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“THE WAR IN IRAQ” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1883-H1886 on April 1, 2008.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE WAR IN IRAQ
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Tsongas). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. SHAYS. I thank the gentlelady for taking her time to allow me and my colleagues to be able to address the chamber. Thank you very much. And I appreciate her husband's service to this country both in Congress and in the Senate.
I am taking this opportunity to talk about the conflict in Iraq, the war in Iraq, and I want to do it based on my 20 visits to Iraq when I first was there in April of 2003 to the trip that just concluded last week. I want to speak very frankly about this war and our presence there and what I think we should do and why I think we should do what we need to do.
September 11 clearly was a wakeup call, from hell, that forced us to address the fact that for such a long time we had a blind eye to what was happening in the Middle East and what was happening particularly as it related to the extreme Islamists who were seeking to get the world's attention by attacking our troops in Lebanon, our Marines, our Soldiers, and Air Force men and women in Saudi Arabia attacked three times, our embassy employees in two countries in Africa, the Cole where we lost 17 Navy personnel and 33 injured.
I was somewhat surprised that, in spite of all this, that we would keep turning the other cheek and ignoring what was confronting us. So when September 11 happened, it was a huge wakeup call. And the issue is, did we respond in the right way?
We created a Department of Homeland Security. Before September 11, when we talked about such a department, people said, ``What are we, Great Britain?'' It was difficult for Americans to conceive that we should do that. We passed the Patriot Act; and clearly we could have given it some other name, but we wanted to make sure that we had modernized our capability to infiltrate cells that needed to be infiltrated. We created a much stronger intelligence structure by establishing a Director of Intelligence that would coordinate these 16 agencies. And we also went into Afghanistan, where there was uniformed consensus that we should do it. But we also went into Iraq, and that obviously was very controversial.
I remember, as I tried to debate whether we should do this, visiting with the Brits, the French, the Turks, the Israelis, and the Jordanians. They all said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But the French said, he has them, but won't use them. And we discounted the French because we knew even then, about the Oil for Food Program, that they had been pretty much bought off, and we knew that they would probably not support using the U.N. as the instrument to remove Saddam from power. So we went in. And, we made sure our troops had the one thing that we felt they needed: Protective chemical gear. We really believed that Saddam had both a nuclear program and a chemical program, and we were very adamant that we shouldn't go in before our troops had that protective chemical gear.
But it became very clear early on that Saddam not only didn't have an active chemical weapons program that he could readily use, and there was no nuclear program. So, the very basis for going into Iraq proved to be false.
I voted to go into Iraq based on what I believed was the right thing to do. I am struck by some Members who somehow blame their decision on someone else. I did what I thought was due diligence. I was impressed by Iraq's neighbors. I was impressed by, frankly, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and others who had reason to be skeptical but believed as well that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
But what surprises me most, and I want to make this point. I remember when George Romney, the former governor of Michigan, not Massachusetts, Governor Romney from Massachusetts's dad, said: I believed we needed to go into Vietnam, but I was brainwashed by the generals. And there was instant ridicule, and he was forced to drop out of the race for President because he wasn't taking ownership for his own decision, and was blaming someone else.
I blame no one for my vote. It was my vote based on my best conclusions. And I would like to think that every Member would own up to their own vote, but somehow some who voted to go into Iraq now act like they didn't, and blame others for their vote. And I think that is wrong. So the question is, we are there, and we were there under false pretenses but very much believed to be true. So what do we do now?
When you go to Israel, Israel had the best intelligence in the region, and they were wrong and they empanelled a commission to try to determine how they could be wrong. They didn't blame their political leaders, they didn't say people lied. What they concluded was that, based on the knowledge that they had, it was reasonable to assume that Saddam had these weapons. That was their conclusion.
It is a fact that even his own troops, his generals, in December were stunned, as we learned from the debriefing of Tariq Aziz and others of the Iraqi politicians, that Saddam told his own generals in December of 2002: We don't have a nuclear program and we don't have a viable chemical program. And they were stunned.
I was so troubled by this that I went to see Hans Blix in Stockholm and I said, ``Why would Saddam want us to think he had weapons of mass destruction?'' And he said, because Saddam thought it was a deterrent to his neighbors, and that he believed there was no consequence because he thought there would be no way the United States would seek to remove him from power if the French and the Russians and the Chinese would not allow the U.N. to be involved.
Well, the fact is that Saddam misread us the first time in Kuwait. Because of Vietnam, he thought we would never go in because of that experience, and we did, and he misunderstood our intentions a second time, which is an incredible lesson about making sure that our adversaries know our true intent and believe our true intent.
We were wrong. But being wrong does not mean we need to get out, get out right away because of our original purpose for being there.
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The fact is once we disbanded the Army, the police and the border patrol, we owned Iraq; and there is no way of getting around it. There is no way to say that we can get rid of all Iraqi police, border patrol and Army, and then say, well, you know, we achieved our objective, good-bye. That would be a cruelty to the Iraqis that they don't deserve, and it would be a huge invitation to the Iranians to just walk right in. We can't allow that to happen.
In my first visit to Iraq, I went just as the war was ending. I actually had to get in with the help of the State Department because the Defense Department said I couldn't go in. I remember speaking to Muhammed Abdul-Assan. He was telling me the things that we were doing that troubled him, like throwing candy on the ground. He said, Our children are not chickens; they are not animals.
He talked about how our troops seemed to be offended when they extended a hand, and an Iraqi woman put her hand to her heart and would not shake the soldier's hand. She was saying, thank you for honoring me, but we don't shake hands with strangers.
He basically put his hands on my shoulders and said, You don't know us, and we don't know you. He told me an incredible story. He told me a story that he had been in an Iranian prison and hadn't made the first exchange of prisoners because the Iranians had more Iraqis than the Iraqis had Iranians in their war with each other. I said to him, You have had an incredibly difficult life, and I started to go on. And he looked at me and said, No different than any other Iraqi.
Well, after my first visit I couldn't get back soon enough to say we need Arabic speakers and we need to understand their culture. These are tough people.
The second time I went in, I went to Basra and I went again outside the umbrella of the military and spent two nights in Basra with Save the Children. I began to hear things like why are you putting my son, my uncle, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my husband, my father, out of work? Why can't they at least guard the hospitals? He was talking about the fact that we put a half a million men out of work, and basically said you have no future in this new government.
And so I couldn't wait to get back home and say: Why are we doing this? And the poignant thing to this is the very first death in the 4th Congressional District Connecticut was Wilfredo Perez. He was guarding a hospital.
Try to imagine what we did when we disbanded their Army, their police and their border patrol. We left them totally and completely defenseless. It is a country of 24-plus million people left with no security.
Let's take New York State. New York State has 19 million people. It is two-thirds the size of Iraq or maybe even smaller. It has 19 million versus 24 million. Imagine New York State with no police, no police in New York City, no police in the subways, no police in Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, no police in any of the towns in between, no security whatsoever. Oh, and by the way, to be consistent with what Saddam Hussein did, he released all his prisoners. We are going to release the prisoners from Attica and Riker's Island and make sure that they are in the community, and then say don't worry, we are going to bring 150,000 Iraqis who speak Arabic to keep the peace throughout all of New York State.
Well, you don't have to be a genius to realize we had created a huge problem. We were basically saying we would provide all of the security in Iraq, but we didn't have enough men and women to do it. We didn't speak their language or know their culture. Are we surprised that militias were formed? Are we surprised that when we put half a million people out of work, that they would go to the other side?
And then there is the looting. They were dumbfounded. Iraqis love their antiquities. They love their history. If you go to an Iraqi and somehow suggest it is not a real country, they will look at you and say, Let me get this straight. You did not learn in your school, about the Fertile Crescent where the two rivers met, the cradle of civilization? You never studied about us Iraqis? They are stunned that we would think them not a country, and they were particularly stunned, when the Senate voted to divide Iraq into three parts, they said aha, it just goes to show what we have been saying. You want to divide and conquer us, and then take our oil.
We made huge mistakes and we didn't correct them and we didn't deal with the reality on the ground. The reality is that we needed to train more Iraqi troops than we were, and we needed to have more American troops there given we had gotten rid of a half million security forces for all of Iraq.
When you go to an Iraqi and you ask, Are you a Sunni? They will say, I am a Sunni but I am married to a Shia.
I will go to a Shia and say are you a Shia, to try to understand their perspective, and they will say, I am a Shia, but my tribe is Sunni.
I will go to someone I suspect to be a Kurd, and ask, Are you a Kurd? They will say, Yes, I am a Kurd; but you do know Kurds are Sunnis? They are constantly lecturing me about understanding what they are and the significance of what they are.
We have the fear of sectarian violence in Iraq, and it is often compared to Bosnia. In Bosnia, you had fathers who literally raped their child's best friend. So a father is raping a 14- or 12-year-old child because she happens to be Christian and he is Muslim or she is Muslim and he is a Christian. I remember going to Bosnia and seeing a house filled with garbage, garbage filled all of the way to the top. It was a message, don't come back to your home, you are not wanted.
That kind of violence is not what has happened in Iraq. What has happened in Iraq is when there were Sunnis and Shias living together, they were not kicked out by their neighbors, they were kicked out by outsiders who came in and tried to have it be one ethnic group, which is very different than Bosnia.
Now that is not to suggest that Sunnis and Shias will agree on everything. But again, it is not like Saudi Arabia where Sunnis there don't like Sunnis in other countries if they are not Wahhabbis. We sometimes tend to judge the Middle East, I think, on what we see in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is another issue we are going to have to have a frank conversation about. It is not Iraq.
When I go to Turkey, the Turks say to me, We used to run this place for 402 years; why don't you pay attention to us?
When I go to Egypt, they say, We have been a country for 4,000 years, why don't you pay attention to us?
When I go to Jordan they say, We are direct descendants of Mohammed, why don't you pay attention to us?
When I go to Iraq, they say, We are the cradle of civilization, why don't you pay attention to us?
So we are starting to. We are starting to pay more attention to them. We are certainly paying attention to the ambassadors that come from countries near Iraq. And they say, we may not have wanted you to go in, are there, for you to leave now would be an outrage. And they are right.
Now that we stirred everything up and we created significant dislocation in Iraq, we have a moral obligation to set Iraqis in a place where they can govern themselves; or failing to govern themselves, it will be their failure. But they need the security to do it.
So what do I see and what have I seen over the course of 20 times in Iraq?
If this is April 2003, we could have gone in an upward direction. It could have been an amazing experience. We could have kept their military. We could have listened to them. We could have had Arabic speakers. We could have found that rather than digging a deep ditch, we could have gone in the other direction. But as soon as we allowed the looting, as I made reference to earlier, they really believed that was our message to them that we had only contempt for them. That is what they believed. They thought, You could have stopped it and you didn't. The thing we cherished the most, our antiquities, you allowed those looters to just desecrate, and you were the security.
We then put them out of work and left them with no security. We dug a deep hole.
I began to feel, though, that we were turning the situation around when we transferred power in June of 2004. Mr. Bremer left, and Iraqis were being invited to make some major decisions. And they did something extraordinary. I was there for the first election. They put our elections to shame.
What did they do? They had far more people who voted, and they were honest votes. The U.N. will tell you, these elections were very well run. I was in Arbil for the first election, and I saw men following their wives because their wives were determined to vote, dressed up with their kids in their arms or following them. I was there as an observer, and I saw them come and vote for local, regional and national elections. They came and got all three ballots and filled them out in a protected area, and then they came and put them in the ballot box. But before they could do that, they had to stick their finger in the ink jar. I watched that for awhile, and then I went and quietly asked, as an observer, Do you mind if I put my finger in that ink jar? I wanted to bond with them; and I, frankly, wanted to come home and show people that there was something pretty monumental going on in Iraq.
The woman looked up at me, looked down, and then she said, No! you're not an Iraqi! Everybody looked at me. I clearly wasn't an Iraqi. I was first embarrassed, and then I thought this was amazing. I was in a Kurdish area. And she didn't say, No, you're not a Kurd. She said, You're not an Iraqi.
Well, that election established a government that then created a constitution. And in October of 2005, they voted on that constitution. And more people came out to vote, including Sunnis that had not participated the first time. They had establish a constitution, and then they had an election in December of 2005. I thought in 2003 we had dug a deep hole, but now we and the Iraq's were getting back up there. Things are looking much better.
And they had an election in December, and then nothing happened. January, no leader was chosen. February, no leader was chosen. March, no leader was chosen. By April they had decided on a very slim vote that Mr. Maliki would be the prime minister.
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And so, they had literally delayed for 4 months choosing a leader. And when you're swimming upstream and you stop swimming, you go way downstream. And they dug a deep hole again. You had the Samarra bombings; that was horrific. That was a Shi'a Mosque that was bombed and destroyed, intended to bring out the Shi'as in a total civil war with Sunnis. That almost happened, but didn't happen.
When I came back to Iraq and met with Mr. Maliki after 6 weeks in office, there was a sense on my part that he wasn't going to do any heavy lifting. And so I decided, rather than come back 3 months from now as I usually did, I came back 6 weeks later. And one ambassador told me then, it was in June, he said to me, ``I fear that Prime Minister Maliki does not have the political will to do what he needs to do.''
So, I went back in August. There were 6 more weeks that had passed. Now he had been in office about 12 weeks, and I didn't see hardly any positive change. I concluded that the only thing that would get him to move was to have a timeline. And I demanded to see him. I said, I've been here more than anyone else, I want to meet with Mr. Maliki. And I said it can be a stand-up meeting, but I want to meet him. I want him to look me in the face and tell him what I believe after being in Iraq so often.
So, a meeting was set up. He was meeting with others and we went to a side of the room, and I said, take a good look at me, you're not going to see me after November, and you're not going to see a majority of Republicans that had been supporting our presence in Iraq. You're going to see a change in government because you aren't doing the heavy lifting you need to. You need timelines like you had in '05, where you had one election, then the constitution, then another election, to select a government. He said, no, we moved too quickly; we can't move that quickly.
I came home believing we need a timeline, and I believe that to this day. But it's a timeline that doesn't say we get out tomorrow. It's a timeline that says we leave when the Iraqis can be ready, and we can pretty much predict when that is. And we know it's going to take more Iraqis troops to do it. We know they have to be trained.
With all due respect to my colleagues in the majority who sincerely believe this was a mistake and we need to get out, a timeline that gets us out sooner than we can replace their army, police and border patrol and leaves them in a place where they can protect themselves is a timeline that makes no sense. But a timeline that says we're there forever in this capacity makes no sense either. We need a logical timeline.
Now, one thing I never argued for that turned out to be very important, I never argued that we needed a surge. That was the one area where I didn't feel I had the expertise. So, after that election, I went to Iraq in December of 2006, and frankly, things were worse than ever. The generals told me that they had given up on Anbar Province, the largest Sunni province. In fact, they said it's almost like a mini Afghanistan within Iraq, no one is in charge except al Qaeda. And that was a pretty disappointing bit of news to be told.
When I went back in April of '07 they said we're winning Anbar Province. Now, this was after we started to begin the surge, but that hadn't really taken effect yet. They were doing something that I had argued for for a long time, and that was, we were engaging the Iraqi tribes. The Sunni Iraqi tribes had become totally fed up with al Qaeda for all the reasons that most people know. They wanted to set up the kind of shari'a government that Iraqis want no part of, and they were killing the young Sunni tribal leaders who were not cooperating. And so, the leaders came to us and said, we want to be with you.
So, I went in April, and we're winning Anbar Province. I go back 2 months later and they say, we've really won Anbar Province. I go back in August, and we're starting to win other areas. We're starting to clean out other areas.
And we've started to have al Qaeda be in small little enclaves. And why? Because before the surge they struck us at will. After the surge, they can't get above the water line to take a breath because our daytime troops went after them, and our nighttime troops went after them, and then our daytime troops went after them. They never have a chance to regroup. The surge has enabled us to clean out areas and bring the Iraqi police, which aren't the best of Iraq, but they are good enough to do what police do, and that is, once an area is clean, keep the peace.
This past year, I've been able to go without armor into so many different marketplaces, places they would never have taken me before. And I come back and I say things are getting better, and then people say yes, but there were the rockets on the Green Zone. Well, there are going to be rockets on the Green Zone and there are going to be men and women who wear vests that basically are filled with explosives and they're going to blow themselves up. There are women who have lost their husbands who see no future. There is obviously al Qaeda, that still has some influence. There will be those kinds of attacks, but there are going to be different kinds of attacks than has existed in the past.
So, I have seen the surge is working. The tribal leaders have made a huge difference. We are now going into other areas. We've cleaned up our two-thirds of Iraq. Mosul is going to be a very difficult area. It's a very mixed community of Sunnis, Shias, Turkmen, and others.
The other reason why we're seeing an improvement beside the surge and support of tribal leaders is the Iraqi troops have become competent, in some cases very competent. And I'm sure there may be some who will criticize me for saying it, but I believe the Iraqis are actually beginning to like us, or at least respect us, and in some cases trust us. And why would that be? Well, they were raised for 30 years to hate Americans and love the Russians. So, in comes this government, Americans, and we attack them, and we put a lot of their loved ones out of work. And they were convinced that we would take their oil. But it's been 5 years, and they've come to realize that there is a country so good that it would spend nearly a half a trillion dollars, have more than 20,000 of its American forces wounded, some very severely, have 4,000 of its troops killed and not take a drop of its oil, not a drop of its oil. We're beginning to gain credibility that we actually meant what we said and that there is a country so good in the world that it would do that for something far more important.
We want a world of peace. We want a world where people can live their lives as they want to. We want a world where commerce can flow back and forth freely. And we're willing to give a lot and spend a lot to do that.
Now, I want to say something to my colleagues that may not believe we should ever have been in Iraq. I fear that there are some in this Chamber who fear that if we ultimately win in Iraq, and by winning, I mean restore a security force of Iraqis that can fend for themselves and where they can govern for themselves and where there is a significant movement towards a more democratic form of government, and a government that, unlike its neighbors, allows its women to be educated, allows its women to be part of commerce, if we do that, it justifies the war.
We may say at the end, we spent a trillion dollars, we lost 4,000 to 5,000 men and women, and we have this result which is pretty spectacular, but in the end, it may not justify what we have done. But where we all should be united, it seems to me, is that we leave Iraq in a place that the void is not filled up by the Iranians.
Now, we haven't taken a drop of their oil, but one thing is very clear, Iraq has a lot of oil and gas. In fact, Bunker Hunt came to my office, rolled out a map that would cover this desk, and he said, I believe Iraq has more energy than exists in Saudi Arabia. The world says it has 10 percent. He told, I believe it may have as much as 20 percent of the world's reserves. And then he showed me this map with markings throughout Iraq indicated a real potential for either gas or oil. He said, to an oil man, this is a candy store of opportunity. Well, it belongs to the Iraqis. And my hope and prayer is that they will someday be able to enjoy it and share it with the rest of the world.
And the thing that's stunning is, it's not just in Sunni areas, it's not just in Shi'a areas and it's not just in Kurdish areas, it's throughout Iraq. This is a nation that doesn't believe in shari'a law. It's a nation that is very secular. It's a nation where Sunni and Shi'as have, in particular, gotten along with each other. It's a nation that has so much oil as a resource, and gas, but almost as importantly, it has so much water. When I fly over it, you see these magnificent rivers, not just the Tigris and Euphrates, but the others that join it, but all the canals and the irrigation that exists. This is a country that will be able to export and feed parts of the world.
This is a country that will educate both its men and women. This is a country that has significant resources. This is a country we hope to be friends with for a long, long time. And this is a country that deserves some patience from Americans. We need to understand that they didn't have the head start we had in the United States. And even then, think about it, we knew democracy before we became these United States. We had democracy in our colonies.
We had the Declaration of Independence in 1776. And it took us 13 years to have the Constitution of the United States, 13 years. And even then, as perfect as we would like to think our Constitution is, but in our Constitution as Condoleezza Rice points out, she was three-fifths a person, and a slave. So, we certainly didn't get it all right.
I'll conclude by saying, we've seen the most progress on the part of the military. We've seen not the kind of progress we want to see from the politicians. But even then, we need to give them credit. They have voted out retirement for ba'athists, Saddamists. That was hugely important. While they don't have an oil law that formally distributes the oil to the different regions of Iraq, they are doing it in spite of that without the formal agreement.
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They have a de-Baathification law that's coming into place so that they're hiring people that, in the past were told they couldn't be part of this new Iraqi government.
And they're going to have provincial elections. The significance of that is the local elections were the first of the three elections, and Sunnis didn't participate, so we have some Shiias who run Sunni areas. This means that these leaders are willing, and know that they have to give up power to the predominant group within their regime of Iraq.
No one knows how history is going to judge our involvement in Iraq. But the one thing I do know is that we finally have the kind of leadership in Iraq that I've been hungry for, some real honest talk from Mr. Petraeus. He'll tell you what's going right and what's going wrong. We've had, I think, good military leaders, but I think he's learned a lot, and I think he's clearly the best.
We needed to make a change with Secretary of Defense, and since then I've seen significant progress. It took Abraham Lincoln 9 generals before he got the generals that finally started to win some battles, Sherman and Grant.
We're starting to see a difference in Iraq because of this leadership. We're even starting to see Mr. Maliki show some guts by confronting his own political base, Shiias, in Basra.
They haven't been given the opportunity that we had of having 13 years before a true government was established under our Constitution. They've had five.
We have American time. We want them to act more quickly. But, at the same time, in terms of Middle East culture, they're moving a lot faster than some people give them credit.
Madam Speaker, I really appreciate your willingness to allow me this opportunity, and I want to just repeat that everyone in this chamber loves our troops. I'm addicted when I go back to Iraq, to meet with the men and women who serve, those who are content we're there, those who would go back and again and again, and some who wish they weren't there. But every one of our troops are real patriots. I can't tell you what an honor it is to interact with them. And with that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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