30-Something Working Group

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - September 25, 2006)

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

You ask a very important question: What have we done?

I think that answer came to us in the form of a third-party validator in the form of the New York Times on Sunday with the headline, ``Spy Agency Says Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.'' The national intelligence estimate, which is a conglomerate report of all of the spy agencies that operate inside the U.S. Government, and they attribute literally a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented in either White House documents or in a report released last Wednesday by our House Intelligence Committee. Essentially, it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized, the words in the report, and spread across the globe.

We are literally in a situation now where we have our good friends on the other side of the aisle trying desperately to articulate that they are stronger on national security when every day brings more and more bad news for them in terms of where we are versus where we were 5 years ago.

If you recall, a couple of weeks ago we talked about on this floor everywhere we all went on September 11. Our constituents asked us, so are we safer? Are we safer this September 11 and beyond than we were on September 11 5 years ago?

I have not seen a more damning assessment with a resounding ``no'' as an answer than this one.

Add to that your question of what have we done. There are so many reports we could spend the entire hour just on the whole issue of the lack of troops that we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, the assessments that our military experts are doing and desperate messages that they appear to be sending to the administration that are going unheeded.

One colonel said his unit equipment levels have fallen so low that they now had no tanks or other armored vehicles to use in training and that his soldiers were rated as largely untrained in attack and defense. That is one of our colonels fighting in Iraq. That is just absolutely inexcusable.

It would be different under the Democrats. We would implement our real security plan. We would make sure that the equipment that our troops need would be funded and provided. We would make sure that we have a plan to get us through the war, make sure that we stand up to Iraqi troops and have a phased withdrawal of American troops, and that there would be an end in sight.

Mr. Ryan, you said it so well the other day when you gave a very stark assessment of what is going on with the war in Iraq. I know you have some charts here that I am sure you will take us through. We have got to make sure that we focus both on security and getting a handle on the situation over there and getting a handle on the homeland security situation here that is also writhing in disarray inside our own borders.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Delahunt, we talked a couple weeks ago about that handshake and how in the years that I was growing up, that Mr. Meek and Mr. Ryan were growing up, in a trillion years you would never have expected this handshake to ever happen. And it certainty is not the culmination of years of hard work and diplomacy. Growing up, these two countries, Iraq and Iran, were bitter enemies locked in a war across their borders that was seemingly endless. And to have predicted that what would bring them together, and certainly Prime Minister Maliki does not hate the United States, but what would force these two countries together as allies, as that picture demonstrates, is the United States' inappropriate involvement in the midst of that region where essentially they have been forced together because of Iran's hatred for us. And the original conflict emanated from Sunni and Shiite tension and hatred, and now the United States has done what thousands of years was not able to do, brought the Sunnis and the Shiites together, united in hatred for the United States.

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Ms. Wasserman Schultz, this is not something as it relates to the Democrats proving a point. This is not about proving a point. This is about America. This is about the United States of America. This is about the safety of United States citizens and those that live within the borders of the United States and those that are abroad of our future, and better yet this administration is saying, stay the course with very little or no oversight

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And you are absolutely right, Mr. Meek. And we have our interests and we have our intelligence experts saying that staying the course is the wrong approach because we are getting worse not better in terms of the results that we are getting over there.

We have our military experts, our generals, that I know Mr. Delahunt has the commentary from the generals that ran the operations in Iraq lined up and ready to walk us through. We try to talk about this. This is not, you know, it would be very easy for us to come out on the floor and talk about what DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ's opinion is, KENDRICK MEEK's, TIM RYAN, BILL DELAHUNT, we are citing the experts, the intelligence experts, the military experts.

Mr. Delahunt, I want you, if you would not mind, to go through that. I want to read the opinion of one soldier who communicated my office. This is an e-mail that I got from a soldier in Iraq fighting in Baghdad now. I want to read you his opinion because he is there.

He says, ``In truth every day we are over here we become weaker and they become stronger, Taliban too. It is not getting worse in the sense of more violence and stuff like that, it is getting worse in the minds of those over here and those who are going to have to come back over here. We are not doing anything over here. The bad guys just have to kill one American every couple of days, and that is all they have to do to keep things'' expletive deleted.

``We could kill hundreds a day and it would not matter. The longer we stay the worse it gets. Think about it like this, when Americans came back from fighting World War II people said, `thank you for fighting.' When people come back from Iraq, people say, `I am so sorry you had to do that.'

They feel pity. Take from that what you will. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in the White House in a year and a half, America is in a seriously bad situation. What happened to Russia after they failed in Afghanistan, not to say that that will happen to us, but the fact of the matter is that we are a lot worse off than we were 6 years ago, a lot worse off.''

Now that is pretty damning from a soldier on the ground who is obviously a patriot and who is doing everything he can to protect American interests and to protect the interests of the democracy, the fledgling democracy that has been created by hook or by crook over there.

But, let's take that one step further. And look at this chart, Mr. Delahunt, and then I would like to yield to you. But let's follow up on what this young soldier's opinion is from a snapshot of his on the ground, to the reality of our withdrawing from Afghanistan.

We have the rhetoric versus the reality. We have joined with the Afghan people to bring down the Taliban regime, the protectors of the al-Qaeda network, and aided a new Democratic government to rise in its place. That is the Republican rhetoric.

The reality is that the national--that is the rhetoric called the National Security Strategy of the United States, March 16, 2006. Here is the reality on the ground. From 2001 to 2003, the number of Taliban attacks amounted to 22.

From 2004 to 2006 the number of Taliban attacks amounted to 284. How about the number of suicide attacks from 2001 to 2004? Nine. The number of suicide attacks from 2005 to 2006? Sixty-four. This is in Afghanistan, we are not talking about Iraq.

Goal for numbers of NATO and U.S. trained soldiers in the Afghan army? 70,000. The number of trained soldiers in the Afghan army: About 26,900.

How about the number of hectares, which is an area, in Afghanistan devoted to poppy cultivation in 1999? 51,500. Hectares in Afghanistan devoted to poppy cultivation in 2005? 107,000, more than double.

Estimated opium produced from Afghanistan's crop? 4,475 metric tons, and the percent of global opiate supply originating in Afghan is 90 percent.

But let's stay the course, Mr. Delahunt. Let's keep going in the same direction and repeating the same mistakes.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. It just does not have to be this way. We have a real security plan that we will implement. After November 7, our Democratic leader, Ms. Pelosi, who will be the Speaker, who will be the Speaker of this House of Representatives, talks about in the first 100 hours, we will pass legislation that will implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations.

That we will make sure that we provide our troops with the equipment that they need, that we will provide the region with the number of troops necessary to get the job done so that we can stand the Iraqi troops up and withdraw our troops, and make sure that we begin to withdraw from the region and develop a plan to make sure that it can sustain itself.

It is just mind boggling that they support a stay the course concept. We have got to implement the plan that is going to work, instead of continuing down this path to absolute chaos.

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