“Thank you to the Town Hall organization meeting. It is an honor to be asked to speak before this very distinguished forum that I’m told has been in operation for some 70 years. It is a wonderful contribution to American democracy that such an organization exists and I thank you so much for that.

There’s one thing I want to leave with you. So I will begin with it and I will also end with it and that is that this speech or this plea is not about Iraq per say. Of course much of my conversation will be about the status of the Iraq war. But what it is about is American national security – our national security. And national security, in my judgment, is the top priority of all Americans at this time in our history. That’s a lot to say because I go to every one of Wisconsin’s 72 counties every year and hold a town meeting. That means I’ve done over 900 of them. The thing that most comes up at the town meetings is the desperate need to reform our health care system. And the burden that it is placing on our businesses and our economy.

We hear terrible concerns about job loss, especially job loss oversees in part due to trade agreements that I think weren’t terribly well thought out and cost Wisconsin 90,000 manufacturing jobs since the year 2000. I’m hearing an awful lot right now, even before gas prices went up, that Americans want us to get together and have what they call a “Manhattan project” for energy independence to not be dependent on foreign oil. I hear a great deal and I am pleased about it that people are a little sick and tired of the fact that we now have one of the largest deficits in American history. We didn’t even have one when President Clinton left office in the year 2000. Of course there is a growing course that I don’t need to tell the people of Southern California about, about the problem of immigration, how to handle all of that. And so we must show the American people that we can address those issues.

But in my view all Americans and especially Democrats and especially progressive Democrats must renew a commitment to correcting the mistakes that have been made in American national security priorities by this administration. We must speak often, we must speak well, and we must speak with passion about American lives and about protecting our nation from the fanatical persons and organizations that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001 and continue to attack us. When we talk of it we should not speak defensively or grudgingly but as proud Americans who continue to be outraged that our nation was attacked so viciously on 9/11. So four years after 9/11, and almost three years after the authorization of the Iraq war by the Congress, it’s time to speak broadly, and with imagination, about a better vision of our national security.

Of course when you use a phrase like national security there’s so much that goes into it where do you begin? One place you obviously begin is the looming challenge that China presents: I’m very concerned that Americans and the American government is not sufficiently focused on everything from the economic, to the military, to other activities of the Chinese government and how it will affect our future; the problem of North Korea that I think has not gotten the attention it deserves; the growing concern of what Iran is up to with regard to nuclear weapons and in general; the hope and the concern about peace in the Middle East; the enormous instability and the threats caused by poverty and HIV/AIDS and other problems in places like Africa where I have done a great deal of my work on the Foreign Relations committee.

These are all terribly important and they will occupy so much of the energy of the American people throughout the 21st century. Theses all require our serious and sustained attention. But for me, since 9/11, I have believed that the threat of fundamentalists and jihadist based terrorism and the related networks and organizations is the most immediate threat to our nation, including our stability, our economy, and our confidence, including the lives of our children and our families.

And that threat is presenting itself all over the world. You see it in Indonesia, you see it in the Philippines, and you see it places like Algeria and Northern Africa, not to mention the more obvious examples like Madrid and London. It’s good to turn to the definition that the 9/11 Commission report itself gave of what this threat is: “the enemy is not Islam, the great world faith, but a perversion of Islam,” the report reads, “The enemy goes beyond Al-Qaeda to include the radical ideological movement inspired in part by Al-Qaeda that has spawned other terrorists groups and violence. Thus our strategy must match our means to two ends: dismantling the Al-Qaeda network and in the long term prevailing over the ideology that contributes to Islamist terrorism.”

Having said all that I certainly do think that at this point, at this time in this year, figuring out the Iraq problem is critical to getting the fight against terrorism right and therefore getting our problems with national security right. I believe that in order to reduce the danger of Al-Qaeda and jihadism all over the world, we must return to the post-9/11 focus that we had on the global threat. In other words, Iraq is not the be-all end-all of our national security. And in fact I’m not so sure that the President is exactly right when he likes to say that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism. To some extent we have chosen to make it so and arguably if it is the central focus in the war on terrorism, it may be to our enemy’s advantage that that is where the central focus has become. So I think it is time to identify a plan to achieve our mission in Iraq with a flexible timetable to achieve those goals and how to do it and then to have a proposed target date to have those troops come home after they have done what they can do, and hopefully they have succeeded in their mission so that we can get back to the broader issue of fighting those who attacked us on 9/11.

In other words, to put it in a more concise way, what we need in the fight against terrorism is a major course correction in how we are going about it. The fight against terrorism has to do with the jihadist terrorist threat. And it is my view that the lack of presidential and administration leadership has set up a situation where we are actually feeding the insurgency in Iraq. The al Zarqawi’s, the Osama bin Laden’s can call for an international jihad to come to Iraq to fight the permanent American occupation as they falsely and dishonestly portray. That’s the poster that they use to convince many foreign terrorists to join those who are trying to kill our people in Iraq.

Now, I want to be clear, I supported the Afghanistan invasion, I thought that the Administration did an excellent job post 9/11 of calmly and carefully lining up support for what had to be done to attack the Taliban and bin Laden and others. And I was impressed, and therefore awfully puzzled when President Bush shifted the focus to Iraq and caused us to lose the focus that I thought they had shown a pretty good sense of. I saw the difference because I do a lot of work with African countries. The response of one African country was very enthusiastic in helping us with rooting out some of these terrorist influences because they had some of the same in their own country. I talked to that same official after the Iraq invasion and he told me that it had become much tougher for him to do that publicly because of the change in the attitude of the Islamic minority in his country. The very people that were helping us became less politically able to help us because of the extreme focus on the way that we went into the Iraq war. So I see it, in many ways, as it being a tactical error, in the larger war against terrorism.

But the Administration has been so good, as we all know, at putting up various arguments, some might call them red herrings or just plain false arguments, to oppose any public attempt to complete Iraq and to get back to the fight against terrorism. These claims about why we can’t talk about getting the job done remind me about the bogus claims that were used to get us in there in the first place. I want to just mention a few of them. First the President sets up a completely false dichotomy saying that the only ways that we can go here are “stay the course” or “cut and run.” I don’t understand that choice. It’s the idea that we are somehow going to stay in Iraq until every insurgent is killed? That doesn’t even make sense from the point of view, the kind of operation that an insurgency is. I think that there are other choices than simply leaving today or simply staying the course without having some kind of public idea of when this will all end.

The second argument that the President uses, that the Administration uses, is “Well this is the thing that we are going to do, we’re going to get all the terrorists to come to Iraq and then we’re going to get them there and then they won’t come to America.” I call this the roach motel argument, the notion that somehow all the terrorists from around the world are going to come to Iraq and then we are going to get them all. You know who doesn’t agree? The President’s own CIA director, Porter Goss, who, in February, came before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee and said publicly, “The number one threat to American security right now is the growing training and urban warfare that is being conducted by jihadists in Iraq who will then leave,” and he did say that they would be able to leave and export their terrorism to other places. So I don’t think the roach motel argument works very well.

And when somebody comes out and says, “We ought to have some sort of public timeframe, we ought to have some sort of public goal that everyone can see about how this can end,” the President says, “You can’t do that, then the terrorists will just wait us out.”

Well I ask you if that’s what they want to do then why don’t they just stop blowing up people right now? Then we’d leave and then they’d take over. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I assure you I don’t come up with this on my own, because I know I’m not a military man. And I know that I’m not in the executive and I didn’t want to be the guy talking about this stuff. But they’re not willing to. So when I went to Iraq with John McCain and Hillary Clinton I had a chance to ask one of the two of three leading generals there, off the record, I said what do you think in your own view about a timetable, some kind of a timeframe where we talk about finishing this mission and leaving? He said and I quote, “Nothing would take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents better than that sort of timetable.”

And then the President and others say that if we leave it will just be chaos in Iraq. Well, right now when you come to Iraq you can’t even drive from the airport to the Green Zone. And I was in the Green Zone with these five senators and we really wanted to see the rest of Baghdad, but we couldn’t go out in the rest of Baghdad at all. When we were in the Green Zone we had a helmet on and a flak jacket. Sounds a little chaotic to me already. The notion that somehow the current mission is under control and that figuring out a way to finish the military mission will be chaotic, I think is a little too simplistic.

And finally the President says if we leave Iraq on some sort of a timetable, our enemies will know that we are weak. I would say that without a plan to finish, our enemies we will know that we have fallen into a trap and we can’t figure out how to get out. That’s what I think they will think of us and that’s weak, as well as not being very smart.

That’s too bad, that’s all we get from this administration. And I say with respect, because I do respect the President personally and as the President. He likes to say whenever anybody criticizes his policy that we don’t understand the lessons of 9/11. I think it’s the President who does not understand the lessons of 9/11 and who attacked us, and why. In fact, as ironic as it is, we have helped foster a strong jihadist presence in a place, in Iraq, that, believe it or not, wasn’t even on the list that the State Department and the President put out two months after 9/11. I carry this document with me everywhere and it was on their website. It says “The Global Fight Against Terrorism, and it lists 45 countries with George Bush’s name on it where they believed al Qaeda was operating two months after 9/11. You’ve got of course Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, Jordan, Ireland, the United States. Guess which country wasn’t even on the list? Iraq. Iraq wasn’t even on the list that the Administration had.

We must lance this growing threat in Iraq before more terrorists arrive, more Americans are killed, and more people are trained to go to London or Madrid, or New York or Los Angeles, in order to attack us. Sadly these clear problems with Iraq policy have also not been aggressively addressed by many members of Congress, and especially Democratic members of Congress. The Bush Administration has been very successful in one thing: in intimidating people into not uttering the words timetable, or timeframe, or the goal of finishing the mission by a time that we can all agree on, or a target date. It’s almost like a “taboo” for members of Congress, or at least in the Senate, and it has crippled our ability to speak publicly on ways in which we can succeed in Iraq or have some measure of success in Iraq. And then return to the fight against the terrorist networks and return to the focus on national security.

But the good news is when you talk to Americans outside of Washington, it sounds like common sense to them. As I indicated, it’s not my preference to offer a proposed timeframe or a target date. In fact, I became the first senator, just a couple months ago, to offer a resolution that said we’d like to ask the President to, within 30 days, to give us a sense of how long the mission will be and what the benchmarks will be and when the troops might come home, consistent with achieving those goals. Not only did I get no response from the President, but even my colleagues in the Senate felt like that was too radical to touch. And so I went back home, and I just held 17 town meetings, almost exclusively in Northern Wisconsin, in some of the most conservative counties, not Feingold counties to say the least. The deepening despair about the lack of leadership on this Iraq mission was overwhelming. 58 people said either let’s have some sort of a timeframe or just withdraw. Only two said, they asked neutral questions, only one person indicated opposition, and I was particularly struck in a place called Pickerel Wisconsin, in Langlade County, way up north as we say. 40 people showed up on a Sunday night, to just talk about the issues of the day, but in particular Iraq. This is I assure you, not a hotbed of liberalism. In fact at some point in the town meeting I said “You know I never thought of this as a radical place,” and one lady said, “It’s getting there!”

But they looked sad, they looked confused, they looked hurt about the way that this war started and about the way it’s going. So I decided to take another step that I had said before I wouldn’t take. This is to get out there and break this taboo, and I suggested last week, let’s talk about trying to finish this thing by December 31st, 2006. When I say finish I mean finish the military mission, finish the ground aspect of it. Obviously we would continue to help with many other aspects on the future of Iraq; it would be a flexible target date. Troop drawdown could begin with deference to the military and the President, they should decide the timing and the order of when those troops should come home it’s not something that should be micromanaged by Congress and maybe somebody has a better idea of what the date should be, but I do firmly believe that we ought to have some sort of a public goal to get this thing done. After we leave with a military mission we would continue with military cooperation with the Iraqi government, of course to oppose the terrorist networks in Iraq, as we do in so many countries around the world, we need to do more of that. I’m talking about having troops on the ground, troops that are vulnerable to this kind of attack to continue to have this kind of approach.

And I think this is not a radical idea actually because the Administration itself is conflicted by this. You here generals talking about bringing home, getting down to 60,000 troops next summer. So they are all over the map on this thing and I think it’s actually hurting their credibility, to not have some sort of a public talk on when this could be done. In fact, the President says we can’t cut and run. I believe that it is his policy and his lack of a plan that is leading people to say, “Why don’t we just get out of there right away.”

It feeds the idea that somehow this has to fail, and I reject the idea that it has to fail. There is a middle ground between being there forever and simply cutting and running. In the end there has to be a political solution in Iraq to succeed and I think properly, wisely finishing the military mission will help rather than hurt, bring that country together as a political unit.

Now finally let me turn to the bigger national security point, as we figure out the Iraq problem we must simultaneously and quickly move to the fundamental national security concerns of opposing this international jihadist terrorist network. And again Democrats must be comfortable in discussing a hard headed national security and advocating more sophisticated and specific ways of trying to oppose this threat.

Let me just list a few. These are all offered in the spirit of making America stronger and making our enemies weaker.

First we need to focus on how to counter emerging terrorists’ tactics. That means focusing the best minds in the country on how we can more effectively counter the threat posed by improvised explosive devices. How can we detect them before detonation? How can we disable them? We have seen the destructive power of the IED’s in Iraq and it’s easier to imagine more of them in other venues. This has to be one of the highest-level priorities in our military and in our government. Not just an area of research that is sort of competing for attention among a thousand other research areas. We need to focus intensively on ways to undercut terrorist recruiting tactics and to break the cycle or indoctrination and incitement that begins with extremist schools, and continues in internet chat rooms and sometimes ends up with a suicide attack.

That means coming up with better, more effective ways for a society committed to a bedrock principle of freedom of speech to nonetheless contest the space that terrorists have staked out on the internet.

Second we have to get our counterterrorism programs right. Terrorists find active and passive support among the alienated and the disaffected. We need to think about the reasons for that disaffection, and start addressing those problems with our policy and acknowledging those problems with our words. I’ve been struck by how often extremists from Algeria to Indonesia emphasize the decadence of those they seek to overthrow, often pegging their arguments to public frustration with rampant corruption in government. And I know that corrupt border guards and custom officials often enable terrorist networks to operate. We need to start talking about corruption and we need to have a massive effort to combat it abroad, empowering those forces to use the rule of law to combat the insidious influence of corruption. And we need to start thinking of how counterterrorism assistance programs look to others. We shouldn’t be shoring up governments, however abusive and corrupt, simply because they are also threatened by extremist networks. That might ultimately exacerbate our problem, creating more disaffection and more resentment. Most recently, was the close U.S. relationship with the repressive government Mauritania really such a good investment for our security? Might we have done better to invest in civil society forces in Mauritania who support neither oppression or terrorism, but rather reform. Shouldn’t this at least be part of our strategy?
Obvious further examples of this are even more dramatic such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries which are symbols among the Islamic people of places where we support regimes that deny the very freedoms that we Americans talk about when we go to war to fight for freedom.

Third, non-proliferation. We need to do much more to stop nuclear proliferation and assure that terrorist organizations do not get access to nuclear weapons. We must deal with the threats of loose nukes as an urgent priority. This administration has failed to do so. More potential nuclear weapons were secured in Russia in the two years before 9/11 then in the two years after. That makes no sense. And we should not have missed the opportunity at the last NPT conference to start moving forward on a new global regime. One that does a better job of protection, and punishing cheating so that states cannot take their nuclear programs right up to the line of compliance and then withdraw from the treaty and then break out as new nuclear weapon states. And yes, we should reverse the foolish decision to ease export restrictions on bomb grade uranium that was part of the massive energy bill just signed by the President. Glad to say I voted against that bill.

Speaking of energy, a fourth idea, why don’t we try and finally get that energy independence that I mentioned earlier? The bill was an abject failure in that regard. At least the Senate version had some positive steps such as working with businesses to have 10 percent renewable energy portfolios, but that was removed and we ended up with a hollow shell of a bill that doesn’t help us become less dependent on countries and regions where some of the threats come from.

Fifth, we have to deal with military needs. We have to repair the damage to the Army. I have voted for an increase in the Army’s end strength because it has become clear to me that this administration’s policies have nearly broken the United States Army. We have got to look at those recruitment figures for this year as we come to the end of the fiscal year, for the Army, and the National Guard, and the Reserves. We’re not meeting the goals, it’s not good. And we need some accountability for the fact that the Department of Defense budget, that so dwarfs our spending in any other sector and so dwarfs the spending of any other country, still has somehow not been enough to pay for the timely provision of adequate armor and adequately armored vehicles to our men and women in the battlefield.

Why are Marines being packed in like sardines for transport, in the high threat environment of Iraq, in a 1970’s era amphibious vehicle designed to take them from ship to shore? This is a disgrace, it is unacceptable and it is simply inexcusable. The DoD has astronomical resources; we need leaders who will spend those resources wisely.

And finally and this goes to the word passion that I used earlier. We need a new massive surge in public and private diplomacy, and a passionate effort to tell the rest of the world who we are, who we really are, and who we want to be with regard to the rest of the people of the world. We need a massive diplomatic effort to improve our understanding of the strategic environment in what is in some ways a battle of ideas. We need to increase our presence abroad not just to gather information, although that is critical and I am quite certain that we have inadequate information right now, for example, about what terrorist networks are doing and not doing in places like Somalia and Northern Nigeria and elsewhere. And we need to listen when we go to those countries. Our public officials and our private officials need to show the respect of listening to people, particularly in Islamic communities. We also need to increase our presence so the United States is there, physically embodied in actual people, who can go out and do others the basic respect of listening as I just mentioned. It’s time to stop writing report after report on how important public diplomacy is, time to stop producing glossy brochures and videos that relegate others to a passive role, and time to start this massive public diplomacy effort, one that involves real dialogue, give and take, and a sustained effort to regain the special American power: our power to lead, persuade, and to inspire that this administration’s policies have squandered.

So if I may, after this wonderful opportunity, I would like to conclude by just saying a few things to my friends here. The answer is neither stay the course in Iraq, or is out of Iraq a national security policy by itself that can help us secure American lives and allow us to return to the compelling domestic issues that require our attention as well. We must stand up to the intimidation of the Bush administration – which one of my constituents at one of those meetings this month called “their astonishing ability to manufacture consent” or sometimes suppress dissent. We can suggest alternatives and we can do it as patriots who support out troops. We must give national security and antiterrorism and Iraq’s relationship to it sustained attention every day throughout this year and beyond. That means during the Roberts hearings, that means during appropriations bills at the end of the year, that means when we are out of session, every day, because the executive has the advantage of being there and being on the news all the time. It must be given sustained attention. Yes, we must show the American people that we can pursue a positive and effective national security agenda that simultaneously protects American lives but also reaches out to the rest of the world with friendship and hope.

As I said, we must speak of it with passion and in a personal way. For me, my daughter graduated from the University of Wisconsin—Madison this year. She did a heck of job. She’s over in London working. I get to visit her with my other daughter this next week. She’s a great girl. I want this young woman to not only be safe but I want her to be able to walk across this world and be welcomed as an American. That’s my desire and I bet that is the desire of every American parent. Thank you.”