January 30, 2007
Mr. President, today in Iraq, we sadly find ourselves at the very point I feared most when I opposed giving the President the open-ended authority to wage this war in 2002 - an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences in the midst of a country torn by civil war.
The American people have waited and the American people have been patient. We have given chance after chance for a resolution that has not come, and, more importantly, watched with horror and grief the tragic loss of thousands of brave young American soldiers.
The time for waiting in Iraq is over. The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close. And the need to bring this war to an end is here.
That is why today, I'm introducing the Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007.
This plan would not only place a cap on the number of troops in Iraq and stop the escalation, more importantly, it would begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces with the goal of removing of all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by March 31st, 2008 - consistent with the expectations of the bipartisan Iraq study group that the President has so assiduously ignored.
The redeployment of troops to the United States, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the region would begin no later than May 1st of this year, toward the end of the timeframe I first proposed in a speech more than two months ago. In a civil war where no military solution exists, this redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve the political settlement between its warring factions that can slow the bloodshed and promote stability.
My plan allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain as basic force protection, to engage in counter-terrorism, and to continue the training of Iraqi security forces.
And if the Iraqis are successful in meeting the thirteen benchmarks for progress laid out by the Bush Administration itself, this plan also allows for the temporary suspension of the redeployment, provided Congress agrees that the benchmarks have actually been met and that the suspension is in the national security interest of the United States.
The U.S. military has performed valiantly and brilliantly in Iraq. Our troops have done all that we have asked them to do and more. But no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war, nor settle the grievances in the hearts of the combatants.
It is my firm belief that the responsible course of action - for the United States, for Iraq, and for our troops - is to oppose this reckless escalation and to pursue a new policy. This policy that I've laid out is consistent with what I have advocated for well over a year, with many of the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and with what the American people demanded in the November election.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience, is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried and failed policy opposed by generals and experts, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and many of the Iraqis themselves.
It is time for us to fundamentally change our policy.
It is time to give Iraqis their country back.
And it is time to refocus America's efforts on the challenges we face at home and the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.
"The Time Has Come for Universal Health Care": Barack Obama at the Families USA Conference
Families USA Conference, Washington, DC | January 25, 2007
Thank you Ron Pollack and thank you Families USA for inviting me to speak here this morning.
On this January morning of two thousand and seven, more than sixty years after President Truman first issued the call for national health insurance, we find ourselves in the midst of an historic moment on health care. From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans, the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.
Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday. The President's latest proposal that does little to bring down cost or guarantee coverage falls into this category. There will be many others offered in the coming campaign, and I am working with experts to develop my own plan as we speak, but let's make one thing clear right here, right now:
In the 2008 campaign, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. We have the ideas, we have the resources, and we must find the will to pass a plan by the end of the next president's first term.
I know there's a cynicism out there about whether this can happen, and there's reason for it. Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics, leaving the rest of America to struggle with skyrocketing costs.
For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics - the idea that there isn't much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country. And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process.
Well we can't afford another disappointing charade in 2008. It's not only tiresome, it's wrong. Wrong when businesses have to layoff one employee because they can't afford the health care of another. Wrong when a parent cannot take a sick child to the doctor because they cannot afford the bill that comes with it. Wrong when 46 million Americans have no health care at all. In a country that spends more on health care than any other nation on Earth, it's just wrong.
And yet, in recent years, what's caught the attention of those who haven't always been in favor of reform is the realization that this crisis isn't just morally offensive, it's economically untenable. For years, the can't-do crowd has scared the American people into believing that universal health care would mean socialized medicine and burdensome taxes - that we should just stay out of the way and tinker at the margins.
You know the statistics. Family premiums are up by nearly 87% over the last five years, growing five times faster than workers' wages. Deductibles are up 50%. Co-payments for care and prescriptions are through the roof.
Nearly 11 million Americans who are already insured spent more than a quarter of their salary on health care last year. And over half of all family bankruptcies today are caused by medical bills.
But they say it's too costly to act.
Almost half of all small businesses no longer offer health care to their workers, and so many others have responded to rising costs by laying off workers or shutting their doors for good. Some of the biggest corporations in America, giants of industry like GM and Ford, are watching foreign competitors based in countries with universal health care run circles around them, with a GM car containing twice as much health care cost as a Japanese car.
But they say it's too risky to act.
They tell us it's too expensive to cover the uninsured, but they don't mention that every time an American without health insurance walks into an emergency room, we pay even more. Our family's premiums are $922 higher because of the cost of care for the uninsured.
We pay $15 billion more in taxes because of the cost of care for the uninsured. And it's trapped us in a vicious cycle. As the uninsured cause premiums to rise, more employers drop coverage. As more employers drop coverage, more people become uninsured, and premiums rise even further.
But the skeptics tell us that reform is too costly, too risky, too impossible for America.
Well the skeptics must be living somewhere else. Because when you see what the health care crisis is doing to our families, to our economy, to our country, you realize that caution is what's costly. Inaction is what's risky. Doing nothing is what's impossible when it comes to health care in America.
It's time to act. This isn't a problem of money, this is a problem of will. A failure of leadership. We already spend $2.2 trillion a year on health care in this country. My colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, who's recently developed a bold new health care plan of his own, tells it this way:
For the money Americans spent on health care last year, we could have hired a group of skilled physicians, paid each one of them $200,000 to care for just seven families, and guaranteed every single American quality, affordable health care.
So where's all that money going? We know that a quarter of it - one out of every four health care dollars - is spent on non-medical costs; mostly bills and paperwork. And we also know that this is completely unnecessary. Almost every other industry in the world has saved billions on these administrative costs by doing it all online. Every transaction you make at a bank now costs them less than a penny. Even at the Veterans Administration, where it used to cost nine dollars to pull up your medical record, new technology means you can call up the same record on the internet for next to nothing.
But because we haven't updated technology in the rest of the health care industry, a single transaction still costs up to twenty-five dollars - not one dime of which goes toward improving the quality of our health care.
This is simply inexcusable, and if we brought our entire health care system online, something everyone from Ted Kennedy to Newt Gingrich believes we should do, we'd already be saving over $600 million a year on health care costs.
The federal government should be leading the way here. If you do business with the federal employee health benefits program, you should move to an electronic claims system. If you are a provider who works with Medicare, you should have to report your patient's health outcomes, so that we can figure out, on a national level, how to improve health care quality. These are all things experts tell us must be done but aren't being done. And the federal government should lead.
Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry. It's perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.
At a time when businesses are facing increased competition and workers rarely stay with one company throughout their lives, we also have to ask if the employer-based system of health care itself is still the best for providing insurance to all Americans. We have to ask what we can do to provide more Americans with preventative care, which would mean fewer doctor's visits and less cost down the road. We should make sure that every single child who's eligible is signed up for the children's health insurance program, and the federal government should make sure that our states have the money to make that happen. And we have to start looking at some of the interesting ideas on comprehensive reform that are coming out of states like Maine and Illinois and California, to see what we can replicate on a national scale and what will move us toward that goal of universal coverage for all.
But regardless of what combination of policies and proposals get us to this goal, we must reach it. We must act. And we must act boldly. As one health care advocate recently said, "The most expensive course is to do nothing." But it wasn't a liberal Democrat or union leader who said this.
It was the president of the very health industry association that funded the "Harry and Louise" ads designed to kill the Clinton health care plan in the early nineties.
The debate in this country over health care has shifted. The support for comprehensive reform that organizations like Families USA have worked so hard to build is now widespread, and the diverse group of business and health industry interests that are part of your Health Care Coverage Coalition is a testament to that success. And so Washington no longer has an excuse for caution. Leaders no longer have a reason to be timid. And America can no longer afford inaction. That's not who we are - and that's not the story of our nation's improbable progress.
Half a century ago, America found itself in the midst of another health care crisis. For millions of elderly Americans, the single greatest cause of poverty and hardship was the crippling cost of health care and the lack of affordable insurance. Two out of every three elderly Americans had annual incomes of less than $1,000, and only one in eight had health insurance.
As health care and hospital costs continued to rise, more and more private insurers simply refused to insure our elderly, believing they were too great of a risk to care for.
The resistance to action was fierce. Proponents of health care reform were opposed by well-financed, well-connected interest groups who spared no expense in telling the American people that these efforts were "dangerous" and "un-American," "revolutionary" and even "deadly."
And yet the reformers marched on. They testified before Congress and they took their case to the country and they introduced dozens of different proposals but always, always they stood firm on their goal to provide health care for every American senior. And finally, after years of advocacy and negotiation and plenty of setbacks, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law on July 30th of 1965.
The signing ceremony was held in Missouri, in a town called Independence, with the first man who was bold enough to issue the call for universal health care - President Harry Truman.
And as he stood with Truman by his side and signed what would become the most successful government program in history - a program that had seemed impossible for so long - President Johnson looked out at the crowd and said, "History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history."
Never forget that we have it within our power to shape history in this country. It is not in our character to sit idly by as victims of fate or circumstance, for we are a people of action and innovation, forever pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Now is the time to push those boundaries once more. We have come so far in the debate on health care in this country, but now we must finally answer the call first issued by Truman, advanced by Johnson, and fought for by so many leaders and Americans throughout the last century. The time has come for universal health care in America. And I look forward to working with all of you to meet this challenge in the weeks and months to come. Thank you.
Thank you Ron Pollack and thank you Families USA for inviting me to speak here this morning.
On this January morning of two thousand and seven, more than sixty years after President Truman first issued the call for national health insurance, we find ourselves in the midst of an historic moment on health care. From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans, the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.
Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday. The President's latest proposal that does little to bring down cost or guarantee coverage falls into this category. There will be many others offered in the coming campaign, and I am working with experts to develop my own plan as we speak, but let's make one thing clear right here, right now:
In the 2008 campaign, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. We have the ideas, we have the resources, and we must find the will to pass a plan by the end of the next president's first term.
I know there's a cynicism out there about whether this can happen, and there's reason for it. Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics, leaving the rest of America to struggle with skyrocketing costs.
For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics - the idea that there isn't much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country. And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process.
Well we can't afford another disappointing charade in 2008. It's not only tiresome, it's wrong. Wrong when businesses have to layoff one employee because they can't afford the health care of another. Wrong when a parent cannot take a sick child to the doctor because they cannot afford the bill that comes with it. Wrong when 46 million Americans have no health care at all. In a country that spends more on health care than any other nation on Earth, it's just wrong.
And yet, in recent years, what's caught the attention of those who haven't always been in favor of reform is the realization that this crisis isn't just morally offensive, it's economically untenable. For years, the can't-do crowd has scared the American people into believing that universal health care would mean socialized medicine and burdensome taxes - that we should just stay out of the way and tinker at the margins.
You know the statistics. Family premiums are up by nearly 87% over the last five years, growing five times faster than workers' wages. Deductibles are up 50%. Co-payments for care and prescriptions are through the roof.
Nearly 11 million Americans who are already insured spent more than a quarter of their salary on health care last year. And over half of all family bankruptcies today are caused by medical bills.
But they say it's too costly to act.
Almost half of all small businesses no longer offer health care to their workers, and so many others have responded to rising costs by laying off workers or shutting their doors for good. Some of the biggest corporations in America, giants of industry like GM and Ford, are watching foreign competitors based in countries with universal health care run circles around them, with a GM car containing twice as much health care cost as a Japanese car.
But they say it's too risky to act.
They tell us it's too expensive to cover the uninsured, but they don't mention that every time an American without health insurance walks into an emergency room, we pay even more. Our family's premiums are $922 higher because of the cost of care for the uninsured.
We pay $15 billion more in taxes because of the cost of care for the uninsured. And it's trapped us in a vicious cycle. As the uninsured cause premiums to rise, more employers drop coverage. As more employers drop coverage, more people become uninsured, and premiums rise even further.
But the skeptics tell us that reform is too costly, too risky, too impossible for America.
Well the skeptics must be living somewhere else. Because when you see what the health care crisis is doing to our families, to our economy, to our country, you realize that caution is what's costly. Inaction is what's risky. Doing nothing is what's impossible when it comes to health care in America.
It's time to act. This isn't a problem of money, this is a problem of will. A failure of leadership. We already spend $2.2 trillion a year on health care in this country. My colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, who's recently developed a bold new health care plan of his own, tells it this way:
For the money Americans spent on health care last year, we could have hired a group of skilled physicians, paid each one of them $200,000 to care for just seven families, and guaranteed every single American quality, affordable health care.
So where's all that money going? We know that a quarter of it - one out of every four health care dollars - is spent on non-medical costs; mostly bills and paperwork. And we also know that this is completely unnecessary. Almost every other industry in the world has saved billions on these administrative costs by doing it all online. Every transaction you make at a bank now costs them less than a penny. Even at the Veterans Administration, where it used to cost nine dollars to pull up your medical record, new technology means you can call up the same record on the internet for next to nothing.
But because we haven't updated technology in the rest of the health care industry, a single transaction still costs up to twenty-five dollars - not one dime of which goes toward improving the quality of our health care.
This is simply inexcusable, and if we brought our entire health care system online, something everyone from Ted Kennedy to Newt Gingrich believes we should do, we'd already be saving over $600 million a year on health care costs.
The federal government should be leading the way here. If you do business with the federal employee health benefits program, you should move to an electronic claims system. If you are a provider who works with Medicare, you should have to report your patient's health outcomes, so that we can figure out, on a national level, how to improve health care quality. These are all things experts tell us must be done but aren't being done. And the federal government should lead.
Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry. It's perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.
At a time when businesses are facing increased competition and workers rarely stay with one company throughout their lives, we also have to ask if the employer-based system of health care itself is still the best for providing insurance to all Americans. We have to ask what we can do to provide more Americans with preventative care, which would mean fewer doctor's visits and less cost down the road. We should make sure that every single child who's eligible is signed up for the children's health insurance program, and the federal government should make sure that our states have the money to make that happen. And we have to start looking at some of the interesting ideas on comprehensive reform that are coming out of states like Maine and Illinois and California, to see what we can replicate on a national scale and what will move us toward that goal of universal coverage for all.
But regardless of what combination of policies and proposals get us to this goal, we must reach it. We must act. And we must act boldly. As one health care advocate recently said, "The most expensive course is to do nothing." But it wasn't a liberal Democrat or union leader who said this.
It was the president of the very health industry association that funded the "Harry and Louise" ads designed to kill the Clinton health care plan in the early nineties.
The debate in this country over health care has shifted. The support for comprehensive reform that organizations like Families USA have worked so hard to build is now widespread, and the diverse group of business and health industry interests that are part of your Health Care Coverage Coalition is a testament to that success. And so Washington no longer has an excuse for caution. Leaders no longer have a reason to be timid. And America can no longer afford inaction. That's not who we are - and that's not the story of our nation's improbable progress.
Half a century ago, America found itself in the midst of another health care crisis. For millions of elderly Americans, the single greatest cause of poverty and hardship was the crippling cost of health care and the lack of affordable insurance. Two out of every three elderly Americans had annual incomes of less than $1,000, and only one in eight had health insurance.
As health care and hospital costs continued to rise, more and more private insurers simply refused to insure our elderly, believing they were too great of a risk to care for.
The resistance to action was fierce. Proponents of health care reform were opposed by well-financed, well-connected interest groups who spared no expense in telling the American people that these efforts were "dangerous" and "un-American," "revolutionary" and even "deadly."
And yet the reformers marched on. They testified before Congress and they took their case to the country and they introduced dozens of different proposals but always, always they stood firm on their goal to provide health care for every American senior. And finally, after years of advocacy and negotiation and plenty of setbacks, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law on July 30th of 1965.
The signing ceremony was held in Missouri, in a town called Independence, with the first man who was bold enough to issue the call for universal health care - President Harry Truman.
And as he stood with Truman by his side and signed what would become the most successful government program in history - a program that had seemed impossible for so long - President Johnson looked out at the crowd and said, "History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history."
Never forget that we have it within our power to shape history in this country. It is not in our character to sit idly by as victims of fate or circumstance, for we are a people of action and innovation, forever pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Now is the time to push those boundaries once more. We have come so far in the debate on health care in this country, but now we must finally answer the call first issued by Truman, advanced by Johnson, and fought for by so many leaders and Americans throughout the last century. The time has come for universal health care in America. And I look forward to working with all of you to meet this challenge in the weeks and months to come. Thank you.
Floor Statement on Bush’s Decision to Increase Troops in Iraq
January 19, 2007
Mr. President, I would like to speak briefly on what is a roiling debate not only in the Senate but across the country, and that is the President's policy with respect to Iraq. There are countless reasons the American people have lost confidence in the President's Iraq policy, but chief among them has been the administration's insistence on making promises and assurances about progress and victory that do not appear to be grounded in the reality of the facts. We have been told we would be greeted as liberators. We have been promised the insurgency was in its last throes. We have been assured again and again that we are making progress and that the Iraqis would soon stand up so we could stand down and our brave sons and daughters could start coming home. We have been asked to wait, we have been asked to be patient, and we have been asked to give the President and the new Iraqi Government 6 more months, and then 6 more months after that, and then 6 more months after that.
Now, after the loss of more than 3,000 American lives, after spending almost $400 billion, after Iraq has descended into civil war, we have been promised, once again, that the President's plan to escalate the war in Iraq will, this time, be well planned, well coordinated, and well supported by the Iraqi Government. This time, we didn't have to wait to find out that none of this seems to be the case. Already, American military officials have told the New York Times that there is no clear chain of command between Iraqis and U.S. commanders and no real indication that the Iraqis even want such a partnership. Yesterday, Prime Minister al-Maliki, the person whom the President said had brought this plan to us, the man who is supposed to be our partner-in-chief for this new plan, told foreign journalists that if the United States would only give his Army better weapons and equipment, our soldiers could go home.
The President's decision to move forward with this escalation anyway, despite all evidence and military advice to the contrary, is the terrible consequence of the decision to give him the broad, open-ended authority to wage this war back in 2002. Over 4 years later, we can't revisit that decision or reverse some of the tragic outcomes, but what we can do is make sure we provide the kind of oversight and constraints on the President this time that we failed to do the last time.
I cannot in good conscience support this escalation. It is a policy which has already been tried and a policy which has failed. Just this morning, I had veterans of the Iraq war visit my office to explain to me that this surge concept is, in fact, no different from what we have repeatedly tried, but with 20,000 troops, we will not in any imaginable way be able to accomplish any new progress.
The fact is that we have tried this road before. In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war. As the President's own military commanders have said, escalation only prevents the Iraqis from taking more responsibility for their own future. It is even eroding our efforts in the wider war on terror as some of the extra soldiers will come directly from Afghanistan, where the Taliban has become resurgent.
The President has offered no evidence that more U.S. troops will be able to pressure Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds toward the necessary political settlement, and he has attached no consequences to his plan should the Iraqis fail to make progress. In fact, just last week, when I repeatedly asked Secretary Rice what would happen if the Iraqi Government failed to meet the benchmarks the President has called for and says are an integral part of their rationale for escalation, she couldn't give me an answer. When I asked her if there were any circumstances whatsoever in which we would tell the Iraqis that their failure to make progress means the end of our military commitment, she could not give me an answer. This is simply not good enough. When you ask how many more months and how many more dollars and how many more lives it will take to end the policy that everyone now knows has not succeeded, ``I don't know'' isn't good enough.
Over the past 4 years, we have given this administration every chance to get this right, and they have disappointed us many times. But ultimately it is our brave men and women in uniform and their families who bear the greatest burden for these mistakes. They have performed in an exemplary fashion. At no stage have they faltered in the mission that has been presented to them.
Unfortunately, the strategy, the tactics, and the mission itself have been flawed. That is why Congress now has the duty to prevent even more mistakes and bring this war to a responsible end. That is why I plan to introduce legislation which I believe will stop the escalation of this war by placing a cap on the number of soldiers in Iraq. I wish to emphasize that I am not unique in taking this approach. I know Senator Dodd has crafted similar legislation. Senator Clinton, I believe, yesterday indicated she shared similar views. The cap would not affect the money spent on the war or on our troops, but it would write into law that the number of U.S. forces in Iraq should not exceed the number that were there on January 10, 2007, the day the President announced his escalation policy.
This measure would stop the escalation of the war in Iraq, but it is my belief that simply opposing the surge is not good enough. If we truly believe the only solution in Iraq is a political one--and I fervently believe that--if we believe a phased redeployment of U.S. forces in Iraq is the best--perhaps only--leverage we have to force a settlement between the country's warring factions, then we should act on that. That is why the second part of my legislation is a plan for phased redeployment that I called for in a speech in Chicago 2 months ago. It is a responsible plan that protects American troops without causing Iraq to suddenly descend into chaos. The President must announce to the Iraqi people that within 2 to 4 months, under this plan, U.S. policy will include a gradual and substantial reduction in U.S. forces. The President should then work with our military commanders to map out the best plan for such a redeployment and determine precise levels and dates.
Drawing down our troops in Iraq will put pressure on Iraqis to arrive at the political settlement that is needed and allow us to redeploy additional troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region, as well as bring some back home. The forces redeployed elsewhere in the region could then help to prevent the conflict in Iraq from becoming a wider war, something that every international observer is beginning to worry about. It will also reassure our allies in the Gulf. It will allow our troops to strike directly at al-Qaida wherever it may exist and demonstrate to international terrorist organizations that they have not driven us from the region.
My plan would couple this phased redeployment with an enhanced effort to train Iraqi security forces and would expand the number of our personnel--especially special forces--who are deployed with Iraqis as unit advisers and would finally link continued economic aid in Iraq with the existence of tangible progress toward reducing sectarian violence and reaching a political settlement.
One final aspect of this plan that I believe is critical is it would call for engagement by the United States in a regional conference with other countries that are involved in the Middle East--particularly our allies, but including Syria and Iran--to find a solution to the war in Iraq. We have to realize that neither Iran nor Syria wants to see the security vacuum in Iraq filled with chaos, terrorism, refugees, and violence, as it could have a destabilizing effect throughout the entire region and within their own countries. So as odious as the behavior of those regimes may be at times, it is important that we include them in a broader conversation about how we can stabilize Iraq.
In closing, let me say this: I have been a consistent and strong opponent of this war. I have also tried to act responsibly in that opposition to ensure that, having made the decision to go into Iraq, we provide our troops, who perform valiantly, the support they need to complete their mission. I have also stated publicly that I think we have both strategic interests and humanitarian responsibilities in ensuring that Iraq is as stable as possible under the circumstances.
Finally, I said publicly that it is my preference not to micromanage the Commander-in-Chief in the prosecution of war. Ultimately, I do not believe that is the ideal role for Congress to play. But at a certain point, we have to draw a line. At a certain point, the American people have to have some confidence that we are not simply going down this blind alley in perpetuity.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried-and-failed policy, opposed by generals and experts, opposed by Democrats and Republicans, opposed by Americans and even the Iraqis themselves. It is time to change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back, and it is time to refocus America's effort on the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.
Mr. President, I would like to speak briefly on what is a roiling debate not only in the Senate but across the country, and that is the President's policy with respect to Iraq. There are countless reasons the American people have lost confidence in the President's Iraq policy, but chief among them has been the administration's insistence on making promises and assurances about progress and victory that do not appear to be grounded in the reality of the facts. We have been told we would be greeted as liberators. We have been promised the insurgency was in its last throes. We have been assured again and again that we are making progress and that the Iraqis would soon stand up so we could stand down and our brave sons and daughters could start coming home. We have been asked to wait, we have been asked to be patient, and we have been asked to give the President and the new Iraqi Government 6 more months, and then 6 more months after that, and then 6 more months after that.
Now, after the loss of more than 3,000 American lives, after spending almost $400 billion, after Iraq has descended into civil war, we have been promised, once again, that the President's plan to escalate the war in Iraq will, this time, be well planned, well coordinated, and well supported by the Iraqi Government. This time, we didn't have to wait to find out that none of this seems to be the case. Already, American military officials have told the New York Times that there is no clear chain of command between Iraqis and U.S. commanders and no real indication that the Iraqis even want such a partnership. Yesterday, Prime Minister al-Maliki, the person whom the President said had brought this plan to us, the man who is supposed to be our partner-in-chief for this new plan, told foreign journalists that if the United States would only give his Army better weapons and equipment, our soldiers could go home.
The President's decision to move forward with this escalation anyway, despite all evidence and military advice to the contrary, is the terrible consequence of the decision to give him the broad, open-ended authority to wage this war back in 2002. Over 4 years later, we can't revisit that decision or reverse some of the tragic outcomes, but what we can do is make sure we provide the kind of oversight and constraints on the President this time that we failed to do the last time.
I cannot in good conscience support this escalation. It is a policy which has already been tried and a policy which has failed. Just this morning, I had veterans of the Iraq war visit my office to explain to me that this surge concept is, in fact, no different from what we have repeatedly tried, but with 20,000 troops, we will not in any imaginable way be able to accomplish any new progress.
The fact is that we have tried this road before. In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war. As the President's own military commanders have said, escalation only prevents the Iraqis from taking more responsibility for their own future. It is even eroding our efforts in the wider war on terror as some of the extra soldiers will come directly from Afghanistan, where the Taliban has become resurgent.
The President has offered no evidence that more U.S. troops will be able to pressure Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds toward the necessary political settlement, and he has attached no consequences to his plan should the Iraqis fail to make progress. In fact, just last week, when I repeatedly asked Secretary Rice what would happen if the Iraqi Government failed to meet the benchmarks the President has called for and says are an integral part of their rationale for escalation, she couldn't give me an answer. When I asked her if there were any circumstances whatsoever in which we would tell the Iraqis that their failure to make progress means the end of our military commitment, she could not give me an answer. This is simply not good enough. When you ask how many more months and how many more dollars and how many more lives it will take to end the policy that everyone now knows has not succeeded, ``I don't know'' isn't good enough.
Over the past 4 years, we have given this administration every chance to get this right, and they have disappointed us many times. But ultimately it is our brave men and women in uniform and their families who bear the greatest burden for these mistakes. They have performed in an exemplary fashion. At no stage have they faltered in the mission that has been presented to them.
Unfortunately, the strategy, the tactics, and the mission itself have been flawed. That is why Congress now has the duty to prevent even more mistakes and bring this war to a responsible end. That is why I plan to introduce legislation which I believe will stop the escalation of this war by placing a cap on the number of soldiers in Iraq. I wish to emphasize that I am not unique in taking this approach. I know Senator Dodd has crafted similar legislation. Senator Clinton, I believe, yesterday indicated she shared similar views. The cap would not affect the money spent on the war or on our troops, but it would write into law that the number of U.S. forces in Iraq should not exceed the number that were there on January 10, 2007, the day the President announced his escalation policy.
This measure would stop the escalation of the war in Iraq, but it is my belief that simply opposing the surge is not good enough. If we truly believe the only solution in Iraq is a political one--and I fervently believe that--if we believe a phased redeployment of U.S. forces in Iraq is the best--perhaps only--leverage we have to force a settlement between the country's warring factions, then we should act on that. That is why the second part of my legislation is a plan for phased redeployment that I called for in a speech in Chicago 2 months ago. It is a responsible plan that protects American troops without causing Iraq to suddenly descend into chaos. The President must announce to the Iraqi people that within 2 to 4 months, under this plan, U.S. policy will include a gradual and substantial reduction in U.S. forces. The President should then work with our military commanders to map out the best plan for such a redeployment and determine precise levels and dates.
Drawing down our troops in Iraq will put pressure on Iraqis to arrive at the political settlement that is needed and allow us to redeploy additional troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region, as well as bring some back home. The forces redeployed elsewhere in the region could then help to prevent the conflict in Iraq from becoming a wider war, something that every international observer is beginning to worry about. It will also reassure our allies in the Gulf. It will allow our troops to strike directly at al-Qaida wherever it may exist and demonstrate to international terrorist organizations that they have not driven us from the region.
My plan would couple this phased redeployment with an enhanced effort to train Iraqi security forces and would expand the number of our personnel--especially special forces--who are deployed with Iraqis as unit advisers and would finally link continued economic aid in Iraq with the existence of tangible progress toward reducing sectarian violence and reaching a political settlement.
One final aspect of this plan that I believe is critical is it would call for engagement by the United States in a regional conference with other countries that are involved in the Middle East--particularly our allies, but including Syria and Iran--to find a solution to the war in Iraq. We have to realize that neither Iran nor Syria wants to see the security vacuum in Iraq filled with chaos, terrorism, refugees, and violence, as it could have a destabilizing effect throughout the entire region and within their own countries. So as odious as the behavior of those regimes may be at times, it is important that we include them in a broader conversation about how we can stabilize Iraq.
In closing, let me say this: I have been a consistent and strong opponent of this war. I have also tried to act responsibly in that opposition to ensure that, having made the decision to go into Iraq, we provide our troops, who perform valiantly, the support they need to complete their mission. I have also stated publicly that I think we have both strategic interests and humanitarian responsibilities in ensuring that Iraq is as stable as possible under the circumstances.
Finally, I said publicly that it is my preference not to micromanage the Commander-in-Chief in the prosecution of war. Ultimately, I do not believe that is the ideal role for Congress to play. But at a certain point, we have to draw a line. At a certain point, the American people have to have some confidence that we are not simply going down this blind alley in perpetuity.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried-and-failed policy, opposed by generals and experts, opposed by Democrats and Republicans, opposed by Americans and even the Iraqis themselves. It is time to change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back, and it is time to refocus America's effort on the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.
Barack Obama: My Plans for 2008
January 16, 2007
As many of you know, over the last few months I have been thinking hard about my plans for 2008. Running for the presidency is a profound decision - a decision no one should make on the basis of media hype or personal ambition alone - and so before I committed myself and my family to this race, I wanted to be sure that this was right for us and, more importantly, right for the country.
I certainly didn't expect to find myself in this position a year ago. But as I've spoken to many of you in my travels across the states these past months; as I've read your emails and read your letters; I've been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics.
So I've spent some time thinking about how I could best advance the cause of change and progress that we so desperately need.
The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put our country in a precarious place. Our economy is changing rapidly, and that means profound changes for working people. Many of you have shared with me your stories about skyrocketing health care bills, the pensions you've lost and your struggles to pay for college for your kids. Our continued dependence on oil has put our security and our very planet at risk. And we're still mired in a tragic and costly war that should have never been waged.
But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics. America's faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions.
And that's what we have to change first.
We have to change our politics, and come together around our common interests and concerns as Americans.
This won't happen by itself. A change in our politics can only come from you; from people across our country who believe there's a better way and are willing to work for it.
Years ago, as a community organizer in Chicago, I learned that meaningful change always begins at the grassroots, and that engaged citizens working together can accomplish extraordinary things.
So even in the midst of the enormous challenges we face today, I have great faith and hope about the future - because I believe in you.
And that's why I wanted to tell you first that I'll be filing papers today to create a presidential exploratory committee. For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about the challenges we face as a nation, the opportunities that lie before us, and the role that a presidential campaign might play in bringing our country together. And on February 10th, at the end of these decisions and in my home state of Illinois, I'll share my plans with my friends, neighbors and fellow Americans.
In the meantime, I want to thank all of you for your time, your suggestions, your encouragement and your prayers. And I look forward to continuing our conversation in the weeks and months to come.
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