[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 9728-9730]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, President Bush has spent the last 2 weeks 
talking up the ``progress'' we are making in Iraq and talking down the 
Democrats and some of our Republican colleagues for trying to bring 
this war to a responsible end. But sometimes that is a problem because 
you have to deal with the facts. The facts are not as the President 
wants them to be but as they exist on the ground. The fact is, the 
President is totally out of touch with reality. He is out of touch with 
the American people and with America's interests in the region.
  I have been here a while, and I can say I have never seen a President 
as isolated since Richard Nixon. The President appears to be totally 
removed from reality. He tells us that Attorney General Gonzales has 
done a great job, when anybody who watched it views it as one of the 
least impressive appearances of an Attorney General. He tells us that 
the President of the World Bank, an American, is doing a great job, 
oblivious to the damage being done to America's reputation around the 
world. And against the advice of some of the most gifted military men 
and women in a generation, he has adopted a policy in Iraq that is a 
disaster.
  The President argues that the surge is succeeding, but with every 
welcome development he cites there is an equally unwelcome development 
that gives lie to the claim that we are making any progress. For 
example, while death squad violence against Iraqis is down

[[Page 9729]]

in some Baghdad neighborhoods where we have surged, suicide bombings 
have increased by 30 percent over the last 6 weeks. Violence is up 
dramatically in the belt ringing Baghdad. The civilian death toll has 
increased 15 percent from February to March. When we squeeze a water 
balloon in one place, it bulges somewhere else. Moqtada al-Sadr has not 
been seen, but he has been heard, rallying his followers with anti-
American messages and his thugs to take on American troops in the 
south. Last week, he pulled his ministers from the coalition 
government, and intelligence experts believe his militia is simply 
waiting out the surge.
  Closing markets to vehicles has precluded some car bombs, but it also 
has prompted terrorists to change tactics and walk in with suicide 
vests. The road to the airport to Baghdad may be safer, but the skies 
above it are more lethal; witness the ironic imposition of ``no-fly 
zones'' for our own helicopters.
  Tal Affar is the most damaging evidence of the absolute absurdity of 
this policy. The President cites it as progress.
  Architects of the President's plan called Tal Affar a model because 
in 2005 we surged about 10,000 Americans and Iraqis to pacify the city. 
Then we left, just as our troops will have to leave the Baghdad 
neighborhoods after calm is established, if it is.
  But what happened in Tal Affar? It was the scene of some of the most 
horrific sectarian violence to date. A massive truck bomb aimed at the 
Shiite community led to a retaliatory rampage by Shiite death squads, 
aided by Iraqi police. Hundreds were killed. The population of Tal 
Affar, which was 200,000 people just a year or two ago, is down to 
80,000.
  There is an even more basic problem with the President's progress 
report, and it goes to the heart of the choices we now face in Iraq. 
Whatever tactical progress we may be making will amount to nothing if 
it is not serving a larger strategy for success. The administration's 
strategy has virtually no prospect for success, and his strategy, in a 
nutshell, is the hope that the surge will buy President Maliki's 
government time to broker the sustainable political settlement that our 
own military views as essential, and that is premised upon the notion 
of a central government in Baghdad with real power.
  But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the 
government by the people it purports to serve, and no capacity on the 
part of the government to deliver security or services. There is 
little, if any, prospect that this government will build that trust and 
capacity any time soon.
  How many times have colleagues heard, beginning in January, how there 
is an oil agreement, that they have gotten that deal? Has anybody seen 
that deal, after we heralded it time and again as essential to pulling 
this country together?
  In short, the most basic premise of the President's approach--that 
the Iraqi people will rally behind a strong central government, headed 
by Maliki, in fact will look out for their interests equitably--is 
fundamentally and fatally flawed. It will not happen in anybody's 
lifetime here, including the pages'.
  If the President won't look at a program that is different than he is 
now pursuing if his plan doesn't work, what will he do? History 
suggests there are only a couple of ways, when there is a self-
sustaining cycle of sectarian violence, to end it, and it is not to put 
American troops in the middle of a city of 6.2 million people to try to 
quell a civil war.
  Throughout history, four things have worked. You occupy the country 
for a generation or more. Well, that is not in our DNA. We are not the 
Persian Empire or British Empire. You can install a dictator, after 
having removed one. Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony for the U.S. to 
do that after taking one down. You can let them fight it out until one 
side massacres the other--not an option in that tinder box part of the 
world. Lastly, you make federalism work for the Iraqis. You give them 
control over the fabric of their daily lives. You separate the parties, 
you give them breathing room, and let them control their local police, 
their education, their religion, and their marriage. That is the only 
possibility. We can help Iraq change the focus to a limited central 
government and a Federal system, which their constitution calls for. I 
cannot guarantee that my strategy will work, but I can guarantee that 
the road the President has us on leads to nowhere with no end in sight.
  We have to change course to end this war responsibly. That is what we 
are trying to do in Congress. Later this week, we will send to the 
President an emergency supplemental bill on Iraq that provides every 
dollar our troops need and more than the President requested. It also 
provides what the majority of Americans expect and believe is 
necessary: a plan to start to bring our troops home and bring this war 
to a responsible end, not escalate it indefinitely.
  If the President vetoes the emergency spending bill, he is the one 
who will be denying our troops the funding they need. He is the one who 
will be denying the American people a path out of Iraq. The President's 
double talk on Iraq is reaching new heights of hypocrisy. I don't say 
that lightly.
  On April 16, the President claimed that setting a timetable to start 
bringing our troops home would ``legislate defeat.'' Just 2 days after 
that, 2 days later, his own Secretary of Defense had this to say:

       The push by Democrats to set a timetable for U.S. 
     withdrawal from Iraq has been helpful in showing Iraqis that 
     American patience is limited . . . that this is not an open-
     ended commitment.

  Then, in arguing against the supplemental, the President claimed that 
by sending him a bill he would somehow be forced to veto, the military 
would run out of money for Iraq in mid-April--which is not true, by the 
way--and as a result, he would have to extend the tours of duty of the 
troops already in Iraq.
  Extending those tours, the President said, ``is unacceptable.'' 
``It's unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to our veterans, it's 
unacceptable to our military families, and it's unacceptable to many in 
this country.''
  Unacceptable? The very next day, the administration announced its 
plans to do the ``unacceptable'' and extended the tours of every 
American ground troop in Iraq by 3 months.
  Talk about hypocrisy: Telling us the path out of Iraq is a way which 
is forcing him to veto a bill that will require him then to extend 
tours because of that veto and that is unacceptable, and the very next 
day he extends the tour of every person on the ground. Once one gets 
over the hypocrisy, that announcement is an urgent warning that the 
administration's policy in Iraq cannot be sustained without doing 
terrible long-term damage to our military.
  If this administration insists on keeping this many troops in Iraq 
until next year, we will have to send soldiers back for third, fourth, 
and fifth tours, extend deployment times from 6 months to a year for 
marines, from 12 months to 16 to 18 months for the Army. The military 
will also be forced to end the practice of keeping troops at home for 
at least 1 year between deployments, to fully mobilize the National 
Guard and Reserve, and to perpetuate this backdoor draft.
  This President is breaking--is breaking--the military. We don't have 
to guess at the impact on this relentless readiness, its impact on 
retention and recruitment. This month, we learned that recent graduates 
of West Point are choosing to leave Active-Duty service at the highest 
rate in more than three decades. This administration's policies are 
literally driving some of our best and brightest young officers out of 
the military.
  Instead of working with Democrats in Congress in a way forward, this 
President, divorced from reality, is accusing us of emboldening the 
enemy and undermining our troops. I have a message for you, Mr. 
President: The only thing that is emboldening the enemy is your failed 
policy. Mr. President, the only mission you have accomplished is 
emboldening the enemy with your failed policy.
  Instead of escalating the war with no end in sight, we have to start 
bringing this to a responsible conclusion. If the administration 
insists on keeping this

[[Page 9730]]

many troops next year, we are in serious, serious jeopardy.
  I conclude by saying that I believe it is my obligation as a 
Senator--and I hope the obligation of everyone else--to keep 
relentless, unending pressure on this President to come to grips with 
reality, to continually push every single day to say: Mr. President, 
stop; stop this policy of yours.
  It is my hope, even though he is likely to veto this bill, that we 
will keep the pressure on and ultimately convince at least a dozen of 
our Republican colleagues it is time to stop backing the President and 
start backing the troops. It is time, Mr. President, to begin to 
responsibly bring this war to an end.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________