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The speech former Sen. Max Cleland gave here Saturday at the national Young Democrats convention lasted more than half an hour, and he read it fast. He made it clear he was giving it as a citizen and soldier, and not as a candidate for anything, including next year's Senate race.
It was also the most scathing critique of the Bush administration's military and foreign policy we've heard from a Democrat this year, and it got an enthusiastic response from the audience of some 150 young party activists.
Cleland is a big supporter of Sen. John Kerry, who generally supported the administration's actions in Iraq, in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But it wouldn't be a surprise if some of Cleland's lines aren't picked up by some of those against the Iraq War.
"They have not found bin Laden,' Cleland said. "They have not found Saddam Hussein and as of yet there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, we have found two trailers. Is that why we fought the war? For two trailers? Did we send our sons and daughters to spill their blood in the desert over two trailers?"
Some will hear bitterness over last year's campaign in those words, and some will wonder why more Democrats aren't more outspoken. Since this is the Internet, we'll let you decide. We've got the whole speech, shorn of a few introductory remarks, for those who want to read it.
But first a word about the audience. The Young Democrats, like their Republican counterparts, are their party's 20-somethings, usually out of college and starting out in their careers. They met in Atlanta because Scott Butler, who works for Secretary of State Cathy Cox, is the group's outgoing president.
Butler said the presidential candidate who has worked this group hardest is Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. But there was no clear front-runner in this crowd, which tended to divide up along regional lines.
Cleland's Speech (Think of us as the print version of CSPAN)
When I volunteered for Vietnam as a young Lieutenant in the United States Army in the spring of 1967, my country was at war. It was at war with an enemy which used guerrilla warfare, attacks on civilians and suicide bombers. In Vietnam, we called the suicide bombers "sappers." They would strap a satchel charge with explosives on their back and attack a U.S. command post, barracks, or restaurant in Saigon where U.S. soldiers hung out and blow everyone, including themselves, to bits. It was a war of terror against a U.S. ally. The terrorists were determined, willing to wait a long time for the success of their strategy and seemed undeterred by American will, technical know-how and military strength. Does all this have a familiar ring to it? It does to me.
Before I went to Vietnam, I had the privilege of a personal meeting with Sen. Dick Russell from Georgia. He was then the chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. It was the summer of 1965. I was an intern on the House side of the Congress and had a rare opportunity to sit at the feet of one of Georgia's political giants. Among Russell's personal doubts about the American military engagement on the ground in an open-ended guerrilla war with no exit strategy was his fear of our lack of intelligence. I remember he said, "The French had 10 times better intelligence than we have." He was of course referring to the French battle against the Viet Minh, which the French lost. The Viet Minh were the precursors to the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong that we fought in our war.
In 1968, on 1 February, the American military was surprised by an all-out attack by the enemy known at the Tet Offensive. I was caught up in that attack. Several hundred thousand North Vietnamese and VC were sacrificed to make a political point. But that point stuck. President Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the presidential race 60 days later and sued for peace. The war, for all practical purposes, was lost. Later, on April 8, 1968, in relieving the siege of Khe Sanh, I was wounded. For the rest of my life I will remember the sense of surprise and shock by the enemy offensive based on our lack of intelligence up against a determined foe.
I would like to fast-forward to September 11, 2001. I was in my office in the Senate discussing the future of American defenses, particularly against worldwide terrorism, with the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Meyers. The first plane had already hit the World Trade Center and Gen. Meyers bolted from his seat. We rushed into an adjoining office as we saw on TV the second plane slam into the second tower. Gen. Meyers rushed out of my office, headed for the Pentagon. At that moment, the Pentagon was hit. I stared out my window and looked at the Capitol. I had a strange feeling that I was back in Vietnam. I knew the Capitol was next. Thank God it still stands, primarily because of the courage of some wonderful American citizens who sacrificed their lives on a Pennsylvania field.
Since 9/11, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and now as a member of the Independent Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States responsible for finding out what happened on 9/11, and why, I have formed some definite opinions about how we should defend our country both at home and abroad.
First of all, let's not make the same mistakes we made in Vietnam. We got sucked into an open-ended ground war with guerrillas and terrorists, and we had no ultimate plan for our exit strategy or what victory looked like. The enemy we faced then had better intelligence then we did. They knew the terrain and the countryside better than we did, and they were fighting for their concept of their own homeland. We underestimated the determination and will of our enemy, and overestimated our willingness at home to pay a political price in blood and treasure over a long period of time. We also over-stayed our military effectiveness.
We cannot afford to make those same mistakes again. However, I am afraid we are getting sucked into a major ground involvement in Iraq and in Afghanistan with no exit strategy. To say that a three-week war in Iraq against an adversary not linked to 9/11 was a victory against terrorism, and, then, proclaim victory on an aircraft carrier by the President of the United States, is misleading at best. Within days of the so-called victory in Iraq, Al Qaeda was alive and well and killing Europeans, Americans and upper-class Saudis in Riyadh, the very capital of Saudi Arabia. Additionally, LTG. David McKiernan in Iraq says the war is not over. He is right. Since the President declared a so-called "victory," we have buried 34 young Americans killed in Iraq. We are losing young men and women every day. We are trapped in a quagmire. We have 240,000 American troops tied down in Iraq and Kuwait. We have no clear exit strategy. So far we have found no WMD. We have taken our eye off the ball. In so many ways, we have substituted a rogue regime for the true target. The real target is Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cadre around the world.
This administration has not found Osama bin Laden. It has not found Saddam Hussein. And it has not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Supposedly all of that was the rationale for losing over 200 American lives and wounding over 500 American troops so far. We do have to go on the strategic offensive against the terrorists, but we have to chase them down in their own holes, in their own caves, in their own lairs and in their own sanctuaries, wherever they may be. We let Osama bin Laden escape into Western Pakistan in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan because as we closed the loop on him we violated one of the basic lessons of counter insurgency I learned in ROTC in 1962. You cordon off the enemy and close the loop with your own troops. We relied on Afghan rebels and warlords in the operation and Osama bin Laden skipped country. He slipped through the net. Just like in Vietnam, reliance on South Vietnamese intelligence and South Vietnamese troops always proved costly.
This issue of fresh battlefield intelligence is critical because the way we fight and win the war against terrorism is primarily through intelligence and the network that we create with our allies. We need allies all over the world. We need as many friends as we can get. We must not ignore the warning signals our allies provide, as was the case in the months leading up to 9/11. We can't use our technology and our force if we don't know where the terrorist are and can't target them.
For all the hoopla of the president declaring victory, we have to understand Iraq and Afghanistan are still boiling sores. As long as chaos continues to reign in Baghdad, Basra, and other parts of Iraq, resentment will continue to fester and resistance by native Iraqis will foment. We are increasingly looked upon as outsiders and as an occupying force. If only those in the administration had heeded the warnings of the challenge of post-war stability given by Republican Sen. Lugar, and my fellow Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel, perhaps our troops would not be under constant threat of attack. We have taken on an almost impossible mission. We are trying to police an area as big as California. We can't even keep the peace in California much less in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We are trying to re-build hospitals and schools and trying to provide health care and food in Iraq. We need to rebuild crumbling schools in America. We need to extend health care insurance to the 41 million Americans not currently covered by health care insurance. We need to improve police and first responder capabilities in America. We need to rebuild the infrastructure of America, provide jobs to Americans. But we are trying to make Iraq the 51st state. This administration is doing all of this in a time of record deficits while at the same time slashing taxes for the wealthy. And let's be clear about this "economic stimulus." In the long run, this tax cut will redistribute the tax burden onto the middle class. In the tax bill the president signed, those families with children making less than $26,000 a year were denied a child tax credit while those families making more than that amount were given a $1,000 deduction per child. I ask you this. Does this seem fair? As I travel around this state, I see increasing unemployment, increasing financial hardship and increasing economic devastation due to Republican policies which have become themselves weapons of mass destruction particularly falling hardest on those families making $26,000 year or less.
What then is the Bush record in fighting the so-called war on terrorism? They have not found bin Laden. They have not found Saddam Hussein and as of yet there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, we have found two trailers. Is that why we fought the war? For two trailers? Did we send our sons and daughters to spill their blood in the desert over two trailers? We are spending over $100 billion bombing and then rebuilding Iraq while giving a tax cut to America's wealthiest citizens and denying hard-working Americans making $26,000 a year or less a child tax credit in order to pay for it.
That's the Bush record. It is not compassionate, and with this year's budget deficit running over $400 billion -- a record set by no other President, Republican or Democrat, it is certainly not conservative.
We do have to go after terrorists abroad, but they are not dumb enough to hang out in capitals highlighted by this administration as part of the Axis of Evil. We have to track them down, destroy their cells, cut their supply lines and communication channels and destroy their financial network. We must thin their ranks, not cause them to swell. We have to kill and capture every one of them or they will continue to come after us and our military forces around the world. Which brings us to the issue of really protecting America here in this country. What this administration fails to understand is that we really are in a war. Like Colin Powell, I have served in a real war, and I know what it is like. The same cannot be said for other top administration officials, including the president, vice president, secretary of defense, deputy secretary of defense, and other top national security advisers who hatched this scheme to go to war with Iraq. We must be on the strategic offensive abroad, but we really do need to be on the strategic defensive at home. And let me assure you, "strategic defense" involves more than duct tape and a color-coded warning system.
We are being drawn into the kind of battle the enemy wants -- a clash of civilizations where East meets West. Where Islamic fanatics meet Christians and Jews on the battlefield of terrorism in the cities and on the seas where civilians are killed and military units are attacked. The enemy does not care whether this takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years to triumph.
Therefore, I propose the following as part of "Real Homeland Defense" given the nature of the war we are up against.
Put the Coast Guard under the Navy and its direct control. That's what's done in wartime. It is time to do that now. Let the Coast Guard guard the coast. This is a war and we need to treat it as such. We need to allow the Coast Guard the budget and support to provide essentially a quarantine around American ports. They should be allowed to search, seize and inspect any ship, passenger or freighter, suspected of containing contraband to aid terrorists. Additionally, we need to do what I suggested when I was in the Senate. Namely, inspect ships in foreign ports before they get to American ports. A majority of the cargo containers entering American ports come from basically two foreign ports. This job is not only doable but it must be done because at present only 2% of the cargo containers entering American ports are inspected. This administration must not continue to underfund port and harbor security.
Let the National Guard guard the nation. That is what it was designed for. Let the National Guard guard our borders. They are in dozens of places all over the world in so-called "peace keeper" roles filling in for regular U.S. Army units that are needed elsewhere. These regular Army units are stretched so thin that they continue to go to war in some place in the world all the time. If we continue to try and police the world, we will soon run out of people. The National Guard was designed to protect and defend Albany, Ga., not Albania.
Let's give the active duty military the force it needs to fulfill the expanded missions it is increasingly asked to perform. The U.S. Army takes on a new mission somewhere in the world every 16 weeks. If we can't find enough people to volunteer to fill the all-volunteer force, let's supplement our forces with the draft. If the sons and daughters of farmers, carpenters, bricklayers, mechanics and hairdressers can serve in Afghanistan and Iraq, so can the sons and daughters of the wealthiest Americans who just benefited most from the recent Bush tax cut.
In terms of the tax cut -- more than $300 billion of tax cuts I might add -- these monies should go to improve the health care in the military for the over 500 servicemen and women and POW's who were wounded in Iraq alone. Additionally, we need to improve dramatically VA healthcare for all of our veterans instead of cutting the requested VA budget by $6.5 billion as President Bush has done.
Stimulate the economy not by tax cuts for the rich but by a payroll tax holiday so that working-class Americans upon whom the burden of taxes and war always falls will see their sons and daughters return from overseas to an economy that has jobs for them.
Create a National Service Corps for young Americans to spend two years of voluntary service and enable them to serve in government and non-governmental positions that have to deal with homeland defense as well as serving in organizations designed to help the poor, underprivileged and elderly. Additionally, public service in the National Service Corps would make an individual exempt from any draft that might be in effect.
For all involved in defending this country at home and abroad in uniform or in the National Service Corps, we need a greatly expanded GI bill funded by a national lottery. We need this to improve enlistments in the all-volunteer force, to make military service and service in the National Service Corps more attractive and provide real educational opportunities to go to college for those who serve and defend our country.
Eliminate the silly and stupid color-coding in the country. Its real effect is to frighten everybody in the nation without telling them why they should be scared and putting an extra burden on already strained local law enforcement. This is exactly the kind of fear terrorists want to spread. We are doing their job for them! Does a sheepherder in Montana really care about whether the color-code threat level in this country is either orange or yellow? Additionally, get rid of the crazy emphasis on duct tape and plastic. That is about as effective in case of a terrorist attack as the "duck and cover" drills we used to perform in grammar school when I was a young boy. We were supposed to hide under our desk to protect ourselves from a thermonuclear war.
Let's get serious about airport screening. Let's focus on people, not shoes and belt buckles. Terrorists are people. Passenger screening systems should be able to effectively identify potential terrorists. Focus on them.
Like the British, create a domestic intelligence unit separate from the FBI which coordinates its efforts with a new National Intelligence Director. This National Director of Intelligence should be the one person accountable for pulling together all the aspects of American Intelligence, foreign and domestic, into a mosaic that can be clearly understood in terms of threats to our country. There are currently more than a dozen different intelligence agencies in six cabinet level departments. The so called "Intelligence Community" is a horse built by a committee that winds up looking like a camel. We know that we did not have enough adequate intelligence or coordination among our intelligence agencies to stop the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Now we are learning that we did not have enough adequate intelligence in terms of knowing why we were going to war in Iraq. We went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction, but we have not found any yet. Is that a fault of our intelligence community? Or was it just plain deception on the part of the administration? Who knows? The Congress needs to fully investigate the rationale and outcome of the war and explain to the American people who knew what and when did they know it. If the Congress does not do its duty, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on which I sit should take the mission on itself. The American people need to know who was accountable for the war in Iraq and why the cream of American youth was sacrificed. To try to look for justification for the war after our young men and women are buried is immoral, unjust, and unacceptable Before we go to war the next time, the president must be fully truthful to the American people and the Congress, and we should know what we are doing and why. That includes straightening out the intelligence community.
These are just some suggestions that I feel should be taken seriously because we are in a serious war with serious consequences, and the young people of America have the most to gain and the most to lose by the successful defense of the greatest country in the world. To try to look for a justification for the war after our young men and women have been buried, is immoral, unjust and unacceptable. |
