Executive Session

EXECUTIVE SESSION -- (Senate - February 07, 2007)

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise today to comment on the nomination of George Casey to be Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. I have had the occasion, as so many others have had, to visit Iraq on numerous occasions to talk to General Casey. I knew of him before his appointment to Iraq. I think you have to first begin assessing his tenure in Iraq by understanding the situation as he arrived. He arrived after the CPA--the Coalition Provisional Authority--under Mr. Bremer had made systematic and fundamental mistakes with respect to the occupation. He arrived, in fact, after our national command authority entered a country and attempted an occupation without a plan. That, I think, can be attributed to many people but not to George Casey. Without this plan, they were improvising constantly, both on the military side and on the civilian side.

The chief master of improvisation was Ambassador Jerry Bremer. He and his colleagues decided to disband the Iraqi Army without any alternative approach to retaining individuals, paying them, or directing them into useful services.

He also embarked on a very elaborate debaathification program.

In this time it became increasingly more obvious that our forces, because of the misguided and poor decisions by the President and the Secretary of Defense, were engaging in an occupation without sufficient resources. This became most obvious in Abu Ghraib, an incident that shocked the conscience of the world, shocked America particularly. Again, this all preceded George Casey.

When he arrived on the ground he had a situation of chaos, both administratively and also a situation in which the leadership of this Nation--not the officers but the civilian leadership--had grossly miscalculated in terms of successfully stabilizing this country.

Over the intervening months, General Casey established some degree of administrative routine, some degree of planning. He, along with colleagues such as General Petraeus, started an Iraqi training program. Once again, to understand what he saw when he came in, I can recall, as can many of my colleagues, going up and being briefed by Secretary Rumsfeld and others about the 200,000 Iraqi security forces. In fact, they usually pulled out a big pie chart which each week was designed to show the slice of American forces as growing smaller and smaller. That was a total fiction. These people could not be found. When they were found, they were not trained. Again, that is what George Casey inherited.

If people are trying to lay blame and accountability on someone, George Casey is somewhere in the middle or the end of the line. It begins at the top, with the President of the United States whose policies were flawed, with implementation that was incompetent. A large part of the burden should be shared by Secretary Rumsfeld whose personality, whose temperament added further to the chaos that we saw in Iraq. I think we could also include Secretary Wolfowitz and other civilians--Doug Feith, Steve Cambone all of them misguided and impervious to the reality of the ground in Iraq.

Yet just a few weeks ago, as Secretary Rumsfeld left, he was lauded by the President of the United States and the Vice President as the greatest Secretary of Defense we have ever had. That is really accountability.

This nomination is difficult in some respects because in that chaotic and difficult and challenging assignment, General Casey would be the first to admit that his performance was not without flaws. That is one of the appealing aspects of General Casey. He has a certain candor and honesty that he has generated throughout his entire career.

Today, we are debating his nomination. I will support that nomination. I will support it not because he succeeded in every endeavor but because he gave his last ounce of effort and energy to a very difficult and challenging role. He made progress, but that progress today is hampered--but hampered not by his role, certainly, alone--but by strategic decisions that were made by the President, by the Secretary of Defense, and by many others.

Interestingly enough, too, this nomination is not strictly the result of the President's work, but it is also that of Bob Gates who, I think, is an individual of competence and character who has already created a new tone and a good tone in the Department of Defense. Secretary Gates thought long and hard about this, and in some respects to suggest that Casey is the wrong person for this job is to question the judgment of Bob Gates. At this point, I am not quite ready to do that.

I will support General Casey's nomination. He has an important role to play in the Army, an Army that because of this administration has been severely strained. All of the nondeployed units in the United States are not combat ready. There is a huge personnel turmoil caused by extended deployments overseas. The ability of the Army to modernize is sincerely compromised by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has to face all these problems.

There is something else he has to face, too--and, again, it goes right back to the top. It is the selective realism of this President and his Cabinet and his civilian leadership. I was amazed to look at the budget released yesterday, the budget that General Casey will have to operate with, to find out that this administration is estimating the cost of operations in Iraq--not in this fiscal year but the following one, starting October 1, 2008--at a mere $50 billion. Yes, I say a mere $50 billion because this year we will spend about $240 billion; yet next year it will remarkably be brought to $50 billion, although General Pace told me in my questioning that they operate with the assumption at the Pentagon they will spend at least $84 billion.

Where is this $200 billion, or $34 billion, disappearing? It is disappearing into the fiction that this administration is trying to project, not just about Iraq but the deficit reduction, their tax cut plans--all of these things. And General Casey will have to work with that budget.

And there are those in the Senate demanding we vote not to cut off funds for troops. We are not going to cut off funds. But I tell you what. If the President's budget is to be believed, come October 1 of 2008 there will be a huge reduction in funds for those troops in Iraq--but, then again, do we believe the President on this or many other issues?

I will vote for General Casey. I think he should be criticized for shortcomings that he admits readily, but he should not be condemned because he was carrying out a strategy and a policy that was seriously flawed when he arrived on the ground in Iraq. He has done his best to do the job he was given.

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