[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16854-16856]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              WAR IN IRAQ

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I planned yesterday to be here today to 
speak about a totally different subject, and then we learned last 
evening what happened to Strom Thurmond. With the permission of my 
colleagues, I wish to move for a few minutes to a totally different 
subject, and that is the war in Iraq. I say ``the war in Iraq'' because 
there is still a war in Iraq.
  I returned from Baghdad on Tuesday with two of my distinguished 
Republican colleagues--Senators Lugar and Hagel. I came away with 
several impressions that I want to pass on to my colleagues in the hope 
that it will give some additional information or insight. My 
impressions, although not stated in the same way by my two colleagues, 
Senators Hagel and Lugar, I am confident are the same ones they had 
because we did a number of press conferences and we talked at length. 
It was a 14-hour flight back. We are good friends, and we all agree on 
the essence of what I am about to say, although we have different 
emphasis on different points. Let me say what those primary impressions 
are and why I think there is such an urgency.
  First, there is still a war going on. It is more like a guerrilla war 
but there is a war. Meeting with our military troops, meeting with our 
generals, one told us: Every time I send a young man out on patrol on 
the streets of Baghdad in a humvee, I tell them: Treat it as if you are 
in battle.
  He told us how they know now that our young men and women are being 
targeted not by some random group of Islamists who are angry but by 
professionals, the leftover fedayeen, the Republican Guard. Where did 
all these folks go? They went back into their communities.
  One colonel told us they know that people who are engaged in going 
after Americans are instructed in the following way: All our young men 
and women wear helmets and flack jackets. They are instructed when 
there is a disturbance to come out of the crowd. If they are going to 
try to kill one of our young men and women, there is a 4-inch opening 
to do it; that is, space between the back of the helmet and the top of 
the bulletproof vest is where they aim to kill our soldiers. That is 
not the work of just random and irrational people who are angry we are 
in their country. How well coordinated and how well organized it is 
they do not know, and I do not know, but there is still a war going on.
  The second impression I came back with is, what a remarkable group of 
people we have working in the toughest of conditions against the 
longest of odds to put Iraq back on its feet and back into the hands of 
the Iraqi people. I am not merely talking about our military, which has 
been celebrated with good reason and everybody knows; I am talking 
about our civilians. I am talking about Ambassador Bremer. I am talking 
about Ambassador Crocker. I am talking about Secretary Slocum. I am 
talking about the most talented group of people we have assembled, the 
people who have had incredible experience in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in 
Afghanistan in trying to stand up a police department.
  We spent an hour or more at the police training academy with men I 
know are the best in the world. I know because I spent so much time in 
the Balkans and so much time dealing with the subject. I know they are 
the single best in the world. In fact, coincidentally, one of them 
happens to be a former chief of police of the Newark Police Department 
in the town in which I attended college, the University of Delaware. 
These are incredibly talented people working under incredibly difficult 
conditions, made more difficult, I am sad to say, by the incredible 
miscalculations this administration is making about how to proceed in 
Iraq.
  Many of us on this floor--I am not unique--have pointed out that 
winning the war is only half the problem, the smaller half. Winning the 
peace is an astronomically difficult subject. As I say to my colleagues 
and anyone who asks, if the Lord Almighty came down and sat in this 
chair and agreed to give the President and those on the ground in Iraq 
the right answers to the next 20 decisions they had to make, the next 
50 decisions they had to make, consequential decisions, we still only 
have, in my view, a 65-percent chance of getting it right.
  That is how complicated Iraq is. That is how difficult this problem 
is. But it has been made much more difficult, frankly, by the wrong 
assumptions that were made by the administration. This is not second-
guessing. These are things that, for a year before, many of us argued 
with them about.
  I supported us taking out that tyrant, but there seems to be a tone 
deafness right now, and that is that the administration thought 
building the peace would be built upon three assumptions they had, for 
which, in the hearings we held I never found any basis. One is, they 
expected to find a fully functioning bureaucracy when they got to Iraq, 
a literate country that would have in place for each of their 
departments--think of it in terms of the United States--their 
department of education, their department of public works, their 
department of highways, their department of security. We were told, 
with absolute certainty by the administration, that all we had to do 
was go in and decapitate the Baathists, that is the neo-Nazis who ran 
that country, and we would have this infrastructure ready to take over 
the running of their country. But it melted away. It is not there.
  The second assumption was we were told they expected to find an army 
intact. Again, we decapitate the bad guys but there would be a standing 
army we could work with. That melted away. It does not exist, and to 
the extent it exists, it is engaged in guerrilla activity.
  The third assumption was we were going to find a police force in the 
country that once we took the bad apples out of--like we did, by the 
way, in Colombia, helping them vet their national police--that we would 
have tens of thousands of police officers we could work with who were 
trained. There are none, and there never were any.
  The result has been massive problems in terms of getting basic 
services back and restoring security. We have seen looting and 
political sabotage against power, oil, and water plants, some organized 
resistance, which seems to be getting more organized. All of this is 
compounded by years of neglect by Saddam Hussein's regime. Neither this 
administration nor any of us could have reasonably anticipated how 
badly he treated the infrastructure of his own country. It is not 
merely that he did not repair the infrastructure during the period when 
the embargo was on them, when they were operating under sanctions, but 
for 30 years.
  In fairness to the administration, no one knew how badly he had raped 
and pillaged his own country and infrastructure. We knew what he did to 
his people but we did not know this.
  Ultimately, Iraqis need to do all these jobs: Administrate, be the 
army, be the police force, restore security, maintain security, but it 
is going to take a long time to do that. Meanwhile, we the 
international community should be filling the gaps, not we the United 
States alone.
  What is worse is we should have known better. We had extensive 
experience in the Balkans. We had considerable experience in 
Afghanistan, which

[[Page 16855]]

is a failure, in my view. We had considerable bipartisan testimony from 
experts on the left, right, and center, going back to July, that these 
problems would be protracted and they would be deep. I will never 
forget two leading generals, the former head of CENTCOM and former NATO 
director, testifying before our committee, and I remember the parallel 
they used.
  They said we have this incredible military juggernaut which we have 
planned incredibly well and executed it incredibly well, but we should 
in tandem be planning for the occupation of Iraq. There was virtually 
no planning, but that is water over the dam.
  That is not just me. Ask my Republican colleagues who deal with this. 
There was no planning. The question now, and my purpose today, is not 
to say, aha, look at the mistake you made, you did not listen. It is to 
say, let's get over this. Now that we realize and the whole world 
understands these infrastructures do not exist, it is time to 
internationalize the effort.
  First, we need a significant infusion of military and civilian police 
to fill the gap of the Iraqi police. On another date, I will spend more 
time on this, but there are 79,000 Iraqi police spots we have to fill. 
Our experts on the ground in Iraq say there is a need immediately for 
5,800 European crack police, the gens de guerre, to be brought in to 
maintain the peace and security of the citizens, stop the looting, make 
the traffic lights work, investigate the murders and the rapes, while 
we are training 80,000 new police officers.
  There is a gigantic vacuum, and our own people on the ground say we 
need help now. So I implore the President to get over his feelings 
about the Europeans, the French and the Germans in particular, and seek 
their assistance because I believe they are ready to assist. They need 
to be asked.
  As I said, we are starting from scratch to build an Iraqi police 
force of 73,000 people with 18,000 cars. Now we have about 30,000 Iraqi 
police, all ill trained, with about 200 cars. How long will it take to 
get to 73,000, which is a very thin blue line? The estimate of many is 
about 5 years. So what do we do in the meantime if we do not seek to 
internationalize this?
  Second, we need to sustain and probably increase our military forces 
in Iraq, and it need not be more Americans. We should be reaching out 
to NATO. When I have spoken to Lord Robertson, when I have spoken to 
the head of NATO, and spoken to the country specific, I am told they 
are prepared to send hard, tough, fighting troops into Iraq, but they 
want to be asked. To the best of my knowledge, the President and 
Secretary of Defense and the Vice President have decided not to ask. If 
that is true, that is foolhardy.
  We need between 30,000 and 60,000 forces there, and they should be 
NATO forces. Meanwhile, the notion that has been floated out of the 
Pentagon by Mr. Rumsfeld, as he suggested 6 weeks ago that we could get 
down to 30,000 troops by the end of the year, is pure fantasy. Who are 
we kidding? Get down to 30,000 troops within 6 months? Unless he has a 
plan no one has ever heard of internationalizing this to the extent 
that they are backfilled with European and other forces.
  We need to get more troops in. They need to be effective, and the 
best place to look is NATO. As I said, I met with Secretary General 
Robertson last weekend. NATO is willing to help, but the administration 
has to ask. So please ask, Mr. President.
  Third, we are going to need significant resources to get all of this 
done. Just a couple of weeks ago my committee, headed by Senator Lugar, 
had testimony from leading members of the administration saying do not 
worry; basically, the oil revenues are going to take care of all of 
this. What a joke. We have a leading oil man appointed by the 
administration in Baghdad with whom we sat and met, my two colleagues 
and I. He said we will get to 1 million barrels a day maybe by the end 
of the summer; maybe by the end of 2004, an average of 2.4 million a 
day.
  Let me explain that. It means there may be the ability to generate $5 
billion worth of revenue this year and $14 billion next year; and it 
costs us $3 billion a month just to maintain our troops there.
  It is time we start leveling with the American people. Maybe the most 
important impression was our folks on the ground are doing an 
incredible job. I am not being solicitous. I am not just saying we are 
doing a great job. They are doing an incredible job. The most positive 
thing I came away with: I went over despondent about a lack of a 
political game plan of transferring government to the Iraqis. I am 
truly impressed with Ambassador Bremer and his team. They have that 
process underway, after we finally discarded what I assume was the 
Cheney-Rumsfeld idea of putting Mr. Garner in there and finding Mr. 
Chalabi--I may be wrong about that; if I am, I apologize for sounding 
harsh.
  But the President was wise enough to recognize the model they 
originally came up with on the political transition--General Garner is 
a fine man, and the expatriates being the basis upon which the 
government would be stood up quickly--was not realistic, and he made a 
swift change. I implore the President to make a similar change in 
thinking about police and the military.
  Nobody back home understands. The American people have not been given 
the facts, in my view, to be able to fully understand how monumental 
the task is we are undertaking, how long it will take and how much it 
will cost, how many troops. The President needs to go to the American 
people and tell them.
  I will end where I began 10 months ago in this Chamber after my 
hearings in July--almost a year ago, when I chaired the Foreign 
Relations Committee. I said then and I repeat it: The one thing all who 
come out of the Vietnam era generation can agree on is, regardless of 
what our view was on the war at the time, no foreign policy, no matter 
how well fashioned, can be sustained without the informed consent of 
the American people.
  As I have said repeatedly, folks in my State and around the country 
thought when we went in that Johnny and Jane would come marching home 
as they did after gulf I, immediately after the war. There is a bit of 
shock and dismay on the part of the families of the National Guard and 
the reservists when they find out their dads and moms are not coming 
home; they are being extended.
  We knew ahead of time they would have to be extended. You knew it, I 
knew it. We did not tell. We told them, the President didn't. Mr. 
President, please go on television, tell the American people what is 
expected of them now. They will respond. We are a mature people. They 
don't like the fact that 161,000 Americans have to stay there for an 
extended period of time. But we have to tell them, and tell them why it 
is so important it be done. It is in the naked self-interests of the 
United States that we get this right--that we stand up with a 
government at the end of the day that is at least more democratic, is 
not a breeding ground for terror, and is a stabilizing influence in the 
region because it will save the lives of our children and our 
grandchildren if we do it right. We have an opportunity to do it right. 
This is doable. But not on the cheap, and not without leveling with the 
American people.
  Nearly 2 months ago, on May 1, President Bush landed on the USS 
Abraham Lincoln to address our troops and the Nation. Behind them was a 
large banner that read ``Mission accomplished.'' Our troops did 
accomplish their first mission, a remarkable mission in Iraq, of 
ridding its people of the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. But the 
larger and more difficult mission is building the peace in Iraq and is 
far from accomplished. In fact, it has only just begun.
  I respectfully suggest it is time for the President to explain that 
to the American people, to talk to us straight about the hundreds of 
thousands of troops who will be needed immediately and the tens of 
thousands of troops who will be needed for a long time, and the tens of 
billions of dollars that will be needed, and how we will have to 
energize the international community as donor nations to come up with 
that money so we do not hold the bag for it all. It will take many 
years.

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  When Senator Lugar and I held our hearings, everybody kept saying, 
the day after the war, and we said, no, it is not the day after, it is 
the decade after Saddam Hussein is down--the decade after. I have not 
found one reasonable person who suggests that the United States will 
not be heavily involved, even after there is a transition to an Iraqi 
Government, for at least the next 3 to 5 years. If anybody thinks it is 
less than that, they are kidding themselves. If it is less than that, 
it will mean we will lose the peace.
  I know it is dangerous, and I can see my colleague looking at me; it 
is dangerous to prognosticate in this business because everybody 
remembers exactly what you said. But I am saying the same thing I said 
last July. It was a worthy goal to take down Saddam Hussein. He was a 
danger to his people. The one thing the whole world has seen is what a 
madman he was. He has killed 300,000 of his own people at least. Mass 
graves abound. We did a worthy and noble thing. But we must 
internationalize this effort now. Now. Now. We must level with the 
American people.
  I conclude by saying what the troops told us. You have been on these 
missions. These young men and women we have dinner with, these young 
troops we go out and ride around with, the people we spend our time 
with in the country, they want to know in Baghdad, are we going to 
support them? They know how tough this is. They know how many more of 
them are going to die. They know their life is at risk. They know this 
is an incredibly difficult undertaking, and they are wondering why, 
when they pick up the papers back home, it is not being stated that 
way. It is being treated as if this is over. The American people 
deserve to be leveled with.
  Everyone here knows, whether we say another year or 10, whether it is 
75,000 troops or 160,000, whether it is $1 billion or $20 billion or 
$40 billion, we all know it is a lot more than any of us are telling 
the American people.
  It is time, as one of my Republican colleagues said, to tell the 
truth. I am not suggesting the President is lying. He is not. I am 
suggesting the American people do not have any idea what we have signed 
them on to. We had better tell them.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.

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