[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Pages 25489-25490]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we have a continual drumbeat going on in 
this Chamber. It came to a crescendo during the debate over the Iraq 
supplemental, but it goes on even when there is no legislation on the 
floor dealing with Iraq. There are several themes of this drumbeat that 
I would like to address this morning.
  The first theme we hear over and over and over again is the theme of 
faulty intelligence. How could the President have been so stupid as to 
have acted on faulty intelligence? Occasionally, the enthusiasm for 
this theme gets carried away to levels that are inappropriate, as we 
have the accusation that the President was not just misled by faulty 
intelligence, he deliberately lied. We hear this again and again, 
particularly in the media: The President is a liar; he deliberately 
misled the country.
  I would like to address that theme for a moment and then another 
theme we hear over and over which is that the President has made a 
terrible mistake when he has endorsed the concept of preemptive war. We 
have these two themes: No. 1, the President is either stupid or a liar 
because he mishandled the intelligence; and No. 2, he has embraced a 
historically repugnant doctrine, the doctrine of preemptive war.
  On the issue of intelligence, let us understand something about 
intelligence. It is never hard and fast. It is always an estimate. It 
is also a guess. It is also the best view of the people who are making 
intelligence decisions and assessments. And it is often wrong.
  Let me give you an example of a President who acted on intelligence 
that turned out to be wrong. No, let me back away from that, not 
necessarily a President who acted, a commander who acted on 
intelligence that turned out to be wrong that had significant 
international effect.
  I was traveling in China with the then-senior Senator from Texas, 
Phil Gramm, and we met with the Prime Minister of China, not long after 
the Americans, under the command of GEN Wesley Clark, had bombed the 
Chinese Embassy in Serbia. The Chinese were understandably very 
concerned about that.
  We said: It was a mistake. It was an error. And the Chinese 
Ambassador, with whom we were talking at the time, said: You have the 
best intelligence in the world. You must have known that was the 
Chinese Embassy. That was not a hidden fact. That was not a secret. You 
have the most accurate military in the world. You did that 
deliberately.
  Then he pointed out to us that was not just the Chinese Embassy; that 
was, in fact, the headquarters of the Chinese intelligence operation 
throughout Central Europe. So we bombed an embassy and we took out 
their intelligence capability. They said: You did that deliberately. We 
said: No; it was a mistake.
  I remember Senator Shelby saying: The proof of the fact that it is a 
mistake is that nobody would have been stupid enough to do that 
deliberately. Then the Chinese Ambassador said: If it was a mistake, 
why hasn't somebody been fired? And for that, we had no particular 
answer.
  Checking into it, we found the reason that happened is because GEN 
Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO, was demanding targets: I need more 
targets. I'm running out of targets. And under the pressure of those 
demands from that commanding general, the CIA came up with targets, and 
they came up with an old target with bad information, under the 
pressure from a commander who was anxious to keep bombing even though 
he had run out of legitimate targets. In that pressure, a tragic 
mistake was made, and America's relationship with China was seriously 
damaged in that situation.
  So intelligence is not always perfect. But in the postmortem of 9/11, 
we have seen how people want to have it both ways. They look at the 
intelligence that was available pre-9/11, and they say: How can you 
have missed this clue? You should have taken action, Bush 
administration, on the basis of this clue.

[[Page 25490]]

  Then, when we have information with respect to Iraq that turns out 
not to be exactly accurate, we are told: How could you have been so 
misled? How could you have interpreted this way?
  One CIA official said: If we had not acted on the basis of the 
information that we had prior to the war in Iraq, if we had not warned 
the President in the way we did, we would have been held in violation 
of our duty, particularly if something had happened.
  Then the naysayers, who are saying, ``How could you be misled by this 
intelligence,'' would be saying, ``How could you have missed this 
clue?'' They attempt to put the President and this administration in a 
no-win situation. No matter what the President does, he is attacked by 
the people on the other side of the aisle.
  Now, finally, this issue of preemptive war. I will not take the time 
to go into a full discussion, but I say, particularly to those Senators 
who pride themselves on their sense of history, let us look back in 
history and ask ourselves, what would have happened if Neville 
Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, had adopted the attitude 
of preemptive war when he went to Munich? What would have happened if 
he had sat down with Adolph Hitler and done what Winston Churchill was 
urging him to do, which is the same doctrine that George W. Bush had 
put forward, and said to Hitler: If you attack Czechoslovakia, there 
will be war. If you move ahead, there will be war?
  Neville Chamberlain and some of the people around him said: Hitler 
does not represent an imminent threat. Hitler is not talking about 
bombing London now. If we give him Czechoslovakia, he will feel nice 
towards us. We need to worry about international opinion. We need to 
see to it that everybody gets together in the international community. 
And Czechoslovakia does not affect us.
  Chamberlain said: Those are people far away from us with whom we have 
nothing to do, a speech that could have been made on the floor of this 
Senate as people talk about Iraq: They are far away from us, people 
with whom we have nothing to do. And the threat is not imminent.
  Churchill was long-headed enough to know that if Hitler got control 
of Czechoslovakia, he would get control of the finest machine shops in 
Europe, he would add to his military machine, and he would be prepared 
to wage world war. If Hitler were denied Czechoslovakia, we now know in 
history, his own generals would have deposed him for being too risky.
  But Neville Chamberlain said: No. We can't wage any kind of 
preemptive war. We have to wait until he attacks us before we can 
justify it. And 6 million Jews went to the concentration camps and into 
the ovens, and countless millions were killed in the Second World War 
because we did not take preemptive action when we could have. I say 
``we''--the Western World did not.
  Chamberlain was hailed as a hero when he came home, and the motion to 
support the action that he had taken went through the House of Commons 
by huge margins. When Winston Churchill stood up and said: We have 
suffered defeat of the first magnitude, he got only a handful of votes. 
But history has not been kind to Mr. Chamberlain. History has validated 
the position that Winston Churchill took, a position which George W. 
Bush is applying to modern conditions.
  Those who value history should read all of history before they stand 
on the Senate floor and attack the President of the United States for a 
doctrine that they say is repugnant.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. FEINGOLD addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Graham of South Carolina). The Senator 
from Alaska is recognized under a previous order of the body. There was 
a previous agreement that was entered into that grants her this slot of 
time.
  The Senator from Alaska.

                          ____________________