Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan Security and Reconstruction Act, 2004

EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN SECURITY AND RECONSTRUCTION ACT, 2004

Mr. REED. I rise to indicate my support for the approach adopted by the Senator from West Virginia. It is clear to everyone in this chamber and to the American public that we will fund our forces in the field. In fact, I am prepared in the next day or so to bring forth amendments to increase the resources going to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is absolutely essential.

It is also essential we are given the time and the opportunity to look carefully at the reconstruction funds. The Senator from
West Virginia has an amendment that allows that. I concur with his amendment.

I will take a broader view at this time of the process before the Senate. As we debate the administration's request for a supplemental appropriation of $87 billion for operations in Iraq, a salient fact emerges. We are committing ourselves to a long-term, expensive involvement in Iraq. We should realistically assume that significant military forces will be committed to Iraq for at least 10 years. The cost of maintaining the forces will not become negligible. Indeed, they are likely to spike even higher at times based on the level of violence and instability.

This reality should also shape our views on force structure. The nature of this insurgency places significant demands on the Army. Without the contribution of additional international forces, the strain on our military forces, but particularly the Army, will be serious. These strains will be reflected in unsustainable operations tempo and heightened demands for military police rather than conventional combat forces. Ultimately, these stresses could seriously erode recruitment and retention.

The administration is increasingly aware of these problems. Last week, Secretary Rumsfeld indicated the Pentagon was preparing for the callup of a large number of Army Reserves and National Guard. This is only a short-term solution at best.
Today, the Rhode Island National Guard is in the thick of a fight in the Sunni triangle. The 115th military police company, the 119th military police company, and the 118th police battalion have performed with distinction and sadly have already sustained three soldiers killed in action along with several wounded in action. These are proud and patriotic soldiers who will continue to do their duty.

However, in the face of the probability of repeated callups over the next several years, I am concerned many of these soldiers will leave the Guard rather than face the prospects of repeatedly leaving their families.

Given the escalating costs in both lives and national resources, it is incumbent upon us to ask whether we have blundered into a strategic mistake of the first magnitude.

The first principle of war is: "Objective." In the words of the Army field manual:

direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective.

The evolving rationale for a preemptive attack began with the assertion that the Saddam Hussein regime had weapons of mass destruction of immediate concern to the United States.

In addition, the administration consistently implied and, at times, overtly asserted that there was a "terrorist link" with Iraq. The larger implication was this "terrorist link" was tied directly to al-Qaida. Both of these assertions have been proven to be exaggerated.

Now the administration claims we must stay and rebuild Iraq because to withdraw would be a grievous blow to our power and prestige. This point has merit. But the kaleidoscope of rationales for our operations are anything but "clearly defined."

Secondly, our actions should be focused on a decisive outcome. The greatest danger facing the United States is another terrorist attack on our homeland with weapons of mass destruction. One must ask whether our actions in Iraq are decisive in blunting this threat.

Contrary to the President's assertion, Iraq is not the center of the war on terrorism. Indeed, one of the vexing aspects of the war on terror is the lack of a clearly defined center. The al-Qaida threat is international. But, if one were to look for a more lucrative place to strike at al-Qaida, it would be the Afghan-Pakistan border where bin Laden dwells, not Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

When Secretary Wolfowitz testified before the Armed Services Committee, he displayed for the cameras entry documents for jihadists killed in Iraq. He was, once again, trying to make the terrorist connection. However, all of these documents showed that the individuals entered Iraq after March 19, the date hostilities commenced. Now a new rationale may be emerging from the administration: Our operations in Iraq are a giant trap to lure in Islamic terrorists so that they can be destroyed. But this logic misses the point. The jihadists racing to engage us in Iraq are not necessarily the same people who are plotting to strike us here at home. In fact, our actions may have fermented new legions of jihadists with ready access to Iraq. I posed the following question to General Abizaid when he appeared before the Armed Services Committee last week:
If there is another terrorist attack against the United States, is it more likely to emanate from Baghdad or from the Afghan-Pakistan border? His answer is instructive:

Senator, if there is another attack on the United States, it would be organized, planned, and executed through a worldwide network of connections that are borderless. It would be difficult to say where its geographic center would be. There are certainly places on the Afghan/Pakistan border that are semi-havens for terrorists, in the Waziristan area, that the Pakistanis are working to clean up. There are other ungoverned spaces where this is also possible. It is possible that a terrorist group working in Baghdad, or New York for that matter, could organize the attack, so there is no geographic center that I would point to other than to say we've got a lot of cells in a lot of locations that require careful, difficult work to uncover and destroy.

We are in the midst of a global war, but we are disproportionately concentrating our effort in Iraq. Now, I do understand there are significant resources here for Afghanistan, and that is appropriate, because Afghanistan today is in a very precarious position. But a disproportionate concentration of resources are being directed in Iraq when the real existential threat to the United States—a threat that could mean a catastrophic attack upon the United States—is worldwide, diffuse, and disbursed. And one has to question that logic.

While we focus on Iraq, both the North Koreans and the Iranians are marching toward nuclear futures. If these nations obtain nuclear weapons, then the barriers against proliferation will slip even further. Once again, if the greatest threat facing us is nuclear armed terrorists, is our strategic fixation with Iraq justified?

A third aspect of proper military objective is that the outcome must be ascertainable. The administration's stated goal today is to transform Iraq into a market economy and constitutional democracy. Some doubt whether this goal can ever be achieved. It certainly cannot be achieved quickly and at low cost.

The administration has placed us in a predicament where we cannot afford to lose, but winning may have a negligible effect on the existential threat to the Nation, an event with a catastrophic impact on the United States. This could be a textbook definition of poor strategy.

Now the administration comes before us promoting this appropriations bill as a Marshall plan for Iraq. Many of my colleagues have pointed out that this is revisionist history, a term that is frequently used in Washington today. The Marshall plan was not whisked through Congress in a few weeks. It was subject to what the Congressional Research Service described as "perhaps the most thorough examination prior to launching of any program." The CRS added that President Truman "closely consulted with Congress." The authorization was for 1 year, allowing the Congress, again, as described by CRS:

ample opportunity to oversee the Plan's implementation and consider additional funding. Three more times during the life of the Plan, Congress would be required to authorize and appropriate funds. In each year, Congress held hearings, debated, and further amended the legislation.

I think this comment is in the spirit of the Byrd amendment because the Byrd amendment will allow us at least a small opportunity for that implementation, that oversight, that review that was so present in the Marshall plan.

The Marshall plan differed in significant details from the proposal we have before us. The Marshall plan required a dollar-per-dollar match by the recipient. It was not an unconditional grant from the Treasury of the United States. About 10 percent of the aid was in the form of loans that required repayment. The Marshall plan was based on transparency, not secret contracts to companies favored by the administration.

But it is not just revisionist history; it is highly selective history. If a Marshall plan is the proper economic tonic for Iraq, why aren't our occupation policies after World War II the right security policy?

Former Ambassador James Dobbins and his associates at Rand conducted a careful review of nation-building efforts since World War II. Ambassador Dobbins was President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban.
Prior to that service, he oversaw postwar efforts in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. This report points out:

On V-E day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had 61 U.S. divisions (1,622,000 men) in Germany out of a total of 3,077,000 men in Europe. These soldiers became the occupation force for the U.S. sector. They manned border crossings, maintained checkpoints at road junctions, and conducted patrols throughout the sector. The occupation was comprehensive and demonstrated the scope of the German defeat.

Our occupation in Iraq is anything but comprehensive and has yet to demonstrate to significant sectors in Iraq the scope of the defeat of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Pressures in 1945 to shift forces to the Pacific theater and to "bring the boys home" led to a reduction of our forces in Germany. Nevertheless, we maintained a robust military presence in Germany compared to our current deployment in Iraq.

This chart is illustrative of the comparison of what our forces would look like if we adopted the same policies in terms of troops to population that we did in 1945.

This chart projects the experience in several different nation-building scenarios on the present situation in Iraq. In other words, it takes the ratio of the troops we used then versus population to the current population of Iraq. And it is instructive.

The first blue bar shows the kind of forces we would have if we were adopting anything close to the German approach after World War II. It is literally off the charts. This shown here is the 600,000 troop level. Our troop level is here—this red line—about 142,000 troops.

The next column, in the red, is Japan. It is slightly less than the present troop level in Iraq, but there was a unique feature in Japan. Rather than changing the regime in Japan, as we have in Iraq, we basically co-opted the regime, keeping Hirohito in power, and his presence was a decisive factor in limiting the troops we needed. The next column is the Somalia level. Again, this is a situation in which many would argue insufficient troops caused a tactical defeat on the ground and a strategic retreat which was embarrassing for the United States. It is certainly not the model for peacekeeping.

The next column is Haiti, a situation in which our entry into the country was unopposed. There was very little violence. It was a small country, even though it had a significant population for its size. We turned over our efforts to the United Nations within 2 years.

Instructive are the next two columns: Bosnia and Kosovo. In these two countries, under the Clinton administration, we went in with robust forces. As a result, there was none of the violence that we anticipated. We have actually made progress, limited I would add, to ensure that there is at least a growing economy and a growing civic culture in these countries—a remarkable difference between the force levels relative to those we have in Iraq.

The final column is Afghanistan, another situation in which the administration has deliberately kept our forces low. Again, we are reaping some of those costs today as we see heightened terror, a rebounding Taliban, the largest increase in production of opium and heroin in the world, at least getting to those proportions, and that is another example.

We can see throughout the course of the next 3 years projected forward where these troops sizes are significant. It raises the question: If the economic policy is the right policy, if this is a Marshall plan, where is the Marshall-like support in terms of troops on the ground?

The administration repeatedly makes the point that stability and reconstruction go hand in hand. They have seized on the Marshall plan to justify this request for billions of dollars but ignore the reality that stability is hard to come by with insufficient forces.

For example, the New York Times reported just yesterday "that as much as 650,000 tons of ammunition remains at thousands of sites used by the former Iraqi security forces and that much of it has not been secured and will take years to destroy. Meanwhile, insurgents are obtaining huge amounts of weapons and explosives to attack our troops each day.
While we wait for international forces or Iraqi security forces, these attacks go on.

Indeed, in the same article, General Abizaid sounded a cautionary note about reliance on Iraqi security. He said:

There's probably places where we have put Iraqi guards that may be vulnerable to people that would come in and bribe the guards.

There are respected voices that say we do not need more American troops. They say we need better intelligence and international reinforcements to change the appearance of the occupation. But while we wait for our intelligence apparatus to mature and for the arrival of international reinforcements, who will secure the ammunition dumps and the pipelines? Efforts to train Iraqis are underway, but the availability and reliability of these troops is today uncertain.

The administration is quick to brandish the Marshall plan to justify this appropriation. But it is not a Marshall Plan, it is a belated attempt to provide resources for a thinly stretched occupation force while throwing huge amounts of money at reconstruction with the hope that some of it will stick. And this appropriation is the second payment. Congress has already appropriated $74.8 billion in emergency funds for Iraq this year. The demands in Iraq will be significant and persistent. There are more payments to come.

The real question before us is not whether this legislation will pass. The real question is whether the United States can sustain this effort in Iraq over many years. The United States must set a defined, decisive, and obtainable objective in Iraq.
Then we must sustain the effort to achieve that objective. To sustain such an objective and such an effort, we must move more aggressively and quickly to secure international support, both military and financial support. This means giving the United Nations a meaningful role in Iraq without ceding our leadership. Without such a development, our attempt to obtain significant military and financial assistance from the world community will be futile.

To sustain such an effort, we must expand our military forces, particularly our Army, so that we can guarantee a predictable rotation of our troops into and out of Iraq and so that we can lessen our reliance on Reserve and National Guard troops. The strain on our ground forces is severe. And because of our reliance on Reserve and National Guard, this strain is transmitted to every town in America. The support of the American people will be continually tested as they see their neighbors serve and sacrifice without relief and with uncertain results.

To sustain such an effort, we must pay for it. It is simply irresponsible to run huge deficits to pay for the operation in Iraq.
The cost to our economy in the inevitable rise of interest rates and the dampening of growth and the cost to our society in the deterioration of social investment will not go unnoticed and will be particularly resented if scarce American resources are strengthening the Iraqi economy and improving the quality of life of the Iraqi people.

If we fail in these tasks, money alone, the money in this bill, will not allow us to stay the course.

Finally, we must place the objective and effort in Iraq in context. We must recognize that the existential threats to America are not in Iraq. They are worldwide. Al-Qaida has global reach, and we have not yet finished hunting down and destroying their operatives. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is a worldwide problem with both Iran and North Korea on the precipice. We have yet to develop an effective strategy to counter their nuclear ambitions.

The protection of our homeland is an ongoing challenge. The title of a recent report of the Council on Foreign Relations actively conveyed these challenges: "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared." The bill for these dangers still must be paid regardless of what we do with this legislation. We must be mindful of this as we go forward, and we must be honest and candid with the American people. To sustain this effort, we must follow through on the tasks I have suggested. This bill is just part of that effort.

I yield the floor.