May 16, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 82 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
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Iran (Executive Session); Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 82
(Senate - May 16, 2019)
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[Pages S2908-S2911] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] Iran Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, years before President Trump moved to the White House, even before President Obama and his family lived there, our Nation was at odds with an isolated country ruled by a repressive leader. It wasn't long before it became clear to the United Nations and to our country's own intelligence community that the country I am speaking of was enriching uranium for the purpose of obtaining a nuclear weapon, threatening to destabilize a region of great strategic importance. As the world was winding down from a cold war, tensions between the United States and this country were heating up. An administration that some would call naive recently attempted to deescalate tensions, taking an unprecedented step to hold out an olive branch to an unpredictable regime in hopes of reaching a momentous agreement to stop them from continuing to enrich uranium. Surprisingly, that President trusted and was willing to give unprecedented concessions, all without any reliable mechanism to verify whether the nuclear enrichment had indeed ended. My Republican colleagues would be surprised to hear me say this today, especially today, a week after the anniversary of the U.S. decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. They are right to be surprised because I am not talking about Iran; I am talking about North Korea. I am not talking about President Barack Obama; I am talking about Donald Trump. Donald Trump was willing to sit down with a criminal dictator and give away unprecedented concessions in the hopes that North Korea would abandon its nuclear program. On the other hand, he turned his back on Iran, a large country with a growing moderate population--roughly 75 million people, the majority of which, the last I checked, are under the age of 25--and a moderate President. Let me be really clear. There are some bad actors in Iran, and some of them are in powerful positions. But, unfortunately, the actions of this administration, unlike the actions of the last administration, the Obama administration--here is what they sought to do. They sought to diminish the extremists, the hardliners, and their sway over what happens in Iran and at the same time bolster a new generation of Iranians who are growing up, who are more moderate in nature and, frankly, who would like to have a better relationship with our country. Sadly, President Trump turned his back on Iran and looked forward to taking a different course--a different course for sure. Unlike North Korea, Iran committed 2 years ago to unprecedented, invasive inspections under a deal called JCPOA. On July 14, 2015, after years of careful preparation, the Obama administration began implementing the JCPOA with Iran and five negotiating partners--Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China--in an effort to end Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons for years and, possibly, if we are lucky, forever. The deal was not based on trust; it was based on mistrust-- mistrust. There is a Ronald Reagan line that says: ``Trust, but verify.'' That is not the underlying principle with the Iran deal, the JCPOA. It is mistrust, but verify. That is the theme that underlies the JCPOA. Under that agreement, Iran was required to end uranium enrichment for nuclear purposes and would be subject to invasive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. To the surprise of many, they had apparently held up their end of the bargain until now. We pulled out of the JCPOA a year ago. Our other negotiating partners stayed in, and the IAEA recently certified for the 14th time in a row-- I think in February of this year--that Iran has complied with the terms of the agreement, the letter and spirit of the agreement that we pulled out of a year ago. We are the only one who has pulled out of it to date. The IAEA itself says that the inspection regime laid out by this agreement, the JCPOA, is the world's toughest--the world's toughest. Here is the bottom line. Because of the JCPOA, Iran is much further away from developing a nuclear weapon today than it was before the deal was signed several years ago. However, as I said earlier, we have not held up our end of the bargain. One year ago, President Trump announced that this country would unilaterally leave the JCPOA, even though the IAEA certified for the 14th time in a row, this year, that Iran has complied with the terms of the agreement. But we pulled out, leaving our allies, who committed to the deal in good faith, in the lurch. This decision we made, I think regrettably a year ago, had consequences. Instead of celebrating continued stability provided by the Iran nuclear deal last week, Iran's President, President Rouhani, announced that Iran will begin to end its compliance with some portions of the JCPOA, including by stockpiling enriched uranium and heavy water. As I said at that time, President Trump's decision increased the odds of armed conflict with Iran while doing nothing to constrain their other malicious activities in the region. Again, make no mistake. Not everybody in Iran wants to be our friend. Mostly young people want to be our friends, and a lot of folks who have been elected to office over there would like to have a friendly, better relationship with this country. But there are some who do not, and I fully acknowledge that. Today, thanks to President Trump's appointment of John Bolton to be our National Security Advisor--the President's National Security Advisor--we are seeing that prediction come truer than I could have imagined. Last month, the Trump administration designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, further antagonizing Iran. Members of the Trump administration are reportedly mulling over a plan to refuse to issue sanctions waivers to our European allies who intend to purchase oil from Iran, and the administration has reportedly drawn up plans to send 120,000 of our troops to the Middle East in response to alleged increased threats from Iran. But our allies in the region and around the world, including the French, the Brits, and the Germans, say that they have seen no such threat. All of this is happening in the absence of a Senate-confirmed Secretary of Defense. Earlier this week, I was out for a run a couple of miles from here. If you run from the Capitol down to the Lincoln Memorial and then turn around and sort of head back this way, you run by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Whenever I run alongside the memorial, I take my left hand, and with my fingers, I touch the names of 55,000 men and women who died in that war. I served with them. I am the last Vietnam veteran serving in the Senate. They died, and many of us risked our lives over a war that was based--really, premised--on an untruth; some would say a lie. [[Page S2909]] In August 1964, then-President Lyndon Johnson announced that the North Vietnamese had engaged the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin, and he asked Congress to pass a resolution supporting retaliatory attacks. The following day, he added these words to his request: ``The United States intends no rashness and seeks no wider war.'' Those were his words in August 1964. His administration went on to justify a bloody, almost decades-long war after that on the basis of that document--55,000 of my colleagues, my shipmates, my fellow marines, our soldiers, our airmen--55,000-- dead. We had a similar situation in Iraq. It did not involve the Gulf of Tonkin. It did not involve ships. It really didn't involve the Vietnamese. But there were allegations and assertions that the Iraqis were developing weapons of mass destruction. The President, the Vice President--in that case, Bush and Cheney--the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State all asserted that the Iraqis were developing weapons of mass destruction and called on this Congress to give the President the power to respond appropriately. There are 55,000 names on the Vietnam memorial wall. There is no wall for the 4,100 men and women who died in Iraq after Congress provided President Bush the authority to respond to the alleged, perceived threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While there is no wall on which to write those 4,100 names, those names are written in graveyards in every State in this country--4,100 men, women, some young and some old, who laid down their lives on what was really based on a lie--weapons of mass destruction. I want to say that lie was chiefly perpetrated, if I am not mistaken, by a fellow named John Bolton and that administration. Fast forward to today. We have seen this movie before. Thanks to John Bolton's rash actions in the Mideast, I can see it happening again. I don't want to see it happen again. I have been to too many funerals of people, servicemembers from Delaware, who died in Iraq. I don't want to go to any more. I don't want to have to visit any more spouses, children, parents, brothers, and sisters, as we have done in recent years with families who have been crushed by sorrow flowing from our engagement in Iraq. John Bolton has agitated for war with Iran for over a decade. He even wrote an op-ed about it. The op-ed was entitled: ``To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran.'' Under Mr. Bolton's leadership, the Trump administration's Iran policy is becoming ever more dangerous and ever more isolated from our traditional allies. This strategy could very well plunge us into another foreign war, if not corrected. This needless escalation is no way to conduct our foreign policy or to safeguard our national security. What is more, the administration's actions with respect to Iran haven't just increased the odds of an armed conflict. They have also damaged the credibility of our country around the world. If the United States cannot be trusted to uphold our commitments to those with whom we negotiate, there is little reason to believe that other countries, let alone nuclear-armed ones like North Korea, would be willing to negotiate with us in good faith. Now, there is another option here. Yesterday former U.S. Ambassador Wendy Sherman published an op-ed in the New York Times in which she wrote the following: But war is not inevitable. President Trump campaigned on bringing troops home, not sending tens of thousands more to the Middle East. Such a deployment, although inadequate for a full-scale war, is more than foolish. War in the Middle East, as we should have learned by now, is neither swift to end nor sure to achieve its purpose. Reformists in Iran have expressed an interest in diplomatic solutions with the United States and our allies, including a possible prisoner exchange. The foreign minister of Iran, whom I first met a dozen years or so ago at the Iranian Ambassador's residence in New York City--not the Ambassador to the United States but the Ambassador to the United Nations, a fellow name Javad Zarif. It turned out that when I met him, I was impressed with how well-spoken he was. It turns out he had gone to undergraduate school at San Francisco State, I believe, in California. He is a really smart guy. He is not only well spoken but knew a lot about America and spoke English as well as any of us in the room. He went to graduate school in Denver, CO, and he ended up here as the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations. Later, when Ahmadinejab left office--Ahmadinejab was a bad guy, a really bad guy, and was President of Iran before Ruhani--Ahmadinejab sent Zarif back home, got him out of the United States, got him back to Iran, and he sort of disappeared until the new elections. Ruhani emerged as the more moderate--kind of a Gorbachev-type guy, really-- leader in Iran and said: Zarif, I would like you to be my foreign minister. That is like being their Secretary of State, a position that he still holds. Not long ago, about a couple of weeks ago, in that role, he suggested that we do a prisoner swap. We hold a number of people of Iranian descent who are in this country. They hold about a half dozen or so of our folks, I think mostly with dual citizenship, in their country. Foreign Minister Zarif said: Why don't we just do a straight-out prisoner swap? That would actually be a good start to maybe tamping down the rhetoric and to see if we can't find common ground with Iran again. During the 8 years of previous administrations, our foreign policy was designed to strengthen the standing of the moderates in Iran and to undermine the power of the hard-liners in that country. Actually, it worked--not perfectly, but it worked. The elections that they conducted a couple of years ago--6 years ago--reflect that. Sadly, this administration--I can't believe they did it intentionally, but their policy in the last just 2 years or a little over 2 years--what they have done is to undermine the effectiveness and the standing of the moderates in Iran, and they have rallied support of Iran around the extremists and around the hard-liners. It is just the opposite of what was done in the last administration. We have to be smarter than that. We have to be smarter than this. When I think about the contrast between the Trump administration's actions in North Korea and Iran, I can't help but wonder why there is such a stark contrast? I would not trust the leader of North Korea any further than I could throw him, and for this President to embrace this guy and to trust him in ways that befuddle me--and, I think, a lot of other folks, including folks in his party--is beyond me. But why has this administration been so determined to abrogate a carefully crafted deal that keeps Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon? Why will President Trump not work to ensure the freedom of Americans held in Iran? Well, part of the answer is provided by Thomas Friedman, a highly regarded famous journalist whose column appears from time to time in national newspapers. Tom Friedman wrote, a year or so ago, something called the ``Trump Doctrine.'' I think it provides an answer to the question: Why has President Trump been so determined to get us out of the JCPOA and to embrace a leader like the one we have over in North Korea? The ``Trump Doctrine'' from Tom Friedman goes something like this. He said: ``Obama built it, I broke it''--``I,'' being Trump--``you''-- including us here in this body--``fix it.'' That is it. ``Obama built it, I''--Donald Trump--``broke it--you''--the rest of us--``fix it.'' I think my colleagues would agree that it would be a travesty if the President's determination to destroy President Obama's achievement--an achievement shared by others in this country and by our allies and friends in, among other places, Britain, France, and Germany--but our President's determination to destroy Barack Obama's achievement, the achievements of his administration--in this case, the Iran nuclear deal--led us into another endless war in the Middle East. I urge President Trump, as he has done in the case of North Korea, to engage in diplomacy and ratchet down tensions with Iran, rather than engaging in needless provocation. Mr. President, you meet with the President more than I do, but some of the times I have been with him in the last 2 years, whenever he mentions [[Page S2910]] George W. Bush, in the same breath he talks about how he got us into a war that cost us thousands of lives and has cost literally tens of billions of dollars--the Iraq war. So that would suggest to me that the idea of drawing more troops and a whole lot more money into a war with Iran has to be something you do with care. So on this 1-year anniversary of the Trump administration's pulling out of the Iran deal--I think, foolishly doing so--I would urge the President and his advisers to think carefully about what outcomes we really seek as a country. We should be prioritizing diplomacy at this time, not escalating tensions and risking war with American lives with no coherent strategy. It is my hope that cooler heads will prevail. It is also in America's best interest that they do. John Kennedy said a lot of things that are memorable, and one of my favorites is this: ``Never negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate.'' ``Never negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate.'' I think we would be wise to remember those words with respect to Iran. The last thing I would say to the Presiding Officer, who is former military, is this. When I finish speaking, you are going to be succeeded by a Marine colonel who serves here from Alaska. We know people we serve with people who have given their lives up in combat in wars far away around the world. We are very proud in Delaware. The Dover Air Force Base may be the best airlift base in the world. There are 5,000 or 6,000 people who work there, mostly uniformed, and big planes, C-5s and C-17s. Maybe it is the best airlift base in the world. Dover Air Force Base is also home to a mortuary. A month ago, the bodies of three marines, one of whom is from Delaware, were brought back to this country. In this case, their vehicle in Afghanistan was blown up by a roadside bomb, and we lost three of them just like that. They are not the first, and, sadly, they will not be the last members of our Armed Services to come home. For one of the marines, Christopher Slutman, his body came home to his wife Shannon and to their three daughters, ages 4, 8, and 10. I have seen this movie before. I have seen it at Dover Air Force Base with countless bodies that have come back from overseas. I think about those kids every day, and I am sure my colleagues think about the men and the women from their States who have served, in some cases, with great courage and valor. But the idea that 55,000 of those colleagues of mine who served in Vietnam in a war that was premised on a lie and 4,100 are buried in graveyards all over this country--we have to be smarter than that. We owe it to not just the families of those men and women who have died but to the ones who serve today and their families. ``Never negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate.'' I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska is recognized. Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I am down here on the floor to do what I typically do on Thursday, which is talk about an Alaskan who is making a big difference in my State, somebody I refer to as the Alaskan of the Week. But, you know, this is the Senate and we have debates, and we are respectful in our debates, and there is no one in the Senate I respect more than my friend from Delaware, Senator Carper--his service in Vietnam and as a captain in the Navy. When he speaks, I listen, and I have respect. But I actually thought, very briefly--it wasn't what I was planning on doing, but I was just listening to someone I respect--I thought I would offer a bit of a counter view for those watching in the Gallery or on TV on what he just talked about. It is a really important issue, but I just happen to respectfully disagree with most--not everything, but most--of what my colleague just mentioned. So I am just going to touch on that before I talk about an Alaskan who is doing great work. Just listening to my colleague talk about President Trump's turning his back on Iran, the sanctions that we placed on Iran, which we all voted for here in the Senate, are antagonizing Iran. Foreign Minister Zarif is a moderate. Well, let me just touch on that. I think there is this new narrative that is starting to come out from my colleagues, and, again, I have a lot of respect for my good friend from Delaware, but about this kind of blame America first, blame Trump, as if the generals and admirals weren't advising him, and that Iran is some kind of this new innocent moderate that we are turning our back on and we are sanctioning them and antagonizing them. With all due respect to my colleague on the other of the aisle, this couldn't be further from the truth. Iran is no innocent. Iran is no innocent at all. Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has been for decades. As for the JCPOA, which my colleague is lamenting, I read that. I certainly dug into that. I have been involved in our broader Iran isolation policy for many years. That was the first major foreign policy national security agreement in U.S. history that had a bipartisan majority of Senators and a bipartisan majority of House Members who were against it--against it, not for it. That did not have support in this body--certainly not in the Senate, not in the House, and not from the American people. So as for this myth that somehow this was this great agreement, it wasn't. It was a giveaway--billions to the largest state sponsor of terrorism, where in 10 years they are free to go develop nuclear weapons. This was not a good agreement, and this body said so. A bipartisan majority in the House and the Senate disagreed with President Obama. A partisan minority in the House and Senate, for the first time in U.S. history, on a national security agreement of this magnitude, somehow passed it. So there is this myth that this was supported by Congress. It wasn't. Democrats and Republicans opposed it--the majority in both Houses. And by the American people, it certainly wasn't. Remember, this is the country that, after the deal and during the deal, continued to say what? We want to wipe Israel off the map. It is not a really nice, innocent nation saying that: We want to wipe Israel off the map. They continue to say that. Here is the final thing. In my 4 years in the Senate, I have only heard one other U.S. Senator--Senator Cotton from Arkansas--even talk about this issue. Starting in 2004, 2005, I was a staff officer, as a marine, to the commander of U.S. Central Command, and there was top-secret information that started to show in the region--and we were out there a lot, the Middle East--that the Iranians were supplying the Iraqi Shia militia with very sophisticated improvised explosive devices that were killing our soldiers and our marines and our sailors. The Iranians, of course, denied it. They were lying. It all came out to be true. These were infrared tripwires, explosively formed projectiles that could punch through anything-- Abrams tanks, humvees--and if you were an American soldier and you got hit by one of these, you were pretty much dead. I asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an open Armed Services Committee hearing how many American military members were killed by these Iranian IEDs, and over 2,000 was his answer--2,000. I have never heard any of my colleagues talk about that. So the notion that Foreign Minister Zarif was a moderate when he was negotiating with Secretary Kerry is belied by the facts. This Foreign minister literally had the blood of American soldiers on his hands. So I take these issues very seriously, like my colleague from Delaware does. There is this notion that our allies were all for the JCPOA. They weren't. Some of our most important allies--Israel, the Gulf Arab States, which we have been allies with for decades--were adamantly opposed, and they are the closest to Iran. So this notion that we are going to blame the administration--by the way, we keep talking about President Trump. He is getting advice from seasoned generals and admirals to reinforce our military presence in the region because they see threats. In the media right now, there is this narrative that the President is trying to drum up a war. What about the generals? What about General Dunford, a very well respected marine and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs? Are they doing this? [[Page S2911]] I just came from reading some of the intel in the SCIF that is prompting this discussion. Of course, I can't talk about it, but I support what the administration is doing with regard to reinforcing our military capabilities in the region, and this is the reason: It sends a message to Iran that if they are going to try to do what they did in 2004, 2005, and 2006, which is kill and wound thousands of our military members, we are going to have the capability to make them pay. I don't like seeing anyone coming through Dover Air Force Base, either, but over 2,000 of our troops were killed and wounded by these leaders of the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. The notion that somehow they are some kind of innocent country that we are antagonizing or ``turning our back on'' is not accurate. So watch out for the new narrative that the Iranians are the innocents and that somehow we are being provocative. What is provocative is killing our troops, which they have a long history of doing--in Lebanon, the marines--and we need to send a signal that if they are going to look at doing this again or trying to or trying to kill our diplomats, it is not going to be so easy this time. I support what is happening there, and I hope my colleagues will. We are going to get a briefing by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the CIA next week on this, which I think is appropriate. Let's remember who the real bad guys are. We are Americans. Yes, we have political differences, but somehow, if we start to make this narrative that Iran is the innocent and somehow the Trump guys--John Bolton, for example--are some kind of evil people--come on. Come on, really? The largest state sponsor of terrorism, responsible for killing and maiming and wounding thousands of American soldiers, the best and brightest in our country, and we are the bad guys? I don't think so. So watch out for that narrative. I certainly hope it is not going to be something my colleagues on the other side of the aisle start getting out there. It is already in the media. You have the former negotiator for President Obama making these statements that, somehow, poor Iran; all-bad America. I am not a big ``blame America first'' member, and I think we need to be really careful when we talk about trying to demonize our generals, admirals, and national security advisers and make the Iranians look like they are some kind of innocents when they are not. I wish more of my colleagues would talk about the number of dead military members killed and wounded by the Quds Force in Iran, because they never do. No one here ever talks about it. Amnesia. (Thereupon, Mr. Scott of Florida assumed the Chair.)
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