[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 189 (Tuesday, December 11, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15087-S15088]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, to start this discussion about what to do 
in Iraq, I think we need to sort of take inventory of where we are, 
what common ground we do have. I do believe there is a vast, wide, and 
deep support for the men and women in the military by the average 
Republican and Democrat and Independent citizen and Members of 
Congress, and that is indeed good news for our country. It is not one 
of those situations where people came back from Vietnam and were not 
well received by their fellow citizens. For that, we should all be 
grateful.
  I would like to put this debate in a little different context. As my 
colleague from Texas said, whether we should have gone into Iraq is 
sort of a matter for historical discussion. The question for us as a 
nation is winning and losing, and can you put Iraq in terms of winning 
and losing? I think you have to because our enemy has. Our enemy, al-
Qaida and other extremists groups, looks at Iraq very much as a 
battlefront and a battle they want to win and us to lose. That is why 
bin Laden has rallied the jihadist and al-Qaida sympathizers to go to 
Iraq and go to the Land of the Two Rivers and drive the infidel out, 
because I think they understand pretty clearly that if Iraq can 
reconcile itself, become a stable, functioning democracy, with an Iraqi 
spin to it, where a woman can have a say about her children, where the 
rule of law would reign over the rule of the gun, and be a place that 
would absorb religious tolerance, it would be a nightmare for their 
agenda. So our enemy is very certain in their own mind about what would 
happen if we won in Iraq.

  Again, winning to me would be a stable, functioning democracy, 
tolerant of religious differences, where all groups would have a 
political say, where a woman would have a meaningful role in society 
regarding her children and their future. And it would contain Iran. It 
would be a buffer to Iranian ambitions. It would deny extremist groups, 
such as al-Qaida, safe haven. That, to me, is winning, and that, to me, 
is very possible. The reason I say it is very possible is because it is 
in the best interests of the Iraqi people themselves to achieve that 
goal. There is a Shia majority in Iraq, but they are Iraqi Shia. They 
are Arabs. The Persian Shia majority--there has been a war between 
these two countries in the past decades and a lot of animosity. So the 
general feeling on the streets that I have found from many visits to 
Iraq is that, generally speaking, the Iraqi population does not want to 
be dominated by anybody, including Iran.
  Now, the biggest news of the surge that is not being reported enough, 
in my opinion, is that given a choice and an opportunity, a Muslim 
population, the Iraqi Sunni Arabs, rejected the al-Qaida agenda in 
Anbar. The al-Qaida movement in Iraq was formulated and inspired by 
outside forces. Leaders from al-Qaida internationally came into Iraq to 
rally people to the al-Qaida cause. They played a very heavy hand in 
Anbar, which was brutal--from the small things such as banning smoking 
to burning children in front of their parents who did not cooperate. 
They imposed a way of living on the Iraqis in Anbar Province for which 
the Anbar Iraqi Sunni Arabs said: No, we don't want any more of this. 
And the sheiks and all the tribes came to our side because al-Qaida 
overplayed their hand. So the real good news for me is that given an 
opportunity and being reinforced, the al-Qaida agenda will not sell, 
and people within the region will turn it down and reject it. That 
would not have happened without the surge.
  I think most of us do not appreciate what life is like in a country 
where if you raise your hand to be a judge, let's say, not only do you 
become personally at risk, they try to kill your family--the forces 
that do not want to reconcile Iraq.
  Political debates and discourse in this country can be very 
contentious, but on occasion we find that middle ground to solve our 
problems. It is hard and difficult to compromise in an environment 
where the people who want you to fail literally will kill your family. 
So the lack of security in the past has been our biggest impediment to 
reconciliation. Thank God for General Petraeus, General Odinero, and 
all under their command. You have done a wonderful job.
  This we should all agree upon: that the surge, as a military 
operation, has been enormously successful and I think will be the gold 
standard in military history for counterinsurgency operations. Instead 
of bleeding it dry of funds and putting it at risk, we should reinforce 
it politically, monetarily, and in every other way.
  A political leader can reinforce a military leader. Our military, 
because of our system of government, depends on us, those of us in 
elected office, to give them the resources to execute the mission they 
have been assigned. Who among us believes we understand Iraq better 
than General Petraeus militarily? Who among us advocated the surge as 
proposed by General Petraeus? Who among us understands 
counterinsurgency operations better than the general and his staff? 
None of us, if we would be honest with ourselves. He is the expert in 
this area. He has been given an ability to engage in military 
operations with a completely new theory, and it is working--undeniably 
working.
  Security in Iraq is better. Anbar has literally been liberated. If 
you told me a year ago, this time last year, we would be moving marines 
out of Anbar because the security environment

[[Page S15088]]

would justify it, I would have thought: That is optimism beyond what I 
can muster. But it has happened. And all throughout this country called 
Iraq, people are beginning to reconcile themselves because of better 
security. Quite frankly, they are war weary.
  But I am not going to reinvent history. The blame is across the board 
and across the aisle. How many times did Republicans go to Iraq after 
the fall of Baghdad, for maybe 3 years, and say: It is really going 
well, it is just the media's fault. It was not going well, and it was 
not the media's fault. The strategy was failing. So people on my side 
of the aisle were cheerleading for a strategy that, if we followed it, 
we would have been hopelessly lost in Iraq. So there is plenty of blame 
to go around. Finally, we now have adjusted. We have a new general with 
a new strategy. It is a lot more complicated than just 30,000 new 
troops. We are deploying them differently. We are going after the 
insurgency in a different way.

  The biggest nightmare for al-Qaida has been the surge. If you ask to 
pick winners and losers of the surge, it would be extremist groups. At 
the top of the list would be al-Qaida, and it is soon going to be the 
Shia militia aligned with Iran. There is an offensive about to take 
place in Iraq that is going to put the nail in the coffin of extremist 
groups. They are not defeated yet, but they are greatly diminished.
  Now is not the time, colleagues, for us to put this surge in 
jeopardy. Our troops are in a political crossfire here at home. They 
are not in the middle of a heated sectarian war. Security does exist in 
Iraq now to get business done. There are extremist groups, and it is 
still dangerous, but the military has done its part to allow the Iraqi 
people to reconcile themselves.
  We have not done our part. We are still fighting a battle as if 
nothing new has happened. We are still holding on to positions stated 
in April and May as if nothing has changed, and that is not fair to 
those who sacrificed to make it change. I took this floor for a very 
long time with Senator McCain and a handful of others arguing that the 
Department of Defense had a strategy doomed to fail. Thank God the 
President changed course. Thank God for General Petraeus and all under 
his command.
  Now, to my colleagues on the other side, please let us allow General 
Petraeus to finish the job he started. Within a few months, the troops 
begin to come home based on the surge being successful. They will 
return with victory at hand. Victory is not yet achieved, but it is 
possible. The only way to roll back the security gains is to change the 
mission and have the Congress start running the war.
  The political crossfire I speak of is that some people want to give 
the money to support the surge only if they get $11 billion of domestic 
spending unrelated to the military. Some people will not give any money 
for the surge, continued operations in Iraq, unless we change the 
mission and withdraw troops by the end of the next year. That is a 
crossfire politically that is doing more harm than good that should 
end.
  Beginning in March, General Petraeus will come back. He will tell us 
the situation as it exists on the ground. I am here to tell you, in 
December, that I am disappointed in the progress at the central 
government level in Baghdad. They have passed a budget in Iraq--$48 
billion. All revenue being shared among all groups is a great step 
forward, but it is not a permanent solution to the problem.
  We need a permanent law, a national law, that will tell every group 
in Iraq: As to the wealth of the country, part of it will come to your 
area, and you do not have to worry about it budget by budget. Political 
reconciliation in Iraq has to happen for the surge to be successful. I 
have said on numerous occasions that if there is not some major 
breakthrough on the benchmarks by January, I will look at reconfiguring 
the aid we give to the Iraqi Government, not changing the troop 
missions or the troop numbers. I am going to leave that up to the 
military. It is in our national security interest to maintain the gains 
we have achieved on the ground to keep Iraq from going into chaos. But 
we are giving this Government hundreds of millions of dollars of aid, 
and if they cannot reconcile themselves, we may find other places to 
spend that money and other ways to spend that money.
  So I urge my colleagues to allow the troop funding that is required 
to complete the surge, to allow it to go forward. Stop this political 
crossfire of trying to extract from this necessary funding event more 
money to spend domestically here at home or trying to take the mission 
away from the military commanders. That is not where our troops need to 
find themselves in this crucial moment in time.
  I can promise you, as we go into next year, if the central government 
in Baghdad has not done a better job reconciling themselves, I will sit 
down with anyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, to find a way to put 
political pressure, economic pressure, on this government.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tester). The Senator from Arkansas is 
recognized.

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