Statement
Of Senator Patrick Leahy
In Opposition To The Iraq-Afghanistan
Supplemental Appropriations Bill
October 17, 2003
MR.
LEAHY: Mr. President, I speak today about the Senate’s vote on the
President’s request for an additional $87 billion in emergency
funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, of which $65 billion is for
military operations and $21 billion is for relief and
reconstruction. The lion’s share of the funds
are for
Iraq.
I attended the three hearings in the
Appropriations Committee, when Ambassador Bremer, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld, General Pace, and several other witnesses
testified. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough time in those
hearings to discuss the details of a budget request of such enormous
size and complexity. I was also disappointed that the hearings
provided a one-sided perspective, as there were no witnesses from
the U.S. Agency for
International Development or the State Department, and no witnesses
from outside the government.
I also reviewed the materials provided
by the Office of Management and Budget in support of the request,
which are useful but devoid of detail. For example, a request for
$800 million for police training in
Iraq is justified with only three vague
sentences. It is also one thing to ask for $400 million to build two
new prisons. It is another to fail to explain why on Earth it costs
so much, when the price of labor in Iraq is half what it is in the
United States. This is one of many examples – $33,000 pickup trucks
that cost $14,000 in the U.S. and $6,000 satellite phones that sell
in neighboring Jordan for $500, are
others – that have been cited in the press and in speeches by
Senators.
Of course there are things that need
to be done in Iraq. But
some of these costs are shocking and inexplicable. The
Administration is cutting food aid for poor children in Nicaragua; a
million children die of measles each year because they can’t get the
vaccine which costs pennies; a third of the world’s people live in
conditions most Americans would find appalling. Yet we are going to
build wireless Internet access on the Euphrates. It makes no sense.
And then we saw in last Thursday’s
New York Times that
although this is a one year, emergency appropriation, only $6
billion, not $20 billion, can be effectively spent in
Iraq next year. Could it be that the
reason the White House wants this $20 billion now, and not a penny
less, is because they do not want to have to defend this
increasingly unpopular policy again next year before the November
elections? I think the answer is obvious.
I cast my vote against this
Supplemental.
This decision did not come easily.
There are strong arguments pro and con. I know that I will be among
a small minority. But for me, this is a matter of principle, and
after a great deal of thought I have concluded that I can not
support this proposal. I did not support the policy that got us into
war alone. I do not support the tactics the White House has used to
get this Supplemental passed. And I do not support appropriating so
much money, at one time, for an oil rich nation when the responsible
thing would be to approve a portion of the money today and to
revisit this again next year.
Before I explain how I reached this
decision, I want to make three points.
First, I want to mention the issue of
support for our troops.
We all support our troops, who have
endured great hardship and fought bravely. We worry about their
safety. We have spoken to the grieving families of soldiers who have
died. I and other Senators have worked to get them better protective
equipment, after we learned that some were sent into battle in
Iraq without bullet proof
vests or the latest available armor for their vehicles.
But supporting the troops is not
simply a matter of spending billions of dollars so they can remain
in Iraq indefinitely,
with no exit plan, targets in a guerrilla war that is likely to drag
on for years. The President’s policy that caused them to be sent
there, and that will require them to remain there, must also be a
policy that each of us who has to vote on this Supplemental can
support.
And, if we are to make good use of the
taxpayers money, there must be an
effective plan to implement that policy.
Second, it is beyond dispute that
Iraq is infinitely better
off without Saddam Hussein, whose rein of terror was a disaster for
the Iraqi people and a blight on the
civilized world. The Iraqi people have a chance to build the
foundations of a more open, tolerant, peaceful and prosperous
society. Whether they will succeed in that endeavor may not be know
for many years, but I credit President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, our
troops, and the Iraqi people themselves, for giving them this
chance.
Third, I am voting against this
proposal. If, instead, I thought the Administration was being honest
with the American people about its motives and its policy in Iraq
and the Middle East; if this Supplemental were designed to implement
a credible plan to internationalize our policy rather than to
continue a unilateral approach; and if this had not been a one-time
only, take-it-or-leave-it, partisan approach in which almost every
amendment offered by Democrats was defeated along party lines, my
vote today might be different.
I want to be clear. Since 1989, I have
served as either Chairman or Ranking Member of the Foreign
Operations Subcommittee. I am a strong believer in foreign aid.
Spent wisely, foreign aid is in our national interests. I am not
opposed to helping Iraq
rebuild. In fact I supported the Supplemental, passed in April,
which contained billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq and to support
our military operations there. I also voted for several amendments,
which were defeated along party lines, which I believe would have
improved this Supplemental in important ways.
For example, the Byrd-Kennedy-Leahy
amendment would have allowed $10 million of the
Iraq reconstruction funds to be spent
immediately. The balance of $10 billion would be withheld pending a
certification by the President that the U.N. Security Council has
authorized a multinational force under U.S. command in Iraq and a
central role fo the U.N. in the political and economic development
of Iraq, and a second vote by Congress. I am convinced that if we do
not truly internationalize our policy in Iraq our troops will
continue to face daily attacks, our efforts to rebuild will be in
jeopardy, and U.S. taxpayers, virtually alone, will pay the
skyrocketing costs.
The Biden amendment would have paid
for the $87 billion by repealing a tiny fraction of the President’s
huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. I have no doubt that if
the American people had been able to vote on the Biden amendment it
would have passed overwhelmingly.
The Dorgan amendment would have paid
for the reconstruction with revenues from future Iraqi oil sales.
Yearly revenues from Iraqi oil are expected to reach $100 billion in
less than a decade. This amendment, had it passed, would have lifted
a portion of the staggering financial burden of this war off the
backs of American taxpayers.
I offered an amendment, with Senator
Daschle, to shift responsibility for rebuilding
Iraq from the Secretary of Defense to
the Secretary of State. The Pentagon’s role is fighting wars, which
they do superbly. It is not nation building. That is the role of the
State Department. It is ironic that President Bush, who ridiculed
the Clinton Administration for nation building in the former
Yugoslavia, is today defending the Pentagon’s role in the biggest
nation building effort in half a century.
These are only four of the amendments
that I supported, each of which was voted down because the White
House and the Republican leadership opposed them.
Mr. President, in the weeks and days
leading up to this vote, I have been guided by several things.
First, is the importance of
multilateralism. There is no realistic
alternative in the 21st Century to working collectively
with other nations to combat terrorism and other grave threats to
our security which extend far beyond our borders. Iraq, perhaps more
than any foreign policy adventure in recent memory, illustrates the
costs we pay for unilateralist thinking – the cost to our soldiers,
to our relations with allies and the Muslim world, to our influence
with other nations on so many critical issues, and to American
taxpayers.
Second, is that I did not vote for the
resolution that President Bush used to justify the invasion of
Iraq. I felt it gave the
President sweeping authority that the Constitution reserves for the
Congress. I was also convinced that the White House, despite its
protestations to the contrary, was determined to short circuit the
U.N. inspectors and go to war alone.
This Administration’s policy has been
driven by lofty, unrealistic ambitions; White House and Pentagon
officials who were so convinced of their own version of reality that
they felt no need to ask questions, not to mention listen to the
answers; a presumption that other nations would follow us simply
because of who we are; and a naive assumption that we would be
embraced as liberators and that the Pentagon’s chosen exiles,
unknown to most Iraqis, would be quickly enthroned in the seat of
power.
Detractors were silenced. Other
nations were bullied. Members of Congress who did not fall into line
were called unpatriotic. The Administration’s justification for
a pre-emptive war, carried out not in self defense, not in response
to 9/11, and without United Nations support, has changed from month
to month, depending, it seems, on what the White House’s polls say
the American people will believe.
And third, is my concern that in the
two years since the tragedy of September 11th, President
Bush has squandered the support of the rest of the world and has
largely failed to build an effective global response to terrorism.
Mr. President, I am not among those
who feel that everything we have done in
Iraq has been a failure. To the
contrary, thanks to the heroics of our soldiers – many hundreds of
whom have paid with their lives and limbs – the Iraqi people have a
chance to build a government they can be proud of.
But the issues before us are far more
complex than whether or not we should help
Iraq. We should help in ways that are
right for the Iraqi people, and right for
the American people.
The question each of us must answer,
for ourselves and our constituents, is whether this $87 billion, for
the purposes for which the Administration has requested it, is the
right way to do that.
Thinking back, as I have often done
since President Bush launched an essentially unilateral, pre-emptive
war against Iraq, I believe the President got off on the wrong foot
from the moment he made that famous, or infamous, remark "if you are
not with us, you are against us."
That statement was made shortly after
September 11th, when the American people were feeling the
brunt of that national tragedy, and it may have been reassuring to
hear the President express his world view in such bold terms.
But I, like many Vermonters, was
uneasy about what the President said, and in retrospect I believe it
represented a fundamentally flawed approach to the threat our Nation
faced then, and will continue to face for years to come.
What the President’s challenge has
come to mean, is that regardless of who you are, including our
oldest, closest allies, if you do not agree with us we will ignore
what you say, we will dismiss you as irrelevant, we will punish you
if we can, and we will go our own way in spite of you. That, I
believe, is a recipe for failure. It is beneath the
United States. It weakens the United
States.
Not only has the White House done
grave damage to our foreign relations, it has squandered its
credibility with the Congress and the American people.
After handily defeating Saddam
Hussein’s army, virtually everything this Administration predicted
about Iraq has turned out
to be wrong. Yet one would hardly know that from listening to senior
Administration officials on television or in testimony before
Congress.
Rather than give an honest assessment
of the pros and cons, they have preferred to make personal attacks
against those of us who ask legitimate questions. Since jamming
through a Gulf of Tonkin-like resolution last year, top
Administration officials have continually ridiculed those opposed to
the war in Iraq, calling
them pro-Saddam Hussein or pro-Osama Bin Laden.
Only weeks ago, Secretary Rumsfeld
accused those who were asking questions about the deteriorating
security situation in
Iraq of giving comfort to our enemies.
That is baloney. Every one of us
wanted Saddam Hussein gone. But it is the duty of each Senator to
ask questions when young Americans are dying overseas.
The Administration said, over and
over, that the reason we had to invade
Iraq was because of weapons of mass
destruction. The Vice President said "We believe he [Saddam Hussein]
has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," although there was
apparently virtually no evidence to support that.
But after blaming the United Nations
inspectors for being duped, and after months of searching without
any interference, the Administration has yet to find any weapons of
mass destruction. And now, as reported in the press, they want to
spend another $600 million to continue the search.
Not long ago, the Secretary of State
said the weapons were the chemical weapons used against the Kurds in
1988, before the first Gulf War. The gassing of the Kurds was a
horrific war crime, but as much as I respect the Secretary, it is
absurd, and contrary to everything we were told a year ago, to use
an atrocity of 15 years ago to justify a pre-emptive war.
In fact, when Saddam Hussein used
mustard gas against the Kurds, the Reagan-Bush Administration did
little about it. And they continued to sell weapons to Saddam
Hussein for years after. The Secretary of State was a member of that
Administration.
This Administration apparently has no
idea what happened to the weapons of mass destruction, did next to
nothing to secure the sites where it believed them to be after the
fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and now seems to want to forget
about them altogether.
This time last year, there were daily
warnings about mushroom clouds. Yet in his speech to the Nation on
September 7, the President barely mentioned the issue.
This is not, as some have suggested, a
partisan issue. It is an American issue. These are questions that
get to the heart of U.S.
security and credibility. Where are these weapons? Were they
destroyed? Are they in the hands of terrorists, like the Islamic
extremists who are flooding into Iraq to attack our troops? Are they
in Syria or Iran? Was this a massive intelligence failure?
The Administration’s handling of this
issue has severely undermined the credibility of our intelligence
and of the President’s justification for rushing into war.
The White House’s other major
justification for the invasion of
Iraq was to fight al Qaeda and combat
international terrorism. Over and over again, hardliners in this
Administration tried to make this connection. They created a special
unit in the Pentagon. They worked hard to link Saddam Hussein with
9/11, even if the facts did not support it.
Only recently, after misleading a
majority of the American people, did the President publically
concede that there is no evidence of a link. Yet, Vice President
Cheney continues to suggest there is. It would be helpful if the
Vice President would agree with the President on this point.
Mr. President, I want as much as any person to mount an effective
campaign to deter, prevent, and combat terrorism.
But what we have been given is a partisan, "take it or leave it,"
rushed approach costing scores of billions of dollars that is not
backed up with a credible plan.
And by a plan I mean a detailed
strategy that shows us a way to internationalize this policy and
bring our troops home within a reasonable time.
Many in Congress, Democrats and
Republicans, warned of the costs and pitfalls of fighting a war to
enforce U.N. resolutions without the support of the U.N. Security
Council, and of rebuilding
Iraq without the support of other
nations. Iraq is a complex country with a long history of ethnic and
religious conflict, and it was crucial to
have a sound post-war plan and a viable exit strategy. But the
Administration did not want to hear those warnings. I think my good
friend Senator Hagel spoke for many of us, when he said the
Administration "did a miserable job of planning the post-Saddam
Iraq" and "treated many in the Congress, most of the Congress like a
nuisance."
We also know that the White House
ignored concerns expressed by some in the Administration, especially
in the CIA and the State Department, about the difficulties and
dangers involved.
Instead, a small, secretive group in
the Pentagon dominated post-war planning, and miscalculated. Vice
President Cheney said "[t]here’s no question [that the people of
Iraq] want to get rid of
Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States
when we come to do that."
Many Iraqis are grateful. But the Vice
President says almost nothing about the fact that our soldiers, who
have performed so bravely, are under constant attack or threat of
attack from terrorists and remnants of the Bathist regime. He and
others in the White House don’t talk about the hundreds of Americans
who have died, or the nearly two thousand wounded. And many of these
injuries are not just a broken bone or scrapes. They are lost limbs.
Lost eyesight.
Lifetime disabilities.
The Secretary of Defense says nothing
about the fact that this Supplemental includes billions of dollars
to repair damage caused by the catastrophic looting of government
facilities, electric generating equipment, hospitals, oil
refineries, railroads, and communications infrastructure, because
not enough U.S. troops were on hand to keep order after the fall of
Saddam’s government.
This $87 billion request is made by
the President of the party that just a few years ago gave great
speeches in support of a constitutional amendment for a balanced
budget.
In fact, it was the
Clinton Administration that actually
had the fiscal discipline to achieve a balanced budget, which
President Bush inherited. President Bush and Vice President Cheney
say they are deficit hawks. Yet today we are on the road to putting
a $1 trillion deficit squarely on the backs of our children and
grandchildren.
This is also a President who says we
cannot spend another $1 billion in emergency funds to combat AIDS
this year, a disease that kills 8,000 people every day. This
Administration’s AIDS initiative, which has such promise, is
starting looking like more talk than action.
Others here have recounted the
statements of former chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, who
estimated that it would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion
to rebuild Iraq. He was
right, but his analysis was disputed again and again by
Administration officials who wanted to paint a much rosier picture.
For telling the truth, he was forced out of the Administration.
Former OMB Director Daniels said
between $50 billion and $60 billion.
Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz
said "We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own
reconstruction, and relatively soon. The oil revenues of that
country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of
the next two or three years."
Andrew Natsios, Administrator of the
U.S. Agency for International Development, said that $1.7 billion
was all that America’s
taxpayers would have to pay. $1.7 billion.
That is incredible.
These estimates were wildly off the
mark. After so many misstatements, misjudgments, and distortions, I
have no idea who to believe. This Administration has been wrong,
wrong, and wrong.
As
Senator Byrd has pointed out, this $87 billion brings to $194
billion the amount the
United States is spending in Iraq and
Afghanistan – more than twice what the Administration had led the
public to believe just a few months ago.
The
1991 Gulf War, by contrast, cost $61 billion, of which the
United States paid only $7 billion. That is $7 billion spent in 1991
compared to $194 billion today – almost 28 times higher, and this is
only the beginning.
The
$20 billion that the President wants for rebuilding
Iraq
is more than we are spending this year on foreign aid for the entire
rest of the world. The $87 billion is one and a half times the
amount we spend on education in the United States. It is larger than
the total economies of almost half the states of the Union.
The Administration hopes that it will
receive an additional $55 billion for Iraqi reconstruction from
other countries and Iraqi oil revenues over the next two years. But
that, again, may be wildly optimistic.
We are going to rebuild
Iraq and put the Iraqis back to work.
The President says there is money for that – $87 billion.
But there is no Supplemental to help
the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs here at home.
There is no money to fix our broken public schools. There is no
money for health care for 44 million Americans who are without
insurance. None for affordable housing for the
growing number of Americans living in poverty.
Instead of a plan, we get more
rhetoric about winning the war on terrorism. Instead of specifics,
we get abstract talk about democracy in the
Middle East – civilizations that
predate ours by a thousand years. This Administration continues to
support autocratic regimes in the Middle East, Central Asia, and
elsewhere, whenever it suits them. Instead of a time table and a
detailed justification of costs, we get simplistic and inaccurate
comparisons with the Marshall Plan.
The Marshall Plan, as I, Senator
Daschle, and others have pointed out, bore little resemblance to
what we are dealing with here.
The most specific thing the President
has talked about is the price tag: $87 billion. This is staggering.
It gave many Americans sticker shock and awe.
Their so-called "plan" is a July 23rd
document, totaling 8 pages of text and 19 pages of a hypothetical
time line. It is not a plan of anything. It is a vague statement of
objectives, which begins by saying, not a little presumptiously,
that "now that Saddam Hussein’s regime has been removed, the Iraqi
people have the opportunity to realize the President’s vision" for
Iraq. I wonder if anyone
asked the Iraqi people about their own vision for their country.
This plan, which we did not receive
until August 22 – the day Ambassador Bremer came to testify before
the Appropriations Committee – tells us only what has become obvious
to everyone – the President sent our troops into war without a
post-war plan.
Is everything going badly? No. Iraq is
not engulfed in flames, as some press reports might suggest. The
port has been rebuilt. Businesses and schools are opening. Electric
power and health services are being restored. Rubble is being
cleared. A new police force is being trained. There has been
progress, and I commend Ambassador Bremer, USAID, and the many
private voluntary organizations who are working assiduously in
extremely difficult and dangerous conditions.
But there is another picture that the
White House prefers not to talk about. The coordinated, deadly
attacks against our troops and Iraqi police are growing in
frequency. Aid workers are facing daily threats and acts of
sabotage. Many relief organizations are evacuating their employees,
as the U.N. has done. Horrific bombings of civilian targets are
becoming routine. There is growing resentment among the Iraqi
people.
Mr. President, we are at a crossroads,
not only in Iraq, but in
our relations with the rest of the world.
A year ago, I listened as the
President suddenly, inexplicably, changed his focus from defeating
al Qaeda in Afghanistan
to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. I listened to his reasons, which
were unconvincing given what we knew at the time, and they are less
convincing today. Like many, including some of my friends on the
other side of the aisle, I urged patience. We were ignored.
We waited for the evidence. It was
distorted and manipulated. After a brilliant military victory, the
post-war strategy and the justification for the war itself have
largely evaporated. Faced with an $87 billion down payment on what
is likely to be a far more costly, far longer
United States involvement in Iraq, I
have tried, through hearings and amendments, to promote an approach
which I believe could succeed. But the White House and the
Republican Majority have been inflexible.
This has been a difficult process. I
do not believe the United
States, having destroyed Iraq’s government, should walk away. But
neither can I support a policy that was ill-conceived from the
beginning, has seriously eroded our influence with our allies,
further poisoned our already frayed relations with the Muslim world
and weakened the United Nations. It is a policy which cannot succeed
over the long term without a significant change of course.
I have listened to some in the
Majority argue that "we have no choice" but to "stay the course."
We may have no choice but to stay in
Iraq, but we do have a
choice about the course. I believe we need to change course.
We should change course in three key
ways.
First, as I and so many others have
urged, we should internationalize our policy. The amendment I
sponsored with Senator Byrd and Senator Kennedy would have helped do
that, and the U.N. resolution that was adopted yesterday is a
welcome and encouraging step, for which I commend Secretary of State
Powell. But it is nothing more than an expression of good
intentions. We have no idea if it will change anything, as this
White House has steadfastly resisted meaningful input from other
nations.
Will the multinational force be
anything more than a fig leaf for an ongoing
U.S. military occupation involving over
120,000 troops? Will other nations contribute significant resources?
Or will U.S. taxpayers continue to shoulder 99 percent of the costs?
We need to know if the U.N. resolution
represents the change in policy that is long overdue, or if it is
nothing more than political cover to continue drifting along as we
are today – alone, with our troops under fire and U.S. taxpayers
mortgaging their children’s savings.
Second, we must do a far better job of
protecting the taxpayers’ money. Today we should be voting to
appropriate not a penny more than the amount of funds that can be
spent wisely in Iraq and
Afghanistan during the next 12 months. It should be paid for by
repealing a portion of the tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, as
proposed by Senator Biden, not by increasing the deficit. By
mid-year we should hold thorough hearings, and vote again on whether
to stay the course.
Third, we should get the Secretary of
Defense out of the business of nation building and put the Secretary
of State back in charge. My amendment would have done that.
These are not radical alternatives,
but the President’s advisers decided that nothing was open for
discussion. It has been their latest version of "if you’re not with
us, you’re against us." They have treated this Supplemental as a
referendum on the President’s policy in
Iraq, a policy which I believe is
fraught with dangers for our Nation. It is no more the right way to
build the peace than the pre-emptive, unilateral use of force was
the right way to go to war.
Mr. President, I voted for every
amendment that I felt would make the best use of the taxpayer’s hard
earned money. I voted for every amendment that I felt would support
our troops and help them do their jobs better, and come home safely.
I support them by spending money wisely. And I support them by
voting to change course when I believe the course we are on
endangers them unnecessarily.
I yield the floor.
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