Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Ms. DUCKWORTH. Mr. President, I am here to speak on two matters.

The first is the nomination for Ambassador to the Kingdom of Thailand of Michael DeSombre. The Kingdom of Thailand has been a longtime U.S. ally and is a key partner for our efforts in the Southeast Asia region, both economically and militarily.

Unfortunately, this nominee has failed to reach out to either me or my colleague and my senior Senator, Dick Durbin, both of whom are his home-State Senators. He has not reached out to me. So I am asking my colleagues to please vote no on cloture on Michael DeSombre to be our Ambassador to the Kingdom of Thailand until such time as I am able to have a chance to sit down with him. Iran

Mr. President, now I would like to speak on the attacks from Iran.

``All is well.'' That is what Donald Trump said just hours after a dozen missiles were fired at two U.S. military bases last night. That is what he said as thousands of troops are readying to deploy to the Middle East, to a hotbed of anger, where wearing an American flag on your shoulder gets more dangerous by the day. That is what he said as his own Nation careens toward a reckless and unauthorized war of his own making, born out of his illiteracy in matters ranging from foreign policy to common sense.

Donald Trump never deigned to put on the uniform of this great Nation, using his father's money to buy his way out of military service when his country needed him in Vietnam.

Let me make something clear to Donald Trump. All is certainly not well when war is on the horizon, just because you want to look like the toughest kid on the playground. I am incredibly thankful that no Americans were killed last night in Iran's rebuttal attack, but some missed missiles should be no cause for celebration for the President. Just because there weren't fatalities yesterday doesn't mean there will not be any tragedies tomorrow.

We got into this situation because of Trump's glibness, because he liked the feeling of thumping his chest and the roar it got from FOX News, because he was so enamored by maximum pressure that he laughed at the idea of even minimum diplomacy. Now America is less safe as a result. So, no, Mr. President, all is certainly not well.

Sadly, Trump's glibness is shocking but not surprising. Last weekend, he was at his golf course in Florida, while more and more American troops were packing their rucks and getting ready to deploy 7,000 miles east. He was tweeting from Mar-a-Lago while the Iraqi Parliament was voting to expel U.S. servicemembers from their nation. He was rubbing shoulders with fellow millionaires from the comfort of his ritzy country club while the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS was announcing that we no longer have the resources to fight ISIS in Iraq and that, instead, we have to hunker down and focus on protecting our troops from the acts of revenge that Iran has promised are on the way.

A potential global conflict is veering closer by the hour, and it is because of Donald Trump. It is because of his impetuousness and his ignorance. It is because, once again, he has been manipulated by a hostile regime into decisions that further their goals while endangering the security of the Nation Trump is actually supposed to be leading.

When I deployed to Iraq in 2004, I saw firsthand just how eager the country was to shake off Iran's influence. I watched as the anti-Iran protests continued long after I flew my last mission, as young Iraqis spoke out against Iran while I was back in Baghdad just this past spring, as protests roiled as recently as last month, when tens of thousands of Iraqis flooded the streets, raising voices and picket signs, demanding that their government crawl out from under Tehran's thumb.

Now, after Donald Trump decided to kill Major General Qasem Soleimani on sovereign Baghdad soil, those same streets are now filled with protesters once more. Yet, this time, they are marching in solidarity with the enemy that hundreds of Iraqis died marching against just a few short weeks ago.

With one choice, Donald Trump squandered the opportunity that existed to push against Iranian influence and for greater democracy and stability in the Middle East. In one fell swoop, he somehow managed to villainize the United States and victimize Iran, our enemy, isolating us from a long-term partner in Iraq and amping up Iran's influence in a country that everyone knows is vital to our security interests throughout the Middle East.

Look, Iran didn't want Trump to kill Soleimani, but they were hungry for all that has happened as a result. They were starving to go on the offensive, desperate to change the narrative, to swing public opinion and solidify their power in Iraq, to have a new excuse to attack anyone with an American flag on their shoulder and to shrug off the restraints of the nuclear deal.

Like a pawn in a game of chess he didn't even seem to know he was playing, Trump was baited into handing them all of that. Like a child who is blind to consequences, ignorant of his own ignorance, he has given Iran everything they could have asked for in the end, making it far more likely that tomorrow--or next week or next month--more Americans will be sent into another one of the forever wars he has bragged that he, and he alone, would be able to end.

We used to have the Monroe Doctrine and the Truman doctrine. Now we have the Trump doctrine, in which the leader of the free world, the Commander in Chief of the greatest fighting force ever assembled, gets manipulated again and again by dictators of hostile regimes. We have already seen it too many times since he was sworn into office. We have seen it played out on the streets of Venezuela and the deserts of northeast Syria. We have seen him get manipulated by tyrants in Pyongyang and Riyadh, subjugated by despots in Moscow and Ankara, as our allies laughed--literally laughed--at him behind his back.

All these dictators and hostile regimes know. They have realized the same thing: The President of the United States is as easy to control as a toddler. Sweet-talk him or thump your chest and issue a few schoolyard threats and you have got him. He will fall for it every time, doing your bidding as if it is his own. I wish this weren't true, but my diaper-wearing, 20-month-old daughter has better impulse control than this President. Kids in school cafeterias know not to look up when someone tells them that ``gullible'' is written on the ceiling, but I am pretty sure Donald Trump, a man who once stared directly into a solar eclipse, will be caught stealing a glance, just to be sure.

The thing is, Trump told us who he was long before he stepped into the Oval Office, and too many chose not to believe him. As a so-called businessman, he left a string of bankruptcies wherever he went, destroying both his own companies and the small businesses unlucky enough to be caught in his wake.

Now, though, as Commander in Chief, his incompetence has cost us our standing in the world, endangered our national security, and placed an even bigger target on our deployed troops. Now, the currency that he is spending isn't just the money that his father left him but the blood of the men and women who have sworn an oath to defend this Nation to their deaths.

Sixteen years ago, I was one of the many Americans deployed to Iraq, one of the many who was willing to sacrifice everything, after our Commander in Chief convinced Congress that our Nation's security depended on removing Saddam Hussein and replacing his regime with a democracy. A decade and a half later, we have spent trillions of dollars to achieve that goal. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens have been killed or displaced. Thousands of our bravest have died for that goal. Thousands more have been wounded and maimed.

We did not sacrifice all of that for this President to turn our Iraqi partners into adversaries who vote to kick us out of the very democracy we helped to build.

I have friends who have done 8, 9, 10 tours in Iraq, who go each time knowing they will probably be back on that same stretch of sand in a couple of years, who proudly answer the call and who will continue to answer the call, fighting for that same patch of desert over and over again because they believe--they believe--us when we tell them that will make America safer and more secure. They gain a few feet one tour, lose an inch or two the next, watching their buddies lose limbs or lives over that same piece of ground time and again.

Those troops show up ready to do their jobs whenever we ask, no matter what. We need to honor that. We need to honor their willingness to show up and carry out the mission. Now, especially after the attacks last night, we in Congress can honor them by doing our job. We are the branch vested with that most solemn duty of declaring war, so we need to exert our constitutional control over this out-of-control toddler- in-chief and vote to prevent him from entangling us in another major war without legal authorization from Congress. In this moment, at this precipice, we need to be doing whatever we can to break the cycle of escalation. We need less chest-thumping and more diplomacy.

Don't get me wrong--I am glad this general is dead. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American servicemembers over the last decades. I also want to stop Iranian influence, but this decision by this President has not done that.

If we truly want to honor our heroes in uniform, we wouldn't send them into harm's way without a clear-eyed discussion of the mission we are asking them to carry out and the consequences for both them and our Nation. Then, after we have that discussion, if we still believe war is the right path, I will vote yes. But so far, Trump has not even managed to come to us to give us his reasons for his actions. Having never sacrificed much himself, he doesn't understand our troops' sacrifices. Having never really served anything other than his own self-interests, he doesn't give a second thought to their service, treating their dedication to our Nation with the kind of reckless abandon he did the cash he blew through with each of his bankruptcies.

I don't need to remind anyone that Donald Trump is a five-deferment draft dodger. But his ignorance about military service isn't captured just by the privilege he showed when he dodged service in Vietnam--no, it is also revealed in his brazen embrace of torture, his hostility toward good order and discipline, and his stated desire to commit war crimes.

I implore my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to recognize our Commander in Chief for who he really is. Donald Trump will never willingly cut the puppet strings that the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are using to make him dance. We need a strong majority in the Senate to force such an action, to discuss the AUMF. Until then, small-time dictators will continue to have access to the world's most powerful marionette, and we will all suffer the consequences.

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