STATEMENT OF

GENERAL JOHN SHALIKASHVILI
Former Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

U.S. POLICY TOWARD IRAQ

Hearing of the
Senate Armed Services Committee

September 23, 2002

GEN. SHALIKASHVILI: Thank you. Mr. Chairman, Senator Allard and distinguished members of the committee, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear here before you today and for the opportunity to make a few opening comments.

First, I must say that I'm not a stranger to war, for I guess in some sense, I am a child of war. Before I was 10 years old, I had lived through the brutal occupation of the country of my birth, the total destruction of my hometown during the 1944 Warsaw uprising; and together with my family, I joined the millions of refugees fleeing westward ahead of the advancing Soviet armies. Years later, like so many other young Americans, I participated in a very different kind of war in the rice paddies and the jungles of Vietnam.

And still later, when at the end of Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein, with unbelievable brutality, once again turned against his own people, the Kurds, killing thousands and chasing the rest into the mountains of northern Iraq and eastern Turkey,where, without food, without water, without medication, without shelter, the very young and the very old were dying by the hundreds; and to stop this misery and the dying, I was asked by General Powell and then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to organize a military operation to rush emergency airdrops the Kurds, to remove Iraqi forces, if by force were necessary, from the most northern part of Iraq and to establish a safe zone there so some 700,000 Kurds could be returned to what was left of their destroyed villages and homes, and there to protect them with a no-fly zone -- which, by the way, is still doing its job today. Since then, as NATO Supreme Allied Commander and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in one form or another, I had been involved in military operations -- in the Balkans, in Haiti, in Central Africa and many other places. So I know something about war, and I have seen first-hand Saddam Hussein's brutality, and that background does certainly shade my views about war.

We must be very, very careful about going to war, and to do so only when all other attempts to resolve the threat to us have failed, and to do so only with the support of the U.S. Congress and the American people.

But if in the end, war is the only way to deal with a threat, then to go into it united and with all necessary resolve.

In the case of Iraq, there are, for me, three first order questions. Do weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein pose a grave danger to us and to our friends and allies, particularly those in the Middle East, but also in Europe? To me the answer is clearly yes.

Second, if in the end we are unable to eliminate these weapons of mass destruction, and any and all means to produce more, if we are unable to do so through tough, unfettered inspections or other non- military means, would use of force to accomplish this be the right thing to do? Again, my answer is yes.

And question three, in my mind, has to do with timing. Since the threat posed by these weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein has existed for some time, what has changed to create this new sense of urgency? Here I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld has it right; what has changed is 9/11 and our new realization of just how vulnerable we are to terrorist attacks, and the catastrophic damage terrorists with weapons of mass destruction could inflict on the United States.

Now, since I believe that the urgency to move against Iraq is justified, it is essential that the United States continue the full- court press at the United Nations to get the kind of resolution that would set up proper inspections and would authorize the use of force to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the means to produce them, if inspections continue to be frustrated by Iraq or if they prove unsuccessful in leading to the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

While the president must always retain the right to protect the nation with or without a United Nations Security Council resolution, we must recognize that having the U.N. with us would be a very powerful message to Iraq and to our friends and allies. It would make it much easier for a good number of them to be able to join us.

For that reason, we must continue to persuade the other members of the Security Council of the correctness of our position, and we must not be too quick to take no for an answer.

Now clearly, there are a number of issues and risks, large and small, with using force against Iraq, and you have discussed many of those here in previous hearings. But it is always the case when it comes to war. There are always issues. There are always risks.

The question, therefore, is not whether we have eliminated all those. That is seldom, if ever, possible. Rather, the question is whether we have done the detailed planning, political and military, to find work-arounds for some, to minimize the effects of others and to have ensured that our plan is flexible enough to handle the unexpected that invariably is part of all combat operations.

But should, in the end, the president decide that the right thing to do is to use force against Iraq, we must, as I said, go united and with all the necessary resolve. And I am confident that our forces will be fully ready to do whatever will be asked of them.

But to assure that, we must not try to do this on the cheap. We must not put our hope in some silver bullet, or to hesitate to do the politically tough things like, for instance, calling up Reserves. Rather, we must be prepared for the unexpected. And so we must go in with sufficient combat power to ensure that under all circumstances, ours is the decisive force, or as Secretary Perry used to say in previous hearings when we were debating the dispatch of forces, we must ensure that we are always the biggest dog on the block.

Our troops deserve that. And by the way, they deserve as well a straightforward mission, uncomplicated chain of command and robust rules of engagement that will allow them to get the job done and to protect themselves at all times.

And with that, let me stop and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for letting me make these comments. And I'm ready to answer any questions you might have.

SEN. LEVIN: Thank you so much, General. We appreciate your testimony.