Iraq

IRAQ

Mr. REED. Mr. President, we are today, in this country, convulsed by the situation in Iraq. It is an extraordinary crisis. It is taxing our men and women in uniform, and it is certainly taxing our resolve.

I think one of the problems is that the administration has not focused on the reality on the ground, what is really happening on the ground. They are hoping, but hope is not a substitute for planning; hope is not a substitute for a very candid and hard look at the situation on the ground. The reality is that there is widespread violence and instability throughout Iraq.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that

over the past 30 days more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north, according to the comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants.

You would think, given this information, that the administration would begin to reflect on the difficult circumstances on the ground, but that is not the case. They continue to pursue both policies and rhetoric which suggest that all is not well yet it is quickly getting there.

But there is something else they have done which I think is startling, and that is in a related story in the Washington Post, information such as what I just quoted, that data from private security companies is not being recognized and evaluated. It is being suppressed.

According to today's Washington Post, the

USAID said this week that it would restrict distribution of reports by Kroll Security International showing the number of daily attacks by insurgents in Iraq has increased.

On Monday, the Washington Post published a front-page story saying that the Kroll report suggests a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence. A USAID official sent an e-mail to congressional aides stating: This is the last Kroll report to come in. After the Washington Post story, they shut it down in order to regroup. I will let you know when it restarts.

If we don't have accurate information, if we are not able to tell difficult truth one to another, we will never be able to effectively design a policy for Iraq.

It is concerning to me that the administration would try to respond to the facts by suppressing the facts, but that is just one example of what is going on.

I know this. The country, with some exception, is wracked by violence. The Kurds in the north have had a semiautonomous region for many years. It is under our informal protection and formal protection. That is a part of the country where there is a certain stability, but there is political tension building there because the Kurdish sense of autonomy will invariably clash with the need to create a central government in Iraq.

The focal point of that clash could be the oil around Kirkuk, which is the second biggest source of oil for the country of Iraq. Those oil fields could be in jeopardy as a pawn, if you will, in a struggle between the Kurds asserting their autonomy and the central government trying to maintain its authority.

We also understand clearly that Sunni provinces have "no-enter zones"-areas in which the United States cannot even send its troops today successfully. One of these areas is Ramadi.

According, again, to a story in the Los Angeles Times on September 28:

The erosion of order in Ramadi illustrates the success of the insurgents' methods and the serious problems facing the interim government and its U.S. backers in maintaining stability in Iraq. It also threatens to thwart plans for a national election in January. . . . An election that omits key population centers in the so-called Sunni Triangle region would have greatly diminished credibility.

In Fallujah, there are similar situations where there are areas we cannot enter. In the Shia South, there is the instability principally generated by Sadr, the young cleric who has defied the central government and also the U.S. repeatedly.
We generally see the violence in Iraq as a function of attacks against our troops, but when we do that we miss a very important reality; that is, this violence is only a small portion of the violence that the Iraqi people feel each day-not from terrorists but from robbers, burglars, rapists, and murderers.

In June, a poll was conducted. They asked the Iraqi people to list their top three priorities. Fighting crime represented one of the top three priorities of 92.8 percent of the people of Iraq. Stopping attacks on coalition forces represented a top priority of 17.5 percent of the people of Iraq. On a daily basis, we are seeing not just attacks against coalition forces and security forces of Iraq, we are seeing a situation in many places which is beyond chaotic to the point which the Iraqi people are quickly beginning to assume that we not only are occupying but we are inept occupiers. We cannot even provide the level of stability that they enjoyed previously. They have already decided we are occupiers. They have decided we must go.

The struggle now politically, I think, is you have to recognize that in this type of conflict it is essentially a political struggle. We can win tactical victories one after another-and we will-but unless we create a political dynamic which will coalesce support around the new Iraqi Government and coalesce cooperation with us, our efforts tactically will be marginal.
What is happening, though, politically in Iraq now is the fact that each of these groups and subgroups have one eye on the current situation, our presence there, but their other focus is on what happens when we go. Will they be in power? Will they survive? Will they succeed? That creates a dynamic that is very difficult for us and very difficult for stability in Iraq.

How did we get there?

It is in some respects a triumph, as I said before, of hope over history, of ideology, of political calculation, arrogance in some cases, ignorance that has led us to enter the country ill prepared.

There is a litany of mistakes that are quite obvious: No real plans for stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq. We should have sensed that.

I can recall in the fall of 2003 and in succeeding days and months leading up to the attack last year where we had a situation where we were trying to get information about stabilization. We didn't have that. We did not have that information.

In addition, there were insufficient forces to stabilize Iraq and we were left unprotected for weeks and months, which today has led to a proliferation of weapons in Iraq, IEDs particularly, the improvised explosive devices that are bedeviling our forces. We cannot secure those. We could not secure the borders. We need more troops.

There was a failure to secure multinational support, not only in the sense of getting the good will, good wishes, and support of the international community, but particular failures.

We were not able to convince the Turkish Government to allow the use of Turkey as a point of entry into Iraq. The Fourth Infantry Division, poised to move through Turkey, to attack in the north, to roll up and envelop all of the Iraqi forces to the north, was rerouted to the south because of that lack of cooperation. The consequence on the ground was literally thousands of Iraqi soldiers were never effectively contested. They gave up, they disappeared, and apparently reformed as insurgents. That is another example of the lack of international cooperation that could have materially assisted us.
We made a significant error in disbanding the Iraqi Army. Rather than disbanding the army, we should have marched them back to their barracks and tried at that point to see if we could, through some type of vetting of officers and senior enlisted people, or some procedure, get them to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. They are part of the problem today. Many of these insurgent leaders, I believe, have roots going back to the army and the military force structure, the security forces of Iraq.

Then we conducted a de-Baathification program that applied across the board. We put that in the hands of Chalabi and others who had no real legitimacy in the country. As a result, for months and months and months we prevented teachers and professionals from working. It did not help in terms of getting schools going quickly. It certainly created this atmosphere among the Sunni community that they were going to effectively be marginalized as people and as citizens of Iraq. That process was a mistake.

Part of that, as I mentioned, was putting misplaced reliance on Chalabi and his colleagues. I recall he sat as a guest of the First Lady at this year's State of the Union speech, yet today is accused of cooperating and perhaps spying for the Iranians. That has been a mistake.

The CPA, Coalition Provisional Authority, turned out to be not up to the great task with which they were entrusted. The administration rejected the traditional agencies of the State Department and their divisions who have experience in stabilization operations in terms of political governments, reconstruction, economic development, and put together an ad hoc group of people who were the architects of what was a lost year of progress that we should have been making with respect to Iraq.

And, of course, there was the failure to recognize this insurgency. We all recall Secretary Rumsfeld's remarks about a few dead-enders. It was much more than a few dead-enders. It has metastasized into a virulent and effective force attacking our troops on a daily basis and attacking the citizens of Iraq.

There was a failure then simply to read the intelligence. We are debating this intelligence bill today because we have to
create-indeed, it is necessary to create-an intelligence system that is more effective. Let me point to an intelligence success.
This was the national intelligence estimate. According to a report in the New York Times,

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the Director of Central Intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

Very perceptive. It was disregarded by the administration, and I think disregarded for several reasons. They had a view, which was not substantiated by the facts, that we would be greeted with open arms. Principals in the administration said that.

As we debate this intelligence reform, we also have to understand it is not just producing good intelligence; it is having leaders who understand and use that intelligence wisely.

Then one of the most critical issues is that we have wasted a year to train Iraqi security forces. I can recall, as many of my colleagues recall, being briefed over the past many months. It seemed each briefing would contain another pie chart showing the growing, growing Iraqi security forces and the diminishing United States involvement. All of that was an illusion. These forces were untrained, ill equipped, unprepared. It took us a year to recognize that and we are only beginning now to recognize what we have to do to ensure that Iraqi security forces can, in fact, provide for the security of their country.
Part of it was a result of the notion that we could do it ourselves, that this was just a few diehards, as Secretary Rumsfeld said, that we could root them out and we could deal with them with the coalition forces. Then it was reluctance to develop an Iraqi security force because of the fear that they would become another power player in the very complicated politics of Iraq where it seems the only institutions that have any type of strength and coherence are the mosques or the militias, and they sometimes overlap. So for all these reasons, despite the evidence of growing instability, despite the proliferation of crime, we have just gotten down to begin to train an effective Iraqi security force of police, army, national guard, and special operations. That is a year wasted, a year that should not have been wasted. The signs were quite clear.

Indeed, even as we focus on this, there have been reports in the press that General Petraeus, who has been put in charge of this operation, has not yet received his full complement of American personnel to help, another example of a delayed reaction, a reaction based upon hopes that did not materialize. While those hopes were bandied about here in Washington, the situation got much worse.

All of this leads to an Iraq today that is imposing extraordinary costs on this country. One of the most obvious and poignant costs is the loss from American fighting men and women in battle: 1,054 soldiers have been killed and 7,532 soldiers wounded, who have served this country with great fidelity and great courage. Their families deserve our profound respect. We owe them, and we owe their colleagues who still fight, more wisdom and more truth.

That is why it is particularly frustrating to see this example of a reaction where, when the facts are uncomfortable, those facts are suppressed. That is not appropriate given the sacrifices we have seen.

The costs to our Army, particularly, are significant. Personnel costs. We all understand there were misgivings about the full size of the force being deployed. When General Shinseki was asked, he did not volunteer, about the size of the force needed, he said, "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers," and was immediately castigated by Secretary Rumsfeld, saying this estimate was "far from the mark," and Secretary Wolfowitz, who called the estimate "outlandish."

Then in his few remaining days in the Army, General Shinseki was personally shunned by the leadership and made to feel entirely uncomfortable-and I am being very polite. He did not deserve that. This is a professional soldier who was asked his honest opinion and he gave it. I wish there were more folks like him in uniform. Certainly the comments of Secretary Wolfowitz and Secretary Rumsfeld were very far off the mark. We have over 100,000 troops in place. They probably will be there for years. There is a strong sign that we need more.

This is a great stress on our military, 17 months after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations, with over 138,000 troops still stationed in Iraq. They are there because of a patchwork of different policies the Department of Defense has had to undertake because they do not have sufficient soldiers. Approximately 16,000 active-duty soldiers have already had two tours in Iraq and if they stay in the service longer, they will have another. In order to keep the strength up, they have resorted to stop-loss orders, essentially telling a soldier, once your unit has been alerted, you are there until the unit returns home, even if you can leave the service in that interim. In the words of some, it is a "backdoor draft."

Since September 11, DOD has announced six stop-loss policies for the Army, two for the Navy, five for the Air Force, and two for the Marine Corps. Only the Army still has a stop-loss policy in place. That is another way in which to create soldiers by means other than a strictly voluntary approach.

One of the greatest burdens falls on the Guard and Reserves. Today, we cannot continue our mission without the brave men and women of our Army and Air Force Guard and Reserve units. We are asking them to go way above and beyond the call of duty.

Since September 11, 2001, 422,950 members of the Reserve component have been mobilized; 51 percent of the Army Guard and 31 percent of the Air Guard. The average duty days have climbed as a result. Guard and Reserve men and women are now serving, on average, about 120 days a year. In fact, back in 2002, it was only 80, and before that it was much less.

We are looking at a situation which the GAO described as fraught with consequences. In their words:

DOD policies were not developed within the context of an overall strategic framework. . . . Consequently the policies underwent numerous changes as DOD strove to meet current requirements. These policy changes created uncertainties for reserve component members concerning the likelihood of their mobilization, the length of their overseas rotations and the types of missions that they would be asked to perform. It remains to be seen how these uncertainties will affect recruiting, retention and the long term viability of the reserve components.

We have already seen the National Guard report that they have not been able to meet their recruiting objectives for the most current year. So the evidence is beginning to accumulate.

This operation tempo will mean more and more pressure on the military forces, particularly land forces, and, as a result, you will see the stress even more, in recruiting and retention, challenging our military leaders. We need more troops, I believe, as an initial response to the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. We should do that honestly and directly. We should not rely upon supplemental appropriations. We should not rely on emergency authorizations for additional troops. We should increase the end strength of the Army and provide for the payment of that end strength through the regular budget process, not by supplementals.

Senator Hagel and I offered an amendment to do this last October. In March, again, Senator Hagel, joined by Senator McCain and I, introduced a bill that would increase the Army end strength by 30,000 troops. In May, we together offered an amendment to the fiscal year 2005 Defense authorization bill to increase the size of the Army by 20,000 personnel, a figure the Army says it could absorb in an efficient way in 1 year. This was accepted by the Senate, and it is now in conference with the House.

One point I should make, though, is that, once again, the administration insisted-even though they oppose the end strength-if it was to be put in the bill, it still had to be paid for by emergency funds. That is not the right way to do this. We have to make sure we have a suitably sized Army.

This is not a spike. This is not a temporary situation. Every time the President speaks, he talks about staying the course, our long-term commitment to Iraq. That is not a temporary promise, I do not think. I think that requires a permanent fix to the size of our Army and to our Marine Corps.

Now, one of the things that has happened since our debate on the floor is that the Defense Science Board, a panel of experts appointed by Secretary Rumsfeld himself, stated: "Current and projected force structure will not sustain our current and projected global stabilization commitments." There are "inadequate total numbers" of troops and a "lack of long term endurance."

That is the conclusion of experts who have studied this issue, who have looked at all the things the Army is doing through modularity, through technical improvements and technological innovations to minimize the need for additional troops, and they have concluded, as a result of the study requested by the Secretary of Defense, that we need more troops.

It is not only troops. We also need equipment. The Army has sustained $2.439 billion in equipment battle losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presently, the Army has an unfunded requirement for $1.322 billion for munitions.

Last year, the Army spent $4 billion on equipment reconstitution-resetting it, repairing it, and getting it ready to go again.

The Marine Corps expects to need over $1 billion to reconstitute equipment next year.

The GAO reports that since September 11, the Army Guard has transferred 22,000 pieces of equipment from nondeploying units to units deployed in Iraq. What we have is a huge reshuffling going on, as units back in the United States take their equipment and give it out to units that are deploying forward. It leaves these units back in the United States without equipment. If they are called upon to perform a mission, another international mission, a homeland security mission, or a mission involving a natural disaster, where are they going to get the equipment they deployed overseas? How are they going to be affected?

In addition to the National Guard and Reserves, the Active Army is resetting itself under new battle formations, modularity, which is a concept that I think is ingenious, a concept that should be supported. But as they are doing this, they too are shuffling equipment about. There are some units that are not yet up to speed with all their equipment. They will have it, I am sure, before they are deployed overseas, but it is another example of the turmoil in terms of equipment we are seeing within the military.

In order to respond accurately, correctly, and directly to the situation in Iraq, we have to increase our Army, I believe, and make sure they have the resources to have the equipment they need to do the job.

Now, the funding for our operations in Iraq has been primarily through supplementals. In the past 17 months, President Bush has requested and Congress has appropriated $187 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For comparison, the budgets for the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Interior total $163 billion. So we have been spending in Iraq more money than we allow for discretionary spending for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Interior.

The last supplemental, for $25 billion, was passed in May 2004. At that time, the administration said they would not need the funding until January or February of next year, 2005. Yet it has been reported this week that $2 billion of this fund has already been used, showing the huge, huge pressure, the huge cost of our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last week, President Bush announced he plans to divert nearly $3.5 billion from Iraqi water, power, and other reconstruction projects to security, another indication, I think, that the security situation is in very difficult circumstances.

We have been funding these operations with supplementals. But we cannot continue to do that because there will be a point, I believe, at which the American people will be very concerned, when each year we are forced to vote on $60, $70, $80 billion of supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. We know this effort is going to take many, many years. People talk about it as a generational struggle, and I think that is right. We have to prepare for that struggle, but we cannot do it in ad hoc supplemental budgeting.

We also have seen, of course, the terrible incidents of abuse in Abu Ghraib, with too few troops in that prison to do the job, ill-trained troops in that prison to do the job, but it is not just those troops. I think it is wrong simply to single out people we know from photographs who have done despicable things. They will be punished. They are being punished. We have a responsibility to look not only at the young soldiers, but the leadership, the chain of command, the policies they adopted or did not adopt, the confusion they created and did not resolve. We have had several investigations so far. Each one goes a little bit down the road but then seems to stop.

We waited, frankly, for months for the report of General Fay and General Jones, thinking this would be the final authoritative report that would look from the level of three star and four star all the way down. It turns out that for one of the most significant issues, the issue of ghost detainees-those individuals who were not properly recorded by the authorities when they came into our custody-General Jones and Fay had no real answers because they didn't get any cooperation from the Central Intelligence Agency. Now we have another investigation presumably conducted by the IG and the Department of Defense. This is not the way to get to the core of what happened. It might be an effective way of postponing real review and investigation, but it is not the way to get the answers.

These answers are important, not simply because of individual culpability of soldiers up and down the ranks, but because we have to have a military force that understands that they are subject to the laws, that it is not optional for leaders to ignore some or modify them at will. This is the very challenging situation, but it is an example, once again, of the lack of preparedness, the lack of sufficient personnel, and the lack of clear guidance that has plagued our operations in Iraq from the beginning.

I have spent a great deal of time talking about Iraq. The interesting thing in some respects is what we are not talking about. We are not talking about North Korea. But just this week on Monday, at the United Nations, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon said North Korea had been left with "no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent" because of U.S. policies that he said were designed to eliminate his country. He stated:

We have already made clear that we have already reprocessed 8,000 wasted fuel rods and transformed them into arms.

Reprocessing 8,000 rods would extract enough plutonium for as many as eight nuclear warheads. Here is a situation where, as we focused on Iraq, we have sat by as the North Koreans blatantly and boldly opened up the cans in which IAEA sealed the rods and, according to their comments, have reprocessed this material into nuclear weapons. One of the worst possible situations, a nuclear-armed North Korea, may have evolved. We are at this point taking troops out of South Korea to fulfill our requirements in Iraq. What signal does that send to the North Koreans?

It is not a question of deterrence. We have the capability of deterring the North Koreans from coming south. But it certainly is not aiding us in what ultimately must be our objective of disarming North Korea, hopefully through peaceful means and through negotiations, not just our efforts alone but the world community, because the great fear that we all have, that transcends the current struggle in Iraq, is that terrorists will obtain nuclear material and nuclear weapons.

Here we have a situation where over the last several months the North Koreans have finally said: We have them. Part of our lack of response is an internal debate within the administration that has been going on for months, if not years: Do you negotiate, which means some type of arrangement between the world and North Korea, or do you once again embark on a regime change operation? The difference over the last several months is the growing realization that Iraq has put so much stress on our military forces, that in the event of a need to disarm North Korea, there would be far fewer forces to draw on. So that is another huge cost of our involvement in Iraq.

Then add another development: The Iranians continue to insist they have every right to a full, complete nuclear fuel cycle. Of course, the concern-not just of the United States but the international community-is that if they achieve that cycle, they will be able to obtain material with which to construct a nuclear weapon.

Despite their protestations that that is not their objective, there is a growing suggestion, if not conclusive evidence, that certainly that possibility might exist. And once again, what are we doing? Why have we not focused attention on Iran in a more meaningful and decisive way?

One has to question a strategy that has led us into Iraq, to the instability, to the costs, to the lost opportunity, when there appear to be much more serious threats abroad.

We have an opportunity to be much more candid, much more truthful about what is going on. That is an opportunity I would hope the administration would embrace because unless we operate with the facts and unless we operate with the reality of the situation, there will be no way we can effectively plan to deal with the threats we face.

I yield the floor.