[Senate Hearing 115-199]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 115-199
UNITED STATES POLICY AND STRATEGY IN
THE MIDDLE EAST
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2017
__________
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COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma JACK REED, Rhode Island
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi BILL NELSON, Florida
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
TOM COTTON, Arkansas JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
JONI ERNST, Iowa RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
THOM TILLIS, North Carolina JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii
DAVID PERDUE, Georgia TIM KAINE, Virginia
TED CRUZ, Texas ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
BEN SASSE, Nebraska ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts
LUTHER STRANGE, Alabama GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
Christian D. Brose, Staff Director
Elizabeth L. King, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
_________________________________________________________________________
December 14, 2017
Page
United States Policy and Strategy in the Middle East............. 1
Crocker, Ambassador Ryan C., Diplomat-in-Residence, Woodrow 5
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton
University.
Edelman, Ambassador Eric S., Counselor, Center for Strategic and 6
Budgetary Assessments.
Jeffrey, Ambassador James F., Philip Solondz Distinguished 15
Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Jones, Ambassador Stuart E., Vice President, The Cohen Group..... 19
(iii)
U.S. POLICY AND STRATEGY IN
THE MIDDLE EAST
----------
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2017
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:00 a.m. in
Room SD-G50, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator James
Inhofe presiding.
Members present: Senators Inhofe, Wicker, Fischer, Cotton,
Rounds, Ernst, Tillis, Sullivan, Perdue, Cruz, Sasse, Reed,
Nelson, McCaskill, Shaheen, Gillibrand, Blumenthal, Donnelly,
Kaine, King, Heinrich, Warren, and Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JAMES INHOFE
Senator Inhofe. The hearing will come to order.
The committee meets today to receive testimony on the U.S.
policy and strategy in the Middle East.
First of all and foremost, I want to submit for the record
the statement by Chairman McCain, who is not here today.
[The prepared statement of Senator McCain follows:]
Prepared Statement by SASC Chairman John McCain
Washington, DC--U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) submitted the
following statement for the record on behalf of Senator John McCain (R-
AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today at a
hearing on U.S. policy and strategy in the Middle East:
``The Senate Armed Services Committee meets today to receive
testimony on U.S. policy and strategy in the Middle East.
``When we last met to discuss the region some months ago, the
situation was vastly different than the one we see today. The United
States and its coalition partners have achieved great success against
ISIS, liberating its former capital of Raqqa and forcing it out of
major cities across Iraq. The caliphate that terrorists claimed would
overrun the Middle East has diminished significantly in physical size,
despite the persistent influence of its ideology.
``Our achievements are worth celebrating. But our challenges in the
region remain daunting despite our hard-won tactical victories. Our
relentless and essential focus on destroying ISIS has obscured a
troubling reality: the United States lacks a clear, comprehensive
strategy that addresses the Middle East in all of its complexity.
``This is part of the unfortunate legacy that the last
administration left for its successor. But nearly one year into this
administration, we still lack clarity on essential questions about our
nation's role in the Middle East. We are left to observe the
intensifying symptoms of a collapsing regional order as bystanders.
While in some cases we are bystanders who take action, we do so with
unstated and often unclear objectives.
``Our power and influence are diminishing in the Middle East as a
result of our lack of direction, and the vacuum has been filled by
forces working contrary to American interests. Consider the events that
have swept the region in recent months.
``In Syria, the Assad regime--backed by Russia, Iran, and
Hezbollah--has retaken significant territory but shows no signs of
addressing the humanitarian crisis they largely created, which has
destabilized nations throughout the region and could serve as the
breeding ground for radicalization.
``In Iraq, tension between the Government of Iraq, Iranian-backed
militias, a number of Kurdish factions, and a displaced Sunni
population could transform next year's election from a triumph for that
nation into a setback that could pave the way for the resurgent
sectarian tension and minimize America's ability to support stability
in the region. The recent terrorist attacks in New York show the
persistent appeal of extremist ideology; its rise in the wake of U.S.
withdrawal years ago demonstrates the danger of leaving before winning
the peace.
``Lebanon was recently gripped by a political crisis in which Prime
Minister Hariri resigned in Saudi Arabia under the cloud of foreign
interference only to return home to reassume his authority--a welcome
development given his role as a valued partner who supports peace and
security amid divided government where Hezbollah plays a major role.
``A web of Iranian proxies and allies is spreading from the Levant
to the Arabian Peninsula, threatening stability, freedom of navigation
and the territory of our partners and allies, including with advanced
conventional weapons. Iran itself continues to menace its neighbors,
use its sanctions relief windfall to harmful ends, test ballistic
missiles, and spread weapons throughout the region.
``According to our allies and partners, Houthi rebels in Yemen
recently launched an Iranian-provided missile at the airport in Riyadh.
Meanwhile, our Arab allies are embroiled in infighting and diplomatic
disputes that weaken regional cooperation and coalition efforts in the
face of these pressing threats.
``Saudi Arabia itself is in the midst of monumental change. The
recent appointment of a new crown prince, the arrest of a number of
prominent Saudi citizens, and the Kingdom's ongoing war in Yemen--which
has spawned a humanitarian crisis of its own--indicate a forcefulness
that promises progress but also raises concerns about internal
stability and regional conflict. Ultimately, it could serve to
strengthen Saudi rivals.
``The President's decision last week to recognize Jerusalem as
Israel's capital acknowledges what many of us have long believed--but
it also raises issues that must be resolved by Israelis and
Palestinians as part of a comprehensive, internationally supported
diplomatic strategy to achieve lasting peace and security.
``Meanwhile, Turkey and Egypt are both poised to grow closer to
Vladimir Putin's Russia, which casts a long shadow throughout the
region as it reestablishes itself as a power broker hostile to our
interests and our values.
``These challenges are daunting, confusing, and complex. We know we
cannot neglect them any more by virtue of hard experience--whether in
light of Iran's decades-long campaign targeting its independent-minded
neighbors in the region as well as the United States or ISIS's rise
after America turned away from Iraq and Syria. We also know that if we
keep sleepwalking on our current trajectory, we could wake up in the
near future and find that American influence has been pushed out of one
of the most important parts of the world.
``We must remain engaged in the Middle East because the stability
of the region is vital to our national interests and international
security alike. As we know, Middle Eastern instability travels far
beyond its borders--not only in the form of terrorist attacks in places
like Paris, Brussels, Ankara, the Sinai Peninsula, and San Bernardino
or fluctuations in the global economy, but in the form of refugee
crises, the proliferation of weapons, and human suffering magnified the
world over.
``If we do not consolidate our recent gains in the Middle East and
ensure that the United States and its partners are positioned to
maintain a foothold and strong relationships in the region, we will end
up facing down the same problems again and again as other demanding
challenges elsewhere arise.
``Yet despite our current predicament, this moment is not without
opportunities. The United States has numerous comparative advantages
vis-a-vis our rivals and unique opportunities to contest influence with
them in the region. The question is whether we will be resourceful
enough to capitalize upon them and wise enough to use them carefully in
view of our other commitments around the globe.
``Our witnesses are uniquely qualified to speak to how we should
engage all elements of national power in this effort. Today, we
welcome:
``Ryan Crocker, Diplomat-in-Residence at the Princeton
University and the former Ambassador to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon;
``Eric Edelman, Counselor at the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments and former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
and Ambassador to Turkey;
``James Jeffrey, Distinguished Fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy and former Ambassador to Iraq and
Turkey; and
``Stuart Jones, Vice President of the Cohen Group and
former Ambassador to Iraq and Jordan.
``Our witnesses are all distinguished veterans of our nation's
Foreign Service who, between them, possess over a century of experience
as diplomats and national security policymakers focused on the Middle
East. This kind of deep knowledge of, and experience with, our hardest
challenges in the world is the reward we reap when we invest in the men
and women of our State Department--and why it is more important than
ever that our nation continue to do so.
``Given that we have once again enjoyed success on the battlefield
against our most immediate foe, it seems appropriate to call upon our
witnesses' diplomatic experience to identify how we can consolidate our
gains, seek political solutions, and ensure peace and security. At this
critical juncture, winning the hard-fought peace in places like Iraq,
strengthening our partnerships, and deterring our adversaries is
perhaps even more of a diplomatic and economic matter than it is a
military one--and we welcome your views on how our work overseeing the
Department of Defense can support our country's broader efforts.''
Senator Inhofe. We are joined this morning by a group that
we all know well. You have all been before this committee. As I
mentioned to you a minute ago, I think most of the members of
this committee have seen you in action in the field.
Ambassador Crocker, you are a Diplomat-in-Residence with
the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
at Princeton University. You have been all over the map in the
last couple of decades.
Ambassador Eric Edelman, Counselor, Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments. By my account, this is your ninth
appearance before this committee. Does that sound right to you?
Yes.
Ambassador Jeffrey, the Philip Solondz Distinguished
Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I remember
being with you in Turkey and other places.
Ambassador Stuart Jones, Vice President of The Cohen Group.
Your presence was appreciated by, I think, every member here in
both Jordan and Iraq.
So, it is great to have all of you here.
Much of our nation's attention over the last two decades
has gone toward the Middle East in terms of military
operations, and that's appropriately so. We faced very real and
dangerous threats originating from the Middle East, and we've
seen that the problems there are extremely complex. For
example, we formed and led an international coalition to defeat
ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria], and with our local
partners on the ground in Iraq and Syria we have largely done
that. Just last Saturday, Prime Minister Abadi announced the
defeat of ISIS in Iraq.
So it's long past time for us to turn our attention to the
broader strategy and the national objectives in that region, as
our competitors are already doing, Iran and Russia.
I'm very encouraged that under the leadership of President
Trump, America is beginning to reclaim some of its worldwide
leadership that has waned for the past eight years. In October,
the Administration released an outline detailing a strategy to
counter Iranian malign influence. The President also declined
to certify the sanctions relief as a part of the Iran nuclear
deal. That was something a lot of people didn't realize, that
the President has to, on a periodic basis, keep that alive. So
we have started a process now, and I think it was the right
decision.
The President also was encouraged by the recent activity
that has taken place--by the way, some of us were with
Netanyahu when that decision was made, and I've never seen a
happier guy. At the same time, of course, he was very
encouraged by the recent decision to move the United States
Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in concert with current law
and broad bipartisan support. This is something that we decided
to do 20 years ago, and finally we're doing it. So that's good
news.
We have great witnesses. I look forward to the testimony.
Senator Reed?
STATEMENT OF SENATOR JACK REED
Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to commend Senator McCain for scheduling this
hearing and thank Chairman Inhofe for leading it today. It's
very important.
Also, let me thank the witnesses. I've had the privilege
and pleasure of working with you. You have made invaluable
contributions to the national security of the United States in
so many different capacities. When Chairman Inhofe mentioned
that Ambassador Edelman had been nine times here, I think
you're all recidivists, in a very positive way. So, thank you
very much. We are indeed fortunate to have you here today. I'm
very confident you're going to provide valuable insights for a
very challenging area of the world, the Middle East.
Working with our partners on the ground, we have made great
progress in our efforts to dismantle the so-called ISIS
caliphate. According to the United States Central Command, in
the last three years the coalition has liberated more than 4.5
million people and 52,000 square kilometers of territory from
ISIS control. This is a significant achievement for the
coalition and our Iraqi and Syrian partners.
It is also important to recognize that ISIS, al Qaeda, and
other violent extremists are not yet defeated and remain intent
on attacking the United States and our interests, while taking
advantage of opportunities afforded by destabilization in the
Middle East. Despite our operational success since ISIS, we
have not achieved similar success in addressing the political
and social challenges in the Middle East that gave rise to ISIS
in the first place. Our efforts to deal with ISIS, al Qaeda and
others, to deal them a lasting defeat must not rest with the
Department of Defense alone. Sustainable solutions will require
significant contributions from the State Department, USAID
[United States Agency for International Development], and
others.
Unfortunately, our ability to achieve such a whole-of-
government approach is hampered by massive proposed cuts to the
State Department's budget and the fact that our current
diplomats are leaving government service at an alarming rate.
Each of you has deep experience in utilizing the non-
military tools of our national power, and I hope you will
provide the committee with your views on how such tools can be
more effectively leveraged.
Violent extremism is not the only national security
challenge facing the United States in the Middle East: the
success of the Iranian nuclear deal in putting a halt to the
greatest threat facing the United States and our allies in the
region, namely a nuclear-armed Iran; the Quds forces and its
proxies continue their campaign of malign and destabilizing
activities across the region, most notably in Syria, Iraq, and
Yemen. Coupled with an increasingly assertive foreign policy
exhibited by Saudi Arabia, it is hard to imagine the
geopolitical landscape in the Middle East being more
complicated than it is today.
If we are to successfully navigate these challenges, we
need to be clear in communicating our values and objectives.
From the re-tweeting of anti-Muslim rhetoric to last week's
announcement concerning the United States Embassy in Israel,
the President has repeatedly made it more difficult for our
national security and diplomatic professionals to do their
jobs. The risk of failed United States policy in the Middle
East is significant, and we can't afford any unforced errors.
I again want to thank our witnesses not only for being here
today but for their significant contribution to our country
through their decades of work in the Foreign Service. I look
forward to your testimony. Thank you very much.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you, Senator Reed.
We'll start with you, Ambassador Crocker.
All of you know that we try to keep our comments down to
about five minutes and give our well-attended meeting here time
to ask questions.
Ambassador Crocker?
STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR RYAN C. CROCKER, DIPLOMAT-IN-RESIDENCE,
WOODROW WILSON SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS,
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Ambassador Crocker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Reed, members of the committee. It's a privilege to be here
today.
The timing, I think, is fortuitous. We are at, in my view,
a strategic inflection point with the military defeat of
Islamic State to try to answer the ``now what?'' question. As
you both said, the military defeat is necessary but, I would
suggest, not sufficient. I think it is helpful to remember what
happened when I was in Iraq, 2009 through the surge. We just
pounded Islamic State's predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, but we
could never quite eliminate them. They would find little
crevices in Mosul and up the Euphrates River Valley.
Why did they find them? It's important to remember, then as
now, that al Qaeda in Iraq and Islamic State are not, in and of
themselves, the problem. They are the symptom of the problem.
The problem has been--and this goes throughout the region--the
failure to establish good governance, the failure to establish
rule of law and institutions where all citizens in Iraq, and
now in Syria, feel safe. That has not happened.
To take, again, the 30,000-foot view, if one looks at the
modern Middle East, which is roughly 100 years old--it grew out
of World War I and the Versailles Treaty of 1919--if there is
one single consistent point of failure, it is governance. We
have seen ``isms'' come and ``isms'' go--imperialism and
colonialism under the British and the French; monarchism in
some of the central countries like Egypt and Iraq; Arab
nationalism personified by Nassar; undiluted military
authoritarianism, again in Iraq; Arab socialism in Iraq and
Syria; communism in South Yemen. Now we deal with Islamism.
The good news is that it, too, is failing. The bad news is
that the underlying issues of governance which led to the
failure of every other ``ism'' are still untreated, and if we
are unable to help our friends in the area get to a better
place on these issues, you're going to see a successor to
Islamic State. I don't know who. I do know that it will not be
good news for us.
There is a second inflection point that I'd hope we would
have a chance to address today. The United States designed and
led the post-World War II international order. That leadership
changed, or that attitude to leadership changed over the last
eight years. President Obama spoke of not being able to do
everything. That's certainly true. Too often I think that
became an excuse for not doing much of anything.
Sadly, I think we're seeing some continuity between the
administrations, from President Obama to President Trump, on
this issue. Are we going to lead? If not, who will? If not,
what might the consequences be?
So I would urge, before we back out of that international
order from post-World War II that we established and led, we
need to think about the consequences.
I would say, finally, it's hard to do any of this if you
don't have the people to do it. The budget cuts suggested by
the Administration will do severe damage to both our diplomacy
and our development. These things count. I would applaud the
Congress, which has reacted to these proposed cuts. I think
it's very important that they not go forward or you're going to
see a weakened Foreign Service far into the future with some
very significant consequences.
Lastly, truth in advertising here. I sit on the board of
Mercy Corps International. We are heavily engaged on a number
of issues. The one I'd like to highlight would be Syrian
refugees. Mercy Corps doesn't do resettlement. We focus on
keeping refugees as close to their home country as we can. So
we're extremely active in Jordan, and in Lebanon in particular.
Why? That could be the long-term ultimate danger of this
Syrian problem. We saw what happened with Palestinian refugees,
where a spirit of hopelessness in refugee camps bred an entire
generation of terrorism. We are working out there to try to get
the resources and the programs that will get young Syrian
refugees a sense that they do have a future. If that funding is
cut, as has been proposed, humanitarian aid by 40 percent, ESF
[Economic Support Fund] by almost 45 percent, we may be fueling
the next wave years down the line of terror.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you, Ambassador Crocker.
Ambassador Edelman?
STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR ERIC S. EDELMAN, COUNSELOR, CENTER FOR
STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS
Ambassador Edelman. Thank you, Chairman Inhofe and Senator
Reed, and members of the committee. It's a privilege to be
here. While I don't normally want to speak for my Foreign
Service colleagues on this panel, I think I do speak for all of
us saying that I think all of us are thinking about Senator
McCain today and wishing him very well in his recovery.
I agree with my colleague, Ryan Crocker, that we are at an
important inflection point in the Middle East, and I think for
that reason it is particularly important that the committee has
scheduled this hearing, and I cannot tell you how proud I am to
sit here in this company because I have enormous respect for my
colleagues on this panel.
What I thought I would do is just talk about three things,
really: why I think the region remains strategically important
to the United States; the two large strategic challenges I
think the United States faces in the region; and maybe some
thoughts about what we might do about those.
First, I think there is a disposition in Washington that
people talk about the Middle East today after a decade-and-a-
half of difficult and seemingly inconclusive counter-insurgency
operations in the region and growing United States energy, if
not independence, at least self-sufficiency, to want to look at
the region as something we ought to disengage from and try and
limit our liability in the region.
But I would argue that, picking up a theme that Ambassador
Crocker touched on, that as tempting as disengagement might be,
I think it's important to bear in mind that it would reverse a
strong bipartisan consensus over the past 60 years that the
maintenance of a stable regional balance of power in the Middle
East and the prevention of any external or regional power from
dominating this area of the world is vital to the nation's
security.
I think that's the case because, first of all, the energy
resources of the region remain important to our allies in
Europe and Asia, but also because global energy prices can
affect our own economy. So even with our own self-sufficiency,
were large segments of Middle Eastern oil to go offline because
of a crisis in the region, the economic impact on the United
States would be considerable.
But moreover, I think the problem is that, what Ken Pollack
at AEI [American Enterprise Institute] says, ``What happens in
the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East.'' This region
is a cauldron of poor governance and disaffection and, as a
result, a petri dish for extremism that frequently manifests
itself in terrorist attacks against our allies in the region,
our allies in Europe, and ultimately the homeland here in the
United States itself.
Since 2009, I think the United States has largely pursued a
policy of retrenchment and limited liability which I think has
had the unfortunate consequence of raising concerns about the
U.S. role as a security guarantor in the region. I think that's
been exacerbated by some of the consequences of the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] which has freed up
resources for Tehran to use for its own purposes, both to
procure weaponry for itself, but also to support its proxies in
the region, pursuing an agenda of malign activity.
I agree with my colleague that there's been more continuity
than at least I would like in the policies of the Trump
Administration, which are couched in very different rhetoric
but have broadly continued the previous administration's
policies, perhaps reflecting the views that President Trump
expressed during the campaign that the whole region, as he put
it, was one big fat quagmire. But I do think it's something
that requires some renewed attention and a new strategy.
I mentioned the twin challenges, and those I think were
touched on by my colleagues, and it won't come as any surprise
that the two challenges are Iran's quest for regional hegemony,
and very much intertwined with that is the threat, the
persistent threat of Sunni Islamic extremism, even after the
demise of the Islamic State's physical caliphate. These two
threats, I would stress, drive the region's many crises, and
they also drive one another. So Iranian expansionism and
activity and support for Shiite militias and proxies in Iraq
and Syria also fuel Sunni extremism, and vice-versa.
I think the most urgent thing that the United States needs
to do is to develop a strategy and a plan and a policy that
reflect the new realities on the ground in Syria, where Iran is
currently at its most vulnerable and potentially over-extended,
and where the potential for renewed Sunni extremism is perhaps
highest. ISIS has lost its self-declared caliphate, as Senator
Reed noted, but the presence of Russian forces, Iranian forces,
Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias, Hezbollah, et cetera, have
allowed Tehran and Moscow to emerge for the moment as the
arbiters of post-war Syria and have allowed Iran to consolidate
at least the perception that they have a land bridge that links
Tehran directly to Lebanon and to right on the Israeli and
Jordanian borders.
Although there are few really appealing options at this
point in Syria, I think we can and should exploit Iranian over-
extension there. I welcome Secretary Mattis' recent statement
that United States troops will remain in Syria to prevent the
reemergence of ISIS. I think that's a necessary first step. But
I think that will only be possible if we can help our Syrian
allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces, hold strategic territory
that's been liberated from ISIS control. I think that will help
provide leverage for the United States in determining Syria's
post-war fate, and also pose some obstacles and impose some
costs on Iran.
I think in general we need to develop more leverage with
Iran so we can impose costs more effectively, and I would make
a few suggestions about what we might do in that regard. First,
I think we ought to have public discussion about dusting off
and updating our contingency plans for neutralizing Iran's
nuclear facilities should Iran materially breach or withdraw
from the JCPOA in response either to sanctions that this body
chooses to impose or because of more vigorous United States
enforcement of the agreement itself.
Just as it appears to be doing with North Korea, I think
the Pentagon ought to be putting in place the capabilities to
potentially shoot down future Iranian ballistic missile tests.
Iran is developing a very large, very variegated ballistic
missile capability. No country that has done that on the scale
that Iran has done it has ever not ultimately become a nuclear
weapons state.
I think it's equally important for the United States to
cooperate very closely with our regional allies, and I'll defer
any further discussion of that because I believe all of my
colleagues agree with that and will want to talk about it.
I think we have to recognize that Russia has been so far an
obstacle, not a partner, in building security in this region,
and I think we would do well not to allow ourselves to be
deluded into thinking that we can somehow easily split Russia
and Iran from each other. For a lot of reasons that we could go
into, I don't think that's likely to happen.
I think we also need to increase the internal pressures on
the Iranian regime. This remains a very deeply unpopular
regime. I fear that the JCPOA has actually mostly benefitted
the hardliners in Iran because they're the ones who control the
economic sectors that stand most to benefit from the sanctions
relief. But it's also made them more dependent on a narrowing
band of loyalists to maintain stability, as everyday Iranians
feel very little benefit from the sanctions relief.
I think we can exploit all of this. A more aggressive
political information campaign can amplify international
investors' wariness of the Iranian market by highlighting the
complexities of sanctions compliance, as well as the elites'
corrupt business dealings and systematic human rights abuses.
Finally, I think we need to enforce the JCPOA to address
Iran's serial under-compliance, which is what I would call it,
with the agreement. I think this has begun to eat away at our
credibility with Iran and raises the risks of continuing
nibbling at the edges of this agreement, which when it expires
will put Iran at the cusp of having a nuclear capability, as
President Obama admitted at the time of the JCPOA's
negotiation.
Through these steps, a lot of these are difficult steps to
take, but I think we need to start taking them now because
otherwise I'm afraid we will see further erosion in the U.S.
position in the region.
With that, let me stop, and I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Edelman follows:]
Prepared Statement by the Honorable Eric Edelman
introduction
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Reed, Members of the Committee, thank
you for the opportunity to appear before you today on the need for a
coherent strategy to address the manifold challenges confronting the
United States in the Middle East. I have been intimately involved with
the region throughout my career, including as Ambassador to Turkey and
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. I have continued working on this
issue since retiring from government service in 2009 as counselor at
CSBA, as the Roger Hertog Distinguished practitioner in residence at
Johns Hopkins SAIS, and as co-chair of task forces sponsored by JINSA's
Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy and Bipartisan Policy Center.
In these capacities, I have co-authored a range of reports laying out
recommendations for U.S. strategy, but the views expressed here today
are purely my own. \1\
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\1\ I would like, however, to thank Jonathan Ruhe, Associate
Director of the Gemunder Center at JINSA for his assistance in
preparing this testimony and my colleagues on the JINSA, Bipartisan
Policy Center, and Brookings task forces cited below for instructing me
on the strategic issues that bedevil U.S. policy in the region. I would
also like to thank my CSBA colleagues whose work on a Eurasian Defense
Strategy for the United States is also reflected in this statement.
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As on other issues, our country is currently roiled in debates over
what role the United States should play in the Middle East, as well as
what role the region should play in our broader strategic calculus.
Although the Middle East remains increasingly complex and volatile, and
as the threats emanating from the region continue to threaten the U.S.
and our allies both in the region and beyond, these debates are far
from academic. I, therefore, applaud this committee for examining these
matters and assembling today's panel of distinguished Foreign Service
colleagues who have wrestled with the most intractable elements of the
problems we face in the Middle East.
the middle east still matters
It has become a cliche to say that the American public is ``war-
weary'' and supports diminished engagement with the world. There is
certainly empirical evidence for that proposition. According to poll
data from the Pew Center, in the run-up to last year's election,
Americans wanted the new president to prioritize domestic over foreign
policy by a nationwide margin of four to one, as compared to an equal
split only a decade prior. \2\ Fifteen years and counting of difficult
and seemingly inconclusive counterinsurgency (COIN) and stabilization
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus America's growing energy self-
sufficiency, have fed the growing sense that the United States must
bring the ``endless wars'' in the Middle East to a conclusion. This
perception of public pressure has led the United States to attempt to
limit its liability in the region by drawing down the U.S. military
presence and extricating ourselves from the region's seemingly endless
problems.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ ``Public Uncertain, Divided Over America's Place in the
World,'' Pew Research Center, May 5, 2016; and Richard Wike, ``Where
Americans and Europeans Agree, Disagree on Foreign Policy,'' Fact Tank,
Pew Research Center, June 14, 2016.
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However tempting a strategy of disengagement might be, we should
bear in mind that it would reverse a strong bipartisan consensus over
the past 60 years that the maintenance of a stable regional balance and
prevention of any external or regional power from dominating the Middle
East is vital to the nation's security. After World War II, the Middle
East, along with Europe and Asia, was seen as one the vital theaters in
which the Cold War confrontation with Soviet power would play out.
United States policymakers have considered access to the region's
energy resources vital for United States allies in Europe, and
ultimately for the United States itself. Moreover, the region's
strategic location--linking Europe and Asia--made it particularly
important from a geopolitical point of view.
By the late 1960s, the United States assumed de facto
responsibility as the outside guarantor of regional security. The
British relinquished their commitments east of Suez, culminating in the
Carter Doctrine, which explicitly threatened the use of United States
military force to prevent ``any outside force'' from dominating the
Persian Gulf. At the time, this was correctly understood as a response
to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the possibility that the USSR
would attempt to take advantage of the upheaval in revolutionary Iran
to extend its dominion in the region. As a practical matter, the United
States also made clear over the years that hegemony by a regional power
was equally antithetical to the U.S. national interest. It was for that
reason that the United States went to war to liberate Kuwait in 1991
and pursued a policy of ``dual containment'' against both Iraq's and
Iran's ambitions to dominate the region. \3\
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\3\ For an in-depth examination of the historical United States
role in the Middle East, see Eric S. Edelman and Whitney Morgan
McNamara, Contain, Degrade, and Defeat: A Defense Strategy for a
Troubled Middle East (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments, March 15, 2017), pp. 3-19.
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Since 2009 the United States has pursued a policy of retrenchment
and limited liability in the region that has raised questions about its
role as the Middle East's security guarantor. This was first made clear
during the Obama Administration, which expressed through policy
statements its desire to unburden America of the region altogether and
``pivot'' to East Asia. As a result, the United States withdrew from
Iraq at the end of 2011, it failed to uphold its own red line against
Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013, and President Obama
expressed a desire for Saudi Arabia and Iran to ``share the
neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.'' \4\
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\4\ Jeffrey Goldberg, ``The Obama Doctrine,'' The Atlantic, April
2016.
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The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran's nuclear
program removed some limits on Iran's power projection capabilities by
freeing up resources that Tehran subsequently redirected to its weapons
programs and support for proxies. The agreement was seen by many Sunni
Arab allies in the region as undermining United States pledges to
constrain Tehran's revisionist ambitions in the region. \5\ President
Trump's policies in the region to this point, although couched in very
different rhetoric, have broadly continued the policies of his
predecessor, perhaps reflecting the views of the Middle East he put
forth during the campaign. He called it ``one big, fat quagmire'' and
welcomed Russian intervention in Syria. Whether or not he will put into
place a different strategy remains an open question. \6\
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\5\ ``Strategy to Restore U.S. Leverage Against Iran,'' JINSA
Gemunder Center Iran Task Force, July 2017, p. 20.
\6\ ``This Week' Transcript: Donald Trump,'' ABC News, October 14,
2015.
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Notwithstanding the region's difficulties and an understandable
desire to disengage, the geostrategic and economic factors that made
the Middle East so important to our national security in the past are
just as potent today. First, despite rising U.S. energy production and
prospective self-sufficiency, real or even potential disruptions to the
flow of oil anywhere would have serious negative effects on our
economy. This is especially true of the Middle East, which contains
half of global proven oil reserves, accounts for one-third of oil
production and exports, and is home to three of the world's four
biggest oil transit chokepoints. Moreover, U.S. allies remain
vulnerable to disruptions in the flow of oil. \7\
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\7\ BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 66th edition (London:
BP, June 2017), pp. 13-24; and Energy Information Administration (EIA),
World Oil Transit Chokepoints (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Energy, July 25, 2017). See also Commission on Energy and Geopolitics,
Oil Security 2025: U.S. National Security Policy in an Era of Domestic
Oil Abundance, (Washington, DC: Securing America's Future Energy
[SAFE], 2014).
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Second, due to globalization and the region's critical location,
instability there still reverberates outward through Europe, Africa,
East Asia, and even the American homeland. \8\ This depends very little
on our direct involvement in the region, as radical Islamists have made
clear their grievances run much deeper than our footprint there. \9\
Indeed, ISIS only grew into a regional, then global, threat largely
because of our diminishing presence and the security vacuum it created.
At the same time, the Assad regime's indiscriminate offensives against
its own people have triggered massive refugee outflows that are
exacerbating Europe's already strained economic and social fabric and
threatening to overwhelm the security institutions of some our closest
allies.
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\8\ For an analysis of the continued importance of the Middle East
to the United States, see Edelman and McNamara, Contain, Degrade, and
Defeat, pp. 22-23.
\9\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost: Principles for a New
U.S. Strategy in the Middle East,'' Bipartisan Policy Center, April
2017, p. 5.
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Third, the United States has strong incentives to support our
regional allies both as a matter of our ideals and our interests. If we
are seen to be abandoning our Gulf partners in the face of Iran's
aspirations to dominate the region, or if we walk back our red lines on
Syria, how can we be trusted--by friends or by foes--to maintain our
commitments elsewhere in the world like the Baltics, the Korean
Peninsula, or the South China Sea?
addressing twin challenges
Today there are two primary, intertwined threats to U.S. interests
in the Middle East, not counting the underlying absence of a real U.S.
strategy to address them. First is Iran's quest for regional hegemony
through increasingly overt interventions in neighboring conflicts,
support for terrorist proxies, and its continuing pursuit of weapons
capabilities like ballistic missiles--capabilities that, in the long
run, only make sense in the context of achieving a nuclear capability,
which will be within reach when the terms of the JCPOA expire. The
second is the persistence of Sunni Islamic extremism, even after the
demise of the Islamic
State's physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq. These two threats
drive the region's many crises, and also one another: Iranian expansion
fuels Sunni extremism, and vice versa. \10\
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\10\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost,'' pp. 7-8.
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These twin symbiotic challenges will only grow more dangerous over
time if a security vacuum is created by an absence of U.S. leadership.
American policymakers must rebuild what Dean Acheson called
``situations of strength'' by disrupting this destabilizing dynamic
that threatens the entire region. \11\
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\11\ For the importance of building up U.S. strength more broadly
to secure U.S. national security, see Derek Chollet et al., Building
``Situations of Strength'': A National Security Strategy for the United
States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, February 2017). For the
background on Acheson, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of
Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy,
revised and expanded edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
pp. 80-81.
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adopt a post-isis strategy for syria and iraq
Most urgently, the United States needs a plan reflecting the new
realities on the ground in Syria, where Iran is currently the most
vulnerable and the potential for renascent Sunni extremism is the
highest. ISIS has lost its self-declared caliphate; at the same time,
the Assad regime is trying to take back the entire country with
significant assistance, and even direction, from Russia, Iran,
Hezbollah, and other Iranian-sponsored foreign Shi'a militias. These
gains threaten to entrench Tehran and Moscow as the arbiters of postwar
Syria, consolidating Iran's control of a ``land bridge'' connecting it
directly to Lebanon. \12\ By placing the country even more firmly under
what is sure to be seen as a Shiite thumb--one that has profoundly
alienated Syria's Sunnis--this outcome would also fuel the grievances
driving recruitment for ``ISIS 2.0,'' not to mention the local al Qaeda
affiliate Tahrir al-Sham and other jihadist groups still battling the
regime in northwest Syria. \13\
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\12\ ``Countering Iranian Expansion in Syria,'' JINSA Gemunder
Center Iran Task Force, July 2017, p. 7.
\13\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost,'' pp. 10-11.
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While there are few appealing options in Syria, we can and should
exploit Iran's overextension there to create the conditions for an
acceptable outcome. Defense Secretary Mattis' recent statement that
United States troops will remain in Syria to prevent the reemergence of
ISIS is a necessary first step. \14\ As our JINSA Iran Task Force
argued, Mattis' goal can only be accomplished if United States forces
also help our surrogates on the ground--chiefly the Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF)--hold strategic territory liberated from ISIS.
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\14\ Jamie McIntyre and Travis Tritten, ``Jim Mattis on Syria:
`We're not just going to walk away' after ISIS,'' Washington Examiner,
November 14, 2017.
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This will provide vital leverage in determining Syria's postwar
fate and pose serious obstacles to Iranian-backed forces reconquering
the entire country, thus cementing their land bridge. It will also
mitigate one of the greatest constraints on U.S. policy, which is
simply the widespread belief in the region that the U.S. wants nothing
more than to remove itself, and any leverage, as soon as ISIS is
defeated. \15\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\15\ Edelman and McNamara, Contain, Degrade, and Defeat, p. 66; and
``Countering Iranian Expansion in Syria,'' pp. 12-13.
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The conflict against ISIS has allowed Iran to strengthen its grip
over neighboring Iraq as well. As in Syria, Iran's sway over Iraq's
security and interior ministries threatens to alienate the country's
Sunnis--Arab and Kurdish--much as former prime minister Nouri al-
Maliki's purge of Sunnis contributed to ISIS running amok through Iraq
in the first place. Iran's role in Iraq also gives it influence over a
key producer in the global oil market, and its presence in Syria places
it astride the strategic crossroads of the entire region. \16\
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\16\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost,'' p. 10.
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Because an uncontested Iranian presence in these two countries
would give it a dangerous edge in its quest for Middle East supremacy,
the United States would be misguided to try to offset Iran's gains here
by pushing back in secondary theaters like Yemen. Thwarting Iran's
ambition to upend the regional order requires blocking it from creating
a chain of satellite states across the region's heartland. This should
include helping craft some form of local Sunni Arab governance to
preempt the reemergence of the kinds of sectarian and economic
grievances that fostered ISIS. Indeed, the United States will need to
promote credible, accountable and inclusive--if not always democratic--
state and local political institutions in the region more broadly if it
hopes to address the underlying permissive causes of Sunni extremism
and Iranian expansion. \17\
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\17\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost,'' pp. 11-12, 15-16.
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develop credible military leverage against iran
Limiting the spread of these twin challenges in Syria and Iraq is
the most urgent, but perhaps most difficult, task in the Middle East
confronting American policymakers. Tehran has made deep inroads in both
countries; it also shares longstanding ties with both antedating the
current situation.
As our JINSA Task Force argued, the United States must also develop
leverage where it can impose costs most effectively and credibly on
Iran's malign behaviors. Despite the JCPOA's sanctions relief windfall
and the regular IRGC harassment of United States Navy vessels in the
Persian Gulf, for now United States naval and air power in the theater
outmatches Iran's. To begin, the Pentagon should announce it is
updating contingency plans to neutralize Iran's nuclear facilities,
should Iran materially breach or withdraw from the JCPOA in response to
United States enforcement.
Just as it appears to be doing to counter North Korean threats, the
Pentagon must develop credible capabilities in preparation for a
possible shoot-down of future Iranian tests of nuclear-capable
missiles. \18\ To this end, Congress should consider requiring the
Pentagon to forward-deploy part of our Aegis-equipped missile defense
fleet to the Persian Gulf, as it already has in Europe and East Asia.
United States Navy ships must also fully utilize rules of engagement to
defend themselves and the Persian Gulf against Iran's continual
violations of basic rules and norms at sea. \19\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\18\ David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, ``Downing North Korean
Missiles is Hard. So the U.S. Is Experimenting,'' New York Times,
November 16, 2017.
\19\ ``Strategy to Restore U.S. Leverage Against Iran,'' pp. 21,
27.
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It is equally important the United States cooperate more closely
with its regional allies. Policymakers must foster genuine collective
defense among its Gulf partners--led by Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates--that are taking it upon themselves, together, to push
back against Iran. Formal United States military backing, as well as
encouragement for sub rosa support from Israel, are crucial for
directing these energies in concert against Iranian provocations--and
to assuage their sense of insecurity and frustration with Tehran's
increasingly outsized role in their backyard. We must work with these
allies on robust multi-layered theater missile defenses and
interoperable air and maritime defenses in the Persian Gulf. \20\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\20\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost,'' p. 13; and
``Strategy to Restore U.S. Leverage Against Iran,'' p. 28.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Furthermore, the recent ten-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)
on United States defense assistance to Israel should be treated as the
floor for cooperation, and the MoU's artificial caps on United States
missile defense assistance to Israel must be removed. Not only do
United States systems benefit directly from joint research and
production with Israel, but Jordan and Egypt now effectively shelter
under Israel's umbrella--the importance of which only increases with
the IRGC and Hezbollah ensconced along the Golan Heights.
recognize russia as an obstacle, not a partner
Russia has played no small part in enabling Iran and its proxies to
establish a new front against Israel and Jordan in southwest Syria.
Indeed, there is a prevalent misperception that Moscow and Tehran could
be profitably divided through deft United States diplomacy. In reality,
both Russia and Iran want to roll back United States influence even
further in the region, and each depends on the other to help it do so--
primarily in Syria, but also through deepening Russian diplomatic,
economic and technical assistance for Iran's nuclear and conventional
weapons programs. Benefitting as much as it does, Russia is unlikely to
reduce its ties with Iran at anything approaching an acceptable cost to
the United States. Nor is Moscow's approach to counterterrorism at all
complementary to our own. On the contrary, Russia's indiscriminate
bludgeoning of Syrian cities from the air destroyed the moderate
opposition and gave further fuel to Sunni grievances. \21\
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\21\ ``Seeking Stability at Sustainable Cost,'' pp. 13-15.
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increase internal pressure against the iranian regime
Hardliners within Iran's regime are the main beneficiaries of the
JCPOA, as the Supreme Leader and IRGC control the economic sectors
standing to gain the most from sanctions relief. Yet this also makes
them dependent on a narrowing band of loyalists to maintain stability,
especially as everyday Iranians fail to feel the benefits of sanctions
relief. For all the regime's bluster toward America, it still fears
being removed from power in the same way that it seized power in 1979.
We should exploit these fears as an added form of leverage. A more
aggressive political warfare campaign would amplify international
investors' wariness of the Iranian market by highlighting the
complexities of sanctions compliance, as well as the elite's corrupt
business dealings and systemic human rights abuses. To this end,
Congress and the administration should intensify ``non-nuclear''
sanctions on the regime and publicize to the Iranian populace exactly
where the windfall from sanctions relief is going. \22\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\22\ Edelman and McNamara, Contain, Degrade, and Defeat, p. 66; and
``Strategy to Restore U.S. Leverage Against Iran,'' pp. 24-25, 29.
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enforce nuclear restrictions on iran
The United States must also rebuild leverage to address Iran's
serial under-compliance with the JCPOA. This has slowly eaten away at
United States credibility in Tehran's eyes and raises the risks of Iran
continuing to advance toward nuclear weapons capability. Precisely
because the
JCPOA has been so disastrous, the United States must restore
leverage over Iran before deciding the deal's fate. In addition to the
measures already mentioned, this means imposing every restriction in
the JCPOA and UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2231 regarding
enrichment capacity, inspections, illicit procurement activities, and
possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program. These
concentric pressures offer the best prospects to force Tehran
ultimately back to the negotiating table under circumstances far more
favorable to the United States and its allies. \23\
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\23\ ``Strategy to Restore U.S. Leverage Against Iran,'' pp. 26-32.
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Though these steps are many, we must take the first ones now to
prevent the further erosion of our stabilizing presence and leadership
role in the Middle East. I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for my time, and I
look forward to the Committee's questions.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you for a very good statement,
Ambassador Edelman.
We have a quorum right now, so we're going to go and make
sure to take care of some business that must be taken care of.
Since a quorum is now present, I ask the committee to
consider a list of 137 pending military nominations. All of
these nominations have been before the committee the required
length of time.
Is there a motion in favor of the report, this list of 137
pending military nominations?
[The information referred to follows:]
Military Nominations Pending with the Senate Armed Services Committee
Which are Proposed for the Committee's Consideration on December 14,
2017.
1. MG Anthony J. Cotton, USAF to be lieutenant general and
Commander, and President, Air University (Reference No. 1113)
2. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Jennifer A. Mahoney) (Reference No. 1142)
3. In the Army there are 2 appointments to the grade of major
(list begins with Yon T. Chung) (Reference No. 1143)
4. Col. Sharon A. Shaffer, USAF to be brigadier general
(Reference No. 1220)
5. Col. Robert J. Marks, USAF to be brigadier general (Reference
No. 1224)
6. In the Air Force there are 35 appointments to the grade of
brigadier general (list begins with Ronald G. Allen, Jr.) (Reference
No. 1228)
7. In the Navy there are 50 appointments to the grade of
lieutenant commander (list begins with William L. Arnest) (Reference
No. 1245)
8. MG Christopher G. Cavoli, USA to be lieutenant general and
Commanding General, United States Army Europe (Reference No. 1263)
9. LTG Stephen J. Townsend, USA to be general and Commanding
General, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (Reference
No. 1264)
10. In the Army Reserve there are 2 appointments to the grade of
colonel (list begins with Nathele J. Anderson) (Reference No. 1265)
11. In the Army Reserve there are 2 appointments to the grade of
colonel (list begins with Thomas W. Green) (Reference No. 1266)
12. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of colonel
(Adam R. Liberman) (Reference No. 1267)
13. In the Army Reserve there is 1 appointment to the grade of
colonel (Michael E. Steelman) (Reference No. 1268)
14. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Gerald D. Gangaram) (Reference No. 1269)
15. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Brian R. Johnson) (Reference No. 1270)
16. In the Army there are 18 appointments to the grade of colonel
(list begins with Scott T. Ayers) (Reference No. 1271)
17. In the Army Reserve there is 1 appointment to the grade of
colonel (Peter J. Armstrong) (Reference No. 1272)
18. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of colonel
(Ali S. Zaza) (Reference No. 1273)
19. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Phillip T. Buckler) (Reference No. 1274)
20. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of lieutenant
colonel (Vernice K. Favor-Williams) (Reference No. 1275)
21. RADM Nancy A. Norton, USN to be vice admiral and Director,
Defense Information Systems Agency/Commander, Joint Forces
Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network (Reference No.
1281)
22. RADM Richard A. Brown, USN to be vice admiral and Commander,
Naval Surface Forces/Commander, Naval Surface Force, United States
Pacific Fleet (Reference No. 1282)
23. In the Air Force there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Arianne R. Morrison) (Reference No. 1296)
24. In the Air Force there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Richard A. Hanrahan) (Reference No. 1297)
25. In the Air Force there are 2 appointments to the grade of
major (list begins with Aleck A. Brown) (Reference No. 1298)
26. In the Army there is 1 appointment to the grade of major
(Heather M. Lee) (Reference No. 1300)
27. In the Navy there is 1 appointment to the grade of captain
(Sharif H. Calfee) (Reference No. 1301)
28. Col. Mitchel Neurock, USAFR to be brigadier general (Reference
No. 1314)
29. In the Air Force Reserve there are 5 appointments to the grade
of major general (list begins with Hubert C. Hegtvedt) (Reference No.
1315)
TOTAL: 137
Senator Reed. So moved.
Senator Inhofe. Is there a second?
Senator Fischer. Second.
Senator Inhofe. All in favor, say aye?
[Chorus of ayes.]
Senator Inhofe. The motion carries.
Ambassador Jeffrey?
We do business pretty fast when we have to.
STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR JAMES F. JEFFREY, PHILIP SOLONDZ
DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY
Ambassador Jeffrey. That was impressive, Senator.
Mr. Chairman Inhofe, Ranking Member Reed, members of the
committee, I thank you for having us here. It's a particular
honor to have a panel of fellow Foreign Service officers
appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Thank you
for honoring the service of all of our corps around the world.
I also want to associate with Ambassador Edelman's comments
about Senator McCain.
It's a problem when one is a witness before this committee
on this subject when you're the third person to go given that
there is a great deal of agreement on the broad problem and to
some degree the broad elements of a strategy.
As you've already heard, we're dealing with a dual threat.
Right now, I think for several reasons, Iran is the bigger of
those dual threats, and I think this Administration in its
October 13th statement has agreed with that.
The reason is partially because, for the moment, the
biggest threat emanating from the Sunni Islamic extremism,
ISIS, has been at least conventionally defeated. But secondly,
there is a real relationship between Iran's activities and
Sunni Islamic extremism.
When I left Iraq in June of 2012, what became ISIS, al
Qaeda in Iraq under al Baghdadi, was little more than a
terrorist band in West Mosul. Two years later, it was
controlling a third of Syria and Iraq, 9 million people, with
an army of 35,000--not entirely, because governance is always,
as Ryan Crocker said, a huge issue. But bad governance was
promulgated, encouraged, and exacerbated by Iran's decisions
and the decisions of people who were being advised and
supported by Iran, Maliki in Iraq and, of course, Assad in
Syria. This back and forth--there are 20 to 25 million Sunni
Arabs between Baghdad and Damascus. Currently, they're not
being ruled by Sunni Arab leaders. They're being ruled by
people who, in the case of Syria, take orders from Iran, in the
case of Iraq may or may not fall under Iran's influence. If
those people are not protected by the international system that
we've talked about here, they're going to turn again to
terrorist forces, and we'll have this same problem all over
again.
Given the general, I think, consensus on this, then the
question is, including why it is important that Ambassador
Edelman talked about, what to do about it. But before we get to
what to do about it, or at least my view is, let's take a look
at why haven't we figured this out.
While I have a lot of problems with the Obama
Administration's actions on Iran, I certainly don't think he
wanted to turn the region over to Iran, yet Iran has been
advancing. While this Administration has a very tough
rhetorical position against Iran, it has done very little on
the ground in the first nine or ten months to stop further
Iranian successes, and we've got a series of them in the last
several months, largely in reaction to mistakes by our allies.
So why is it so hard? Several reasons. First of all, look
at how Iran operates. It doesn't challenge conventionally like
Saddam Hussein did, but rather it infiltrates other countries,
playing off of bad governance, failed states, ungoverned areas,
terrorist groups either they support or they use as an excuse
to go in. They have people who know the region very well. They
have a long-term strategy. It is all organized and supports
each other--Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, tomorrow Bahrain and
Afghanistan.
This requires a comprehensive response throughout the
region with both us and our allies, because we're not going to
do this with hundreds of thousands of troops. That gets to the
problems with our allies, as we've seen in the last few months
with the Turks--pick the subject--Massoud Barzani and the
independence announcement; the Saudis--again, pick the issue--
Yemen, Hariri, or Qatar. They're all trying to contain Iran and
deal with the terrorist threat in the region, but they're all
doing it in an uncoordinated way that, more likely than not,
advances Iran's objectives rather than contains them.
We need to get hold of this, and we won't do so until we
have a comprehensive plan to deal with Iran and we've convinced
them that we are in the lead and we know what we're doing.
We're not there yet.
Secondly, anything we do to contain Iran, to push back,
will bring with it great risks to us and to people in the
region. Look at the 1980s and early 1990s when we faced four
threats, from Soviets in Afghanistan, Iranians in Southern
Iraq, Iranians in the Gulf, and Saddam in Kuwait. The kind of
decisions we had to take and the chaos we deliberately created
for the good end of containing these people was quite
significant, and we have to be prepared.
There's nothing easy about this. If this was easy, the U.S.
Government in the last 15 years would have done better. It's
very hard. We clearly cannot ignore the area. That's the lesson
of 9/11. We clearly can't go in with hundreds of thousands of
troops for a long time. That's the lesson of Iraq and
Afghanistan. So we have to do economy-of-force, light-footprint
operations with our allies.
That will produce new Benghazis and new Nigers. I hate to
say it. We've all been out there in the field. We know that
sooner or later people make mistakes. We have to be able to
move on and not melt down when these things happen because this
is the right way to approach it.
Finally, on Iran, again, I agree with Ambassador Edelman.
Syria and also Iraq and our presence in these areas is very,
very important. That is the central front in stopping Iran.
That will be very difficult because it requires keeping our
troops on and dealing with what will be unquestionably
deliberate Iranian threats to our people. How will we respond?
In the past, we have not responded in a way that deters Iran
from going after us, in part because we have kept the Iranian
homeland free from any retaliatory threats or action.
On the JCPOA, as one who supported essentially the
President's position publicly before he took it on
decertifying, I would have to say cast it in doubt, do
attrition warfare against the bad things in it, but if you want
to contain Iran in the area, do not walk away from that thing.
It's the best thing from an Iran standpoint that we could do to
break up the coalition against it.
I'll stop there, Mr. Chairman, and turn it over to my
colleague and friend, Stu Jones.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Jeffrey follows:]
Prepared Statement by Ambassador (Ret.) James F. Jeffrey
instability greater than anytime since 1979
Events over the past three months in the Middle East, from Kirkuk
to Syria, Beirut to Sanaa, from Iranian surrogate missile strikes
against key Saudi and Emirati targets, to Israel's increasingly
dramatic attacks against Hezbollah and Iran in Syria, form a pattern,
illustrating the breath of regional crises, Iran's facility in
benefiting from them, and the absence of a guiding United States
strategy that can mobilize our considerable diplomatic, military and
economic assets.
Since this committee last met on the issue of the Middle East, the
region has seen momentous events. The United States has led an
international coalition to success in the conventional war against ISIS
in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, Iran, aided by Russia, has turned the
tide in the Syrian civil war decisively in favor of the criminal Assad
Regime. Finally, President Trump announced a new Iran policy October
13.
Yet the region is less secure, and the United States-led regional
security order more endangered, than any time since 1979. The reason is
that while one threat, Sunni Islamic terror, has been temporarily
defeated in Syria and Iraq, and contained elsewhere, the more strategic
threat, Iran, is growing rapidly, to some degree abetted by Russia.
These two threats are organically linked; Iran benefits from ungoverned
territories overrun by Islamic terrorists, from Yemen to Syria, and
justifies its aggression as `counter-terrorism.' Meanwhile, when
America fails to contain Iran, Sunni populations embrace groups like
ISIS and al Qaeda for self-protection.
President Trump's October 13 policy announcement on Iran, despite
much mention of the Iran JCPOA nuclear deal, wisely set the first
American priority as countering Iran's destabilizing activity
throughout the region. Along with the President's commitment to a
Palestinian-Israeli accord, and the fight against al Qaeda, Taliban and
ISIS terrorists throughout the region, we have the outlines of a new
regional policy, built on our success against ISIS, based on local
partners, diplomatic mobilization and limited but decisive military
power. Yet so far that policy has not spelled out how, specifically, we
will contain Iran, nor reassured our regional partners.
But Iran, enabled by Russia, does has a detailed plan for the
region; the Prime Minister Hariri fiasco in Lebanon, death of former
Lebanese President Saleh, missile attacks on Riyadh, threats to Israel
out of Syria and Lebanon, and the crushing of the Iraqi Kurdish
independence effort, all bear Iran's fingerprints directly or
indirectly. Absent a detailed game plan made-in-Washington, and
successes implementing it, our partners are ``winging it'' in
uncoordinated ways which Iran then exploits to further expand its
gains. The risk is great that one or another such incident will explode
into a regional conflict, if we do not quickly coordinate with our
partners and explain our plan to contain Iran.
region's importance, and u.s. assets
Any United States plan has to start with basics--the importance of
the region to the security and well-being of Eurasia, a core United
States goal since 1917. The Middle East is an essential unifying
component of Eurasia, the source of many of the world's conflicts since
1947, and a key element in the United States-led global security
system. Failure to resolve conflicts there affects our domestic
security and allies' very stability, as we have seen with terrorist
attacks on our homeland and Western Europe, destabilizing refugee flows
out of Syria, and WMD threats. In addition, the region's energy
supplies still remain critical for global economic health.
With the demise of ISIS, the main threat to the United States-led
order is clearly Iran. But Iran's threat is, in Henry Kissinger's
words, both as a state--pressing its hegemonic ambitions, and as a
revolutionary, theocratic cause. This latter dimension stimulates the
other great regional threat--Sunni extremist violence. I was witness to
the rise of ISIS from a minor al Qaeda band in Mosul in 2012 to a major
regional force by 2014 due to the oppression of Sunni Arabs by Iranian
surrogates, Maliki in Iraq, and Assad in Syria. While ISIS is now
largely defeated in the Levant, we risk a repeat of 2012-2014.
Any U.S. plan can draw on significant assets. Most of the states in
the region are our security partners, with a huge conventional
superiority, along with CENTCOM, over Iran, even with Russian support.
The vast majority of oil exports from the region come from United
States partners. Iran despite its claims as an Islamic revolutionary
force can mobilize local allies mainly from the Shiite Muslim 15% of
the region's population, and in some places such as Iraq many Shiite
are uneasy at Iranian encroachment. By supporting the genocidal Assad
regime including its chemical weapons use, and provoking massive
refugee flows into, and terrorist attacks on, Syria's neighbors and
Europe, Iran and Russia have lost any moral argument.
immediate actions
Any United States plan should start by analyzing Iran's strategy.
That strategy, to avoid responsibility and retaliation while advancing
its cause in states where governance is weak, focuses on local
surrogates, more loyal to Teheran than to their own countries. It also
exploits instability, confident that the United States, European allies
and even some in the region prefer short-term stability to effective
countering of Iran's exploitation of weak governments and conflicts.
The United States thus needs to build up the region's nation states and
react quickly to governance failures that provoke terrorism and open
the door to Iranian intervention.
Any detailed policy on Iran also should answer six questions: 1.
What are the basic goals of the policy; 2. What to do now with the
central front, Iraq and Syria; 3. How to mobilize allies; 4. What is
the Role of JCPOA; 5. What response when Iran strikes back; 6. Whether
and how to communicate with Teheran. My suggestions on each follow:
1. The United States should neither strive for regime change nor
portray the Iranian challenge in Shiite-Sunni terms. Either approach
will force Iran to mobilize even more, undercut potential partners
including Turkey and Europe, and allow Russia to champion Teheran and
Shiite Muslims. Rather, emphasis should be on rolling back Iran's
malignant efforts to undermine and ultimately capture states.
2. The two key fronts are Iraq and Syria, which should be
considered, as Iran does, as one theater, but with different
approaches. In Iraq we have a relatively friendly government with Prime
Minister Abadi, deep ties with much of the population, and considerable
anti-Iranian sentiment including among some Iraqi Shiite clerics. The
United States should lead the international effort to integrate Iraq
back into the regional and global community, including with
reconstruction and energy sector assistance. The United States should
also press for a continued United States military training presence, to
prevent a resurgence of ISIS and ensure Iraq is not dependent on Iran
for military support. The goal should not be Iraq as a Middle Eastern
West Berlin, which is not feasible, but rather a Finland, which does
not allow either Iran or the United States to project power out of it.
The Iraqi government, egged on by Iran, should not be permitted to
`cherry pick' relations with us, enjoying our economic and diplomatic
support while acquiescing in Iran's subversion and military moves.
In Syria, Secretary's Mattis' announcement that United States
troops would stay on, to counter a possible return of ISIS, build up
local counter-terrorism allies, and contribute to the Geneva process,
is important. The United States cannot dictate events in Syria, but by
its presence can contest Iran's (and Russia's) freedom of action. Aside
from United States enclaves and local allies in the north and south,
United States allies Israel and Turkey also operate militarily in
Syria, and have a similar core goal of containing Iran, although
differences on tactics, particularly with Turkey, are formidable. UN
Security Council Resolution 2254 gives the United States and the region
a legal justification for a say in any Syrian internal political
organization, given the horrific impact of the Syrian civil war not
only on the Syrian people but the region. Syria also desperately needs
reconstruction, and this gives the United States and its European
allies leverage with Syria and its supporters. Pulling all these assets
together to contain Iran in Syria is a dynamic, uncertain endeavor, but
far less risky than abandoning Syria once again.
3. Various regional partners and European allies are concerned
about Iran, but absent a common United States led plan their responses
have been ill-coordinated and contradictory. Clarity on United States
plans and goals and particularly success against Iran will help
mobilize allies, but the United States must discipline the system and
overwatch partners constantly. The price they pay for U.S. leadership
has to be coordination with Washington before acting.
4. Absent compelling evidence that the international community as
in 2012 will rally behind the U.S. to impose draconian oil sanctions on
Iran, the United States should not pull out of the JCPOA. United States
sanctions without international cooperation would have little impact on
Iran, but would give Iran an excuse under JCPOA article 36 to violate
some of its commitments and thus move closer to a nuclear weapons
breakout, while the world blames the U.S. The President's policy of
keeping the agreement in limbo, criticizing its flaws, especially
missile activity and the sunset clauses, and discouraging business
deals with Iran, is sensible.
5. Bitter experience over decades with Iran demonstrates it
responds violently when challenged, but in ways that make its
responsibility unclear. The United States needs to know, and
communicate, how it will respond, including the possibility of
retaliation directly against Iran, if it wants to deter Iranian
attacks.
6. Opposing a foe does not exclude communicating with it. But
until the United States is clear on its own plans, has won partners'
trust, and scored successes, communication with Iran should be limited
to signaling red lines and deconflicting as in the Gulf. Eventually
however the United States would need to clarify to Iran what United
States goals are.
It is not too late for the U.S. to lead a return to regional
stability and relative calm, but mistakes by successive administrations
and the region's own weakness have contributed to a dangerous
situation. The United States should ensure that everything it does in
the region discourages, not encourages, Iran. That has not always been
the case.
Senator Inhofe. Very good, Ambassador Jeffrey. Thank you.
Ambassador Jones?
STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR STUART E. JONES, VICE PRESIDENT, THE
COHEN GROUP
Ambassador Jones. Thank you.
Senator Inhofe. Use your mic, please.
Ambassador Jones. Thank you, Chairman Inhofe, Ranking
Member Reed. It's an honor to be here before you, and it's a
distinct honor to be here with such distinguished colleagues.
I'm also thinking of Chairman McCain today and wishing him
a speedy recovery.
Chairman Inhofe, as you said, last week Prime Minister
Abadi announced the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, and I had the
privilege to work closely with Prime Minister Abadi during my
time in Iraq, and he's been tireless in his service to his
nation and a reliable partner for the United States. He
deserves our commendation for leading Iraq through a difficult
three-year struggle and for reaching this watershed moment.
The fight against ISIS has been the organizing principle
for our Middle East policy for the past three years, and we've
known that the day would come when ISIS would be defeated, at
least as a military opponent, and we would need to reassess
policy priorities to build on this success.
Today, Iraq enjoys unprecedented low levels of violence,
and Prime Minister Abadi is seen by Sunni and Shiite alike as a
unifying force. Continued oil production growth and
improvements in the oil export infrastructure, stabilization of
oil prices, and support from the World Bank and the IMF have
enabled the Iraqis to contemplate a prosperous economic future.
Iraq will, of course, however, continue to face significant
challenges.
As my colleagues have said, I think one of the main
challenges will be the malign interference of Iran, its
neighbor with a 1,400-kilometer border. While ISIS? terrorist
ground forces are defeated, we know that extremists will go
underground and continue to terrorize Iraq's innocent
civilians, especially in urban areas such as Baghdad. The Iraqi
security forces will need our continued assistance to combat
this threat, and the government of Iraq has invited a limited
number of United States forces to remain to provide training
and other support to assist them in their efforts to combat
extremism. Helping Iraq's counter-terrorism service
reconstitute to face this new challenge is a mission that
United States forces are uniquely positioned to accomplish.
So as I said, with the ISIS threat destroyed, malign
Iranian interference is now the primary security challenge
facing the region. Iran's activities threaten the security of
our strongest ally in the region, Israel, but also threaten
Jordan, a crucial partner, where I had the privilege to serve,
as well as our Gulf partners.
Iranian interference has posed a challenge to Iraqi
stability for some time, and it is now at its highest levels.
Prime Minister Abadi has committed to integrating the popular
mobilization forces, some with close ties to the Iran Quds
Force, into the national security forces, with the requirement
that they leave their political baggage behind them. This will
be a huge task, and he will need our support for this.
The United States Administration is developing a strategy
to push back and contain Iran throughout the entire region.
This pushback needs to be a whole-of-government approach. In
Iraq in particular, we need to go beyond the security support
and remind the Iraqi public of the full benefit of the
strategic framework agreement with the United States, which two
of my co-panelists played an instrumental role in drafting.
Iraq has a large youth population, and from my time there I
can say that Iraqi youth yearn for United States technology,
United States investment, United States training and education.
General Electric Power Up program, which was initiated during
my time in Iraq, has provided thousands of megawatts of needed
electricity but also introduced cutting-edge technology,
created hundreds of high-paying jobs, and afforded training
that will transform those young workers' lives.
Likewise at this moment, U.S. energy firms are developing
proposals to assist Iraq in capturing flared gas. The
comprehensive solution to this problem, which Prime Minister
Abadi has prioritized for 2018, would not only address an
environmental calamity but also restore billions of dollars to
the Iraqi economy in a short period of time.
For these measures to succeed, however, we must ensure that
United States export promotion agencies are fully operational
and targeted at the problem set in the Middle East, much as
they were in the Bush Administration.
To his credit, Prime Minister Abadi has also launched a war
on corruption. The public response to this announcement has
been positive, and a war on corruption will be a blessing for
United States-Iraqi Strategic Framework Agreement because the
intrinsic value of the U.S. partnership becomes clearer on a
fair and transparent playing field.
In our pushback against Iran, we should also continue to
foster Iraq's ties to its other neighbors. Saudi Arabia's
Foreign Minister Jubeir's visit to Baghdad in February,
encouraged by Secretary Tillerson, was a game changer. Since
then we have seen numerous high-level visits back and forth,
and road and air links opened, the latter for the first time
since 1990. The next step should be to encourage further
progress on expanding and securing the highway between Amman
and Baghdad.
Finally, the September referendum on Kurdish independence
has had disastrous consequences for the Kurds and for the
cooperation that had emerged between Baghdad and Erbil during
the Mosul campaign. Although we opposed the referendum, we
should now support restored cooperation between Erbil and
Baghdad. It is often said that the Kurds provide the essential
third leg to the Iraqi stool. Following the referendum, Prime
Minister Abadi did what was needed, but now he's in a position
to work towards reconciliation, and this rift needs to be
repaired ahead of the 2018 elections in May so that the Kurds
will participate fully in national politics.
So again, thank you for allowing me to join this
distinguished group and to be before you today.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Jones follows:]
Prepared Statement by Ambassador Stuart Jones
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed,
First let me thank you for this invitation to testify before this
Committee today. While we have spent a significant amount of time
together it's the first time I have testified before this Committee and
I am honored for the opportunity and I am equally humbled to be seated
with this distinguished panel.
As we all heard, last week Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi announced the
defeat of ISIS in Iraq. I had the privilege to work closely with the
Prime Minister during my time in Baghdad. He has been tireless in
service to his nation and a reliable partner for the United States. He
deserves our commendation for leading Iraq through a difficult three-
year struggle and reaching this watershed moment.
This victory was achieved by the Iraqi Armed Forces, but would not
have been possible without the essential support of the Combined Joint
Task Force for Iraq. We should also recognize the extraordinary
military leadership of CJTF Commanders, LTG James Terry, LTG Sean
MacFarland, LTG Steve Townsend and now LTG Paul Funk.
Again, I had the honor to work with all of these exceptional
military leaders and their teams. They have done far more than defeat
ISIS. Through their train and equip mission, they have restored the
confidence of the Iraqi security forces; saved countless lives from the
barbaric predations of ISIS; and facilitated the return of more than
2.7 million displaced persons to their homes.
The fight against ISIS has been the organizing principle for our
Middle East policy for the past three years. We have known that the day
would come when ISIS would be defeated and we would need to reassess
policy priorities to build on this success. We are now at that point
and the President must decide what United States foreign policy in the
Middle East will look like going forward.
Today Iraq enjoys unprecedented low levels of violence and Prime
Minister Abadi is seen by Sunni and Shi'a alike as a unifying force.
Continued oil production, growth and improvements in the oil export
infrastructure; stabilization of oil prices and support from the World
Bank and the IMF have enabled the Iraqis to contemplate a prosperous
economic future. Iraq will, however, continue to face enormous
challenges.
While ISIS, the terrorist ground force, is defeated we know that
extremists will go underground and continue to terrorize Iraq's
innocent civilians, especially in urban areas such as Baghdad. The
Iraqi Security Forces will need our continued assistance to combat this
threat.
The Government of Iraq has invited a limited number of United
States forces to remain to provide training and other support to assist
them in their efforts to combat extremism. Helping Iraq's Counter
Terrorism Service reconstitute to face this new challenge is a
mission that United States forces are uniquely positioned to
accomplish.
With the ISIS threat destroyed, malign Iranian interference, is now
the primary security challenge facing the region. Iran's activities
threaten the security of our strongest ally in the region, Israel, but
also threaten Jordan, a crucial partner where I had the privilege to
serve--as well as our Gulf partners.
Iranian interference has posed a challenge to Iraqi stability for
some time and it is now at its highest levels. Prime Minister Abadi has
committed to integrating the Popular Mobilization Forces, some with
close ties to the Iranian Qods Force, into the national security
forces, with the requirement that they leave their political baggage
behind them. This will be a huge task and he will need our support.
The United States Administration is developing a strategy to push
back and contain Iran throughout the entire region. This pushback needs
to be a whole of government approach. In Iraq, in particular, we need
to go beyond security support and remind the Iraqi public of the full
benefit of their Strategic Framework Agreement with the United States.
Iraq has a large youth population. From my time there I can say
that Iraqi youth yearn for United States technology, United States
investment, United States training and education. The General Electric
Power Up program, which was initiated during my time in Iraq, has
provided thousands of Megawatts of needed electricity, but also
introduced cutting edge technology, created hundreds of high paying
jobs and afforded training that will transform those young workers'
lives forever.
Likewise, at this moment, United States energy firms are developing
proposals to assist Iraq in capturing its flared gas. A comprehensive
solution to this problem - which Prime Minister Abadi has prioritized
for 2018--would not only address an environmental calamity but also
restore billions of dollars to the Iraqi economy in a short period of
time. For these measures to fully succeed, however, we must ensure that
United States export promotion agencies are fully operational and
targeted at the problem set in the Middle East.
To his credit, PM Abadi has also launched a `war' on corruption.
The public response to his announcements has been positive. A war on
corruption will be a blessing for the United States Iraqi Strategic
Framework Agreement because the intrinsic value of the United States
partnership becomes clearer on a fair and transparent playing field.
In our pushback against Iran, we should also continue to help
foster Iraq's ties to its other neighbors. Saudi Foreign Minister
Jubeir's visit to Baghdad in February, encouraged by Secretary
Tillerson, was a game changer. Since then we have seen numerous high
level visits back and forth and road and air links opened, the latter
for the first time since 1990. The next step should be to encourage
further progress on expanding and securing the highway between Amman
and Baghdad.
Finally, the September referendum on Kurdish independence has had
disastrous consequences for the Kurds and for the cooperation that had
emerged between Baghdad and Erbil during the
Mosul campaign. Although we opposed the referendum, we should now
support restored cooperation between Erbil and Baghdad. It is often
said in Iraq that the Kurds provide the needed third leg of the Iraqi
stool.
Following the referendum, Prime Minister Abadi did what was needed.
Now he is in a position to work towards reconciliation. This rift needs
to be repaired ahead of the May 2018 elections, so that the Kurds may
participate fully in national politics.
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, I want to thank you, again
for this opportunity and for your consistent leadership on these
issues. I always value your insight and I look forward to taking your
questions.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you very much, Ambassador Jones, for
that statement.
I was thinking, Ambassador Crocker--we'll go with five-
minute rounds. Is that all right with you? Try to get as many
people. It's a well-attended meeting here.
When you made the statement, we agree with you on some of
the cuts that are going to be necessary. But on this committee,
we sit and we look at a situation where only a third of our
Army ground brigades can fight, we see only a fourth of our
Army air brigades. We're very sensitive, and we've heard over
and over again that the Marines use the F-18, and the F-18s
right now, 62 percent of them won't fly, so we have to do
things.
When there's a drawback on Armed Services, this happens,
it's real. So somewhere, it has to give. I want to ask for a
response, but that's one of the things that concerns all of us
here.
Let me just put this in context. We're all alarmed to see
how Iranian influence has grown in Iraq since our premature
withdrawal in 2011. Despite losing more than 4,500 American
lives and spending more than $1 trillion in Iraq since 2003,
our hasty, I felt, ill-thought-out troop withdrawal opened the
door to Iran to accomplish its strategic objectives in Iraq.
Iran has been remarkably successful in pursuing those
objectives.
It's not like we didn't see this coming. I and a lot of
members of this committee warned for years that the hasty
withdrawal from Iraq would lead to an increase of Iranian
influence there. I had one of my own quotes down here. It was
August of 2010 when I made the statement, ``Obama's rush for an
expedited withdrawal of troops from Iraq would endanger Israel
and the entire Middle East and would empower Iran.''
So what I'd like to do is kind of--you've all touched on
this, but a response from all four of you. Many people are
unaware of the extent of the influence of Iran that it now
holds in Iraq. Can each of you broadly lay out Iran's strategic
objectives there and discuss how Iran has advanced them since
the United States withdrawal?
Let's start with you, Ambassador Crocker.
Ambassador Crocker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Middle East abhors it even
more. When I left in 2009, violence in Iraq was at an absolute
minimum. The Iranians were on their back feet. Prime Minister
al Maliki had moved against one of their clients, principal
clients in Iraq, the Sadr movement, engaged them militarily
from Basra all the way up to Sadr City, and with significant
help from us, he beat them back.
However, you do not end a war by withdrawing your troops
from the battlefield. You simply cede the space to adversaries
who have more commitment and more patience, and that's exactly
what we've seen, I think, in Iraq with the presence now of a
number of Shiite militia backed by Iran, well-armed, looking
for a new mission after Islamic State. They take their orders
from Tehran, not from Baghdad.
A fundamental understanding we should all have is Iran's
history and its geopolitical assessments. The Shah of Iran
projected force beyond his borders with conventional forces. It
was the Shah's Iran that seized the three islands from United
Arab Emirates. It was the Shah's Iran that sent basically a
mechanized infantry brigade into Oman to help the Sultan put
down a rebellion.
The Islamic Republic is doing the same thing with different
means, using militias rather than regular forces under the
command of Qasem Soleimani, and we now see a resurgent Iran in
the region. The only way I can see us gaining back some of that
ground is not by confronting Iran directly in Iraq. Sadly, they
have more instruments there than we do. But it would be by a
sustained engagement with the Iraqi government, with Prime
Minister Abadi, to do everything we can to build up a stronger
central authority. It will be a long-term commitment. It does
not take forces. It does take consistent, focused, White House-
led political engagement. I hope we see that.
Senator Inhofe. Ambassador Edelman, any comments on this?
Ambassador Edelman. Yes. I would speak, Chairman Inhofe,
with some trepidation sitting here on a panel of three former
ambassadors to Iraq about Iranian strategic goals there. So let
me, if you'll permit me, to kind of open the aperture a little
more broadly and speak more broadly about it.
One of the things I think we neglect at our peril is to
recognize that Iran remains a revolutionary regime committed to
the spread of its particular ideology and emerging as a leader
in the Muslim world despite the fact that it represents a
minority, a current minority sect inside world Islam, and that
I think explains a lot of its behavior. I mean, for years,
since the revolution in 1979, a lot of us have been waiting for
the Thermidorian reaction that would allow Iran to pursue a
Shiite political ideology in one country, to make an analogy
from the history of the Russian revolution, and it hasn't
happened.
It remains committed, at least the leadership and the
regime remains committed, if not the public, to this particular
ideology, and that drives them to use these proxy forces that
they started using in the early 1980s, almost immediately after
the revolution, in Lebanon and now in Iraq and Syria and
elsewhere, to extend their influence to allow them to become
the dominant force in the region.
Senator Inhofe. Okay. Well, thank you. My time has expired,
but if we do a second round, I'd like to have you both,
Ambassador Jeffrey and Ambassador Jones, to be thinking about
this.
Senator Reed?
Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Just a quick follow-on. Ambassador Crocker, you were there
on the ground in 2008, I believe, when President Bush signed an
agreement with Maliki to withdraw all our forces in 2011. Was
your advice to do that, or is that just--why did we do that? I
mean, we agreed to take all our troops out; correct?
Ambassador Crocker. Thank you, Senator Reed. Yes, I was the
senior negotiator for that agreement, as well as its
accompanying security agreement. We pushed hard for more open-
ended language. Prime Minister Maliki told me an important
point. He said, ``Look, we're going to need you here for years,
if not decades, but that has to work in an Iraqi context.
Iraqis, including those opposed to the Prime Minister, need to
hear, at that particular point, that there would be a finite
limit on how long the U.S. would stay. Put the emotions aside,
then let's get working on negotiating the longer-term
agreement.''
That didn't happen, and I would suggest that it didn't
happen because, again, President Obama had run on, in part, a
position to end the wars of the previous administration. Again,
as I said and as we've seen, you don't end wars just by
withdrawing your forces. There was a clear understanding at the
time that our presence would be enduring.
Senator Reed. But there has always been a question about
whether Maliki was entirely sincere about his wishes or his
ability to deliver it, given the Iranian influence. That was a
factor, I think, all through that period.
Ambassador Jeffrey. Senator Reed, could I add something to
that?
Senator Reed. Please.
Ambassador Jeffrey. I was, unfortunately, the guy who lost
the American troop presence, as you all know, in 2011.
Senator Reed. Right.
Ambassador Jeffrey. First of all, it's very difficult to
keep American ground troops in any Middle Eastern country--the
only place where we have a significant number is Kuwait; think
of Kuwait and why that's so--over time when there isn't an
emergency situation. Also, we needed a status of forces
agreement. Maliki was willing in 2011 to sign a piece of paper.
He or his foreign minister, I guess, signed it in 2014 when we
came back in because it was an emergency situation and we
didn't worry too much about that. But in a peacetime situation,
it's very hard to put troops on the ground in a place like that
without the guarantees.
But the relevance of that experience in 2011 for what we're
doing now in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere, I would say is as
follows. We had--and Stu Jones was my deputy as we prepared for
this, so I'll share the blame with you. We had a Plan B that we
were going to cheat, with Maliki's acknowledgement, on all of
the keeping troops out. We had Black SOF [Special Operations
Forces], White SOF, we had drones, we had all kinds of things.
I don't want to get into them in great detail. It was a very
big package, including a $14 billion FMS [Foreign Military
Sales] program. We had bases all over the country that were
disguised bases that the U.S. military was running.
What happened was the Obama Administration--not just the
President, who knew about this plan, but the entire
bureaucracy--loses interest in that kind of deployment because
you don't have a four-star General Petraeus, General Austin to
talk to the Secretary of Defense and directly to the President.
You don't have the focus of the American people once they're
gone. Maliki kept coming back and asking for this little
military asset or that little military asset. We were his
security blanket. We left, so he had to turn to the Iranians.
The second big mistake was in 2014, when we responded to
the fall of Mosul by taking a decision to send at least some
troops back in and support the effort, but we did not do air
strikes for three months, until finally in the north we had the
problem with the Kurds in Sinjar Mountain and the folks up
there. We did that for, I think, good reason. We were trying to
squeeze Maliki out.
But the fact that the Iranians did come to the aid of the
Iraqis and we did not played a huge role in the position
they're in today.
So again, they take advantage, as you've heard from my
colleagues, of mistakes that we or our local allies make.
Senator Reed. My time is running out. This is a topic of
not just Iraq but of other areas. So I hope if there's a second
round we can shift focus to Syria and you can explain to me our
policy there. Thank you.
Senator Inhofe. Thank you.
Senator Fischer?
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ambassador Crocker, this week Putin claimed victory in
Syria. He announced the supposed withdrawal of Russian troops
from the country. He presided over the signing of a $21 billion
plan to build a nuclear power plant in Egypt, and he condemned
United States efforts in the region as destabilizing. I think
it's pretty clear that the Russians are working to increase
their role in the Middle East and undermine United States
interests.
But looking outside of Syria, where do you think their next
targets in this effort are going to be?
Ambassador Crocker. That's a great question, Senator. I am
not an expert on Russian affairs, but that won't stop me from
pontificating.
[Laughter.]
Ambassador Crocker. My colleagues who are will straighten
that out, I'm sure, for the record.
The Russians under Putin played a bad hand brilliantly. The
Russians intervened in Syria not because they saw an
opportunity but because they saw a very real threat that they
were going to lose basically their only asset in the region,
Bashar al Assad. They teamed up with the Iranians, and we see
where they got. Incidentally, at the same time he declared
victory and said he was bringing the troops home, he also
announced that there would be a permanent Russian presence both
in Tartus, the navy base, and at an air base in Syria, so
they're not going away. They will continue to use Syria as a
point of leverage for their broader strategies in the region.
I don't know if they have a next move planned in the
region. I think it's entirely possible that for the time being,
they're going to sit where they are because it's a good place.
Senator Fischer. Do you think--I'm going to interrupt you
for a minute. Do you think they're just looking for
opportunities, then, that there is no comprehensive plan?
Ambassador Crocker. Well, what I believe is that, again,
like Iran, you need to know the history and how the world looks
from that other capital. In the case of Russia, no, it's not a
return to the Soviet Union, clearly, but it looks a little bit
like the return of the Russian Empire. I think that is the
motivating spirit for President Putin, and I would expect to
see their next move not in the Middle East, probably in Europe.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Yes?
Ambassador Edelman. Senator Fischer, if I might, because I
think I'm the only one up here who had a misspent youth in
Soviet affairs, I think you touched on the right thing. I think
President Putin is actually a tactical virtuoso, but I don't
think he has a real strategic plan here.
But what I think you see in Syria is the Russians taking
advantage of a long-time client relationship. They look for
opportunities. I think the fact that they're looking at Egypt,
another place where they've had a long-term relationship,
suggests they may be looking for opportunities there, and
they're certainly looking for opportunities in Turkey, where
Ambassador Jeffrey and I both served, which is not a place that
they've traditionally had strong relations but where they see
the worsening United States-Turkish relationship as opening an
opportunity for them.
Senator Fischer. Any other comments?
[No response.]
Senator Fischer. I would ask all four of you what do you
believe the United States' response should be?
Ambassador Jones?
Ambassador Jones. Thank you. I would just say that in Syria
we do have to cooperate with the Russians. I think that the de-
confliction zones that have been established in southwestern
Syria are having an effect, and I think they create a positive
model for future cooperation. I also think that this holds the
Russians to a certain standard of behavior and also highlights
their responsibility to deliver the performance of their
Iranian and Hezbollah partners inside of Syria. I think we need
to also hold them to their commitment to the Geneva process in
Syria.
So by taking this leadership role in Syria, I think the
Russians have obligated themselves, and we need to hold them to
those obligations in a very public fashion.
I think in the rest of the region, I think we need to
continue to show the value proposition of the United States
partnership. Russia doesn't bring anything to Egypt that Egypt
really needs. Russia doesn't bring anything to Libya that Libya
really needs. We will expect Putin to seek opportunities there
for domestic fulfillment, but I think we need to show steadily
our strategic partnership to these countries and show that we
can offer solutions.
Senator Fischer. How do we hold Russia to obligations when
they violate arms treaties?
My time has expired. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Inhofe. That's a good question.
Senator King?
Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Edelman, a question for the record. You made a couple
of assertions that are inconsistent with the information I've
had as a member of this committee and the Intelligence
Committee, and I'd like you to supply the evidence. One is that
the JCPOA is ``freeing up resources for other malign
activities.'' My understanding is that may be true in a very
minor way, but if you have evidence on that, I would appreciate
having it. This is for the record, you don't need to respond
now.
The second is you cited serial violations by the Iranians.
That is also inconsistent with the information that I have. So
I would like whatever data or evidence you have of that.
Finally on this point, I would ask if you believe that a
nuclear armed Iran, in virtually the identical situation of
North Korea today, would be a positive for the stability and
strategic balance in the Middle East. That's a yes or no
question.
Ambassador Edelman. No, I don't think it would be positive.
Senator King. Thank you.
I'm astonished that none of the four of you mentioned in
your discussions, which is a hearing on the Middle East, the
President's recent decision about recognizing Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel and moving our embassy. I don't see how you
can ignore one of the most significant decisions in terms of
the Middle East, and I wondered--I guess I'll start with you,
Mr. Jones, Ambassador Jones. Given the fact that apparently we
got nothing for that in terms of concessions by the Israelis on
settlements or anything else, do you think that was a positive
move in terms of stability in the Middle East?
Ambassador Jones. No, Senator, I don't. What I'm concerned
about now, I think we've seen initial reactions to this.
Frankly, the reaction has been a little bit more muted than
many experts expected. But we'll also now start to see second-
and third-order consequences, and this is going to have
negative effects on governance inside of Jordan and Lebanon and
other places which have large Palestinian populations. So I am
concerned about King Abdullah in Jordan, who has made very
clear his opposition to this, who I had the honor to serve with
very closely. The Jordanians are concerned.
Senator King. My understanding is that just this morning
Turkey has announced the establishment of an embassy in the
West Bank, recognizing the Palestinian state. I guess any of
you--Mr. Jeffrey, is a two-state solution an important part of
the peace process in the Middle East?
Ambassador Jeffrey. The two-state solution is a very
important part of the situation between Israel and the
Palestinians, and everybody who has looked at this, almost
everybody who has looked at this has not been able to come up
with an alternative given Israel's commitment to a democratic
political system, given the demographics.
In terms of the President's decision, again, as I mentioned
with the JCPOA, any action taken that makes Iran happy in the
region is a mistake, and this made Iran happy, thus it's a
mistake. If this is the biggest mistake this administration
makes in the Middle East, it will be okay because I don't think
the ramifications of it are all that strong because right now
the region is focused primarily on Iran, and that includes most
Arab states, and secondarily on the terrorist threat, where
Israel is extraordinarily effective with both Egypt and Jordan.
Senator King. Isn't it more difficult, though, to achieve a
two-state solution?
Ambassador Jeffrey. I think the two-state solution at the
moment is moribund both from the standpoint of the Palestinians
and from the standpoint of the current Israeli government. So I
don't think we stopped something that otherwise would have
given us a major win in the region. I mean, I've been through
this, as have my colleagues, with the Annapolis Process in the
Bush Administration, obviously with Obama's effort in the first
term, Kerry's effort in the second term. We can go back to
Clinton and Camp David, and again and again, we haven't gotten
there. The region and our influence in it has continued.
Senator King. I agree with your statement that we haven't
gotten there, but nobody has come up with an alternative for
solving this problem that would maintain Israel as a democratic
Jewish state.
Ambassador Jeffrey. Exactly, and thus, it's on my list of
to-do things, but it's not at the top of it.
Senator King. Other thoughts on the issue of moving the
capital? Ambassador Crocker?
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, I think it's too early to tell
what the significance is. The immediate reaction that we
focused on, as Ambassador Jones said, was it's going to create
an explosion of violence in the region. It didn't. The climate
is not really right for that right now, for a lot of complex
reasons. That doesn't mean it isn't going to have a long-term
impact. I think it will, I just don't know what that will be.
There are now voices in the Arab world saying, right, no more
two-state solution, so let's push for a one-state solution in
which all of the citizens of that state have equal rights under
law, including the right to serve in the military.
Again, I don't know where this is going, but it's going to
play out over a longer term and I fear not in any positive way.
Senator King. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Cotton?
Senator Cotton. Thank you, gentlemen, for your appearance
on this incredibly distinguished panel. I respect and thank you
all for your service to our country abroad and in many places
that don't appear on top tourist destinations.
I'll follow up on both points that Senator King made.
Ambassador Edelman, I'll give you a yes-or-no question as well.
Would it be a positive development for the Middle East for Iran
to develop nuclear weapons in 8 to 13 years when the key
provisions of the JCPOA expire, when its economy has grown
stronger because sanctions are lifted, when its conventional
military is stronger because the conventional arms embargo is
lifted in 2020? That can also be a yes-or-no question.
Ambassador Edelman. No, it would not be positive.
Senator Cotton. Thank you.
On the point about Jerusalem being the capital of Israel,
was it an irresponsible and rash decision of this Senate to
vote in July, 90 to nothing, that Jerusalem is the capital of
Israel? Anyone can take it.
Ambassador Jones. Senator Cotton, I think it's just a
recognition of fact. I'm a frequent critic of the Trump
Administration, but the President was acting in conformance
with the law that he was asked to implement. My one criticism
would be I think the step would have been more usefully made in
the context of a broader plan or proposal as opposed to a one-
off. But otherwise----
Senator Cotton. Thank you.
I want to turn now to Syria, and I'll start with Ambassador
Crocker, since I believe you are the only member of the panel
who served in Damascus, although everybody obviously has been
impacted by their service, and then we can get other reactions
after Ambassador Crocker responds.
What are the best steps the United States could take at
this point, not looking retroactively and assigning blame or
credit for any action anyone took in 2011 to this point, to
reduce Iranian influence inside of Syria? I'd like your advice
in terms of best practical steps. I don't think anyone believes
the American people will support a large-scale conventional
military deployment to Syria, but what are the best practical
steps that we could take that could have the durable support of
the American people to minimize Iranian influence inside of
Syria?
Ambassador Crocker. Thank you, Senator, and thank you for
your service.
There are several things. The most critical thing in my
view is pull together a policy. What we're seeing now with the
Syrian Democratic Forces that were so closely allied with us in
the campaign against ISIS, they don't know what we're going to
do next, so they're in touch with everybody. I mean, they're
talking to the Assad regime, they're talking to Tehran, they're
talking to Hezbollah, because they know we haven't set a
policy, and they've got to live there.
So we're into a period now, I think, that's pretty
dangerous, where all the actors are going to posture and take
positions as though we're not there because we may not be. So
that's one.
Second, we need to be present diplomatically and
politically. The Turks, the Iranians, and the Russians started
this Astana process as a counterpoint to Geneva; we weren't
even in the room. Now I guess we're there as an observer. We're
the United States of America. If we're part of a process, we
don't stand on the sidelines and watch. So I would hope that we
would get a grip on the political processes that are in play,
Astana and Geneva, and use those as a forum to start serious
thinking on the way ahead, which is going to be complicated and
messy, but also to assert that the United States is there for a
reason. These are our security interests, and we are going to
be very much a part of that process. We are not going to leave
it to our adversaries, such as Iran.
Senator Cotton. Gentlemen, any other thoughts on that one?
Ambassador Jeffrey. Very quickly, Senator, we have a lot of
assets in Syria even though it doesn't look that way. We and
the Turks between us hold about a third of the country and have
a lot of local allies even though we're not coordinated with
the Turks, but that's a question of diplomacy. The Israelis
operate militarily throughout Syria in the air. That's another
factor. We have a diplomatic entree with U.N. Resolution 2254,
which means it's all of our business how Syria is organized. We
can leverage the possibility of reconstruction as a means to
try to force a wedge between the Russians, as Ambassador Jones
was talking about, and the Syrians and the Iranians, because
ultimately their interests are different. But we have to keep
not just diplomacy but a military presence there, and that
means working with Turkey, the Kurds in Iraq, and the Iraqi
government so that we can physically get in and out, because we
need entree to that region.
Senator Cotton. Well, my time is expired, but thank you
again for your appearances here. I know some of you have
already failed at retirement. To the extent you ever fail again
and want to come back into government service, I bet there are
a bunch of senators on this committee and elsewhere in the
building that would be happy to vote to confirm you to another
position in the United States Government.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Warren?
Senator Warren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
our witnesses for being here today.
As we've been talking about over the past few months, local
forces trained and supported by the United States-led coalition
have retaken former ISIS strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa, and I
want to follow up on Senator Cotton's question, but I want to
broaden the inquiry just a little bit to ask more about what
happens after we defeat ISIS on the battlefield.
It seems like right now we have challenges both with Russia
and Iranian forces and their proxies, and that they're moving
very quickly to take advantage of conditions on the ground in
order to reach their own regional objectives.
So, let me just start with you, Ambassador Jones. What can
the United States do to push back against Russian and Iranian
assertiveness and try to set the conditions for a political
settlement that is in our interests and in the interests of the
Syrian people?
Ambassador Jones. Thank you, Senator Warren. I think most
importantly what all of us have touched on is the need for a
regional approach to containing and pushing back on Iranian
malign interference throughout the region, and this is, of
course, going on in Syria, but it's going on in Iraq and Yemen
and Bahrain and in, of course, Lebanon. So I think we need an
overall regional strategy to help to contain Iran, and then I
think that will bring into higher relief the malign
interference that it's carrying out inside of Syria.
I think it's going to be very difficult given our limited
tools to affect Iranian conduct in Syria without weakening its
other activities.
I'd also say that, in regards to Russia, as I mentioned
earlier, there's nothing very attractive about Russian
involvement in Syria. The Russians saved the Bashar regime in
2015. They haven't really known what to do with it since, as
Ambassador Crocker said. This was to preserve their own status.
But they are interested in cooperating with the United States
for a variety of reasons. So reaching agreement on the de-
confliction zone in southwestern Syria I think does represent a
positive model for cooperation with the Russians, and also for
holding the Russians accountable.
Senator Fischer asked how do you hold them accountable.
Well, I think we have to hold them accountable by highlighting
when they don't meet their commitments, such as if they are not
able to facilitate or to force the withdrawal of Hezbollah and
Iranian forces from some of those areas in southwestern Syria,
then that should be highlighted and that should be called out.
Finally, I think we need to continue to press for the
Geneva process, as Ambassador Crocker said. We need to be
engaged diplomatically, using all of our international tools.
Sorry to go on for so long.
Senator Warren. No, no, I appreciate it, and I appreciate
the focus on Russia. It's been Russian support for Assad that's
prolonged this crisis. Of course, the Iranians continue to
destabilize Syria. It seems to me the Trump Administration
needs a clear strategy for ending the violence, for holding
Assad accountable, and for making sure that the other actors on
the ground don't take advantage of what happens in this post-
ISIS world.
There's one other thing I'd like to ask about before I'm
out of time this morning, and that is about the ongoing Saudi
military operation against the Houthis in Yemen and the
resulting humanitarian crisis there. The situation on the
ground in Yemen continues to deteriorate. Outside experts
estimate that more than 10,000 Yemenis have been killed in the
fighting and millions more are at risk from famine and disease.
In June, 47 senators voted to disapprove the sale of United
States precision-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia, an expression
of deep concern that many of us have had about this
humanitarian crisis.
So let me just ask here how the United States can use our
leverage with the Saudis to limit civilian casualties and to
ensure that Yemeni civilians receive food and medicine and
other basic human necessities.
Ambassador Jones, Ambassador Crocker, who would like to
answer this one? Go ahead.
Ambassador Jones. Very quickly, I will say that I think
that we should be concerned about humanitarian conditions and
civilian casualties in Yemen. I think the Saudis can do better.
I think the solution is to work more closely with the Saudis. I
think that conditioning assistance will be counterproductive
and risks extending the conflict there. I think we're at a
crucial moment now with the new schism between the Houthis and
the General People's Congress, the party of Ali Abdullah Salah,
the recently killed former president.
I think this is a time to push for a political resolution.
But to do that, the Houthis have to see a very credible
military threat, and they should not see any uncertainty from
us in our support for the Saudi coalition.
Senator Warren. I hear your point on this. I just want to
push a little bit. I think this conflict and humanitarian
crisis in Yemen is breeding more extremism in the region and
continues to put us more at risk, and there's no doubt that
Iran should stop making this conflict worse. But let's not
forget that Saudi Arabia is the one receiving weapons from us
and receiving support from us, and I think we need to hold our
partners to a higher standard here. We have a crisis on our
hands that's getting out of control.
I'm out of time, so I'll stop there, Mr. Chairman. But I
think we've really got to raise the bar on this one. Thank you.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Ernst?
Senator Ernst. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, gentlemen,
as well, for your committed service to the great United States
of America.
Ambassador Edelman, I'm going to start with you in regards
to Turkey, and then if anybody else would like to hop in as
well, I'd appreciate that.
Sir, you once served as the Ambassador to Turkey. Thank you
for doing that. But I think you would agree with me that our
relationship with Turkey has changed drastically since your
time in service in that country. Erdogan continues to
consolidate power, he suppresses his opposition, and he has
really cozied up to Russia. This complicates our security
cooperation as it pertains to NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] and our collaborative efforts within the Syrian
Democratic Forces to defeat ISIS in Syria.
If you could, Ambassador, just simply, are you optimistic
about the direction of United States-Turkey relations?
Ambassador Edelman. I'm not, and I invite my colleague, Jim
Jeffrey, who served multiple tours in Turkey, including as
ambassador, to add and subtract from what I say. But I'm not
optimistic. I think the relationship is likely to get a little
bit worse before it gets better. I think that's largely driven
by President Erdogan's domestic calculations about what he
needs to do to consolidate the personalistic presidential
regime that he is trying to impose on Turkey in which he now
has to face the electorate one more time for the presidency
when his term comes up, and I think that's driving almost
everything, and a lot of those calculations drive him to do
things that make the relationship worse.
I also think that to some degree, while I obviously think
it's a huge mistake for Turkey to procure S-400s and to cozy up
to the Russians as they have, to be fair, some of that is a
reflection of the vacuum that we have created which my
colleagues have been talking about. I mean, we have let Russia
and Iran become the arbiters of Syria's future. Syria sits
right on Turkey's border. They're housing three million Syrian
refugees on their territory, which has imposed enormous costs
on Turkish society.
So, I mean, we bear a little bit of the blame here for this
deterioration in relations, going back a number of years to the
outbreak of the civil war in Syria back in 2011, Senator Ernst.
But I don't think we can tolerate some of the behavior that our
Turkish allies are showing, and in particular the use of
American citizens and American Foreign Service national
employees, in essence, as hostages to the desires of the
Turkish government, their attempt to put bounties on the heads
of former United States Government officials like Henri Barkey
and Graham Fuller and Michael Rubin, people who they are
accusing of being coup plotters, an outlandish charge. I mean,
we really have to draw the line here and push back very hard on
this.
Senator Ernst. Right. With that aspect, Ambassador, and
Ambassador Jeffrey, I would appreciate your opinion as well, or
your thoughts on this matter, then what can we do as the United
States to work with and change the current trajectory of
Turkey?
Why don't we start with you, Ambassador Jeffrey?
Ambassador Jeffrey. Yes. I knew this question would come
up, Senator, and because none of us want to be an apologist for
Turkey because the things they do are toxic, but let me make a
couple of general points.
We've talked about how we're going to deal with this
region, and as Senator Cotton said, we don't want to put lots
of ground troops in there. That means we have to rely on five
countries--Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt.
We've already talked today about the problems with many of
these countries. We wouldn't pick these allies if we were
coming up with a different Middle East, but we have to deal
with the Middle East we have.
They're crucial, and we can't even get to this region
without them. This is from yesterday's Military Times:
``Deployed to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, the 74th Fighter
Squadron has dealt punishing blows to ISIS fighters in support
of United States-backed Kurdish fighters known as the Syrian
Democratic Forces.' That was yesterday. Those Syrian Democratic
Forces are commanded and controlled by a PKK [Kurdistan
Workers' Party] offshoot, as Ash Carter told this committee two
years ago, that is dedicated to overthrowing Turkey. We're
supporting that group because we need it against ISIS. Turkey
complains, screams, does all these things against us, and every
day those planes fly. That's the Middle East we have to deal
with today. It's unpleasant, it's transactional, it's ugly, but
we and Turkey have very similar strategic goals. Russia and
Iran and, to some degree, Syria want to change the mix of the
Middle East. We do not, Turkey does not, and at the end of the
day we just have to push back, as Ambassador Edelman said, but
don't cut off this relationship. It is crucial to us.
Senator Ernst. Very good. I appreciate it, gentlemen. My
time has expired.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Shaheen?
Senator Shaheen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all
very much both for your service at the State Department, as
well as for being here today.
Ambassador Crocker, you talked about the fact that we're
not even at the table in the discussions in Syria right now,
and I would argue that part of the problem there is that we
have a State Department that is not functioning in the way that
we would like it to because we have an administration that
doesn't recognize the importance of diplomacy and the role of
the State Department in foreign policy. I'm not even sure how
much it recognizes the importance of foreign policy.
But I wonder, I'm going to ask you, Ambassador Jones,
because you were most recently the State Department's top
diplomat for the Middle East, I wonder if you could talk about
what we could be doing to better enhance endeavors with our
allies and partners in the Middle East through traditional
diplomatic channels.
Ambassador Jones. I think that this administration actually
has taken significant steps to improve relations with key
partners in the Middle East. I do think that the Riyadh summit
in June was a watershed moment when President Trump was able to
convene the Islamic world and make a very strong declaration
both of respect for Islam and also a rejection of extremism. I
think these kind of measures are significant and should be
continued.
As I said in my remarks too, we have to make sure that we
actuate these gestures that are being done at the very senior
levels at the working levels, and we need to use all of our
soft power tools in places like Iraq and Saudi and in the Gulf
and in other parts of the Middle East, in Egypt certainly, to
make clear the value proposition of the United States
relationship, and that means business, that means technology,
investment, and----
Senator Shaheen. Well, that certainly makes sense. I'm
sorry to interrupt, and I appreciate what you're saying about
the message that that sent to other Middle Eastern countries
about how we view our relationship with Saudi Arabia and with
Sunni countries. But I don't know, Ambassador Edelman, I think
it may have been you who talked about the disconnect between
our policy objectives and what we're seeing from some of our
allies in the Middle East, and I wonder if you would connect
what Ambassador Jones is saying to what we could do to be
influencing Saudi Arabia's behavior so that it doesn't try and
manipulate Lebanon, for example, so that it doesn't help create
a famine in Yemen in a way that is not in anyone's interest.
How can we encourage them to be on the same page in terms of
strategic objectives?
Ambassador Edelman. Senator Shaheen, it's nice to see you
again.
Senator Shaheen. Nice to see you.
Ambassador Edelman. I think it's important to go back to
what I was saying in response to Senator Ernst's question about
Turkey. A lot of the things that we see Turkey doing that we
don't like are a function of their reaction to having to fend
for themselves rather than rely on the security guarantees they
get through NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and from
their traditional strong bilateral relationship with the United
States.
In my opening statement I talked about some of the
challenges that have been created in the region by the
appearance that the United States was receding from the region
and giving up its role in the region. I think when you create
that kind of vacuum, I think what happens is people try to do
it on their own. In the case of the Saudis, I think they're
doing it on their own without a lot of experience of having
done this. So it's not altogether surprising that they will do
things in a way that we think makes things worse rather than
better.
I think the most important thing we can do, and I think
Ambassador Jones talked about this a little bit in his response
to Senator Warren's question, is to make our allies understand
that we are there for the long term, that we have their back,
that we are going to be with them, but that we think maybe they
want to adjust what they're doing a little bit. You get much
more receptiveness to that kind of guidance, which Ryan Crocker
excelled at in multiple posts in the region, if you've got a
strong alliance basis on which to base it.
Senator Shaheen. Doesn't that speak, then, to a very robust
diplomatic effort in the region?
Ambassador Edelman. Of course.
Senator Shaheen. While I appreciate the singular event in
Saudi Arabia, the fact is we don't have an ongoing strategic
response that connects what we're doing militarily and what
we're doing diplomatically, that I can see, and that that, I
think as all of you have laid out, is one of our challenges
there. We don't have a long-term, consistent strategy for what
we're doing in the region.
Ambassador Jeffrey. Very quickly, Iranian missiles and
rockets in southern Lebanon and in northern Yemen are strategic
existential threats to two of our key allies, Saudi Arabia and
Lebanon. Ten thousand more dead civilians in the Middle East,
in a region that's seen 1 million in the last 30 years, by my
count, or a stable coalition government in Beirut are not going
to deter the Saudis and the Israelis from acting against this
threat. How they act against it, as Ambassador Edelman said, is
where we should be more active.
Senator Shaheen. Well, I certainly agree with that. That's
one of the reasons I've been a sponsor with other members of
this committee of Hezbollah sanctions, so that we can put more
pressure on them. But as you point out, it's got to be
consistent.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Perdue?
Senator Perdue. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to echo other
comments today about the august group we have here. I've
learned so much just sitting here the last hour from you
gentlemen after spending a couple of years on Foreign
Relations, so I hope you take this show on the road over there
as often as you get asked.
Ambassador Jeffrey, I want to move this a little bit. I
think not only is this a pivotal point in time, it seems to me
we've got a couple of pivot points in the region
geographically. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] is having a
crisis right now, and Qatar is right in the middle of that, and
two of our allies really are creating a destabilizing influence
I think right now when we need to be showing force against the
Iran-Russia influence over there. We've got about 10,000
troops, including Central Command and our air assets, plus a
full deployment of a full brigade's worth of armor sitting
there. So it's a pivot point for Afghanistan and other points
in the region.
Can you speak to us just briefly about your perception of
what's this really about between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and
what should we be doing to influence two allies to cut it out
and let's see if there's alignment that we can find here?
Ambassador Jeffrey. I first had to do an inventory of
whether any of my colleagues had served in Qatar, in Saudi
Arabia, so I could kick the thing. I think those are the only
two places where Ryan Crocker hasn't served, but he probably
has a view because he did well on Russia.
But anyway, it gets back to what all of us, but I think
most eloquently Ambassador Edelman, has said. Our allies, left
alone to deal with the Iranian threat, and secondarily the
threat of Islamic extremism, because there's a Muslim
Brotherhood element between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the
Emirates as well, flail around and do things that are
uncoordinated. They don't check with us enough in advance, and
we wind up with a mess.
I think this administration, despite a couple of initial
comments by President Trump, has taken a good position. I saw
this at the security conference this last weekend out in the
Gulf. They basically are, all in all, supporting Qatar. I would
say it's 55/45, because we have great interests with the Saudis
and the Emiratis. But they clearly made a mistake. Qatar is
objectionable in many ways, just like, as I said and as we
discussed at length, Turkey and Saudi Arabia and other places.
But we can't be going at each other, scratching each other
because of these secondary sins when the real sinning in the
region is done by Islamic terrorists and Iran. So we have to
get a better hold of our allies.
Senator Perdue. What should we be doing with Qatar
specifically in Saudi Arabia to keep Qatar from leaning back
toward Iran, which it certainly looks like they are in a
position to do?
Ambassador Jeffrey. They will to some degree because it
starts with the Paz gas field. I mean, they're going to have a
strong relationship with Iran because they share that critical
gas field. The more we can get the Saudis and the Emiratis to
roll back, the more the Qataris presumably will eventually find
that they don't have to keep turning to the Iranians, the
Russians, Turkey and others, and this feud eventually blows
over. There was an earlier feud, I think 2014 or 2013, and it
did blow over. This one looks uglier.
Senator Perdue. Ambassador?
Ambassador Edelman. Might I just add something to my
colleague's comments? This is more in the nature of a problem
in search of a solution than a solution, but one of the
problems I think we have with both Turkey and with Qatar is
that they house very important United States military
facilities. As a result of that, both of those governments
have, I think, concluded that there is a limit to how much we
will push them on certain things we don't like because of the
desire to keep those facilities, which are very important
facilities, available.
I think we need to look at more diversified and resilient
basing in the region so we don't become hostage to this kind of
behavior and we can push back a little bit more effectively
when the Qataris do things we don't like. I have a certain
amount of sympathy for the Saudi and Emirati position about the
Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. They
did a lot in the early days of the Syrian civil war to make
things infinitely worse than they had to be.
So we have to figure out a solution to this ourselves so
that we don't find ourselves being held back from pushing back
on some of the things our allies do that we think are wrong.
Senator Perdue. You bring up an interesting point from a
strictly military point of view. We talked about it in here.
After 17 years of war over there, I'm shocked at our support
footprint. Incirlik is at risk. I just got back from a trip
earlier this year to Pakistan and Afghanistan to see how we
resupply that and what we have to do to do that. I mean, this
is a very precarious footprint we have over there, and now
Russia is at Lodaki and Tartus, moving down in the Horn of
Africa. China is in there now. So this is a key, key topic, I
think, to support not only the diplomatic effort but also the
military support for that too. It's a great point. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Peters?
Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to each
of our very distinguished witnesses. It's been a fascinating
discussion, and I appreciate your service and your willingness
to impart some of your knowledge with us here today.
In Michigan, I'm very proud to represent a very large Arab-
American, Muslim-American community that focuses on these
issues quite a bit, given that that is their homeland. In
addition to that, I have a very large and thriving population
of religious minorities from the Middle East as well,
particularly Chaldeans and Yazidis, and ISIS has been
absolutely devastating. Their actions have been devastating to
these ethnic communities and have really showed, I think, a
unique brutality toward them and their historical homeland.
I supported legislation that declared the atrocities
committed by ISIS against Christians, Yazidis, and other
religious and ethnic minorities as war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide. In March of 2016, then-Secretary of
State Kerry declared ISIS was responsible for genocide against
these groups in areas under their control.
As Ambassador Jones mentioned in his written testimony,
ISIS can be expected to go underground and to continue to
attempt to terrorize Iraqis in the months and years ahead. So
I'm concerned that despite the military successes that we have
seen against ISIS, members of these communities are still going
to face violence and persecution. But I'd like to hear from
each of you, based on your experience, if you could provide an
update as to how you view this situation and your
recommendations as to what we should be doing and should the
United States be doing more.
I'll start at this end.
Ambassador Crocker. Thank you, Senator. This is with
respect to the religious minorities?
Senator Peters. Religious minorities, correct.
Ambassador Crocker. One of the lessons I learned a long
time ago is beware of unintended consequences of major actions,
and there is no action more major than a military intervention
in someone else's country. You are setting in motion not third-
and fourth-order consequences but 30th- and 40th-order
consequences, as we are seeing to this day in both Iraq and
Afghanistan.
With respect to the minorities, they were doing okay under
Saddam because they posed no threat to him. I mean, he was an
equal opportunity dictator and murderer, but by and large the
minorities could live in Iraq. I frankly question how much
longer we're going to see a significant Christian presence,
particularly on the Plains of Nineveh.
I had a conversation a year ago that I will never forget
with one of the patriarchs, and I won't go further in
identifying him, who met with me in Europe with a prominent lay
representative. The lay representative spoke first and said
support us, make a clear declaration you will defend us, train
us, arm us, so we can look after our local security, be an
ally. The patriarch then said, please do none of those things.
All you will do is paint a big bulls-eye on our backs to give
the religious extremists grounds to say clients of America, and
it will get even worse. So just don't do anything.
That was a very sad moment for me, because I think we are
looking at literally an existential threat to the minority
communities in Iraq, and also in Syria for those who didn't get
out. I don't have an answer for that except to say be careful
what you get into.
Senator Peters. I appreciate that. Anyone else have a
comment?
Ambassador Edelman. Senator Peters, I'd just say, first of
all, I think we are witnessing an enormous tragedy in the
region, which is in many places a likely loss of the various
Christian and other heterodox minority communities, which is a
shame for the region.
I would just point out that in the Turkish context there
are significant minority issues as well with the Olavi
population, and we have one issue in Turkey where Pastor Andrew
Brunson, a Protestant missionary, is being held by the
government on very preposterous charges of being a coup
plotter. So this is very broad throughout the region. In that
case you're dealing with a NATO ally, not even a country that's
outside the ambit of our normal alliances.
Senator Peters. But in terms of the Nineveh Plain, is there
anything specifically we should be doing? We have two more
ambassadors within the remaining time, which is limited.
Ambassador Jones. Thanks, Senator Peters. I think that we
can be proud of our record on stabilization throughout Iraq,
and I think continuing to invest in stabilization, which is an
immediate, fast-action, low-cost process of restoring
electricity, water, education to communities so that people
return to their homes. That's probably the best thing that we
can do for them.
I want to associate myself with all of Ambassador Crocker's
remarks and also add that when we meet with these Christian
leaders in Iraq, they say please don't make it so easy for our
people to leave Iraq, because we're losing our communities
here, and the more we lose our communities, the weaker we
become. So we have to think, as Ambassador Crocker said,
through second-, third-, and fourth-order consequences.
But the best thing we can do, I think, is help people
return to their homes and help build up institutions in Iraq
that will protect the rights of these individuals.
Senator Peters. Thank you.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Rounds?
Senator Rounds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, first of all, let me just say thank you for your
service to our country. What you do goes unnoticed in many
cases, and yet it is so critical to our long-term successes in
international diplomacy, which is much more desirable than
international intervention with military force.
Let me go back to the JCPOA for just a moment. I want to
just walk through the logic of where we're at today. The
reality is, it's in place. The reality is that we have up-
fronted with resources that were committed by the United States
to Iran. Those have been received by them. Now the obligation
to execute their portion of the contract, the JCPOA, is in
place, and they have certain obligations that they have to
respond to.
I question whether or not there is built into the JCPOA the
appropriate penalties involved for their failure to do so, and
I'd like to challenge, if I could, the thought process that I'm
laying in front of you that this is really a one-sided
obligation forward. This is up to them as to whether or not
they respond, and yet at the same time, since there is nothing
more that we have to do with this in terms of any other
obligation that we're committed to if they behave, if they
behave, then the JCPOA has simply delayed the time period in
which they will have nuclear capabilities.
On the other hand, if they do not, then simply the JCPOA
has not worked, other than the fact that we have other allies
who have supported this effort and who are also part of the
international community who may or may not feel some obligation
to condemn Iran when they do or if they do fail.
Would you, if I could ask each of you briefly, could you
either correct my assumptions involved in the discussion or
reaffirm what I'm suggesting?
Ambassador Jeffrey. Let me start, Senator. I was involved,
as was Ambassador Edelman, in the Bush Administration, which
took the basic decision not to use unilateral means, which is a
euphemism for war, to deal with the Iranian problem, but to go
to the P5+1. That was formed during the Bush Administration to
negotiate internationally. When you go down that route with the
IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the non-
proliferation treaty and the U.N. Security Council, you're
going to get a marginal product because that's the nature of
international affairs.
What we got was a marginal product. It also does the job
for 10 years of keeping them a year away from having a nuclear
capability if they adhere to it.
Your specific question was do we have tools if they don't
adhere to it. The answer is absolutely. Article 36 allows any
member, including Iran, by the way, if the others are not
living up to their actions, to stop all or a part of the
commitments made under the agreement. That would include our
sanctions. That's article 36. There's a process you have to go
through for about three months to try to convince the others
and try to resolve it. But at the end of the day, you can
unilaterally within the agreement stop doing things that you
were supposed to do in it. Again, Iran can retaliate.
The second thing is you have the snap-back provisions of
article 37 at the end of that process. We, as a state that has
the veto in the U.N., it leads to a U.N. resolution essentially
saying continue this agreement, and if you veto it, the
agreement basically dies, or the U.N. aspects of it die, which
is tantamount to killing it.
So there are very powerful tools that we do have within
this ten-year period. But at the end of the ten years, as
President Obama admitted, it's a different ball game, and we're
going to have to figure out what we're going to do with that
then.
Senator Rounds. Other thoughts?
Ambassador Edelman. Senator Rounds, I largely agree with
you, and let me make just three points, some of which goes back
to Senator King's question.
First, I think the JCPOA was inadequate in dealing with the
past military dimensions of Iran's activity. The IAEA ended up
closing the file on that without really getting to the bottom
of all the issues that had been raised in the 2011, the
November 2011 IAEA report, NxK I think it was, that outlined
all the different problems that more than ten countries'
intelligence services had provided evidence to the IAEA about
with regard to military activities. Without that as a baseline,
it becomes very difficult to verify the agreement.
Secondly, the provisions of the JCPOA itself for
inspections were far from the anytime/anyplace that was
originally promised and which, for instance, were a very
important part of verifying South Africa's abandonment of its
nuclear program.
The third element is, I think, what I call the under-
compliance which we've seen, which is the nibbling around the
edges, which are activities Iran is engaged in which were then
`'solved'' by side deals after the fact. So twice Iran--and
this is in answer to Senator King's question--twice Iran
exceeded the amount of heavy water it was allowed to produce.
Once we solved it by buying it, once we allowed them to switch
it out for Russian uranium. They missed other deadlines for
amounts of low enriched uranium above certain percentages and
certain amounts, which we then solved by, again, these side
deals.
So there hasn't been a major violation. The IAEA has said
that repeatedly. But there has been this pattern of nibbling
around the edges, which I think is very dangerous because over
time it conditions the Iranians to believe that they can engage
in bigger violations and perhaps get away with it.
Senator Rounds. Thank you, and I apologize. My time has
expired, but I most certainly appreciate all of your service,
and thank you very much for your responses today. Thank you.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Blumenthal?
Senator Blumenthal. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You are probably aware that on Monday, Turkey will meet
with Russia to finalize a deal to purchase the Russian S-400
surface-to-air missile system. Saudi Arabia has also expressed
an interest in this system. I'm concerned that this trend or
that this kind of action may be part of a trend, a very
troubling trend of our allies in the region turning toward
Russia to invest in this kind of system. Among its other
distinctions, it is incapable of integration, or at least not
readily so, in the United States or NATO defenses.
My question to all of you--and I really appreciate your
being here. Your insight and expertise is enormously valuable
to us, as it has been while you were in service. What should we
be doing to address this issue? If these systems are purchased
and installed, what are the implications for our military and
our diplomacy around the world?
Ambassador Crocker. Well, as the person who knows least
about Turkey, let me start. It's an important question,
Senator, without doubt. I think, as you suggested, there are
some real issues of the effect this will have on Turkey's
defense capabilities. As you know, it's a Russian system. It's
not compatible with Turkey's systems, which are our systems,
and have been for the last 70-odd years.
But I do think we need to take a deep breath on this one.
Turkey was a founding member of NATO precisely because of the
Soviet Union. They have a history going back through the
Ottoman Empire of confrontations between two great empires,
theirs and the Russian Empire. So I think there are some
natural limitations here.
I would say with respect to what we should do, obviously
Turkey is doing a lot of things we don't like. They are a NATO
partner in a region where we don't have a choice between
democracy and autocracy. That's not on the table. It's the
forces of order versus the forces of disorder. Turkey has
always been a force of order. I think we, again, need to
engage, if we could just get a few assistant secretaries
confirmed, and ambassadors, and start going through the
relationship, as happened under Ambassador Jeffrey and
Ambassador Edelman. We need to get back to that point where,
indeed, Turkey is a NATO ally.
Finally, I would just say one of the reasons we are where
we are was the consistent refusal of the European Union to
seriously entertain Turkey's bid for membership, good enough to
fight and die for NATO but not good enough to join the
gentleman's club of the EU [European Union]. The Turks are a
proud people. They were embarrassed, I think, by that, and
Erdogan seized on it.
So everybody needs to take a deep breath here. I think this
is salvageable, but we kind of need to get on with it.
Senator Blumenthal. Thank you.
Ambassador Edelman. Senator Blumenthal, I agree largely
with what Ambassador Crocker said. First, again, a little bit
of historical context to be fair to our Turkish allies. On a
couple of occasions over the past decade and a half, when the
issue of defending Turkey from ballistic missile threats came
up, it was tough to get the NATO assets down to Turkey because
of reluctance on the part of some of our allies who dispose of
the assets and debates inside of NATO, and I think that's
opened a question mark in Turkish minds about whether NATO will
actually, at the end of the day, be there to defend them, to be
fair to them.
Having said that, it's very clear that the S-400 is not
compatible with NATO systems, as Ambassador Crocker said, and
that was also true of a Chinese system that they were thinking
about buying before the S-400 became available to them.
We do need, I think, to engage with them and remind them of
what that actually means, both for broader NATO defense but
also for Turkey's defense, because it means there are going to
be a lot of early-warning assets that won't be available to
them that will put them at some risk, and that does require an
ambassador in place. We do have an Assistant Secretary for
European Affairs, which is a good thing, a very capable one, as
a matter of fact, but we need to get them engaged in this now
rather than wait until it's too late.
I mean, one of my concerns about the lack of staffing in
the Administration has been that, if we go back to something we
discussed earlier in this hearing, which was the miscalculation
of Massoud Barzani about the referendum in Kurdistan, I think
the United States Government was very late to publicly get out
there and express its opposition to this. Back in the good old
days when giants walked the earth, and I'm talking about my
colleagues to the left and right, we would have been engaged in
this at a much earlier point in time and have had more time to
manage the problem, I believe.
Ambassador Jeffrey. The entire NATO missile defense system
focused on Iran that the Obama Administration put in following
the Bush Administration is based on NATO radars that then-Prime
Minister Erdogan personally agreed to in 2009 or 2010.
Senator Blumenthal. Thank you. My time has expired, so I
apologize. I have a lot more questions on this, but whether or
not giants ever walked the earth, I think we would settle for a
few ordinary experienced human beings in those ambassadorships
today. Men of your caliber would be even better, men and women
of your caliber would be even better, but there is no
ambassador to Turkey right now. There are no ambassadors in
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, certainly very
critical roles that have to be filled, and the connection
between our military strength and our diplomatic strength is
inextricable, as you know, and unfortunately it's been ignored
by this administration.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Inhofe. Senator Kaine?
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to all of
you. I just would recommend to my colleagues--I apologize for
being late today, but the Foreign Relations Committee had a
closed briefing on the Administration's new counter-terrorism
guideline proposal, which is the proposal for changing the
Obama doctrine about the use of drones, and I think some on the
committee have received that briefing. But I would encourage--
because it really bears on this topic today, I would encourage
everybody to try to get that briefing.
I had been following a little bit when I wasn't here the
questions that were asked and, Ambassador Jones, you talked
about the Kurdish referendum in your opening statement. But I
would really like to have all of you address this issue, not
just the referendum but working down the road with us on the
Kurds. They have been wonderful partners. Their independence
aspirations creates real challenges down the road for a unified
Iraq.
They have been wonderful partners in Syria, but our work
with the Kurds in Syria has been one of these agitation points,
among others, with our relationship with Turkey as an ally.
What do you think the long-term policy of the United States
should be vis-a-vis the Kurds in both Iraq and Syria?
Ambassador Jones. Well, I think in the first instance, as
we agreed, the referendum has had negative effects for the
Kurds. So we should focus our efforts now on reconciling
between Erbil and Baghdad. I think many of us here are close
and warm friends with Massoud Barzani. I still think that he is
an outstanding leader in Kurdistan. But now the Kurds and Prime
Minister Abadi need to find ways to return to the level of
cooperation that they enjoyed in the lead-up to the Mosul
campaign.
I'm frankly more troubled by the situation in northeastern
Syria, although I think it was absolutely necessary to carry
out the military cooperation we have. I think now we do need to
take seriously the Turks' concerns about the rise of the YPG
[People's Protection Units] there, and we need to make sure
that our military presence there does not create a political
monopoly for a political organization that is really hostile to
U.S. values and ideology.
So I think my concern about the referendum in Iraq was that
it wasn't well prepared, it wasn't coordinated with us, it
wasn't coordinated with the Iranians, who do have a role, and
it wasn't coordinated with the Turks and with Baghdad. So I
think that's the lesson, that if the Kurds want to move forward
on this agenda, there needs to be much more deliberation and
understanding between all of the parties in the region on how
this should go forward.
Senator Kaine. Other comments?
Ambassador Jeffrey. The region, and that begins with
Turkey, can--as I said, the Turks are allowing us to support
the PKK offshoot Kurds in Syria every day--reluctantly, with a
lot of bitching, but they do it.
The region, and Turkey in particular, can support
autonomous Kurdish entities to one or another degree--and it
varies because these are very different kinds of Kurds in the
two countries, in Syria and Iraq--as long as it fits, as long
as we're there, the Turks know why we're there, and the Turks'
interests are taken care of, and these are not violations of
the unity of those countries involved. In Syria, I'm less
concerned. But with Iraq, Senator, that's 5 million barrels of
oil produced on a good day. They don't have many good days with
the OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] quota
and such, but they can do that today if they needed to, and
they can go up soon to seven or eight. That's getting into the
Saudi Arabia category. That's a very important trump card, so
to speak, in the Middle East, and we don't want to just break
it up.
The timing was wrong, the idea was wrong, and what it has
done is it has set the Kurds back terribly in terms of their
ability to survive, because much of the oil they were exporting
now is in central government hands. The Turks are still
allowing them to export their own oil, but that's about half of
what they were exporting before, 650,000 barrels.
So there is major political, security, and economic aspects
of this, and they have gone in three months from one of the
best good-news stories in the region to another basket case.
Senator Kaine. Mr. Chairman, my time is running out, but I
know you're interested in this question too. Could I let the
other two witnesses answer the question as well? Please? Thank
you.
Ambassador Edelman. Senator Kaine, I'm not sure how much to
add to what Ambassador Jones and Ambassador Jeffrey just said.
We're wrestling here with a problem that is really, in a way,
the last remnant of the Ottoman Empire, because the Kurds are
the largest nationality in the world without a state, spread
among four different states.
I think all of us who have wrestled with this have, by and
large, believed that if you could get decently organized
societies that took into account minority rights, they would be
better off as citizens of a pluralistic Syria, Iraq, Iran, and
Turkey. In some sense, Turkey might have been the best case for
that, and the opening that President Erdogan, back when he was
prime minister, did to the Kurds I think was one of the most
promising and constructive things he's done in his time in
office, and that now, unfortunately, has fallen by the wayside.
I think at the end of the day that's still the right
answer, but right now things are so much in flux in the region
that we may have to revisit this whole question about what the
status of the Kurds is depending on how well these other states
hold together over time.
Senator Kaine. Mr. Ambassador?
Ambassador Crocker. Great question, Senator. We have, of
course, a long history with the Kurds of that region, and it
isn't very pretty, particularly for them. I think above all
what we need to do now is not, even with the best intentions,
get them into a position where they are crossing red lines
inside these states or across state boundaries, because we're
probably not going to be around to back them up when the going
gets rough. It's the same as, sadly, with the Christian
communities.
We are seen, broadly speaking, as a great power that comes
and then goes, and there's just a lot to support that in the
broader region. So I think the first thing we need to do is see
if we can turn the referendum and its failure into the
beginning of a discussion of now what for them. I think all of
us here feel this way. Sadly, there are more nationalisms than
there are nations, and the one thing that Turkey, Iran, Iraq,
and Syria before 2011 all agreed on was no Kurdish state. Until
that shifts, I think it would be the height of folly and of
danger to encourage these aspirations on the part of the Kurds.
Senator Kaine. Mr. Chair, thank you.
Senator Inhofe. I thank you very much for bringing that up.
We had both expressed a lot of concern back during the
referendum time, and also one of the things that you may not be
as aware of as we are, that Barzani has had a very close
relationship with a lot of us over a lot of years, and it's
been good.
We had decided, Senator Reed and I, that we would not have
a second round. However, if either one of you want to pursue
anything further, we can do that.
Let me just thank very much the panel. This has been a
great panel. I kind of agree with what was stated by one of the
members here, that you need to be appearing before one other
committee that's out there.
I want to thank you, Ambassador Crocker, for bringing out
our deficiencies in confirmations. That needs to be said.
Thank you very much for being here.
[Whereupon, at 11:59 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
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