Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about two topics that often make this body and sometimes my side of the aisle uncomfortable. I want to talk about the fight that is on across the world--or particularly in the Middle East for the soul of Islam and how it matters to the United States--and I want to talk about our relationship with Saudi Arabia and the connection to the former issue.

We frequently hear this criticism of President Obama that he doesn't have a strategy to defeat ISIS. I fundamentally don't believe that is true. He does have a strategy, and it is largely working when you look at the metrics on the ground. You see that ISIS's territory in Iraq and Syria have been reduced by about 30 percent over the course of the last year. We have tightened our immigration policies here to make sure the bad guys don't get in. We have stood up a more capable fighting force inside Iraq. We have clamped down significantly on ISIS's sources of revenue and financing. Listen, it is hard to win when only one spectacular and deadly strike can erase all of your good work, but the President does have a strategy on the ground right now inside Iraq and inside Syria.

The problem is that it is still a relatively short-term strategy. As we debate how to defeat ISIS or groups like it, our strategic prescriptions are all relatively short term. We use military force. We try to retake territory. We try to take out top terrorist leaders. We clamp down on sources of financing. These are necessary and important measures to combat a serious threat to the United States, but they don't address the underlying decisions that lead to radicalism. Addressing those issues is the only way to ensure that the next iteration of ISIS--whoever it is, whatever it is, wherever it is-- doesn't just simply emerge in its place.

So my argument is that one of the reasons no one has a particularly credible long-term strategy is that it would involve engaging in some very uncomfortable truths about the nature of the fight ahead of us and about the imperfections of one of our most important allies in the Middle East. To make this case to you, I want to first bring you to northwest Pakistan and ask my colleagues to imagine that you are a parent of, let's say, a 10-year-old boy. You are illiterate, you are poor, and you are getting poorer by the day. Unemployment in your village is sky high. Inflation is robbing you of any wealth you may have. Your crop yields have been miserable, but one day you get a visit that changes your perspective. A cleric from a nearby conservative mosque offers you a different path. He tells you that your poverty is not your fault but simply a punishment handed down to you because of your unintentional deviation from the true path of Islam. Luckily, there is a way to get right to God, to submit your only son to Islam.

It gets even better. This cleric is going to offer to educate your son at his school. We call them madrassas. Not only will you not have to pay for the education, this school is going to actually pay you maybe $6,000 just to send your son there. When your son finishes school, this individual promises you that he will find him employment in the service of Islam. Your 10-year-old, previously destined to lead a life that was perhaps more hopeless than your own, is now going to get free housing and meals, religious instruction, the promise of a job when he is older and you get money that you badly need and improved favor with God.

For thousands of families in destitute places such as northwest Pakistan, we can see how it is often a pretty easy choice. But as the years go on, you lose touch with your son. The school cuts off your access to him. And when you do get to see him every now and again, you see him changing. Then one day it is over. He is not the little boy you once knew. He is a teenager. And he is announcing to you that the only way to show true faith with Islam is to fight for it against the infidels who are trying to pollute the Muslim faith or the Westerners who are trying to destroy it. He tells you that he is going off to Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq with some fellow students and that you shouldn't worry about him because God is on his side.

You start asking questions to find out what happened in the school and you start to learn. You discover the textbooks he read that taught him a brand of Islam greatly influenced by something called Wahhabism, a strand of Islam based on the earliest form of religion practiced under the first four caliph. It holds that any deviation from Islamic originalism is heresy. In school, your son was therefore taught an ideology of hate toward the unbeliever--defined as Christians, Jews, and Hindus, but also Shiites, Sufis, and Sunni Muslims who don't follow the Wahhabi doctrine. He is told that the crusades never end; that aid organizations, schools, and government offices are just modern weapons of the West's continuing crusade against his faith; and that it is a religious obligation to do ``battle'' against the infidels.

I tell my colleagues this story because some version of it plays out hundreds of times every day in far-flung places, from Pakistan to Kosovo, Nigeria to Indonesia, the teaching of an intolerant version of Islam to hundreds of millions of young people.

Think about this: In 1956 there were 244 of these madrassas in Pakistan; today there are 24,000. These schools are multiplying all over the globe. Yet, don't get me wrong, these schools, by and large, aren't directly teaching violence. They aren't the minor leagues for Al Qaeda or ISIS. But they do teach a version of Islam that leads very nicely into an anti-Shia, anti-Western militancy.

I don't mean to suggest that Wahhabism is the only sect of Islam that can be perverted into violence. Iran's Shia clerics are also using religion to export violence as well. But it is important to note that the vicious terrorist groups whom Americans know by name are Sunni in derivation and greatly influenced by Wahhabi Salafist teachings.

Of course, the real rub is that we have known this for a very long time. Secretaries of State, ambassadors, diplomats, and four-star generals have all complained over and over again about it. Yet we do very little to stop this long, slow spread of intolerance. We don't address it because to do so would force us to confront two very difficult issues.

The first is how we talk sensibly about Islam. Right now we are caught between two extremes. Leading Republicans want to begin and end this discussion with a debate over what we call terrorists. Of course, the leading candidate for President often equates the entire religion with violence. I think this debate over nomenclature is overwrought, but I certainly understand the problem of labeling something ``radical Islamic terrorism'' because it gives purchase to this unforgivable argument that all Muslims are radicals or terrorists. So many Republicans don't want to go any deeper into the conversation than just simply labeling the threat. But Democrats, frankly, aren't that much better. The leaders of my party often do back flips to avoid using these kinds of terms, but, of course, that forestalls any conversation about the fight within Islam for the soul of the religion.

It is a disservice to this debate to simply brand every Muslim as a threat to the West, but it is also a disservice to refuse to acknowledge that although ISIS has perverted Islam to a degree to make it unrecognizable, the seeds of this perversion are rooted in a much more mainstream version of that faith that derives in substantial part from the teachings of Wahhabism.

Leaders of both parties need to avoid the extremes of this debate and enter into a real conversation about how America can help the moderate voices within Islam win out over those who would sow the seeds of extremism. Let me give an example. Last fall, I visited the Hedayah Center in Abu Dhabi, a U.S.-supported, Arab-led initiative to counterprogram against extremist messaging. When I pressed the center's leadership on the need to confront Wahhabi teaching and the mainstream roots of extremism, they blanched. They said it was out of their lane. They were focused on the branches of extremism, not the trunk. But, of course, by then it is probably too late.

America, frankly, doesn't have the moral authority or weight to tip the scales in this fight between moderate Islam and less tolerant Islam. Muslim communities and Muslim nations need to be leading this fight. But America--and most notably, sometimes the leaders of my party--also can't afford to shut its eyes to the struggle that is playing out in real time. Saudi Arabia

That brings me to the second uncomfortable truth, and I present it to you in a quote from Farah Pandith, who was President Obama's Special Representative to Muslim Communities. In a moment of candor, she commented that in her travel to 80 different countries in her official position, she said, ``In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence . . . funded by Saudi money.''

The second uncomfortable truth is that for all the positive aspects of our alliance with Saudi Arabia, there is another side to that country than the one that faces us in our bilateral relationship, and it is a side we can no longer afford to ignore as our fight against Islamic extremism becomes more focused and more complicated.

First, let me acknowledge that there are a lot of good aspects in our relationship with Saudi Arabia. I don't agree with cynics who say our relationship is just an alliance to facilitate the exchange of oil for cash and cash for weapons. Our common bond was formed in the Cold War when American and Saudi leaders found common ground in the fight against communism. The unofficial detente today between Sunni nations and Israel is a product, in part, of the Saudi-led diplomacy. There have been many high-profile examples of deep U.S.-Saudi cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda and ISIS. More generally, our partnership with Saudi Arabia--the most powerful and the richest country in the Arab world--serves as an important bridge to the Islamic community. It is a direct rebuttal of this terrorist idealogy that asserts that we seek a war with Islam.

But increasingly, we just can't afford to ignore the more problematic aspects of Saudi policies. The political alliance between the House of Saud and the conservative Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, and this alliance has resulted in billions of dollars funneled to and through the Wahhabi movement. Those 24,000 religious schools in Pakistan--thousands of them are funded with money that originates in Saudi Arabia. So are mosques in Brussels, Jakarta, and Paris. According to some estimates, since the 1960s the Saudis have funneled over $100 billion into funding schools and mosques all over the world, with the mission of spreading puritanical Wahhabism. As a point of comparison, researchers suggest that the Soviet Union spent about $7 billion--a fraction of that--during the entire period of 1920 to 1991. Less well- funded governments and other strains of Islam just can't keep up with the tsunami of money behind this export of intolerance.

Rightfully, we engage in daily castigations of Iran for sponsoring terrorism throughout the region. But why does Saudi Arabia largely get off the hook from direct public criticism from political leaders simply because they are a few degrees separated from the terrorists who are inspired by the ideology their money helps to spread? Why do we say virtually nothing about the human rights abuses inside Saudi Arabia, fueled by this conservative religious movement, when we so easily call out other countries for similar outrageous behavior?

Second, we need to have a reckoning with the Saudis about the effect of their growing proxy war with Iran. There is more than enough blame to be spread around when it comes to this widening Saudi-Iranian fault line in the Middle East. I would argue that the lion's share of the responsibility lies with the Iranians, who have been a top exporter of terrorism and brutality for decades. It is primarily Iranian-backed groups who have destabilized places such as Lebanon and Iraq. It is the Iranians who are propping up a murderous regime in Damascus.

But in the wake of the Iran nuclear agreement, there are many in Congress who would have the United States double down in our support for the Saudi side of this fight in places such as Yemen and Syria simply because Saudi Arabia is our named friend and Iran is our named enemy. But the Middle East doesn't work like that anymore, and there is growing evidence that our support for Saudi-led military campaigns in places such as Yemen are prolonging humanitarian misery and, frankly, aiding extremism.

Ninety billion dollars in U.S. arms sales money has gone to Saudi Arabia during the Obama administration to help them carry out a campaign in Yemen against the Iranian-backed Houthis. Our government says its top priority in Yemen is defeating AQAP, which is arguably Al Qaeda's deadliest franchise, but this ongoing chaos has created a security vacuum in Yemen in which AQAP can thrive and even expand. No expert would dispute that since the Saudi campaign began, Al Qaeda has expanded in Yemen and ISIL has gained a new territorial and recruitment foothold. To make matters worse, Saudi Arabia and some of their GCC allies are so focused on this fight against Iran in Yemen that they have dramatically scaled back or in some cases totally ended their military efforts against ISIS. Under these circumstances, how does military support for Saudi Arabia help us in our fight against extremism if that is our No. 1 goal?

Here are my recommendations. The United States should get serious about this. We should suspend supporting Saudi Arabia's military campaign in Yemen, at the very least until we get assurances that this campaign does not distract from the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda or until we make some progress on the Saudi export of Wahhabism throughout the region and throughout the world. And Congress shouldn't sign off on any more military sales to Saudi Arabia unless similar assurances are granted.

If we are serious about constructing a winning, long-term strategy against ISIS and Al Qaeda, our horizons have to extend beyond the day to day, the here and now, the fight in just Syria and Iraq. We need to admit that there is a fight on for the future of Islam, and while we can't have a dispositive influence on that fight, we also can't just sit on the sidelines. Both parties here need to acknowledge this reality, and the United States needs to lead by example by ending our effective acquiescence to the Saudi export of intolerant Islam.

We need to be careful about not blindly backing our friend's plays in conflicts that simply create more instability, more political insecurity vacuums which ISIS and other extremist groups can fill, such as what is going on in Yemen today.

We need to work with the Saudis and other partners to defeat ISIS militarily, but at the same time, we need to work together to address the root causes of extremism. Saudi Arabia's counter-radicalization programs and new anti-terrorism initiative are good steps that show Saudi leaders recognize some of these problems, but they need to do more. Tackling intolerant ideologies, refusing to incentivize destabilizing proxy wars--these are the elements of a long-term anti- extremism strategy, and we should pursue this strategy even if it on occasion makes us uncomfortable.

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