Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016-- Continued

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. President, yesterday I spoke about the horrific terror attacks in Paris last week and why they were a stark reminder of two things: first, that the threat of ISIS stretches well beyond Syria and Iraq, and, second, that this terror army has grown in power. It has grown in influence and certainly has grown in territory.

Unfortunately, the administration and the Commander in Chief, in particular, have effectively stood by as spectators without developing an effective strategy to degrade and destroy ISIS as the President claims is his goal. Instead, we have seen airstrikes, which are necessary but not sufficient to deal with the threat of ISIS in Syria and in Iraq.

So more than a year ago, I, among others, called on the President to discuss with the Congress his strategy. My thought is that anytime Americans are sent into harm's way--and there are Americans in harm's way both in Iraq and perhaps throughout the region--there ought to be a clear purpose articulated by the Commander in Chief. It ought to be a joint undertaking between the Congress and the Executive because our men and women in uniform deserve the unqualified support of all Americans, and I think that can best be demonstrated and accomplished by building consensus for this action in Congress.

But what we have seen instead are speeches, interviews, and assurances that have really attempted to hide the fact that the President's so-called strategy against ISIS has been nothing more and nothing less than an abject failure. The picture painted by the administration on the perceived success of this strategy has been overstated at best and disingenuous at worst. Between referring to ISIS, now numbering as many as 30,000 strong, as the ``JV team'' and just hours before the Paris attacks proclaiming in an interview with ABC that they were ``contained,'' the President has simply not shot straight with the American people.

The American people can take the truth; they just haven't heard it yet about the nature of the threat and about an effective strategy to deal with that threat. As we have learned and as the 9/11 Commission observed, one of the worst things we could do for our own national security is allow safe havens for terrorists to develop in places such as Syria and Iraq, places where they can train, arm, and then they can export their attacks, and given the unique capability of ISIS, they can communicate by social media and over the Internet and radicalize people here in the United States, just as they apparently did with people in France.

Criticism of the President's lack of a strategy is not a partisan issue. It is not limited to members of my political party. On Monday, in an interview on MSNBC, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the senior Senator from California, said: ``ISIL is not contained,'' adding, ``I have never been more concerned.'' That is Senator Feinstein the ranking member--I believe they call them vice chair--of the Intelligence Committee. I couldn't agree with my Democratic colleague from California more. ISIL, ISIS, Daesh--whatever you want to call it--has not been contained. I agree with her. I have never been more concerned about a terrorist threat, particularly since 9/11.

It is very clear that in the wake of the tragic events in Paris, what the administration is doing to combat ISIS is failing. It is not working. In Iraq, ISIS has captured city after city over the last 2 years where Americans have shed their blood, where Americans spent their treasure and took years to bring relative peace preceding President Obama's precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.

I can only imagine how hard it is for some of our veterans who served in Iraq to hear the laundry list of familiar places that have been taken by ISIS almost overnight. Sadly, of course, this includes cities where the precious lives of American heroes were lost, places such as Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi. I can only imagine what an American veteran, having lost a limb or suffered other grievous injury, must feel, the rage they must have after seeing those hard-fought gains squandered. And I can't help but think of the Gold Star Mothers, moms who have lost service men and women in combat and in service to our country. What a terrible squandering of hard-fought-for gains. But that is what laid the predicate and created the vacuum for the threat we see today.
From where we stand today, Iraq is undeniably worse than when President Obama took office. He said he wanted to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see, because of bad judgment and bad strategy, the war proliferate and get that much more serious--at least the war being conducted against us, our American interests, and our allies. As I said, the result of that bad policy and bad judgment is not one less war, it is a safe haven for ISIS that has been carved out of Syria and Iraq. The border between those two previously separated countries has been completely erased, as 30,000 fighters continue to plunge the region deeper into chaos.

I was struck by the comments of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday. He said that before the current administration, there were probably about 700 adherents left. That is the origin of this problem today which is known as Al Qaeda--700 or so adherents left. And as I have already alluded to, according to news reports, there are between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria. Those are the numbers of troops ISIS can now muster as a result of our failed policies in Iraq and Syria. So according to the CIA Director's own estimate, that means there has been an increase, just during the seven years of the Obama administration, of between 2,700 and 4,400 percent.

Mr. President, your strategy is not working.

As we all know, this is not just about a fight over there; this is about a fight that is coming here, to a neighborhood, to a city near you. According to the media reports on Monday, the CIA Director also warned that ISIS was likely planning additional attacks. On that same day, a new propaganda video popped up online in which ISIS issued a fresh threat to target Washington, DC.

Perhaps most concerning--and it is all concerning--is a serious threat we face at home from a jihadist who is already living here on U.S. soil. Most of the people who carried out the attacks in France were born and grew up in Belgium. Some of them immigrated, one under a fake Syrian passport, apparently. But we need to be concerned about homegrown radicalized terrorists, radicalized by ISIS or like-minded groups via the Internet. In Texas, we have seen this firsthand--the so-called homegrown threats that occurred at Fort Hood in 2009 and in Garland, TX, earlier this year.

But in the face of all of this--the President's own CIA Director talking about the huge increase in the threat over the last 7 years of this failed strategy--and given what has happened in Paris, given the threat against the United States and Washington, DC, in this propaganda video, why in the world would any reasonable person say ``We don't need to change a thing; we need to stay the course''--which is apparently what the President is saying. No rational person would say ``Hey, this is working out just the way I had it planned.'' You would reconsider and you would reevaluate in light of the evidence and the experience. That is what a reasonable person would do.

Well, the Washington Post, on November 16--I guess that was 2 days ago--issued an editorial called ``President Obama's false choice against the Islamic State.'' In the first paragraph, they used a word to describe the President that I thought I understood the meaning of and I think I did, but I looked it up anyway. It is the word ``petulant.'' This is what they said:

Pressed about his strategy for fighting the Islamic State, a petulant-sounding President Obama insisted Monday, as he has before, that his critics have offered no concrete alternatives for action in Syria and Iraq, other than ``putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground.''

Well, ``petulant''--I did look it up. ``Childishly sulky or bad-tempered'' is one definition. So apparently the Washington Post wasn't impressed with the President's response either.

They went on to say that the President's claim was faulty in a number of respects. First, nobody has proposed putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground--no one. So this is a straw man the President erects just so he can knock it down to try to discredit anybody who doesn't drink the same Kool-Aid he does on this topic.

The Washington Post went on to say that a number of military experts have proposed a number of constructive ideas that would help us make better progress against this enemy, things such as deploying more Special Operations forces, including forward air controllers who can direct munitions, airstrikes, and bombing raids with much more accuracy than without them.

We could also make sure that we have more Americans to advise the Iraqis' moderate Syrian forces and other people with similar interests on battlefield tactics to make them more effective. The President could send in more advisers to Iraqi battalions and more U.S. specialized assets. There is no one in the world who has a technological advantage on the United States when it comes to our military and our specialized assets, such as drones, for example, among other things.

Then there is the issue of the Kurds. The Peshmerga have been an impressive fighting force. They have been boots-on-the-ground in a large portion of Iraq, and they have been crying out for the sorts of weapons that they need in order to be more effective. The administration has decided: Well, let's send everything through Baghdad. Sadly, most of those weapons don't end up making their way into the hands of the Kurds and the Peshmerga because of political differences between them.

So there is a lot we could do, and the President's straw man that he continually erects so he can just knock it down as he tries to ridicule and criticize anybody who has the temerity to question this failed strategy--it is just not working. It is not working for him, and people increasingly are losing confidence in his judgment.

To eradicate ISIS abroad and neutralize the threat this terror army poses at home, we need a proactive, multifaceted strategy. The President's approach, characterized by ineffectual airstrikes and half measures, has resulted in a tactical stalemate that has kept ISIS's morale high and recruitment steady.

We are blessed with some of the most elite military forces in the world, incredible human beings and great patriots. But not even they can hold on to territory after it is bombed because there simply are not enough of them. That is why, as the Washington Post suggested, it is so important to send in American advisers on tactics and people who will allow the boots on the ground, such as the Kurds, the Peshmerga, to be more effective. They can be the boots on the ground. They are the ones with the most direct interest in the outcome.

It doesn't take an expert military strategist to see that airpower alone will not defeat ISIS. Perhaps the greatest military leader we have had, and certainly in my adult lifetime, GEN David Petraeus, has said that. The President's own military advisers have told him that, but he simply won't listen to them--preferring, it seems to me, to sort of run out the clock on his administration and then have to hand off this terrible mess to his successor. But Heaven help us if in the meantime, as a result of this ineffective strategy and an emboldened ISIS, we see more attacks not over there but over here.

We already have U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria. I would just remind everyone that there are about 3,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and about 50 U.S. special operators in Syria, as the Obama administration has publicly stated. So if the President is going to put American boots on the ground, why not come up with a strategy, working together with our allies and those with aligned interests, to make them more effective and actually crush ISIS before ISIS hits us here in the homeland?

We know the White House has sought to micromanage the military campaign and impose unreasonable restrictions on what the troops who are there are allowed to do--so-called caveats. Our warfighters literally have had one arm tied behind their back. This is simply just another recipe for continued failure, and it has to stop, it has to change.
We know that ISIS cannot be dislodged from territory it now holds unless we have effective partners on the ground. That means working closely, as I indicated, with partners such as Iraqi security forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Sunni tribal forces, and supporting them with U.S. airpower and intelligence. To further bolster these ground partners, the President needs to consider embedding American troops as military advisers, as I just said. By employing U.S. troops as joint tactical air controllers, as I mentioned earlier from the Washington Post editorial--that was one of their suggestions--in support of those ground partners, we would make our airstrikes more precise and more lethal.

This is the type of thing that will be needed to clear and to hold territory after recapturing it from ISIS. It doesn't accomplish very much to bomb the living daylights out of some ISIS stronghold and not follow on with troops to hold that territory. We end up doing the same thing over and over again--bombing the same territory, they leave, and then they come back--because there is nothing there to hold that territory.

In the long run, the overall effort to dislodge ISIS from key tribal areas and population centers has to be undergirded by a political framework as well that will sustain the lasting rejection of ISIS's bankrupt ideology. No one is suggesting that military combat alone is going to solve this problem, but in order to bring the people who can--the so-called reconcilables, the people who are willing to try and work toward a long-lasting solution and eradicate the ones who will not--it will take a military strategy and a political framework.

I will just close on this. There has been a lot of concern about refugees. I have heard it in my office and we have all heard it from our constituents back home. Whose heart doesn't break for people who have been run out of their own homeland, who have seen family members murdered by a butcher like Assad in Syria? But this is not a new phenomenon. We have known since the Syrian civil war started, following the Arab Spring in 2011, that hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of Syrians have fled their country, have been dislocated within the country, have moved into refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan, in Lebanon, and now they are going to Europe and some of them are showing up here in the United States.

I would bet, if you ask every single one of them or most of the refugees, would you prefer to live in safety and security in your own land or do you want to go somewhere else, they would say: I want to stay here. So we need a policy that will actually allow Syrians to stay in Syria and Iraqis to stay in Iraq, but in the absence of any kind of military strategy, no political framework, and no solution from the Commander in Chief, these poor people have nowhere else to go. So we need to create safe zones in Syria.

We can do that. We can create a no-fly zone in cooperation with our partners there in the Middle East. We need to create safe zones in Syria, where tens of thousands of refugees who are now trying to flee Syria could actually live, with our help. This means areas where innocent men, women, and children can be protected from attacks both from the air and from the ground, zones where they don't have to worry about being murdered 24 hours a day by ISIS or by the bloodthirsty regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Congress should not have to tell the Commander in Chief how to conduct a successful military campaign or what a strategy looks like. But you know what. It takes the Washington Post editorial to tell the President that what he is saying is the alternative is just not true and that there are constructive ways we can turn the tide against ISIS and provide more stability and safety to people who prefer to stay home and not flee to distant shores and create consternation here in the United States about whether we are adequately screening these refugees to make sure they are not a threat to us here.

It is my hope the President will consider thoughtful options that are being proposed by Members of Congress. I will bet there are thoughtful options being proposed by the President's own military advisers, but he is just simply not listening to them and stubbornly resisting reconsidering his failed strategy--petulant is what the Washington Post called it. Childishly sulky or bad temper, that is what they called the President's attitude.

The American people have seen some of their own countrymen and countrywomen murdered by ISIS in barbaric and horrific fashion in images transmitted around the globe. They are understandably apprehensive about our security as a nation and our receding leadership role in the world. What is basically happening is, as America retreats, the tyrants, the thugs, the terrorists, the bullies fill that void. In this case, just like before 9/11, that void is filled by bad people who want to not only harm the people nearby but the West--meaning the United States and our allies over here.

So the American people deserve a clear, credible strategy from the President, one that will combat this terror threat before the violence we saw last week in Paris shows up here on our own doorstep. More than ever our Nation needs strong leadership, and I hope the President will finally rise to the challenge.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source