Date: 2007-10-16
Speaker: TOM DAVIS (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Virginia

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise today to speak on H. Res. 734. a resolution about corruption in Iraq. Corruption. the theft of public resources for private gain. saps the life out of everything it touches. The fact that official corruption has long undermined government effectiveness and public confidence in Iraq and throughout the Middle East should come as no news to anyone. But no one believes rampant corruption is inevitable or tolerable in Iraq. Republicans dont support corruption. Democrats dont support corruption. so the pace and reach of our efforts to help the Iraqis prevent. deter. investigate and punish corruption in their struggling democracy should be one thing. perhaps the only thing. about our policy in Iraq that we can agree on. But we were never given the chance to agree. The language of this resolution has never been considered by any committee. Why not? Just last week. four House Committee chairmen wrote to the Secretary of State asking for her cooperation in "finding solutions" to corruption in Iraq. So those committees apparently have an interest in the issues raised by the resolution. But none of them ever considered this language. Why not? Because this resolution is just the latest find in the frantic search for proxy antiwar votes that the leadership has staged to feed an increasingly restive left wing of their party. Unable to prevail directly. they ignore regular order and nibble around the edges with symbols. surrogates. and sense of Congress resolutions. In this political environment. "it almost doesnt matter how we vote since the resolution means so little and accomplishes even less. But. fairly or not. as has been voiced by several Members on the other side. a "no" vote would be portrayed as "procorruption." Thats unfortunate. and it didnt have to be that way. Both the committee majority and the "State Department have gone out of their way to politicize the discussion of corruption in Iraq. This resolution cherrypicks statements from our hearing testimony and tries to pick a fight with the Secretary of State over access to certain information. I offered a substitute to try to bring some balance and perspective to this resolution. but it was rejected by the majority in the Rules Committee. I will talk more about that substitute later. For its part. the State Departments process for answering our inquiries about anticorruption assistance to Iraq has been sluggish and poorly thought out. When requested documents failed to show up.. we didnt demand a committee vote on subpoenas the chairman decided to send to the Department. Its a separation of powers issue. The committee has a right to timely and meaningful access to information about executive branch programs and operations. The Department then classified information already. irretrievably. in the public domain. As a result of that decision. they felt compelled to limit open discussion on what everybody already knows about corruption in Iraq. Had the State Department witness at our hearing said to the committee what Ambassador Satterfield said in todays Washington Post. broadly speaking about the Iraqi Governments political will to fight corruption. we might not have needed to consider this resolution at all. Nevertheless. this is obviously not a resolution Id bring to the floor to assert our constitutional rights. Both the process and the product tend to trivialize a serious and pernicious problem by reducing it to the terms of a spat over what State Department employees can say in an open forum and classification of a few sentences and two reports. Its a transparent attempt to draw the Secretary of State into a highly visible. but completely- avoidable. conflict with the Oversight Committee. What is -the House being asked to "resolve" in this resolution? That we should know"the extent of corruption in Iraq"? That it was wrong to "retroactively classify" two draft State Department reports that had never been reviewed for sensitive informati6n before? That its an abuse of the classification process to "withhold" broad. unverified assessments of a foreign government by lowlevel State Department employees? And that a "directive" limiting discussion of potentially sensitive matters to a closed setting should be rescinded? Let me take them one by one. The phrase "the extent of corruption in Iraq" is used several times. In truth. its cQde for the unspoken conclusion that if we only knew the real level of corruption. we would all conclude Iraq could never stand on its own. But contrary to what this resolution implies. its no secret there is widespread corruption in Iraq. We concede that. Its sadly well documented. from the scandalous OilforFood Program in the 1990s to presentday diversion of oil revenues. Corruption is a critical concern to the United States GoVernment. to the Iraqi Government. and to the Iraqi people. No amount of handwringing or feigned indignation can avoid the hard truth that the United States did not bring corruption to Iraq. and it wont stop -when we leave. And no spreadsheet or corruption clock will ever give us the realtime cost of bribes and the realtime cost of graft there. Focusing on the extent of corruption rather than the extent of anticorruption efforts betrays a desire to publicize corruption. not help fix it. On the classification question. in all honesty. I have my doubts whether the State Departments reports should have been classified. A sloppy process in Baghdad leaked them. theyre on the Internet right now. Its probably counterproductive to put that genie back in the bottle. The Department simply should have said. "The reports got out. Our mistake. But they represent only the collected anecdotes and flavor added by the authors and were not official policy statements of the United States." That could have avoided the whole fight over classification. but they didnt do it. On the question of "withholding" information. there is a difference. and in my judgment an important difference. between hiding information and simply exercising appropriate caution and good management in deciding who makes official statements about U.S. relations with another sovereign state and where those statements are made. More determined to be aggrieved than informed. the committee refused repeated efforts and offers to question witnesses in a setting that could permit us to discuss sensitive and classified information. If anything constructive comes out of passage of this resolutioii. I hope its to refocus and reenergize State Department anticorruption efforts in Iraq. They need it. That might not be the goal of all those that are voting for this resolution. but its my goal in voting for it. and its the only positive outcome that I can see. Mr. Speaker. I reserve the balance of my time.