Speech by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), July 15, 2004

Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Farr-Schakowsky-McGovern amendment.

Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment about America, about us, and about the pressures placed on our uniformed men and women serving in the Armed Forces. In effect, this amendment matches what the House has already approved in the Defense authorization bill. In this sense, it is a conforming amendment. Everyone in this House knows that America's troops are stretched dangerously thin. Every day, there is a story in one of the major papers about the stresses facing American troops as more are deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. We are diverting troops from South Korea to Iraq, and we are placing burdens on our Guard and Reservists just to give some small amount of relief to our regular military units before they are redeployed into combat once again.

Faced with these tremendous strains, the administration has come forward and asked Congress to double the number of troops in Colombia, offering no more compelling a rationale than Colombia needs more of our men and women for their civil war.

The Farr amendment, like the Taylor provision in the Defense authorization bill, offers a prudent alternative: provide a modest increase of 150 more troops, give the U.S. military in Colombia a bit more flexibility and relief, retain the private contractor cap at 400, and evaluate our global military situation over the next 12 months.

I do not want any Member of this House to be fooled. This latest bid to raise the military troop cap will not be the last. The administration has assured Congress repeatedly that no increase to the troop cap would be necessary; yet, now their story has changed. Will it change again in another year or two? Let us refresh our memories on what the administration has told Congress about the current troop cap.

On April 4, 2001, General Peter Pace, commander of the U.S. Southern Command said, ``That troop cap, sir, is well within the limits that I need to do the job that I have been given, and I support it.''

On October 4, 2002, Brigadier General Galen Jackman, J-3 Chief of Operations at the U.S. Southern Command testified, ``We have a 400-person military cap in Colombia. We do not envision that that is going to change. Typically, we have maybe a couple of hundred people in the country at any given time.''

On March 7, 2003, Mark Grossman, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs stated, ``There are caps on the number of people who can be in Colombia at any one time, and there is no one who is advocating the breaking of those caps.''

And on August 19, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, ``I think it would be unlikely to be anything that would break that cap.''

Mr. Chairman, when Plan Colombia was first launched and American troops first sent down to Colombia, Congress was told we were only going to fight the drug trade. Then we were asked to commit our troops to fight not only a drug war, but to join the campaign in a counterterrorist, a counterinsurgency civil war. Now we are being asked to double the number of our soldiers, boots on the ground in Colombia. There is a term for what is happening in Colombia. It is called ``mission creep.''

Mr. Chairman, Congress was right 4 years ago to impose military personnel caps in Colombia. It was a smart and prudent safeguard against any rapid escalation of U.S. involvement in Colombia's internal armed conflict. We did the right thing then. The Farr-Schakowsky-McGovern amendment is the right thing to do now.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment on U.S. troop caps in Colombia.

As of July 16, 2004 this page was also available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/B?r108:@FIELD(FLD003+h)+@FIELD(DDATE+20040715)