Executive Session

EXECUTIVE SESSION -- (Senate - January 26, 2005)

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to support Dr. Rice's nomination to be Secretary of State. I don't do it as fulsomely as I rose to support the nomination of the previous Secretary of State. I will explain why.

I believe the President of the United States is entitled to his Cabinet unless the person he selects is so far out of the mainstream, incompetent, clearly of questionable character, or, as some in the past have been, dedicated to the express purpose of dismantling the very agency to which they were being assigned, such as President Reagan--as my mother would say, God love him--who wanted to do away with the Department of Education and assigned two people to be the head of the Department of Education for the express purpose of eliminating an agency that I thought needed to remain, or in the special case when the office calls for an unusually different relation, as the Attorney General does. The Attorney General does not work for the President. He is the people's lawyer. He is hired by the President, but he or she is the people's lawyer and, in the worst of all cases, sometimes required to investigate the President himself and in the best of cases is required to interpret the constitutional laws of the land.

I very reluctantly voted against Attorney General Gonzales's nomination to be Attorney General because I believe he has so wrongly interpreted law on torture and did such great damage as a consequence of that decision. There were significant consequences. There is a fundamentally different relationship and a fundamentally different constitutional obligation. It is his judgment that I question, and I currently believe he should not be Attorney General.

Dr. Rice does not fit in any of those categories. I have known and worked with her for the past 4 years. She is knowledgeable, she is smart, she is honorable, and her relationship with the President is essentially to be the public face of the President of the United States here.

As the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, I have a special responsibility to work with Dr. Rice, so I am going to vote for Dr. Rice, but I am going to do so with some frustration and reservations. Let me explain why. I have said this to Dr. Rice, so she is not hearing this for the first time.

Last week, we gave Dr. Rice an opportunity to acknowledge the mistakes and misjudgments of the past 4 years. The point is not to play the game ``gotcha.'' It is not about embarrassing the President. It is about learning from our mistakes so we do not repeat them. A second term is also a second chance.

Instead of seizing that opportunity, Dr. Rice stuck to the administration's party line: Always right; never wrong. It is as if acknowledging mistakes or misjudgments is a sign of weakness. I do not think it is. I think it is powerful evidence of strength and maturity.

But during the hearing, Dr. Rice claimed that my colleague, BARBARA BOXER, was impugning her integrity when she asked about her changing rationale for the war in Iraq.

Now, I wish instead that Dr. Rice had acknowledged the facts. This administration secured the support of the American people, and of Congress, for going to war based on what it insisted was an imminent threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Now, when it turns out there are no such weapons, Dr. Rice and the President claim the war was now about removing a dictator. I am glad Saddam is gone. He deserves his own special place in hell, but removing him from power was not the justification initially offered by this administration to go to war. Again, it is an example of what BARBARA BOXER was talking about: a changing rationale for war. Why Dr. Rice would not acknowledge that is beyond me.

Reading the resolution that Congress passed giving the President the authority to use force if necessary, it was about ``disarming'' Saddam. And reread the words of the President and other senior officials. In speech after speech, television appearance after television appearance, they left the American people with the impression that Iraq was on the verge of reconstituting nuclear weapons. In fact, Vice President Cheney said they already had them.

The administration left the American people with the impression, even today, that Saddam had other weapons of mass destruction, and that he was complicit in the events of 9/11 and that he collaborated with al-Qaida--I assume collaborated with al-Qaida for purposes of the 9/11 attack. Back then the administration liked to claim that President Bush never said Iraq was ``an imminent threat.'' Well, this is what he and other senior officials did say. They referred to it as an ``immediate threat,'' a ``mortal threat,'' an ``urgent threat,'' a ``grave threat,'' a ``serious and mounting threat,'' a ``unique threat.'' And it would be funny, the denial that they did not say ``imminent threat'' if it were not so deadly serious.

This is my point: Especially in matters of war and peace, we have to level with the American people if we want not only to secure their support but to sustain their support.

My poor colleagues are tired of hearing me say, for the last 2 years, the following: No foreign policy can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. And this administration has been very reluctant to keep them informed. Informed means all the information and a truthful rendition of the balance of the information they have.

During the time I was criticizing President Bush for his assertions about aluminum tubes and his administration's assertions about other things, the press kept saying to me: Why won't you say the President is a liar? He was not lying. But what the President did--he got the intelligence, as we did on the committee. We can argue whether a minority or a majority, but a significant number of the intelligence assets in the U.S. Government said: We think those aluminum tubes are or could be used for gas centrifuges. A significant number said: No, they are not used for that. They are for artillery.

Well, my criticism of the President was not that he, in fact, chose to believe that portion of the intelligence community which said they were used for gas centrifuge systems, which is needed to build a nuclear capability and if you are going to use uranium; my problem with it was, both he and Dr. Rice implied there was no dissent, that this was the view of the intelligence community, when it was not. There was, at a minimum, a significant dissent both in Energy and at the CIA, and other places. So they did not lie. They chose to pick the portion--I am not saying they did it for any reason other than they believed it, but they chose to pick the portion of the intelligence community's assessment which fit with their objectives, without ever mentioning, acknowledging, or suggesting there was any dissent within the intelligence community.

I love my colleagues now who keep saying: Don't blame it on Rice. Don't blame it on Gonzales. Blame it on the intelligence community. I think our former Director of the CIA is getting a bad rap here.

The fact is, we have to be honest with ourselves and the world; otherwise, we are going to do terrible damage to our most valuable asset, our credibility. After Iraq, it is going to be much harder to rally the world to our side if we have to face a truly imminent threat to our security from, say, Iran or North Korea.

The same goes for the way Dr. Rice answered my questions about training Iraqi security forces. Time and again, this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000--as high as 120,000; or I think there was even a higher number offered--of fully competent police and military. They don't say fully competent; they say trained.

Now again, it is like that story I have told. We Catholic kids go to Catholic school. We learn to go to one of the Sacraments in the Catholic Church, Penance. You go to confession. They explain to us that when we go to confession, we should confess all our sins. My nuns told me the story about Johnny, who said to the priest: Bless me father for I have sinned. I stole a gold chain. And he failed to tell the priest that attached to that gold chain was an antique gold watch. He did not lie. He stole the chain. But when you say what you did, you should say all of what you did.

Failure to acknowledge, as my grandfather used to say, the ``hull'' of it, failure to do that is, at a minimum, misleading--at a minimum, misleading. That is what has happened here.

So 120,000 troops trained. There may be 120,000 people who we put uniforms on--and I will not go through it in the limited time I have; I will submit for the RECORD the facts as I believe them based on talking to our military and police trainers--but the real question is, How many American forces doing the job of policing the streets, going after insurgents, guarding the borders, whatever functions we are now providing, how many of those could be replaced with an Iraqi now? I think the number is closer to somewhere between 4,000 and 18,000.

Now, the good news--when I asked the question, I thought she would say we have made mistakes. We went for quantity not quality. We realize we had to fundamentally change our training programs. We brought in General Patraeus, who is a first-rate guy. He is well underway of doing that--which he is--and we are going to get it right. But, no, we have 120,000 trained forces out there.

Well, the fact is, we are months, if not years, from reaching the target we need of putting uniformed soldiers, uniformed cops, and uniformed National Guard with Iraqi uniforms into Iraq.

The bottom line is, we should focus on real standards, not raw numbers. To my mind, there is a real simple standard. An Iraqi soldier and policeman should be considered fully trained when he or she is capable of doing the job we are now asking an American young man or woman to do. How many meet that standard today? Nowhere near, as I said, 120,000. In my judgment, it is closer to 14,000 total. Army trained is probably closer to 5,000.

So last week's hearing was a chance for Dr. Rice to wipe the slate clean with the American people and with our allies. I wish she had seized it.

This is not about revisiting the past. It is about how Dr. Rice and the administration will meet the challenges of the future.

I notice, in the defense of Dr. Rice, I no longer hear on the floor disagreements--I don't want to get him in trouble--disagreements with the position taken by my friend, the chairman of our committee, or by my friend, Mr. Hagel, or Mr. McCain, or myself, or others. I do not hear people saying we have conducted this postwar policy very well. I do not hear anybody defending that. They are now saying, which is good: Hey, wait a minute, I guess we have made mistakes.

Why the administration cannot do that is beyond me. They are not up for reelection again. It would seem to me it would be a way to coalesce support.

In my judgment, America faces two overriding national security challenges in this new century. First and foremost, we must win the struggle between freedom and radical Islamic fundamentalism. Secondly, we must keep the world's most dangerous weapons away from its most dangerous people.

On the latter point, the man we owe the greatest debt of gratitude to on making progress on that score is my friend and colleague, Senator Lugar, and former Senator Nunn. Senator Lugar is the guy who is following up on this and the guy forcing us all to face the reality that much more is needed to be done.

To prevail, we have to be strong. We also have to be smart, wielding the force of our ideas and ideals together with the force of our arms.

Today, after a necessary war in Afghanistan and an optional war in Iraq, we are rightly confident in the example of our power. But we have forgotten the power of our example.

Foreign policy is not a popularity contest. We must confront hard issues. Sometimes they require us to make hard choices that other countries do not like. But above all, they require American leadership, the kind of persuasion that brings along others to our side.

We have been having a tough time doing just that the past few years. So despite our great military might, in my view, we are more alone in the world than we have been in recent memory. As a result, we are much less secure than we could or should be.

That is because virtually all the threats we face--from terrorism, to the spread of weapons of mass destruction, to rogue states that flout the rules, to endemic and pandemic diseases--cannot be solely met by the unilateral use of force.

I had hoped to hear from Dr. Rice how she planned to help rebuild America's power to persuade, and to restore our Nation's respect that it once enjoyed. For she said, now is the time for diplomacy. Parenthetically, I think diplomacy was needed 4 years ago. I am happy now is the time for diplomacy.

I also had hoped to hear her ideas for contending with a series of problems the administration has put on the back burner but whose pots are boiling over, such as the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran, the dangerous backsliding of democracy in Russia, and the genocide in Sudan, to only name a few.

Over the past few years, North Korea has increased its nuclear weapons capacity by as much as 400 percent. It may now have as many as eight nuclear weapons to test, hide, or sell to the highest bidder.

Dr. Rice told us it is ``unacceptable'' for North Korea to have these nuclear weapons, but she did not tell us what that meant or how the administration proposed to stop this growing threat.

Over the past few years, the reform movement in Iran has been crushed and the regime has accelerated its own nuclear program. There may be nothing we can do to persuade Iran not to develop these weapons by diplomacy, but our European allies are trying through a combination of carrots and sticks. They believe they cannot succeed, though, unless the United States engages directly in this effort.

I asked Dr. Rice whether we should be a party to a deal in which the Iranians agreed--if there was a way to verify--that they would stop their attempts to build a nuclear weapon and end their missile program. She said: Well, we have a lot of other problems with Iran.

Of course we do. But our No. 1 problem is the growing danger they will develop nuclear weapons. Our best chance of stopping that is to work with the Europeans in showing Iran it can get more if it does the right thing, and what it risks if it does not. But we are sitting on the sidelines, in my view. Nothing Dr. Rice said gave me confidence we are really going to get on the playing field.

Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: How much time do I have?

The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 4 minutes remaining.

Mr. BIDEN. Over the past few years, President Putin has reversed the course of democratic development and the rule of law in Russia. The administration has been largely silent. How can we be so concerned about the advancement of democracy in the Middle East and so unconcerned about the regression in Russia?

The President gave a powerful, eloquent inaugural address about expanding freedom around the world. Every American shares that ideal--it goes to who we are as a people, to our experience, and to our interests.

The question isn't the goal, it's how you achieve it. I wonder if the President plans on bringing a signed copy of his address to President Putin when he meets with him next month. I fear that in Russia and many other places, the gap between the administration's rhetoric and the reality of its policies is only going to get wider.

At the same time, we have gotten little in return for turning a blind eye to Russia's regression. One of the most important programs to protect America' security--the effort to help Russia account for, secure and destroy weapons of mass destruction and related materials--has become mired in redtape that the two Presidents need to cut through.

Finally, in Darfur, Sudan we have watched a terrible tragedy unfold. Militia supported by the government have killed as many as 100,000 civilians and chased as many as 2 million from their homes.

Four months ago, before the Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary Powell rightly called it genocide. Since then, the situation has gotten even worse. Yet we heard virtually nothing from Dr. Rice about what the administration and Congress can do, now, to stop this slaughter and to help African allies develop their own peacekeeping capacity.

Let me end with something hopeful that Dr. Rice talked about: putting diplomacy back at the center of America's foreign policy.

That effort is long overdue. Be that as it may, I strongly agree with Dr. Rice that this is the time for a new diplomatic offensive with old allies, rising powers, and even hostile regimes.

But our diplomacy has to be sustained. It has to do as much listening as it does talking. And it has to use all the tools at our disposal.

Our military might is critical. It gives credibility to our diplomacy. And it gives us the most powerful tool in the world to act, if necessary, against dictators who are systematically abusing the rights of their people, or against regimes with no democratic checks that are harboring terrorists and amassing weapons of mass destruction.

But there are many other critical tools that have atrophied under this administration--our intelligence, our public diplomacy, our alliances, international organizations, treaties and agreements, development assistance, trade and investment. We need to wield them with the same determination with which we use force--even if it can be frustrating and even if the payoff takes years, even a generation.

That is what we did after World War II. That is why we prevailed in the Cold War.

Now, faced with a new but no less dangerous set of challenges, we must recapture the totality of America's strength.

Mr. President, I will conclude by suggesting that we are now faced with a new but no less dangerous set of challenges than we were in World War II, and we have to recapture the totality of America's strength.

Above all, we have to understand that those who spread radical Islamic fundamentalism and weapons of mass destruction, although they may be beyond our reach and there is no choice but to confront them and to defeat them, there are still hundreds of millions of hearts and minds around the world who practice Islam who are open to American ideas and ideals, and we have to reach them.

Dr. Rice says she is going to make diplomacy her primary task. I will work with her in that effort.

One of my colleagues said--by the way, I want to note parenthetically that I think it is totally appropriate for Senator Dayton and Senator Kennedy and my friend from California to say what they have said, to take the positions they have taken. It is consistent with the facts as they see them. They choose to view one side of the coin. I am viewing the other side of the coin.

One of my colleagues said he is voting his notion that this is going to get worse. I forget the exact phrase my friend from Massachusetts, Senator Kerry, used. Well, it reminded me of a comment by Samuel Johnson who described second marriages as the triumph of hope over experience. Well, I may be guilty in this second term of choosing hope over experience, because my experience thus far with this administration on foreign policy has been very disquieting. My hope is that the new--and I suspect she will be; I hope she will be confirmed--the new Secretary of State will, in fact, play a role in trying to change that policy, engage in diplomacy, and use the totality of our strength, which includes our ideas and our ideals, as well as our military power.

I reserve whatever time I may have and thank the Chair.

I yield the floor.

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