Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004

Mr. REED. Mr. President, just a few days ago I had the privilege of traveling, with Senator Warner and Senator Levin, and other colleagues, to Iraq. I wish to comment upon my observations of that trip in the context of this Defense appropriations bill.

After the most stunning victory in the annals of military history, the fighting and dying in Iraq goes on. The war is not over.
It has changed its character. Conventional warfare of major formations against major formations has yielded to hit-and-run attacks against our troops. We are in a tenuous moment where the momentum of the battle has shifted from our coalition forces and may shift dramatically to opposition forces in Iraq.

We are being opposed by groups of Baathist diehards, Islamic fundamentalists, and criminals. Although this resistance, until recently, appeared to be uncoordinated and spasmodic, there are strong signs emerging that organizations are beginning to coalesce and we are facing a much more serious threat.

Just today, in Iraq, a manned portable air defense missile was fired at an American aircraft over Baghdad International Airport, signaling a major escalation of the capabilities of our opponents and the ability of these opponents to interfere with our occupation forces in a significant way.

Another American soldier died. The mayor of an Iraqi city was gunned down. Indeed, today General Abizaid indicated that we are facing a classical guerrilla-type war situation. And I must say, General Abizaid is a person I had the privilege of serving with 30 years ago in the 82nd Airborne Division. There is not a more talented and dedicated and decent officer in our Army or our military force. His expertise and knowledge make him the most capable person we could have there. So his conclusion, I think, is one that should resonate through these halls.

Now, if one of these groups—Baathists or fundamentalists, radicals, or criminals—becomes more coherent in their efforts—and it seems, based on today's events, they are becoming more coherent—then the danger to our force will rise.

Let me suggest this is a startling revelation today. It was difficult to bear the sight of American troops being hit with RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades, but to have the capability and the cunning to launch a missile against an aircraft in Baghdad should send shivers down our spine, not just with respect to Baghdad but throughout the world.

One of the issues which I am sure they are desperately trying to determine today is: How many of these manned portable missiles are there in Iraq? I do not know for a fact, but I would suggest there are hundreds, if not thousands.

While we were visiting the northern area of Iraq under the control of the 4th Infantry Division, General Odierno, the commander, indicated they had identified and were securing almost 3,000 ammo dumps, including small arms, all the way up to medium-range missiles with about a 100-kilometer range. This country is chock-full of RPGs and other weapons. The other question is: If they are in Iraq today, have some of these manned pads exfiltrated out of the country into very dubious hands? We face a serious issue.

Now, if all of these elements are able to come together with a common purpose—the Baathists and the criminal elements and the radical fundamentalists—we have a very serious challenge. And, most important, if any one or all of these groups can tap into an innate nationalism among the Iraqi people, if they can translate their disappointment about their economic position today, their dashed expectations of what liberation would mean, then we have a great challenge to our occupation of Iraq.

To dismiss these forces as inconsequential or without support, I think, is a serious mistake. What they may lack in popular support and skill—although, again, their demonstrated performance increases each day—they can make up in desperation and fanaticism. There are remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime. The disgruntled Baathists have no place to go, and they know it. For them, it will be a fight to the death.

In Chris Hedges' brilliant polemic about the corrosive effects of war, entitled "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," he described a visit to an Iraqi prison in Northern Iraq that was liberated at the end of the gulf war. In his words:

When it was attacked in 1991 by Kurdish fighters and enraged civilians, 300 Iraqi secret policemen and guards, including the
warden, held out for three days. None of the defenders survived. And after the battle, a triumphant fighter expressed the wishes of many. In his words:

We wanted them all to come back to life .    .    . so that we could kill them again.

This is the nature of the struggle and the combatants in Iraq. There are thousands of former secret police and Fedayeen, not
just the 52 cards in the famous deck. We can expect fierce and persistent resistance from most if not all.

It is no surprise, then, that our military commanders assume that the situation in Iraq will get worse before it gets better.
We should be prepared for continued casualties on a frequent basis. Indeed, we should be prepared for heavy casualties on given days.

Again, this is absolutely consistent with General Abizaid's conclusion that we are in a classic guerrilla war struggle today.

The most obvious objective of opposition forces is to inflict sufficient casualties on our troops so that support within the
United States for a continued presence within Iraq will erode and evaporate. As such, our immediate response must be to communicate to the American people that the road ahead will be difficult. We are likely to sustain constant casualties, and we must commit significant resources to the struggle to rebuild Iraq.

That is why the absence of appropriations in this bill for our effort in Iraq is unfortunate. The administration has not requested funds so this absence is not the fault of the committee. It represents a very deliberate policy of the administration to avoid declaring to the American public, in an explicit fashion, the true course of our operations in Iraq.

We all anticipate that the administration will make a supplemental request early next year and argue that the funds are critically needed to cover costs that have already been incurred. But the American people deserve something better. They should know these costs now.

Having decided to use military force to eliminate the regime of Saddam Hussein, we cannot walk away from the difficulties of pacifying and rebuilding Iraq. We may come to seriously question the commitment we have undertaken, but to walk away at this point from the challenge would deal a serious blow to our prestige and power in the international community. To ensure that we stay the course, it is essential the American people know the costs, and the cost of our passage.

Our efforts in Iraq ultimately depend on the attitudes of the Iraqi people. They will be the final judges of our policies and our continued presence. At present, the long and terrifying shadow of Saddam Hussein continues to bedevil them. Many of our military officers and our civilian administrators attribute the noncommittal attitude of the Iraqis to the continuing uncertainty of Saddam's fate. There is much truth to this assertion. But we should be careful not to see the capture or death of Saddam as the "silver bullet" that will transform our presence in Iraq.

The Iraqi people seem to be withholding their enthusiastic endorsement for our efforts not just to await the fate of Saddam, but to be assured that the coalition can deliver at least the same degree of economic security they enjoyed under Saddam and, hopefully, much more.

It strikes me that the Iraqi people are not simply motivated by a residual fear of Saddam. They have grown up in a system that provided meager sustenance in exchange for utter subservience, a subservience that was enforced by ruthless terror. It will take more than Saddam's demise to erase this pervasive authoritarian culture. It will take many years and significant improvements in every phase of Iraqi life.

The most pressing demand in Iraq today is to provide a secure environment for our forces and for the Iraqi people. That challenge is inextricably linked and bound up with the economic revitalization of Iraq. Coalition forces are occupying a country whose economy has collapsed. Iraq under Saddam was a country in which everyone directly or indirectly worked for the regime. And now the regime is gone. Perhaps the single greatest long-term danger to our efforts is the huge number of unemployed. Unless we can rapidly put these people to work, they will be vulnerable to the overtures of those who wish us ill. We are in effect in a sprint to revive the Iraqi economy before the Iraqi people decide that freedom is not worth the uncertainty of a dysfunctional economy, and they become susceptible to the overtures of those who want to eject us from Iraq.

Another pressing demand is to create a legitimate Iraqi Government acceptable to the Iraqi people. We have begun to take the first steps in that process by the selection of a governing council. This council will exercise defined powers such as the appointment of Iraqi ministers. All of their actions, however, are ultimately subject to the veto of Ambassador Bremer. The council was selected to reflect the ethnic, religious, and demographic realities of Iraq. That was a positive and appropriate step. This council will participate in the selection of a larger conclave that will draft a constitution for Iraq.

All of these efforts are leading up to putting, as so many people have said, an Iraqi face on the Government of Iraq. We all realize that the longer we appear to be running the show, the more likely it is that opposition to our presence will grow.

At this juncture, we have avoided ceding authority to any one faction in Iraq. We are for the moment holding the various factions at bay. But this balancing act will become more and more difficult as we approach the time when real power is transferred to a real executive. At that point, the traditional rivalries of Sunni and Shia and Kurd will emerge and emerge with some force.

One aspect of the new governing council that I find troubling is the attention and influence given to exiled leaders. According to a report in the New York Times:

    .    .    . significantly, the new interim government will be dominated by the Iraqi exile leaders and Kurdish chieftains who carried out the long campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

    Given the presence of Kurds in northern Iraq and their obvious power—they have their own army; they control their own territory—it is not surprising that they would have a major role. But giving such a significant role to the exiles seems likely to be more controversial than constructive.

    The best known of these exiles is Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi has long resided outside of Iraq. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia by a Jordanian court for embezzlement and bank fraud. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. It is not surprising that reaction to Chalabi and the exiles is not entirely favorable.

    Hassan Zahrawi, a 23-year-old student at Baghdad's Mustansariya University, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying:

    We are the people who suffered. .    .    . They are thieves. They do not know anything about the suffering of the Iraqi people.

This certainly is not a scientific sampling. You could perhaps find people who would endorse Mr. Chalabi. But I think we are taking a risk by inserting, insinuating exiles in a dominant place in this governing council. I think that will strike a chord in Iraq and not a favorable chord as people who have suffered, who have very little, see these people who have just arrived dominating the political process. It could be a severe miscalculation.

Let me suggest another potential miscalculation. I read with great interest Ambassador Bremer's op-ed piece in the New York Times. One quote struck me:

Our economic reform plan will entail a major shift of capital from the value-destroying state sector to private firms.

No one could disagree with that logic. But I think we have to be very careful that we do not replicate the experience we have seen in Russia, for example, where the winners of this transition of capital from the state to the private market were the insiders, the people with the connections, the people who were able to influence the government. We have made serious mistakes in our occupation planning. I hope we don't compound those mistakes by creating a government that has no legitimacy really and that serves simply as a conduit to enrich those who are participating in that government.

All of these concerns resonate throughout a country with distinction and disparate regional characteristics. On our trip, we visited Basra in the south, Baghdad in the center of the country, and Kirkuk in the north. The southern portion is predominantly Shia. They are engaged in a very careful balancing act between Iranian influences and their desires to participate in a secular government but certainly participate so that their religious culture is recognized. They are the largest population group in Iraq. We have been working with them. In the south my impression is that they are still weighing all of their options, and we have to be extremely careful.

In the north there is a significant population diversity, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Arabs. They are much more comfortable with our role there. They have seen the example of several years of a virtually autonomous region the Kurds established after the 1991 war.

The most stable regions at the moment seem to be the north and the south, although there are incidents of violence in all parts of Iraq.

But the key point, the most dangerous place is Baghdad. There in the suburbs leading to the west towards Falluja and up towards the north, toward Tikrit, the ancient home of Saddam and his tribal relatives, that is where the action is, that is where our soldiers are, frankly, being killed.

Our biggest concern at the moment is intelligence. Frankly, we did not expect this type of operation, and we are rapidly and diligently trying to understand who is attacking us, where they are getting their weapons and money and their support and supplies. Are their foreign influences? How many foreign fighters have come into Baghdad? We are in a race to find out about them before they do us even more grievous harm.

There is, of course, the issue of how many troops we should have in Iraq. I have heard reports that General Abizaid will recommend force strength in-country of about 160,000 soldiers and sailors, marines, all of our Armed Forces participating in one way or the other. That is a function of how much we know. My sense is that if we don't know who the enemy is, if we have uncertain threats from multiple directions, then we will err on the side of more troops rather than fewer. This situation could go on for a very long time.

There are those who have said we have gotten ourselves into another Vietnam. No, we haven't. That was a different time, a different place, a different situation. We don't have a rural insurgency as we did in Vietnam. We don't have a country that is a proxy for international politics being supported and encouraged by a significant infusion of foreign resources, wealth, and guidance. But we very well might have our own version of Belfast or the Intifada, urban guerrilla warfare in which there is insignificant foreign support at the moment but, as I indicated before, more than enough people who are determined to attack us and to hurt us.

As we traveled around in Iraq, we talked about the issue of weapons of mass destruction. Just one point: I assumed in my deliberations that the Iraqi regime would have chemical and biological weapons, but I assumed that they did not pose an immediate threat to the United States. Therefore, I did not vote to authorize the unilateral use of force. We have been surprised. But now what I sense is happening is that the search for weapons which so many declared were absolutely there and were so critical in their decision to mount a unilateral military attack, now that has been transformed into a search for a program. I wouldn't be surprised that in the months ahead, based upon analysis of documents, that some type of program emerges.

But with each passing day, it seems less and less likely that we will find a militarily significant concentration of chemical or biological weapons. I thought there was no credence to the claims by the President and others that there was an ongoing nuclear program in Iraq at the time, and I think that will be borne out.

Now, all of this leads me to several conclusions. One is particularly pertinent to this appropriation. Our Army and our marines—particularly our Army—are stretched thin, taut. They won't break because they are magnificent soldiers. They are under extraordinary pressure.

Let me suggest where our Army is. We have 370,800 soldiers in 120 countries, not just Iraq. In Iraq itself, we have the 3rd Infantry Division. These are the troops who led the fight into Baghdad. They have been told they are going home; they have been told they are staying. Once again, decisions have been reversed because of the situation. They are good soldiers.
They will do their job, but certainly this is not the way to have a good plan, to rotate and move soldiers throughout the world.

The 4th Infantry Division is in the north. The 101st Airborne Division is in the north in Mosul. The 1st Armored Division has elements in the country. The 173rd Airborne Brigade conducted a parachute assault in the first days, and they are in Kirkuk. The 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne is there. The 2nd and 3rd Light Cavalry Regiments are there. There are about 134,000 soldiers, together with 44,000-plus soldiers in Kuwait for supporting operations. In Afghanistan, we will have, by the end of summer, two brigades of the 10th Mountain Division. In the Balkans, we have the 34th National Guard Division from Kansas. In Kosovo, we have elements of the 1st Infantry Division, which will be replaced shortly by the Pennsylvania 28th National Guard Division. In the United States, we have soldiers deployed in counterdrug and other operations. Our Reserve elements are the 1st Cavalry Division, 1st Infantry Division Brigade, and we have new Stryker battalions or brigades up in Fort Lewis, and one in Alaska.

This is an extraordinary deployment of American forces. Included in the total are a significant number of National Guardsmen. These National Guardsmen and Reserve are one part of our great Army—one whole unified element.

I have left for last Korea. We have 37,000 soldiers there from the 2nd Infantry Division. I was shocked when I read yesterday of Secretary William Perry's conclusion that we are in a serious crisis with North Korea. Over the last few months, the administration has been trying diplomatically. But Secretary Perry, who is probably the most knowledgeable and experienced with respect to North Korea, is now convinced that we might have missed our opportunity for diplomacy to work.

One of the factors that goes into our strategy is whether we can complement our diplomacy with real military force. There is not much left to do that. Those 37,000 soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division are not the kind of combat power you need to stare down the North Koreans if there is a serious breach of the current situation. But we are stretched thin. We cannot pull forces out of Iraq. We would jeopardize the mission there. We cannot pull them out of Afghanistan. We would jeopardize that mission. We have to consider what is most important for the Army, and we have to make decisions. Those decisions have to come to us quickly from the Department of Defense. What will we do?

This bill should have considered and included those types of recommendations—not our ideas, but the proposals of the Department of Defense and the administration, and there is scant detail with respect to Iraq and potential conflict with Korea. I hope diplomacy will work. But we have discovered that diplomacy without credible and complementary military forces is not as effective. This is a situation where we are stretched and we have an ongoing classic guerrilla war in Iraq, we have a situation in Afghanistan that is unstable, and we have a potential crisis in Korea. We need recommendations from the Department of Defense about where we are going to get soldiers to take these missions. I had hoped this bill would include such information. It doesn't.

Certainly, I am going to support the legislation, but I hope these questions are answered very quickly.

I yield the floor.