Middle East Strategy

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Last month I got to spend a lot of time with the people of Kentucky, and since there has been no shortage of issues to keep people up at night over the past few months, I got a lot of straight talk on a lot of topics. I heard a lot about the crisis at the border, about lost health care plans, the chronic shortage of good jobs, stagnant wages, even Ebola, the spread of which is a threat that must be taken seriously.

Yet one issue that kept coming up is America's role in the world and the growing sense that some in Washington are more or less content to let others shape our destiny for us. For many that concern was crystallized when they witnessed the barbaric execution of an American citizen by an ISIL terrorist and the halting reaction to it by a President who has yet to find his footing when it comes to dealing with this group that clearly has the will, the means, and the sanctuary it needs to do more.

Last week the White House announced that the President plans to explain the nature of the threat ISIL poses in a speech to the American people tonight. Well, after spending a month talking with folks in Kentucky, it is pretty clear--to me, at least--that the American people fully appreciate the nature of this threat. After the beheadings of two American citizens, they don't want an explanation of what is happening, they want a plan. They want some Presidential leadership.

I hope the President lays out a credible plan to defeat ISIL. I hope he outlines the steps he intends to take beyond simply the defense of Baghdad, Erbil, Sinjar, and Amerli, and what legal authorities and resources he thinks are required to execute a successful campaign against ISIL. But the fact is the rise of ISIL is not an isolated failure. The spread of ISIL occurred in a particular context, and if we hope to defeat this threat, we need to come to terms with that now.

So before speaking with a little more specificity about ISIL and the ongoing threat of global terrorism, I would like to briefly restate my concerns about the consequences of the President's foreign policy, as I warned a few months ago, because ISIL's military advance across Syria and Iraq carries a much larger lesson--a lesson that should prompt the President to reconsider and revise his overall national security policy and better prepare the country and our military to confront the threats that will survive his time in office.

First, it is important to note a few of the consistent objectives that have always characterized this President's national security policy: drawing down our conventional and nuclear forces, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and placing a greater reliance upon international organizations and diplomacy.

As I have noted on other occasions, I have serious differences with the President over this approach. In my view, we have a duty as a superpower without imperialistic aims to help maintain international order and balance of power, and that international order is maintained by American military might. Indeed, American military might is its backbone. But that is not a view this President seems to share.

The defining bookends to the President's approach were the Executive orders signed his first week in office which included the declaration that Guantanamo would be closed within a year without any plan on what to do with its detainees and the Executive orders that ended the CIA's detention and interrogation programs at the same time. In May of this year the President also announced that all of our combat forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of this term whether or not the Taliban is successful in capturing parts of Afghanistan, whether or not Al Qaeda's senior leadership has found a more permissive environment in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and whether or not Al Qaeda has been driven from Afghanistan.

All of this underscores something I have been suggesting for some time--that the President is a rather reluctant Commander in Chief--because between those two bookends much has occurred to undermine our Nation's national security. Yet, tragically, the President has not adapted accordingly.

We have seen the failure to negotiate a status of forces agreement with Iraq that would have allowed for a residual military force and likely prevented the assault by the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant.

We have seen how the President's inability to see Russia and China as the dissatisfied regional powers they are, intent on increasing their spheres of influence, has exposed our own allies to new risk. The failed reset with Russia and the President's commitment to a world without nuclear weapons led him to hastily sign an arms treaty with Russia that did nothing to substantially reduce its nuclear stockpile or its tactical nuclear weapons. And, of course, Russia was undeterred in its assault upon Ukraine.

The President announced a strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific without any real plan to fund it. This failure to invest in the kinds of naval, air, and Marine Corps forces we will need to maintain our dominance in this region in the years to come could have tragic consequences down the road.

Of course, we have all seen how eager the President was to declare an end to the war on terror, but as the President was focused on unwinding or reversing past policies through Executive order, the threat from Al Qaeda and affiliated groups only metastasized. Uprisings in north Africa and the broader Middle East resulted in additional ungoverned space in Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. There were prison breaks in Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya, and the release of hundreds of prisoners in Egypt. Terrorists also escaped from prisons in Yemen--a country that is no more ready to detain the terrorists at Guantanamo today than they were back in 2009.

The President's response to all of this has been to draw down our conventional forces and capabilities and to deploy special operations forces in economy-of-force train-and-assist missions across the globe. Speaking at West Point in May, he pointed to a network of partnerships from South Asia to the Sahel to be funded by a $5 billion counterterror partnership fund for which Congress has yet to receive a viable plan. In those cases where indigenous forces prove insufficient and a need for direct action actually arises, the President announced his intent to resort to the use of armed, unmanned aerial vehicles for strikes, as has been done in Yemen and Somalia. By deploying special operations forces, the President hoped to manage the diffuse threat posed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Boko Haram, terrorist networks inside of Libya that now threaten Egypt, the al-Nusrah front, the Taliban, ISIL, and other terrorist groups.

But as the nature of terrorist insurgencies has evolved, the President sees no need to reverse the harmful damage of the defense cuts he insisted upon, to rebuild our conventional and nuclear forces or to accept that leaving behind residual forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is an effective means by which to preserve the strategic gains we have made over the years through tremendous sacrifice.

The truth is that the threat of some of these al Qaeda affiliates, associated groups, or independent terrorist organizations has simply outpaced the President's economy-of-force concept. In some cases the host nation's military, which we have trained and equipped, has proven to be inadequate to defeat the insurgency in question, as is the case with AQAP, the Taliban, or ISIL. In some cases the insurgency does not affiliate itself with al Qaeda or builds upon territorial gains before aspiring to attack the U.S. homeland.

The growth, advance, and evolution of ISIL presents a turning point for the President. Will the fall of Anbar Province and the threat posed by ISIL to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey lead to a reconsideration of his entire national security policy, the kind I have alluded to here and elsewhere, or will the President confine himself within the bookends of shortsighted national security policies that were originally conceived on the campaign trail back in 2008?

If prior events or arguments left the President unpersuaded, the emergence and recent actions of ISIL should convince him that the time has come to revisit his prior assumptions and rethink his approach. ISIL is large and lethal, and its rapid growth has outpaced the capacity of either the Peshmerga, the Iraqi security forces, or the moderate Syrian opposition to contain it. Ominously, ISIL has developed expertise in small-unit infantry tactics, the use of insurgent tactics, and as a terrorist organization. As a result of oil sales, ransoms, bank robberies, and donations, it is also well funded.

We need a plan, and we need it now. The President has now declared that defeating ISIL is his objective, and that is a very good start. But Americans don't want a lecture, they want a plan--a credible, comprehensive plan to deal with this menace that clearly wants to harm us here at home and is only becoming stronger by the day.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dempsey has said that defeating ISIL will require military action within Syria, and the President has now declared that defeating ISIL is his objective. Tonight the President needs to set forth the military strategy and the means required to defeat ISIL and to link those actions to any additional authorization and appropriations he would like to see from Congress. If the President develops a regional strategy, builds a combat-effective military coalition, and explains how his strategy will lead to the defeat of ISIL, I believe he will have significant congressional support. This is no small matter. If Congress is asked to support a strategy, it needs to be a strategy that is designed to succeed and not a mere restatement of current policy which we know is insufficient to the task.

The President must seize this opportunity to lead. This is not the time to shirk or put off his solemn responsibilities as Commander in Chief because passing off this threat to his successor would not only be irresponsible, it would increase the threat ISIL poses to Americans by enabling it to secure its gains within Iraq and Syria. In my view, ISIL's campaign across Syria and Iraq presents the President with an opportunity. It is an opportunity to reconsider his failed national security policy.

The President and his advisers may have convinced themselves of their standard straw man argument that anyone who disagrees with this failed approach is bent on serial occupations or bent on invasions, but that is really a false choice, and it is certainly not a plan.

It is time to put the straw man aside and to realize the fight is not with his critics here at home, it is with ISIL. That is why this morning I am calling on the President to present us with a credible plan the American people have been waiting for, explain our military objectives, and rally public support for accomplishing them. That is what the Commander in Chief should be doing at a moment such as this.

If the threat from ISIL demands the commitment of American resources and the risk of American life, the President has a duty to explain that to the Nation and Congress this evening even if it doesn't conform with the tidy vision of world affairs he outlined as a candidate 6 years ago. If his strategy is little more than a restatement of the current policies, if all he plans to do is manage this threat and pass it off to his successor, well, we need to know that too because Americans are worried and they are anxious. They want and deserve the truth. Most of all, they want a plan, and that is what I am hoping for tonight.

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