Hearing of Committee on Foreign Relations - Strategies for Reshaping U.S. Policy in Iraq and the Middle East
Hearing of Committee on Foreign Relations
"Strategies for Reshaping U.S. Policy in Iraq and the Middle East"
STATEMENT OF HON. JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., U.S. SENATOR FROM
DELAWARE
Senator Biden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Tony, I am sorry I missed the very beginning of your statement, but I can assure you quite literally there is not a
thing you have written that I have not read in the last 2 years, and that is not an exaggeration.
As I listened to your statement, General, I think we should point out for the record, nothing either of you are saying is
new today in terms of what you have been saying from the very beginning. It is kind of dumbfounding we are here at this point
having to be--reiterating these points.
Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for having this hearing. As we have all seen, we obviously have an extremely
distinguished panel. I have already relied a great deal on the advice of two of our witnesses over the last 2 years in
formulating my own views thus far. So it will not be surprising for them to hear that I agree with virtually everything they
have had to say.
Sunday's elections were, to state the obvious, a significant positive tribute to the courage of the Iraqi people
and to the courage of our soldiers and civilians in Iraq. The images of children dancing in the streets and elderly walking
miles to polling stations despite the obvious danger were incredibly moving. Given the trauma of the past 2 years, to say
nothing about the past 3 decades, it was encouraging to have some good news coming out of Iraq.
But, as all of you have pointed out, one election does not make a democracy or even a stable government make. Whether the history books look back on Sunday as a transformational event in Iraq is going to depend on what the Iraqis do and what we do in the next several months. It seems to me that we have several very important challenges, some of which you all have
mentioned.
First, in my judgment we have to use our influence to work the Sunnis back into the constitutional writing process here,
which will define minority rights and protections. Quite frankly, in my most recent trip to Iraq last month, I got the
sense, from some of the Shias with whom we met that they understood that, that the Kurds understood that. Now, whether
or not they can translate that understanding to reality remains to be seen. But it seems to me that is a critical step that has
to be undertaken.
Second, the Iraqi Government, to state the obvious, needs more capacity. When Senators Lugar and Hagel and I were there a year and a half ago, right after Saddam's statue went down, we kept talking about capacity, what we were going to do to provide the Iraqi people with any capacity.
When the transfer of sovereignty occurred last summer, it was clear that we transferred sovereignty, but virtually no
capacity. I want to ask you in the question and answer period more about why it has been we have failed to focus on that and
instead have insisted on this arbitrary number of 127,000 trained Iraqis as if it provided capacity for this government.
Third--and I am summarizing here, Mr. Chairman--we need to show reconstruction results. I am going to be anecdotal. I was
with my friend from Rhode Island on a recent trip. We met with a number of people, the same people we met with, I met with, 2
months earlier, 3 months earlier, with Senator Hagel. General Chiarelli of the First Cav, he was very, very simple and straightforward. I think he has done a hell of a job. He said: Look--he showed us Sadr City and he said: This is my responsibility. Then he showed us HMMV's going down the streets with sewage up to the hubcaps and piles of garbage
literally 10, 12 feet high in front of the front doors of homes, not much further away than this rail is from that door.
He said: I talked to the CPA and I have talked to their successors about what we do about that, and they talk about
$100 million, hundreds of millions of dollars, tertiary treatment plant.
He said: Give me some PVC, let me run it with Iraqis from the homes to the Tigris River, drain the swamp. You know, we
have all seen the Powerpoint presentations the military, that you guys, General, love so much; He then showed us where all
the attacks on his forces had been, where the most environmentally degrading circumstances existed, where he had,
I think it was--correct me, Chuck or staff, if I am wrong. I think he said he had 30 million bucks he was able to spend
right away, where he used it.
Then he put another graph right on top and said: Now look what has happened. CNN 3 or 4 days ago--some of you may have seen it; I was at Davos and I turned on CNN. They had Chiarelli walking down a street with Iraqis who were turning in
insurgents because they now had a street built, the garbage taken away, the sewage diverted, and lights on.
The idea that we have only spent $2.4 billion--not very well, I might add--out of the 8--as you said, Tony, the good
news and the bad news. The good news is we have only wasted $2.4 billion. The bad news is we still have this vast bulk of
this reconstruction money we have not used.
So I would like to ask you some more specific questions about that, but the failure of us being able to use more than
15 percent of the so-called Marshall Plan reconstruction has not been all because of insurgents. It is not all because it is
too dangerous. It is the method we have chosen as to how to lay it out.
In my judgment we have to move away from these massive projects that are costly, slow, susceptible to both the
incompetence of American contractors and the difficulty they have in dealing with security, as well as not providing any
immediate tangible results for folks in the street.
Fourth, it seems to me we finally have to make Iraq the world's problem, not just ours. I had the opportunity, Mr.
Chairman, to spend I do not know how much time, but a considerable amount of time with a few of my colleagues, with
President Chirac. The President, our President, has a unique opportunity when he heads to Europe now. It is time the
Europeans stop bleeding for the Iraqi people and ante up a little bit. It is time they get over George Bush. It is time
they get over the election. It is time to get over it. They love beating up Bush and I believe it has been used as an
excuse, in some cases from their perspective legitimate, to avoid their own responsibility.
Talking with the French president, he was very specific--it is not appropriate to lay it out here--very specific about
things he is willing to do relating to training on and off the scene, relating to involvement in civil society issues. We
should ask, ask. We should give them a way out and into their responsibilities. I know some of you have mentioned that.
Fifth, it seems to me we have to articulate much more forcefully what our plan is. We are going to come up and we are
going to have to vote for $80 billion, I say to my colleagues here. I am prepared to vote for it, but this time I am not
voting for it unless they tell me what they want to do. I am not looking for a withdrawal date. I am one who has been
calling for more forces up until recently. I have been one who has been suggesting that we have to do more.
But I want to tell you something. As that old song goes, what is the plan, Stan? I do not see any evidence, except on
the training side and only in the last 4 to 6 weeks, that there is any coherent notion about how Iraq fits into our regional
strategy and about how, in fact, we even define what the insurgency is.
The Secretary of Defense started off calling them dead-enders and jihadists. Give me a break. They are dead-enders, a
bunch of dead-enders and jihadists. Well, what are they? I want the administration to tell me what they think they are, so I
have any notion to whether or not there is any maturation in the thinking of this administration, because otherwise we are
faced with a situation, Dr. Cordesman, in my view that you had said in your November article which you have updated for this
presentation here, which is that we do not have much better than a 50-percent chance.
You indicate if we do these things we have a much better than 50-percent chance. I think we do as well. But I want to
tell you: If there is no change, no change in the thinking of this administration, significant change in the last 10 months,
we do not have a shot in my view of prevailing. And I am not in on the game any more, because then I am faced, as we always are in the Senate, with Hobson's choices by presidents, two bad choices. The one is, do we continue to drain American blood for an approach that seems to be, I think, a loser, or has there been a change in the strategy. And if it is, what is the strategy? So I want to know what it is as just one Senator.
I also believe, to state the obvious, we have to support our military, and that relates to their training, their mission, their rotation schedule, the equipment they are provided. We can go into that later and I do not want to take the committee's time since so many of our colleagues are here now.
I think maybe most importantly, I say to my colleagues more than the witnesses, we need some straight talk to the American
people here. We need to level with them. I know you are tired of hearing me saying this, but no foreign policy can be
sustained very long without the informed consent of the American people, and there has not been informed consent. We
still operate in this fiction that we do not have to put money for Iraq in the budget, in the regular budget.
I do not know how you guys in good conscience can support that notion, that it is unknowable what we need. We still talk
about this in terms of what great success we are having. I recommend any administration official who tells us what great
success we are having to get back in a HMMV with the Senator from Rhode Island and me and go 50 to 60 miles an hour inside the Green Zone, with automobiles weaving in and out and while sitting there, although I did not hear them, six mortar attacks in broad daylight inside the Green Zone; flying in, making sure we cannot go anywhere at all except on a helicopter at high speeds about 100 feet off the ground. Tell me about how much more security we have. Why do they insist on this fiction that we have 125,000 trained Iraqis?
So we better level with the American people. There are a number of questions that are going to have to be answered by
the administration. They will get my continued support if they try to answer them, but I want to tell you something. We should
use this opportunity, I will say parenthetically, Mr. President, of voting for money to get a real live strategy written, stated, articulated by the administration as to what their plan is, because if it is a repeat of the last 2 years we are doomed to fail in my humble opinion.
I thank you for allowing me to make this statement, Mr. Chairman, and I will reserve my questions until after you
question.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Senator Biden. Thank you. I promise I will adhere to the same discipline.
I would like to just focus in the 7 minutes on training, if I may. Dr. Cordesman, through my four trips into Iraq and
regular e-mail contact between the trainers that are there and my staff, I share the view that has been expressed I think by
all of you, that I think that there has been a bit of, as we Catholics say, an epiphany of the need for fundamental change
in training. I think General Petraeus is first rate. I think he is making a genuine effort. I think they are changing the way
in which this is going on. I think they are much more realistic about what the reality is there.
Without getting us into numbers--and by the way, Dr. Cordesman, you said up to 16 or 17 thousand. I think that was
the number. I have been using the figure, based on what I have been able to glean from the folks in the field, somewhere at
the low end of around 5,000, at the high end, 18,000, depending on how you define their mission and what you define as
capacity.
We all agree that part of, quote, a ``success strategy'' is giving the capacity to the emerging elected government to not
only govern itself with some legitimacy, but also to be able to maintain its position with a capacity to have a security force
available to it. How long are we talking about, assuming the change has taken place as to how to train and what the goals
are as we think it has? I am vastly oversimplifying in the interest of time. How long are we talking about, assuming
everything went according to plan, we work like heck, we have a rational new policy?
What are we talking about? Are we talking months? Are we talking more than a year, Dr. Cordesman? What are we talking
about to be able to give an Iraqi government the capacity to maintain its own security?
Dr. Cordesman. I think, briefly, Senator, we are talking some point in 2006. We had only one operational battalion of
the Iraqi army in the spring of 2004. We have been able to increase that to something like 27 battalions at the end of
this month. But that is training and equipment. Let me stress, that does not mean they are combat-ready.
Senator Biden. I understand.
Dr. Cordesman. You have to have leaders. You have to have unit integrity and you have to have experience. We can do that by putting in U.S. advisers. We can do it by selectively moving units into the field. But to actually get to combat-ready
forces, that process, once you have trained and equipped, is going to take you a matter of at least 3 to 4 months.
You also, in terms of equipment, have not equipped these forces with what they need to survive. What you have are a few
old Soviet APC's, but you do not have a real mechanized battalion in the field yet. We will have a mechanized brigade
by some time in the summer. But we are talking about three divisions eventually and that would be some point in 2006.
Senator Biden. Thank you.
General, do you want to add to that? You have done it.
General Newbold. Sir, just a couple of quick comments. As is obvious to everybody here, we are not training them to
western standards. The real standard is how good are they against the insurgents. So to some degree it depends on how
quickly we and the Iraqis can destroy the power of the insurgents, not just military but political as well.
I would argue that we ought to--in certain areas of Iraq--use moderately trained Iraqis to control the situation, as we have seen both in the north and in the south of Iraq. We certainly cannot in western Iraq. But we can incrementally feed them into the more benign areas with the state of training that they have right now.
I think it will take until the end of this year to be able to do that in many areas of Iraq. It will take through next
year, if we overhaul our strategy, before the predominance of the security mission can be undertaken by the Iraqis. They will
be at a self-generating point, dependent upon the activity of the insurgency, probably within a year. That does not mean
that----
Senator Biden. No, I understand. By the way, in communicating with some folks on the ground these last couple days, on the Iraqi performance. They did perform well in the election. But what everybody forgets is the United States secured the perimeter. The United States essentially established martial law. The United States on election day actually shut down the country in terms of vehicles, etcetera. Then within the second perimeter you had the Iraqi army performing well, and within the interior perimeter you had the national guard and police performing well.
But absent that outer perimeter, being able to be locked down, figuratively speaking, by the United States military, no
one should read into what happened on election day the idea that the Iraqi forces have the capacity. Let me put it another
way. Absent the presence of American forces in Iraq on Sunday, I do not think the kind of situation that existed would have
been possible.
Well, I can see the light is about to go on. I am going to come back and ask you about the notion of building an
integrated Iraqi force--I am talking about an army that can shoot straight, have the proper equipment, be under the control
of a civilian Iraqi government, being in the range of 30 to 40,000 over the next couple years. Is it likely to be integrated, that is Sunni, Shia, Kurd? What are the problems we face there?
But I have many more questions, but I will abide by the yellow light and yield back the last few seconds I have.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Biden.
http://foreign.senate.gov/testimony/2005/BidenStatement050201.pdf