Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to come to the Senate to speak about the situation in Iraq. A moment ago I was joined by some very close friends from South Florida, including the former mayor of West Miami, and now the chair of the county commission in Miami-Dade County, Rebecca Sosa. She actually got me started in politics.

When she was mayor of West Miami, I told her I was interested in public service. We walked door to door in the small city called West Miami which has 5,000 residents. She taught me how to campaign one on one with real people and their real lives.

Now I return home every weekend--when we are done here and with my work throughout the State--to the same community that I still live in, and increasingly people there are asking me about the situation in Iraq. The question I get from many people is--and I want to be blunt about how they say it--I understand this is a problem, but why is it our business? Why do we care about what is happening in another country when it seems to be a fight among themselves?

That is a very legitimate question. I know Americans are watching the issues that are happening abroad, and they ask themselves: Why does America need to be the world's policeman?

I want to take a few moments to explain why this matters--why it matters to people not just in the Middle East but even people in the small city of West Miami where I still live.

The situation in Iraq is, to some extent, a civil war between Sunni and Shia, as we see in other conflicts such as Syria and other places. That is a real aspect of it. I would say the current government of Iraq has contributed greatly to it--by the way, spurred on by Iranian influence--to further exacerbate that divide between Sunni and Shia.

While it is fair to say that much of what is happening in Iraq is a civil war between two sects, it is not fair to say that is all it is, because what is happening in Iraq has a direct bearing on the future security of every American, even those Americans who live in the small city of West Miami where I live. Here is why.

Imagine for a moment if we could go back in time to the year 1997 or 1996 or 1998 or 1999 and had known about Al Qaeda then what we knew by September of 2001. We would have realized this is a dangerous group that had the capacity and the deep willingness to attack and kill Americans in order to terrorize so that we would leave the Middle East and turn it over to people such as them. If we had known that and taken that seriously--and I would say some did know this--if we had done something about it, it is fair to say that eventually there would have been some sort of terrorist attack, but maybe there wouldn't have been one on September 11, 2001. If we had actually targeted this group and degraded their capabilities while they were still in their safe haven in Afghanistan--or even before that--we potentially could have saved the lives of thousands of Americans and, more importantly, avoided the rise of Al Qaeda in the region and in the world. But we did not. While this is not a time to point fingers or throw blame around, I certainly think it is a time to learn the lessons of that history and apply them to the challenges of our time.

What is happening today in Iraq and in portions of Syria is in many ways the exact same thing: A radical group--ISIL--which, by the way, rose through the ranks of Al Qaeda until they now have a split from Al Qaeda, believe it or not, because Al Qaeda thinks that ISIL is too brutal to their fellow Muslims. This group has been growing in strength ever since the United States left Iraq. This group has been fed and its strength has been given to them by foreign fighters who have spilled into the conflict in Syria where they have established a foothold and have used it as a staging and operational ground to take their brand of ruthlessness now into Iraq.

We saw over the weekend images and photographs and videos of the mass assassinations, executions of Shia members of the Iraqi military. They have grown in strength over this time and they have begun to grow in their influence in Iraq. Their goal is simple: They want to establish the premier Islamic caliphate in all the world--the premier Sunni Islamic caliphate in the region. Caliphate basically means Islamic kingdom. They don't care about existing borders. The kingdom they envision is a vast safe haven that encompasses portions of Syria they already have under their control and portions of Iraq they are now gaining control of.

What is their goal for this place they are trying to set up? Their first goal is to institute Sharia law, and they have a particularly brutal brand of Sharia they have forced upon people both in Syria and now increasingly in Iraq.

Their second goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate state--a safe haven from where they can plan and train and ultimately carry out terrorist attacks against the United States and other countries, including attacks here in our homeland.

We must learn the lessons of before 2001, and we must say to ourselves: Under no circumstances will we ever again allow a safe haven or for this kind of terrorist group to ever gain a safe haven anywhere in the world. We will never allow this to happen again.

That is why it is so critical for us to be engaged here. The reason why we should care about this issue is not because we want to force upon Iraq democracy or force upon Iraq the type of government we think they need. The reason why we care is because we cannot allow a safe haven to develop there, that can be used to carry out attacks that can kill Americans, including here in our homeland. This is why we should care. This is why it is so important that the Commander in Chief of the United States--the President--come as quickly as possible before the American people and before this Congress with a plan to address this risk.

I know the President likes to go around saying the war is over, but no one told ISIL that. No one told Al Qaeda that. No one has told these terrorists that. They don't think the war is over. In fact, in their minds, this war will go on for hundreds of years. The only person who can rally this country behind a plan to address this is not a U.S. Senator or a Member of Congress, not the majority leader or the Speaker of the House, not the countless people who write very well-informed opinion pieces in our newspapers. The only person in this country who can rally us around a plan to address this is the President himself.

So while I understand he doesn't want us engaged in another conflict, and neither do most Americans, he knows--he must know--that we are going to have to do something about this. That is not the issue before us. The issue before us is whether we do something about it now or we do something about this later when the problem will be much harder and more costly to address.

I hope the President does bring us

together to solve this problem. This doesn't need to be--and it should not be--a partisan issue. The national security of the United States should never be a partisan issue, for if terrorists carry out an attack on our homeland they will not attack Democratic sites but Republican sites; they will not target conservatives but leave liberals alone; they will target Americans. Americans from every political persuasion died on 9/11. I fear that may happen at some point again. So we should all care about this.

The only person who can bring us together to do something about it is the President, and so far he has failed to do it. I don't know if it is because it runs counter to his political narrative that the war is over and he got us out of Iraq. I don't know why it is, but so far he has not done that, and he must.

Mr. President: On this issue, you must lead. You must put aside all of these domestic, political debates that are going on in your office about how this is going to poll or whether this runs contrary to what you said on the campaign trail. This is too important, it is too vital, it is too serious, and it is too dangerous.

I have my own ideas, as do others, about what that plan should look like, but we want there to be a plan. We are not asking the President to come forward with a plan to go looking for something to attack. We want him to come forward with a plan because only he can, and he must. In my opinion, that plan has to be we must do whatever we can and everything we can to prevent this group, ISIL, from gaining operational long-term control of these territories in Iraq. To me, that means going after their command-and-control structure, which involves their ability to transit fighters and weapons and fuel and food and ammunition from their safe havens in Syria to their increasingly new spaces they have now carved out for themselves in Iraq.

I think all of us in this Chamber, when it comes to issues of national security, understand we should not be a part of the back-and-forth of partisan politics.

I guess my plea here today on the Senate floor is this: Mr. President, you must lead on this issue. You must come forward with a plan that we can rally this Congress and our people behind, because if we fail to do so, I fear our Nation will pay a terrible price down the road. Never again can we allow an Al Qaeda-style group to establish a safe haven where they can plot against us anywhere on this planet. The choice before you, Mr. President, is you either deal with it now or some future President and future Congresses and future Americans will deal with it later. I hope you will deal with it now. I hope we will remember the lessons of our recent history. The only one who can lead us in that direction is you, Mr. President. I hope you will, because the consequences of failing to do so would be dramatic and, in my opinion, will be condemned by history.

I hope over the next few hours, the next few days, we will have the opportunity to come to this floor and advocate on behalf of a concrete plan of action that most, if not all, of us can support, so we can ensure we can say that during our time here we did everything we needed to do to keep America safe.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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