Talking Points on Kyl-Lieberman Amendment

Council for a Livable World and Open Society Policy Center Urge "No" Vote

The Council for a Livable World and Open Society Policy Center oppose the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment No. 3017 to the Fiscal Year 2008 Defense Authorization bill as a provocative measure that will only undermine efforts to resolve tensions with Iran through diplomacy.

*Talking points on the amendment*

*The amendment could wind up being another in a long line of blank checks
provided to the Executive Branch in the mold of the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution and the authorization to use force in Iraq. *It endorses the
"use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq," including
military. While it calls for "prudent and calibrated" measures, the
loophole is big enough to drive an aircraft carrier or a fleet of planes
through. **

*Provocative measures such as the Kyl-Lieberman amendment can lead to a
tit-for-tat escalation resulting in military confrontation between the US
and Iran.* There are no good military options for solving our disagreements
with Iran. Military action would only result in disastrous and unintended
consequences for U.S. and Israeli interests. If we have learned nothing else
from Iraq, it is that there are limitations to the use of military force.

*Rather than escalating tensions, the U.S. should pursue smart, tough-minded
dialogue and diplomacy*, which are far more likely than force to produce a
satisfactory resolution in the case of Iran.

*Iran**'s gains in Iraq are largely due to the Bush invasion of Iraq.* As
Peter Galbraith recently wrote in the New York Review of
Books,
*"George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned
would be a disastrous consequence of a US withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover
of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia . . . Since
2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic,
political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link
the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from
southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive
military assistance to the Iraqi government." *

*The Kyl-Lieberman amendment is a resolution based almost entirely on false
premises.* The resolution only quotes questionable and unsubstantiated
assertions provided by the U.S. military about Iranian involvement in Iraq.
Though General Petraeus first embraced the official line in his written
Congressional testimony that Iran is using its elite "Quds force" in Iraq to
mold the Shiites into a proxy force to fight U.S. troops, he later
contradicted himself in answering a question from Rep. Hunter when he said
that that the Quds force had been withdrawn from Iraq. General Petraeus
said: "?The Quds Force itself ? we believe, by [and] large, those
individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese
Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity."

*The U.S. has not captured or even identified a single Iranian official in
Iraq who has been working on the transfer of weapons to Iraqis* despite the
fact that the U.S . military command has arrested and interrogated a number
of alleged leaders of the Iraqi network that is alleged to have been created
by the Quds force. On July 6, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S.
operations south of Baghdad, in response to a question said that his troops
had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran". [1]

During a press briefing on July 2, U.S .command spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin
Bergner also contradicted himself when he said that the Iranians had left
the training of Shiite militias in Iraq to Hezbollah, because Hezbollah
could "do things that perhaps they didn't want to have to do themselves *in
terms of interacting directly with special groups*".[2] In another public
statement, General Petraeus denied that Iran had anything to do with the
attacks on US forces in Kerbala.

*Senior officials in the Bush administration who wish to demonstrate US
resolve against Iran are pressuring for targeting the Quds Force in Iraq*.
According to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the
Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published January 26, 2007, "The wide-ranging
plan has several influential skeptics in the intelligence community, at the
State Department and at the Defense Department who said that they worry it
could push the growing conflict between Tehran and Washington into the
center of a chaotic Iraq war." [3]

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*The Council for a Livable World and Open Society Policy Center* *urge a
"No" vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment No. 3017 to the Fiscal Year 2008
Defense Authorization bill. *