[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 91 (Thursday, June 12, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3628-S3630]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IRAQ
Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I come to the floor this morning with
great sorrow and great concern and an even deep alarm about the events
that are transpiring rapidly in Iraq.
ISIS, the most extreme Islamist organization, radical terrorist
organization, now controls at least one-third of Iraqi territory. It is
rapidly gaining more. The areas of Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit, they are on
the outsides of Samarra. With these victories, ISIS controls a swath of
territory that stretches from the Syrian-Turkish frontier in the north,
down to the Euphrates River, all of the way down to the Iraqi city of
Fallujah, just 40 miles west of Baghdad. Of course, hourly they are
experiencing greater gains while the Iraqi military and police seem to
be dissolving before our very eyes.
ISIS social media published pictures of their fighters demolishing
the sand berm which hitherto marked the border between Syria and Iraq,
an interesting symbolic gesture. ISIS released footage of large numbers
of weapons and armored military vehicles being received by members in
eastern Syria, confirming fears that the looted weapons would fuel the
insurgency on both sides, both Syria and Iraq.
Sources in the Syrian city of Hasaka confirmed that large numbers of
trucks, convoys of trucks, carrying weapons, arrived late on Tuesday
and were met by a senior ISIS figure Omar al-Chechani. General Keane,
the architect of the surge said:
This organization [speaking of ISIS] has grown into a
military organization that is no longer conducting terrorist
activities exclusively but is conducting conventional
military operations. They are attacking Iraqi military
positions with company--and battalion--size formations. And
in the face of that the Iraqi security forces have not been
able to stand up to it.
The most frightening part is that ISIS's strength will only grow
after today. It will use the cash reserves from Mosul's banks, the
military equipment seized from military and police bases, and the
release of 3,000 fighters from local jails to bolster its military and
financial capacity.
ISIS has now become the richest terror group ever, even after looting
$429 million from Mosul's central bank. The governor confirmed Kurdish
television reports that ISIS militants had stolen millions from
numerous banks across Mosul.
Most disturbing is as the Iraqi security forces are collapsing,
Kurdish and Shia militias are, to some degree, filling the vacuum.
The story goes on and on, including the fact that the International
Organization for Migration says that as many as 500,000 citizens have
fled Mosul. There are reports of tens of thousands of citizens forced
from their homes in other areas as fighting escalates across northern
and central Iraq.
Then the question arises: Could all of this have been avoided? The
answer is absolutely yes--absolutely yes.
I think it is probably the height of ego to quote one's self, but I
think it is important to have again on the record what I said during
this whole process when the only goal of the President of the United
States was to leave Iraq and Afghanistan--and he is about to make the
same mistake in Afghanistan that he did in Iraq.
Those of us who knew Iraq, who knew Al Qaeda, who knew how vital and
how fragile the Iraqi Government is--the day the President announced
that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year, I said on
October 21, 2011:
Today marks a harmful and sad setback for the United States
in the world. I respectfully disagree with the President:
this decision will be viewed as a strategic victory for our
enemies in the Middle East. . . . Nearly 4,500 Americans have
given their lives for our mission in Iraq. Countless more
have been wounded. I fear that all of the gains made possible
by these brave Americans in Iraq at such grave cost are now
at risk.
On November 15, 2011, in the Senate Armed Services Committee, when
Ambassador Crocker said it was a mistake, I said--and I will not give
the whole statement, but I said:
We cannot avoid the fact that Iraq's progress is now at
greater risk than at any time since the dark days before the
surge, and that it did not have to be this way.
Finally, on December 14, 2011, the day the President triumphed,
visited Fort Bragg to mark the end--in his view, the end of the Iraq
war--I said:
Over 4,000 brave young Americans gave their lives in this
conflict. I pray that their sacrifice is not in vain. . . .
Unfortunately, it is clear that this decision of a complete
pullout of United States troops from Iraq was dictated by
politics, and not our national security interests. I believe
that history will judge this President's leadership with the
scorn and disdain it deserves.
Of course, we know the United States rebuffed, according to the New
York Times today, in an article by Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt, the
United States refused Maliki's request to strike against the militants'
strategic disaster, assisted by withdrawal from Iraq.
Iraq's terrorists are becoming a full-blown army.
One of the smartest guys I have encountered, a man named Dexter
Filkins, has great experience. He has an article in the New Yorker,
``In Extremists' Iraq Rise, America's Legacy.''
When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed
the Iraqi state.
He continues:
The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no
small measure because of a lack of engagement by the White
House. Today, many Iraqis, including some close to Maliki,
say that a small force of American soldiers--working in non-
combat roles--would have provided a crucial stabilizing
factor that is now missing from Iraq. Sami al-Askari, a
Maliki confidant, told me for my article this spring, ``If
you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they
would be cooperating with you, and they would become your
partners.'' President Obama wanted the Americans to come
home, and Maliki didn't particularly want them the to stay.
The trouble is, as the events of this week show, what the
Americans left behind was an Iraqi state that was not able to
stand on its own. What we built is now coming apart. This is
the real legacy of America's war in Iraq.
If I sound angry, it is because I am angry, because during this whole
period of time, for example, the Washington Post, in an editorial this
morning called ``The Iraq success.''
Denis McDonough, then deputy national security adviser and
now White House chief of staff, told reporters in 2011 that
Mr. Obama ``said what we are looking for is an Iraq that's
secure, stable and self-reliant, and that's exactly what we
got here. So there's no question this is a success.''
Sometime we are going to hold people responsible for their policies
as well as their words. To declare that a conflict is over does not
mean it necessarily is over.
There is a great piece by Daniel Henninger this morning in the Wall
Street Journal entitled, ``While Obama Fiddles.''
Meanwhile, Iraq may be transforming into (a) a second Syria
or (b) a restored caliphate. Past some point, the world's
wildfires are going to consume the Obama legacy. And leave
his successor a nightmare.
What needs to be done now? Every hour the options become fewer and
fewer as ISIS, the most radical Islamist terrorist group alive, sweeps
across Iraq and now, according to the latest reports, is even
threatening Baghdad, that there are signs of further deterioration of
the Iraqi military.
What do we need to do now?
Obviously, the first thing I think we need to do is call together the
people who succeeded in Iraq, those who have been retired, and get
together that group and place them in positions of responsibility so
they can develop a policy to reverse this tide of radical Islamist
extremism, which directly threatens the security of the United States
of America, and it is time the President got a new national security
team.
It is time he got a group of people together who know what it is to
succeed in conflict. I would say the leader of that would be General
Petraeus. I would say General Mattis is one. I would say General Keane
is another one. I would say Bob Kagan is another one.
[[Page S3629]]
There is a group of people, along with myself and the Senator from
South Carolina, who predicted every single one of these events because
of an American lack of reliability and American weakness--and the
President of the United States declaring that conflicts are at an end
when they are not--an exit from Iraq and now an exit from Afghanistan
without a strategy and without victory.
So drastic measures need to be taken. The Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff is one who has gone along with this policy for a long
time. We need a new Chairman. We need a new National Security Adviser.
We need a new team. We need a new team that knows what America's
national security interests are and are more interested in national
security than they are in politics.
I come to this floor with great sadness because all of this could
have been avoided. There is no inevitability about what is taking place
in Iraq.
Iraq is a faraway place, but ask any intelligence leader in this
country and that leader will tell you this poses--a takeover of Iraq in
the Iraq-Syria area--which is now the largest concentration of Al Qaeda
in history--is a direct threat to the United States of America.
Our Director of National Intelligence, General Clapper, has said in
open testimony that this concentration of Al Qaeda-oriented and Al
Qaeda-affiliated groups will be planning attacks on the United States
of America.
The saddest part about all of this to me is the fact that 4,400 young
Americans lost their lives, thousands lost their limbs. Thousands are
scarred for life because of the experience they had serving in Iraq.
They had it won. In the words of General Petraeus: We won the war and
lost the peace.
That is a direct responsibility of the President of the United
States, who is the Commander in Chief. But I grieve for those families
who lost their loved ones, who fought so bravely, and made such
sacrifices.
To see all of that, all of that success, where the surge succeeded,
thanks to one of the finest generals in history, GEN David Petraeus, we
see this all now torn asunder because of a policy of withdrawal without
victory.
When those withdrawals and that policy were being orchestrated, the
Senator from South Carolina, I, and others, stood and said: Please
don't do this. Please leave a small force behind in Iraq. We are
begging now, please leave a small force in Afghanistan.
The Afghans have no air capabilities. The Taliban will come back and
all of the sacrifice in Afghanistan will be made in vain. So at least
take immediate action to try to break the advance of ISIS across Iraq
today but also revisit the decision to completely withdraw from
Afghanistan because the Taliban is still alive and well.
Because the President of the United States declares a conflict is
over does not mean, in the eyes of the enemy, it is over. Conflicts end
when the enemy is defeated. The Iraq war did not end because the forces
within Iraq were still undefeated.
The conflict in Afghanistan will not be over 2 years from now in
2017, when the final American is scheduled to leave Afghanistan.
Please learn the lessons.
I say to the President of the United States: Get a new national
security team in place. You have been ill-served by the national
security team and the decisions that you have in place now and the
decisions that you made, and have that new national security team come
up with a strategy, a strategy to do whatever we can to prevent this
direct threat to the national security of this Nation, the security of
this Nation.
Of all the visits the former Senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman,
Lindsey Graham, and I made every Fourth of July, two or three times a
year, traveling the country, and having been in the company of not just
great leaders such as General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker but the
young men and women: the privates, the corporals, especially the
sergeants--these brave men and women who were serving and who were
willing to sacrifice on behalf of somebody else's freedom they believe
they had won, the surge succeeded. Any military expert will tell us the
surge succeeded. But it was won at great sacrifice.
Among other cities, the black flags of Al Qaeda fly over the city of
Fallujah today. Ninety-six brave soldiers and marines were killed and
600 wounded. What do we tell their families? What do we tell their
mothers?
So it is not too late. America is still the most powerful nation on
earth. We still have the finest and strongest military ever. We have
the finest young men and women who are serving in it ever.
It is not too late. But we have to have a dramatic reversal of course
before the situation gets to the point where, as the Director of
National Intelligence has stated, this will be an area where attacks on
the United States of America will be orchestrated.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the referenced articles
be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New Yorker, June 11, 2014]
In Extremists' Iraq Rise, America's Legacy
(By Dexter Filkins)
First Falluja, then Mosul, and now the oil-refinery town of
Bayji. The rapid advance of Al Qaeda-inspired militants
across the Sunni heartland of northern and western Iraq has
been stunning and relentless--and utterly predictable. Here's
a forecast: the bad news is just beginning.
The capture of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, by Sunni
extremists on Tuesday is the most dramatic example of the
resurgence of the country's sectarian war, which began almost
immediately after the withdrawal of the last American forces
in December, 2011. The fighters who took Mosul are attached
to an Al Qaeda spawn called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-
Sham, or ISIS, which is now poised to carve out a rump state
across the Sunni-dominated lands that stretch from western
Baghdad to the Syrian border and beyond.
As I detailed in a recent piece for the magazine, Iraq's
collapse has been driven by three things. The first is the
war in Syria, which has become, in its fourth bloody year,
almost entirely sectarian, with the country's majority-Sunni
opposition hijacked by extremists from groups like ISIS and
Jabhat al-Nusra, and by the more than seven thousand
foreigners, many of them from the West, who have joined their
ranks. The border between the two countries--three hundred
miles long, most of it an empty stretch of desert--has been
effectively erased, with ISIS and Nusra working both sides.
As the moderates in Syria have been pushed aside, so too have
their comrades in Iraq.
The second factor--probably the dominant one--is the
policies of Nuri Al-Maliki, Iraq's Prime Minister. Maliki is
a militant sectarian to the core, and he had been fighting on
behalf of Iraq's long-suppressed Shiite majority for years
before the Americans arrived, in 2003. Even after the
Americans toppled Saddam, Maliki never stopped, taking a
page--and aid and direction--from his ideological brethren
across the border in Iran. When the Americans were on the
ground in Iraq, they acted repeatedly to restrain Maliki, and
the rest of Iraq's Shiite leadership, from its most sectarian
impulses. At first, they failed, and the civil war began in
earnest in 2006. It took three years and hundreds of lives,
but the American military succeeded in tamping down Iraq's
sectarian furies, not just with violence but also by forcing
Maliki to accommodate Sunni demands. Time and again, American
commanders have told me, they stepped in front of Maliki to
stop him from acting brutally and arbitrarily toward Iraq's
Sunni minority. Then the Americans left, removing the last
restraints on Maliki's sectarian and authoritarian
tendencies.
In the two and a half years since the Americans' departure,
Maliki has centralized power within his own circle, cut the
Sunnis out of political power, and unleashed a wave of
arrests and repression. Maliki's march to authoritarian rule
has fueled the reeemergence of the Sunni insurgency directly.
With nowhere else to go, Iraq's Sunnis are turning, once
again, to the extremists to protect them.
Which brings us to the third reason. When the Americans
invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state its
military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most
everything else that might hold a country together. They
spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace
the one they crushed. By 2011, by any reasonable measure, the
Americans had made a lot of headway but were not finished
with the job. For many months, the Obama and Maliki
governments talked about keeping a residual force of American
troops in Iraq, who would act largely to train Iraq's Army
and to provide intelligence against Sunni insurgents. (They
would almost certainly have been barred from fighting.) Those
were important reasons to stay, but the most important went
largely unstated: it was to continue to act as a restraint on
Maliki's sectarian impulses, at least until the Iraqi
political system was strong enough to contain him on its own.
The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no
small measure because of a lack of engagement by the White
House. Today, many Iraqis, including some close to
[[Page S3630]]
Maliki, say that a small force of American soldiers working
in non-combat roles--would have provided a crucial
stabilizing factor that is now missing from Iraq. Sami al-
Askari, a Maliki confidant, told me for my article this
spring, ``If you had a few hundred here, not even a few
thousand, they would be coooperating with you, and they would
become your partners.'' President Obama wanted the Americans
to come home, and Maliki didn't particularly want them to
stay.
The trouble is, as the events of this week show, what the
Americans left behind was an Iraqi state that was not able to
stand on its own. What we built is now coming apart. This is
the real legacy of America's war in Iraq.
____
[From the Washington Post]
The Iraq `Success'
The Obama administration needs a strategy as dangers mount in the
Middle East
For years, President Obama has been claiming credit for
``ending wars,'' when, in fact, he was pulling the United
States out of wars that were far from over. Now the pretense
is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
On Monday, a loathsome offshoot of al-Qaeda, the self-
styled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, captured Mosul, one
of Iraq's most important cities, seizing large caches of
modern weaponry and sending half a million civilians fleeing
in terror. ISIS, which can make the original al-Qaeda look
moderate, controls large swaths of territory stretching from
northern Syria into Iraq. On Tuesday, militants advanced
toward Baghdad, capturing Tikrit and other cities.
If Iraq joins Syria in full-fledged civil war, the danger
to U.S. allies in Israel, Turkey, Jordan and the Kurdish
region of Iraq is immense. These terrorist safe havens also
pose a direct threat to the United States, according to U.S.
officials. ``We know individuals from the U.S., Canada and
Europe are traveling to Syria to fight in the conflict,'' Jeh
Johnson, secretary of homeland security, said earlier this
year. ``At the same time, extremists are actively trying to
recruit Westerners, indoctrinate them, and see them return to
their home countries with an extremist mission.''
When Mr. Obama defended his foreign policy in a speech at
West Point two weeks ago, he triggered some interesting
debate about the relative merits of engagement and restraint.
But the question of whether Mr. Obama more closely resembles
Dwight D. Eisenhower or Jimmy Carter is less relevant than
the results of his policy, which are increasingly worrisome.
In Syria, where for three years Mr. Obama has assiduously
avoided meaningful engagement, civil war has given rise to
``the most catastrophic humanitarian crisis any of us have
seen in a generation,'' Mr. Obama's United Nations ambassador
Samantha Power said in February.
In Libya, Mr. Obama joined in a bombing campaign to topple
dictator Moammar Gaddafi and then declined to provide
security assistance to help the nation right itself. It, too,
is on the verge of civil war.
In Iraq, Mr. Obama chose not to leave a residual force that
might have helped keep the nation's politics on track, even
as the White House insisted there was no reason to worry.
Denis McDonough, then deputy national security adviser and
now White House chief of staff, told reporters in 2011 that
Mr. Obama ``said what we're looking for is an Iraq that's
secure, stable and self-reliant, and that's exactly what we
got here. So there's no question this is a success.''
Now Mr. Obama is applying the same recipe to Afghanistan:
total withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2016, regardless of
conditions.
At West Point, the president stressed that ``not every
problem has a military solution.'' That is obviously true. In
fact, a goal of U.S. policy should be to help shape events so
that military solutions do not have to be considered. The
presence of U.S. troops in South Korea, for example, has
helped keep the peace for more than a half century.
Total withdrawal can instead lead to challenges like that
posed by Iraq today, where every option--from staying aloof
to more actively helping Iraqi forces--carries risks. The
administration needs to accept the reality of the mounting
danger in the Middle East and craft a strategy that goes
beyond the slogan of ``ending war responsibly.''
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a
quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized
for 10 minutes to 15 minutes, as if in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. We have an order to go to executive session at
11:30.
Mr. GRAHAM. I ask unanimous consent to speak until 11:30.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________