[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 24 (Thursday, February 12, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S949-S951]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                  AUMF

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, to her high school classmates it was 
pretty clear what kind of person Kayla Mueller was going to turn out to 
be. As a teenager she took up the causes of the disenfranchised and the 
dispossessed, such as when she joined a campaign to stop the city of 
Flagstaff from using recycled wastewater to make snow on a set of peaks 
the Hopi people considered to be sacred. She later went to the most 
dangerous place on Earth because people there needed help. She saw 
suffering on an unimaginable scale, brought on by a vicious civil war 
inside Syria and Iraq, and she wanted to make it better.
  No one is responsible for her death except for ISIL. They killed her, 
as they did James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Abdul-Rahman, Peter Kassig, 
and thousands of individual innocent Iraqis and Syrians over the course 
of the last year.
  It has been a long time since the world has seen such evil. This is a 
brutal inhuman terrorist organization

[[Page S950]]

that today is a threat to the region in which they prowl, but without 
question could pose a threat to the United States if their march is 
allowed to go unchecked.
  Like the Presiding Officer, every time I hear of a new attack or a 
new execution carried out by ISIL, my blood boils, I get furious, and I 
commit myself to doing everything within our power to stamp them out. 
But I also remember that as justified a response as it is, fury is not 
a strategy; revenge is not security.
  If we are going to defeat ISIL, we need to act with our heads, not 
just with our hearts. And that means Congress needs to pass a war 
authorization that includes a strategy for victory--a strategy that 
learns from a small little creature called the planarian flatworm. I 
want to tell you about flatworms for a second. This is going to sound a 
little strange, but I will bring it back here.
  These flatworms are extraordinary little things that live in ponds, 
under logs, and in moist soil. What is amazing about these flatworms is 
that if you split one of them in two, if you cut it in half, both 
halves regenerate into new flatworms. In fact, if you cut it into four 
pieces, all four pieces can regrow into new flatworms. It means if for 
whatever reason you are trying to get rid of flatworms, cutting them 
into pieces does more harm than good. If you take a knife to it, you 
actually create more flatworms than you destroy.
  So why am I talking about this? Because they are a perfect object 
lesson of the simple truth that if you attack a problem the wrong way, 
you might not just leave the problem unsolved, you might actually make 
it worse. If you use the wrong tool to try to eradicate flatworms, you 
just end up with a lot more of them.
  In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we were told we were going 
to be treated as liberators. We were told we would be out of Iraq in a 
few years. When that failed, our invasion turned the one-headed monster 
of Saddam Hussein into a two-headed monster of competing Sunni and 
Shiite insurgencies.
  Then we were told more troops would do the trick. And it worked, for 
only as long as tens of thousands of Americans were patrolling the 
sands of Iraq. But ultimately our occupation was quietly breeding a new 
brand of an even more lethal insurgency, one that turned into the 
terrorist group we are fighting today.
  Put simply, ISIL in its current form would not exist if we had not 
put massive ground troops into the region in the first place. Our 
presence in Iraq, our mishandling of the occupation, became bulletin 
board material for terrorist recruiters. Iraq became, in the CIA's 
words, the ``cause celebre'' of the international extremist network. We 
killed a terrorist, and the next day two more showed up.
  Let me be clear, because I don't want people to twist my words here. 
America is not responsible for this evil ideology, and our troops are 
not to blame for ISIL. No one forgets that Al Qaeda attacked us and 
killed 3,000 of our people before we invaded Iraq. But do we believe 
having hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers occupying territory in 
the Middle East since then has succeeded in making us safer?
  We have killed a lot of terrorists over the last 13 years, and yet 
there are more of them, in more places, with an even more radical 
agenda today than ever before.
  Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates understood the lesson of the 
flatworm when he said, upon his departure from the Department of 
Defense, any future Secretary who proposed putting ground troops back 
into the Middle East should ``have their head examined.''
  So for me, as we debate this new war authorization against ISIL, I 
have a bottom line: We cannot authorize a strategy that could result in 
American combat troops going back to the Middle East.
  If this President or the next President puts our soldiers into the 
Middle East to fight ISIL, they would serve with bravery and honor. But 
an intervention of this scale would ultimately create more terrorists 
than it destroyed. And to the extent we drove back ISIL, it would only 
be temporary, lasting only as long as our troops were there.
  Why? These extremist groups such as ISIL exist not because of a 
military vacuum but because of a political and an economic vacuum. They 
prey upon disenfranchised young men who see no future for themselves in 
societies with massive, crippling hunger, poverty, and destitution.
  These groups work best when autocratic or sectarian governments 
marginalize and dispossess specific ethnic or religious groups, pushing 
them into the arms of extremists who pledge to fight the corrupt and 
dehumanizing status quo.
  Foreign ground troops do nothing to address these underlying issues. 
But worse, more often than not, foreign ground troops exacerbate these 
motivating forces. Bloody ground wars make more economic dislocation, 
not less. Foreign occupations often empower divisive local leadership, 
such as the former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, who pushed 
people toward--not away from--extremist groups. Then groups such as Al 
Qaeda and ISIL use this misery to brainwash young men into believing 
America is to blame, that we are the enemy they are yearning to fight.
  That doesn't mean there isn't a role for military force in the Middle 
East. I have voted for an authorization in the Foreign Relations 
Committee that allows for the United States--our military--to go in and 
kill terrorists, but we simply need to understand that ultimately what 
military force is in the Middle East is a shaping mechanism to give us 
space in order to achieve the political and economic reform on the 
ground with our local partners such that those root causes of 
terrorists disappear.
  American military force is useful in this fight, but it has limits. 
There is a decreasing marginal return and then a point where it 
actually flips on its head and begins to actually create more of the 
people we are seeking to destroy.
  I have heard two arguments over the past few days as to why this AUMF 
shouldn't have a limitation on ground troops. First, some of my 
Republican friends say this kind of prohibition on ground troops would 
be unwise because it would telegraph to our enemies a critical tactical 
limitation. My response: Good.
  Why do we think ISIL puts up these execution videos? Because they 
know the best long-term play for their desired caliphate is predicated 
on the United States making a mistake and rejoining a ground war in the 
Middle East. Recent history has taught ISIL that the best tool by far 
to recruit terrorists--and estimates are there are as many as 20,000 
foreign fighters who have joined ISIL--is the U.S. Army in the Middle 
East. Thus, I have no problem being transparent with our enemy by 
signaling this to them; that we are going to learn from our mistakes 
and we are going to fight this war with tools that result in victory, 
not defeat.
  The second argument I hear is that Congress would be overstepping our 
constitutional bounds by limiting the power of the President to 
prosecute a war. But first let's note that over and over again, 
starting with Congress's very first authorizations of military force 
passed in early American times, we have put restrictions consistently 
on war declarations and AUMFs. Most recently, Republicans and Democrats 
in the Foreign Relations Committee voted to put some pretty serious 
limitations on our authorization for the use of military force in Syria 
in the wake of chemical weapons usage. Frankly, regardless of the 
precedent, I would argue Congress has a constitutional responsibility 
to help set the strategy for war, to help guide the Nation's foreign 
policy.
  Let's be honest. This AUMF is going to go on for 3 years, according 
to the limitations the President proposed, well into the next 
President's term. As someone who believes combat troops in the Middle 
East would be a mistake, I simply can't rely on President Obama's 
promise that he will not use ground troops against ISIL because he only 
has 2 more years left, and many leading Republicans have made it 
perfectly clear they would push a President from their party, if that 
is who comes next, to put troops back into the fight against ISIL. As 
an elected representative of the people I serve, I should get a say as 
to whether we have learned from our mistakes of the past 10 years.
  I remember my first visit to Iraq. I was there in the bloody spring 
of 2007. I remember being absolutely blown

[[Page S951]]

away by the capability and the bravery and the capacity of the young 
U.S. soldiers whom I met in places such as Baghdad, Tikrit, and Baiji. 
So I can understand why it is easy for some people to believe there is 
no enemy our soldiers can't beat, that there is no challenge they can't 
meet, that there is no threat they can't eliminate. I believe in 
American exceptionalism in my heart, but I don't think it allows us to 
ignore history, to avoid facts, to deny reality, and the reality is 
extremists in some parts of the world are like flatworms. If we come at 
them with the wrong weapon, we may kill one, but we will create two 
more.
  I am pleased the Senate is finally able to debate a new war against 
ISIL. This debate is past due. ISIL needs to be defeated, and we 
deserve to honor the U.S. Constitution and step up to the plate and 
debate an authorization.
  Make no mistake, we should pass an AUMF. ISIL is evil personified, 
but for us to beat them, we need an AUMF that makes it totally clear we 
will not simply repeat the mistakes of the past that got us into this 
mess in the first place.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Rounds). The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, what is the status of the floor debate 
and how much time might I have?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democrats have 8 minutes remaining.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for 
10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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