Rice Stirs Skepticism in Budget Committee Hearing
WASHINGTON, Feb. 16– “You can mark me down as a skeptic,” said Senator Ken Conrad, D-N.D., to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she testified at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Thursday morning.
Conrad, who was extremely critical of Rice’s argument that there has been progress in Iraq, said that $30 billion of “American taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, so the American people have been very generous already.”
Senator Judd Gregg, R-N.H., the chairman of the committee, was the only other senator present for most of the hearing. Gregg did not echo Conrad’s skepticism but instead asked if Rice believed that the amount of money budgeted was enough.
“You’re one of the few secretaries that comes before this committee who’s had significant increases in your budget,” Gregg said. He asked if Rice could explain how the department was going to use the money and whether the significant increase was enough.
Rice said that the State Department would do its part to make sure that the dollars are well spent. However, she said, the United States was not meeting diplomatic needs and there were more positions that were needed in many of the Latin American, Chinese and Indian posts.
“I promise you we’re going to be looking to squeeze out every dollar that we can, but right now the demand outstrips the supply of even significant increases that we’ve had because I think we’ve recognized the challenges before us,” the secretary said.
Conrad said: “I’m very concerned that we’re going to be asked for boatloads of additional funding. There’s an enormous challenge in the Middle East, we also face big challenges in our own Midwest ,and I say to you that this. doesn’t look good to me.”
U.S. taxpayer dollars have been put toward modernizing the infrastructure of Iraq, Rice said, citing the increased capacity in that country for water and sewerage
“We can improve capacity, that’s great,” Conrad said, but at the end of the day what people cared about was having actual water and sewerage facilities.
“We don’t want our foreign assistance program to be a kind of permanent dependency for countries,” Rice said. “We really want them to be able to take on their own problems.”
“I think the secretary made a very strong case for what they were doing,” Gregg said in an interview after the hearing. The senator said Rice made a legitimate point, and if the United States were able to produce a functioning market-oriented democracy in Iraq, that “will undermine the Islamic fundamentalist movement throughout the region.”
Gregg said countries like Iran who are running governments that counter democracy “will find themselves under a lot of pressure from their own people to pursue the same course as Iraq has pursued, with liberties and democracies and women getting freedom and having the vote.”
“We need to be successful in Iraq and produce a successful democracy there, and we’re well down the road to accomplishing that,” Gregg said.
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