[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 4] [House] [Pages 4827-4828] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]COMPREHENSIVE ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF IRAQ ON THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF AMERICA IS NEEDED The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Sestak) is recognized for 5 minutes. Mr. SESTAK. Shortly, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will come before the House and the Senate to provide an update on the military and the political situation in Iraq. That is my grave concern, that once again we will have placed a man who is responsible for the security, the military security only, of Iraq, in the position, in the singular position, of determining the national security policy of the United States and the public's perception of it, when what is needed, what is direly needed, is a comprehensive assessment of the national security of America and the impact of the strategy we have in Iraq upon it. So in fact it is the questions that General Petraeus cannot or should not answer that are the most important ones. For example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be asked directly, what is the impact of Iraq upon the military's readiness to deploy and meet the required timelines of its various war plans, when in fact today it cannot deploy its forces, its army, in order to protect the 28,000 men and women who wear the cloth of our Nation in South Korea from an attack on the timelines required by North Korea against the South? And while before Iraq we actually trained on multiple areas of warfare, [[Page 4828]] for the past 3 years your army has only been training in counterinsurgency. The Joint Chiefs of Staff must address the impact of 3 years of its army training only in one warfare area and being unable to meet any timeline of any war plan by its army in America's arsenal of war plans. Then, in the long term, the impact of 42 percent of our men and women who we are recruiting today being less capable than ever of being able to operate and maintain the systems of our weaponry in the future as they can in the past 3 years. Second, it is not the general or the ambassador who should come here to speak about Iraq's security, but rather our intelligence agencies that must address the question about whether the Iraq strategy has improved our overall efforts in the global war on terror, with Afghanistan once again prey to terrorists, and the Taliban having gone back into the ungoverned regions to protect them, and General Hayden, head of the CIA, having said that al Qaeda now has a safe haven in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. What is the impact of a strategy in that unstable region that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has described as ``in Iraq what we do what we must, but in Afghanistan, we do what we can.'' Officials from the State Department likewise must address the impact upon our allies of this war in Iraq and our relationships with them and the efforts to achieve other diplomatic goals, remembering that when we went into Bosnia, 50 percent of the coalition troops were non-U.S., and when we went into Iraq 5 years ago, less than 7 percent of the troops that entered that country were non-U.S. And then the Treasury, how can they explain the impact of what all economists agree are now almost $2 trillion to $3 trillion as the cost of this war in Iraq? When Iraq is awash in oil revenues, why are we using taxpayers' dollars? Therefore, the questions that General Petraeus can and should not answer comes down to, he should not be the one to tell us how long and at what cost before we change our strategy. It is only if Congress changes the forum for this general to come before us to say and hold up a national mirror, this is the impact of Iraq upon our overall national security strategy, and if it is not working and if it is negatively impacting it, we must therefore change the strategy. I believe it is against the spirit, as a man who has served in the military 31 years until I entered Congress, to have a military man placed in the position to determine singularly, when he is only responsible for the security of Iraq, to then determine without everyone else there the right strategy and course for America's national security. We must have that debate. Is the strategy working? Is it harming our overall national security? If it is, change the strategy. ____________________