Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - Iraq After the Surge: Military Prospects

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SEN. JIM WEBB (D-VA): Thank you Mr. Chairman. It would seem that everything that can be said has been said. I had to leave the hearing for a while. But I was watching most of it from my office. I had another meeting I had to go through. But I did want to come back and raise a few points.

First thing I would like to say is that in -- I've read the testimony, all the testimony, I've listened to most of it. On the -- on the testimony that relates to your point Ms. Flournoy, I'd like to offer a little bit of a different suggestion here.

When you talk about the options that we have are unconditional engagement -- unconditional disengagement or conditional engagement, my view would be that what we really should be pursuing is conditional disengagement.

That we should be making it very clear that we are on our way out, subject to certain conditions, sort of, in many ways, tantamount to what the Nixon Doctrine was saying in the early '70s that if there were external attack or if there were issues of international terrorism that were -- clearly are broader than Iraq that we would reserve the right to take military action.

But that we're on the way out. And I don't think we should be putting ourselves in a situation of withdrawing our forces only based on circumstances that relate to performance of the Iraqis, which is a situation that we can't control.

And in that regard also, you mentioned in your statement that you believe that the only way to take advantage of security gains is to use our remaining leverage to push various Iraqi actors toward political accommodation. And I would just like to say that I strongly believe that the only way that we're going to really resolve this is through regional cooperation.

And it's almost impossible to -- when you have situations that have had this much disagreement and violence, it's almost impossible to push base factions into some sort of an accommodation purely from the inside.

And in an analogy, a very quick one, because I want to get on to a couple of things here, is I worked a good bit of time on the normalization of relations with Vietnam. I still work on that issue.

And you had two entities there that conducted a great deal of violence toward each other for reasons that I supported from our national perspective, quite frankly. But then after the war was over, the communist government when they came in were absolutely brutal to the people who were on the other side.

And that's probably the most irresolvable issue. But you can't -- we were unable -- we're still unable to say that those two entities should be making peace you know, between themselves without some sort of an outside bridge.

And that's why I've continued to say, over, and over again for the last four years that the way to resolve this is with a strong statement of purpose that we are going to remove our forces off of the local defense on you know, the street-by-street-level military action and to assist in the creation of an international umbrella under which we can solve this problem.

I want to say I strongly agree with General Odom that the question is not training the Iraqis. I think the Iraqis have shown in many cases they know how to fight. And I think the insurgency demonstrates that. The Iraqi military in the past demonstrated that.

They fight their own way. I think the way that they handled our initial invasion was a classic example of asymmetric warfare. They weren't going to take the hit but they were going to blend back -- blend back away from where we were. And then come back in piece-meal.

The question is whether they want to fight, which is something that was also brought up. And then finally, just to make the point, General McCaffrey, I listened to what you were saying a few minutes ago. I was in my office getting ready to come over here, about how most of the blame belongs here in the Congress for congressional inaction.

And I would like to offer a different perspective on that. I remember last year when you testified, and one of the things that you mentioned in the testimony was the Article 1 power of the Congress with respect to the Army and the Navy. And I can remember actually having a conversation with you because there were two separate clauses.

The Army clause is different than the Navy clause. The Congress has the power to raise and maintain an Army. It is required to maintain a Navy that does give the Congress the authority to set things into motion. And I would agree with you that the vote that was taken to set this war into motion was a very regrettable experience for this country.

And I was doing my best as someone who was not in the Congress at that time to provide a warning voice on that matter. But if I look at the -- from my perspective the greatest failure since that time and perhaps to a certain extent before that time, it quite frankly has come from the highest ranking leadership of the military and the retired military.

I think that there are too many senior military officers who either for reasons of loyalty, or reasons of political alignment with the Bush administration, or because they were doing business with companies that made it very difficult for them to make these judgments, didn't speak out.

They didn't speak out like General Odom spoke out, they didn't speak out like Tony Zinni spoke out, or didn't take the risks that people like Greg Newbold and General Shinseki took in their positions.

And the -- as someone who grew up in the United States military, as a son of a career-military officer, who served in the military, who has a son who has served in Iraq, as well as a son-in-law, that puzzles me.

And I think that to me is the -- is the most regrettable -- looking back, one of the most regrettable reason of where we are. We need the people like the Greg Newbolds of the world, General Odoms to be speaking out honestly, loyalty to the country, but finding a solution here so that we can move forward and face our true strategic concerns around the world.

GEN. MCCAFFREY: Yeah, let me if I may though say that I don't think Congress bears a preponderance of the responsibility at all, if I led that impression. I do think Congress was sadly lacking in the debate. Their only power is not some narrow governance of the armed forces or setting their --

SEN. WEBB: Well, I would certainly -- General, I certainly would agree with you in terms of the debate that set this into motion. And once it went into motion, it's very difficult to stop from a congressional perspective.

GEN. MCCAFFREY: I agree.

SEN. WEBB: And the Congress in the last year and four months, I think, has at least from the Democratic side, I don't mean to make this a party issue, from the Democratic side we have tried time and again and every single issue that is connected to Iraq has been elevated to a filibuster, including a memo that I put forward that basically said, as long as you'd been deployed you should have that much time at home.

That's -- you know, that's as someone who has had a dad deployed, who's been deployed, who's had a son deployed, to me that was just common sense. But even that took on political overtones. So the Congress may have been paralyzed, but I don't think that Congress has been able.

GEN. MCCAFFREY: No, I agree. And by the way make sure you add my name to the list of people who spoke up in writing in the Wall Street Journal on day five of the war.

So I've been pretty critical on Rumsfeld and his crew for getting us -- for starting the mess we've been in. And I also don't disagree with your view that the key military leadership has been more compliant than they should have been.

SEN. WEBB: I think a lot of us who have long experience in national security affairs saw this coming. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post six months before the invasion, and I said there would be no exit strategy because they did not intend to leave.

There were a lot of people who could see that. And we have to do what we can now to repair the damage that this has been -- has done to our country and to our reputation around the world, and to our ability to address the issues that we were supposed to be facing in the first place.

GEN. MCCAFFREY: Yeah.

MS. FLOURNOY: Senator, might I respond to your first couple of comments. It's interesting that you should mention conditional disengagement. We're actually in the midst of a heated internal debate at CNAS as to whether we've got the name of our strategy correct or not. And the other option is conditional disengagement.

So you may see the change over time.

And I think that we will see more on --

SEN. WEBB: I think that puts the place of the United States in the right spot --

MS. FLOURNOY: Right.

SEN. WEBB: -- if you were to use that form of --

MS. FLOURNOY: Yeah, I mean, I think, if you're talking about the military dimension, that's probably more fitting. I think if you're talking about broader all the tools of power, there'll be a continued engagement in Iraq over time, you know. But I do think it's an important framing issue that we're in discussion on.

On the regional point, I couldn't agree with you more. And I -- forgive me for leaving that out, there cannot be any -- you know, we absolutely have to push the Iraqis internally to make the hard choices. But they can't do that without a broader context of regional agreement and regional cooperation and some sort of support for --

SEN. WEBB: You know, as I said I in -- the Vietnam -- the Vietnamese experience is a good microcosm because you know, I would -- I started to go back to Vietnam in 1991. And my concern was always the people who were with us on the battlefield, who were left behind, many of them went to reeducation camps, et cetera, they have been lost in the debate.

We're talking about all Vietnam veterans. We're talking about what the communist soldiers had done. And I would raise that and when I would raise it to, for instance, Du Moi, who was the secretary general, the lineal descendant in the job of Ho Chi Minh.

He would say I have mothers who've lost five sons fighting for the, you know, for the communist side. You can't tell me to go give the urban veteran the same veteran benefit as my guy. I can't do it. And the people on -- who fought with us were so bitter about the reeducation camp experiences, they don't talk, and so you need that kind of a bridge.

And very much so in Iraq, because there are so many of these countries that are playing under the table anyway that have interests. And the best way to deal with it is to bring them on to the, you know, out in the open in terms of what they are willing to commit nationally toward a solution there.

Thank you Mr. Chairman, I know --

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