[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Page 20192]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         IRAQ CONTINGENCY PLANS

  Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, an issue I wish to address today relates to 
a request that Senator Clinton, my colleague from New York, made to the 
Secretary of Defense back in May, asking that appropriate oversight 
committees in the Congress, particularly the Armed Services Committee 
on which I serve, as does the Presiding Officer, be given briefings 
regarding what current contingency plans might exist in the Department 
of Defense if we do, in fact, begin a withdrawal of our forces from 
Iraq.
  The Secretary of Defense did not respond to the Senator from New York 
directly. Instead, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Eric 
Edelman, wrote her a letter with which she took great umbrage last 
weekend stating, and I quote from Mr. Edelman's letter, ``that 
premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from 
Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon 
its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, 
Lebanon, and Somalia.''
  He then said at the end of his letter:

       It is a longstanding departmental policy that operational 
     plans, including contingency plans, are not released outside 
     of the department.

  I have great concerns about this letter, having spent 5 years working 
in the Pentagon and knowing these sorts of letters require coordination 
among the highest offices inside the Pentagon. I ask that the Secretary 
of Defense clarify that position of the Department of Defense on the 
matters that his Under Secretary addressed.
  Is it the policy of the Department of Defense that a discussion of 
the withdrawal of forces reinforces enemy propaganda and that we might 
be abandoning our allies, as we are perceived to have done in Lebanon 
and Somalia?
  The first thing I ask is, what allies did we abandon in Lebanon and 
Somalia?--I was in Lebanon as a journalist. We went into Lebanon as 
part of a U.N. peacekeeping force in order to separate warring 
factions. We were there purely on a mission of peace. We were not there 
to side with one faction or another. In Somalia, it was basically gang 
warfare. We all know that now.
  This is the kind of rhetoric that, in my opinion, was designed purely 
for the purpose of attacking Senator Clinton rather than addressing the 
issues that we need to be looking at.
  There is probably no greater testimony to that than to just go back 
to the bill that Senator Warner and Senator Lugar offered as an 
amendment on the Defense authorization bill, which was just pulled 
because this amendment--which was put together after careful thought by 
the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the former 
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, two of the esteemed 
leaders of the Republican Party--asked for the same thing. In fact, it 
called for the same thing.
  Senator Warner and Senator Lugar were stating in this amendment that 
the President should require, among other things, a report to be 
presented to the Congress no later than October 16, 2007, which 
specifically addressed the same issues that Senator Clinton asked to be 
addressed in her letter, showing what the plans might be and when they 
might be executable in the event we decide to withdraw our forces from 
Iraq.
  Also, I think it is a legitimate question for people in Congress to 
be asking when we look back at the way we ended up going into Iraq. I 
was not a Member of this body, but I watched, as did so many Americans, 
on television as this body and the House of Representatives had 
administration officials testifying. They asked in the runup to this 
war how long we were going to be in Iraq, and the answer was a litany. 
It was as long as is necessary and not 1 day more.
  For Under Secretary Edelman to in any way indicate that it is the 
policy of this administration that they do not have to share the 
thought they are putting into these options is totally out of line.
  For that reason, I joined with Senator Clinton, Senator Bayh, and 
Senator Byrd in a letter to the chairman of the Armed Services 
Committee specifically asking that we have hearings in the Armed 
Services Committee that will address these issues. If the 
administration wants to go into closed hearings, that is fine. But I am 
asking today, No. 1, that the Secretary of Defense clarify for us what 
his beliefs are with respect to the rhetoric that came out of a letter 
that took 2 months to be generated from his Department in response to 
what Senator Clinton asked for; and then secondly, that the other 
Members of this body join me in expressing their concern on this issue.
  We have to have contingency plans. It is within the purview of the 
Congress for us to examine them. Again, I ask Senators on both sides of 
the aisle to put their eyes on this and join me in this expression of 
concern.

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