[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 19877-19879]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I would like to step back for a few 
minutes and reflect on the debate that occurred here a few nights ago 
with respect to the war in Iraq. One of the things I like to do is to 
try to see if we can't find consensus--rather than just disagreeing on 
issues, to try to find ways to bring us together. I have been 
reflecting a good deal on that debate.
  I had an opportunity, along with two of our colleagues, Senator Ben 
Nelson and Senator Mark Pryor, to have a breakfast meeting with 
Secretary Gates at the Pentagon earlier this week. That was the first 
time I had ever had a chance to spend any personal time with Secretary 
Gates, who came to us as one of the people who served on the Iraq Study 
Group. You may recall that, Mr. President, he served there for most of 
its time and has been president of Texas A&M. He served in a number of 
leadership posts here in earlier administrations and was a senior 
official in intelligence. He is a very bright, able guy and also of 
very good heart, someone who, over breakfast with us, was remarkably 
candid in his observations, not someone who tried to sugar-coat what is 
going on in Iraq but who just was as honest and forthright with us. 
That was enormously refreshing.
  He is a person of strong intellect, obviously, and a person who dealt 
with a faculty senate at Texas A&M and I think is not uncomfortable 
dealing with the U.S. Senate. I have been told by any number of people 
who have been presidents of universities that the transition to working 
here in this body is not all that hard. If you can work with a faculty 
senate, you can work with the U.S. Senate. We have a couple of people 
here, ironically, who have been university presidents and now serve 
here, among them Lamar Alexander from the University of Tennessee.
  I left the breakfast meeting actually feeling encouraged about maybe 
the prospects, somewhere down the line, of finding consensus.
  Here in the United States, our patience grows thin with respect to 
our involvement there. We have been involved for over 4 years. We have 
lost thousands of lives, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars--
money we have largely borrowed from folks such as the Chinese, South 
Koreans, and Japanese because these are moneys we don't have, so we 
simply increase our Nation's indebtedness to pay for this war. 
Meanwhile, those in this country who pay the taxes, whose sons and 
daughters, husbands and wives have gone over and been shot at, in some 
cases been shot, hurt, wounded, in some cases killed--they paid the 
price and have borne the burden. In many cases, they are tired of it, 
as I think most of us are. We would like to see the beginning of the 
end and, frankly, a new beginning at the same time for the people of 
Iraq.
  I think for the most part most of us realize we are going to have a 
military involvement there, we are going to have a presence in Iraq, 
maybe for several years. If you look at Kosovo, we have been out of 
Kosovo for 10 years, but we are still there militarily. The war ended 
in Korea over 50 years ago; we still have a significant military 
presence there. I think it is likely we are going to have a military 
presence in Iraq for some time. The question is, What should they be 
doing? What should our troops be doing?
  Today, as you know, we are policing a civil war, trying to keep 
Sunnis and Shiites from killing each other while at the same time going 
after insurgents and training Iraqi troops and trying to help secure 
the borders of Iraq. My hope is a year from now--and I suggest a year 
from now--we will still have troops in Iraq, probably tens of 
thousands, hopefully not 140,000 or 150,000 troops. What will they be 
doing? My hope is they will not be policing a civil war. My hope is 
they will not have to be involved in trying to keep Sunnis from killing 
Shiites and vice versa. My expectation is there is going to continue to 
be a need to train and equip and supply Iraqi armed forces and police. 
There will be a need for our troops to protect U.S. assets, the 
embassy, and other physical infrastructure we have, that we own or 
occupy. There will be a need in some cases to join the Iraqis in 
counterinsurgency operations against the really bad guys. There may be 
an opportunity and need for us to help police the borders of Iraq with 
Syria and Iran, borders which leak like sieves today.
  Those are the kinds of responsibilities I suspect our troops will be 
called upon to perform. But my hope is we will not need as many of 
them, not nearly as many of them, that they will not be as numerous nor 
as visible and hopefully not as much in danger as they have been the 
last 4 years.
  On the Iraqi side, what I heard 4\1/2\ weeks ago, about a month ago 
when I was last there, is a lot of the Iraqis don't want us to be there 
in such great numbers. They don't want us to be as visible. They don't 
want us to be as numerous. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki suggested about 
a week ago that whenever we are ready to step out they are ready to 
step up. I wish that were true. He later sort of spoke again or someone 
stepped in, one of his spokespeople stepped in and said that is not 
exactly what he said or what he meant.
  I believe the Iraqis are not of one mind with regard to our presence. 
Some would like it if we would leave tomorrow, but a number realize we 
have sacrificed and given our life's blood, a lot of money, a lot of 
patience with them, and I think for a lot of the folks there they 
realize that and they appreciate that. But they don't want us to be as 
numerous or visible, and eventually they want to have their country 
back with us not as an occupying force, although some may see us as 
that, but have us playing a diminishing role.
  What I think we have here is a growing consensus in this country to 
begin reducing our presence--not this month, not this summer, maybe not 
until later this year. I think we need to send a signal, our President 
needs to send a signal to the people of our country, to the Congress, 
that this is not going to continue forever. We don't want it to, it is 
not sustainable, and it should not be our responsibility forever. 
Eventually, the Iraqi people have to decide whether

[[Page 19878]]

they want a country. They have to step up. They have to be willing to 
make the difficult choices that at least to this point in time their 
leaders have been reluctant or unable to do.
  I don't want to provide a strong defense for inaction on behalf of 
the Iraqi Parliament and Iraqi leaders, but I remind us, and we have 
seen it here this week, the U.S. Senate, an institution that has been 
around for over 200 years, how hard it is for us to come to consensus 
on difficult issues. We saw that as recently as last night. We saw that 
as recently as 2 nights earlier, when we were up all night. We, in a 
country that has worked with democracy and democratic traditions for 
over 200 years, should not be surprised that in a country where they 
have basically 2 years of experience, in the middle of a war and 
insurgency, sometimes they struggle through a democratic process to 
make difficult situations. It is not a surprise to me, and I don't 
think it should be a surprise to them or to any one of us.
  Having said that, I am impatient with their inability to make tough 
decisions. Around here, sometimes we will hold off making a difficult 
decision unless we are almost staring into the abyss, we have almost no 
choice, they have figuratively a gun to our heads, and then when we 
find ourselves in that predicament, Congress--House, Senate, Democrats, 
Republican, the administration--will come to a consensus.
  The Iraqi Parliament, Iraqi leaders are, in my view, at that abyss. 
When I was over there a month ago with Senator McCaskill, we met with, 
among others, the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, an impressive fellow. 
He is a Kurd, from the northern part of the country. His name is Salih. 
We were talking about a sense of urgency and the fact that the Iraqi 
leaders don't feel this sense of urgency about making the difficult 
decisions, about sharing oil wealth and power, any decision with 
respect to the greater involvement for the Sunnis, providing an 
opportunity for the Baathist party folks, who enjoyed great power under 
the old regime but who basically are enjoying no responsible role at 
all, to give them a role to play--those kinds of decisions; municipal 
elections out in the provinces--they are supposed to have them, and 
they have not had them.
  But I talked with Deputy Prime Minister Salih. We spoke about the 
lack of a sense of urgency on behalf of his country's leaders. He 
readily acknowledged that was the case.
  I was looking for a sports analogy to draw with him and his 
countrymen, and I said to him: Do you play basketball here? I know you 
play soccer--you call it football, but do you all play basketball here?
  He said: We do. We don't play baseball or what you call football, but 
we do play some basketball.
  I said: Do you recall that basketball is a four-quarter game? The 
Iraqi leader and the Iraqi Parliament are acting as if you are in the 
first quarter of the game. In truth, you are in the fourth quarter. 
This is the fourth quarter of the game. It is not a game, but it is the 
fourth quarter. We are late into the fourth quarter.
  I said to the Deputy Primary Minister: Have you ever heard of 
something called the shot clock? He had not. Well, in American 
professional basketball, we have a shot clock that begins when the ball 
is inbounded and you have so many seconds for the team on offense, with 
the ball, to take a shot; if you do not, you lose possession of the 
ball.
  I said: We are in the fourth quarter. We are deep into the fourth 
quarter here. The shot clock has begun to run. And the Iraqi team, half 
of the team, is still on the sidelines. You are arguing about what the 
rules of the game are, who is going to get into the game, what play to 
call, who is going to take the shot. Meanwhile, the shot clock is 
running.
  What the Iraqis need to do, in the Parliament where the hatred 
between the Sunnis and Shias is such that it makes them hard to ever 
feel or think like a team, somehow they have to find a way to put that 
behind them. They have to begin making the difficult decisions they 
have been unwilling and unable to make.
  The Iraqi people are waiting for leadership. As in this country or 
any country with democratic tradition, the people yearn for strong 
leadership, fair leadership. The Iraqi people are looking to their 
leaders to show that they can work together, to figure out how to share 
this enormous oil wealth of their country, a country where they are 
capable of pumping today something like 300 million barrels of oil at 
$70 a barrel. Do the math. I should say 5 million barrels of oil a day, 
$70 dollars a barrel. That is $350 million. They are pumping less than 
2 million. They are literally leaving oil on the table, something like 
$180 million, almost $200 million a day on the table. These are 
revenues they will not realize because they simply cannot figure out 
how to work together. They need to figure that out.
  The cabinet has figured that out. They submitted to the Parliament a 
plan for sharing the oil revenue. The Parliament has to act on it.
  We are going to take the month of August off, not the entire month 
off. We will be in session until probably the first week in August, we 
come back right after Labor Day, so we will be out about 28 days. 
Meanwhile, I am told that the Iraqi Parliament was thinking about 
taking 2 months off this summer. They since have said they will take 
maybe August off. Our soldiers are not. Our soldiers, marines, our 
airmen, are not taking August off. They are going to be there exposed, 
at risk, every day for the month of August. The idea that the Iraqi 
Parliament will not be in session is unconscionable at a time when our 
troops are being asked to make such sacrifices. They need to be in 
session. They need to be figuring out how to deal with these difficult 
issues.
  I am convinced if they do that, the Iraqi people will respond. As the 
Iraqi people respond, it provides us with an opportunity to begin 
redeploying our troops this year. There is plenty of work they can do 
in Afghanistan. In some cases there is an opportunity for them to be 
stationed not far away if needed. In other cases, frankly, there is 
even a need to have them back here. As an old Governor, commander in 
chief of my National Guard, I understand full well how much we relied 
on the National Guard, especially in times of emergency. Whether in the 
middle of winter or hurricane season as we have right now, there is 
plenty of work for them to do. Plus, they have families here. Guard and 
Reserves, they are being asked to do things that--as a former national 
flight officer, having served in Vietnam, 18 years as a Reserve naval 
flight officer--we were never asked to do. We are asking our troops to 
make extraordinary sacrifices as Reservists and Guardsmen.
  There is plenty of opportunity for meaningful engagement, both in 
Afghanistan, in the Middle East region, not far away from Iraq, and 
frankly back at home for these troops to do, and simply in some cases 
to come back and be with their families after an extended separation; 
in some cases to come back and go to work with their old employers; in 
some cases to go back to their businesses, which are, in too many 
instances, in trouble in some cases out of business, and be able to 
resuscitate their business or breathe fresh life into it. There is 
plenty to do.
  In the meantime, the Iraqis have 350,000 people in their military and 
police. Think about that. We have about 150,000 troops over there. They 
have 350,000. We have been working to train them now for several years. 
I am told some of the battalions have stepped up; they are able to go 
out alone. Some of them can lead, but they need our help not too far 
away. They have got to continue to improve their readiness and their 
ability to go out and lead the fight. And my counsel to the Iraqis is: 
You can do this, we can help, just like they say in the Home Depot ad: 
You can do this, we can help. We will help. God knows we have done a 
lot and we are prepared to do more.
  The signal I hope the President would send us, once we hear from 
General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in the middle of September, is 
not we are going to surge for another year or two or three, but that we 
are going to begin redeploying our troops.

[[Page 19879]]

  They are not going to all be out a year from now. There will be 
plenty for them to do. I have talked about the four or five major 
responsibilities they can pursue a year or so from now and for some 
time after that. But I think that sends the kind of signal the American 
people are waiting to hear. I think it sends a real strong message to 
the Iraqis as well that our patience is not infinite, that we have 
expectations of them, that they need to step up. Again, another sports 
analogy: They need to step up to the plate. This is their time. This is 
their country. It is not our country, it is their country. If they want 
to have a country, they have to make the decisions. If they want to 
have a country, they need to do what is necessary to bring their people 
together and to build an institution in their country that can survive 
and persevere and hopefully can prosper.
  As we end this week, a week that has seen a lot of ups and downs here 
in the Senate, a week that has seen more than its usual degree of 
acrimony, this is a place where we actually mostly like each other, 
have a pretty good ability to work together with a fairly high degree 
of civility and comity. A lot of times too often this week that 
civility and comity has been lacking. Fortunately, when we left here 
this morning about 1 o'clock, I felt some of the bumps and bruises were 
now at least behind us, and we were back to a better footing. I hope as 
we rejoin here on Monday, we will pick up where we left off early this 
morning with the near unanimous passage of the Higher Education Act, 
something Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi and others have worked on, 
crafting together a very fine bipartisan bill, that the spirit we 
walked out of here with this morning will be waiting for us when we 
return on Monday.
  I yield the floor, and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call 
be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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