| WASHINGTON
- September 24 - Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you for arranging this hearing and for bringing these two distinguished gentlemen to testify before our committee.
I think this could well be one of the most important hearings I have attended in my 34 years on this committee.
· For one thing the amount of money that has been requested is so huge that it is nearly impossible to place in perspective.
· It is by far the largest supplemental request in history.
· The only one that comes even close is the one we passed last spring.
· It amounts to more than $1000 for every working age family in America and it is much larger than all but three of our regular Appropriation bills.
· It is in fact nearly as large as seven of our thirteen bills.
· It is more money than the entire Defense Budget during any year of the Viet Nam War.
· The Iraq economic Reconstruction portion of this package alone is more than 20% larger than regular Foreign Operations bill produced by this subcommittee only a few months ago.
· Because we had allies who were part of the take off and helped pay the bills, the first Iraqi War cost us less than $8 billion. This "my way or the highway" operation has already cost us far more than $60 billion and now we are being asked for $87 billion more. Going it alone is expensive.
But this hearing is also important because it is an opportunity to try to rebuild a consensus about our policy in Iraq.
I voted against the invasion. I did not believe that the administration had produced sufficient evidence of an imminent threat to the U.S. While I recognized that Saddam had harbored terrorist organizations that attempted to threaten Israel-a fact that was no more true a year ago than it had been during the period when we were providing Saddam with assistance-those groups did not and do not pose an imminent threat to the people of the United States. The President himself has finally admitted that we had no evidence of Saddam's involvement in 9/11.
I also believed that the greatest problem posed by an invasion of Iraq was the prospect that we would gain control or at least nominal control of a country that neither ourselves nor anyone else could govern. That concern appears to have been all to well placed.
But this request is not about whether the war was a good idea. The reality of our current situation is that Iraq under Saddam may not have posed an imminent threat to the United States but what ultimately replaces Saddam could be highly problematic to our interests and even our security.
Prior to the U.S. invasion there were probably fewer terrorists plotting against the United States from Iraq than from most other countries in the region such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria and Pakistan. That situation has changed dramatically. While Iraq is not currently a safe haven for anyone, it has certainly become a haven for precisely the individuals and organizations that do target our country.
Further, the failure of the United States to install a stable government after the bloodshed that resulted from the invasion will create an environment throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds that will be highly conducive to organizing further attacks against the U.S. If an unfriendly government emerges we face the prospect of an oil rich country with a government interested in pursuing a nuclear program and no international sanctions to hinder that interest. So the stakes here are huge.
But that does not mean I will support this request. We have a tremendous responsibility to the American people and to the troops in the field to see to it that provide only those funds that are necessary to protect the lives of American servicemen and to effectively accomplish the difficult mission before us. The ugly truth is that the $87 billion in this request is no more than a down payment. Even the most optimistic estimates about security, political stabilization, oil production and prices, reconstruction and economic recovery will produce more requests from the administration for additional amounts of U.S. taxpayer money to pay for this operation.
How much more we will be asked to spend will in large part be determined by how effectively we spend the funds that are requested here. I will support this request if the administration can demonstrate that it has carefully developed a plan of action that will turn the situation in Iraq around-that it has cleansed itself of the mentality that got us into this mess and that it is capable of explaining in detail what money is needed and why it is needed and that there is a reasonable chance that the overall plan will succeed. But I will not hesitate to oppose a flawed product that will not in my judgment offer a reasonable prospect for success or does not carefully target funds toward the highest priority needs.
I also wish to point out that we should pay for as much of this request as possible. Even without this supplement the federal government will be forced go into the bond market this year and borrow nearly half a trillion dollars in new debt-far more than net household savings for the entire country. Every dime that we spend in Iraq will be financed with debt that will be passed on to our children and will prevent us from making needed investments in education, health care here at home unless we find a way to pay for it now. If we are serious people we cannot avoid tough choices. If it is truly important for us to spend the money in Iraq that the administration has requested, then this President and this Congress must face the fact that we cannot afford $88,000 tax cuts for people who make over a million dollars a year. We must rethink our actions on taxes in light of these new circumstances.
I expect this hearing to be a rocky one. I hope that the two gentlemen before us understand that they are career servants of the American people. One is a diplomat and one a war fighter. They represent the best that this nation produces. We do not want to find ourselves shooting the messengers. But this hearing today will in large part be about huge miscalculations and our problem is that the people most responsible for these miscalculations, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon will not be answering the questions today. I find it highly ironic that an administration that has so frequently ignored the counsel of career State Department and Military personnel would now be relying on two of them to make their case on Capitol Hill.
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