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SUPPORTING U.S. EFFORTS IN IRAQ -- (Senate - July 19, 2004)

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, on July 7, 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued an important report regarding flaws in our prewar intelligence on Iraq . Last week, Lord Butler issued a similar report on British intelligence. In a related vein, the 9/11 Commission will issue its report this Thursday.

Each of these reports either already has, or no doubt will, shed light on how we can improve our ability to protect this country and our allies from future terrorist attacks.

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Coming almost 3 years after 9/11, it is important to note that many reforms have already been implemented by Congress and the administration without waiting on a committee or a commission report. Still, the recommendations of each of these reports ought to be carefully considered and debated by Congress.

If this were not a Presidential election year, we might be able to even undertake this important work without playing the blame game in order to score political points. My hope is that we will, to the extent humanly possible, strive to do so. If not, we risk politicizing the process to the detriment of long-term solutions to our intelligence problems.

Some have used the occasion to criticize our Nation's policies in Iraq and the broader war on terror. Some say, on the one hand, that our leaders did too little before 9/11 to stop the horrible events of that day. Some say, on the other hand, that our leaders did too much in removing Saddam based in part on the remarkable clarity that comes with 20/20 hindsight.

I did not say, and consciously so, President Bush's policies but, rather, our Nation's policies because our policies in Iraq and in the broader war on terror have generally been a consensus policy authorized by the Congress and ultimately implemented by President Bush. In fact, the policy of regime change in Iraq was shared by the Clinton and Bush administrations and is now being criticized for political gain by some who voted for those very policies.

It is important that we set the record straight. The Senate Intelligence Committee report in particular directly rebuts some of the more outrageous claims that administration officials, including the President himself, intentionally misled the American people. Indeed, due to systemic flaws in our intelligence apparatus, it appears that it was the administration itself that was misled to some extent. But that does not mean we were wrong to remove Saddam Hussein from power. There were many good reasons for the regime change in Iraq in addition to those which have at least so far turned out to be mistaken.

There is no question that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein in a prison cell instead of remaining in his royal palaces. There is every reason to believe he is precisely where he belongs.

When the Senate voted overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis in October 2002 to authorize military force to defend the national security of the United States and enforce all relevant United Nations security council resolutions, the resolution this body passed noted that Iraq , in 1991, entered into a United Nations-sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed among other things to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them and to end its support for international terrorism.

That resolution also noted that the efforts of international weapons inspectors, U.S. intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery in 1991 that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated.

That resolution also said that Iraq in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and development capabilities which finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998.

That resolution went on to note that the current Iraqi regime at that time under Saddam Hussein has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use

weapons of mass destruction against other nations and against its own people.

Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of U.S. citizens.

It was on this last point that Acting Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin said just yesterday in an interview:

We could, through intelligence reporting, say with some credibility that there had been meetings between senior Iraqi officials and Al Qaida officials. We could also say that there had been some training that had flown back and forth between the two sides. And we could say that there was some degree of safe haven that Al Qaida-related people had obtained in Iraq for a variety of reasons. We could also say with some assurance that operating from Iraq , someone like Abu Musab Zarqawi had arranged the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan.

Saddam dared the United Nations Security Council and the free nations of the world to act and act we, the coalition, did. Congress expressly recognized in the authorization it gave President Bush that ``the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations.''

We knew that Saddam had them but we did not yet know what he did with them. Why he kicked out United Nations weapons inspectors in 1998 and never accounted for them, all the while defying resolution after resolution of the United Nations Security Council we may never know for sure.

I once thought that no one would question whether America was safer and that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam but some, during this political season, have come awfully close. Put another way: Does any reasonable person truly believe that America and Iraq were better off with Saddam Hussein in power? Surely not. Surely not. But you simply can't have it both ways. You must choose, and choose we did.

I believe the Senate made the right decision in supporting our efforts in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nothing we learned since then has changed my mind. It has been our official consensus policy since 1998 under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, under both Democrat and Republican leadership in the Senate. For example, in the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, we said:

It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.

Everyone, Republican and Democrat, knew that the dictatorship of Saddam raised the prospect of a dangerous and irrational government in the Middle East. Everyone knew that the Iraqi people were living under a brutal and murderous tyrant. And at that time everyone knew that Saddam was armed with weapons of mass destruction.

It was in a speech to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon staff generally that President Clinton eloquently described the consequences of inaction. He said:

What if [he] fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction. ..... He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal.

That was President Clinton in 1998.

Our intelligence community told us before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs--chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear. Now in the past, in 1991, our intelligence had sometimes underestimated Saddam's capabilities; so there was no question that there was reasonable cause for concern for an armed Saddam, ready to lash out, without warning, against Israel, Kuwait, or other countries in the region. We also feared that because of his hatred for America, Saddam might give the weapons he was developing to terrorists for whom he provided sanctuary. These concerns were nearly universally shared, as articulated in the quote I read from President Clinton.

At the outset of our military operations against Iraq in December of 1998, President Clinton described the risks of leaving Saddam in power. He said:

The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world. The best way to end that threat once and for all is with the new Iraqi government, a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people.

Again, a statement by President Clinton in 1998.

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We should all be glad Saddam Hussein is out of power. Iraq's fledgling government is taking the first steps toward freedom and democracy. Neither we nor they have to fear Saddam's regime cooperating at any level with al-Qaida or other terrorists who wish to do violence against the American people or our allies. But it is also true that the weapons programs we found in Iraq were not what our intelligence information predicted before hostilities broke out in 2003. Saddam Hussein had the capability and the raw resources to do many things, but he did not at that time have the fully operational weapons systems we believed he possessed.

So why, it is logical to ask, did we have this problem with our intelligence? We know, as the unanimous, bipartisan report of the Select Committee on Intelligence said, that despite the insinuations of administration critics, the intelligence we had was not rigged or interfered with in any way. The same conclusion was echoed by Lord Butler's report in Great Britain which found no evidence of deliberate distortion of the intelligence material or of culpable negligence. It is clear that any such allegations to the contrary are baseless, partisan, and have no foundation in the truth.

The Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate found in conclusion 83:

The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.''

In conclusion 84, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said:

The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated ..... Or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.

And in conclusion 102:

The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism.

How did we get here? How did we know that Saddam had these weapons of mass destruction, defied resolution after resolution of the U.N. Security Council, defied every request that he open his country to U.N. weapons inspectors and reveal what he had or, we might say, what he no longer had?

Consider in 1993 we saw the first successful terrorist strike by radical Islamists on U.S. soil--a car bomb that exploded in the basement garage of the World Trade Center, killing 6 and wounding 1,000. Then in 1996, there was another attack on the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding 515 Americans and Saudis. In 1998, the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked by al-Qaida suicide bombers who killed 234 people and wounded more than 5,000. And in 2000, al-Qaida attacked the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors and wounding 39.

It was during these same years that Congress made dramatic cuts in funding for the Government agencies most involved in the fight against terror, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency. These cuts were significant, including letting go nearly 40 percent of those recruited to spy for America's interests. The number of officers in the clandestine service was downsized by roughly 25 percent and nearly one-third of our overseas offices were shut down. All of these cuts seriously hampered the intelligence community's ability to monitor and analyze the rising threat posed by terrorism. Again, Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McLaughlin, said yesterday, because of these cuts, we were almost in Chapter 11 in terms of our human intelligence collection. This much seems clear: Our early warning system was blinded by a self-inflicted wound.

There is simply no way that President Bush's administration could have filled all the holes of an underfunded and demoralized intelligence community in a mere 8 months after it had been dismantled systematically and deliberately during the preceding years. So when President Bush came to office, he inherited an intelligence community that was ill prepared to meet the challenges of the war on terrorism.

We should not make this merely a game of election year ``gotcha.'' We must debate the causes of our intelligence flaws in a way that commands the confidence of the American people and in a way that makes them safer and freer. We must also remain committed to our task in Iraq , to finishing that task and not allow election-year politics to create a climate that undermines the morale of our brave troops in the field.

Let us finish the task we have undertaken in good faith and with the noblest of aspirations on behalf of free people around the world. Let us not let partisan politics lead us into the trap identified by Winston Churchill when he said:

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of the Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature.

September 11 forced the civilized world to realize that the terrorist foe we had been fighting for years sought a more deadly goal than we ever suspected. Once Congress and the administration came to grips with the horrible truth of this new breed of terrorism, we knew what had to be done. We knew we had to take action. Under President Bush's leadership, we resolved that our aim was to defeat terrorism as a threat to our very freedom and our very lives.

Nor could we achieve our aim merely by maintaining a defensive posture. Fighting terrorism on American soil is not enough. That is merely a holding pattern and a capitulation of our responsibility. When it comes to confrontation with terrorists, we must either change the way we live or we must change the way they live. We chose the latter, and I believe we chose wisely. It is a policy of action rather than inaction, and one clearly warranted by the new reality of our post-9/11 world.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.