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Now
I know it is probably appropriate to
speak of our colleagues, and I will do that on the record. I
rise tonight, however, to speak about a subject heavy on my mind.
It is the subject of the war in Iraq.
I have never worn the uniform
of my country. I am not a soldier or a veteran. I regret that
fact. It is one of the regrets of my life. But I am a student
of history, particularly military history, and it is that perspective
which I brought to the Senate 10 years ago as a newly elected
Member of this Chamber.
When we came to the vote on
Iraq, it was an issue of great moment for me. No issue is more
difficult to vote on than war and peace, because it involves
the lives of our soldiers, our young men and women. It involves
the expenditure of our treasure, putting on the line the prestige
of our country. It is not a vote taken lightly. I have tried
to be a good soldier in this Chamber. I have tried to support
our President, believing at the time of the vote on the war in
Iraq that we had been given good intelligence and knowing that
Saddam Hussein was a menace to the world, a brutal dictator,
a tyrant by any standard, and one who threatened our country
in many different ways, through the financing and fomenting of
terrorism. For those reasons and believing that we would find
weapons of mass destruction, I voted aye.
I have been rather silent on
this question ever since. I have been rather quiet because, when
I was visiting Oregon troops in Kirkuk in the Kurdish area, the
soldiers said to me: Senator, don't tell me you support the troops
and not our mission. That gave me pause. But since that time,
there have been 2,899 American casualties. There have been over
22,000 American men and women wounded. There has been an expenditure
of $290 billion a figure that approaches the expenditure we have
every year on an issue as important as Medicare. We have paid
a price in blood and treasure that is beyond calculation by my
estimation.
Now, as I witness the slow
undoing of our efforts there, I rise to speak from my heart.
I was greatly disturbed recently to read a comment by a man I
admire in history, one Winston Churchill, who after the British
mandate extended to the peoples of Iraq for 5 years, wrote to
David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England:
At present we are paying 8
millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful
volcano.
When I read that, I thought,
not much has changed. We have to learn the lessons of history
and sometimes they are painful because we have made mistakes.
Even though I have not worn
the uniform of my country, I, with other colleagues here, love
this Nation. I came into politics because I believed in some
things. I am unusually proud of the fact of our recent history,
the history of our Nation since my own birth. At the end of the
Second World War, there were 15 nations on earth that could be
counted as democracies that you and I would recognize. Today
there are 150 nations on earth that are democratic and free.
That would not have happened had the United States been insular
and returned to our isolationist roots, had we laid down the
mantle of world leadership, had we not seen the importance of
propounding and encouraging the spread of democracy, the rule
of law, human rights, and the values of our Bill of Rights. It
is a better world because of the United States of America, and
the price we have paid is one of blood and treasure.
Now we come to a great crossroads.
A commission has just done some, I suppose, good work. I am still
evaluating it. I welcome any ideas now because where we are leaves
me feeling much like Churchill, that we are paying the price
to sit on a mountain that is little more than a volcano of ingratitude.
Yet as I feel that, I remember
the pride I felt when the statue of Saddam Hussein came down.
I remember the thrill I felt when three times Iraqis risked their
own lives to vote democratically in a way that was internationally
verifiable as well as legitimate and important. Now all of those
memories seem much like ashes to me.
The Iraq Study Group has given
us some ideas. I don't know if they are good or not. It does
seem to me that it is a recipe for retreat. It is not cut and
run, but it is cut and walk. I don't know that that is any more
honorable than cutting and running, because cutting and walking
involves greater expenditure of our treasure, greater loss of
American lives.
Many things have been attributed
to George Bush. I have heard him on this floor blamed for every
ill, even the weather. But I do not believe him to be a liar.
I do not believe him to be a traitor, nor do I believe all the
bravado and the statements and the accusations made against him.
I believe him to be a very idealistic man. I believe him to have
a stubborn backbone. He is not guilty of perfidy, but I do believe
he is guilty of believing bad intelligence and giving us the
same.
I can't tell you how devastated
I was to learn that in fact we were not going to find weapons
of mass destruction. But remembering the words of the soldier--don't
tell me you support the troops but you don't support my mission--I
felt the duty to continue my support. Yet I believe the President
is guilty of trying to win a short war and not understanding
fully the nature of the ancient hatreds of the Middle East. Iraq
is a European creation. At the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious
powers put together Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia tribes that had
been killing each other for time immemorial. I would like to
think there is an Iraqi identity. I would like to remember the
purple fingers raised high. But we can not want democracy for
Iraq more than they want it for themselves. And what I find now
is that our tactics there have failed.
Again, I am not a soldier,
but I do know something about military history. And what that
tells me is when you are engaged in a war of insurgency, you
can't clear and leave. With few exceptions, throughout Iraq that
is what we have done. To fight an insurgency often takes a decade
or more. It takes more troops than we have committed. It takes
clearing, holding, and building so that the people there see
the value of what we are doing. They become the source of intelligence,
and they weed out the insurgents. But we have not cleared and
held and built. We have cleared and left, and the insurgents
have come back.
I, for one, am at the end of
my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers
patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by
the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be
criminal. I cannot support that anymore. I believe we need to
figure out how to fight the war on terror and to do it right.
So either we clear and hold and build, or let's go home.
There are no good options,
as the Iraq Study Group has mentioned in their report. I am not
sure cutting and walking is any better. I have little confidence
that the Syrians and the Iranians are going to be serious about
helping us to build a stable and democratic Iraq. I am at a crossroads
as well. I want my constituents to know what is in my heart,
what has guided my votes.
What will continue to guide
the way I vote is simply this: I do not believe we can retreat
from the greater war on terror. Iraq is a battlefield in that
larger war. But I do believe we need a presence there on the
near horizon at least that allows us to provide intelligence,
interdiction, logistics, but mostly a presence to say to the
murderers that come across the border: We are here, and we will
deal with you. But we have no business being a policeman in someone
else's civil war.
I welcome the Iraq Study Group's
report, but if we are ultimately going to retreat, I would rather
do it sooner than later. I am looking for answers, but the current
course is unacceptable to this Senator. I suppose if the President
is guilty of one other thing, I find it also in the words of
Winston Churchill. He said:
After the First World War,
let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe that any war will
be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on this strange
voyage can measure the tides and the hurricanes. The statesman
who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is
given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of
unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
That is a lesson we are learning
again. I am afraid, rather than leveling with the American people
and saying this was going to be a decade-long conflict because
of the angst and hatred that exists in that part of the world,
that we tried to win it with too few troops in too fast a time.
Lest anyone thinks I believe we have failed militarily, please
understand I believe when President Bush stood in front of ``mission
accomplished'' on an aircraft carrier that, in purely military
terms, the mission was accomplished in the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. But winning a battle, winning a war, is different than
winning a peace.
We were not prepared to win
the peace by clearing, holding, and building. You don't do that
fast and you don't do it with too few troops. I believe now that
we must either determine to do that, or we must redeploy in a
way that allows us to continue to prosecute the larger war on
terror. It will not be pretty. We will pay a price in world opinion.
But I, for one, am tired of paying the price of 10 or more of
our troops dying a day. So let's cut and run, or cut and walk,
or let us fight the war on terror more intelligently than we
have, because we have fought this war in a very lamentable way.
Those are my feelings. I regret
them. I would have never voted for this conflict had I reason
to believe that the intelligence we had was not accurate. It
was not accurate, but that is history. Now we must find a way
to make the best of a terrible situation, at a minimum of loss
of life for our brave fighting men and women. So I will be looking
for every opportunity to clear, build, hold, and win or how to
bring our troops home.
I yield the floor.
Gordon Smith is the Republican senator from Oregon.
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