Jerrold Nadler

Mr. NADLER

Mr. NADLER. Clearly, to answer your question, there will be no legitimacy. There is no legitimacy for that government there now. There will be no legitimacy for any government that is a result of elections in which large parts of the country do not participate, and I think it is probably illusory at this point to hope that there is going to be a democratic regime in Iraq any time soon. But what this really points out, what these facts really point out is that this administration through very ill-advised policies, through not doing what Senator Kerry and others urged a year and a half ago, to internationalize it, to say to other countries, we will surrender to you the monopoly, we will share it with you, we will share with you the decision-making power, we will share with your companies the business contracts for reconstruction if you send in your troops to help reconstruct and if you help do this. They are not going to do it now. But if this had been done, then it might have been possible to have the Iraqi people see what is going on there as an international reconstruction of their country, rather than an American occupation, because an occupation will bring forth as it now has a nationalist insurgency resulting in a real quagmire. I do not know how to get out of it. The worst problem is we are now deeply engaged in a quagmire that no one has a good idea how to get out at this point.

Mr. NADLER. And tragically that is going to continue. But Iraq is essentially, despite the fact that we are spending $200 billion so far, despite the fact that 1,000 Americans so far have been killed and 6 or 7,000 wounded, Iraq is a side show in the war of terrorism that is being waged against us by the Islamic jihadists and we are not directing our attention and our resources toward where they are really needed because we are diverted by Iraq. As I said before, Saddam Hussein was not a real threat to this country. He had terrible will, he had terrible intentions; but we had him contained. He did not have the weapons. He did not have the capability. We had him contained with the no-fly zones, and we had him deterred. The real threat to the United States in the Middle East is Iran, because Iran is not a fascist dictatorship. Iran is a religious fanatic dictatorship. Religious fanatics cannot be deterred. You cannot deter a suicide bomber. If Saddam Hussein had gotten nuclear weapons, which he was nowhere near getting, the CIA said 7 to 10 years, and we knew that before we attacked them. But had he gotten nuclear weapons, deterrence would have stopped him from using them, because he was a fascist dictator, not a religious fanatic, and he did not want to just kill himself and his whole country. But the mullahs in charge, the ayatollahs in charge in Iran are religious fanatics and unless that regime is changed, and there is a lot of domestic opposition to it and maybe we will be saved by regime change, by domestic insurrection, but if that does not happen, they are trying to get nuclear weapons; and if Iran gets nuclear weapons, if a religious dictatorship, religious fanatic dictatorship gets nuclear weapons, they may very well use them. They say they would. You read the speeches of Mr. Rafsanjani, the former president, the current chairman of the council of expediency. He says they would use it. They say they want to destroy American civilization, and you have to take them at their word. We cannot permit this regime if it survives to have nuclear weapons, even if that should mean a few years down the road the necessity for military action because they might use those nuclear weapons simply for the greater glory of Allah. They say they would. You have to believe them. If it became necessary, if President Bush or President Kerry or their successor 5 years from now or 8 years from now came before this House and said, based on our intelligence, we know that the Iranians are about to get nuclear weapons, and we know that they would use them and we must stop them now, and therefore I ask authorization for action, who would believe that President? We cried wolf in Iraq. Like the fabled shepherd boy who cried wolf, we have no credibility, not this administration certainly and even another administration will have a long way to go to regain the credibility of the United States and of our intelligence agencies. To deal with a nonexistent phantom threat in Iraq, we have made the problem of dealing with a very possibly real mortal threat in Iran in years to come 40 or 50 times more difficult because that is where the threat might really be.

Mr. NADLER. I thank the gentleman and I thank Representative Bereuter for being honest and being right. Unfortunately, he is right. We are in a quagmire in Iraq. We must extricate ourselves. I do not know how, frankly. We must extricate ourselves, and we must get our priorities straight. We have a war being waged against us by the Muslim terrorists, not by all Muslims, but by the Muslim terrorists. There is a civil war going on in the Muslim world. We must have Radio Free Islam. We must try to help the moderates against the jihadists. But we must also protect ourselves. We must fight the terrorists, but we must lead a worldwide civilized effort against the Islamic terrorists. To do that we have to have credibility around the world. We have to have alliances around the world. It is not wrong to have alliances. When Vice President Cheney said, shamefully, that if Senator Kerry is elected President, our country would not be safe, I think it more accurately could be said the other way around, because this administration does not have its priorities straight. It is not protecting us against the threat of Islamic jihadists having nuclear weapons, as they will if we do not get control of those nuclear materials as fast as possible, if we do not spend $3 billion or $4 billion a year for the next 4 years and get them the heck out of Russia and Uzbekistan and Pakistan and the 40 countries around the world. We are at risk if we do not protect our ports by having every container inspected electronically or by hand before it is put on a ship bound to the United States. We are at risk if we do not protect our nuclear facilities and our chemical facilities and our transportation facilities in this country, if we do not harden this country. We have been talking about this, but we will not spend the money. This administration talks a great game about national security, but it will not spend the money. It will spend it in Iraq, it will spend it on an ABM system against a nonexistent threat, but against the real threats of nuclear terrorism, of nuclear explosions in this country, against the real threats of bombs coming in in a container, of the real threat of missiles, of shoulder-fired missiles being launched on American airliners, against the real threat of our nuclear facilities, our chemical facilities, our transportation facilities being targeted, we are not spending the money because they care about Iraq, they care about the ABM, they care about the tax cuts for the rich, but they do not seem to really care about the safety and security of the American people; or if they do care, they do not seem to understand where the real dangers are coming from. We must secure the nuclear materials. We must protect the containers and other shipping facilities abroad. We must protect the ships coming here. We must harden our nuclear and chemical and transportation facilities, and this will cost a lot of money. And we must ally with other countries in a worldwide alliance against the Muslim terrorists so that when a cell is broken up in Hamburg by German intelligence, by German police work, that helps us. We must have a worldwide effort here, and we must spend the money on the real threats and not on these phantom threats that this administration is preoccupied with.

Mr. NADLER. Well, I do not know because President Bush flip-flops. So maybe he is referring to President Bush after he decided to support it. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) flip-flops, and maybe he is referring to himself. Maybe he is referring to the families of the 9/11 victims who were the leading proponents of an independent commission. He may have been referring to Democrats who were, in fact, running for President, or who a year later ran for President, such as Senator Kerry and Howard Dean and others who did support this. Most Democrats supported it, but the majority of the Americans supported it, and I do not think the majority of Americans ran for President.

Mr. NADLER. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. NADLER. The fact is, that is true. We are doing that. We did that in the 1980s and 1970s and 1960s, and there was lively debate in this country, and it is a pragmatic debate. Sometimes you have to ally with bad people because of the danger presented by other bad people. The question whether you should is sometimes a question of pragmatism, is it really necessary? Is it really necessary in order to advance the greater cause of survival, the survival of liberty or the physical survival of the United States? Now here I want to get back to the main point I wanted to make. Iraq's Saddam Hussein is a fascist thug. Terrible. But there are 30 or 40 others just as terrible. We do not seek to go to war against all of them to change those regimes. The only justification for going to war against another country, with the possible exception if it is committing genocide, is self-protection: to protect the United States, to protect our own people, to protect our friends and allies against invasion, against attack. But because we attacked Iraq which was not a threat to the United States, we diverted resources from the real war against the Islamic terrorists. We did not find Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Dick Clarke, the former National Security Director, testified we had specialized troops in Afghanistan that could have found him, but they were taken away and the job was given to Afghanistani warlords. Who knows who gave them the higher pay, us or Osama bin Laden. They did not do the jobs because our troops were taken to Iraq. Now we have now shifted the resources back, so Dick Clarke says, well, we will find Osama bin Laden, but in those 2 years, al Qaeda has morphed. It has become many different organizations. It has become Hydra-headed. So capturing Osama bin Laden will not give us the yield in increased safety that doing so 2.5 years ago might have done. And why did we do that, to deal with a threat that we now know, and we should have known then, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? There were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. We had no operational connections with al Qaeda, to quote the 9/11 Commission findings, no real reason to go to war with them at all except the President now retroactively says they were nasty people. Sure, they were nasty people; but that does not justify going to war and having 1,000 American troops killed so far, and thousands of Iraqi citizens killed so far because we decided it would be nice to have a democratic regime there. Sure it would. I do not know if it is going to happen. The more likely result is prolonged quagmire and civil war in Iraq. The fact is that should not have been on the front burner. We should have finished the job in Afghanistan and finished the job in going after al Qaeda. Equally to the point, we spent $200 billion in Iraq, a total waste of money, and between the $200 billion that we have spent in Iraq so far and the trillions of dollars of tax cuts to the wealthy this administration and this country have passed, this administration is not willing to spend the money on what they should spend the money on to protect us. This administration does not take seriously enough the terrorist war being waged against us by the Islamic jihaadists. From before 9/11, when the Bush administration ignored many warnings, to this day, this administration refuses to spend the money necessary to protect the American people. Two months after 9/11, there were proposals in this House to spend $10 billion to protect our nuclear and chemical facilities and our transportation terminals against attacks which could kill or wound thousands of people. The administration opposed those proposals. Those proposals died. On ABC News tonight we saw pictures of trains going across tracks a few blocks from here, trains carrying chlorine gas and other lethal chemicals, unprotected; trains that, if attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade that pierced those cars, would loosen clouds of chlorine which could kill hundreds of thousands of people in Washington. This administration refuses to spend the money to buy the weapons- grade plutonium and uranium in the former Soviet Union which could easily be smuggled out to make atomic weapons because they care more about tax cuts for the wealthy and this misbegotten quagmire in Iraq than about protecting the American people from the real threats. When I saw in real-time, and I was watching on television, I saw the second plane go into the World Trade Center, I had two thoughts immediately. My first thought, my God, this is a terrorist attack. And my second thought was thank God they do not have access to nuclear weapons. Three thousand people were killed. If that had been a 10- kiloton nuclear bomb, which is a baby as they go these days, it would have been half a million people, and yet we are not doing what we should to make sure that that will not happen. I just finished reading a rather terrifying book by Graham Allison, ``Nuclear Terrorism,'' which predicts flatly if we do not change our policies and start showing some real urgency, that within 10 years there will be nuclear explosions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, and God knows where else. Millions of Americans will die, but this administration is dragging its feet. The 9/11 Commission and leading nonproliferation experts say the administration has been too lax in securing nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Mr. Speaker, the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons is widespread. When President Bush said that if given weapons-grade material, weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, Iraq could build a nuclear bomb within a year, he was correct; but so could 20 other countries, if given the weapons-grade material, build a nuclear bomb within a year. So could al Qaeda, and so could a lot of sophisticated terrorist groups. The problem is getting that weapons-grade nuclear material. That is what countries spend millions of dollars to do. That is why we built Hanford and Oak Ridge in World War II. That is why Iran and Pakistan are trying to get lots of centrifuges, but you have to get hold of that material. Hundreds and hundreds of tons of it are lying around, enough to build thousands of bombs, in the former Soviet Union, guarded by a colonel who may not have been paid lately just waiting to be sold on the black market or smuggled to al Qaeda. We have an agreement with the Russians under the Threat Reduction Initiative of Nunn-Lugar. Again, that is a bipartisan initiative. Senator Nunn is a conservative Democrat; Senator Lugar, Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. That bipartisan initiative was passed in 1991 to acquire that material. We have an agreement with the Russians to do it over a 30-year period.

Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I certainly agree with the gentleman. The 9/ 11 Commission in their final report said, ``Outside experts are deeply worried about the U.S. Government's commitment and approach to securing the weapons and highly dangerous materials still scattered in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union.''

Mr. NADLER. Well, I do not remember the exact date, but people were talking about this commission not long after 9/11. And, in fact, in early 2002 they were doing it. In July 2002, I quoted this before, the administration issued a statement of policy opposed to the creation of such a commission. In July of 2002, which meant in the spring of 2002, people were pushing it. So 2 years ago, or 2\1/2\ years ago.

Mr. NADLER. Well, there was a reluctance to have a 9/11 Commission, then there was a reluctance to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission, because, remember, they had to beg and threaten, threaten subpoenas to get information out of the administration. Then they had to threaten subpoenas to get witnesses before the commission. Then there had to be heavy political pressure because, with all these delays, they could not finish their work by the legislatively mandated time at the end of May; and so they sought a 2-month extension, and the administration and the Republican leadership of the House said no. So there had to be heavy pressure from the Democrats, from the public, from the families of the victims to get them the extension so they could finish their job. Then, when they got the extension and they made their recommendations at the end of July, and they said, okay, now it is time to move on this, then the Republican leadership in the House said, we cannot move on this. We will not have time to do it before the election, maybe until next year. Then there was heavy pressure from the Democrat leadership, from Democrats and the families of the victims, and others, and, finally, finally, the Republicans have now said, only in the last couple of weeks, that they are now going to try to have legislation enacted before the election. And I am glad the Republican leadership has flip-flopped once again on this, because at least I will say this, when they are pressured by the Democrats, when they are pressured by the families of the victims, when they are pressured by the American people, when they are pressured by the media, at least on this subject, they flipflop in the right direction, toward what they should have been doing earlier.

Mr. NADLER. The problem is that there seems to be an obsession in the Bush administration with nation states, Iraq being one of them. The real enemy here is not nation states right now. The real enemy are the Islamic terrorist groups, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and various others. They keep morphing and having new names and groups. They work together. They have tremendous technical sophistication. They have a lot of people, and they have the ability to threaten us with nuclear weapons. Let me say, to quote Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, ``All of the experts I know recommend that the most urgent task to prevent terrorist networks from getting their hands on such materials is to secure the stockpiles of these materials where they exist, and the prime location is Russia and the former Soviet Union.'' Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration intended to eliminate funding for this program, eliminate it, but they did reverse course after the terrorist attacks. Most critics agree that the pace is too slow and the scope is too narrow.

Mr. NADLER. We are now spending about $400 million a year.

Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, on September 11, 2001, 3 years ago, I watched in horror as America, and part of my district specifically, was attacked and destroyed. The extreme sense of pain and loss I felt as a New Yorker and as an American, as someone who knew many of the victims, does not even begin to match the pains that the families of that attack must have felt. This attack on the United States was an attack, a deliberate attack on civilians. It was a deliberate attempt to kill as many American civilians as possible for the simple and great crime of being Americans. This we will never forget, and we must never forgive. We must not allow ourselves to forget how vulnerable we have become and how we must change that vulnerability. We know that we are not as safe as we should have been on September 11, 3 years ago, and we still mourn the thousands who died that day. The 9/11 Commission charged with investigating the tragic events of September 11 released its unanimous report that should help us ensure that this type of attack does not happen again. Democrats are fighting to implement the Commission's recommendations, but the Republicans, by and large, who fought the creation of the Commission and tried prematurely to end its work are still dragging their feet. President Bush strongly opposed any independent inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. He argued that it would duplicate a probe conducted by Congress. In July 2002, his administration issued a statement of policy that read, The administration would oppose an amendment that would create a new commission to conduct a similar review. Such an amendment is duplicative and would cause a further diversion of essential personnel from their duty fighting the war. House majority leader, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission. I quote from a CNN interview on May 22nd, 2002, by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay): We are at war, and when you are at war, you have to worry about making public a lot of things that should be kept private for you to fight the war. An independent commission by its very nature is very public. Frankly, it has only been asked for by people that are running for President.

Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would agree with the gentleman. It is very clear that had we acted with dispatch, the commission could have been appointed at least a year or 16 months earlier than it was, and it could have had its report ready a year or 16 months earlier than it did, and we could have acted on that report a year or 16 months earlier than we will, and we could have started implementing these things. This is part of a pattern. And the pattern is that despite these flipflops, despite this bowing to Democratic pressure to act, this administration, this House, the Senate still is not doing nearly enough to make this Nation safer. Osama bin Laden is still at large. We did not finish the job in Afghanistan. The Taliban has reemerged. The illegal drug trade is booming in Afghanistan. The warlord disarmament is behind schedule. Why? Because we took the resources away. In the fall of 2002, we started taking the resources, the troops who could have founded Osama bin Laden, the Rangers who knew how to look, and we took them away to put them in Iraq. Mr. Speaker, I want to read two paragraphs from an article in the current issue of the American Prospect about the war on terrorism. It says, ``The President, as he revealed last week, doesn't think,'' and this is an article by Matthew Yglesias. The title is ``Surrender Monkey in Chief.'' ``The President, as he revealed last week, doesn't think he can win the war on terrorism. That is a bit of an off-message remark for a man whose re-election campaign is predicated on the notion that only he can win the war on terrorism. Worse, the statement suggests the President has only a passing familiarity with the generally accepted meaning of the term `war on terrorism.' ``Even stranger than this, however, is what the President said he thinks is possible. `I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.' Total victory may indeed be setting the bar too high, but is it so unreasonable to expect the President to promise that his policies will reduce the incidence of terrorism, mitigating the problem if not completely solving it? Apparently so. ``George Bush not only won't bring us total safety, he won't even make us safer. Instead he will make those who threaten us `less acceptable.' He won't thwart their efforts to achieve their goals, the imposition of a neofundamentalist Caliphate on the Islamic world, followed by God knows what. He will simply discourage them from `using terror as a tool' to advance that goal. It's a starkly pessimistic vision.'' Now, that is the paragraph from this article by Matthew Yglesias in the American Prospect, but it is quite correct. The President, Mr. Speaker, will not even recognize the nature of this war. He keeps calling it a war against terrorism. But the fact is we are not fighting against terrorism as a technique, nor, are we, in fact, fighting against all people who use terrorism as a technique. We are not at war with the Irish Republican Army, who do not threaten the United States. We are not at war with the Baath terrorists who threaten Spain, but not the United States. We are not at war with the Tamil Nadu terrorists who want a separate Nadu state in Sri Lanka, and who use terrorism against the Sri Lankans but not against the United States. We are at war against Islamic terrorists, against those in the Muslim world who think it their duty, who think it their religious mission to carry on a Jihad, to carry on a religious war using terrorist messages against the West in general and the United States in particular. That is who we are at war against. And if we do not admit who we are at war against, who have declared war on us, it is very difficult to define the war properly and the measures necessary to wage that war properly. That is one of the reasons why the President badly mistakes and the Vice President badly mistakes, and most of the speakers at the Republican convention last week badly mistake when they conflate the war in Iraq with the war on terrorism. The war in Iraq is a different war. Iraq is not part of the terrorist threat. Saddam Hussein was a standard fascist thug dictator, of whom there are, unfortunately, 40 or 50 in the world.

Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the gentleman. To quote Joseph Cirincione, the Director for Nonproliferation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the author of the book ``Deadly Arsenals & Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction,'' we should be aiming to do all of this in the next 4 years, and Senator Kerry must have read that book because his proposal is to do it in 4 years.

Mr. NADLER. I will yield.

Jerrold Nadler

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