Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

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Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the Senate floor, along with my colleague, Senator Corker, a fellow member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to speak about a joint resolution we are introducing today that deals with the situation in Libya.

This is introduced as a joint resolution rather than as an amendment on the current legislation because I believe this matter is serious enough that our body should actually consider this as a stand-alone piece of legislation and coordinate it with the House and get this passed with due speed.

This resolution, first of all, contains a statement of policy that American Armed Forces should be used exclusively to defend and advance our national security interests.

Second, it prohibits the deployment, establishment, or maintenance of ground troops in Libya, with two notable exceptions. The first would be for the purpose of the immediate personal defense of American Government officials, including diplomatic representatives, which I believe would be an important exclusion once and if we decide to conduct negotiations or reestablish our Embassy inside Libya. The other exception would be for the purpose of rescuing members of our Armed Forces who would be in Libya and would be under imminent danger.

It also prohibits the awarding of a contract to private security contractors to conduct, establish, or maintain any activities on the ground in Libya.

This language in section 2 is similar to language that passed the House last week with a vote of 416 to 5.

Section 3 includes a sense of Congress that the President should request congressional authorization for the continuation of American involvement in ongoing activities in Libya, and that the Congress, in its constitutional role, should debate and consider this matter expeditiously.

Sections 4 and 5 require the transmission of information to the Congress on a wide variety of information that, to this point, we have not been properly included on. That language, in some form, passed the House last Friday with a vote of 268 to 145.

Again, I appreciate very much Senator Corker joining me as the principal cosponsor of this joint resolution.

I would like to explain why I believe it is important we take this measure as a body, as a Congress, in response to the actions the President took in Libya nearly 3 months ago.

First, we know, and we are reminded every day, that our economy is going through a terrible crisis, even as we are expending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on wars in the most vitriolic and contentious parts of the world.

Second, our military has been engaged in continuous combat operations for nearly 10 years. We still have 45,000 military members in Iraq despite a stated commitment for a full withdrawal by the end of this year. We have about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the prospect for a meaningful withdrawal in the short term does not look good.

When we examine the conditions under which the President ordered our military into action in Libya, we are faced, in my view, with the prospect of a very troubling, if not downright odd, historical precedent that has the potential to haunt us for decades.

The issue in play is not simply whether the President should ask the Congress for a declaration of war, nor is it wholly about whether the President has violated the edicts of the War Powers Act, which, in my view, he clearly has. The issue for us to consider is whether a President--any President--can unilaterally begin, and continue, a military campaign for reasons that he alone defines as meeting the demanding standards of a vital national interest worthy of risking American lives and expending billions of dollars of our taxpayers' money.

What was the standard in this case? The initial justification was that a dictator might retaliate against people who rebelled against him. I do not make light of the potential tragedy involved in such a possibility, although it should be pointed out that there are a lot of dictators in this world and very few democracies in this particular region, which gives this standard a pretty broad base if a President decides to use it again. Then, predictably, once military operations began in Libya, the stated goal became regime change, with combat now having dragged on for nearly 3 months.

So in a world filled with cruelty, the question becomes whether a President--any President--should be able to pick and choose when and where to use military force using such a vague standard. Actually that is the most important question. Given our system of government, who should decide? Even if a President should unilaterally decide on the basis of overwhelming, vital national interests that requires immediate action, how long should that decision be honored, and to what lengths should our military go before the matter is able to come under the proper scrutiny and boundaries of our Congress?

Let's review the bidding. What did it look like when our President ordered our military into action in Libya, and what has happened since? Was our country under attack or under the threat of an imminent attack? Was a clearly vital national interest at stake? Were we invoking the inherent right of self-defense as outlined in the United Nations charter? Were we called upon by treaty commitments to come to the aid of an ally? Were we responding in kind to an attack on our forces elsewhere as we did in the 1986 raids in Libya when I was in the Pentagon, after American soldiers had been killed in a disco in Berlin? Were we rescuing Americans in distress as we did in Grenada in 1983? No, we were not.

The President followed no clear historical standard when he unilaterally decided to use force in Libya. Once this action continued beyond his original definition of ``days, not weeks,'' he did not seek the approval of Congress. While he has discussed this matter with some Members of Congress, he has not formally conferred with the legislative branch.

I believe it is appropriate to question on whose behalf this continuing action is being taken, and, most importantly at this point, what is going to be asked of our military in the coming months, assuming the Qadhafi regime does fall? This is not even a civil war.

As Secretary of Defense Gates commented to me when I asked him that question during a hearing on the Armed Services Committee recently: You don't have a civil war when there is no clearly formed opposition movement. It has been a random rebellion. We can empathize with the frustrations of this rebellion, but looking into the future, the only thing the opponents of the present regime all seem to agree on is that Qadhafi should go.

As I have said repeatedly over the past few months, this matters greatly when one considers what the aftermath of this action could entail for the international community.

An additional curiosity is that we still recognize this regime even as we have been participating for nearly 3 months in actions designed to destroy it. I have raised this matter repeatedly with our State Department. We have not severed relations with this regime, nor have we recognized a successor regime. We have merely suspended our relations. So we are looking at something of a historical anomaly. We are participating in attacks on a regime that we recognize, on behalf of rebel forces that are so amorphous that we don't, and we really do not know what is going to replace the regime that we recognize once it is gone.

Obviously, I am not raising these points out of any lasting love for Mr. Qadhafi or any hopes that he continues in his present position. But let's be very clear. This is a region rife with tribalism, fierce loyalties, and brutal retaliation. In this part of the world the lust for revenge upon those who try to destroy you is not a characteristic that is unique to Mr. Qadhafi. Whether Qadhafi stays or falls, that is very likely going to be the future at some level in Libya, and this is not a place for American troops to be sent in order to sort out this mess. If other nations decide to do so, I certainly have no objection. But our military is stretched too thin, our economy is too fragile, and the reasons for us to continue in this effort are too ill-defined.

So it is important for the Congress to step in and to clearly define the boundaries of our involvement. We should be saying without hesitation that no American ground personnel should be introduced into Libya, now or in the future. We should also be insisting on fair and open communication from this administration to the Congress rather than the stonewalling that has characterized the past 3 months.

This is not a political issue for me. Rather, it is an issue of how our government is structured. I would submit that this issue has historical consequences. Our three branches of government were carefully designed by the Founding Fathers to guard against hasty decisions or judgments that would not be fully in our national interest. For centuries, the English monarchs had been able to wage wars of choice, with the only restriction being whether Parliament would raise enough taxes to fund their adventurous armies. Our Founding Fathers said no. The Framers of the Constitution deliberately gave the Congress the specific power to rein in such conduct and to protect our people from unwise choices by insisting on a democratic consensus.

The structure of international relations has become much more complex since then, but the principle is still vital, and it still must hold.

Over the past 10 years, in pursuit of a workable formula with which to defend our Nation against legitimate threats, we have allowed the balance of power in our constitutional system to tilt far too heavily to the executive branch. There could be no clearer example of why the Congress must finally say ``enough is enough'' than the situation we now face in Libya. We must clearly say, as a governing body, that there are boundaries on the conduct of a President--any President--when it comes to his or her unilateral decision to use military force. We should be clear that American military forces--in uniform or not--do not belong on the ground in Libya.

We should make it clear that we will not be deterred in requests for information that allow us to perform our responsibilities. To do less than that would bring us back in time, to a system of government our forefathers risked their lives to improve upon. We are not the Parliament of King Charles. I believe my fellow Members would agree that our role as a legislative body is more than that of collecting taxes so that the President--any President--can raise armies and fight wars of his own choosing. And that is why I am asking every Senator to support this legislation.

I yield the floor.

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