Iraq: Levin Floor Speech on the Senate Resolution Calling for a Change of Course in Iraq, Including the Replacement of the Secretary of Defense: 09/06/06
Mr. President, our current policy in Iraq is not been working. It is making us less secure against the common enemy. The question is whether the current course we are on is contributing to the defeat of that enemy, or whether the current course we are on is making us less secure, as our resolution states.
It is long past time for a change in course. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Unfortunately, President Bush and the administration just keep digging us into a deeper and deeper hole. The President has given the Iraqis the impression that our commitment in Iraq is open ended. He reinforced that impression when he said last month that “We are not leaving so long as I am President.”
The Iraqi leadership needs a wakeup call, a dose of reality. They need to be told: if you don’t get your political house in order, if you don’t reach a political settlement that leads to the end of the Sunni insurgency and leads to the dismantling of the Shia militia, then we cannot save you from yourselves. It is in your hands, we must tell the Iraqis, not ours. Whether you want to put together a nation or whether you have a civil war is your choice. We have opened the door for you. We have given you an incredible opportunity which no other country would even consider giving but ours. We have paid for it in blood and treasure.
But only the Iraqis can utilize that opportunity. We cannot force them through that door that we have opened for them. The Iraqi leadership is now operating under the misconception that we are there as long as they want us or as long as they need us. That misconception must end. They must be told that they must make the political compromises. They must share resources and political power that only they can decide to do if they are going to, in fact, avoid an all-out civil war and defeat the insurgency.
We cannot do that for them. We have been there now longer than we fought the Korean War. They have had an opportunity to create a constitution. By now, they were supposed to consider amendments to that constitution. That apparently has been shelved by the Iraqi political leadership. That is unacceptable to us. It is unacceptable to the American people. The American people want the Iraqi leadership to make the compromises they need to make to avoid an all-out civil war. They must take hold of their country.
We must begin, I believe, a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of this year. Iraq should be told that the phased withdrawal is going to begin by the end of this year. It is essential to do this in order to prod the Iraqis to reach the political settlement which according to our top commander in Iraq is essential if all-out civil war is going to be avoided. This cannot be won militarily. The military piece has been done.
We have 80 to 90 percent of the Iraqi military force now trained. It is the political will in Iraq which is lacking, and that will must be brought to bear. We must prod it, we must pressure it. We must push them to do what only they, again, can do. I believe they must face an abyss. These decisions are obviously difficult. We know that. There is a long history there that needs to be overcome. But the Iraqi leaders must face the abyss. They must face a very stark choice: civil war or nationhood. The American security blanket is now providing a negative incentive to reach those kinds of essential decisions. Instead, similar to a broken record, President Bush and members of his administration keep saying that the choice in Iraq is between staying the course or withdrawing, cutting and running.
That is not the choice. There is a third choice: changing the course, changing the negative dynamic in Iraq, which is the best and, I believe, only hope of achieving our mission. Staying on this downward spiral in Iraq makes no sense.
Some of the President’s recent comments on Iraq sound as if he is out of touch with the reality on the ground. For example, the President was extremely naive when he said at a recent press conference that the violence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza was the result of “groups of terrorists trying to stop the advance of democracy.'’ But it is a terrorist group, Hezbollah, which is part of a democratically elected Government of Lebanon, and the democratically elected Government in Iraq supported and identified itself with Hezbollah and its attacks on Israel.
The President also said at that August 21 news conference that “Saddam Hussein had relations with Zarqawi,'’ a terrorist who was killed in Iraq. That simply was not true. It continues the administration’s tactic of trying to link Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, a link that our intelligence community has repeatedly said did not exist. It continues a pattern of this administration of falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the people who attacked us on 9/11 in an obvious effort to win public support for the administration’s Iraq policy.
It is part of a continuing pattern of misleading and false statements, such as the effort which lasted over years of making the American people believe that there was a meeting in Prague between the head of the Iraqi Secret Service and Mohammed Atta prior to 9/11, Mohammed Atta being the lead hijacker and attacker on us on 9/11. That was false. The intelligence community did not believe that meeting took place. And yet month after month prior to the war and after the war, the administration kept pointing to reports of the meeting that suggested the link between the people who attacked us on 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, trying to create the impression that Saddam Hussein was part of that attack to such an extent that over half the American people believed that in fact there was such a link.
Finally, the President recently insisted there be no withdrawal of American troops so long as he was President. He gave a long list of reasons for his statement, and one of those reasons was that it is “what the Iraqi people want,” to quote the President. The President is badly misinformed.
An April 2006 survey of Iraqi public opinion conducted by the University of Michigan leads to the opposite conclusion. This survey found that almost 92 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition troops in Iraq. Even more disturbing than that is the fact that this number was an increase from the 74 percent of Iraqi people who opposed the presence of coalition troops in Iraq in 2004. So that in the 2 years from 2004 to 2006, the percentage of Iraqi people who oppose the presence of coalition troops in their country increased from 74 percent to 92 percent. And almost 85 percent of that 92 percent–almost 85 percent of Iraqis–are “strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops.'’
So our open-ended commitment of troops is not supported even by the Iraqis, and it sends the wrong message to the Iraqi leadership.
Our strategy in Iraq is not succeeding. We need to change course. The longer we maintain our failed stay-the-course approach, the weaker we are in the war on terrorism. The Iraqis need to hear a wake-up call from the President instead of a soothing message that we will be there so long as he is the President.
President Bush has repeatedly said that as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down. The Iraqi security forces are 85 percent stood up. Where is the Presidential promised response that there be at least the beginning of a standdown as the Iraqis have been standing up? Why isn’t that commitment being kept, so critically important to the American people, so repeatedly made by the President of the United States, that as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down? It doesn’t say after all the Iraqis have been fully trained, even though they are nearly there. It says “as they stand up.” And the reason that is so critically important is because as long as the present policy continues and the Iraqis believe we will be there as a security blanket even though they do not make the political decisions and compromises which are essential to their success, our policy of staying the course, our open-ended commitment makes it less likely that we are going to succeed in Iraq.
I think every Member of this Chamber believes we have a common enemy, and that is the religious fanatics who terrorize innocents. It is a common enemy and we all want to see them defeated. But the current course that we are on makes it more difficult for us to defeat that enemy, and it makes it less likely that we will have the ultimate success which is so essential to our own security.
The amendment that is being offered calls on the President to change course in Iraq. It also says that one important indication of that change would be the replacement of the current Secretary of Defense. I have said in the past that I would call for changing the Secretary of Defense if I thought it would represent a change in the administration’s policies in Iraq. I have focused on the policies, not on the personalities. But, in my view, as the resolution says, replacing Secretary Rumsfeld would be an indication, finally, that the Bush administration recognizes the need to change course in Iraq. B ecause it is that policy change which is so essential, I will support the resolution and hope that the Senate is allowed to vote on it.