Troop Surge Enters Defense Bill Debate
Senators debate troop withdrawal and the effectiveness of the surge in Iraq.
July 10, 2007 — -- With President Bush set to offer Congress his assessment of the surge strategy and Congress clamoring for troop withdrawal, senators took up the Iraq debate again, clashing over the fundamental question: whether U.S. troops are adding to the chaos in Iraq or tamping it down.
As the president pleaded for patience in a Cleveland speech, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, slated to give a surge assessment to Congress later this week, roamed Senate office buildings attempting to shore up support for the surge strategy as fissures in GOP support continue.
Senate Democrats, who advocate a timeline for withdrawal, are using the 2008 Defense Authorization Act and the debate surrounding it to test waning Republican support of the president's Iraq policy.
On the Senate floor, American history invaded Iraq as senators from both parties defended differing opinions on the surge through stark analogies between the current Iraq involvement and the withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s.
In an impassioned floor speech, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., returning from his sixth trip to Iraq last week, first defended the troop surge in plain language.
"If we leave Iraq prematurely, jihadists around the world will interpret the withdrawal as their great victory against our great power," McCain said.
McCain also described an Iraq withdrawal as tantamount to repeating the mistakes of Vietnam.
"Then, too, the argument in the United States focused primarily on whether U.S. forces should pull out. But many who supported that withdrawal in the name of human rights did not foresee the calamity that followed which included genocide in Cambodia, tens of thousands slaughtered in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese and the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of boat people," McCain said.
"I saw it once before," said McCain, who spent years as a prisoner of war when his fighter jet was shot down over Vietnam.
"I saw a defeated military and I saw how long it took a military that was defeated to recover. And I saw a divided nation beset by assassinations and riots and a breakdown in a civil society."
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