[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3926-3927]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Washington (Mr. McDermott) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, although I rise to honor the 10th 
anniversary of the Iraq war, what I really want to do today is ask: 
Why? Ten years ago, I stood on this floor and said we were entering a 
war under false pretenses. No weapons of mass destruction later, I have 
never been so sad as to be right.
  We took out Saddam Hussein with as much forethought as we gave to 
arming him just a few years earlier. We scooped him out of office and 
thought a new democracy would suddenly flower in its place.
  Last week, Robert Dreyfuss wrote an article in The Nation that I 
would like to enter into the Congressional Record. He explains that the 
CIA is currently training Syrian rebels, some of whom have Sunni 
fundamentalist ties, at the same time that it is fighting Sunni rebels 
in Iraq. Recently, dozens of Syrian soldiers fled to Iraq, only to be 
killed by Iraqi Sunnis. He asked the question:

       When will the United States learn that it doesn't know 
     enough about the Middle East to go charging in there, 
     seemingly without a clue about what it all means?

  So here we are: 10 years of neoconservative hawks preaching that we 
can franchise American democracy and freedom; 10 years of quicksand 
diplomacy; 10 years of wrong answers, and we still don't know the 
question.
  What has been the cost of all of this? And I don't mean financially. 
Because, yes, we've spent probably a trillion or more on this war, or 
will. Yes, as we speak, we are cutting food assistance to kids in this 
country and funding for R&D that would drive our economy. But we can't 
appropriate a sum of money to fix the real cost of Iraq. We can't pay 
back the lives of 4,486 American men and women who have died there, or 
the roughly 2,000 broken soldiers who came home and took their own 
lives.
  The wounded--physically and mentally. The soldiers who didn't know 
how not to be a soldier. The families living with a hole in their 
hearts, and the families living with someone they no longer recognize. 
Ten years of young men and women leaving their families, living in 
hell, and coming home to unemployment and to homelessness. To a country 
that has forgotten it's at war at all. To a country that

[[Page 3927]]

seems to think a yellow ribbon magnet on their bumper is the only kind 
of support that our troops need.
  And the cost in Iraq? Untold deaths. Let me rephrase that: unknown 
deaths. We can only guess at the destruction that we have left in our 
wake: 115,000 Iraqis? 600,000? You can find a number. What was the 
long-term impact of that on their environment, water, and health. What 
happens when someone lives in constant fear of becoming collateral 
damage?
  Today, Iraq is a sad shadow of a society that once boasted the best 
infrastructure in the region. Instability and violence fester on this 
very day, and now it teeters on the brink of an inevitable civil war.
  This is the legacy of our last 10 years, and I still don't understand 
why. I hope this anniversary will remind us that a whole new generation 
of veterans are waiting to help reintegrate into civilian life. I 
believe it's time to elevate our level of commitment to these veterans.
  I am introducing a bill to create a commission on veterans care to 
investigate what we as a society can do to help our men and women come 
home. I hope it will remind us that no lives, regardless of 
nationality, should be taken lightly. I hope it will remind us as to 
why the next time. And I hope it won't take another war to get that 
answer.

                   [From The Nation, March 13, 2013]

             The CIA Takes Opposite Sides in Syria and Iraq

                           By Robert Dreyfuss

       What, really, could be more bizarre than this: as the 
     United States ramps up its aid to Syria's rag-tag rebels, 
     whose backbone is comprised of radical Islamists and Sunni 
     fundamentalists, some with ties to Al Qaeda, the CIA is 
     busily engaged in combat inside Iraq with the very same 
     radical Islamists and Sunni fundamentalists, some with ties 
     to Al Qaeda.
       Yep, that's right.
       We're backing the same guys in Syria that we're fighting in 
     Iraq.
       Of course, we shouldn't be involved in Iraq in any way, 
     shape or form, but try telling that to the CIA. According to 
     the Wall Street Journal:

       The Central Intelligence Agency is ramping up support to 
     elite Iraqi antiterrorism units to better fight al Qaeda 
     affiliates, amid alarm in Washington about spillover from the 
     civil war in neighboring Syria, according to U.S. officials.
       The stepped-up mission expands a covert U.S. presence on 
     the edges of the two-year-old Syrian conflict, at a time of 
     American concerns about the growing power of extremists in 
     the Syrian rebellion.

       The Journal notes that this isn't an accident. It was the 
     result of a carefully thought-out White House decision:

       In a series of secret decisions from 2011 to late 2012, the 
     White House directed the CIA to provide support to Iraq's 
     Counterterrorism Service, or CTS, a force that reports 
     directly to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, officials 
     said.

       The CIA has since ramped up its work with the CTS--taking 
     control of a mission long run by the U.S. military, according 
     to administration and defense officials. For years, U.S. 
     special-operations forces worked with CTS against al Qaeda in 
     Iraq. But the military's role has dwindled since U.S. troops 
     pulled out of the country at the end of 2011.
       The paradox, obviously, is that Maliki, the guy we're 
     helping in Iraq, is an ally of Iran's and is sympathetic to 
     President Assad of Syria. That's because were the Sunni-led 
     rebels in Syria to seize Damascus and topple Assad, they'd 
     turn their wrath next door against the Shiite-led Maliki 
     regime, and funnel weapons and fighters to support the Sunni-
     led rebels in Iraq.
       That's not stopping the United States, though, from 
     boosting the fortunes of the Syrian rebels by funneling aid 
     and support to them and coordinating the flow of weapons from 
     Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Meanwhile, as The New York 
     Times has been reporting for a while, the same CIA that is 
     trying to squash the Sunni rebels in Iraq is actually 
     training Sunni rebels in a secret program in Jordan, to fight 
     in Syria.
       Oddly enough, the rest of the media hasn't picked up on the 
     Times reports on the CIA training efforts in Jordan, and the 
     Times itself hasn't elaborated. How many gangsters is the CIA 
     training in Jordan? What are they doing?
       It all comes together in the recent reports that dozens of 
     Syrian soldiers, loyal to Assad, who fled into Iraq recently, 
     were then massacred by Iraqi Sunni crazies.
       We blundered, bungling, into Iraq in 2003 without knowing 
     really a damn thing about the country we invaded. When will 
     the United States learn that it doesn't know enough about the 
     Middle East to go charging in there with guns, seemingly 
     without a clue about what it all means?

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