Foreign Affairs Hearing on GAO Iraq Findings

"The long-awaited Administration report next week will undoubtedly say that sectarian violence is declining. It is not. In a desperate effort to show the surge is working, the Administration has attempted to cook the books by excluding large numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties from its estimates, arguing that only certain types of deaths are due to sectarian violence. But the families of the dead know better than to write them off that way. According to the Government Accountability Office, overall attacks on Iraqi civilians have not dropped, and the Administration's own National Intelligence Estimate states: 'The level of overall violence, including attacks on, and casualties among civilians, remains high.'"

"All along the Administration and others here in Congress have said 'Wait 'til September.' We told the American people, 'Wait 'til September.' And now September's here, your report is here, and already they're shooting darts through it. There's much truth in your report, and I commend you highly for it. But I want to mention a few things General Casey has just said. He said our forces are stretched out of our balance, the temper of our deployments are not sustainable, our equipment usage is five times the normal rate, and continues to be operating in harsh environments. Major General Benjamin Mixon said last week, 'I have not seen any improvement really in the year I've been here. Regarding the Iraqi security forces, progress is slower than it should be inside the Iraqi army in particular.'"

"There's frankly been more progress on the security from what we've done, not from what the Iraqis have done, but what we've done, than there has been on the political front, and clearly the biggest gap is on the political front. But one must keep in mind what was the purpose of the surge. The purpose of the surge was to provide breathing room so that political progress could be made. That is the stated purpose of the surge. So far we haven't seen that political progress -- hopefully that will change, hopefully that will change -- but that was the stated purpose of the surge."

"It would be difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the psychological costs. I will say we now have an all-volunteer force. And that is a very significant difference from what we had, for example, during the Vietnam conflict, and one needs to keep that in mind. Secondly, there's not a lot of shared sacrifice because we're not paying for this war. We're debt financing this war. And our grandkids are going to pay it off with interest, compound interest."