[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.

                          ____________________