[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 51 (Wednesday, April 2, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H1943-H1944]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




COMPREHENSIVE ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF IRAQ ON THE NATIONAL SECURITY 
                          OF AMERICA IS NEEDED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Sestak) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SESTAK. Shortly, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will 
come before the House and the Senate to provide an update on the 
military and the political situation in Iraq. That is my grave concern, 
that once again we will have placed a man who is responsible for the 
security, the military security only, of Iraq, in the position, in the 
singular position, of determining the national security policy of the 
United States and the public's perception of it, when what is needed, 
what is direly needed, is a comprehensive assessment of the national 
security of America and the impact of the strategy we have in Iraq upon 
it. So in fact it is the questions that General Petraeus cannot or 
should not answer that are the most important ones.
  For example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be asked directly, what 
is the impact of Iraq upon the military's readiness to deploy and meet 
the required timelines of its various war plans, when in fact today it 
cannot deploy its forces, its army, in order to protect the 28,000 men 
and women who wear the cloth of our Nation in South Korea from an 
attack on the timelines required by North Korea against the South?
  And while before Iraq we actually trained on multiple areas of 
warfare, for the past 3 years your army has only been training in 
counterinsurgency. The Joint Chiefs of Staff must address the impact of 
3 years of its army training only in one warfare area and being unable 
to meet any timeline of any war plan by its army in America's arsenal 
of war plans.
  Then, in the long term, the impact of 42 percent of our men and women 
who we are recruiting today being less capable than ever of being able 
to operate

[[Page H1944]]

and maintain the systems of our weaponry in the future as they can in 
the past 3 years.
  Second, it is not the general or the ambassador who should come here 
to speak about Iraq's security, but rather our intelligence agencies 
that must address the question about whether the Iraq strategy has 
improved our overall efforts in the global war on terror, with 
Afghanistan once again prey to terrorists, and the Taliban having gone 
back into the ungoverned regions to protect them, and General Hayden, 
head of the CIA, having said that al Qaeda now has a safe haven in the 
border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. What is the impact of 
a strategy in that unstable region that the Chairman of the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff has described as ``in Iraq what we do what we must, but 
in Afghanistan, we do what we can.''
  Officials from the State Department likewise must address the impact 
upon our allies of this war in Iraq and our relationships with them and 
the efforts to achieve other diplomatic goals, remembering that when we 
went into Bosnia, 50 percent of the coalition troops were non-U.S., and 
when we went into Iraq 5 years ago, less than 7 percent of the troops 
that entered that country were non-U.S.
  And then the Treasury, how can they explain the impact of what all 
economists agree are now almost $2 trillion to $3 trillion as the cost 
of this war in Iraq? When Iraq is awash in oil revenues, why are we 
using taxpayers' dollars?
  Therefore, the questions that General Petraeus can and should not 
answer comes down to, he should not be the one to tell us how long and 
at what cost before we change our strategy. It is only if Congress 
changes the forum for this general to come before us to say and hold up 
a national mirror, this is the impact of Iraq upon our overall national 
security strategy, and if it is not working and if it is negatively 
impacting it, we must therefore change the strategy.
  I believe it is against the spirit, as a man who has served in the 
military 31 years until I entered Congress, to have a military man 
placed in the position to determine singularly, when he is only 
responsible for the security of Iraq, to then determine without 
everyone else there the right strategy and course for America's 
national security.
  We must have that debate. Is the strategy working? Is it harming our 
overall national security? If it is, change the strategy.

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