Iraq War Resolution

Floor Speech

IRAQ WAR RESOLUTION -- (House of Representatives - February 15, 2007)

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Mr. DOGGETT. I thank the gentleman.

This debate is late, very late, thousands of deaths too late. This escalation scheme is an unmitigated disaster.

President Bush seems determined to continue to make the same old mistakes, just make them a little bit bigger; defying sound military judgement; defying the Iraq Study Group; defying the wishes of our allies and the Iraqis themselves; and, most particularly, defying the will of the American people.

This President continues to pursue a go-it-alone strategy in Iraq. Like most every problem that he has created, and there are many, he seeks only to pass it along to his successor, who we will elect next year--pass along in this case what is no doubt the most colossal foreign policy failure in American history.

The administration's top budget official told me in a hearing just last week that ``the best minds in the Pentagon'' see no need to fund this escalation, which has not yet really begun, for more than another seven months. In truth, our military has been so overstretched that it cannot sustain a prolonged escalation, even when it unfairly recalls inadequately supplied troops for a second, third, and fourth tour of duty. Little wonder that the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gates, admitted last week that he is already looking for another plan after this escalation falls short.

This week, this House, we say ``stop the increase.'' And next, we must begin the decrease with a phased withdrawal from Iraq. We should not act precipitously, but we must move very expeditiously to extract our troops from the crossfire of the warring factions in this civil war quagmire.

To our troops, whose courage we honor today in this very resolution, we say to you, those of who you who are out there on the front lines today, we will do everything we can to protect you; but we will also be working as hard as we can to bring you home safely to your families sooner rather than later.

There is a better way to show support for our troops than just sending more of them to be killed. There is a better way than continuing to give this President a blank check for war funding. Unless we move forward to place firm limitations on the appropriations, we will leave this war-making President constrained only by DICK CHENEY's imagination.

The words of our adversaries in this debate have often been very short, but their true conflict is not really with us; it is with reality. They are in a losing war with the truth. Iraq has never been the central front in the war on terrorism. Like the alleged connection between 9/11 and Iraq, like the claim that Saddam's nuclear mushroom cloud was looming just over the horizon, this charge is but another falsehood foisted off on the gullible.

The central front on the war on terrorism was largely abandoned by President Bush in his ideological rush to invade Iraq. Vital resources and expertise that were needed to capture Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who caused 9/11 were cut in Afghanistan when President Bush ran into Iraq. The real war on terrorism suffered a major setback from which today it has still never recovered. That is the only ``cut and run'' that now endangers our families. Nor does this debate in the people's House embolden the enemies of democracy when we exercise democracy here in America.

To me, the terrorists seem mighty emboldened with their daily death and destruction that they wreaked across the Middle East long before anyone ever conceived this resolution. Frankly, it is the administration that is the terrorists' top recruiter.

As we predicted at the outset, this war is creating new generations of terrorists who view it as a war against all Islam. We cannot kill our enemies fast enough with the current policies creating more of them every day.

And now this President is stoking the flames of war with Iran. Ironically, that is the only country in the world to have directly benefited from his attacking Iraq. Widening the war to Iran with the macho slogan that ``boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran'' risks an even wider, even more destabling debacle that can eventually involve our families in a third world war.

Having failed entirely to learn any lessons from Vietnam, this administration seems to already have forgotten our experience in Iraq. Some here who profess to be conservative have been very liberal with billions of misspent taxpayers' dollars and very liberal with the blood of others in the sand of Iraq.

President Bush was absolutely correct when he personally declared his war in Iraq to be a ``catastrophic success.'' He has certainly been successful at creating one catastrophe after another in Iraq.

Our Nation is great enough with sufficient resources and creativity to change course, but each day we delay we sink further into a quagmire from which fewer and fewer choices remain. We must step back from the abyss

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