Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I come first to support the distinguished chair of the Appropriations Committee in her endeavor to pass a continuing resolution. I, specifically, want to speak to support the President's request for authorization to stand up a title 10 overt, train and equip mission for vetted moderate Syrian opposition. The hearing I held yesterday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee laid out specifics of how the President is moving forward in building the anti-ISIL coalition.

We will undertake targeted airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. We will train and equip a Syrian opposition force committed to a pluralistic, free Syria.

This is a multifaceted plan, and we heard both from Secretary Kerry and a second panel of regional experts that coalition partners are ready to contribute in real terms and not just empty words.

The ISIL threat is grave and it is urgent. We must stand with our partners in the region to confront this barbarism in the interests of all of the individuals being brutalized by ISIL but also because regional stability and U.S. Security demand it.

Training and equipping a fighting Syrian force is one urgent element in the broader plan.

We in the Senate must provide this authority, as our colleagues in the House did yesterday. In Iraq we have the Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga forces committed to combating ISIL and partnering with us to do so. At this point in time we do not have such a force to partner with inside of Syria.

Let's be clear-eyed about what this challenge is. It is messy and complicated and not at all easy. There is no silver bullet. But without a trained, equipped, and capable moderate opposition force to fill the void, as we conduct airstrikes against ISIL, we would essentially be opening the door to Assad and his Russian- and Iranian-backed regime forces to regain lost territory.

Imagine how our adversaries will celebrate if we fail to build a force that is equipped, trained, and committed to defeating the barbarism of ISIL and Assad.

The administration was posed with the question yesterday: Why now? Why train these forces now, 4 years into this civil war?

There are several answers:

First, we have been working with these moderate armed groups for over 2 years now. We know them.

Second, there is no real alternative to building a local opposition force to take the fight on in Syria unless you are talking about American boots on the ground. That is not in play here.

Third, the region is standing with us in training and creating the ability to assist these Syrian rebels. It is truly a remarkable development that Saudi Arabia, for example, is willing to publicly discuss its support and publicly disclose that it will host and contribute to our train-and-equip mission. Other gulf countries are willing to fund this mission and help with recruiting efforts. No longer are our partners willing to quietly support from the shadows. They view the threat coming from Iraq and Syria with ISIL with such urgency that they are going public loudly and assertively.

I am clear-eyed about the enormity of the challenge. There is risk. But at this point, given the rapidity of ISIL's advance and the savagery of its actions, we must be willing to take some risk to degrade this brutal, barbaric organization. The fact is that Sunni neighbors across the region are lining up to join this mission.

The moderate Syrian forces we will train can pressure ISIL in Syria, the Iraqis from Iraq, and we pressure ISIL from the air. The question is, Why now? The response to the question is this: Yesterday I held--as the Presiding Officer knows, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed legislation last year to increase lethal assistance to the moderate rebels battling Assad in a bipartisan way. We do not get do-overs, so we cannot change what was not done. We cannot change what has already happened. But we can change what exists on the ground in Syria today. We can influence what happens going forward and work together to set conditions for how it ends.

Yesterday Robert Ford--our exceptional former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, probably our greatest expert on Syria and the rebels particularly, and until recently our senior State Department official working with the moderate opposition--could not have had more compelling testimony. In response to questions I posed to him about whether a moderate armed opposition still exists for us to train and arm, he said: Yes, they exist. Yes, they are already fighting ISIL. Yes, they share our view that a radical, extremist Islamic State should not be imposed on Syria. That conflict will only end with a political deal or negotiated settlement.

In response to questions about whether there is recruitment potential, whether we can find enough fighters who are moderate who will pass our vetting standards to receive our training, he said: Yes. We know them. We have provided them with nonlethal assistance, which they have used responsibly.

By the way, he described them as being pretty resilient in the face of being outgunned, that they are still engaged and fighting for their own future.

He also said: We have talked politics with them, meaning understanding where their mindset is as it relates to the future.

In fact, Mr. Ford said that the problem has always been that there were more willing fighters than there were guns and ammunition.

In response to whether the moderate armed Syrian opposition shares our goal of degrading ISIL, the answer was also affirmatively yes.

The force we train and arm will fight ISIL because ISIL is threatening their supply lines and has butchered hundreds of members of the moderate Syrian opposition. In Syria, the moderate opposition has been mired in a two-front war--one against ISIL and the other against Assad and his regime backers--for years. The language in the amendment to the CR reflects this reality. We are training and arming a force that will defend the Syrian people from ISIL attacks and also promote conditions for a negotiated settlement to end the conflict in Syria--in other words, going after Assad's security forces.

Finally, Ambassador Ford lamented that if we do not go forward with this proposal to train and equip the moderate armed opposition, Assad will likely become even more convinced that his strategy all along has worked. His strategy is to convince the world that he is the only viable alternative to ISIL and radical extremists and that we will eventually resolve ourselves to working with him.

Let me conclude by saying that the only course of action at this point in time is for us to commit to the grinding work of building a viable alternative, which is the moderate armed Syrian opposition.

Again, this is not going to happen overnight, but it certainly will not happen if there is not a moderate, capable alternative to Assad, a group that is neither radical nor has the barbarism of ISIL, nor the nihilistic, barrel bomb-dropping of Assad.

We must be realistic if we are going to degrade and destroy ISIL. Frankly, I still have many questions about the way forward beyond this issue. I intend to work with the administration to ensure that the plan is sound and the strategy is effective. We will continue to vet that through a series of both hearings and intelligence briefings. But I have no question that this particular action is needed now.

I fully intend for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to explore, vet, and ultimately craft what a possible authorization for use of military force should look like. In that regard, we need to get it right, not just do it fast. I do not want an AUMF that ultimately--as of September 2001--finds us 13 years later in a host of different countries that were never envisioned as being the authorization for it, to send the sons and daughters of America without the authorization of the Congress.

We will work on all of that in a determined, studious, and detailed way to make sure that we understand the strategy and all of its dimensions, that we can provide for that, and at the end of the day that we can defeat ISIL, but without an open-ended check.

With that, I urge support for the CR.

I yield the floor.

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