30-Something Working Group
Floor Speech
30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - May 15, 2007)
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan. I am nothing if not a fan of New England etiquette. I would let the gentleman speak for as long as he wishes, but he makes great points.
The American people sent this new Congress in order to set a new direction. They didn't imagine on election day that new direction was putting more troops in harm's way in the middle of a civil war. The word ``escalation'' was not in their vocabulary when they conceived of what that new direction would be.
They believed it was about time to start listening to the bipartisan foreign policy community as represented by the Iraq Study Group Report, of the record number of generals coming back and telling us we needed to start setting a new course. They believed that new direction was about redeploying our forces and bringing the National Guard home.
I hope tonight we will talk about how stressed the National Guard is, bringing the troops back home to protect ourselves on our homefront, and being able to respond to the natural disasters and emergencies that are all too frequent on our own shore, and begin to focus on places where we can still win.
Afghanistan, a fight that is taking it right to the insurgency that attacked this country, taking it right to the training ground of al Qaeda, the place where Osama bin Laden trained and prepared his forces to attack this country. Certainly we can win there, but it is time we start recognizing what that new direction has to be.
It was amazing when I listened to the Republican leader say a week or so ago, and I am paraphrasing, but the thought was that the Republicans were willing to hear out the President's plan to escalate the war for a period of time. But, say, by the fall or later this year if it wasn't working, it was time for the President to propose plan B.
I am not sure how anyone who has been watching this play out for the last 4 years could still believe we are on plan A. We are not plan A or B, we are on like plan triple R right now. We have tried everything. And guess what, every new strategy, every new approach that we take based solely on military might alone, which has been essentially our practice so far, has made the situation even more chaotic and has plunged Baghdad and its environs into greatest chaos.
Why? Guess what, because the rest of us, the American public and the Democratic Caucus, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, retired generals from every stripe, have realized that we cannot win this conflict. And everyone's definition of win is different, I understand, but we cannot prove victorious there on the force of our military might alone.
I got to spend a couple of days on the ground in Baghdad with those soldiers. If anyone can fulfill the mission they have been given, it is the men and women in the Armed Forces that we have put on the ground. They are the bravest and most capable people I have ever been around. But the fact is that we have given them a mission which is nearly impossible.
We are forcing them one day to be soldiers, the next day to be diplomats, and the next day to be civil engineers. The reason why plan A through Z has not worked yet is because it doesn't recognize the very fact that if we can solve this, if we can somehow bring some resolution to Iraq, it will be through diplomatic and political might, not sheer military force.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, we have been in this fight over timetables, and so many of us believe that we have got to start setting a deadline on when the Iraqis are going to have to stand up for themselves. Okay, so we passed that, and the President vetoed, and we came back and said, all right, let's talk about something a little bit less than that. Let's talk about what you outlined.
Let's give you all the money you want and more for the next several months for the conduct of this war, and then after that's done, let's see if it's working. That's a revolutionary concept here. Before we authorize the next round of several dozen billion dollars for the conduct of this war, let's just ask some questions. Is it working? Are the Iraqis doing what they need to do to achieve a political settlement? And guess what, the message is to that idea as well, that's not acceptable either; it is going to get a veto just like the first one.
There was a word that was just lost here for a long time. You and the 30-somethings talked about it night after night, but it was a foreign phrase to people and it is accountability. It is accountability.
Guess why the Iraqis consider going home for the summer? Why the parliament thinks it is okay to stand down? Because they know they have a crutch to rely on. They know that the Americans will be there as long as they continue to refuse to stand their military up, to stand their political institutions up, to stand up their ministries.
They know that, in fact, we're going to reward their incompetence. Enough is enough.
I got to spend a couple of days there, and in addition to spending some time with the troops you get to spend a little bit of time with the Iraqi military, and you can see that there's potential there. You can see that they are ready to do this mission but you can also see that there's no incentive there to do it right now.
And so that word ``accountability'' which has been lost here for so long is I think a large reason for why Congress looks a little bit different now, why you have a whole bunch of new Members who were sent here, not just to wrap up this war, not just to bring our troops home but to also instill in this government a sense that if we are going to spend taxpayer dollars, we better have some accounting for how it is done.
The two bills that we have passed, both the first bill that set a timetable to wrap up this war; the second bill, frankly, is as reasonable as you can get in trying to provide some benchmarks for success, they are both about that missing word missing here for a long time. It is accountability.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We talk about the enormous and unconscionable level of American casualties there, and the number that we focus on are the number of men and women who don't come back, and not enough focus gets put on the number of American soldiers who come back with grave, crippling injuries. But we don't talk at all about the number of Iraqis who have been killed, the immense civilian casualties that mount not by the two or three or four a day but mount by the dozens every day.
And so when you see what we are seeing now, which is an Iraqi parliament standing up and saying enough is enough, we need the Americans to go home, what you're hearing is a bunch of people who are realizing that the best way to keep their own people safe is to have the Americans stand down because, on more days than not, we are drawing additional fire into the chaos there.
We went over and asked the generals there, we said, listen, tell us how much of the fire that you are seeing in and around Baghdad is a result of Shia and Sunni violence and tell us how much of the fire is directed at American forces. And the stat was pretty amazing. Ninety percent of the fire there is fire directed from one religious civil group to the next, from one sect to the other. Ten percent of it is directed at American forces. It's an inexcusable 10 percent, but to think that we are asking our men and women to stand in the middle and be a human shield between Shia and Sunni fighting each other, in fact sometimes Shia and Shia, Sunni and Sunni fighting each other, is a miserable way to conduct foreign policy.
And I asked one of those soldiers, I said, you know, you're being asked one day to try to negotiate some political settlement between religious groups, when the day before they were shooting at each other; how on earth do you tell who's shooting at who? And the soldier looked at me inquisitively, sort of shocked that I would ask the question. He said, we don't know who's shooting at us; if they are shooting at us, we shoot back. That's their job. That's their job, to protect them, to protect the people around them.
But as you said, the fact is when you can't tell who it is that's doing the shooting how on earth the next day are you going to be expected to sit down and try to mend the fences that gave rise to that violence in the first place?
Like I said, if anybody can do it, I think that these guys and women can do it. They are the most amazing, capable people that I have ever met in my life, but the fact is that if you don't know who's perpetuating the violence, it's very hard to heal those wounds the next day.
And to my mind, if the Iraqis are telling us that what they believe is necessary to make their country safe is a precipitous withdrawal of American forces, if our own intelligence community is telling us that we are less safe because of what's going on there, the Iraq Study Group, retired generals, American public, Iraqi parliament, intelligence community, there's a wall around Pennsylvania Avenue right now, and none of that seems to be going in there. And if we don't change course sooner or later, we're going to do damage that is not going to be even reversible by this Democratic Congress.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. This place has been a one-horse show for a real long time. You talk about the Constitution. It's kind of been a document
that's been dead and buried for a long time. People say the United States Congress here is to be an equal branch of the United States Government, to be able to operate within a structure that recognizes that not every single decision gets made by one man sitting in a house up the street; that people go out to elections in record numbers like they did last November and they should think, rightfully so, that what they say and the votes they cast are going to have some impact on what happens down there.
And I understand that the President's version of working together is us agreeing with whatever he asks us to agree with, but that's not what the American people sent us here to do. I certainly didn't get sent here to do this as a new Member, and the sooner that we recognize that you have a Congress for the first time in a long time that is going to stand up and speak for the people that sent us here, the sooner that happens the better.
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