Jay Inslee: Washington's 1st Congressional District
Issues
Iraq
Controlling the Tyrant in Iraq
Speech on the Floor of the House of Representatives
March 13, 2003
Mr. INSLEE: Madam Speaker, I have come to the floor tonight to discuss our Nation's policy in Iraq and before I discuss that most important issue I would like to make a couple of preparatory comments.
First, I would I want to express my respect, admiration and appreciation for the men and women of our Armed Services who are today deployed in the service of their country, who are already assisting the security and freedoms of our country today, regardless of the outcome of our national policy in Iraq. And I think it is important to note in any discussion of our national policy that the very reason we have the opportunity to discuss and debate these issues on the floor of the House of Representatives are the contributions past, present and future of the men and women of the America's armed forces. Because the very right of freedom of speech would not exist without the courage and dedication of our soldiers and sailors and Air Force personnel, Marines and Coast Guard and there are others.
We would not have the ability and other Americans would not have the ability to protest, to question their government's policy but for the dedicated courage of these individuals. And I have a particular personal connection and admiration for them. In the last 2 weeks I have gone to two deployments of citizens and my neighbors to the Middle East. I went to the deployment in Bremerton, Washington of the 8th Navy Hospital Unit who left about 2 1/2 weeks ago and watched them say good-bye to their husbands and wives and children for the service of this country. And I have them in mind when I am deciding what position to take in Iraq.
I have the sailors of the U.S.S. Rodney Davis, a U.S.S. frigate that shipped off last weekend from Everett, Washington now bound for the Middle East and watched them say good-bye to their loved ones on that dock, and I have them in minds when I think about what our policy ought to be in Iraq.
Regardless of what Americans think their policy should be in Iraq, I think we should stand absolutely unanimously as we did in Congress here, in the House last week when we passed a resolution respecting and pledging our support and our prayers, which the brave men and women have tonight and today, in the sands of the Middle East, and we have should not forget them in any stretch.
Second, I want to say that I think that the U.S. Congress needs more discussion, not less, of America's policy in Iraq. And I think it is very disappointing to many Americans that there has been a pall of silence in the House about Iraq for the last several months. It is disappointing because while every democratically elected legislative body around the world or many of them have been debating this subject, the very citadel of democracy, the U.S. House of Representatives right here, the People's House, has been almost absolutely silent on this issue, and I think that is not in the best traditions of democracy.
To that end, we have invited some of my Republican colleagues, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), to lead an effort to debate what should be our policy here in the House of Representatives, and to date we have not convinced them to agree to that type of debate in the House and I think it is very unfortunate. I hope that some of my Republican colleagues will engage with us in that discussion in the near future, and we have hope the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) would reconsider and would allow debate to occur on the floor of the House in this regard.
And the reason I say that is while this House did cast a vote, which I believe unwisely abrogated our constitutional authority to make the decision on war to the executive branch, a lot has happened since that decision months ago. This Chamber should be debating what the right course of action is in Iraq. We owe it to the soldiers and sailors of the 8th Hospital Unit in the Navy and the people of the U.S.S. Rodney Davis and all Americans to decide and debate this subject. And I think it is most unfortunate that the House has derogated its responsibility to make that decision and punted it over to the White House down on Pennsylvania Avenue. So I hope that we can inspire additional debate. I have come to discuss this today. I wish we had others to join us who has a different view about Iraq.
Now to the substance of Iraq, I will pose about 8 or 10 questions that I think that we need to have answered before a war starts in Iraq.
The first question I would pose is, is a policy of inaction in Iraq the right and acceptable policy for America and the international community? And I will answer that with a resounding no.
Inaction is not an accepted policy when it comes to Iraq. And fortunately inaction is not what we have at this moment. We have a policy of keeping this thug, this tyrant, this diabolical dictator in a tight little box and that is where we ought to keep him, and we ought to continue and promote and make stronger our inspection protocol to find and root out and disarm this tyrant. And we have been having success in that regard in the last several weeks. And we ought to continue and enhance and strengthen our no-fly zone, which denies that dictator effective control of 70 percent of his country. And fortunately, and this is very difficult to the Iraqi innocent citizens under this tyrant's control, but we ought to continue this economic sanction policy as well to keep this tyrant in his box.
We will continue to get our efforts to get a dialogue going in the House. The gentleman (Mr. Kind) has written the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert). I have written the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay). We will continue these efforts.
Before the gentleman (Mr. Kind) goes, I will note just a little problem we will be working on. I met with a group of reservists last weekend because we are having these longer deployments and longer call-ups and one of the things we need to work on is make sure they get adequate health care when they switch from one coverage to another as well as adequate travel reimbursement because, unfortunately, we will have longer deployments. I will be talking with the gentleman.
I thank the gentleman (Mr. Kind) for joining me and I thank him for his leadership on this work.
Madam Speaker, we are talking about inaction is not an option when it comes to Iraq. And I point this out because I feel that in the debate, those who have supported a largely unilateral war, which is the situation we are in with very little international support, those who support that position have suggested that there is only two decisions here, war or passivity, war or inaction.
I think it is very important to note that the course we are advocating is that we continue to squeeze down on this tyrant. And that it is important to realize that we ought to engage the power of the international community to isolate him and to continue this disarmament program, and I think just in the last few days we have continued to see success in the inspection process, and it is important to realize no inspection process is going to be totally effective in the first 24 hours or the first 30 days. It took us years in the 1990s but the disarmament program and the inspection protocol, although it was not absolutely foolproof, in fact destroyed more weapons of Saddam Hussein than were destroyed in the Persian Gulf War. That is a significant fact that is sometimes forgotten. It ought to give us some degree of optimism about continuing the inspection protocol which is so important, which we ought to make stronger.
By the way, when it comes to these inspections, if we have to double the number of inspectors, if we have to triple the number of inspectors, if they need to go up a factor of ten, it is cheap at twice the price, because frankly this inspection protocol is costing us a few million dollars a year. A war will cost somewhere between 60- and $120 billion a year to the United States taxpayers. And we ought to advocate with the United Nations to have a more rigorous inspection protocol and accomplish that.
The second question I would ask and I think is important to answer in this debate, is the President's assertion, his implicit assertion, that Saddam Hussein was behind the horrendous attack on our Nation September 11 supported by the evidence of our intelligence services? And I am afraid to say that that assertion is wholly unsupported by the evidence.
If Saddam Hussein were connected with the September 11 attack on this Nation, I would not hesitate for 5 seconds to vote for an action by the United States, even largely unilaterally, as we did in Afghanistan, because the Taliban was directly behind the attacks of the United States of America. It was responsible for thousands of deaths.
I have listened closely for months now for some shred of meaningful evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken with his decade of failing and refusing to ally with the al Qaeda, and all of the sudden the September 11 attack, and that has been wholly missing in this debate. I have gone to repeated classified briefings; and I obviously will not disclose what were in those briefings, but I have come away from a review of the entire record and not seen meaningful evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11.
Frankly, it is not too surprising, because anyone who has studied the Mideast understands that there is a dramatic difference between the thinking of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and the type of tyranny and oppression that Saddam Hussein has advocated, because al Qaeda has been a fundamentalist Islamic group, and they have called Saddam Hussein, as recently as several weeks ago, an apostate, who is a secular tyrant; and they have been oil and water, and it is a good thing that they have been.
I serve on the Committee on Financial Services, and as recently as yesterday we had the Homeland Security Department, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Treasury; and we were looking at money laundering and issues about the financing of terrorism. I asked our three agencies whether there was any evidence that they would share with us that there was any financing by Saddam Hussein of the September 11 attacks, and I asked them a very specific question, because this is fundamental to the President's argument. They did not present one shred of evidence that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11, and this is very important in this debate.
It is not important to know whether Saddam Hussein is a despicable, loathsome human being who has been a tyrant, who has tortured his citizens, who has started wars, who one can find no virtue in whatsoever. That is an accepted fact, and we should not be naive enough to think otherwise.
When it comes to deciding whether America should go to war, it would be a huge mistake to go to war based on an illusion that this is the person responsible for September 11; and unfortunately, and it is unfortunate, I think, I saw a poll the other day that the President has convinced 42 percent of Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 when his own intelligence agencies know otherwise. That is unfortunate in this debate.
The third question I would ask that is important to ask is what is the relative threat posed by Iraq relative to the threats posed by other nations and non-nations around the world, and that is an important question, because there are an unlimited number of threats to our personal security. It is unlimited, and there is a hierarchy of how imminent and how dangerous they are, and if we simply focus on Iraq and if we are willing to go to war in Iraq, to the detriment of our ability to deal with other threats that I believe are more imminent and potentially more lethal, it will be a bad decision by the United States. So if I can, for a moment, talk about some of these other threats.
The President has indicated that Saddam Hussein has attempted to obtain fissionable materiel and nuclear weapons. This is true. It is clear that Saddam Hussein has tried for decades to obtain a nuclear device, and he has been spectacularly unsuccessful in his multiple-decade efforts, but other countries have not been unsuccessful.
North Korea, the country that the President of the United States told us is not creating a crisis, a country that has probably got fissionable materiel and is on the course to have several nuclear weapons in several months, that recently intercepted our reconnaissance aircraft, which has been involved in infiltration of various other countries, who is acting in a fanatical, totally unpredictable manner, who may have or will have shortly nuclear weapons that can reach Japan, who is developing missiles that can reach the western coast of the United States in a few years, that is an imminent threat to this country. Unfortunately, America's response to North Korea has been damaged, hindered and limited due to the President's concentration on Iraq, and I have to stand here to sadly say that if Saddam Hussein could, potentially, I do not know how with the inspection process, but with our inspection process under way, he is decades away from a nuclear weapon.
North Korea is months away from nuclear weapons that are deliverable to other nations and potentially the Western United States in several years. That is the number one threat to the security of this Nation and the
President, who only has 24 hours in the day, has been making a lot of calls about Iraq, and has not had time to make calls about North Korea; and we have to be aware of the presence of these other threats.
Second threat, Iran. I was in Israel about a year and a half ago, and I met with the number three or five person in the Israeli defense force, and I asked him what he was most concerned about in threats in the region and to the security of Israel. Obviously, the intafada, creating the havoc and destruction, is first on his mind; but he told me, and he had a lot of concern in his voice when he told me this, that we had to really crack down on a country that started with the letter I in the Mideast, because they were very, very dangerous to the regional security of the area and to the security of Israel, and that country was Iran.
Because he told me that, because of the assistance of Russia, Iran was making significant progress to nuclear weapons, and his statement to me almost a year and a half ago has been borne out by the intelligence photographs we saw last, I guess it was, Monday now in our newspapers about the cascade of centrifuges that Iran has developed to develop fissionable materiel in relatively short order for another nuclear power in the Mideast. That is a clear and present danger to the security of the Mideast and ultimately to the United States, but the United States has not been able to deal with that threat because it has been so focused on Iraq, and I think that is most unfortunate.
While we are fighting a war in Iraq, if that breaks out, these other nuclear-armed countries, or very shortly will be, will be perfecting their weaponry under the cover of this war of Iraq. While we are fighting a country that is trying to make balsa wood airplanes, that we are now told was the reason to go to war, and I will come to that in a moment, we have got to be very cautious about focusing on one threat to the detriment of our ability to deal with others.
Fourth question, are we making progress in disarmament of Iraq? I have been actually relatively pleasantly surprised at the rate of progress we have made. It seems like every week or two we have been able to make progress in the disarmament of Iraq, and the folks listening probably are more familiar than I am; but it is important to note that progress continues as it did in the 1990s.
I think we cannot be naive. There is no way to guarantee absolute 100 percent disarmament of Iraq unless it becomes under our military control. It would take years to conduct searches of every nook and cranny in Iraq; but what we can say, I think with a relative degree of assurance, is that we have stopped Iraq's efforts to the extent they existed, which were quite rudimentary, at least in the last year or two, toward a nuclear weapon.
We have significantly impaired any ability to have a meaningful bioweapons hazard program, and we are on the way to assuring that the destruction of the delivery system or potential delivery system to the al-Samoud missile system, which I think now we have destroyed about 40 percent of their missile system, we are making real progress. The question in my mind is why stop that progress now in favor of a war while we are continuing to make progress on this effort? I do not believe there is a good answer to that question.
Fifth question, what would be needed in postwar Iraq? Here is where I think unfortunately the administration is wholly not up at least at the moment to the task of what they have said their goal is in Iraq. The President has offered a variety of statements as to what his goal is in Iraq. He has said that he has wanted to wage war or may want to wage war in Iraq in order to preserve the sanctity of the United Nations to make sure that the United Nations has credibility, and he has said that he is concerned about Iraq's threatening its neighbors. He said that it is for our own personal security, and he has said that he wants to free the Iraqi people from this tyrant; and I want to address that last goal of freeing Iraq from this tyrant.
The reason I want to address that is, to me, that actually if there were a legitimate reason for a war in Iraq would be the one that would be most telling and most consistent with the facts and the evidence, and the reason is because there is no question but that innocent Iraqis, by the millions, have suffered at the hand of this tyrant. It is an appealing thought to believe that we could free them from that control of this despot. That is appealing.
I have to say that in reviewing the plans, or lack of plans, and the commitment, or lack of commitment, of this administration, the ability of George Bush to bring democracy to Iraq, at best, is highly speculative; and I will tell my colleagues the reasons why.
Number one, exhibit A, Afghanistan. I believed war in Afghanistan was necessary from a personal security standpoint due to the tie of the Taliban government to the September 11 attack; but we had a perfect opportunity to, in fact, try to establish a democracy, and this administration has blown it big time. To the extent that when it came time for this year's budget, to put money in to help the rebuilding of Afghanistan, to help restore democracy to keep out the return of the Taliban, do my colleagues know how much money they put in their budget? Zero dollars, zero dollars for democracy in Afghanistan.
Their explanation was they forgot, and I think that was very candid. The President's administration forgot about the goal of democracy in Afghanistan; and today we are faced with the same problem we had after there were efforts to kick the Russians out, which is the return of the Taliban and the return to tyranny and return to the war lords because we have not made the investment that is required to get the job done in Afghanistan; and if we want a template, unfortunately, and I think it is unfortunate, if we want a template of what the Bush administration would do in Iraq, look what they have done in Afghanistan, which is to basically say we are going to take care of about a 10-block area around Kabul so we can say we have got some vestiges of a country. That is a farrier and I have not seen anything better planned for Iraq.
We have been asking on a bipartisan basis for the administration's plans on a postwar Iraq for months and months now; and we have been given, I do not know how to say this charitably. I am searching for a way to say it charitably. A joke perhaps is the best thing to say on what their plans are on a postwar Iraq.
Here is a country, cobbled together after the British Empire left the Mideast, of three distinct ethnic groups that have never worked together except under the heels of a despot with the Kurds who the administration has already decided to sell out to Turkey for the 15th time to the Kurds, the Kurds who are now finally enjoying some degree of autonomy under our no-fly zone. We have got the Kurds some freedom today from Saddam Hussein because of our no-fly zone and think of the irony of it.
The President may be on the cusp of a war, and he has agreed to turn them back to Turkey, and in fact, that is overstating a little bit, but he has allowed Turkey, under the secret deal he wants to make, to come into the Kurds' territory; and what an irony it is that the President says he wants to restore democracy in Iraq, and the first deal he cuts with Turkey is to allow them to come back in and again be dominant over the Kurds who are now free for the first time in decades.
That is the type of shady dealing and efforts that have plagued us in our Mideast policy for years.
And to think that we can break these eggs and put them back into the democracy category with the lack of commitment of this administration is wholly speculative and most disappointing to the poor people of Iraq. And I think anyone who knows the history of these people knows how terrible their conditions have been.
Frankly, if we had an administration that we believed we could have confidence would really commit to the democracy in Iraq, for the long-term future, and who made the commitment financially and otherwise, I would be a lot more willing to look at the idea. But we do not have that right now in this administration.
Talk about a financial commitment, we are talking about tens of millions, perhaps in the billions, of dollars in a postwar Iraq. And the President has not even factored in the cost of even the attack, much less the postwar cost into his budget, nor have my friends on the Republican side of the aisle. What type of commitment do we think we can make to the international community to in fact build democracy in Iraq when we basically have said we are not going to spend a dime to do it and we have been afraid, Congress and the administration, to build into our budget the cost that it would take to do this? No, perhaps building democracy in Iraq after a war could be a great vision, but we have certainly not seen the vision to make it happen.
Six. What are the real goals of the administration in Iraq? Here is something I think that is very important in the discussion. The discussion we have heard, and it has changed over time, but when the President went to the United Nations at one time, he said his good deal was the disarmament of Iraq. The problem is, and the reason I believe we have had so many problems in winning and building an international coalition, unlike the success that the first President Bush enjoyed, is that President Bush, in the very first statement of his administration, said that was not our goal at all. He said our goal was simply to remove Saddam Hussein, period. No ifs, ands, buts. No disarmament. Saddam Hussein was going to have to go.
When the President said, as he did most recently last week, that it is simply about removing Saddam Hussein, it did not matter what benchmarks he made, did not matter what inspections we had or what disarmament he would do, he was going to have to go, well, that would be attractive; but it has damaged our ability to build an international coalition to deal with this despot. And it is an unfortunate contrast to the skills that the first President Bush demonstrated in building an international coalition to deal with the threat in Iraq.
When the first President Bush spoke with respect to our international partners, we were clear to them about our goals, we hewed to the commitments we made to our international partners, and we did not tell our international partners that we were going to do what we were going to do, and it did not matter what they thought. That is what the first President Bush did, and he was successful. This administration has violated all those fundamental precepts of human communication, which is respect for one another.
The other goal is the President has said he wants to make sure the United Nations resolutions are honored. That is a legitimate goal. He has implicitly said he wants to show respect for the United Nations and build it up as a coalition, an international body that can deal with this. That is a laudable goal and an important one, but it certainly is shortchanged and has its legs cut out from underneath it when in the same breath the President says he wants to respect the United Nations, but then says he is going to ignore the United Nations if they do not do exactly as he wants them to do and he will start a war anyway.
You do not instill trust in your colleagues, or in the United Nations, when right out of the box you say you are just coming to them for a rubber stamp and you are going to start a war anyway. It is not the way to build respect in the United Nations. It is one of the problems we are having now in trying to build an international coalition to deal with this problem.
Seventh question. What has changed since Congress voted on this resolution? I thought it was unwise then for the U.S. Congress to derogate its constitutional duty to make a decision about war when it voted to essentially allow one person, one person in this country, to make the decision to go to war, rather than the elected officials here in Congress. When they drafted the Constitution, they said Congress had the power to declare war, so that one person would not have that awesome challenge and responsibility. Nonetheless, Congress did that, and my side of the vote did not prevail.
It is important to have this discussion now because since that decision, other potential enemies of the United States have used our continued concentration and obsession, and I will not use the word obsession, I will strike that word, but our concentration on Iraq has allowed them to continue to develop their own nuclear weapons programs. And we have been totally ineffective in dealing with those other issues, and that calls for Congress to have a debate about what the current state of this situation is. And we should have one.
The eighth question. Has the President really leveled with the American people about the ramifications of this war financially and otherwise? The sad fact is that he has not. He has refused to even discuss with the U.S. Congress what the costs are going to be. And at the same time that we are going to incur from $60 billion to $120 billion in cost, the President, unlike any other wartime President in American history, and every other wartime President in American history has leveled with the American people, and they have told the American people what the war would cost in lives and treasury. They have been straight and said we need to pay this. And this President has not been straight with the American people about the cost of this war, either in lives or treasury, because he wants his tax cut above everything. Above everything. At the same time we are going to spend an additional $60 billion to $120 billion, he continues to try to ram through these tax cuts, which is his number one ideological belief.
Now, to me, when we have seen our soldiers and sailors off to harm's way in this war, and they are making this sacrifice, it does not seem to me to be right that the President of the United States says we might have a war overseas, but we are going to have a fiscal party at home. That is irresponsible, and it does not respect the tradition and the willingness of Americans to sacrifice together when we do face a mutual security threat.
Number nine. What does a war in Iraq do to our security on the downside? Because many of us believe, and I believe, that while a war in Iraq and the elimination of Saddam Hussein's rule could reduce a particular threat that he presents, it could create greater threats in many other ways. I believe that in balancing those threats there is as much potential increased harm to the United States, in threats to our security, as there is benefit. And there are multiple reasons for that. The most obvious reason is what is happening in Iraq today, where we have kicked Saddam Hussein out of a particular region in the northeast corner of the country and al Qaeda has moved in.
It is a great irony. We have seen the sort of picture of what Iraq is going to look like in a post-Saddam Hussein world. Because in this corner of chaos, where there is no state, it is like a little Afghanistan about a decade ago. The fundamentalist Islamic movement has moved in and this group has now got about 700 fighters that are grouping in Iraq. Not under or allied with Saddam Hussein, but they are using the absence, this vacancy, this vacuum of state control to regroup and potentially plan attacks against the United States of America. By creating a chaotic situation in Iraq, we not only inspire the hatred which we have heard so many people talk about of young Muslim folks in the Mideast, but we will provide them a place to group, which is in a vacuum of what used to be Iraq.
It has been said by many people that a war in Iraq could be sort of the great dream of Osama bin Laden. Because no Osama bin Laden is going to bring down the United States in his wildest imagination. His dream is to incite a war between the West and Muslim nations. And his dream can only be accomplished in one possible way, and that is if the United States acts in a way which will prove to folks in the Muslim nations that in their view that we intend a colonial empire in the Middle East, which I do not believe we do. But to them, having an occupied Mideast Muslim nation, occupied for potentially years, and we have been in Germany for over 50, the ramifications of the recruiting efforts of Osama bin Laden are obvious.
I cannot think of a single thing that could potentially allow the regrouping of the al Qaeda network other than a war with Iraq, eventually. This is truly one battle we could win but lose the war. That is why war does not always buy more security. Sometimes it buys less, even if you win the first battle. And I think we should think about that.
Tenth. What would a largely unilateral war do to America's moral leadership in the world? I will close on this point, because I think it could be the most important for the long-term future of our Nation.
I believe America is a unique country that has a unique responsibility for moral leadership in the world. The world looks to us for leadership. It looks to us for an idea of what is acceptable conduct by nations and men. It looks to us to lead in the establishment of a rules-based society, because that is the genius of America. We have rules here and we follow rules here. Other countries do not. They do not have rules they follow in a lot of countries.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, an empire we contained in a way that certainly makes Saddam Hussein look like a petty little maggot, but we contained the Soviet Union for many, many decades, and we should think about that in regard to Saddam Hussein. But we have this moral leadership, and we wear the cloak of moral leadership in the world, and we are looked to all over the world for leadership. The Statue of Liberty is not just about immigration. That flame is about leading the world in a lot of ways, not just economically.
It is my belief that should we go it alone, largely alone, which is the position we are in at the moment, if there is a lack of success developing an international coalition, which there has been a spectacular failure at this moment, if we act without United Nations sanctioning, we will have damaged our ability to fulfill the destiny of America to lead the world to a new civilization internationally, not just along the borders of our country. That is why it is so important for us to work with the international community to maintain what we have right now, which is the admiration of the world.
Think about what has happened in the last 12 months, where in the weeks following September 11 the world embraced us. There were headlines around the world in various newspapers. We were all Americans. Think how far that has changed because of the reaction against the United States and this administration acting so cavalierly in certain regards. It is disappointing.
But we can regain this. We can regain our position. We can continue to keep this tyrant in his box. We can build an international coalition. We can succeed in these inspections. We can continue our no-fly zone. We should continue to work with the international community. And in the days ahead, we hope that the President will listen to the American people and the voices from around the world in doing that, because that is America's destiny.