing sense among some Iraqis that
this may be the way in which you have to try to build a resolution.
Those are the kinds of things we should be talking about in the Senate.
These are the kinds of things we ought to be pursuing in diplomacy. And
where is the diplomacy? Where is the significant standing summit? I
think 3 years ago, when I was running for President, I talked about the
need to have a standing summit and a standing conference. Senator Lugar
has talked about it repeatedly, to the point of exhaustion, that you
have to have people who are talking to each other every day. You have
to have envoys of consequence.
Why couldn't we have former President Bush and President Clinton
serve as special envoys to convene and meet with these folks and work
through these differences on a daily basis, with the notion that you
are going to try to create a resolution, or find the resolution, like
we did in Bosnia and Kosovo, as we have in so many other conflicts in
the world?
As a young person, when I came into politics, I remember one of the
things I admired on both sides of the aisle was those titans of
American diplomatic history. During the period that I grew up, there
were people with names such as Acheson and Ball and Bundy and a host of
others, and some did better than others. Kissinger and then Jim Baker,
who I remember made 15 trips to Damascus just to get President Asaad to
agree finally to Desert Storm. And he went the last time, on the 15th
trip, without even knowing what the outcome would be, but he knew that
he had to repeatedly be there and be in their face and cajoling and
working and moving the process.
There has been such a total absence of that kind of effort over the
course of these last years, it just frustrates me to think about young
men and women on the front lines suffering these grievous injuries and
believing in our country and in the idea of trying to help Iraq and not
having the kind of support and policy that does justice to the risks
they are taking. It is stunning, Mr. President.
I believe, as Tom Friedman said the other day, negotiating in the
Middle East--without leverage is playing baseball without a bat. And
that is basically what we have been doing because we will not get up
from the table. There has never been a baseball owner in history who
went into negotiation with another player and said: I can't get up from
the table. That is a negotiation that is not going to end well. That is
the negotiation we are basically in today.
The President of the United States has said to the Iraqi Government,
we are going to have 130,000 troops there next summer. It is already
there. What did they have to do? What do you have to do if you are an
Iraqi sitting there playing your game, knowing you are going to be
there, not us, forever, if you stay alive; knowing that you are able to
use the 130,000-troop promise of next year and you can just float along
and avoid any kind of responsibility or decisionmaking and play your
own political power game for the future? If you are already aligned
with Iran, as many of those politicians are who are Shia, in the
majority, they have no motivation whatsoever to compromise.
You have to change the dynamics. You have to change the play on the
ground. You have to get them worried
[[Page S11844]]
and get them thinking about legitimate implications of what happens if
we do something. Right now, when the United States starts talking
militarily about Iran, they are not particularly scared because they
know the situation with our troops. They read the newspapers. They hear
the debate in the Senate. They know how overstretched we are. I mean
this is not complicated. We don't have the leverage that we ought to
have to get them to do what they ought to be doing--if they are willing
to do it at all--and put it to the test to find out if they are willing
to do it at all because we are going to have 130,000 troops there no
matter what they do next summer. We have already told them that. The
same number of troops we had last year when America said staying the
course was not good enough; we want a better strategy, our strategy is
to go back to where we were when the country almost disintegrated a
year ago with 130,000 troops.
The other thing we know is that we are not going to put enough troops
in there to secure every single community. So when you push in Baghdad
or you push in Anbar, and then somebody goes over to Baqouba, or
somebody goes over to Diyala Province or one of the other provinces,
they have infinitely more capacity to move around.
I learned that lesson a long time ago, back in the war of the 1960s,
in Vietnam. We learned what it was like to go into these villages where
you don't share the culture, the language, you don't look like the
people, the religion--any of it. You are carrying guns, and they think
you are occupying their land. It is tough. It is tough on our folks.
What are they doing? They are going out and finding IEDs the hard
way. I hear folks talking about these battles and the enemy. The enemy?
The enemy are IEDs. Obviously the people who plant them, but they don't
see them very much. Most of the wounded are from IEDs. Most of the
killed are from IEDs. This is not a set piece battle such as we have
seen in a lot of other wars we have fought. It is not even the same
kind of insurgency battle we have seen in a lot of other wars we have
fought. It is very different.
I don't think we have been as smart or as thoughtful and creative in
the kinds of strategies we need to change it--particularly when you
hear the Iraq Study Group and our own national intelligence entities
all come together saying the American footprint is part of the problem.
The large presence of American forces is attracting jihadists,
attracting terrorists, creating the impression of occupation. That is
what General Casey said and General Abizaid. That is what the Iraq
Study Group has said. Everybody has said that.
What have we done about it? We have increased the presence. We have
increased the footprint. We have lent even more credibility to the
concept, as General Jones said, that we are there for the long run
because we have this massive footprint with great big bases and
unbelievable amounts of equipment. A whole bunch of people think we are
not just there to help Iraq, we are there for the long run, we are
there because we want to be there for much larger purposes.
I think we have to do this differently. The open-ended, seemingly
endless commitment has clearly done nothing to directly confront the
problem. What we need to do, the responsibility that each of our
colleagues has, is to look at these kinds of dynamics and examine them.
If the Shia really believe what they believe and the Sunni really
believe what they believe--and you can talk to them and read history
and make judgments about it--then the troops are not going to change
what is necessary for them to try to make some decisions.
GEN Tony Zinni--for whom I have great respect, who is former CENTCOM
commander, he travels frequently over there and meets with an awful lot
of people--some time ago talked to me about an idea that has appealed
to me very much over the last years, which is the need to negotiate a
new security arrangement for the region itself; if we were to become
involved in trying to engage these other countries in that arrangement,
which can be leveraged by the notion that we are going to pull back,
that we are going to shift responsibility to the neighbors to begin to
bear some of the strategic long-term requirements--with respect to
Iran, for instance; with respect to the protection of the Gulf States--
Saudi interests, Jordanian interests, et cetera--remembering always
that those countries are Sunni. An awful lot of the money that is
reaching the 20-percent Sunni population who are resisting today is
coming from those places. So our friends and our allies are even part
of the problem right now because we are going it alone.
Our strategy, in my judgment, is that while Americans fight and die
to give Iraqis breathing room, Iraqi politicians refuse to resolve the
political issues that matter the most. There is no progress on the
lynchpin issue of sharing oil revenues, no progress on the
debaathification law--despite the fact they tell us, on the oil law,
they are sharing some revenue. That doesn't satisfy Sunnis, if there is
no law. Gee, you mean we are getting a few revenues today at the grace
of the folks who want to give us the spoils or something? What happens
when things start to get rough? Is it still going to be there? Is there
a law? Is there a requirement? Does anybody have to live up to
anything? Will it be enforced? Who will enforce it?
All of those issues are outstanding until they resolve that kind of
difference, so it doesn't satisfy me, and certainly doesn't satisfy
them, for someone to come and say they are sharing some of the revenue
or they are putting some money into these other areas. By any measure,
until you deal with the provincial elections, the constitutional issue,
the federalism, the oil, and debaathification, you cannot begin, if you
can at all, in the current atmosphere, to reconcile these differences.
General Petraeus can come back next March and he can say, oh, we are
making progress, but if there is no political progress, then what are
our colleagues going to say and do next March? Ask for another 6
months? Say we have secured this area a little more and that area a
little more, give us another little 6 months?
I think as long as you give the Iraqi politicians as long as they
want, they will take as long as they want. As long as we say we are
there for as long as it takes, they will take as long as they want.
That is exactly what they are doing today.
That is our policy. The policy of General Petraeus is basically a
policy for staying, it is not a policy for winning, absent the
political reconciliation. No one has shown how you get that political
reconciliation. If it was doable, why couldn't it have been done in the
last 7 months? Why couldn't it have been done in the last 4 years, when
there was less violence 3 years ago, and 4 years ago, than there is
today? Why couldn't it have been done? Because the political will is
not there to do it.
We have changed tactics, not strategy. Yes, we have some gains. I am
not going to stand here and say there are not some tactical gains or
that our military hasn't done a good job. They have done a tremendous
job under the toughest of circumstances and they have made some gains
in those communities. But it is not producing what you need to change
the overall dynamic in Iraq, if it is changeable in the current
context.
What I regret is all this talk will see us back here in March. They
will not bring peace or long-term stability to Iraq absent diplomacy.
If we come back here in March and we have resolved the political
differences, it will be because they decided to resolve the political
differences--which they could do at any other time or could have done
anywhere in the last few days.
So rather than ``no surrender,'' I think the policy we have today is
``no real way out.'' There is no real way to resolve the differences.
It is a wing and a prayer. It is a hope. Even Ambassador Crocker, for
whom I have great respect; I presided over his hearing for his
nomination to be there; I admire his career--he is a Middle East
specialist, an Arabist, he has been there, speaks the language,
understands it. But in the conversations I have had with him privately
as well as what he said publicly, it is clear to me he cannot say, with
any certainty at all, what is around the corner, and he specifically
said none of us can predict what is going to happen in the current
context. That is what we put ourselves
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into, absent the kind of diplomacy necessary to try to change those
dynamics.
I think what we are seeing are the moves of the President, who has
decided to wait out his time in office and shift responsibility for
this disaster to the next President. He has as much as said that, that
we are going to have troops there for a long time, and the next
President is going to have to resolve these differences.
I believe we have a bigger responsibility than that in the Senate. I
believe that very deeply. When I was a young serviceman and in a war, I
remember looking to Washington and wanting those folks who were in
positions of responsibility to make the judgments that affected my life
on a day-to-day basis.
I remember being bitterly disappointed in the debates that went on as
people kept finding these same kinds of excuses, the same arguments
were made. I remember President Nixon actually stood up and said: I am
not going to be the first President to lose a war.
Our military has not lost this. Our military has won everything they
engaged in on a personal basis. Nobody doubts the power or strength of
the American military. No one would doubt the power or strength of the
American military if they announced that, because the Iraqis are not
making their decisions, we are not going to stay here and keep dying
for you, folks. I don't think that is losing. I think that is actually
a note of reality. It is the Iraqis who are losing. It is the Iraqi
politicians, led by Mr. Maliki, if they are led at all, who are
unwilling to make the decisions. They are the ones losing this
opportunity for democracy. They are the ones losing the opportunity for
peace. They are the ones turning their backs on the opportunity for
reconciliation--not us. It is not for us to reconcile. No brave troop
in Iraq has the ability to create that reconciliation. You are not
going to create that reconciliation at the end of a gun barrel. It
doesn't happen. It never has.
I think it was the Roman historian Tacitus who, with respect to
Carthage, said: ``They made a desert and called it peace.''
That is what you can do with guns and with military might. But those
who have always thought the power of ideas and the pen is more powerful
than the sword right now believe we have a better ability here to be
able to find a way through this.
I think we ought to be refocusing on what we are doing. It is not
precipitous. It is not a withdrawal sufficient to please a certain
number of people. It is the beginning of the change of the footprint.
It is a clear statement that we are drawing down and you have to assume
a certain responsibility.
There is a complete contradiction, incidentally, in the arguments
made by the other side. I remember visiting General Petraeus when he
was training people. Two years ago, he said we will have 125,000,
200,000-something next year. How long does it take to train people? We
have been training people for 4\1/2\ years. We certainly have been
training them for at least 2 years in a highly focused manner--2\1/2\
or 3 years. How long does it take to take our recruits down to Parris
Island or out to the Great Lakes, from total civilian status to
graduation? Three or four months. Then they go to a specialty school
and then, within a few months, they are ready to go and serve on the
frontlines. They always do it with great distinction.
These folks have been training and training and training. The problem
is, it is not a lack of training, it is a lack of motivation. It is a
lack of commitment and will. It manifests itself in the following way.
If you are a Shia, can you safely go into a Sunni neighborhood and
police? Can a Shia go tell a Sunni what to do? Will the Sunni listen
and feel safe? Ask anybody in the country about that equation. That is
part of the problem, a lack of historical understanding, a lack of
cultural understanding, a remarkable kind of arrogance that came out of
corners in the Pentagon, led by Secretary Rumsfeld and Richard Perle
and Doug Feith and these other folks, all of whom talked about parades
and flowers and the easy welcome of our troops and welcomed as
liberators and every decision was wrong, not to mention the arrogance
of turning their backs on the plans that the State Department and
Secretary Powell drew up for how you deal with postwar Iraq.
We are paying for that now. I think those who argue somehow these
buzzwords of retreat and surrender--it is almost pathetic, to be honest
with you. Because it is so divorced from the reality of what is being
talked about, about how you strengthen America and strengthen our
position and support the troops. The troops deserve a policy that is
equal to the sacrifice they are being asked to make.
Let me go through a couple of principal arguments and then I will
yield the floor. First of all, those who want more of the same failed
policy, this surrender talk, it seems to me--I think I mostly covered
that. I think I pretty much discussed the idea, but I want to emphasize
something. Leaving the President the discretion to fight al-Qaida, to
finish the training and standing up of Iraqis, to protect American
facilities and forces and to do so over the course of a year--to set a
target date for the achievement of that goal a year from now is
anything but precipitous.
They cannot achieve these fundamental benchmarks of what they needed
to do to show they are reconciling in that year; they are not going to
do it while we are there.
Secondly, it seems to me you have to remember what General Jones
himself said. I want to quote from his report. He said:
If our security gains are to be anything more than short-
lived, the single most important event that could immediately
and favorably affect Iraq's direction and security is
political reconciliation.
So General Jones is saying: If you want to have an impact on
security, you have to have political reconciliation. He is not saying
that the security is going to be given to you by the military; he is
saying it is the political reconciliation--nothing will have more
significance with the security.
Sustained progress within the Iraq security forces depends
on such a political agreement.
That is precisely what we are trying to achieve.
Supporters of the escalation asked for more time to translate
military success into political progress. But if General Petraeus is
correct, that sectarian violence began decreasing in January. I do not
have that chart here, but I absolutely know this because we asked him
direct questions about that. And he spoke to the fact. He acknowledged
that the better part of the violence reduction did, in fact, take place
prior to the American forces becoming part of it. It is partly because
of the dislocation that had taken place as a consequence of the militia
and also the political decisions that were made individually in Anbar
and elsewhere which preceded the vast majority of those forces
arriving.
Now, Prime Minister Maliki has been in office since May of 2006. But
the fact is, the Iraqi Government, as we have discussed, has simply
been absent from any kind of adequate responsibility to meet what they
themselves said they would do.
Now, why a deadline? I guess it is kind of like anybody doing their
homework--we operate under deadlines here. Does anybody here believe we
get the budget done without a deadline that we usually have? We usually
have drop-dead times. In fact, we even move the clocks. We have a
continuing resolution that is short-lived, and then we come back and we
live under a certain sense of, you know, a responsibility factor there
and all kinds of deadlines.
The fact is, deadlines have worked in Iraq already. There was a
deadline to have the transfer from the Provisional Authority from Paul
Bremer. In fact, Iraqis and a lot of other people said: Do not do this
to us; we are not ready. But the Government, our Government, to its
credit, we insisted and said: No, this is what is going to happen. And
it happened. Now, the decisions they made afterward were awful. But the
transfer took place; likewise, the elections; likewise, the
Constitution. Each of them was accomplished with a deadline.
In fact, the President himself has already set a deadline, in some
ways, because he is saying: We are going to have X number of forces out
by such and such a time--30,000. That is a deadline. He has told us
when--by next spring. General Petraeus has set a
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deadline that he is going to come back by next March and he is going to
say something to us. So this idea that deadlines don't work or it is a
losing equation, I just do not agree with that. I think, like any human
reaction, when a big country like the United States of America gets
serious in putting some deadlines there, people can begin to respond
and you change the dynamics that people are dealing with.
What is more, some people may not like to hear this, but clearly and
obviously an administration would have the ability to come back in 4
months and say: Look at all of the progress we have just made because
we set the deadline, and we are making so much progress, but we can't
get over the hump by the end of this period. Will you not give us a
little longer? There is no one here, if that is a true measure of what
is happening, who is not going to respond responsibly.
So, again, this is a phony debate about the impact of a deadline,
what it means.
We can get together in a room, sensible people, and come up with a
way to do this. But it has been made into a challenge to the
President's authority, it has been made into a big political football
where Republicans feel they have to go out and defend the President,
and somehow everyone else thinks everybody else is after him, when what
we are really after is a sensible policy in Iraq in the face of 4\1/2\
years of having not been given it time after time, even under the
withering criticisms of some Senators from the other side, such as
Senator Hagel, Senator McCain, and others, who have called the shots as
they saw them over a number of years.
Third. Supporters of the escalation point to the consequences of
failure in Iraq. Well, I can remember how people used the sort of
cataclysmic, dire end result as a legitimization of carrying on
something that was going into oblivion. It was called Vietnam. We had
the Domino Theory, we had the Bloodbath, we had all kinds of arguments
thrown out there about what it would be like if the United States
ultimately withdrew.
Ultimately, we withdrew. Ultimately, Henry Kissinger and Richard
Nixon negotiated a withdrawal, and they negotiated a withdrawal with
something that was then called the ``decent interval''; 1973 we left,
and in 1975 the place fell because the Government itself was so corrupt
and so inept and so incapable they were not able to withstand what came
at them. They did not have legitimacy, but they were given the
opportunity to have it. What ultimately happened is precisely what
could have been avoided 4 or 5 years later. Half the names that are on
that Vietnam wall down the street were put on that wall from a time
period after which our top leaders in the Defense Department and
elsewhere knew the policy wasn't going to work, and they have since
even written exactly that. That is craven, that so many lives were
lost, 25,000 or so, more than half, in that period of time to pursue a
policy that people knew was ultimately what could have been achieved
even earlier.
So when people talk about the dire consequences, we all understand
Iran is a threat. Well, let's go back to what I said earlier: Iran is
more of a threat today because we are less capable of confronting them
and because we have not engaged in that kind of robust diplomacy that
the French, the Germans, and the British engaged in for almost 3
successive years without us at all, because we had a policy of not
talking to anybody; just do as I say. The result is, you know, they
throw out these consequences, so we wind up staying there because we
have been there.
I have heard people say: Well, you know, we obviously need to honor
the lives of those we have lost. Yes, we do. I believe that is what we
are trying to do. I think you honor the lives of those who have been
lost there and those who have given their lives by making certain that
we are not wasteful going forward, that we are reasonable, that we are
not stupid going forward, that we do what is correct. But you do not
lose lives to honor the lives you have lost. That does not honor them.
And losing more lives and the fact that we have lost lives is not an
excuse for continuing the same policy.
Now they argue it is not the same policy; we have a new general, we
have a new strategy. But it is not a strategy; it is a tactic that has
no relationship to the real strategy that has to be political and
diplomatic and much more creative and much more global in this case.
So we have lost sight of what is at stake here. I believe we are
paralyzed in a sense because of it. You cannot leave because of this.
Oh, gosh, Iran is going to do this. In fact, the Senator from Alabama
talked a little while ago about how Iran will become involved in Iraq.
Iran is involved in Iraq. Iran has thousands of agents in Iraq. It has
people training people in Iraq. The Shiia in the south are aligned,
particularly in the Basra area. But the British, nevertheless, have
redeployed to the airport, and they have left those factions to kind of
duke it out against each other without any serious enough consequence
that we are rushing in to fill the breach. If it is okay for them, why
is it not for us? If it is not okay for them, why did we let them do
it, and why are we not responding?
These contradictions just sort of leap out at you. And the fact is
that Iran and al-Qaida are thrilled that we are bogged down in Iraq.
Every day that we are bogged down in Iraq, we are presenting al-Qaida
with targets. We are presenting al-Qaida with the image of American
forces occupying a country, and they can run around and enlist more
jihadists. They have been doing it. You can just talk to anybody in the
intelligence community about it.
This is a policy which makes America weaker. This is a policy which
puts America at greatest risk. This is not a policy which advances
America's larger strategic interests in the region or elsewhere in the
world. That is a bad foreign policy when that is what is happening. A
policy that makes you weaker, not stronger, is not a policy I would
want to take out to the country. That is exactly what they are
presenting us with. Americans are dying at greater levels now than in
2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, for a policy they have already told us is
going to end next summer. And the Iraqi politicians know it is going to
end next summer. That is a deadline. So, evidently, it is okay for them
to plot and plan for the end of the surge, but they are not going to be
changed in their planning for the end of American involvement. I do not
get that. That is a complete contradiction.
Fourth. The President's allies warn that Iraq could become a failed
state. Well, guess what. According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Iraq is
becoming a failed state under the current strategy. In fact, it ranks
second in the entire world on the Failed State Index behind only the
Sudan as the state most at risk for failure. That will only change when
the Iraqi Government steps up, not our troops. Our troops cannot run
the Government, and most of the Iraqis have said they do not want us
there. Incidentally, the new polls coming out of Iraq show that 50-
plus--58 percent of the Sunnis think it is okay to go kill and hurt
Americans. Seventy percent of the Iraqis think America should be gone.
Our friends warn of a humanitarian catastrophe. But as the New York
Times reported earlier this month, many mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad
and surrounding provinces in Iraq have already been ethnically
cleansed. Two million people are internally displaced, 2 million people
have left the country as refugees. Baghdad, as I said earlier, which
had a population when we went there of 65 percent Sunni, now is a 75-
percent Shiia majority city.
What we are supposedly staying in Iraq trying to prevent is happening
right under our very noses, and General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker
told us that in their testimony. Ambassador Crocker specifically
referenced the movement of personnel and the ethnic cleansing and did
not say that our troops or the surge is capable of stopping it. So we
are witnessing right now a very high level of sectarian violence. Over
1,000 civilians are dying a month.
Across Iraq, the level of violence is higher than it was in 2004 and
2005. The Washington Post reported on Monday that about 2 million
Iraqis are displaced in Iraq and 2.2 million to the neighboring
countries. Apparently, 60,000 Iraqis are evacuating their homes every
month. And what I have been told in the visits when I have been there,
people have described to me the exodus of the middle class. You do not
have the middle class there now to try to help do some of the
reconciliation and building that is necessary.
[[Page S11847]]
I have also heard many people point to the legacy of Vietnam. But I
hear the wrong conclusions being drawn about that legacy--somehow a
presumption that given the great power conflict that we were caught in,
people seem to forget that one of the reasons we did not invade the
north was not that we did not have the military ability or other
things; it was because China and Russia and the Cold War was raging at
the time, and those countries were aligned with Vietnam, North Vietnam
then, and many people saw a bigger, wider, more complicated, and
dangerous conflict as a consequence. So it was not our withdrawal from
Vietnam. People need to remember this.
You know, we did a period of Vietnamization, we did a period of
transition, we negotiated the process, we left in 1973. It was not our
withdrawal that caused the instability in the region; it was the
underlying cause of the violence that had gone on for 10 years
preceding it. It was the American bombing in Cambodia that many people
remember that created the instability of that country and China which
created problems with the Khmer Rouge and the ethnic Chinese that
created many of the original boat people, the original exodus. It was a
civil war, a civil war that our military could not end. Many of the
conditions that came about were the result of being there and what
happened in that dislocation.
Our troops cannot end the Iraqi civil war. Only, again, a political
accommodation can achieve it, and that can only come through adequate
diplomacy and effort. We ought to be working over time on that.
The final thing I will point out is, supporters of the Bush
escalation say we cannot abandon the central fight in the global war on
terror. I have pointed out again and again, as we all do, it is OK to
have a good debate about issues. But somehow the world's greatest
deliberative body ought to find a way to accept what is fact and accept
what is fiction and kind of put the fiction aside and deal with the
facts, instead of coming back speech after speech repeating the same
fiction, which is what happens. The fact is, we have never suggested
pulling any punch or reducing the effort to go after al-Qaida. We give
the President complete and total discretion in this legislation to do
what the President needs to do in order to prosecute the war on terror
against al-Qaida. So to keep reasserting al-Qaida in a way that
suggests that Democrats somehow are forgetting about that is not
accurate.
In fact, we have been the ones who consistently point out that al-
Qaida is reconstituted globally, that al-Qaida's principal leaders are
in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that it is from Pakistan and Afghanistan
they have plotted and conducted the attacks they have conducted in
recent months and plotted the attack against our airlines most
recently, and that they communicate to the world network, not Iraq.
The reality is, we all intend to defeat al-Qaida. Al-Qaida will be
defeated. I am absolutely confident of that. I don't think a
nihilistic, cynical, completely ideologically, and morally barren
effort such as al-Qaida's has a chance in the long haul. What it can do
is confuse people and attract converts in the absence of a legitimate
counter moral force, and that moral force can come from moderate Islam,
and needs to, and it can come from the rest of the world.
I have heard this all through every visit I have made in every part
of the region. I serve now as chairman of the Near East-South Asia
Subcommittee. I make a point of trying to understand what is going on.
The fact is, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the current torture
practices that we know are being engaged in, and the world knows, and
the new 4,500 Web sites of various jihadist groups exploit those
things. That is the war on ideas the President appropriately talked
about, that supposedly Karen Hughes was appointed to lead a great
effort on. Nobody has seen her or knows what is happening with respect
to that most significant effort.
I don't think this escalation or this current policy is protecting
our homeland. I believe where there was previously no threat from al-
Qaida in a place called Iraq, there is now a threat, though not the
level of threat or the kind of threat that is often described. The real
threat remains centered in Afghanistan and Pakistan and many other
places, including Europe. It is growing in Europe. Unless we deal with
these larger implications, that challenge is going to become more
significant as a consequence of this policy.
This is an opportunity for us to try to do what I know is very
difficult, because I understand the pressures that are put on
colleagues, many of whom have come to the floor and spoken eloquently
in opposition to the war and in opposition to the strategy. But they
somehow won't translate those words into a vote. They won't go that
extra step of actually confronting the President and changing the
policy. What General Petraeus has obviously succeeded in doing--and we
understand it--is giving people a reason to say: Give us 6 more months.
He is obviously going to get that 6 more months, because the President
has the power to veto and the power to move his policy in these next
days. But I hope my colleagues will think about how history is going to
measure what we do here and how their own responsibilities measure up
to what this moment is about. I think the facts speak loudly and
clearly for the imperative to have a policy that moves in a better
direction to protect our Nation. That is the bottom line. That is what
is at stake, our national security and our ability to protect future
generations and stand up and lead the world in a more effective way in
order to eliminate al-Qaida and, in fact, open up a whole set of new
possibilities with Islam and a host of countries that are currently
sitting on the sidelines and standing apart from us because they
disagree with our policy and the way we are implementing it.
I hope our colleagues will take advantage of this opportunity, and I
hope we will cease to have a debate on buzz words and slogans but
instead a debate on facts and do justice to the troops who, as I said,
deserve a policy that is equal to what they are doing on our behalf
every single day. We salute them.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, today we saw the floor of the Senate
hijacked for purely partisan political purposes at a time when we need
the U.S. Senate to instead come together for the purpose of protecting
our national security and changing a policy in Iraq that is not
working.
What happened in the Senate today is partisan, political and
demeaning of this institution. The Republican minority is desperate to
distract the Senate and our country from the real issue at hand, which
is a failed escalation and an administration policy in Iraq that is
every day costing American blood and treasure. The same Senators who
have gone along with the President's Iraq policy every step of the way,
who have expressed not a shred of outrage about nonexistent weapons of
mass destruction, predictions of a ``cakewalk,'' ``mission
accomplished,'' or ``an insurgency, its last throes'' will now say and
do anything to avoid talking about what is really happening in Iraq.
They would rather express outrage about a newspaper ad run by an
independent entity, than express outrage about a policy pursued by
their party and their administration. And certainly they don't want to
address the outrage of more Americans dying for a policy we know is not
working.
The Senate did not need to spend hours today on this debate. Nine
days ago, the first time I was asked about the ad which the Senator
from Texas loves to talk about, I said it was ``over the top'' and
``inappropriate, period.'' I said that, as a veteran, I thought it was
wrong to characterize any member of the military in the way General
Petraeus was characterized in that advertisement. I have nothing but
respect for General Petraeus. I wasn't alone in that feeling. Senator
Reid spoke out. Senator Biden spoke out. There was no question about
where Democrats stood. And we ratified that opinion in a broad
condemnation of that behavior--including the Petraeus ad--in the Boxer
amendment.
But I also asked that we all recognize that the emotion behind that
ad is an emotion shared by the American people: frustration--
frustration as we head into the 5th year of being told one thing about
Iraq and finding out another. That is why we should be having a real
debate and a real discussion about the policy in Iraq rather than
trying to score partisan points over the politics of Iraq. It is as
insulting as it is illuminating that in a week-long debate in which
each side can offer just
[[Page S11848]]
five amendments, the Republicans would waste one of their chances to
change a broken policy by choosing instead to embrace a political
stunt.
We are where we are. I vehemently oppose the kind of political abuse
of the Senate embodied in the Cornyn amendment, and I am saddened if
not surprised to see that so many of the Republicans who believe that
what happened to General Petraeus was wrong, could not bring themselves
to vote for the Boxer amendment which made clear that the assault on
Senator Cleland's patriotism in 2002 was wrong, and that the lies
broadcast about my own military record in 2004 were also wrong. The
votes against the Boxer amendment--an amendment which makes clear our
disagreement with the ad which ran September 10--speak volumes about
the partisan motivations behind the Cornyn amendment, and the fact
that, apparently, many of our colleagues believe that attacking the
integrity of veterans and members of the military is fair game as long
as they are Democrats. I would remind them that when you sign up for
military duty, no one asks whether you are a Democrat or Republican,
liberal, or conservative.
Over the last years, I have defended veterans who have been under
assault from any quarters, left or right. I spoke out in 2000 when John
McCain's integrity and military record was questioned by the Bush
campaign in South Carolina. I spoke out when Max Cleland's patriotism
was savaged by people who had never worn the uniform. I defended Jack
Murtha when vicious partisans on the right called that decorated marine
a ``coward.'' I spoke out when the Bush administration questioned the
patriotism of career military men and Generals throughout the war in
Iraq, whether it was General Shinseki, or many in uniform who spoke out
against Secretary Rumsfeld. I don't reserve my defense of patriotism
for Democrats, I defend all who have worn the uniform, whether they
agree with me or not. I wish I could say the same for those who brought
forward the Cornyn amendment and voted against the Boxer amendment.
This was not a proud day in the Senate, or a high mark in our
politics; rather, it was hours lost and time wasted when the Senate
should have delivered what all the men and women of the armed forces
truly deserve: a policy equal to their sacrifice.
Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I opposed the amendments offered by
Senators Cornyn and Boxer because they were a diversion from the real
issue before us; namely, the future of our military involvement in
Iraq. I disagreed with the language used in all of the ads addressed in
these amendments, but we should not let those ads sidetrack the real
work of the Senate. I hope the Senate will not get in the habit of
condemning political speech, even speech that is offensive.
____________________