A High Price for a Hollow Victory

Sen. Byrd delivered the following remarks on November 3, 2003, before the Senate granted approval to the President's $87 billion funding request.

The Iraq supplemental conference report before the Senate today has been widely described as a victory for President Bush. If hardball politics and lock-step partisanship are the stuff of which victory is made, then I suppose the assessments are accurate. But if reasoned discourse, integrity and accountability are the measures of true victory, then this package falls far short of the mark.

In the end, the president wrung virtually every important concession he sought from the House-Senate conference committee. Key provisions that the Senate had debated extensively, voted on, and included in its version of the bill—such as providing half of the Iraq reconstruction funding in the form of loans instead of grants—were thrown overboard in the conference agreement. Senators who had made compelling arguments on the Senate floor only days earlier to limit American taxpayers' liability by providing some of the Iraq reconstruction aid in the form of loans suddenly reversed their position in conference and bowed to the power of the presidency.

Before us today is a massive $87 billion supplemental appropriations package that commits this nation to a long and costly occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, and yet the collective wisdom of the House and Senate appropriations conference that produced it was little more than a shadow play, choreographed to stifle dissent and rubber stamp the president's request.

Perhaps this take-no-prisoners approach is how the president and his advisers define victory, but I fear they are fixated on the muscle of the politics instead of the wisdom of the policy. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to policy, the Iraq supplemental is a monument to failure.

Consider, for example, that before the war, the president's policy advisers assured the American people that Iraq would largely be able to finance its own reconstruction through oil revenues, seized assets, and increased economic productivity. The $18 billion in this supplemental earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq is testament to the fallacy of that prediction. It is the American taxpayer, not the Iraqi oil industry, that is being called upon to shoulder the financial burden of rebuilding Iraq.

The international community, on which the administration pinned such hope for helping in the reconstruction of Iraq, has collectively ponied up only $13 billion, and the bulk of those pledges, $9 billion, is in the form of loans or credits, not grants. But still, the president claims victory for arm-twisting Congress into reversing itself on the question of loans and providing the entire $18 billion in U.S. tax dollars in the form of outright grants to Iraq. I readily admit that how this convoluted logic can be construed as a victory for the president is beyond me.

But reconstruction is only part of the story. On May 1, the president stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln—strategically postured beneath a banner that declared "Mission Accomplished"—and pronounced the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

Since that day, however, more American military personnel have been killed in Iraq than were killed during the major combat phase of the war. According to the Defense Department, 376 American troops have been killed to date in Iraq, and nearly two-thirds of those deaths—238—have occurred since May 1. When President Bush uttered the unwise challenge, "Bring 'em on" on July 2, the enemy did indeed "bring them on", and with a vengeance! Since the president made that comment, more than 165 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. And as the death toll mounts, it has become clear that the enemy intends to keep on "bringing 'em on."