Turkey and Syria

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Delaware for his comments.

I rise to continue to speak about the U.S. retreat from Syria and our alliance with our Kurdish allies.

The hasty withdrawal of the United States from northern Syria produced vivid and painful pictures of U.S. troops being pelted with stones and rotting vegetables as they walked away from the Kurdish allies they had stood alongside in the fight against ISIS for years-- those Kurdish allies who had fought so valiantly with the United States--our best battlefield partners--in the defeat of ISIS.

The Trump retreat has been pitched by the President as a great victory for American foreign policy. It isn't. It is a grave failure that will ultimately make our country less safe. It is paving the way for potential ethnic cleansing. That has been testified to by administration officials.

In the last 2 weeks, 176,000 Kurds--more than half of them children-- have been displaced.

President Trump claims that the Kurds understand we are doing them a great service. That is just flatly wrong.

The Trump retreat empowers Russia, empowers Iran, empowers the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who is an international pariah because he is responsible for human suffering at an unimaginable scale, and it also empowers Turkey, which, despite being a NATO member, has undergone a troubling slide toward authoritarianism.

The Trump retreat has led us to abandon a steadfast U.S. ally, the Syrian Kurds. It is more than just abandoning them and walking away from them; the President reached out personally to say that they were no angels, thrashing them on the way out of the door. For what reason?

The Trump retreat has already led to more than 100 ISIS prisoners escaping, according to the testimony of the special Ambassador who has been charged to be the envoy for the region, Ambassador Jeffrey. The President declared that they had ``been largely recaptured,'' but when Ambassador Jeffrey was asked yesterday about the President's claim, he stated: ``We do not know where they are.''

Based on testimony from military leadership and diplomats--testimony which was just read by Senator Carper--it is pretty clear that the President has increased the likelihood of a resurgence of ISIS with this move. We hope that does not happen, but it has largely been predicted by our defense leaders.

What is the grand strategy here? If you look at this highly consequential decision, which is literally a life-and-death decision, and you look at how it was made, it becomes pretty clear to me that there wasn't a grand strategy.

President Trump encouraged a career State Department diplomat, Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, who spent his whole life in this region, to come out of retirement and take a portfolio of responsibility for Syria and the anti-ISIS campaign. Ambassador Jeffrey was charged directly with this task, but Ambassador Jeffrey testified before the Foreign Relations Committee the other day that he was not even asked or consulted about the cause of action that this President took.

Imagine how that would make you feel. You have retired. You are recruited by the President to come and lead the coalition against ISIS, to be responsible for the Syrian portfolio. The President makes a life- and-death decision about the Syrian mission and does not even ask you for your advice about it. This speaks volumes about the chaotic nature of the retreat.

In July, Ambassador Jeffrey announced--and this was good news--that he and the team had convinced Britain and France to add troops to the mission--the anti-ISIS mission in Syria--to deal with this ISIS threat. That was announced 2 to 3 months ago. But what we heard after President Trump's announcement was that he did not consult with Britain and France, the nations that had made commitments and then bulked up their troop strength in the area. President Macron of France said he heard of President Trump's decision by tweet.

So when neither the U.S. Ambassador charged with the responsibility of this mission, nor the British and French allies, who are also together with us on the battlefield, were consulted about this, that adds to the sense of chaos.

I believe this: If the administration had come to Congress 3 months ago or 3 weeks ago and said: Here is our proposal. We want to empower Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Assad. We want to raise the risk of ISIS reconstituting. We want to walk away from the Kurds. We want to make other allies wonder about whether we will be loyal to them. And we want to send a message that protecting oil wells is more important than protecting allies--if the administration had come to the Armed Services or Foreign Relations Committee and said ``We have an idea. This is what we want to do. What do you think?'' I know what we would have done. I think virtually everyone in the body would have asked questions but would have laughed the strategy out of the room.

But the President didn't come to Congress, didn't come to the relevant committees to share his thought or his idea about what should be done. Instead, he took the unilateral action, and now we are seeing the consequences of the Trump retreat.

The Trump retreat was promoted at a press conference by the President yesterday with a branding, and the branding was ``Mission Accomplished and Promise Kept.'' That branding sent a very bizarre, chaotic, and contradictory message: We are protecting oilfields but not our allies from ISIS. We are pulling out of the region, but we are also putting thousands more troops in Saudi Arabia. We are pulling out of the region, but we have, in fact, added 14,000 more troops to the gulf since May. We are pulling back from the safe zone that we spent months trying to implement, just to put Russia in charge of that safe zone. We are empowering dictators, but we are abandoning allies. We are sending the signal in Saudi Arabia that the reason we are putting troops there is, as the President said, because they will pay for it, sending the message that our military are now mercenaries, that we would go to the country where the country will pay for it regardless of the human rights situation in that country.

The withdrawal has made it very difficult for anybody to think about partnering with us in the future against a threat like ISIS.

The Syrian Kurds and the Iraqi Kurds, by the way, are both very, very strong partners in the battle against ISIS. If ISIS does resurge, the normal reaction would be to go to our best battlefield partners and ask them if they would help us to defeat ISIS. The President has made it virtually impossible for us to go back to the Syrian Kurds and say: OK, well, now can you help us defeat ISIS again? And I think the President's actions this week have sent a message to other nations as well that when the United States asks you to get on the battlefield, you have to be worried about whether the United States will abandon you when it has decided your time is up.

I want America--and I know the Presiding Officer does as well because of his background--to be the country that tells the world ``You can count on us,'' not the country about which the world says ``Don't believe a word they say.''

In my capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services and the Senate Foreign Relations Committees, I have spoken with a number of Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle about what we can do because I don't think the President is going to reverse course. But there are things we can do as the article I branch here to repair some of this or at least start on the road to repair.

There is strong bipartisan support for the passage of the Risch- Menendez bill, which provides a path forward. This is a bill that deals with sanctioning Turkey for its behavior and calling the administration forward to present us with the anti-ISIS plan that should exist right now. I urge the Senate to take up that bill and pass it immediately. It has strong bipartisan support.

I further urge the Senate to pass either the House resolution condemning the President's action or the resolution that Senator McConnell has introduced to condemn the President's action. I think either or both of those would be strong statements that the Senate could make.

For some reason that has not yet been explained, the administration has refrained from implementing the mandatory CAATSA sanctions against Turkey following Turkey's purchase of the S-400 missile system from Russia. These are mandatory sanctions. By law, the President was supposed to have implemented them by now.

We have heard from Brett McGurk, who is working in the region, that Vladimir Putin has looked at Americans and said: Hey, look, Turkey bought our system, and you guys haven't sanctioned Turkey yet, so you are a paper tiger.

The actions of these sanctions are noticed in the region, and the region is wondering: They are mandatory. Yet the United States isn't implementing the sanctions. Why not?

I call on the administration to reverse this decision and immediately implement the sanctions to send an important message to both Turkey and Russia.

I call on Congress and the administration to be focused on the need for increased humanitarian assistance in the region. The 176,000 Kurds who have been displaced from their land already are likely to be followed by tens or hundreds of thousands more, and we should focus on what we might do in the humanitarian space to assist them. I believe that humanitarian assistance to international NGOs is important and, also, I would argue, humanitarian assistance to the KRG--to the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Naturally, as the Kurds leave the space in northern Syria under attack from Turkey, one of the places they are likely to go is to Kurdistan and northern Iraq. In the first 10 days, nearly 9,000 Kurdish refugees from Syria have crossed the border into Iraq.

So as we are looking to humanitarian assistance to deal with the scope of this crisis created by President Trump's action, I hope we will consider humanitarian support to the KRG as Kurds cross the border.

I call on Congress to pass the bill that has been introduced by Senators Warner and Blumenthal, which would provide special immigrant visa opportunities for Kurdish translators and others who have worked alongside our military. This is something we have had a good track record of doing with people who supported our troops in Iraq and supported our troops in Afghanistan and then are left in harm's way because of that support. Those on the Kurdish side who have worked together with our troops in northern Syria, I think, should be extended the same special immigrant visa status.

The administration should be asked to come to both Houses of Congress and testify about the plan to prevent a resurgent ISIS. This is something Americans should be afraid of. Maybe the administration has a plan about how they will try to protect against that happening, but whether they have a plan or not, they should come to Congress, and we should ask them about it.

Finally, I want the White House to release the transcript of the call between President Trump and President Erdogan in which this deal was hashed. When I heard the testimony of Ambassador Jeffrey at the hearing yesterday--the testimony was public--that he wasn't consulted and that the British and French, who have just recently put in troops, weren't consulted, I still have real questions about why this decision was made. I believe those questions would largely be answered if the transcript of the call between Presidents Erdogan and Trump were delivered, whether in a classified or other context to Congress, so I call on the White House to release the transcript.

I am going to conclude with this: Along with many of our colleagues today, I gathered here in the Chamber at 10:30 to go over to the memorial service for Elijah Cummings, and it was a powerful one. It was a powerful one. Not many Members of Congress--Senate or House--lie in state in the Capitol, and it was a moving occasion.

I knew Elijah Cummings pretty well, being kind of a next-door neighbor of Virginia and Maryland. Over the years, we did a number of events together. One of the things that Representative Cummings used to say in one of these voices that sounded like it was coming out of the Old Testament--you know, it was a fire-and-brimstone voice--was this powerful, powerful statement: ``We are better than this.''

He would say that, and when he would say it, he would say it about a number of circumstances. He said it probably most recently, most vividly, when pictures emerged of children in cages at the border. But he would often say it, and he would say it to criticize actions. It would sound like a tough criticism.

But as some of the eulogists today were mentioning that statement of Representative Cummings, I thought about ``We are better than this,'' what it means, and it suddenly struck me as not a critical statement. It suddenly struck me as an extremely optimistic and positive statement. I hadn't really thought of it that way until I heard it earlier today.

Why do I say it was optimistic and positive? The statement ``We are better than this'' says that whatever the imperfections of the day, we are really more defined by our ideals than our imperfections. We are more defined by our values than our vices. And, sure, when he would use that statement, he would be criticizing an imperfection of the day--a bad decision or bad policy--but he would be criticizing it by saying that we as a country, we as a Congress, we as a Senate, even we as individuals are actually better than this. Our ideals are better than the way we are acting right now.

If you look at reality, you can define it by its imperfection or you can try to define it by its ideals, and I would like to have a judge who looked at me and judged me by my ideals more than my imperfections, even while calling me to live up to my ideals.

The fact that an Elijah Cummings, who had suffered throughout his life many kinds of second-class treatment of discrimination, even being routed into special ed classes as a kid because people thought he was slow when he was actually really, really gifted, the fact that he would go through life and still believe so strongly that our country's values and ideals were a more accurate reflection of who we are than our imperfections and vices is something that I found pretty inspirational as I thought about his life.

I do believe we are better than this with respect to this particular issue. I think we are better than abandoning battlefield allies. I think we are better than empowering authoritarian dictatorships. I think we are better than suggesting we care more about oil than we care about people. I think we are better than facilitating ethnic cleansing of a proud population, including kids. I think we are better than this.

So in the spirit of Representative Cummings, I am going to define us as a nation, us as a Senate, us as individuals more by our ideals than by our imperfect actions and then call us to live up to it. There are concrete steps we can take--some of which I have outlined--that I think will be more in tune with who we actually are and the ideals we hold.

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