AMUF

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, to her high school classmates it was
pretty clear what kind of person Kayla Mueller was going to turn out to
be. As a teenager she took up the causes of the disenfranchised and the
dispossessed, such as when she joined a campaign to stop the city of
Flagstaff from using recycled wastewater to make snow on a set of peaks
the Hopi people considered to be sacred. She later went to the most
dangerous place on Earth because people there needed help. She saw
suffering on an unimaginable scale, brought on by a vicious civil war
inside Syria and Iraq, and she wanted to make it better.

No one is responsible for her death except for ISIL. They killed her,
as they did James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Abdul-Rahman, Peter Kassig,
and thousands of individual innocent Iraqis and Syrians over the course
of the last year.

It has been a long time since the world has seen such evil. This is a
brutal inhuman terrorist organization that today is a threat to the region in which they prowl, but without question could pose a threat to the United States if their march is allowed to go unchecked.

Like the Presiding Officer, every time I hear of a new attack or a
new execution carried out by ISIL, my blood boils, I get furious, and I
commit myself to doing everything within our power to stamp them out.
But I also remember that as justified a response as it is, fury is not
a strategy; revenge is not security.

If we are going to defeat ISIL, we need to act with our heads, not
just with our hearts. And that means Congress needs to pass a war
authorization that includes a strategy for victory--a strategy that
learns from a small little creature called the planarian flatworm. I
want to tell you about flatworms for a second. This is going to sound a
little strange, but I will bring it back here.

These flatworms are extraordinary little things that live in ponds,
under logs, and in moist soil. What is amazing about these flatworms is
that if you split one of them in two, if you cut it in half, both
halves regenerate into new flatworms. In fact, if you cut it into four
pieces, all four pieces can regrow into new flatworms. It means if for
whatever reason you are trying to get rid of flatworms, cutting them
into pieces does more harm than good. If you take a knife to it, you
actually create more flatworms than you destroy.

So why am I talking about this? Because they are a perfect object
lesson of the simple truth that if you attack a problem the wrong way,
you might not just leave the problem unsolved, you might actually make
it worse. If you use the wrong tool to try to eradicate flatworms, you
just end up with a lot more of them.

In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we were told we were going
to be treated as liberators. We were told we would be out of Iraq in a
few years. When that failed, our invasion turned the one-headed monster
of Saddam Hussein into a two-headed monster of competing Sunni and
Shiite insurgencies.

Then we were told more troops would do the trick. And it worked, for
only as long as tens of thousands of Americans were patrolling the
sands of Iraq. But ultimately our occupation was quietly breeding a new
brand of an even more lethal insurgency, one that turned into the
terrorist group we are fighting today.

Put simply, ISIL in its current form would not exist if we had not
put massive ground troops into the region in the first place. Our
presence in Iraq, our mishandling of the occupation, became bulletin
board material for terrorist recruiters. Iraq became, in the CIA's
words, the ``cause celebre'' of the international extremist network. We
killed a terrorist, and the next day two more showed up.

Let me be clear, because I don't want people to twist my words here.
America is not responsible for this evil ideology, and our troops are
not to blame for ISIL. No one forgets that Al Qaeda attacked us and
killed 3,000 of our people before we invaded Iraq. But do we believe
having hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers occupying territory in
the Middle East since then has succeeded in making us safer?

We have killed a lot of terrorists over the last 13 years, and yet
there are more of them, in more places, with an even more radical
agenda today than ever before.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates understood the lesson of the
flatworm when he said, upon his departure from the Department of
Defense, any future Secretary who proposed putting ground troops back
into the Middle East should ``have their head examined.''

So for me, as we debate this new war authorization against ISIL, I
have a bottom line: We cannot authorize a strategy that could result in
American combat troops going back to the Middle East.

If this President or the next President puts our soldiers into the
Middle East to fight ISIL, they would serve with bravery and honor. But
an intervention of this scale would ultimately create more terrorists
than it destroyed. And to the extent we drove back ISIL, it would only
be temporary, lasting only as long as our troops were there.

Why? These extremist groups such as ISIL exist not because of a
military vacuum but because of a political and an economic vacuum. They
prey upon disenfranchised young men who see no future for themselves in
societies with massive, crippling hunger, poverty, and destitution.

These groups work best when autocratic or sectarian governments
marginalize and dispossess specific ethnic or religious groups, pushing
them into the arms of extremists who pledge to fight the corrupt and
dehumanizing status quo.

Foreign ground troops do nothing to address these underlying issues.
But worse, more often than not, foreign ground troops exacerbate these
motivating forces. Bloody ground wars make more economic dislocation,
not less. Foreign occupations often empower divisive local leadership,
such as the former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, who pushed
people toward--not away from--extremist groups. Then groups such as Al
Qaeda and ISIL use this misery to brainwash young men into believing
America is to blame, that we are the enemy they are yearning to fight.

That doesn't mean there isn't a role for military force in the Middle
East. I have voted for an authorization in the Foreign Relations
Committee that allows for the United States--our military--to go in and
kill terrorists, but we simply need to understand that ultimately what
military force is in the Middle East is a shaping mechanism to give us
space in order to achieve the political and economic reform on the
ground with our local partners such that those root causes of
terrorists disappear.

American military force is useful in this fight, but it has limits.
There is a decreasing marginal return and then a point where it
actually flips on its head and begins to actually create more of the
people we are seeking to destroy.

I have heard two arguments over the past few days as to why this AUMF
shouldn't have a limitation on ground troops. First, some of my
Republican friends say this kind of prohibition on ground troops would
be unwise because it would telegraph to our enemies a critical tactical
limitation. My response: Good.

Why do we think ISIL puts up these execution videos? Because they
know the best long-term play for their desired caliphate is predicated
on the United States making a mistake and rejoining a ground war in the
Middle East. Recent history has taught ISIL that the best tool by far
to recruit terrorists--and estimates are there are as many as 20,000
foreign fighters who have joined ISIL--is the U.S. Army in the Middle
East. Thus, I have no problem being transparent with our enemy by
signaling this to them; that we are going to learn from our mistakes
and we are going to fight this war with tools that result in victory,
not defeat.

The second argument I hear is that Congress would be overstepping our
constitutional bounds by limiting the power of the President to
prosecute a war. But first let's note that over and over again,
starting with Congress's very first authorizations of military force
passed in early American times, we have put restrictions consistently
on war declarations and AUMFs. Most recently, Republicans and Democrats
in the Foreign Relations Committee voted to put some pretty serious
limitations on our authorization for the use of military force in Syria
in the wake of chemical weapons usage. Frankly, regardless of the
precedent, I would argue Congress has a constitutional responsibility
to help set the strategy for war, to help guide the Nation's foreign
policy.

Let's be honest. This AUMF is going to go on for 3 years, according
to the limitations the President proposed, well into the next
President's term. As someone who believes combat troops in the Middle
East would be a mistake, I simply can't rely on President Obama's
promise that he will not use ground troops against ISIL because he only
has 2 more years left, and many leading Republicans have made it
perfectly clear they would push a President from their party, if that
is who comes next, to put troops back into the fight against ISIL. As
an elected representative of the people I serve, I should get a say as
to whether we have learned from our mistakes of the past 10 years.

I remember my first visit to Iraq. I was there in the bloody spring
of 2007. I remember being absolutely blown away by the capability and the bravery and the capacity of the young U.S. soldiers whom I met in places such as Baghdad, Tikrit, and Baiji. So I can understand why it is easy for some people to believe there is no enemy our soldiers can't beat, that there is no challenge they can't
meet, that there is no threat they can't eliminate. I believe in
American exceptionalism in my heart, but I don't think it allows us to
ignore history, to avoid facts, to deny reality, and the reality is
extremists in some parts of the world are like flatworms. If we come at
them with the wrong weapon, we may kill one, but we will create two
more.

I am pleased the Senate is finally able to debate a new war against
ISIL. This debate is past due. ISIL needs to be defeated, and we
deserve to honor the U.S. Constitution and step up to the plate and
debate an authorization.

Make no mistake, we should pass an AUMF. ISIL is evil personified,
but for us to beat them, we need an AUMF that makes it totally clear we
will not simply repeat the mistakes of the past that got us into this
mess in the first place.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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