A Change In Iraq Policy
A CHANGE IN IRAQ POLICY -- (Senate - January 11, 2007)
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Mr. REED. Mr. President, last evening President Bush spoke about Iraq. His speech represented perhaps a change in tone but not a fundamental change in strategy, and the American people were looking for a fundamental change in strategy. They were particularly looking for this change based upon the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. These are distinguished Americans who have dedicated themselves to public service, bipartisan individuals who thoughtfully and carefully looked at the situation in Iraq and made a series of proposals, most of which the President apparently ignored.
The American people are deeply concerned about the course of our operations in Iraq. They are incredibly supportive, as we all must be, of the soldiers, the marines, the sailors, the airmen and airwomen who are carrying out this policy, but they are deeply concerned. One of the things that has characterized the President's approach to Iraq for so many years has been the discussion of what I would describe as false dichotomy--false choices. You can recall, in the runup to the conflict in Iraq, the President said we have two choices--invade the country, occupy it indefinitely, or do nothing. Of course, those were not all the choices.
We had the ability to interject U.N. inspectors to do the things which we thought were important, which is to identify the true status of weapons of mass destruction--and that was rejected out of hand. We had diplomatic options. We had limited military options. If, as was suggested, there were terrorists lurking in the Kurdish areas, we could have used the same approach as we used a few days ago in Somalia, a preemptive targeted strike, targeted on those whom we had identified as terrorists. All of that was rejected.
Then the President undertook a strategy which I think was deeply flawed, which has led us to a situation now where the emerging threat of Iran is much more serious. Iran has seen its strategic position enhanced by the Bush strategy.
Of course, we know now the incompetence of the occupation of Iraq, the decisions made in Washington about debaathification, about dismantling the Iraqi Army, about spending so many months in denial of the spreading insurgency have led us to this day. After all of that, the American people were looking for something more than a so-called surge.
I say so-called because this is not a surge. This is a gradual increase in troops--20,000 troops approximately in the Baghdad area, and additional Marine forces in Al Anbar Province. It is gradual because our Army and Marine Corps are so stretched that they could not generate an overwhelming force in a short period of time. In fact, due to the policies of this administration, we lack an adequate strategic reserve. Our Army Forces who are not deployed to Iraq are, in so many cases, unready principally because of equipment problems, to rapidly deploy. That I think is a stunning indictment of this administration.
But this gradual escalation is not, I think, going to accomplish the goal and objective that the President talked about. One of the critical aspects of this is that even though 20,000 troops will represent billions of dollars of additional expense and put a huge strain on the Army and Marine Corps, it is probably inadequate to the task of a counterinsurgency operation in a city such as Baghdad, a city of roughly 6 million people. Lieutenant General David Petraeus who has been nominated to take over the operations in Iraq, replacing General Casey, spent the last several months coauthoring a new field manual on counter-insurgency, and one point they make in this field manual is that counterinsurgency operations require a great deal of manpower.
At a minimum, the manual suggests 20 combat troops for every 1,000 inhabitants. That would mean Baghdad, with roughly a population of 6 million people, would require, according to the manual, 120,000 combat troops. The additional 20,000 troops the President is suggesting will hardly make that total of 120,000 combat forces. I know there will be Iraqi forces there, but those forces have proven to date to be less than reliable. They are motivated, not so much by a military agenda but by sectarian agendas. They are often overruled by their political masters in the Iraqi Government.
So as a result, the increase of forces is probably inadequate to accomplish the mission the President wants. That is not according to some subjective view; it is based upon the best thinking of the best minds in the Army and the Marine Corps. For that reason alone, the President, I think, has to ask himself after the speech, Why am I doing it?
The other huge cost is not just in terms of money, in terms of stress on the regular Army and Marine Corps, but inevitably we are going to have to reach out, once again, to our National Guard, those men and women who have served so well, the citizen soldiers we call upon, again. They will receive an additional burden to bear. Again, probably not in sufficient numbers with a 20,000 deployment to achieve and guarantee success.
The other factor here, too, is it will literally take the pressure off Iraqi forces and Iraqi political leaders to do the job that they must do. The issues in Iraq, the issues of counterinsurgency are fundamentally more political than they are military. That is what we are seeing today in Iraq. It requires political will. It requires political competence to succeed.
That will and confidence must be the Iraqis' primarily, not that of the United States.
What I think is happening in Iraq today is this Government is essentially a Shia government. They feel they are winning. They are accomplishing the goals they won't articulate but that seem to be obvious from the pattern of their behaviors: to marginalize the Sunnis so they never again will be in a position of dominating Iraq, consolidating Shia power in the south of Iraq, using probably the model of the Kurds in the north. If you go to Iraq, the area which is the most successful, prospering, is the Kurdish area. If you look at it and ask why, they have their own militia, they have their own virtual autonomy, they have access to oil, and they are doing quite well.
Again, that is what the Shia intend for themselves. That, of course, leaves the Sunnis in an area where they face an existential conflict. If things continue as they are today, they will be absolutely and totally marginalized in Iraqi society. The Shia, still harboring fears after years and years of domination and horrific tyranny by Sunni leaders, are unwilling to compromise.
Unless we can forge some type of reasoned compromise, it is very likely the future of Iraq is one of political fragmentation, if not formal disintegration. I think the best and perhaps the only leverage we have as a nation is to suggest to Shia leaders that we are not going to give them an open-ended commitment.
I was pleased last evening to hear for the first time the President say something my colleague CARL LEVIN has been stressing for almost 2 years now, a simple statement by the President to the effect that there is not a blank check to the Iraqi Government. I fear those perhaps are just words because in the same speech he is talking about increasing our military forces there, increasing our support to the Iraqi security forces. That is where we have our leverage. I don't think the President is quite yet willing to use that leverage. More importantly, until we do exert that leverage, the milestones the President talked about--the milestones which were announced months ago by the Iraqis and still are unfulfilled--will remain unfulfilled.
The political issues have not yet been resolved by the President. Without political cooperation and political commitment by the Iraqi Government, the number of forces we have in the country is a secondary matter. What I think the Iraqi political leaders--the Shia government and the Maliki government, with Hakim and the Badr organization and Moqtada al Sadr and Maahdi army, all part of this government--what they would be quite willing to do is to have us conduct operations in Sunni neighborhoods in Anbar Province, but what will be left undone is confronting, in a serious way, the Shia militias which are also part of the problem.
If you go to Iraq, as many of my colleagues have, as I have, and you talk to the Prime Minister or the Minister of the Interior, they recognize there is an insurgency. It is a Sunni insurgency. They would be very happy for us to conduct operations against the Sunnis. But they are very unwilling to take the steps that are necessary to provide a check on Shia militias and Shia operations in that country.
There is another long-term consequence of the President's speech which may be, in the longer term, the most important. Any strategy of the United States--increasing troops, redeploying troops, training Iraqi forces--requires as an essential element, public support of the people of the United States. The people spoke last November and in a very convincing way said they need to see a change in course in Iraq. They continue to speak--not just in the formal polls, but go out to the coffee shops, walk the streets of this country, all across this country, and you will discover the great concern and disquiet the American public has about the President's policy in Iraq.
Nothing changed last evening, fundamentally. In fact, the President actually predicted that this increase in troops is likely to create more chaos in Baghdad, more casualties. That is the nature of committing more troops to intense combat operations in an urban area. The American public will have a very difficult time squaring that with the assertion this is the way forward. I fear they might abandon support for any type of significant commitment to the region.
This is a very dangerous precedent that could be emerging today. The President, in disregarding popular opinion, is running the risk of alienating that opinion in a way in which we cannot conduct serious operations there for limited missions in Iraq and elsewhere.
We have a very difficult situation. We have a situation in which we have to begin to manage the consequences of the administration's failures. This is not a question of winning or losing. This is a situation of managing a situation that is deteriorating rapidly and, some fear, irreversibly. In doing that, we have to adopt a strategy that is consistent with our resources--our military personnel, our diplomatic resources, our economic resources, and the political support of the American people.
That strategy rests in the context of a phased withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, a refocusing of our mission to specific areas which is more consistent with our national interests than trying to arbitrate and settle the sectarian civil war. These missions would be training Iraqi security forces so the country does not collapse because of chaos and anarchy; focusing attention on those small elements of international terrorists who are there, many of whom came after the fall of Saddam--not before; of indicating to the regional powers that we would not tolerate gross violations of the borders of Iraq or gross intervention in the political affairs of Iraq. These are missions that can and should be done, and they don't require an increase of troops. In fact, I
would suggest they require a redeployment of our troops.
The real challenge is--and the President alluded to it without indicating to the American public confidently and surely that these milestones are being accomplished--that the Iraqi Government, the Maliki government, must undertake serious reconciliation. I think the temper of that Government at the moment is not to do that because they feel they do not have to.
Second, they have to begin to spend their own money. I was aware of the significant money--upwards of $13 billion that the Iraqi Government is sitting on--they are not spending. I hope the American people were paying attention when the President announced the Iraqis are promising to spend $10 billion for their own benefit. We have been pouring billions of dollars into Iraq for reconstruction and economic revitalization and the Iraqis have been sitting on billions of dollars when their survival and the integrity of the country is at stake. Something is wrong. They have suggested they will spend the money, but only time will tell because so far they have been extremely reluctant to spend resources unless they benefited their own sectarian community. If that continues, this will be another idle promise.
There is one issue, too, that the President did not talk about which is essential to progress in Iraq. It is not democracy and freedom--all the buzzwords--because, frankly, what democracy means in Iraq to the Shia is Shia control. What democracy means to the Sunni is Sunni control. That is one of the reasons they are having sectarian struggle.
What we need now more than democracy and freedom and elections is governmental capacity, ministries that actually can serve the people of Iraq so they feel they have a stake in their Government and the Government can respond to their basic needs. They have ministers in Iraq today who are political operatives. The Minister of Health is a devotee of Moqtada al Sadr and the Maahdi army and will refuse to adequately supply hospitals in Sunni areas. We have repeated examples where the ministries of Iraq are not only nonfunctional but deliberately so. Until they help them, or someone helps them, there won't be a government to rally around for the Iraqi people because the Government provides nothing to them.
This is a long list of items that has to be accomplished. I am not confident, after the President's speech, that any of this will be done by the Iraqi Government, nor am I confident at all that an additional 20,000 troops in Baghdad will make a decisive military difference. I believe the President has to go back to the drawing board to craft a truly changed strategy that will be consistent with our strategic objectives in the region, consistent with our resources, and consistent with the will and desires of the American people. I hope he does that.
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