Hearing of the House Oversight Committee's National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee - Six Years Later: Assessing Long-Term Threats

Hearing of the House Oversight Committee's National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee - Six Years Later: Assessing Long-Term Threats, Risks and the U.S. Strategy for Security in a Post-9/11 World

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REP. WELCH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank all of you.

Listening is -- I don't want to say it's depressing, but I'll make an observation: Everything you're saying that we should be doing, we're not. Basically institution building for the modern threats -- there's been none; the definition of what the conflict is is still debated, but actually there's been I think an operational conclusion that it's all military all the time; and there's been a relaxation on the effort to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I'm interested in whether the other panelists agree with Dr. Mathews on this question of whether Iraq simply has to be dealt with before we're going to be able to address these profound transformational foreign policy questions for security. It certainly is the sense that I have sitting here that it's all Iraq all the time and it's just a powerful impediment to any clear thinking.

And on one of these trips when I -- we were in the Middle East and went over there, we met with the king of Jordan, and I was thinking that he was going to be talking about Iraq and how that had to be dealt with -- of course, they have to deal with 2 million -- with hundreds of thousands of refugees and it's very unstable -- and that was third in his list of problems.

The first one for him was the Arab-Israeli conflict, second was Lebanon and then a distant third was Iraq, and of course, over here it's all Iraq all the time.

So my question, I guess, to Mr. Isaacson and Dr. Lieber is whether you're in agreement that if we're going to even start considering the recommendations you're making, somehow, someway we've got to get Iraq behind us?

MR. ISAACSON: Yeah. I'm not sure I would take fully that premise from Jessica's testimony, so I don't want to put the words in her mouth. But let me address the question --

REP. WELCH: She can respond too.

MR. ISAACSON: Yeah. I do believe, personally, that this is a multi-pronged approach. And the resolution of the U.S.-Palestinian -- I mean, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is very important right now and you see some hopeful signs, I would say, in Dr. Rice's trip. I also agree that there's an enormous amount we should be doing that we aren't, whether it's their building madrassas around the world and we're not even close in figuring out how we're going to have education programs, English language programs, technology programs. Things that if we -- the fact that we cannot compete with the madrassas movement, when we know how to do things like that, we're just not doing it, is appalling to me and that we're letting more of their education, as opposed to us having technology centers, education centers. We're doing some of that and I'm involved with some of that, but I just wish it were a hundred times more.

On Iraq, I don't think it has to be solved totally first before we get onto anything else. I think it would be a very unwise approach. I do think that the current implementation of our Iraq strategy and our current occupation strategy -- I don't mean occupation to be a loaded term, but you know, what we're doing there -- is actually very bad right now for us dealing with the other problems.

REP. WELCH: Thank you.

MR. LIEBER: I share your sense that there is -- there's a term I like to use: the problem of the -- (speaking in Latin).

REP. TIERNEY: No. I use that all the time too. (Laughter.)

MR. LIEBER: Two years of Latin in Chicago public schools serves me well.

It's certainly true that Iraq is the elephant in the living room. There's a tendency to see everything else through that lens. I think the virtue of the hearings that this committee has called is to encourage us to not ignore Iraq, but try to look beyond it -- especially for whoever is responsible for the presidency in January 2009.

I'd also note, if we look back, that at the time we went into Iraq, 70 percent of the American public, more than three-fifths of the Congress, two-thirds of the European governments supported that judgment. It proves to have been a very fateful decision. The consequences of our involvement in Iraq are still not entirely clear and the judgment of history may be ultimately quite harsh or it may not be.

I'm a little more cautiously optimistic about the current strategy or tactic in Iraq. I think that after the fall of Baghdad there were serious failures in what to do, but that the policy being followed by General Petraeus has at least the possibility that it may be turning things around. I use lots of cautions and I think the advantage is to know what you don't know. It remains to be seen what will occur in Iraq. There is at least a possibility that the situation will stabilize.

Clearly, Iraq is having an impact elsewhere, but I think it's also the case -- as was mentioned in the question -- that other countries are looking at other issues. I'd suggest that some of them, as Jessica has suggested, others of them, and I think there is more of a willingness to look beyond Iraq.

Lastly, in Europe, for instance -- for those of us who travel and go there a good deal -- the kind of bitterness and heated debate that marked the years 2002, 2003, 2004 has subsided and I think there's a willingness to try to look beyond Iraq rather than focus on that to the exclusion of other priorities.

MS. MATHEWS: I didn't mean to suggest there's nothing we can do, because I -- and I want to add to my earlier remarks a couple of other things I think we can change. But I do believe that everything we are doing -- as you suggest -- I mean, the big cost is simply the oxygen. It's just impossible to get away from. And the amount of political capital that we all, as a country, have to focus on this -- there's very little left over for other huge priorities.

But let me just -- and I am under no illusion that we could stop terrorism by changing U.S. policies, but we can affect it in a big way by a number of what I think are really, really bad policy choices. And I want to add also to the prior question three: One is the question of a permanent U.S. presence of Iraq. At the end of Iraq week up here a lot of the media said, oh, gosh. Petraeus came and talked for hours and hours and nothing changed. But in fact, in my judgment very big changed in the president's speech when he said we're going to have fewer troops and bigger mission. And he said what Secretary Gates said at the beginning of June, which was "a long-term presence" on the model of Japan and Korea.

The whole Arab world believes that we went into Iraq in order to dismantle the most powerful Arab state and get our hands on its oil for Israel's benefit and our own. That's what they believe already. And if we -- and of course, one of the reasons that we chose to go in was because of the problem of the American -- current American presence in Saudi Arabia -- military presence. If we choose to do this, and do it without public discussion, without involvement of the Congress -- and as far as I know, there has never been a national security meeting on this subject or a debate within the administration on the wisdom of building permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. It will be one of the biggest mistakes of this whole business.

The passage of amendments forbidding the spending of money to create a permanent presence is a waste of time, because the administration has figured who can say what's permanent, right? Fifty years is not permanent, but 50 years is a great big mistake -- in my judgment. If it were me, I'd be up here having bicameral, bipartisan hearings on the wisdom of this choice -- not in the context of the administration's position, necessarily, but whether this is something the United States wants to do. I think it has everything to do with the supply of people to al Qaeda.

Secondly, we need a new policy on democracy promotion. In particular, we need a set of policies to separate democracy promotion from regime change, which is what it is believed to be in most of the rest of the world -- not just the Middle East: Russia, for example, China. This is a subject where we can affect our destiny and the likelihood that we will face terrorist attacks.

And finally Pakistan: I am a deep, deep pessimist about our ability to turn around Afghanistan. Again, history tells me this one is going to take 10 times what we're willing to give it. But Pakistan we cannot afford not to be paying an awful lot more attention to. And I think we do have some levers to affect the supply of terrorist impacts. So my point is just -- while we're paying a terrible price in Iraq and will continue to for many, many years -- there are things that will make it either better or worse.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Welch.

REP. WELCH: Thank you very much.

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