Tanner says Bill Will Let Congress Engage in Oversight of Iraq Planning

Press Release

TANNER SAYS BILL WILL LET CONGRESS ENGAGE IN OVERSIGHT OF IRAQ PLANNING

On C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" Tuesday, Congressman John Tanner discussed Iraq and his bipartisan proposal (H.R. 3087) to ask the White House to report to Congress in 60 days with a status report on planning for redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq. The bill passed the House Armed Services Committee Friday, 55-2.

Following are excerpts from Tanner's remarks:

"[H.R. 3087] is an attempt to get Congress - not the Democrats or the Republicans, but Congress as an institution - to engage with the Administration on a strategy. This bill directs the Secretary of Defense and the Administration within 60 days of passage, to submit to Congress a status report of what happens next in Iraq…. It does not call for withdrawal of troops, it does not fence any money. It does nothing but say to the Administration, ‘Within 60 days, give us a status of what you're thinking.' It is what I would say our constitutional responsibility is, and that's oversight, which has not been done very well, in my view, in the past six years….

"I voted for the resolution to authorize the President to use the force of the military if necessary to do two things, in that resolution back in 2002. One was to address the threat posed by the then-regime, Saddam Hussein's regime, in Iraq. The second was to enforce the U.N. resolutions that were being violated. Both of those have been accomplished. Our military has performed magnificently. Our military has won the war. What we now see in Iraq is a situation where, as General Petraeus says, you can't have just a military component; you must have the political component as well, and the political component in Iraq is simply not functional….

"We've been there as long as it took us to win World War II. One still cannot walk outside the Green Zone, sometimes not even in the Green Zone, without getting shot at and killed. This is in the capital. We've lost more than 3,650 troops, more than 27,000 wounded. We're asking our young people to continue to patrol the streets of Baghdad. We're asking the American taxpayers to spend $2.5 billion a week - to put that another way, that's over $200,000 a minute…. The parliament is not even meeting now, and when they do meet, they hardly get a quorum; a third of them have been boycotting the sessions. They don't have any laws that have been passed regarding the oil or the de-Baathification. The political process over there, I think, really is not capable of being fixed - at least by us. So we're asking the President to give us the status, and let's see if we can work together as Americans first and Democrats and Republicans second….

"In written testimony, the nominee to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [Adm. Michael Mullen], said [slow progress in Iraq is undermining] our overall strategy in that part of the world, such as Iran. I'm chairman of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly delegation from Congress. The Iraq situation is controversial, not only in the United States, but it's very controversial in Europe. Until we can figure out how to handle that… we are going to be hampered in our ability to fight the terrorists and al-Qaeda where they actually are, which is Pakistan and Afghanistan. We need Europe's help to handle Iran…. There is no controversy among our European and NATO allies about Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The problem is Iraq; we've got to figure that out, and this bill is an attempt to do that….

"You have some people in Congress who want to be the generals on the ground and determine what hill to fight from. Well, as a military guy myself, I know that won't work. Then you have people in Congress who sit over here and just appropriate $100 billion every six months with no questions asked. H.R. 3087 is an attempt to be constructive and do something different, because this current model's not working too well."

Tanner represents Tennessee's 8th Congressional district in west and middle Tennessee. A veteran of the U.S. Navy and the Tennessee Army National Guard, Tanner serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is chairman of the U.S. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

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