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IRAQ -- (Senate - September 27, 2004)

[Page: S9696]  GPO's PDF

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Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I also wish to speak for a few minutes about the mess in Iraq. Last week, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi came to Washington to join in President Bush's campaign of relentless happy talk about the war in Iraq. President Bush says:

We're making progress. We're making progress.

Meanwhile, back in the real world--the world that American soldiers confront on the ground in Iraq--the chaos gets worse and worse. Entire regions and many provincial capitals are under the insurgents' control. Virtually every day we see car bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, beheadings.

As we learned last week, the CIA has produced a formal National Intelligence Estimate that says that, at best, the current level of violence will continue and, at worst, Iraq will plunge into a civil war. As Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged yesterday, it is getting worse in Iraq. But amazingly, President Bush insists that this mess in Iraq has made us safer, and the President and his political allies have been relentless in using the war on terror for their own electoral purposes.

Their message to the American people is simple: Be afraid, President Bush will protect you; his opponent will not.

Vice President Dick Cheney also took this line of attack 2 weeks ago when he darkly warned with his Darth Vader-type voice that if John Kerry is elected President, then ``the danger is we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating.'' That was Vice President Cheney.

Last Tuesday, the senior Senator from Utah, Mr. Hatch,

said that terrorists ``are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry.''

Last Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said terrorists in Iraq ``are trying to influence the election against President Bush.''

If these gentlemen have such excellent access to the terrorists' thoughts, they are not doing a good job of turning that knowledge into effective policy against the terrorists. At key junctures, this administration has made disastrously wrong choices. Repeatedly, these decisions have played into the terrorists' hands. Let's look at the record.

[Page: S9697]  GPO's PDF

It is a fact that the September 11 attacks happened despite repeated warnings to Mr. Bush from the CIA that al-Qaida was planning to attack America. Those warnings included an August 8, 2001, President's daily briefing which he received while he was vacationing in Crawford, TX. The report was titled ``Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.'' That is not a subhead or a sentence in the memo, that is the title of the memo: ``Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'' [OMG!]

Let's look at the rest of the record.

On President Bush's watch, the U.S. botched the single best opportunity to capture bin Laden at Torah Borah in Afghanistan. A political decision was made to allow Afghan warlords to carry the brunt of that siege, and bin Laden escaped.

It was President Bush who 3 years ago pledged to smoke bin Laden out of his cave, but has utterly failed to do so. Instead, by successfully defying President Bush, bin Laden has become a folk hero across the Muslim world. He has attracted not only thousands of new recruits, but dozens of imitators, new bin Ladens who are forming their own terrorist organizations to attack America and Americans.

It was President Bush who diverted our military intelligence resources and certain military hardware, such as the Predator aircraft, the unmanned aerial vehicles, took them out of Afghanistan, away from the hunt for bin Laden and sent them to Iraq.

It was President Bush whose taunt, ``Bring it on,'' did indeed bring it on--a nationwide insurgency in Iraq, an urban guerrilla war that has trapped our Armed Forces in a quagmire.

It was President Bush whose unilateral approach on Iraq alienated many of our oldest allies and turned world opinion against the United States.

It was President Bush whose invasion and occupation of the second largest Arab country has outraged much of the Muslim world and has been a recruiting bonanza for Islamist terrorists.

This is an astonishing record of mistakes, misjudgments, and mismanagement. It is an astonishing record of George W. Bush again and again playing into Osama bin Laden's hands. It is like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, only this time it is not funny. It is a colossal tragedy. It has put our Nation at even greater risk of terrorist attack.

Ironically, President Bush's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, warned against the folly of invading and occupying Iraq. Listen to this. On February 28, 1999, speaking to a group of Desert Storm veterans at Fort Myer, VA, former President Bush said:

Had we gone into Baghdad--we could have done it, you guys could have done it, you could have been there in 48 hours--and then what?

The first President Bush continued:

Whose life would be on my hands as the Commander in Chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we're going to show our macho? We're going into Baghdad. We're going to be an occupying power--America in an Arab land--with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous.

That is the first President Bush. That is not me. That is an exact quote from the first President Bush, 1999. I would say to this President: You do not have to listen to us, just listen to your father. He would have told you what you are getting into in Iraq.

This is what his father said:

We're going to be an occupying power--America in an Arab land--with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous.

It is disastrous. Of course, we heard the same prophetic warnings from Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and other foreign policy experts. But this President Bush and his partner Dick Cheney and the neoconservative intellectuals thought they knew better. They reveled in words such as ``slam dunk'' and ``cakewalk.'' And so now the disaster that Bush 41 warned against has become a reality under Bush 43.

The Iraq invasion has set back, rather than advanced, the war on terrorism and al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden remains at large--an imminent danger to our homeland. Our Armed Forces are bogged down in Iraq, with casualties rising above 8,000, and they are not able to respond to real threats to the United States. Our moral authority and credibility on the world stage are at rock bottom.

The other day I was watching former President Carter at the Carter Center answer a question. He said he has been, I believe I am not mistaken, in over 120 countries. He said never in the history of the United States has our country been at such low esteem and moral authority in the rest of the world--never in the history of our country.

Despite President Bush's blustery threats about the so-called axis of evil, on his watch, North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and Iran appears to be proceeding with impunity to develop its own nuclear weapons. This is an extraordinary record of mistakes, misjudgments, miscalculations, and missed opportunities.

As a consequence of President Bush's choices over the last 4 years, America is weaker, America is less secure, America is more vulnerable.

I say to my friend and colleague from Utah, whom I quoted earlier, look at the record. Look at this record and come to only one conclusion: The single best recruitment poster for al-Qaida and the terrorists is our policy in Iraq. Quite frankly, the architect of that policy, the person who is carrying it out, is President George W. Bush. No, it is not John Kerry, I say to my friend from Utah. It is not John Kerry. George W. Bush's reckless, stubborn policy is the single best recruiter for al-Qaida, and this must end so that our people can truly be made secure; that we can go after the terrorists; that we can get out of this quagmire in Iraq; that we can once again become the moral authority, the shining city on a hill that America has been to the rest of the world. I am sad to say it will not happen on this President's watch. That is why a change is in order.

I ask unanimous consent that an article that appeared September 26, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times be printed in its entirety in the RECORD.