Mr. Kyl: Mr. President, on May 24, I voted for H.R. 2206, but I am disappointed that it took so long to complete work on this legislation, while we have troops deployed and under fire fighting against an enemy that, as few others have in history, seeks our total destruction.
For 108 days, the majority held up vital funding for our troops' equipment and training. All this time, the majority was playing politics with this funding, even sending to the President a bill that they knew would be vetoed. And this is not my analysis; we know this through the Democrats' own words. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said, "We are going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war." And "well, it doesn't matter what resolution we move forward to. You know, I can count. I don't know if we'll get 60 votes. But I'll tell you one thing, there are 21 Republicans up for reelection this time."
So, with that in mind, we finally received the final version of the security supplemental at 8 p.m., the last night before the Memorial Day work period. While Democrats finally decided to listen to our generals and not MoveOn.org and yielded to Republicans' demand to exclude an arbitrary withdrawal date, this bill still has serious flaws. A policy that would potentially restrict the very economic reconstruction funds that are necessary to achieve the political and diplomatic solution General Petraeus says we need represents bad public policy, to say the least.
What's more, I am disappointed to see, yet again, that the majority would use the needs of our troops as leverage to include extraneous, and in many cases ill-conceived, spending and policy provisions. Among these are a raise in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour; $22 million in Corps of Engineers funding specifically earmarked for Long Island and Westchester County, and certain areas of New Jersey; $40 million in agriculture assistance specifically earmarked for certain areas of Kansas affected by the recent tornadoes; $10 million for radios for the Capitol Police; several new provisions to give certain labor unions and Continental and American Airlines relief from their employer pension plan contribution obligations; and a provision that mandates that the Secretary of Health and Human Services approve a state's request to extend a waiver for the Pharmacy Plus program, making Wisconsin the only state to benefit from this provision.
The delay in passage of the security supplemental caused by the majority party created significant disruptions for the Department of Defense and for our men and women deployed in the war against terrorists.
Since the emergency request was submitted by the President, the Department of Defense has realigned significant funds internally and submitted to Congress approximately six reprogramming requests driven by the delays in the supplemental.
Secretary Gates stated in an April 11 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, "[i]t is a simple fact of life that if the . . . [supplemental] is not enacted soon, the Army faces a real and serious funding problem that will require increasingly disruptive and costly measures to be initiated--measures that will, inevitably, negatively impact readiness and Army personnel and their families."
Then, Secretary Gates in a May 9 letter to Senator McCain wrote:
[i]n submitting the FY07 supplemental request in early February, the Department planned on these funds becoming available by not later than mid-April. Accordingly, starting in mid-April, the Department began a series of actions to mitigate the impact of the delay in the supplemental on our deployed forces by slowing down spending in less critical accounts. In addition, funds budgeted for fourth quarter Army operations and personnel costs have been or are in the process of being moved forward and expended to partially make up the shortfall.
These actions have resulted in the Army having to take a series of steps including deferring repair of equipment and restraining supply purchases. In short, these steps, while necessary to account for the delay in the supplemental, have already caused disruptions within the Department.
Mr. President, here are just a few specific examples of disruptions that have occurred within the Army:
Facility maintenance and purchases for barracks, mold abatement projects, and dining facilities has been deferred. As a result, there is a risk of troops returning from combat tours to sub-standard barracks and facilities that had been scheduled for renovation or updates while soldiers were deployed;
Orders of supplies have been reduced. Deferring orders for major repair parts and unit level maintenance items creates system lag and an accumulation of backlogged orders waiting to be placed. Units can sustain operations for only a limited time by consuming existing inventory.
In his May 9 letter to Senator McCain, Secretary Gates also made clear that these disruptions would have effects on the war effort:
[T]he lack of timely supplemental funds has limited the Department's ability to properly contract for the reconstitution of equipment for both the active and reserve forces. This situation increases the readiness risk of our military with each passing day should the nation require the use of these forces prior to the equipment becoming available. In other cases, the funding delay negatively impacts our forces in the field by needlessly delaying the accelerated fielding of new force protection capabilities such as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle and counter-IED technologies developed and acquired by the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). Finally, the ongoing delay resulted in the depletion of funds necessary to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces.
Multinational Force-Iraq spokesman, Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, on April 4 said, "At the current moment, because of this lack of funding, MNSTC-I--Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq--is unable to continue at the pace they were in the developmental process of the Iraqi security forces … It is starting to have some impact today, and will only have more of an impact over time."
While I firmly believe that the manner in which Democrats managed this legislation reveals their misplaced priorities, it is absolutely necessary that we get this funding to the men and women on the front line without further delay. That is why I voted for this supplemental. Having forced our troops to wait 108 days for this needed funding, there is no other choice but to accept this legislative blackmail.
I would also like to speak to a larger point, Mr. President. My friends on the other side of this issue in both houses talk about a failed strategy, and about a war that is lost. How do they know the Petraeus strategy has failed? It isn't even in place yet. The fifth brigade of the surge isn't there yet, and the fourth has only just arrived.
Even commentators like Joel Klein of Time magazine, no friend of this administration or this policy, have been forced to admit that progress is being made. While pointing out the many struggles that remain, Mr. Klein said:
There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It comes from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the Sunni insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me--confirming reports from several other sources--that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni- dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as Time's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.
What is now happening is an attempt to reconsider the vote of four years ago when, by large bipartisan majorities in both chambers, we authorized this war. In an effort to appease far left-wing groups, some are attempting to distance themselves from their votes to authorize this policy, and from their own statements acknowledging what the intelligence information told us: Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to America's national security.
What they're not doing is talking about the consequences of defeat. It is clear from respected national security figures like General Anthony Zinni that "This is no Vietnam or Somalia or those places where you can walk away. If we just pull out, we will find ourselves back in short order."
Additionally, even the Brookings Institution released a study that argues:
Iraq appears to have many of the conditions most conducive to spillover because there is a high degree of foreign "interest" in Iraq. Ethnic, tribal, and religious groups within Iraq are equally prevalent in neighboring countries and they share many of the same grievances. Iraq has a history of violence with its neighbors, which has fostered desires for vengeance and fomented constant clashes. Iraq also possesses resources that its neighbors covet--oil being the most obvious, but important religious shrines also figure in the mix. There is a high degree of commerce and communication between Iraq and its neighbors, and its borders are porous. All of this suggests that spillover from an Iraqi civil war would tend toward the more dangerous end of the spillover spectrum.
We cannot forget that Iran and Syria are fostering instability in Iraq. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both active there as well.
As I have mentioned before, but have not heard answered from the critics, we know that chaos in Iraq could draw in others in the region. For example, Saudi Arabian officials have threatened "massive intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis." A Kurdish secession would likely cause Turkish intervention.
Does anyone in Congress disagree that failing in Iraq would be a dramatic setback in the war against terrorists? Iraq must not be divorced from its context--the struggle between the forces of moderation and extremism in the Muslim world. After all, al-Qaida has been in Iraq since before the U.S. invaded and has dedicated itself to fomenting sectarian violence there. Osama bin Laden referred to Iraq as "capital of the Caliphate," arguing that "[t]he most … serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War … [that] is raging in [Iraq]."
Terrorism expert Peter Bergen has told us that a:
[U.S. withdrawal] would fit all too neatly into Osama bin Laden's master narrative about American foreign policy. His theme is that America is a paper tiger that cannot tolerate body bags coming home; to back it up, he cites President Ronald Reagan's 1984 withdrawal of United States troops from Lebanon and President Bill Clinton's decision nearly a decade later to pull troops from Somalia. A unilateral pullout from Iraq would only confirm this analysis of American weakness among his jihadist allies.
Failure in Iraq will encourage further attacks against the United States and provide a base from which to plan and train for attacks.
I will remind my friends who pushed so hard for this legislation, and who cheered for votes on an immediate withdrawal, and the passage of the first security supplemental which the President correctly vetoed, if you are going to advocate a strategy for failure or a precipitous withdrawal, you have the responsibility to tell the American people what the consequences would be, and to tell them how you would respond. These are the burdens of leadership.
