January 11, 2007

On the eve of the Second World War, the 20^th Century’s most daunting and difficult struggle, Winston Churchill explained that “there is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away…People face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.”

 Madam Secretary, I’m sorry to say that today, “fool’s paradise” describes nothing so aptly as our failed Iraq policy. You and I know it, the American people know it, and the Iraqi people know it most painfully.

 If the President did grasp the sad extent of that failure, I sincerely doubt he would have ordered more troops to take part in it.

 The President’s plan simply strikes me as a continuation of Operation Together Forward—which, far from improving Iraq’s security climate, produced the unintended consequence of heightened sectarian violence.

 I fail to see how the outcome will be different this time. And that is a true disservice to American troops who have shown nothing but professionalism and courage, and should not be asked to risk their lives for an unsound strategy and an unsure purpose.

 The Baker-Hamilton Report should have disabused us of the notion that, caught in the midst of sectarian, ethnic, religious and political hatreds, we can simply bludgeon our way to victory.  As many of us have been saying for some time now, only political and diplomatic possibilities hold out any hope of reversing the spiral into chaos.

 The time for blunt force is long past.  Instead, we ought to withdraw our combat troops from urban centers of sectarian conflict, where they are simply cannon fodder. We ought to focus on training reliable Iraqi security forces whose allegiance is to the greater Iraqi people, not to any specific sect. We need to redouble counterterrorism efforts and border security to deny al-Qaeda a failed-state foothold. And, perhaps most importantly, we must engage Iraq’s leaders and its neighbors to promote political reconciliation.

 If the only solution to Iraq a is political one, diplomacy is the only weapon we have left.   

 What has the administration been doing in the last four weeks? Since the time the Iraq Study Group’s report was released, almost 100 American soldiers have been killed and by many estimates, four to five thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed in the widening strife.

 And the President’s solution to all of this was to ignore the most important recommendations of the Iraq Study Group – namely “robust diplomacy,” and instead settle on an escalation of our current combat strategy.

 This is a tactic in search of a strategy, and it will not bring us a stable Iraq.

 The American people have spent $14 billion training and equipping 300,000 Iraqi police and security forces. Yet, today, 23 separate sectarian militias operate with impunity throughout Baghdad. Sectarian killings continue largely unabated—averaging scores of deaths a day, and thousands a month.  This is not random violence: It is a targeted civil war, complete with ethnic cleansing.

 Those of us who have been to Iraq recently have seen it with our own eyes and heard it with our own ears.

 Beyond that, president’s own intelligence experts have told us that the Islamic world is growing more radical, and that the terrorist threat is greater today than it was on 9/11—not despite, but because of the continuing war in Iraq. Iraq, they conclude, has become both a physical and an ideological training ground for the next generation of extremists.

 The wider region has been further plunged into violence, Hezbollah has crippled the Lebanese government, civil war in the Palestinian territories now seems more likely than ever, Syria and Iran are more powerful and emboldened than they’ve been in recent memory. We are further away from stabilizing Afghanistan, as drug traffickers and tribal warfare now threaten to destroy its nascent democracy, and the Taliban is stronger now than at any point since our invasion.

 And perhaps, most troubling of all is our standing in the world.  According to the Pew Center for Global Opinion, more people in Great Britain, France, Spain, Russia, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, India and China think that the War in Iraq is a greater danger to world peace than either Iran or North Korea. The President says we are in a “war of ideas.” But how can we possibly win a war between democracy and extremism when so much of the world considers us to be the threat?

Isn’t it the State Department’s job to engage in this debate and win the world over, or at least try? Instead we’ve had year after year of inaction, bellicose rhetoric, a categorical refusal to ask for help, to work collectively, to engage—and what has it bought us?

How weakened is our standing in the world and our support from foreign peoples? How many tools have we thrown away? How safe are we now?

Madam Secretary: We have arrived at a moment of choice.  We can choose to continue down the road we are on, one that has produced divided, angry allies and strong, emboldened enemies.  Or, we can dramatically alter our journey with the first steps beginning a new direction in our policy in Iraq – robust diplomacy within Iraq and with Iraq’s neighbors to promote dialogue and reconciliation. 

I look forward this morning to exploring with you opportunities for making the right choice for our future and for the future of the Iraqi people.