[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 11748-11749]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            IRAQ WAR STATUS

  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of 
order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Without objection, the gentleman from 
Illinois is recognized for 5 minutes.
  There was no objection.
  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, last week we had a big debate about Iraq, 
and our battles over there continue. There were a lot of accusations 
about which party cut and run, yielded by those on the other side who 
said Democrats wanted to cut and run.
  It is ironic because this is the first war in American history that a 
party and a President has chosen to divide Americans on the war rather 
than unite them.
  But let's take the concept of cutting and running. In the spring of 
2002, American forces had Osama bin Laden on the run in Tora Bora and 
Afghanistan, but the administration decided to cut and run from that 
fight taking resources appropriated for Afghanistan and moving them 
onto the field of Iraq and cutting and running from Afghanistan and its 
responsibilities of isolating and getting Osama bin Laden.
  Then Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, led the charge into 
Iraq with a cut-and-run mentality, touting what he called the 10-30-30 
strategy, to bug out of Iraq as soon as we finished invading: 10 days 
of war, 30 days of occupation, and 30 days of transition.
  His prediction was by May of 2003 we would have less than 30,000 
American troops in Iraq.

                              {time}  1830

  So I ask, how are we doing on Don Rumsfeld 10-30-30? His entire 
mentality was to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. And we have 
been bogged down in Iraq because of his cut-and-run mentality, because 
he had too few troops, not a plan for the occupation for Iraq at all.
  And when you go back and think about it, they promised a quick war, 
and we got a long war. When the Republican Congress cut and run from 
its responsibility oversight, how did that war change?
  They said we were going to find weapons of mass destruction, and all 
we got was sand. But the Republican Congress cut and run from its 
responsibility of oversight.
  They said we were going to have a conventional war, and we ended up 
with an insurgency. And the Republican Congress and Don Rumsfeld cut 
and run from their responsibility of oversight and changing the 
strategy.
  They said we were going to be treated as liberators, and we became 
occupiers. And they cut and run from the responsibility of oversight, 
and Don Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, cut and run from 
understanding the type of conflict we had.
  They said we needed no more than 130,000 troops, and it has become 
self-evident that we needed more troops than even in the first Gulf 
War, and that Bremer, the then President's ambassador, and others had 
asked for more troops, and the administration and, most importantly, 
the Secretary of Defense cut and run from his responsibility to provide 
those troops.
  And that doesn't even count the Kevlar vests, the Humvees, and the 
other types of equipment that the troops needed at every step of the 
way. The Republican Congress and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld cut 
and run from their responsibility, and that reality that they met with 
in Iraq cut right into their ideology of cutting and running from their 
responsibilities.
  And need I remind the Secretary of Defense of the words of Winston 
Churchill. ``Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and 
easy. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the 
signal is given, he is no longer the master of the policy, but the 
slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.''
  Or as Don Rumsfeld himself likes to say, ``Stuff happens, and it's 
untidy.'' Perhaps it turned out untidy because from day 1 the 
administration had a cut-and-run attitude towards the results of the 
war.

[[Page 11749]]

  Don Rumsfeld convinced the President to cut and run on the safety of 
our troops when it came to Kevlar vests and Humvees. Over objections of 
GEN Eric Shinseki and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of 
Defense Rumsfeld produced a plan to invade a nation of 25 million with 
only 130-some-odd-thousand troops.
  GEN Anthony Zinni, Commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East, 
said, ``We are paying the price for the lack of credible planning or 
the lack of a plan. Ten years of planning were thrown away.''
  LTG Greg Newbold, top operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, put it more succinctly and clearly. ``My sincere view is that 
the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness 
and a swagger that are the special province of those who have never had 
to execute these missions or bury the results.''
  Secretary Rumsfeld's spokesman Larry DiRita visited Kuwait in 2003 
and said, ``We don't owe the people of Iraq anything. We're giving them 
their freedom, and that's enough.''
  So when it comes to the accusation of cutting and running, let's look 
at the record. And the record is quite clear that although the slogan 
is easy to throw around, that it is the mentality of the Secretary of 
Defense.

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