Senator Levin

Feb. 7, 2007

You could feel the anti-war energy last Saturday outside of Building 50 in Traverse City.
About 150 people lined the streets to protest the war, while another 200 people inside attended a fundraiser for Sen. Carl Levin.
He, too, was talking about getting out of Iraq. But it was obvious there was a difference of opinion on how to do just that.
As people drove by the protest, they could hear on the national news that a
record 100,000 people showed up in Washington D.C. to protest the president’s plan to send 21,500 more troops into Baghdad neighborhoods.
Traverse City protesters had it a lot rougher, standing in frigid weather and falling snow with signs that reflected their impatience with the policy and politicians.
While protesters praised Levin for his nonbinding resolution that opposes the surge, they added that the resolution is symbolic and has no teeth. A compromise version will likely go before the Senate this week for a vote.
Many of the protestors want the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to go further by taking direct action to stop the troop increase–blocking the money that’s needed for the surge. Levin, one of the most outspoken critics of the war, said he’s not willing to do that.
Inside, Senator Levin outlined his strategy, saying the Democrats need to gain the political capital necessary for a phased pull-out.
Levin said that if he can gain support for his non-binding resolution, the next step would be to cap troop numbers. A cap would be as effective as blocking money, but would have a greater chance of passing and be less injurious to the soldiers, he said.
Protesters were disappointed that Levin didn’t come out and speak to them. When the senator broke free at noon, ready to speak, the protesters had already left. Prior to the event, Senator Levin took an hour to explain his views to the
Northern Express.

NE: Democrats are viewed as obstructionists, who can never come together on a plan for success in Iraq. Is that true?
SCL: No, it is not. Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, and I proposed a bill in June that would have told the Iraqis we’re going to reduce our forces beginning in the next four to six months.
Number two, it would have told Iraqis we are changing our mission to one of support rather than as being a principal occupier.
The purpose of this bill was to put Iraqis on notice that they have the responsibility for their own country, and to pressure the leaders to settle their differences. All the Democrats except for five, including Senator Lieberman, didn’t sign on.
The bill was signed by all of the Democratic leaders in the Senate and the House and by all those who have recently announced they will run for president. No one can say we were divided.

NE: You have coauthored a nonbinding resolution against increasing troop numbers, yet are not interested in cutting off funds for the troop increase. Why the contradiction?
SCL: Three reasons. We cannot win a funding resolution. It sends the wrong message to the troops, and it strengthens Bush. We do support the troops, and we’ll support them with training to reduce the stress on them, and we support them by giving them our best thinking to succeed in Iraq.
“One of the reasons that Bush’s attacks on us are so off–that our resolution “emboldens” the enemy–is that we are carrying out our responsibility to support our troops. We want to maximize our chance of success by pressuring the Iraqi leaders to resolve their differences.

NE: But isn’t the president trying to give them breathing space to do that?
SCL: They’ve had three and a half years. We don’t believe they need breathing space. They need pressure.
NE: What about dividing up the country–one section for the Shiites, one for the Sunnis, the other for the Kurds, and then devise a formula for sharing the oil?
SCL: There’s just no practical way to divide the country. The people are too mixed in. The issues right now are sharing political power and autonomy issues, and it’s not just the Kurds who want autonomy. The Shia in the South want autonomy too, and that’s where there’s a hell of a lot of oil.

NE: Do the troops in Iraq feel that you support them?
SCL: I think that most of them understand that critics of the policy do support the troops. This is not Vietnam.
Forty percent of troops now believe the war we’re in is off track. I talk to the troops all the time. They know I’m a critic of the war, that I voted against invading Iraq, and it was wrong to disband the Iraqi Army.
We all wanted Saddam out of there, but it doesn’t mean invade the country. There are other ways to remove or deter dictators.

NE: There are suggestions that we should send a different message of peace to the Muslims.
SCL: Yes, Karen Hughes, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, has been going around with this kind of message.
But it doesn’t do any good when you have a Western occupation of a Muslim country, now going on four years. I don’t see how we can change the message when the president issues an executive order to allow for aggressive interrogation techniques, like water boarding, and pictures of this end up in the newspaper.
When the Muslims see the pictures of prisoner abuse, when Congress isn’t even allowed to see the executive order permitting that, it’s hard to swallow a different kind of message
What we’ve got to do is reach out. To win a war on terror, you’ve got to have allies in the Muslim world. We can’t win it alone, we can’t win it with arrogant rhetoric. It’s a hearts and mind question. Eighty to 90 percent of the Muslim world now dislikes us. After 9/11, we had the world with us. What’s happened since then?

NE: Is it time to look at a new paradigm? Instead of putting billions into war, put billions into a peace effort, starting with politically unstable or impoverished countries?
SCL: I think there’s some truth to that, but I don’t think poverty is the real problem. Saudi Arabia is extraordinarily wealthy. Iraq was not a poor country, by the way. We’ve put $300 billion into the Iraq war, $100 billion maybe into reconstruction. That’s not the issue. The issue is sectarian strife.
NE: But don’t many of the schools confine themselves to teaching the Koran and hatred of the West? Is there some way we can change or counteract that?
SCL: In Pakistan, kids learned in schools to hate our country, and those schools were funded by Saudi Arabia. If you fund schools that teach hate, that’s a big problem.
The real problem is the fanatic strain of Islam, which is supported by countries we are allied with and by countries we are not allied with.
This fanatic strain is carrying out “God’s will” by blowing up restaurants and buses and market places. That is the terrorists’ strategy, and now it’s being utilized as a tactic in a sectarian war.
That fanatic strain can only be defeated by mainstream Islam.
Ninety-eight percent of Islam hates al Qaeda. If you can get support for someone like King Abdullah of Jordan who issues fatwas–religious edicts–against violence, against attacks on innocents, then you’re doing something extremely constructive. We can’t get involved in Muslim religious issues, but we can promote those people who are promoting mainstream Islam.

NE: Can you elaborate on the president’s specific proposal for more troops?
SCL: The president wants to insert not only 21,500 more troops, their mission is to go into the neighborhoods of Baghdad and “clear and hold.” It’s not just attacking terrorist cells or houses, which is problematic enough inside a Muslim community. They’re also going to stay there and become sitting targets.
General David Patraeus thinks the troops can pacify Baghdad–and maybe they can for a while–but this is a change in mission. It puts American troops in the middle of a sectarian war. It is unlikely to succeed, but even if it produces a temporary lull in Baghdad, it doesn’t solve the political problems that are at the heart of this matter, which is: The refusal of the political leaders in Iraq to resolve differences over resources, power and autonomy.

NE: Do you think, though, that this will draw the terrorists out of the woodwork? Isn’t it hard to identify them when they’re on the run?
SCL: They’re basically trying to hold security in Baghdad. Most importantly, the president would say, is they have a commitment from Iraqi leaders that their troops will follow the national leaders instead of their own sectarian leaders. But those promises have been made before. Will they? I hope they do. Will that put pressure on the Iraqis to reach a political settlement? I don’t think so.
The president likes to say he wants to succeed and his critics want failure, and that’s baloney. Now everyone agrees that there has to be a political settlement among the Iraqi leaders. Even Bush would agree with that. But he thinks that the way to achieve that is to give them breathing room. They’ve had three and a half years of breathing room.
We think they need pressure. That’s the bottom line. They’ve got to be pressured, they’ve got to look right in the abyss of a civil war. They’ve got to decide, do we want a civil war or do we want a country?

NE: I read that you are planning on holding hearings on the prisoner abuse in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Republicans charge these hearings dwell on the past and we need to focus instead on Iraq today.
SCL: Just because you have a hearing doesn’t mean you’re dwelling. In terms of balance, our priority is to find a way out of Iraq, and increasing our chance of success–telling the Iraqis we’re dialing down, we’re not dialing up. That’s our first priority, that’s our second priority, and that’s our third priority.
Are we going to try to also, in terms of learning from the past and not repeating mistakes, hold people accountable where mistakes were made?
For abuse of prisoners, for instance, which has hurt our own security.
Abu Ghraib has harmed American security hugely. It has poured fuel on a terrorist movement.
The president talks about emboldening terrorists? He emboldens them by occupying a Muslim country without Muslim support. When Abu Ghraib pictures are shown on television, you want to talk about emboldening terrorists! What is the president’s reaction to that? He says, ‘These are just a few people.’ No it isn’t. It’s the intelligence people asking the enlisted folks to “soften up prisoners so we can get some information from them.”
By the way, you get lousy information when you use torture or abusive tactics. The information is not reliable, and it also endangers our own troops. The Iraqis have now captured three or four American soldiers, and I heard they might have executed them.
What do we think they’re going to do when our troops are captured when they see us abusing prisoners? I’m not saying they’re not going to abuse them anyway, but what leg do we have to stand on going after countries or groups that abuse people if we don’t take action on Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay?
This Administration has refused to turn over documents about the intelligence community, the CIA, secret camps. They won’t give us the executive orders and the legal opinions that backed up the abusive tactics. We have not been able to get them so far, but now that we’re in control, we’re going to try. I’ve subpoenaed them. The best way to avoid mistakes in the future is to hold people accountable when they’ve committed crimes.

NE: What’s behind the secrecy?
SCL: They want to protect their rear ends. That’s the mindset. They want to protect themselves to lessen their liability, both civil and criminal. They’re covering up.
When an intelligence officer says to an enlisted person, “We’ve gotta soften ’em up. Use your dogs. Make them think they’re dying, drowning”–then the intelligence community has to be held accountable for this. The people who wrote the legal opinions saying, “You can do that” have not been held accountable. Republicans in the administration would like to bury that. But if the public or the rest of the world thinks we’ll bury it, they’re simply wrong. This abuse is just like handing a club to the terrorists. Giving them a weapon. This administration handed a propaganda weapon to terrorists.

NE: Do you think this type of policy is simply an anomaly?
SCL: I hope it is. I think what’s happened here is a sense of overzealous mission.
If somebody in your unit has been captured and you’re trying to find out where he is, you need intelligence. There’s huge pressure to beat up somebody who you think might have information. So that’s a good instinct in a sense. You want to try to help your buddy. You’re a team; you’re there for each other.
So there is a temptation there unless there’s real professionalism and real supervision, to just make that person think he’s going to die unless he talks. He may not know or he may give you lousy information.
And if it comes out that he was tortured or killed, you’re going to threaten a lot of your future buddies. Because when American troops are captured, it’s a matter of “We’re doing to you what you did to us.”
There’s a moral issue as well and there’s also a practical issue. Most people in the intelligence business will tell you that torturing doesn’t work. The FBI strongly objected to what was going on in Guantanamo. We’ve got some of the protest letters that the FBI agents were writing to the Department of Justice about what was going on there, but we haven’t been able to get out all of it.
It’s been a huge battle. You can read the emails on our website, by the way.

NE: This secrecy–does it go to Vice President Cheney and his belief in the supreme power of the executive branch?
SCL: Absolutely. He thinks they can do anything they damn well want.

Editor’s Note: Go to TraversePeaceAlerts.org
to see upcoming peace events and related links.