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Edited on Sat Apr-15-06 11:42 PM by karynnj
Here is the Senate Floor speech which is the most detailed statement: S.J. Res. 33. A joint resolution to provide for a strategy for successfully empowering a new unity government in Iraq; to the Committee on Foreign Relations. Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, 39 years ago this week Dr. Martin Luther King gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York about the war in Vietnam. He began with these words: I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. His message was clear. Despite the difficulty of opposing the government's policy during time of war, he said, ``We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.'' GPO's PDF I am here today to speak about Iraq. There should be humility enough to go around for a Congress that shares responsibility for this war. I believe the time has come again when, as Dr. King said, we must move past indecision to action.
I have many times visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall, as many Vietnam veterans have. When you walk down the path of either side of that wall, east and west of the panels, you walk down to the center of the wall where it comes together in a V. That V represents both the beginning of the war and the end of the war because the names start at that V and go all the way up one end, east, and then they come back from the west.
I remember standing there once after reading ``A Bright Shining Lie,'' by Neil Sheehan, Robert McNamara's memoirs, and many other histories of that war. One cannot help but feel the enormity of the loss, of the immorality that our leaders knew that the strategy was wrong and that almost half the names were added to that wall after the time that people knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion with respect to our policy in Iraq.
Obviously, every single one of us would prefer to see democracy in Iraq. We want democracy in the whole Middle East. The simple reality is, Iraqis must want it as much as we do, and Iraqis must embrace it. If the Iraqi leadership is not ready to make the changes and the compromises that democracy requires, our soldiers, no matter how valiant--and they have been valiant--can't get from a humvee or a helicopter.
The fact is, our soldiers have done a stunning job. I was recently in Iraq with Senator Warner and Senator Stevens. I have been there previously. No one can travel there and talk to our soldiers and not be impressed by their commitment to the mission, by their sacrifice, by their desire to have something good come out of this, and by the remarkable contribution they have made to give Iraqis the opportunity to create a democratic future for their country. Our soldiers have done their job. It is time for the newly elected Iraqi leadership to do theirs. It is time for America's political leaders to do theirs.
President Bush says we can't lose our nerve in Iraq. It takes more nerve to respond to mistakes and to adjust a policy that is going wrong than it does to stubbornly continue down the wrong path.
Last week, Secretary Rice acknowledged ``thousands'' of mistakes in Iraq. Amazingly, nobody has been held accountable for those mistakes. But our troops have paid the price, and our troops pay the price every single day. Yet the President continues to insist on a vague and counterproductive strategy that will keep U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely.
I accept my share of responsibility for the war in Iraq. As I said in 2004, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war, and I certainly wouldn't have done it the way the President did. My frustration is that many of us all along the way have offered alternatives to the President. Countless numbers of Senators, Republican and Democrat alike, have publicly offered alternative ways of trying to achieve our goals in Iraq.
I have listened to my colleagues, Senator Feingold, Senator Biden, Senator Hagel, the Presiding Officer, and others all talk about ways in which we could do better. But all of these, almost all of them without exception, have been left by the wayside without any real discussion, without any real dialog, without any real effort to see if we could find a common ground. My frustration is that we keep offering alternatives.
In 2003, in 2004, 2005, 2006, year after year, we put them on the table, but they get ignored and then we get further in the hole, the situation gets worse, and we are left responding, trying to come back to a worse situation than the one we were responding to in the first place. And we keep putting out possibilities, and the possibilities keep being left on the sidelines.
Time after time, this administration has ignored the best advice of the best experts of the country, whether they be our military experts or former civilian leaders of other administrations or our most experienced voices on the Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee
of the U.S. House and Senate.
The administration is fond of saying that we shouldn't look back, that recrimination only helps our enemies, that we have to deal with the situation on the ground now. Well, we do have to deal with the situation on the ground now, but we have to deal with it in a way that honors the suggestions and ideas of a lot of other people who have concerns about our forces on the ground and our families at home and our budget and our reputation in the world and our need to respond to Afghanistan, North Korea, and Iran.
Frankly, accountability and learning from past mistakes is the only way to improve both policies and institutions. Let me, for the moment, go along with this idea, the administration's idea. Let me focus on the here and now and let's face that reality honestly and let's act accordingly.
You have to live in a fantasy world to believe we are on the brink of domestic peace and a pluralistic democracy in Iraq. One has to be blind to the facts to argue that the prospects for success are so great they outweigh the terrible costs of the President's approach. And you have to be incapable of admitting failure not to be able to face up to the need to change course now. Yes, change course now.
Our soldiers on the ground have learned a lot of terrible lessons in Iraq. All you have to do is talk to some of the soldiers who have returned, as many of us have. It is time those of us responsible for the policies of our country learn those lessons. It is clear the administration's litany of mistakes has reduced what we can reasonably hope to accomplish. Any reasonable, honest observer--and there are many in the Senate who have gone over to Iraq and have come back with these views--knows that the entire definition of this mission has changed and the expectations of what we can get out of this mission have changed.
I, for one, will not sit idly by and watch while American soldiers give their lives for a policy that is not working. Let me say it plainly. Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq over the course of the year in a timely schedule is actually necessary to give democracy the best chance to succeed, and it is vital to America's national security interests.
Five months ago, I went to Georgetown University. I gave a speech where I said that we were then entering the make-or-break period, a make-or-break 5-month, 6-month period in Iraq. I said the President must change course and hold Iraqis accountable or Congress should insist on a change in policy. And I set a goal then, back in November, that we should try to reduce American combat forces and withdraw them by the end of this year.
The situation on the ground has now changed for the worse since then. In fact, we are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The first war was against Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction. The second war was against Jihadist terrorists whom the administration said it was better to fight over there than over here. And now we find our troops in the middle of a low-grade civil war that could explode into a full civil war at any time.
While the events in Iraq have changed for the worse, the President has not changed course for the better. It is time for those of us in Congress who share responsibilities constitutionally for our policy to stand up and change that course. We have a constitutional responsibility, and we have a moral responsibility not to sit on the sidelines while young Americans are in harm's way.
That is why today I am introducing legislation that will hold the Iraqis accountable and make the goal of withdrawing the most American forces a reality. I personally believe that most of those forces could be and should be out of Iraq by the end of the year. This war, in the words of our own generals, cannot be won militarily. It can only be won politically.
General Casey said, of our large military presence, it ``feeds the notion of occupation'' and it ``extends the amount of time that it will take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant.''
That is General Casey saying that the large force of American presence in Iraq contributes to the occupation and extends the amount of time. Zbigniew Brzezinski put it:
The U.S. umbrella, which is in effect designed to stifle these wars but it is so poor that it perpetuates them, in a sense keeps these wars alive ..... and probably unintentionally actually intensifying them.
Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, breaking a 30-year silence, summed it up simply:
Our presence is what feeds the insurgency.
The bottom line is that as long as American forces remain in large numbers, enforcing the status quo, Americans will be killed and maimed in a crossfire of vicious conflict that they are powerless to end. We pay for the President's reluctance to face reality in both American dollars and in too many lives. American families pay in the loss of limb and the loss of loved ones.
I don't think we should tolerate what is happening in Iraq today. We can no longer tolerate the political games currently being played by Iraqi politicians in a war-torn Baghdad. No American soldier, not one American soldier, should be sacrificed for the unwillingness of Iraqi politicians to compromise and form a unity government.
We are now almost 5 months since the election. What is happening is the daily game being played by Iraqis who listen to the President say we will be here to the end. There is no sense of urgency, there is no sense of impending need to make a decision. The result is they just go on bickering and they go on playing for advantage while our troops drive by the next IED and the next soldier returns to Walter Reed or to Bethesda without arms and limbs.
Given the recent increase in deadly sectarian strife, Iraq urgently needs a strong unity government to prevent a full-fledged civil war from breaking out and becoming the failed state that all of us have wanted to avoid. I believe the current situation is actually allowing them to go down the road toward that sectarian strife rather than stopping them.
Thus far, step by step, Iraqis have only responded to deadlines. It took a deadline to transfer authority to the provisional government. It took a deadline for the first election to take place. It took a deadline for the referendum on the Constitution. It took a deadline for the most recent election. It is time for another deadline, and that deadline is to say to them that they have to come together and pull together and put together a government or our troops are going to withdraw. And under circumstances over a period of time, we will withdraw in order to put Iraq up on its own two feet.
Iraqi politicians should be told in unmistakable language: You have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military.
I know some colleagues and other people listening will say: Wait a minute. You mean we are going to automatically withdraw our military if they don't pull it together?
The answer is: You bet we ought to do that. Because there isn't one American soldier who ought to be giving up life or limb for the procrastination and unwillingness of Iraqis who have been given an extraordinary opportunity by those soldiers to take hold of democracy and who are ignoring it and playing for advantage. We all know that after the last elections, the momentum was lost by squabbling interim leaders. Everybody sat around and said, coming up to this election, the one thing we can't do is allow the momentum to be lost. Guess what. It has been lost. It has been squandered, again. We are sitting there with occasional visits, occasional speeches but without the kind of sustained diplomacy necessary to provide a resolution. It has gone on for too long, again.
If Iraqis aren't willing to build a unity government in 5 months, then how long does it take and what does it take? If they are not willing to do it, they are not willing to do it. It is that simple. The civil war will only get worse. And if they are not willing to do it, it is because there is such a fundamental intransigence that we haven't broken, that civil war, in fact, becomes inevitable, and our troops will be forced to leave anyway.
The fact is, we have no choice but to get tough and to ratchet up the pressure. We should immediately accelerate the redeployment of American forces to rear guard, garrisoned status for security backup, training, and emergency response. Special operations against al-Qaida in Iraq should be initiated on hard intelligence leads only.
If the Iraqi leaders finally do their job, which I believe you have a better chance of getting them to do if you give them a timetable, then we have to agree on a schedule for leaving, withdrawing American combat forces by the end of the year. The only troops that remain should be those critical to finishing the job of standing up Iraqi security forces.
Such an agreement will have positive benefits in Iraq. It will empower and legitimize the new leadership and the Iraqi people. It will expedite the process of getting the Iraqis to assume a larger role of running their own country. And it will undermine support for the insurgency among the now 80 percent of Iraqis who want U.S. troops to leave. In short, it will give the new Iraqi Government the best chance to succeed in holding the country together while democratic institutions can evolve.
This deadline makes sense when you look at the responsibilities that Iraqis should have assumed by then. Formation of a unity government would constitute a major milestone in the transfer of political responsibility to the Iraqis. Even the President has said that responsibility for security in the majority of the country should be able to be transferred to the Iraqis by this time. If the President believes that it should be able to be transferred to the Iraqis by this time, why not push that eventuality and make it a reality? By the end of the year, our troops will have done as much as they possibly can to give Iraqis the chance to build a democracy. I again remind my colleagues, we are still going to have the ability to have over-the-horizon response for emergency, as well as over-the-horizon response to al-Qaida. And we will have the ability to continue to train those last forces to make sure they are in a position to stand up for Iraq.
The key to this transition is a long overdue engagement in serious and sustained diplomacy. I want to say a word about this. I am not offering this plan in a vacuum. Critical to the achievement of all of our goals in Iraq is real diplomacy. Starting with the leadup to the war, our diplomatic efforts in Iraq have ranged from the indifferent
to the indefensible. History shows that effective diplomacy requires persistent hands-on engagement from the highest levels of America's leadership. Top officials in the first Bush administration worked directly and tirelessly to put together a real coalition before the first Gulf War, and President Clinton himself took personal responsibility at Camp David for bringing the Israelis and Palestinians together and leading the comprehensive effort to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. This type of major diplomatic initiative has proven successful in many places in American history.
Most recently, in 1995, there was a brutal civil war in Bosnia involving Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Faced with a seemingly intractable stalemate in the midst of horrific ethnic cleansing, the Clinton administration took action--direct, personal, engaged action. Led by Richard Holbrooke, they brought leaders of the Bosnian parties together in Dayton, OH, with representatives from the European Union, Russia, and Britain to hammer out a peace agreement. NATO and the United Nations were given a prominent role in implementing what became known as the Dayton Accords.
In contrast, this President Bush has done little more than deliver political speeches, while his cronies in the White House and outside blame the news media for the mess the administration has created in Iraq. We keep hearing: They are not telling the full story. They are not telling the story.
Secretary of State Rice's brief surprise visit to Iraq a few days ago pales in comparison to the real shuttle diplomacy that was practiced by predecessors such as James Baker and Henry Kissinger. Given what is at stake, it is long since time to engage in that. I can remember Henry Kissinger going from one capital to the next capital, back and forth, engaged, pulling people together. Jim Baker did the same thing.
GPO's PDFThere was a genuine and real effort to leverage the full prestige and full power of the United States behind a goal. That is absent here.
Ambassador Khalilzad is a good man, and he has done a terrific job, almost by himself, left almost to his own devices. That is not the way to succeed. Given what is at stake, it is past time to engage in diplomacy that matches the effort of our soldiers on the ground. We should immediately bring the leaders of the Iraqi factions together at a Dayton-like summit that includes our allies, Iraq's neighbors, members of the Arab League, and the United Nations. The fact is, a true national compact is needed to bring about a political solution to the insurgency. That is how you end the sectarian violence. Our soldiers going on patrol in a striker or a humvee, walking through communities will not end this violence. Our generals have told us, it can only be ended politically. Yet where is the kind of political effort that our Nation has seen in history now, trying to effect what our soldiers have created an opportunity to effect through their sacrifice?
Iraqis have to reach a comprehensive agreement that includes security guarantees, disbanding the militias, and ultimately, though not necessarily at this conference, confronting some of the questions of the Constitution. All of the parties must reach agreement on a process for reviving reconstruction efforts and securing Iraq's borders. Our troops cannot be left hanging out there without that kind of effort to protect them.
At this summit, Shiite religious leaders must agree to rein in their militias and to commit to disbanding them. They also have to work with Iraqi political leaders to ensure that the leadership of the Interior Ministry and the police force under its control is nonsectarian. Shiite and Kurdish leaders must make concessions necessary to address Sunni concerns about federalism and equitable distribution of oil revenues. There is no way the Sunnis are going to suddenly disband or stop the insurgency without some kind of adequate guarantee of their security and their participation in the process. That was obvious months ago. It is even more obvious today. It still remains an open question.
The Sunnis have to accept the reality that they will no longer dominate Iraq. Until a sufficient compromise is hammered out, a Sunni base cannot be created that isolates the hard-core Baathists and jihadists and defuses the insurgency itself. We must work with Iraqis at the summit to convince Iraq's neighbors that they can no longer stand on the sidelines while Iraq teeters on the edge of a civil war that could bring chaos to the entire region. Where they can help the process of forming a government, they need to step up. And for my colleagues who suggest that somehow withdrawing American forces will put that region at greater risk, I say ``no.'' I say that an over-the-horizon deployment, a deployment in Kuwait and elsewhere, diffusing the insurgency, and an adequate effort to diplomatically pull together this kind of summit is the only way to diffuse the insurgency and ultimately strengthen the region.
The administration must also work with Iraqi leaders in seeking a multinational force to help protect Iraq's borders until finally a national army of Iraq has developed the capacity to do that itself. Frankly, such a force, if sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, could attract participation by Iraq's neighbors, countries such as India and others, that would be a critical step in stemming the tide of insurgents and of encouraging capital to flow into Iraq.
To be credible with the Iraqi people, the new government must deliver goods and services at all levels. It is absolutely stunning--I don't know how many Americans are even aware of the fact--that today, several years later, electricity production is below where it was before the war. It is at 4,000 megawatts compared to the 4,500 before the war. Crude oil production has declined from a prewar level of 2.5 million barrels per day to 1.9 million barrels per day. We were told that oil was going to pay for this war. That has to change. Countries that have promised money for reconstruction, particularly of Sunni areas, haven't paid up yet. The money is not on the table.
We can also do our part on the ground. Our own early reconstruction efforts were--now known to everybody--poorly planned and grossly mismanaged. But as I saw on a recent trip to Iraq, the efforts of our civilian military provisional reconstruction teams, which have the skills and capacity to strengthen governance and institution building around the country, are beginning to take hold. We need to stand up more of those teams as fast as possible. If we do that in the same context as we find the political resolution, then you have a chance.
We must also continue to turn the job of policing the streets and providing security over to Iraqi forces. That means giving our generals the tools they need to finish training an Iraqi police force that is trusted and respected on the street by the end of the year. It also means finishing the training of Iraqi security forces with U.S. troops acting only on the basis of hard intelligence to combat terrorist threats.
The withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is necessary not only to give democracy in Iraq the best chance to succeed, it is also vital to our own national security interests.
We need to pay more attention to our own vital national security interests. We will never be as safe as we ought to be if Iraq continues to distract us from the most important war we need to win--the war on Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida, and the terrorists who are resurfacing even in Afghanistan.
To make it clear, despite everything this administration has said, today, al-Qaida, and the Taliban, even, are more dangerous in northwest Pakistan and northeast Afghanistan than Iraq is to us at this moment in time. There is a greater threat from al-Qaida, which has dispersed cells and through its training and abilities to organize, in Afghanistan than in the place that is consuming most of America's forces and money.
The way to defeat al-Qaida is not by serving as their best recruitment tool. Even Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's National Security Adviser, has joined the many experts who agree that the war in Iraq actually feeds terrorism and increases the potential for terrorist attacks against the United States. The results speak for themselves: The number of significant terrorist attacks around the world increased from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004, and it has continued to increase in 2005.
The President keeps talking about al-Qaida's intent to take over Iraq. I have not met anybody in Iraq--none of the leaders on either side, not Kurds, the Shia, or Sunni--who believes a few thousand, at most--and by many estimates, less than a thousand--foreign jihadists are a genuine threat to forcibly take over a country of 25 million people. And while mistake after mistake by this administration has actually turned Iraq into the breeding ground for al-Qaida that it was not before the war, large numbers of United States troops are not the key to crushing these terrorists.
In fact, Iraqis have begun to make clear their own unwillingness to tolerate foreign jihadists. Every Iraqi I talked to said to me: When we get control and start moving forward, we will deal with the jihadists. They don't want them on Iraqi soil, and they have increasingly turned on these brutal foreign killers who are trying to foment a civil war among Iraqis. This process will only be complete when Iraqis have taken full responsibility for their own future, and resistance to a perceived occupation no longer provides them any common cause with jihadists.
As General Anthony Zinni said on Sunday, building up intelligence-gathering capability from Iraqis is essential to defeating the insurgency. He said:
We're not fighting the Waffen S.S. here. They can be policed up if the people turn against them. We haven't won the hearts and minds yet.
Once again, I remind my colleagues, the hearts and minds of the Iraqis will be more susceptible to being won when American forces are not there in the way they are now, in a way that can be used as the recruitment tool that it has been, when 80 percent of the Iraqi people suggest that American forces ought to leave.
After the bulk of U.S. forces have been withdrawn, I believe it is essential to keep a rapid reaction force over the horizon. That force can be over the horizon within the desert itself, or it can
GPO's PDFbe in Kuwait, and that can be used to act against terrorist enclaves. Our air power--the air power we used to police two-thirds of the no-fly zone in Iraq before the war--will always ensure our ability to bring overwhelming force to bear to protect the U.S. interests in the region. The bottom line is that working together with Iraqis from inside and outside Iraq, we can prosecute the war against al-Qaida in Iraq more effectively than we are today.
Withdrawing U.S. troops will also enable us to more effectively combat threats around the world. But winning the war on terror requires more than the killing we have seen from 3 years of combat. The fact is that just taking out terrorists, as our troops have been doing, is not going to end the flow of terrorists who are recruited, for all of the reasons that we understand. The cooperation critical to lasting victory in the region is going to be enhanced when Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, civil chaos, and mistake after mistake in Iraq no longer deplete America's moral authority within the region.
This is also key to allowing us to repair the damage that flag officers fear has been done to our Armed Forces. I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--members of the Armed Services Committee and Intelligence Committee--have heard from flag officers in private about what is happening to the Armed Forces of our country. We know it will take billions of dollars to reset the equipment that has been lost, damaged, or worn out from 3 years of combat. In the National Guard alone, units across the country have only 34 percent of their authorized equipment, including just 14 percent of the chemical decontamination equipment they need. That is a chilling prospect if they are ever asked to respond to a terrorist incident involving weapons of mass destruction.
The fact is the Army is stretched too thin. Soldiers and brigades are being deployed more frequently and longer than the Army believes is best in order to continue to attract the best recruits. Recruiting standards have been changed and recruitment is suffering. The Army fell 6,700 recruits short of their needs in 2005--the largest shortfall since 1979. Recruitment is suffering today. Not only are American troops not getting leadership equal to their sacrifice on the civilian side, but our generals are not getting enough troops to accomplish their mission of keeping the country safe.
The fact is that in the specialties--special forces, translators, intelligence officers, for the Marines, for the Army, for the National Guard--our recruitments are below the levels they ought to be.
Withdrawing from Iraq will also enable us to strengthen our efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, is absolutely delighted with our presence in Iraq. Why? Because it advances their goals, keeping us otherwise occupied, and it allows them to make mischief in Iraq itself at their choice. Their President is so emboldened that he has openly called for the destruction of Israel, while defying the international community's demands to stop developing its nuclear weapons capability. Could that have happened prior to our being bogged down the way we are?
North Korea has felt at liberty to ignore the six-party talks, while it continues to stockpile more nuclear weapons material.
Any effort to be stronger in dealing with the nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea is incomplete without an exit from Iraq. It will also enable us to more effectively promote democracy in places such as Russia, which is more than content to see us bogged down while President Putin steadily rolls back democratic reforms.
China benefits from us throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into Iraq instead of into economic competition and job creation here at home. Our long-term security requires putting the necessary resources into building our economy and a workforce that can compete and win in the age of globalization. We cannot do as much as we need to--not nearly as much as we need to--while the war in Iraq is draining our treasury.
Finally, we have not provided anywhere near the resources necessary to keep our homeland safe. Katrina showed us in the most graphic way possible that 5 years after 9/11, we are woefully unprepared to handle a natural disaster that we know is coming a week in advance, let alone a catastrophic terrorist attack we have no notice of. Removing the financial strain of Iraq will free up funds for America's homeland defense.
The time has come for the administration to acknowledge the realities that the American people are increasingly coming to understand--the realities in Iraq and the requirements of America's national security. Stop telling us that terrible things will happen if we get tough with the Iraqis, when terrible things happen every single day because we are not tough enough. If we don't change course and hold the Iraqis accountable now, I guarantee you it will get worse.
Ignoring all of the warnings, and ignoring history itself, in a flourish of ideological excess, this administration has managed to make the ancient cradle of civilization look a lot like Vietnam. But there is a path forward if we start making the right decisions.
As Dr. King said so many years ago:
The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
Now is the moment of choice for Iraq, for America, and for this Congress.
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