End this Endless War in Iraq

Floor Speech

END THIS ENDLESS WAR IN IRAQ -- (House of Representatives - October 10, 2007)

Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Speaker, on this unfortunate day 5 years ago, a majority of this House enabled President Bush to proceed with his tragic ``go it alone'' war. He was dead certain then, and he was dead wrong then. He is dead certain today, and once again dead wrong. As a result of his choices, we approach now some 4,000 Americans whose lives have been lost, perhaps as many as another 30,000 who have been disabled.

Our Treasury, of course, has been disabled of what is scheduled to be probably a trillion or more dollars out of our Treasury that could have been spent right here at home on more causes that would have touched and protected the American people, their health care and economic security.

After this 5 years, I think it is important to look back and realize that despite the position of the Republican leadership, the Republican administration, and most of the Democratic administration, that in this House that day 5 years ago, a substantial majority of House Democrats voted against this war that should never have been launched.

We say today that the best course for this country to pursue is a new course, a change of course, not just more of the same old thing as the President proposed in his escalation, as he has implemented in his escalation, but a genuine change in course.

We need to end this endless war in Iraq. We really already have a blueprint of how to do it, how to implement a safe and orderly redeployment. The United Kingdom, the only one of our allies to offer any substantial help in Iraq, is already redeploying and seems to be indicating that their troops will be out of Iraq next year. We need to join that coalition, the coalition of refocusing on priorities here at home, because what we have done in Iraq has not made our families safer. As one independent study after another has shown, what we have done there has made our families much less safe than had this adventure never been launched.

For the last 5 years, this administration has repeatedly presented us with false choices. Remember, there would be a mushroom cloud, perhaps, if we waited to find the smoking gun to justify the invasion of Iraq to find all these weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Now we hear the same old deadly course is the only alternative to a ``precipitous withdrawal.'' Well, I don't know of anyone who is proposing a precipitous withdrawal. There are other reasonable alternatives. We believe that the better course, a new course, is a safe, orderly, fully funded, phased redeployment. The British already have this underway.

The British already have this underway. We can follow their example, and we can follow the leadership of the American people reflected in one study after another, that they want that kind of change in course.

The choice to redeploy or not is a decision about priorities. While it is true that the big cost of what we are doing there is measured in the blood of the brave, we are also hemorrhaging some $3 billion in Iraq expenditures right out of our Treasury, week after week, month after month.

The President vetoed the Children's Health Insurance bill, because even too little for our children seems to be too much for him. Half a trillion dollars for a war already that he chose in Iraq, but for the children of America's working poor, he brusquely tells us, they can just go to the emergency room. With millions of children uninsured, it is too soon to declare ``mission accomplished'' there, just as it was too soon for him to make that declaration years back and many deaths back in Iraq.

In Iraq and with the Children's Health Insurance Program, we believe that the President is on the wrong course and that we cannot afford to wait until he departs office to end this war and to end the indifference that he has shown toward our children.

This fifth anniversary then should be commemorated with thoughtful consideration of alternatives for new courses and new avenues to address the tremendous damage that has been done by this faulty policy of preemptive war. I believe that we need in these next few months to continue to focus on the wrongs that have been committed, the damage that has been done, and bring people together behind a genuinely new course that we have not tried before, and that is a complete but phased, safe and orderly, fully-funded redeployment of our troops that will protect our families, that will assure our Nation's security, and will not continue with the hemorrhaging that we have suffered these last many years.

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