Speech of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on American National Security
and Finishing the Mission in Iraq
At the Town Hall Los Angeles Association
August 23, 2005
“Thank you to the Town Hall organization meeting. It is an honor to
be asked to speak before this very distinguished forum that I’m
told has been in operation for some 70 years. It is a wonderful contribution
to American democracy that such an organization exists and I thank you
so much for that.
There’s one thing I want to leave with you. So I will begin with
it and I will also end with it and that is that this speech or this
plea is not about Iraq per say. Of course much of my conversation will
be about the status of the Iraq war. But what it is about is American
national security – our national security. And national security,
in my judgment, is the top priority of all Americans at this time in
our history. That’s a lot to say because I go to every one of
Wisconsin’s 72 counties every year and hold a town meeting. That
means I’ve done over 900 of them. The thing that most comes up
at the town meetings is the desperate need to reform our health care
system. And the burden that it is placing on our businesses and our
economy.
We hear terrible concerns about job loss, especially job loss oversees
in part due to trade agreements that I think weren’t terribly
well thought out and cost Wisconsin 90,000 manufacturing jobs since
the year 2000. I’m hearing an awful lot right now, even before
gas prices went up, that Americans want us to get together and have
what they call a “Manhattan project” for energy independence
to not be dependent on foreign oil. I hear a great deal and I am pleased
about it that people are a little sick and tired of the fact that we
now have one of the largest deficits in American history. We didn’t
even have one when President Clinton left office in the year 2000. Of
course there is a growing course that I don’t need to tell the
people of Southern California about, about the problem of immigration,
how to handle all of that. And so we must show the American people that
we can address those issues.
But in my view all Americans and especially Democrats and especially
progressive Democrats must renew a commitment to correcting the mistakes
that have been made in American national security priorities by this
administration. We must speak often, we must speak well, and we must
speak with passion about American lives and about protecting our nation
from the fanatical persons and organizations that attacked us on September
the 11th, 2001 and continue to attack us. When we talk of it we should
not speak defensively or grudgingly but as proud Americans who continue
to be outraged that our nation was attacked so viciously on 9/11. So
four years after 9/11, and almost three years after the authorization
of the Iraq war by the Congress, it’s time to speak broadly, and
with imagination, about a better vision of our national security.
Of course when you use a phrase like national security there’s
so much that goes into it where do you begin? One place you obviously
begin is the looming challenge that China presents: I’m very concerned
that Americans and the American government is not sufficiently focused
on everything from the economic, to the military, to other activities
of the Chinese government and how it will affect our future; the problem
of North Korea that I think has not gotten the attention it deserves;
the growing concern of what Iran is up to with regard to nuclear weapons
and in general; the hope and the concern about peace in the Middle East;
the enormous instability and the threats caused by poverty and HIV/AIDS
and other problems in places like Africa where I have done a great deal
of my work on the Foreign Relations committee.
These are all terribly important and they will occupy so much of the
energy of the American people throughout the 21st century. Theses all
require our serious and sustained attention. But for me, since 9/11,
I have believed that the threat of fundamentalists and jihadist based
terrorism and the related networks and organizations is the most immediate
threat to our nation, including our stability, our economy, and our
confidence, including the lives of our children and our families.
And that threat is presenting itself all over the world. You see it
in Indonesia, you see it in the Philippines, and you see it places like
Algeria and Northern Africa, not to mention the more obvious examples
like Madrid and London. It’s good to turn to the definition that
the 9/11 Commission report itself gave of what this threat is: “the
enemy is not Islam, the great world faith, but a perversion of Islam,”
the report reads, “The enemy goes beyond Al-Qaeda to include the
radical ideological movement inspired in part by Al-Qaeda that has spawned
other terrorists groups and violence. Thus our strategy must match our
means to two ends: dismantling the Al-Qaeda network and in the long
term prevailing over the ideology that contributes to Islamist terrorism.”
Having said all that I certainly do think that at this point, at this
time in this year, figuring out the Iraq problem is critical to getting
the fight against terrorism right and therefore getting our problems
with national security right. I believe that in order to reduce the
danger of Al-Qaeda and jihadism all over the world, we must return to
the post-9/11 focus that we had on the global threat. In other words,
Iraq is not the be-all end-all of our national security. And in fact
I’m not so sure that the President is exactly right when he likes
to say that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism. To some
extent we have chosen to make it so and arguably if it is the central
focus in the war on terrorism, it may be to our enemy’s advantage
that that is where the central focus has become. So I think it is time
to identify a plan to achieve our mission in Iraq with a flexible timetable
to achieve those goals and how to do it and then to have a proposed
target date to have those troops come home after they have done what
they can do, and hopefully they have succeeded in their mission so that
we can get back to the broader issue of fighting those who attacked
us on 9/11.
In other words, to put it in a more concise way, what we need in the
fight against terrorism is a major course correction in how we are going
about it. The fight against terrorism has to do with the jihadist terrorist
threat. And it is my view that the lack of presidential and administration
leadership has set up a situation where we are actually feeding the
insurgency in Iraq. The al Zarqawi’s, the Osama bin Laden’s
can call for an international jihad to come to Iraq to fight the permanent
American occupation as they falsely and dishonestly portray. That’s
the poster that they use to convince many foreign terrorists to join
those who are trying to kill our people in Iraq.
Now, I want to be clear, I supported the Afghanistan invasion, I thought
that the Administration did an excellent job post 9/11 of calmly and
carefully lining up support for what had to be done to attack the Taliban
and bin Laden and others. And I was impressed, and therefore awfully
puzzled when President Bush shifted the focus to Iraq and caused us
to lose the focus that I thought they had shown a pretty good sense
of. I saw the difference because I do a lot of work with African countries.
The response of one African country was very enthusiastic in helping
us with rooting out some of these terrorist influences because they
had some of the same in their own country. I talked to that same official
after the Iraq invasion and he told me that it had become much tougher
for him to do that publicly because of the change in the attitude of
the Islamic minority in his country. The very people that were helping
us became less politically able to help us because of the extreme focus
on the way that we went into the Iraq war. So I see it, in many ways,
as it being a tactical error, in the larger war against terrorism.
But the Administration has been so good, as we all know, at putting
up various arguments, some might call them red herrings or just plain
false arguments, to oppose any public attempt to complete Iraq and to
get back to the fight against terrorism. These claims about why we can’t
talk about getting the job done remind me about the bogus claims that
were used to get us in there in the first place. I want to just mention
a few of them. First the President sets up a completely false dichotomy
saying that the only ways that we can go here are “stay the course”
or “cut and run.” I don’t understand that choice.
It’s the idea that we are somehow going to stay in Iraq until
every insurgent is killed? That doesn’t even make sense from the
point of view, the kind of operation that an insurgency is. I think
that there are other choices than simply leaving today or simply staying
the course without having some kind of public idea of when this will
all end.
The second argument that the President uses, that the Administration
uses, is “Well this is the thing that we are going to do, we’re
going to get all the terrorists to come to Iraq and then we’re
going to get them there and then they won’t come to America.”
I call this the roach motel argument, the notion that somehow all the
terrorists from around the world are going to come to Iraq and then
we are going to get them all. You know who doesn’t agree? The
President’s own CIA director, Porter Goss, who, in February, came
before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee and said publicly,
“The number one threat to American security right now is the growing
training and urban warfare that is being conducted by jihadists in Iraq
who will then leave,” and he did say that they would be able to
leave and export their terrorism to other places. So I don’t think
the roach motel argument works very well.
And when somebody comes out and says, “We ought to have some
sort of public timeframe, we ought to have some sort of public goal
that everyone can see about how this can end,” the President says,
“You can’t do that, then the terrorists will just wait us
out.”
Well I ask you if that’s what they want to do then why don’t
they just stop blowing up people right now? Then we’d leave and
then they’d take over. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. And
I assure you I don’t come up with this on my own, because I know
I’m not a military man. And I know that I’m not in the executive
and I didn’t want to be the guy talking about this stuff. But
they’re not willing to. So when I went to Iraq with John McCain
and Hillary Clinton I had a chance to ask one of the two of three leading
generals there, off the record, I said what do you think in your own
view about a timetable, some kind of a timeframe where we talk about
finishing this mission and leaving? He said and I quote, “Nothing
would take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents better than that
sort of timetable.”
And then the President and others say that if we leave it will just
be chaos in Iraq. Well, right now when you come to Iraq you can’t
even drive from the airport to the Green Zone. And I was in the Green
Zone with these five senators and we really wanted to see the rest of
Baghdad, but we couldn’t go out in the rest of Baghdad at all.
When we were in the Green Zone we had a helmet on and a flak jacket.
Sounds a little chaotic to me already. The notion that somehow the current
mission is under control and that figuring out a way to finish the military
mission will be chaotic, I think is a little too simplistic.
And finally the President says if we leave Iraq on some sort of a timetable,
our enemies will know that we are weak. I would say that without a plan
to finish, our enemies we will know that we have fallen into a trap
and we can’t figure out how to get out. That’s what I think
they will think of us and that’s weak, as well as not being very
smart.
That’s too bad, that’s all we get from this administration.
And I say with respect, because I do respect the President personally
and as the President. He likes to say whenever anybody criticizes his
policy that we don’t understand the lessons of 9/11. I think it’s
the President who does not understand the lessons of 9/11 and who attacked
us, and why. In fact, as ironic as it is, we have helped foster a strong
jihadist presence in a place, in Iraq, that, believe it or not, wasn’t
even on the list that the State Department and the President put out
two months after 9/11. I carry this document with me everywhere and
it was on their website. It says “The Global Fight Against Terrorism,
and it lists 45 countries with George Bush’s name on it where
they believed al Qaeda was operating two months after 9/11. You’ve
got of course Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, Jordan, Ireland, the United
States. Guess which country wasn’t even on the list? Iraq. Iraq
wasn’t even on the list that the Administration had.
We must lance this growing threat in Iraq before more terrorists arrive,
more Americans are killed, and more people are trained to go to London
or Madrid, or New York or Los Angeles, in order to attack us. Sadly
these clear problems with Iraq policy have also not been aggressively
addressed by many members of Congress, and especially Democratic members
of Congress. The Bush Administration has been very successful in one
thing: in intimidating people into not uttering the words timetable,
or timeframe, or the goal of finishing the mission by a time that we
can all agree on, or a target date. It’s almost like a “taboo”
for members of Congress, or at least in the Senate, and it has crippled
our ability to speak publicly on ways in which we can succeed in Iraq
or have some measure of success in Iraq. And then return to the fight
against the terrorist networks and return to the focus on national security.
But the good news is when you talk to Americans outside of Washington,
it sounds like common sense to them. As I indicated, it’s not
my preference to offer a proposed timeframe or a target date. In fact,
I became the first senator, just a couple months ago, to offer a resolution
that said we’d like to ask the President to, within 30 days, to
give us a sense of how long the mission will be and what the benchmarks
will be and when the troops might come home, consistent with achieving
those goals. Not only did I get no response from the President, but
even my colleagues in the Senate felt like that was too radical to touch.
And so I went back home, and I just held 17 town meetings, almost exclusively
in Northern Wisconsin, in some of the most conservative counties, not
Feingold counties to say the least. The deepening despair about the
lack of leadership on this Iraq mission was overwhelming. 58 people
said either let’s have some sort of a timeframe or just withdraw.
Only two said, they asked neutral questions, only one person indicated
opposition, and I was particularly struck in a place called Pickerel
Wisconsin, in Langlade County, way up north as we say. 40 people showed
up on a Sunday night, to just talk about the issues of the day, but
in particular Iraq. This is I assure you, not a hotbed of liberalism.
In fact at some point in the town meeting I said “You know I never
thought of this as a radical place,” and one lady said, “It’s
getting there!”
But they looked sad, they looked confused, they looked hurt about the
way that this war started and about the way it’s going. So I decided
to take another step that I had said before I wouldn’t take. This
is to get out there and break this taboo, and I suggested last week,
let’s talk about trying to finish this thing by December 31st,
2006. When I say finish I mean finish the military mission, finish the
ground aspect of it. Obviously we would continue to help with many other
aspects on the future of Iraq; it would be a flexible target date. Troop
drawdown could begin with deference to the military and the President,
they should decide the timing and the order of when those troops should
come home it’s not something that should be micromanaged by Congress
and maybe somebody has a better idea of what the date should be, but
I do firmly believe that we ought to have some sort of a public goal
to get this thing done. After we leave with a military mission we would
continue with military cooperation with the Iraqi government, of course
to oppose the terrorist networks in Iraq, as we do in so many countries
around the world, we need to do more of that. I’m talking about
having troops on the ground, troops that are vulnerable to this kind
of attack to continue to have this kind of approach.
And I think this is not a radical idea actually because the Administration
itself is conflicted by this. You here generals talking about bringing
home, getting down to 60,000 troops next summer. So they are all over
the map on this thing and I think it’s actually hurting their
credibility, to not have some sort of a public talk on when this could
be done. In fact, the President says we can’t cut and run. I believe
that it is his policy and his lack of a plan that is leading people
to say, “Why don’t we just get out of there right away.”
It feeds the idea that somehow this has to fail, and I reject the idea
that it has to fail. There is a middle ground between being there forever
and simply cutting and running. In the end there has to be a political
solution in Iraq to succeed and I think properly, wisely finishing the
military mission will help rather than hurt, bring that country together
as a political unit.
Now finally let me turn to the bigger national security point, as we
figure out the Iraq problem we must simultaneously and quickly move
to the fundamental national security concerns of opposing this international
jihadist terrorist network. And again Democrats must be comfortable
in discussing a hard headed national security and advocating more sophisticated
and specific ways of trying to oppose this threat.
Let me just list a few. These are all offered in the spirit of making
America stronger and making our enemies weaker.
First we need to focus on how to counter emerging terrorists’
tactics. That means focusing the best minds in the country on how we
can more effectively counter the threat posed by improvised explosive
devices. How can we detect them before detonation? How can we disable
them? We have seen the destructive power of the IED’s in Iraq
and it’s easier to imagine more of them in other venues. This
has to be one of the highest-level priorities in our military and in
our government. Not just an area of research that is sort of competing
for attention among a thousand other research areas. We need to focus
intensively on ways to undercut terrorist recruiting tactics and to
break the cycle or indoctrination and incitement that begins with extremist
schools, and continues in internet chat rooms and sometimes ends up
with a suicide attack.
That means coming up with better, more effective ways for a society
committed to a bedrock principle of freedom of speech to nonetheless
contest the space that terrorists have staked out on the internet.
Second we have to get our counterterrorism programs right. Terrorists
find active and passive support among the alienated and the disaffected.
We need to think about the reasons for that disaffection, and start
addressing those problems with our policy and acknowledging those problems
with our words. I’ve been struck by how often extremists from
Algeria to Indonesia emphasize the decadence of those they seek to overthrow,
often pegging their arguments to public frustration with rampant corruption
in government. And I know that corrupt border guards and custom officials
often enable terrorist networks to operate. We need to start talking
about corruption and we need to have a massive effort to combat it abroad,
empowering those forces to use the rule of law to combat the insidious
influence of corruption. And we need to start thinking of how counterterrorism
assistance programs look to others. We shouldn’t be shoring up
governments, however abusive and corrupt, simply because they are also
threatened by extremist networks. That might ultimately exacerbate our
problem, creating more disaffection and more resentment. Most recently,
was the close U.S. relationship with the repressive government Mauritania
really such a good investment for our security? Might we have done better
to invest in civil society forces in Mauritania who support neither
oppression or terrorism, but rather reform. Shouldn’t this at
least be part of our strategy?
Obvious further examples of this are even more dramatic such as Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, and other countries which are symbols among the Islamic
people of places where we support regimes that deny the very freedoms
that we Americans talk about when we go to war to fight for freedom.
Third, non-proliferation. We need to do much more to stop nuclear proliferation
and assure that terrorist organizations do not get access to nuclear
weapons. We must deal with the threats of loose nukes as an urgent priority.
This administration has failed to do so. More potential nuclear weapons
were secured in Russia in the two years before 9/11 then in the two
years after. That makes no sense. And we should not have missed the
opportunity at the last NPT conference to start moving forward on a
new global regime. One that does a better job of protection, and punishing
cheating so that states cannot take their nuclear programs right up
to the line of compliance and then withdraw from the treaty and then
break out as new nuclear weapon states. And yes, we should reverse the
foolish decision to ease export restrictions on bomb grade uranium that
was part of the massive energy bill just signed by the President. Glad
to say I voted against that bill.
Speaking of energy, a fourth idea, why don’t we try and finally
get that energy independence that I mentioned earlier? The bill was
an abject failure in that regard. At least the Senate version had some
positive steps such as working with businesses to have 10 percent renewable
energy portfolios, but that was removed and we ended up with a hollow
shell of a bill that doesn’t help us become less dependent on
countries and regions where some of the threats come from.
Fifth, we have to deal with military needs. We have to repair the damage
to the Army. I have voted for an increase in the Army’s end strength
because it has become clear to me that this administration’s policies
have nearly broken the United States Army. We have got to look at those
recruitment figures for this year as we come to the end of the fiscal
year, for the Army, and the National Guard, and the Reserves. We’re
not meeting the goals, it’s not good. And we need some accountability
for the fact that the Department of Defense budget, that so dwarfs our
spending in any other sector and so dwarfs the spending of any other
country, still has somehow not been enough to pay for the timely provision
of adequate armor and adequately armored vehicles to our men and women
in the battlefield.
Why are Marines being packed in like sardines for transport, in the
high threat environment of Iraq, in a 1970’s era amphibious vehicle
designed to take them from ship to shore? This is a disgrace, it is
unacceptable and it is simply inexcusable. The DoD has astronomical
resources; we need leaders who will spend those resources wisely.
And finally and this goes to the word passion that I used earlier.
We need a new massive surge in public and private diplomacy, and a passionate
effort to tell the rest of the world who we are, who we really are,
and who we want to be with regard to the rest of the people of the world.
We need a massive diplomatic effort to improve our understanding of
the strategic environment in what is in some ways a battle of ideas.
We need to increase our presence abroad not just to gather information,
although that is critical and I am quite certain that we have inadequate
information right now, for example, about what terrorist networks are
doing and not doing in places like Somalia and Northern Nigeria and
elsewhere. And we need to listen when we go to those countries. Our
public officials and our private officials need to show the respect
of listening to people, particularly in Islamic communities. We also
need to increase our presence so the United States is there, physically
embodied in actual people, who can go out and do others the basic respect
of listening as I just mentioned. It’s time to stop writing report
after report on how important public diplomacy is, time to stop producing
glossy brochures and videos that relegate others to a passive role,
and time to start this massive public diplomacy effort, one that involves
real dialogue, give and take, and a sustained effort to regain the special
American power: our power to lead, persuade, and to inspire that this
administration’s policies have squandered.
So if I may, after this wonderful opportunity, I would like to conclude
by just saying a few things to my friends here. The answer is neither
stay the course in Iraq, or is out of Iraq a national security policy
by itself that can help us secure American lives and allow us to return
to the compelling domestic issues that require our attention as well.
We must stand up to the intimidation of the Bush administration –
which one of my constituents at one of those meetings this month called
“their astonishing ability to manufacture consent” or sometimes
suppress dissent. We can suggest alternatives and we can do it as patriots
who support out troops. We must give national security and antiterrorism
and Iraq’s relationship to it sustained attention every day throughout
this year and beyond. That means during the Roberts hearings, that means
during appropriations bills at the end of the year, that means when
we are out of session, every day, because the executive has the advantage
of being there and being on the news all the time. It must be given
sustained attention. Yes, we must show the American people that we can
pursue a positive and effective national security agenda that simultaneously
protects American lives but also reaches out to the rest of the world
with friendship and hope.
As I said, we must speak of it with passion and in a personal way.
For me, my daughter graduated from the University of Wisconsin—Madison
this year. She did a heck of job. She’s over in London working.
I get to visit her with my other daughter this next week. She’s
a great girl. I want this young woman to not only be safe but I want
her to be able to walk across this world and be welcomed as an American.
That’s my desire and I bet that is the desire of every American
parent. Thank you.”
|
