January 25, 2007

Senator Clinton Questions Defense Secretary William Perry, Ambassador Dennis Ross, and General Jack Keane on Iraq Strategy

Senator Clinton: Thank you. And I want to thank each of our witnesses for your lifetime of service to our country and thank you very much for spending so much time with us and with other committees. Obviously, you can see clearly the anguish of members of this committee and other committees before whom you have appeared. No one wants to see this situation descend into even greater blood shed and violence or a failed state. We understand that this is a direct threat to American national, vital interests, as well as a very tragic outcome for the intervention that we commenced. The problem we're having and the reason for this debate is to try to figure out what Congress can usefully contribute to this. Again, we have no illusions that the President is going forward with his policy, several of you said that. The troops are moving. The policy is being implemented. But I have three concerns that I would just like you to briefly respond to. First, we are confronted, and General Keane was eloquent and I know how much it pained you to describe the failures of this strategy in the past. I would personally appreciate any insights any of you might have into why the strategy failed and why we allowed that failure to continue. Clearly I have strong opinions about the failure of oversight and accountability in the Congress, but within the decision making circles of both the civilian and military leadership of our country, why was this failed strategy maintained when it became evident to many people that it was not working. Because I think if we don't understand that, we're going to be sitting here in a year, once again, talking about another strategy that, for whatever reason, has not yet succeeded. Secondly and this perhaps goes directly to General Keane. What is behind the decision to have joint command? You were right on point about the necessity for the unity of command. There's an article in today's New York Times that I think illustrates the difficulty our forces are going to confront, where once again, joint US/Iraqi patrol on Haifa street, which has changed hands so often they can't keep up with it, and it became very clear that it was hard to know who was in charge, who was supposed to be making the decisions, who the enemy was. There is a troubling quote from a Sergeant First Class, "Who the hell is shooting at us. Who's shooting at us? Do we know who they are?" Is it Sunni? Is it Shiite? Is it, in fact some of the Iraqi soldiers who showed up and then disappeared? And there is a very strong argument just based on this one story that turning and expecting to have that cooperative unity, or lack of unity of command, instead of having the kind of command structure that I think that you would recommend, we're going to have a chaotic command structure, which I think plants the seeds of disaster from the level of the street fighting all the way up. Thirdly, I believe strongly in trying to hold the Iraqis to, whether we call them benchmarks or conditions, and I absolutely agree with Ambassador Ross that we've had no consequences for non-performance. And we have squandered a lot of the leverage that we have had. I think that our failure to impose any kind of conditions on our continuing funding of the Iraqi security forces and even the personal security for members of the Iraqi government is one piece of leverage that we've abdicated. So I understand the argument that the proponents of this policy are making. We use military force, putting our young men and women into situations, like the street fight in Haifa, to try to quell the insurgents and change the behavior of the Sunnis who are supporting them, so that we can get the Maliki government secure enough to decide that it's willing to reach out to the Sunnis, who having been in some respect quelled, are going to be more responsive to such efforts on political reconciliation and that's how we are going to reach the point where we can begin to resolve these outstanding differences. I mean, it sounds like a very complicated process that I am dubious can have success. So would just briefly could you just comment on some of those points, perhaps Dr. Perry you could start. Dr. Perry: I must say that I'm appalled by a decision to move forward on the Baghdad operation without a joint command. The operation is called Operation Together Forward and to be together forward we really need a joint command. So, General Keane has said, and I hope he is right that General Petraeus will do what he can do to mitigate that problem, but it is still a problem. Secondly, I testified before I think even with the increment troops that are being added there will be too few to do the job. Again, General Keane has said that there is a strategy for dealing with that problem and I think it's a very innovative strategy, which is to focus on the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood, of which there are fewer than 2 million people. And so if you focus on 2 million people, then maybe you will have enough to do the job. I think that is our best chance of success there and I wish General Petraeus well on being able to achieve that, but it is a long-shot and I wish so much was not hinging on what I consider to be a long-shot. And in any event, whatever we do militarily, if we cannot get the Maliki government to move forward, meaningfully and effectively on political reconciliation, I think it doesn't matter whether we have three brigades or five brigades or seven brigades, it will not be enough to deal with the problem. I have strongly believed that we need to move forward with political reconciliation and security jointly, not wait, not do the security hoping we can do the political reconciliation later. Thank you. Ambassador Ross: I'll just make two quick comments on your first set of observations about why the strategy failed and why we held on to a failed strategy for so long. I think there's no doubt we went in with far too few forces and we went in with far too optimistic assumptions. And we ignored what the nature of the real sectarian divide was and how you're going to have to cope with that, which really leads me to the last set of observations you made. The fundamental problem we face today and, Dr. Perry was just saying it, is the lack of reconciliation and the lack of prospect for it. I see little sign that this Shiite government is interested in it and the only way to change their behavior is for them to see that they have a lot to lose if they don't. So we have to find a way to strike the balance between not necessarily having the lid come off, because they aren't sufficiently uncomfortable with how things are, and yet convince them that they're going to end up producing the very scenario that could end up threaten them. Somehow, if we don't produce consequence, if we don't hold them to a standard of performance, and I say since they, themselves have promised it, let's hold them to what they, themselves have said. And I see no reason why the Congress can't, in fact, use their own words now as a standard by which to judge their performance and to create a set of consequences if they don't act. General Keane: I appreciate the thoughtful questions. They're not easy to deal with. The why the failed strategy-- in my own mind, I think we, right from the beginning, we were executing an ideology dealing with the level of force of taking the minimal application of force. This happened in Afghanistan, in my judgment, when we put the force levels in there following the collapse of the Taliban and we were only willing to commit the minimum force to deal with it. Actually, in my own view it was a lack of sufficient force. It wasn't even enough and it's not surprising that the Taliban are able to resurge and commit and exploit the vulnerabilities that exist because of it. So, here comes Iraq and a very successful invasion, in what I believe was the appropriate level of force. Not everyone agreed with that, but the Joint Chiefs all had their finger prints on the level of force that was applied for the invasion. We backed into the insurgency in a sense we didn't see it coming. I think you can hold us, as senior leaders, accountable for not at least reasoning that this is one of those options that they could select, that we should've had plans to deal with that and if we had plans we would have intellectually thought about how to do this and what's more importantly, we would have had a force list of the kind of forces and the size of forces we would need to deal with it. And then, if it began to materialize, we would have been ready with a much different size of force and also the character of the force in terms of its content would've been different. So, that was wrong. But then as we got into this thing, I believed this minimal ideology in terms of applying force was in play. And we developed what I call, a short-war strategy designed to rush to a political objective when the political culture is not ready for a truly representative government. And that's one of our challenges that we're here now. We're trying to get them to do this, but the truth is they don't have the political maturity to deal with the true representative government. So, that was one issue and I think a mistake. The second one was the military strategy. I believe without saying so, as I look at this, we made up our minds. Without publicly saying so, we made up our minds that, look it, if we go after this insurgency and try to defeat the insurgency with U.S. forces in the lead, by every sense of the word, will be a protracted conflict that would go on for years and will eventually erode the American people's will and we'll have to keep high force levels for a long time there and the adverse impact on the Army and Marine Corps. would be significant. And I think that was in play, without ever being put on the table. So we had a short-war strategy politically and then a short-war strategy militarily because we made the conscience decision to turn it over to the Iraqis to let them do it, thinking that we could get them trained up in sufficient time so we could then exit and they would be-- their readiness would be our exit strategy. The problem with that is when I look at it, and I was still supporting it myself in zero-five, I knew it had risk associated with it. But in zero-five we began to have enough evidence to know that the enemy was exploiting that strategy because we were not protecting the people, ourselves. The Iraqis could not and they began to raise that level of violence beyond anything that we had envisioned that the Iraqis would have to be able to deal with. So right then, I think in hindsight, we knew the strategy could fail. Even before the general election, we knew that the military strategy was failing and we should've started to make an adjustment to it and say, look it, the only way to bring this level of violence down is we have to begin to secure this population and keep these thugs and killers off of them. To do that would've meant what? More troops. And I just think that was off the table clearly. It was just not an item that was on the table. And I also believe this Senator, that the military leaders themselves-- I don't buy this argument that Rumsfeld was muscling on Generals and therefore they did not have the moral courage to request more forces, but somehow knew they all need more forces. I believe that General Casey and General Abizaid, they're thoughtful people, they were committed to the strategy and they believe it could work. And when you commit yourself to something and you're working an eighteen-twenty hour day, and you have nothing nurturing your life whatsoever, except this one singular mission that you're absorbed with. And there's nothing else in your life but this, and you're looking for some measures of success for all of this effort that you're expending, not just yourself, but this entire force, you're going to see some things that are looking okay to you. And you have a tendency to fall prey to that and to make more out of that than what it should be and you deny seeing some of the things, the harsh reality of what's taking place. I'm not making excuses. I'm just trying to explain the human dynamics of this thing. You know, how very good people, who have had good judgment in the past, can make some mistakes.

Read more statements by Senator Clinton concerning the war in Iraq.


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