BIDEN, JOSEPH: I say to my friend: Ask. Let me give you an example. I will be concrete. It is like pushing an open door. I asked for a meeting, I say to my friend, in the tradition of Senator Lugar when he was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee
BIDEN, JOSEPH: I asked for a meeting, a private meeting with the Permanent Five of the Security Council, who, as my good friend knows, is: China, Russia, England, France, and the United States.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: All five of those Ambassadors, including our own, Khalilzad, agreed to meet with me and two other members of the Foreign Relations Committee privately 5 weeks ago--on Monday I think it was 5 weeks ago. We sat in a conference room overlooking the East River for about an hour and a half
BIDEN, JOSEPH: I asked the question to all five, including our Ambassador. I said: What would you do, gentlemen--one lady; the British Ambassador is a woman. I said: What would you do, gentleman and lady, if the President of the United States asked each of your countries to participate in convening an international conference on Iraq
BIDEN, JOSEPH: One of the Ambassadors--since this was a private meeting I will not name him--said: Senator, I would ask your President: What took you so long to ask?
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Then I can refer to the French Ambassador. The French Ambassador pointed out that there is an inevitability of us leaving.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: And if, in fact, we leave a shattered Iraq, his country is in trouble. Remember, last August we were reading about automobiles being torched from Marseilles to Normandy. Why? Over head scarves. Between 10 and 14 percent of the French population is Muslim.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The last thing the French need is a radicalized, cannibalized Iraq. It went on from there.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: My point is, the President--I promise you--has not asked. He has not asked. I think my friend from Indiana knows, at least indirectly--because Ambassador Khalilzad, I believe, spoke to him; he was there with me--there is a consensus among many in the administration to ask,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: but there is still this overwhelming reluctance that we don't need anybody's help; we can do it. Let me tell you, that is a vanity which is a burden, a significant burden.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: There are three things we should be doing immediately. And I know we have a disagreement on this, in my view, redefining the mission of Americans who are there being killed and wounded. We are not going to settle this civil war by remaining on the faultlines.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: It is not going to happen. Even to totally quell it, you know--as a military expert, I defer to you--we don't have enough troops with the surge. If you have 500,000 troops, you could sit on the faultlines. It wouldn't solve the problem
BIDEN, JOSEPH: but you could send it underground. But we don't. I wouldn't even advise it if we did because there is no underlying political rationale.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: My point is, redefine the mission. Were I President today, which is a presumptuous thing to say, I would be doing exactly what General Jones recommended. I would be pulling back to the borders. I would be dealing with force protection.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: I would be focusing on al-Qaida of Mesopotamia. I would be focusing on training Iraqi forces. I would not be focused on going door to door in Sunni or Shia neighborhoods in a city of 6.2 million people. I would not have an American convoy traveling the streets with roadside bombs being blown up
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The second thing we need to do, but it is not required to support this amendment, there is an incentive to the world, to the region, and to the recalcitrant leadership in Baghdad to say: Hey guys, we are drawing down.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: For the mission I just stated--and I defer to my friend--you don't need 160,000 troops for the Jones mission, for lack of a better way of phrasing. You need closer to 50,000. Guess what. That is going to get the attention,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: as my friend Carl Levin has been saying for some time, of the Iraqis. They may have their altar call. I am not counting on it, but they may.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The third thing we should be doing is, if you look at the David Ignatius piece in the Post today, what Senator Lugar and I and others and maybe my friend from Virginia have been talking about for 4 years--we talked about it before we went in.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Who is talking to the tribal chiefs? Who is talking to the local folks? Who is engaging them? What are we finding out now? Just read the Ignatius piece. All of a sudden, it is like, my goodness, maybe we should be talking to these guys
BIDEN, JOSEPH: So here is the deal. When you get to this, you say: Look, here is what your Constitution says, and here is what you voted on in your Parliament to implement articles 15, 16, 17 and 18, which allows you to become a region,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: essentially a state like the United States. Write your own Constitution. It can't supersede the federal one. Allow you to own your local security.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Why is it working in Anbar to the extent it is? It is working because we said: Look, we promise you, tribal leaders, nobody is going to send anyone from Baghdad for you. There ain't going to be any Kurds or Sunnis in here.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: You set up your own police force. Cut through all the diplomatic jargon. That is what we did. That is it. Guess what. Once we did that, the tribal sheiks whistled and said: Boys, you can join. They had 10,000
BIDEN, JOSEPH: people show up who wanted to be cops or police. Why? Because Sunnis were going to be guarding Sunnis.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: So this stuff about political movement is a joke. Not a joke--that is the wrong way to say it. It is a fiction. There is nothing unity about that. I sat next to Abdul Sattar for 2 hours, the guy who got blown up last Thursday,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: the tribal sheikh who led the insurrection against al-Qaida Mesopotamia, told me how safe everything was in Ramadi. They land me and my staff and the Senator from Arkansas in a Blackhawk helicopter with two Cobra gunships.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: We go inside the city. We are told how safe it is. I can walk down the street; that is true. We have a sandstorm. I say: No helicopters coming. Can you drive to Baghdad? No, no, no. It ain't that safe.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Then 7 days later I get a call from a reporter from the Washington Post: Senator, didn't you spend a lot of time with the same tribal chief the President was with at the airbase? I said: Yes. In this safe city that he runs,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: with an American tank sitting in front of his house, with bodyguards, he got blown to smithereens.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The generic point I am making here is the idea that somehow we are going to be able to negotiate these faultlines is beyond our ability. But it is possible, working with Sunni, Shia, Kurd, we may be able to augment their physical security as they make this transition
BIDEN, JOSEPH: What did we do in Dayton? It is not precisely analogous, but it is analogous. There was more sectarian violence from Vlad the Impaler to Milosevic than in 5,000 years of history of what we now call Iraq. That is a fact.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: That is a historical fact. What did we do? As my friend from Indiana knows, I was deeply involved in pressuring President Clinton from 1993 on to take action in the Balkans. What did we finally do in Dayton in a bipartisan way?
BIDEN, JOSEPH: We called in Russia, the European powers. We then brought in the Serbs, Milosevic, the Croats, Tudjman--who, as my friend knows, was no box of chocolates--and Izetbegovic. We got them all in one room. We essentially locked the door.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: We said: Figure it out, folks.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: What did they figure out? Separate the parties. Even I was a little concerned about the Republika Srpska within Bosnia. What did we do? We said: Your militia can now become your police force. That is, in essence,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: what we did. We said to the Croats and the Bosnians, who were Muslims: You have to coexist in this other place. This place called Sarajevo is going to be a capital city, but it ain't going to govern the whole country in the way in which the capital of Washington,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: DC, has influence over the rest of America.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Guess what. To truncate this, the West has had an average of roughly 20,000 troops there for 10 years. What has been the result? Knock on wood--not one has been killed, not one has been shot dead. The ethnic cleansing has stopped.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: What are they doing now? Attempting to amend their Constitution to become part of Europe.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: I asked my staff to go back. I said: Tell me how the repatriation is going on. People are returning. Of the 2.2 million refugees in Bosnia, internal or external, 1.1 million have returned to their homes. Almost half a million have returned as minority returns,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Serbs moving back into predominantly Croat neighborhoods, Croats moving back into predominantly Bosniak or Serb neighborhoods. It is painful. It takes time. But what did we do? We got them all in a room,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: figuratively speaking.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: We have to get them in a room, Senator Lugar. We have to get them in a room. Because let me tell you something, some in the administration privately say to me: Joe, you are right. There is an inevitability to a federal system.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The difference between an inevitability and us being the catalyst to bring it about may be years. That is thousands of deaths, maybe tens of thousands, counting Iraqis and American. We don't have that time.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: And look, I don't want to criticize the President. I don't.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: God love him, I don't care whether he gets credit or blame at this point. But let me tell you one thing for certain: What Presidential leadership is about is a change in the dynamic of situations that are admittedly out of control.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: It requires taking risks. Thus far, the only risk we have taken is the lives of our troops. We have taken virtually no diplomatic risks.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: I say to my friends, there is a reason why, although what I am proposing here is not ideal, I think there is a reason why so many people--left, right and center--have come to this conclusion. One thing about us Americans is,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: we have ultimately led the world as a consequence of two traits we possess, in my opinion, that exceed that of any other country. It is not just our military power; it is our idealism coupled with our pragmatism.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: It gets down to a very pragmatic question: If you don't like Biden et al.'s political solution, what is yours? What is yours?
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The world is waiting. They are literally waiting. No one has the capacity, no group of nations has the capacity, absent our active cooperation and engagement, to do anything to better the situation. We do.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: The potential power is in our hands. But I respectfully suggest that we can't do it by ourselves. We have lost the credibility to do that, rightly or wrongly.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: So it takes me to the essence of this amendment. The amendment simply says--and I will not take the time to read it; I know other people wish to speak. I might add, this is the first and only time in the last 3 months I have spoken on the floor.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: I apologize for the time, but I think it is the single most critical issue we face. I know my friends think that too.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Regardless of your political persuasion, how do you attend to the agenda each of us has, from the right or the left, to deal with the social ills and concerns of America until we end this war? We are going to spend,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: counting it all, $120 billion a year. How do you deal with that--the Republican approach to dealing with generating economic growth or the Democratic approach? How do you deal with tax structure and tax policy?
BIDEN, JOSEPH: How do you do this?
BIDEN, JOSEPH: Look, it is the ultimate preoccupation, with good reason, of the American people. Again, I know no one more loyal or knowledgable about the U.S. Armed Forces whom I have served with in the Senate than my friend from Virginia.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: He knows there is only one group of Americans making a sacrifice now--it is the thousands of families, thousands, 166,000 families.
BIDEN, JOSEPH: It is those families. They are the only ones. But guess what. It is against the Senate rules to refer to the Gallery by pointing to them. But I will refer to previous Galleries. Everyone who sits in this Gallery,
BIDEN, JOSEPH: they get it. They get it, whether they have a child, son, daughter, husband or wife there. So folks I must tell you I'm getting frustrated with all of the tactical