State of Illinois Archives: on War & Peace

Mark Curran: Sanctions & possible bombing, to stop spread of nuclear arms

Susan Rice: Small U.S. military presence in Syria fought ISIS threat

Mark Kirk: Ground troops against ISIS only with long-term exit strategy

Duckworth: Yes

Kirk: No

Q: On Iraq: Should the US recommit significant additional ground troops to Iraq to combat the success of ISIS?

Duckworth: Only as part of long-term plan and exit strategy drawing on all facets of U.S. power.[5]

Kirk: Supports Obama request to fight ISIS for limited engagement of three years.

Andrea Zopp: Supports the Iran nuclear deal

The GOP-led House is expected to pass a resolution of disapproval, but the deal has enough overall congressional support to prevent opponents from blocking the pact's implementation.

Senator Mark Kirk has long championed efforts to ratchet up sanctions against the Islamic Republic and condemned its financial support of terrorist groups in the region.

Democrat Andrea Zopp, who supports the Iran deal, also is running for Kirk's seat.

Tammy Duckworth: Iran is our enemy, but nuclear deal prevents Iranian nukes

Duckworth wrote an op-ed explaining her support for the deal. Duckworth said she reviewed the agreement, attended briefings with national security experts and heard from "hundreds" of constituents before reaching a decision. "I have no illusions about the authoritarian Iranian regime," she said in a statement. "Iran is our enemy, it is Israel's enemy and it is the enemy of all nations that seek peace and stability. But Iran's destabilizing role in the region would be much greater if it could obtain nuclear weapons. Therefore preventing a nuclear armed Iran must be our primary goal. While not perfect, I believe the nuclear agreement provides the US and our allies with the most realistic and effective course of action currently available to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Richard Durbin: Engage China to de-escalate North Korean nukes

Sen. DURBIN: The last thing we want is the launch of any kind of nuclear missile or nuclear weapon on the Korean peninsula. We've got to deescalate the rhetoric and the testing that's going on in North Korea and we're turning primarily to China, to tell the North Koreans if they want to continue this kind of escalation of rhetoric, it's at the expense of the safety of this world, as well as their own economy.

Q: Sen. Cornyn, a year ago, you accused Obama of a policy of appeasement towards North Korea.

Sen. CORNYN (R-TX): Well, I'm not for paying an unhinged leader like Kim Jong Un ransom in order to have him toned down his rhetoric. None of us wants [nuclear conflict]. But I don't see that this policy of paying ransom just to get him to tone down rhetoric has been successful. It's just sort of like a bad movie. We keep seeing the reruns.

Alexi Giannoulias: Stand firmly and unequivocally against Iranian aggression

Alexi Giannoulias: Expel al Qaeda from Afghanistan, then end commitment

Alexi supports the President's decision to increase troop levels as part of a larger military and political strategy to defeat the Taliban insurgency and permanently expel al Qaeda. This is not, and should not be, an open-ended commitment. Our military presence in Afghanistan should be aimed at preventing the Taliban from establishing a base from which to destabilize Pakistan, giving the Afghanis an opportunity to develop a government that works, and training and enabling the Afghanis to secure their own borders and to keep al Qaeda and the Taliban out of the region themselves.

Alexi Giannoulias: Withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2010

Richard Durbin: We can’ afford $10B to $15B a month in Iraq

Durbin argued the United States can’t afford to keep spending $10 billion to $15 billion a month, along with soldiers’ lives, to rebuild Iraq. He called for a “systematic, sensible withdrawal.”

Steven Sauerberg: Critical to keep U.S. troops in Iraq to help Iraqis

Durbin argued the United States can’t afford to keep spending $10 billion to $15 billion a month, along with soldiers’ lives, to rebuild Iraq. He called for a “systematic, sensible withdrawal.”

Jim Oberweis: Stay the course; gradual withdrawal from the Iraq war

McCain described Oberweis as a successful businessman who shares retired Rep. Dennis Hastert's "values, his principles and his fiscal conservative ideals."

"John McCain has established a reputation, as I have, for speaking his mind even if that means taking a position that might be out of step with the so-called fashionable thinking and even if it might be politically unpopular," Oberweis said.

Foster criticized McCain for his Iraq war stance; McCain said that having US troops in Iraq for 100 years "would be fine with me." "I respect Sen. McCain and his decades of service, but when it comes to Iraq, I think Sen. McCain, Pres. Bush, and Jim Oberweis are flat wrong," Foster said. "Like George Bush, Jim Oberweis says we need to stay the course in Iraq."

Alan Keyes: Iraq War reduced probability of attack from Saddam to zero

KEYES: We either fight the war against terror or the terrorists kill us. What Pres. Bush did was take a situation where there was a probability of a terrorist attack and respond. Now what probability was there that there was going to be a biological or nuclear attack against the US? Bush did was what any responsible president would have to do: He acted to reduce that probability to zero because that is the only probability we want. So he acted to attack them before they attack us, to make it clear to enablers of terrorism like Saddam Hussein that we will retaliate. And it’s worked. It was a necessary decision the president made to save our country from disaster.

OBAMA: We have not reduced the probability of a terrorist attack to zero, when we have nuclear fuel lying around in the former Soviet Union & while Osama bin Laden roams free in the hills of Afghanistan.

KEYES: We have reduced the probability of an attack from Saddam Hussein to zero

Alan Keyes: Naive to think Saddam has no connections to Al Qaeda

OBAMA: There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This war has made us less safe. Osama bin Laden roams free in the hills of Afghanistan.

KEYES: The breathtaking naivete of the assertion that there is no connection between Al Qaeda & Saddam Hussein when Saddam was providing payments to the families of Hamas suicide bombers who had ties to Al Qaeda. I worked on the National Security Council staff. Maybe that’s why I understand the situation a little better than Barack Obama. Those ties are real and we cannot afford to let them operate.

OBAMA: I don’t think that Mr. Keyes knowledge of the situation is better than Donald Rumsfeld’s or the other experts who have confirmed that there was no connection between those who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 and Iraq. This was an ideologically driven war. But now we do have a hotbed of terrorism to fight in Iraq.

Barack Obama: Iraq War has made US less safe from terrorism

OBAMA: There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This war has made us less safe because it betrayed a set of international rules that were in place to protect us, that could have helped us defeat terrorism. Mr. Keyes implied that by fighting this war in Iraq we have reduced the probability of a terrorist attack to zero. That cannot be the case when we have nuclear fuel lying around in the former Soviet Union. We still have ports that are insecure. We have nuclear and chemical plants that are still insecure. The notion that we have eliminated the terrorist threat while Osama bin Laden roams free in the hills of Afghanistan is simply not the case.

KEYES: We have reduced the probability of an attack from Saddam Hussein to zero.

Barack Obama: Saddam has no connections to Al Qaeda nor to 9/11

OBAMA: There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This war has made us less safe. Osama bin Laden roams free in the hills of Afghanistan.

KEYES: The breathtaking naivete of the assertion that there is no connection between Al Qaeda & Saddam Hussein when Saddam was providing payments to the families of Hamas suicide bombers who had ties to Al Qaeda. I worked on the National Security Council staff. Maybe that’s why I understand the situation a little better than Barack Obama. Those ties are real and we cannot afford to let them operate.

OBAMA: I don’t think that Mr. Keyes knowledge of the situation is better than Donald Rumsfeld’s or the other experts who have confirmed that there was no connection between those who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 and Iraq. This was an ideologically driven war. But now we do have a hotbed of terrorism to fight in Iraq.

Alan Keyes: Troops should stay in Iraq until they get the job done

A: They stay there until they get the job done. Kerry is preoccupied with an exit strategy, but if you get into a battle and the only thing you’re thinking about is how to get out, I think we have a word for you-and it’s not very complimentary. We are engaged in a war against terror that was started by the terrorists, that claimed the lives of thousands of Americans, that involves a global infrastructure of insidious individuals. We have seen the work they do against innocent lives in the most bestial fashion possible. To fight that war, it is not sufficient to have rhetoric, it is not sufficient to react after the fact. You have got to preemptively move against their bases, against their sources of supply, against their training camps, against the states the provide them with safe haven and infrastructure. If you do not, then they will simply prepare for further attacks.

Alan Keyes: Preemptive strike in Iraq is a right decision

Alan Keyes: There is no distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq

A: There is not. One of the problems with folks who haven’t really had much experience in dealing with terror is that they don’t understand that we are in fact faced with a global infrastructure. Saddam was providing, for instance, payments to the families of suicide bombers who were moving against the Israelis. Bin Laden made it very clear he was doing so on behalf of, he said, the Palestinians and their cause. All of this suggests is the reality that we are not dealing with discrete elements here. We are dealing with a single war that has a front in Afghanistan, a front in Iraq that has a covert series of fronts that we don’t hear much about, but in which our people are presumably going after the cadre of terror, that has a financial front & other fronts. To deal with this as if we’re dealing with discrete little episodes is to show that you have no real understanding of the danger that we face.

Alan Keyes: Bush didn’t have the wisdom of hindsight in the Iraqi War

KEYES: That’s the fallacy, because you did make an argument just then from the wisdom of hindsight, based on conclusions reached now which were not in Bush’s hands several months ago when he had to make this decision.

Barack Obama: Terrorists are in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran

KEYES: That’s the fallacy, because you did make an argument just then from the wisdom of hindsight, based on conclusions reached now which were not in Bush’s hands several months ago when he had to make this decision.

Barack Obama: Invading Iraq was a bad strategic blunder

Barack Obama: We must make sure that Iraq is stable having gone in there

A: The War on Terror has to be vigorously fought. Where we part company is how to fight it, because Afghanistan in fact was not a preemptive war, it was a war launched directly against those who were responsible for 9/11. Iraq was a preemptive war based on faulty evidence-and I say that not in hindsight, or Monday-morning quarterbacking. Six months before the war was launched, I questioned the evidence that would lead to us being there. Now, us having gone in there, we have a deep national security interest in making certain that Iraq is stable. If not, not only are we going to have a humanitarian crisis, we are also going to have a huge national security problem on our hands-because, ironically, it has become a hotbed of terrorists as a consequence, in part, of our incursion there. In terms of timetable, I’m not somebody who can say with certainty that a year from now or six months from now we’re going to be able to pull down troops.

Barack Obama: Advance the training speed and get the reconstruction moving

We have to do three things in Iraq.
1. We have to advance the speed with which we are training Iraqi troops and security forces so that they can stabilize the country, and that’s going to require our help.
2. But it’s also going to require the help of the international community, which is why we have to internationalize this process. I’m under no illusions that the Germans and the French are going to be sending troops in any time soon, but we can get them to put more resources into the training and infrastructure required to secure the Iraqi borders and the Iraqi streets.
3. Finally, it’s important that we get our reconstruction moving. The reconstruction process that has taken place has been completely inept. And that’s not simply my estimation, that’s the estimation of the two ranking Republican Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who issued a blistering attack on the Bush administration. Highly unusual and it indicates how badly botched this job has been.

Barack Obama: Democratizing Iraq will be more difficult than Afghanistan

A: It is an absolutely hopeful sign for the people of Afghanistan. As I have stated unequivocally, I have always thought that we did the right thing in Afghanistan. My only concerns with respect to Afghanistan was that we diverted our attention from Afghanistan in terms of moving into Iraq, and I think would could have done a better job of stabilizing that country than we have in providing assistance to the Afghani people. All of us should be rooting for the Afghani people & making sure that we are providing them the support to make things happen. With respect to Iraq, it’s going to be a tougher play. I don’t think any of us should be rooting for failure in Iraq at this point. This is no longer Bush’s war, this is our war, and we all have a stake in it.