[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3520-3521]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 URGING CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT OF IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, in order to solve the problem, you have to 
recognize that you have a problem in the first place.
  For 3 years, the President and his administration contended that 
everything was going fine in Iraq, that we were winning, and they 
openly questioned the motivations and the patriotism of anyone who 
questioned or disagreed with them.
  Now we are finally getting some straight talk from people who have 
been in the administration since the very beginning. The U.S. 
Ambassador to Iraq says the country is nearing a civil war and we have 
opened ``Pandora's box'' by toppling Saddam Hussein.
  Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte said, ``Even if a 
broad, inclusive national government emerges, there will almost 
certainly be a lag time before we see a dampening effect on the 
insurgency.''
  And today, General Peter Pace, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 
said, ``The Iraqi people themselves are standing at a crossroads, and 
they are making critical decisions for their country right now about 
which road they want to take,'' whether it is going to be a civil war 
or the road to democracy.
  These are sobering assessments, but they were a welcome change from 
the standard White House line of everything is fine, everything is 
hunky-dory, we are winning in Iraq, the road to victory is in Iraq. In 
fact, we are at the precipice of a civil war. We are on the doorstep of 
a civil war.
  Now that we have this honest talk finally, we are finding from people 
who are telling us what the beginnings were because we did not get here 
by accident. We got here by people not listening to the people on the 
ground. Our first ambassador, Paul Bremer, writes in a recent book, 
even on page 10, you don't even have to finish the book, he had asked 
for more troops. The President of the United States, the Secretary of 
Defense for years maintained nobody had asked for more troops. We had 
enough troops, if the generals needed more troops, they would have told 
us. Now the lead ambassador, the point man for the President of the 
United States, in fact, asked for more troops.
  One of the big problems we had, we had 500,000 troops to get Iraq out 
of Kuwait, but somehow some genius over at the Department of Defense, 
that is the Secretary of Defense, thought you could do it for less than 
100,000, both occupy Iraq, win a war in Iraq, and do it for less than 
100,000 when we needed 500,000 just to get them out of Kuwait. In fact, 
somebody did ask for more troops, and the President of the United 
States and the Secretary of Defense refused to listen to the 
ambassador, their point person.
  That is not the only mistake they made. In fact, today, going back to 
one of the early days of the insurgency, we now realize from the last 2 
days of The New York Times, generals were saying we had to not try to 
topple Iraq, we had to deal with the Feyhadeen. Otherwise, we are going 
to have the beginnings of an insurgency. The generals on the ground 
were overruled.
  Again, contrary to the line, which is, we are going to listen to the 
generals and whatever they need, we did not listen to the generals. 
When we finally get to Baghdad and did finally topple the government, 
and there was all this chaos going on, the Secretary of Defense once 
again used his famous line which is ``Freedom is messy. Sometimes it is 
followed by chaos,'' after a country has been headed by an 
authoritarian dictatorship for so long.
  Every problem we are facing today, too few troops, not listening to 
the generals to literally suppress and put down the insurgency early 
on, not having a plan for the occupation, is what has gotten us to this 
point today, where we are on the precipice of a civil war. And all is 
not hindsight, Monday morning quarterbacking. At the very time these 
problems were emerging, people said you are doing the wrong thing. And 
the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States and 
others around his administration refused to listen.
  And this Congress has acted like the ``hear no evil, see no evil'' 
Congress. We have $10 billion on Iraq reconstruction that nobody can 
account for, and there have been no hearings and no accountability by 
the administration. Paul Bremer has not asked to come up and tell us 
what happened when he said he needed more troops. What happened to the 
generals when they said we have to put down the insurrection?
  Yet, this Republican Congress refuses to hold anybody's feet to the 
fire, refuses to ask any question, ask the questions and get the 
answers for the people that we represent want to know.
  On page 10 of ``My Year in Iraq,'' Bremer writes that he was alarmed 
by a RAND Corporation report stating we did not have enough troops on 
the ground to stabilize the country. Bremer continues, ``I found the 
conclusions persuasive. And troubling. That afternoon, I had a summary 
of the draft copied and sent down the corridor to Don Rumsfeld. `I 
think you should consider this,' I said in my cover memo. I never heard 
back from him about the report.''
  Troop levels were not increased. The Feyhadeen were never put down. 
We have lost $10 billion, never to be accounted for, and we never had a 
plan for the occupation we have today. And now we are the precipice of 
a civil war.
  Mr. Speaker, we can do better than this. These problems that are 
repeating in Iraq where nobody is held accountable and nobody is asked 
questions are not isolated to the problems of Iraq. Look at Hurricane 
Katrina and all of the trailers down there and the money wasted. Again, 
nobody was in charge. Nobody listened, and American taxpayers' hard-
earned dollars are seen wasted away.

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