[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5455-5458]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            PROGRESS IN IRAQ

  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes to talk about 
the testimony given yesterday by General Petraeus and Ambassador 
Crocker regarding our progress and challenges in Iraq. I think it is 
important for the American people to understand and for our colleagues 
to understand that the surge of troops in Iraq that began in the early 
part of last year was a corrective measure, and that from the fall of 
Baghdad until January 2007, it was clear to me, Senator McCain, and 
others that our strategy during that period of time was not working; 
that we had too few troops; that the country got into a lawless state; 
that political progress and economic progress was virtually 
nonexistent. There was a paralysis when it came to the ability to 
govern in Baghdad: The economy was stalled; violence was spreading 
throughout the country to the point, in 2006, that the al-Qaida flag 
flew over parts of Anbar Province.
  So there was a moment of reckoning. The President had a decision to 
make after the Republican losses in November of 2006. It was widely 
held that the reason Republicans lost in the midterm elections was 
because of Iraq policy. Secretary Rumsfeld resigned and the President 
had a choice. One of the choices would have been to adopt the strategy 
of withdrawing at a faster rate, the theory being to put pressure on 
the Iraqi military and government to perform better because they were 
not doing well because they were relying too much upon us. The other 
theory was that the security environment is so out of control and so 
tenuous that you will never have military, political, or economic 
progress until you get better control over security.
  Well, the surge argument, advocated primarily by Senators McCain, 
Lieberman, and others, won the day with the President. So it was clear 
that we needed to change strategy at the end of 2006, and we did. There 
is an ongoing debate about whether that was the correct choice. To 
evaluate fairly the testimony of Ambassador Crocker and General 
Petraeus, I think one has to look at what happened from January of 2007 
up to today and planned out to July 2008.
  During that period of time, there was a surge of American combat 
forces into Iraq of 30,000 additional combat troops. The security 
argument prevailed over the withdrawal argument. The troops were 
deployed in a significantly different way. Not only were there more of 
the troops, which was a requirement, General Petraeus came up with a 
new strategy. He got the troops out into the communities, at security 
stations, where American soldiers served with Iraqi soldiers and 
policemen within the community. That built a sense of confidence we had 
not seen before. At the end of 2006, something very startling happened 
in Anbar Province. Sheik Sattar, one of the young sheiks in the Anbar 
Sunni region, after part of his family was murdered by al-Qaida, came 
to an American colonel and said: We have had it, we want to fight with 
you. We want these guys out of Anbar. We don't want to be dominated by 
al-Qaida in Iraq. The commander seized the moment and put a couple of 
tanks around the guy's house. From that action by the colonel and the 
addition of combat forces, Anbar Province is a completely different 
place.
  If you ask me what is the most successful event of all within the 
surge period of time, I would argue it is the uprising in Anbar 
Province by Iraqi Sunni Arabs against the al-Qaida presence in Anbar. 
They have rejected the al-Qaida agenda and joined forces with the 
coalition forces, American forces, and we have literally delivered a 
punishing blow to al-Qaida in Anbar Province--to the point now that 
Ramadi and Fallujah are some of the safest places in all of Iraq.
  So for the American public to grasp what is going on here, I think 
you have to understand this one fact. When Arab Muslim people say no to 
al-Qaida and we will fight bin Laden, his agents, and sympathizers, 
that is a good day for America. That is what the war is going to be 
about conventionally, in terms of how we win. If the people in the 
Mideast turn on al-Qaida and they say no and shoulder the burden of 
fighting and create a community in place of al-Qaida's agenda that is 
more tolerant, more open, that will allow the Shia and the Kurds to 
live in peace; that will not try to pass on the al-Qaida philosophy and 
agenda to everybody surrounding the region. So this is incredibly good 
news from the surge, with the increased combat capability and the 
overplaying of al-Qaida's hand in Anbar; they were incredibly vicious 
to the people.
  I have been to Iraq 11 times, and the stories that come out of Anbar 
Province while al-Qaida dominated the region are heart-breaking and 
bone-chilling. Now we have, in April of 2008, a completely changed 
Anbar Province, where we have over 90,000 Iraqis, called the ``Sons of 
Iraq,'' patrolling their communities at night and during the day to 
make sure al-Qaida doesn't come back.

[[Page 5456]]

  Iraq is a changed place in many ways. If you had to list the winners 
and losers of the surge, I argue that the biggest loser of all is the 
al-Qaida presence in Iraq. Any time al-Qaida is losing, we are winning. 
What has happened in that period of time? The economic progress in Iraq 
is real and is fundamentally different than it was before the surge. 
The reason I think we have had economic progress in Iraq is because, 
with better security, you can engage in commerce. It is hard to run an 
economy when you are afraid to go to work. It is hard to build a 
society when your children cannot go to school. The GDP growth in Iraq 
is about 7 percent, and inflation before the surge was at 66 percent. 
Now it is close to 12 percent, and dropping. The oil production is up 
by 50 percent. Electricity demand is up by 25 percent.
  We have economic progress in Iraq that is showing signs of a vibrant 
country moving toward normalcy. We had a budget path in Baghdad by the 
Iraqi Parliament, where Sunni, Shia, and Kurds took the $48 billion of 
revenue that the central government has under their authority and 
shared it with each province and each and every group within Iraq. What 
does that mean? I think most political leaders in America would tell 
you that money is political power. In our minority status as 
Republicans, the Democratic majority gives us an allocation to run our 
staffs and participate in committee activity. We share the resources of 
running the Senate. We sit down and say the Republicans get this and 
the Democrats get that. That is a recognition that we may disagree 
with, but we all have a vibrant role and we need the resources. The 
fact that the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds were able to come together and 
allocate resources owned by the country as a whole to each and every 
group is a major step forward. It would not have happened a year and a 
half ago. It is a buy-in by every group that Iraq is a separate country 
with a common identity. When you can get all three groups giving the 
resources of the country to each other, that is a buy-in to win Iraq.
  There is more than that. An amnesty law was passed about 90 days ago. 
That means there are thousands of people in jail in Iraq--mostly 
Sunnis--who were captured in part of the surge and some before--that 
were taking up arms against the central government. These Sunnis in 
jail didn't want to participate in democracy. They ran the show under 
Saddam Hussein. Even though they were a minority in Iraq when Saddam 
was in power, they ran the show. They had an uprising, using violence 
to get their way, to topple the government. They landed in jail. One 
thing history will tell you and teach you, if you follow it closely, is 
that there will never be a reconciliation of a country that is divided 
ethnically or politically until there is a level of forgiveness. 
Reconciliation is a word, and it means nothing without action. The 
amnesty law was passed by the Shia, Kurds, and Sunnis, and it gave the 
people in jail who were captured as part of the Sunni insurgency a 
chance to be released and to start over again. There have been 24,000 
applications to be released from jail under the amnesty law and 17,000, 
I have been told, have been granted.
  That is a statement by the Shia and the Kurds who were on the 
receiving end of the violence to the people in jail, saying: Go back 
home. Let's start over as a new country. That, to me, is an act of 
forgiveness that is a precondition to reconciliation, and it would not 
have happened if there had not been a surge in the reduction of 
sectarian violence.
  I see my good friend from Arizona.
  Mr. KYL. I wonder if I might interrupt the Senator to ask a couple of 
questions.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Please.
  Mr. KYL. I think the Senator from South Carolina makes an exceedingly 
important point here, and that is that our theory, which was that the 
Muslim world itself had to reject this virulent, militant Islamist 
approach, which is manifested in the terrorism of al-Qaida; that until 
the Muslim world itself turned on those militants, those terrorists, it 
would be difficult for the West itself to actually defeat terrorism. It 
could pose a defensive posture, but it would not be defeated. What the 
Senator from South Carolina has said is what we are now seeing, as a 
result of the American support for the Iraqi people: A, a unification 
of the Iraqi people and, B, importantly, a rejection of this militant 
Islamist terrorism to the point that they are now joining in the fight 
and have something invested in that in terms of their country.
  The question I want to ask has to do with how all of this relates to 
American security. Yesterday, Senator Warner asked both General 
Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker whether, as a result of the success of 
the surge--and a key point that the Senator from South Carolina made, 
that now the Iraqi Muslim population was itself fighting to excise this 
cancer from the region--whether this fact does translate into America 
being safer. I wonder if the Senator could comment on both General 
Petraeus's response to that and Ambassador Crocker's response, and the 
Senator's own extensive experience and what his comments on that would 
be.
  Mr. GRAHAM. I asked General Petraeus that very question. He said that 
anytime Muslims would take up arms against al-Qaida, it is marching 
toward the solution America has been seeking. I think General Petraeus, 
myself, and Senators Kyl and Lieberman understand this war is not just 
about killing terrorists; this is about supporting moderation where you 
can find it, isolating the elements within the region.
  If you had to put a list of extreme elements together, al-Qaida would 
be at the top. To those men and women who have participated in the 
surge and stood by the Anbar Iraqis who turned on al-Qaida, I think you 
have made our country safer. To the Iraqis who took up arms against al-
Qaida, I think you have made Iraq safer and the world safer.
  Mr. President, my question back to the Senator from Arizona, if I 
may, is, from his understanding of what was said yesterday, what can 
the Congress do, rather than criticize, what constructively can we do 
as a body to support those in harm's way and make sure we leave Iraq 
with a successful outcome?
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, that is an extremely important question 
because there is a lot of rhetoric about this war. The question is, 
What is the action line here, what can Congress do? Actually, it is a 
question of what Congress must do.
  As I understand it, looking at General Petraeus's testimony, he was 
very adamant that Congress needed to pass the supplemental 
appropriations bill that will actually fund the troops in the field. 
This money was requested over a year ago. It represents a little over 
$100 billion.
  According to his testimony, it is critical not only to the military 
needs but also he importantly talked about the Commander's Emergency 
Response Program, the State Department's Quick Response Fund, and the 
USAID programs.
  The Senator from South Carolina was talking a moment ago about this 
two-part process, not only the political reconciliation but the 
economic reconstruction of the country.
  General Petraeus himself, who clearly wants to get the troops funded, 
noted the interrelationship of the funding to help reconstruct the 
country, as well as to support the troops.
  We are very soon going to be in a situation, according to Secretary 
Gates, where the Armed Forces are going to have to allow money to be 
borrowed from their regular operational accounts to fund the operations 
in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said the results of that would be a 
slowdown in training and equipping Iraqi forces, the halting of 
military operations and pay of defense personnel, and losing the 
ability to replace lost and damaged equipment by ongoing operations 
and, finally, that some operations simply would not be started because 
they will not know in advance that the funding will be there to 
complete the operation, something with which I am sure no operational 
commander in the field would want to live.

[[Page 5457]]

  My understanding of his testimony is he very strongly urged the 
Congress to quickly pass the supplemental appropriations bill so the 
troops in the field can be funded and do the mission, after all, we 
have sent them to do.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I see our colleague, Senator Lieberman, is 
on the floor. If I may, I wish to direct a question his way.
  One of the themes of the testimony from General Petraeus is that 
after the surge has progressed to this stage, the biggest threat to 
Iraqi stability is no longer al-Qaida or sectarian violence but special 
groups trained by the Iranian Government sent back into Iraq to 
destabilize this effort of moderation.
  Mr. President, can Senator Lieberman tell us his take on Iran's 
involvement and where he thinks we need to go as a nation?
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from South Carolina 
and also my friend from Arizona.
  This is a very important question, and I thought it was a very 
compelling part of the testimony offered both by General Petraeus and 
Ambassador Crocker yesterday. If I may approach this by going back to 
the colloquy between my two friends earlier, they put their finger on a 
very important point. Let me go even a little further back.
  After 9/11/01, after we were attacked, one of the insights we had was 
there is a violent civil war, both theological and political, going on 
within the Muslim world between a small group of fanatics, violent 
jihadists and the rest of the Muslim world who are pretty much like the 
rest of all of us. They want to live better, freer, more opportunity-
filled lives for themselves and their children.
  We went into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We are there now to 
essentially help the Iraqis--and remember, Iraq is not just another 
country. It is one of the historic centers of the Arab world--to help 
this great country and its leaders and people to take hold of their own 
destiny and, in doing so, reject the extremists, the jihadists, the 
suicide bombers, and create for the Muslim world a different path to 
the future than the extremism and suicidal death and hatred and 
primitivism that al-Qaida, the current leadership of Iran, and others 
of that sort present to them.
  Part of what the testimony yesterday, I think, from Ambassador 
Crocker and General Petraeus said is that thanks to the backing of the 
United States through the surge, the Iraqis are taking control of their 
destiny.
  As my colleagues pointed out, the moderates are winning. They have 
al-Qaida on the run out of Al Anbar Province. The businesses are 
reopening. The children are going back to school. They have hopes of a 
better future.
  One of our colleagues on the Armed Services Committee said to General 
Petraeus: What is going on here? I thought we were in Iraq to fight al-
Qaida. Now you are telling me we pretty much have beaten al-Qaida, we 
have them on the run, and now you are telling us we are there to fight 
Iran.
  That question missed the point, the point my colleagues have made in 
their colloquy. The point is, we are there for an affirmative reason. 
We are there to help the Iraqis establish a self-governing, self-
defending moderate country, an antiterrorist country. We do have al-
Qaida on the run, but as the two witnesses made clear yesterday, Iran 
is not on the run. In fact, Iran is an expansionist, fanatic power not 
only working through these special groups in Iraq but through Hezbollah 
in Lebanon and through Hamas in the Palestinian areas. They were 
tremendous statements yesterday, very strong.
  Ambassador Crocker:

       Iran continues to undermine the efforts of the Iraqi 
     Government to establish a stable, secure state.

  This takes me--and then I will yield back to my colleagues--to what 
seemed to be the frustration of some of our colleagues on the committee 
yesterday. They were trying to get General Petraeus and Ambassador 
Crocker to tell us again: We are going to get all our troops or most of 
our troops out by X date. Fortunately, General Petraeus and Ambassador 
Crocker are not accountable to political calculus. They have been given 
the responsibility for this mission. They have American lives on the 
line. They have lost American lives.
  The answer General Petraeus gave us is clearly the right one: I wish 
I could tell you how many brigades more I can pull out after July, but 
I can't until I see what conditions on the ground are. Maybe I can 
bring out some more, but maybe I can't. If I do it prematurely, we will 
run the risk of chaos and a loss of all we have gained in Iraq; 
frankly, a disrespect of the lives of Americans who have been lost 
there. Their families and loved ones always tell us: Don't let them to 
have died in vain. The No. 1 winner, if we pull out prematurely, would 
be Iran. They are all over Iraq. They have their hands in just about 
everything.
  If we leave and chaos ensues, as Ambassador Crocker said yesterday:

       Iran has said publicly it will fill any vacuum in Iraq, and 
     extremist Shi'a militias would reassert themselves.

  We cannot let that happen. I thank my colleague.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I think our time expires in the next 5 
minutes. I will quickly wrap up my thoughts and ask my colleagues to 
comment.
  People want to know when we are going to come home. Trust me, if you 
have been to Iraq at all, if you spent any time with our men and women 
in uniform, you want them to be with their families and out of harm's 
way in the most desperate way.
  The point I want people to remember is these are all volunteers. Some 
have been there two, three, four times. They make one simple request to 
me as a Senator: Take care of us, but support us so we can win. The 
reason they go back time and time again is they understand the 
consequences to our Nation if we lose.
  So if you want to take stress off the military--and don't we all--the 
best stress we can take off our military is the stress of not knowing 
if they are going to be allowed to win.
  I hope colleagues in this body will respect General Petraeus's 
reasoned opinion and give him some deference because I think he has 
produced results that will go down in history as one of the most 
successful military counterinsurgency operations anywhere on the planet 
and give a little deference and respect to Ambassador Crocker, who has 
put together political progress under the most difficult circumstances, 
where the Iraqis are seeing each other now not as enemies but as 
partners in an endeavor to create a better life for themselves, to live 
at peace with their neighbors, and to make the whole world safer 
against extremism.
  When we come home is not the question for the ages. It may be for 
your next election and it may be about your political future; that may 
be the way you are looking at it or it may be about the Republican 
Party's political future. It is not that way for me, Senator McCain, or 
I think anybody else, certainly not for Senator Lieberman.
  The question for me, the question for our Nation, and the world over 
time is, What did we leave behind? I am more confident than ever that 
we can leave behind, in the heart of the Mideast, in the center of the 
Arab world, a group of people called Iraqis, who will be our friends 
for a long time to come, will contain Iranian expansionism, and will 
continue to be al-Qaida's worst nightmare. That day is coming. The only 
way we can lose now is for Congress to undercut it.
  To Senator Kyl, how important is it for the Congress to pass a 
supplemental without strings attached?
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I say to my colleague there are going to be 
efforts apparently to hold this war funding hostage to other funding 
requests. For example, one of our colleagues said we are going to look 
at the supplemental not only for the $190 billion for the war--by the 
way, that figure is incorrect; it is $102 billion--but also what we can 
do on this bill for summer jobs programs.
  I submit it is important to fund the troops because we have sent them 
on a mission. They volunteered, and they deserve our support. We should 
not threaten to withhold that support unless there is also funding for 
other programs that have a far lower priority than the security of our 
troops and the security of the United States.

[[Page 5458]]

  I will also add one other point. In reading from what General 
Petraeus said yesterday and focusing right down on the American people, 
it is clearly in our national interest, he said, to help Iraq prevent 
the resurgence of al-Qaida in the heart of the Arab world. Both he and 
Ambassador Crocker said it is worth it to the United States that the 
success there is making us safer here at home. That is what it all gets 
back to, when folks say we need to have supplemental funding on other 
programs. This is making us safer at home.
  I will conclude. I want my colleague from Connecticut to comment for 
a moment, and the Senator from Tennessee also wanted a couple minutes 
at the end of our time. I assured him we would have a of couple 
minutes. We may have to ask for an extra minute or so.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend. Briefly, I recount a 
conversation with a friend of mine this morning. He said, watching the 
hearings yesterday, that he thought those who have been critical of our 
effort in Iraq seemed quite restrained yesterday. I said they were, and 
I think it is because the record General Petraeus and Ambassador 
Crocker were giving us was one of remarkable progress militarily, 
politically, and economically. It was hard to criticize, so the 
criticisms were kind of around the side: Why can't you tell us when we 
will get out exactly? Why didn't President Maliki consult more before 
he went south?
  What I wish is that our colleagues had accepted the facts General 
Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker gave us of the extraordinary progress 
in Iraq, which is very critical to our security because it creates a 
victory for the moderates, the good guys in the civil war within the 
Islamic world, and it protects our security in that sense because, 
remember, it is the fanatics who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11.
  Let's hope for another day when there will be an agreement on the 
facts, and maybe we can get together to figure out how we can 
accelerate progress in Iraq so what all of us want can happen, which is 
we bring as many of our troops home as quickly as possible, with honor 
and after success. What can Congress do? I would say two things, after 
listening yesterday. One is to pass a supplemental. The second is to 
stay out of the way and not force our military and diplomatic leaders 
to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don't impose deadlines.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator 
Alexander be recognized for 3 minutes to celebrate a big event for the 
State of Tennessee.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, the Senator from 
Tennessee is recognized.

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