Executive Session

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

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, this whole debate regarding what the Senate should do and how to send the right messages regarding Iraq war policy is important, but the most important message the Senate can send, to me, would be to our troops and to our potential enemies.

Everybody in America understands the war is not going well. Those who don't understand it are in denial because it clearly has not been the success we were hoping for.

The new strategy we are about to embark on, the Petraeus doctrine, for lack of a better word, I do believe has the best chance left for us to succeed, and additional troops in Iraq can make a huge difference. We have been able to clear in the past but never hold. We don't need any more combat power to clear. We have won every battle we have ever been in with the insurgents. But we have been unable to hold the territory. Mr. President, 17,500 more troops in Baghdad would allow us to hold territory for the purpose of political reconciliation.

The ultimate question for the body is how to bring out the best in the Iraqi political leadership. Some say we need to send a strong message that we are going to leave at a date certain, threaten to cut off funding for the Iraqi military, quit providing security to political leaders in Iraq.

My answer is that democracy is hard without being shot at. The reason we don't solve immigration, Social Security, and other emotional problems is because in our own country we get locked down by pretty extreme voices who have political action committees and run 527 ads.

The problem the Iraqi political leadership has to deal with is a violent country, to the point where it is hard to get political compromise. It is tough to go to Baghdad and do an oil-sharing revenue agreement among Sunnis, Kurds, and Shias when 100 of your constituents have been shot in the head and left out in the street that day.

So I believe precondition to political reconciliation is better security and the better security can only be achieved by going into militia strongholds that were previously off limits, by more combat capability on the ground to hold territory cleared, and by putting the Iraqi troops out front with a sufficient support network behind them and American hands to give them the capacity they are lacking today to deal with the insurgency.

The McCain-Graham-Lieberman resolution understands a million troops won't matter if the Iraqi political leadership doesn't reach political consensus on oil, rule of law, and on a million other problems they have. But the benchmarks in our resolution are an acknowledgment that it takes political compromise in Iraq to bring about stability, but we cannot have that political compromise with this level of violence.

The resolution also talks about a failed state in Iraq and the consequences to this country. They are long lasting and far reaching. A failed state in Iraq is partitioned, where the civil war environment spreads to the region, as a disaster. So if you throw in the towel on Iraq, you don't stop the fight; you guarantee a larger fight.

The debate for the Senate is how many votes should we have to express the differences we have in this body? If the Warner-Levin resolution--I respect both authors, but I just disagree with the message it sends--if Warner-Levin is ever adopted by this body, the headlines throughout this world will be: Senate condemns surge. Baghdad lost.

The resolution disapproves of sending more troops. I believe we need more troops in the short term to bring about political reconciliation. But it is not only me saying it. It is General Petraeus, the commander. I think the message from the resolution considers his efforts lost before they have had a chance to be implemented. It is a lack of resolve in terms of the enemy. The enemy will see this as a lack of resolve on our part, and no good comes from it because it doesn't stop the troops.

Secondly, it says you can continue operations in Anbar, the Sunni area where al-Qaida is operating, but you can't go into Baghdad. Baghdad is a mess. Baghdad is a very violent place where they have sectarian violence occurring. The question is: Do we stop it now or let it grow bigger? There are 6 million people in Baghdad. The nightmare I worry about is an open civil war, where we have a bloodletting that will bring in Sunni Arab nations to come to the aid of their Sunni brothers, Iran will get involved in the south of Iraq, and nothing good will come of that.

The reason we are having this sectarian violence is because al-Qaida struck the mother lode when it bombed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the third most holy religious site in the Shia religion. That has created sectarian fighting that has gotten out of control.

For decades, Sunnis and Shias married and lived together in Baghdad and other places. The Shia population was terribly oppressed during the Saddam Hussein regime, but the Shia majority had remarkable restraint up until the bombing of the mosque, which was al-Qaida inspired. I don't want to give in to acts of terrorism that bring out the worst in people.

Our goal is not to get the oil from Iraq; it is not to create a puppet state for the United States in Iraq. It is to bring out the best in the Iraqi people, to allow the moderates in the region a chance to conquer and defeat the extremists who have no place for anybody other than only their way of doing business, including us.

We can't kill enough of the terrorists to win, but we surely can empower the moderates so they have a chance of winning.

I am glad we did not take a vote in isolation on Warner-Levin. It would have been 50-something votes, less than 60, and the headlines throughout the world would read: Surge condemned. Baghdad lost. It would have been embarrassing to the President. This is not about President Bush being embarrassed. It is about the message we send to our troops and our enemies.

The reason the Senate is not the House is because we have a chance for the minority; we have a chance to have a healthy, full debate. We were asking for two votes, not one. If you are going to vote on Warner-Levin, fine, I will come to the floor and take the responsibility for opposing it, vote against it, and argue vehemently that it undercuts our efforts in Iraq. But there was another vote being proposed on the Judd Gregg amendment that simply said we will not cut off funding, we will not cap troops as a statement of this body. It would have gotten 70 votes. And the reason we couldn't have those two votes, in my opinion, is because the Democratic left--and we have them on the right--would have ginned up and gone nuts over the idea that the Democratic caucus would not cut off funding for a war that the Democratic left thought should have ended last week.

I know what it is like. I have been through this on immigration. Once your base gets mad at you, it is not pleasant, but you can't build policies around bloggers.

So I am glad the Senate did not take a single vote that was designed to embarrass a single political element in the country. If we are going to debate Iraq on the floor of the Senate, we should be willing to take more than one vote. Two votes is not too much to ask.

Where we go from here, I don't know. I can't promise success from this new strategy, but I can promise the consequences of failure, and these young men and women who will leave to go off as part of this new strategy, I know every Member of the Senate wishes them well and prays for their safety. But I do hope as they leave, we do not take any action to undercut their efforts because of 2008 politics. The war in Iraq is much bigger than the next election.

I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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