The Nation's Progress in the War on Iraq

THE NATION'S PROGRESS IN THE WAR IN IRAQ -- (House of Representatives - February 04, 2004)

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Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus for organizing this Special Order and I too commend him for taking so much of his time to organize us to come to this floor to help shed light on what is going on in this Congress and in this world. I look forward to every opportunity that he affords me to participate.

The massive costs of the war and how they will affect Americans in their everyday lives is an incredibly important issue that we must continue to discuss. This past Monday, the President sent his fiscal year 2005 budget to Congress. We found out that under this President's guidance, the Nation's debt has grown to record numbers. This year alone, the deficit is expected to be at least $521 billion. And the national debt has grown by $1.7 trillion since 2001. Yet instead of taking the necessary steps to bring our fiscal house into order, the President has proposed more of his failed policies.
I am having an interesting time, Mr. Speaker, discussing this with my friends. They say to me, Maxine Waters, I thought that you were the one that has been accused of being one of those tax-and-spend liberals but now your President has outdone you. He is spending money like a drunken sailor. How can you explain it?

I say to him, I cannot explain it, but it falls into that category of misdirection, of tales that are being told that just do not hold up when you place them under scrutiny.

The President's budget is extremely dangerous. It calls for eliminating 38 education programs and cutting funding for dozens of others. It does virtually nothing for the 43 million Americans who have no health insurance. It cuts $1.6 billion from HUD's section 8 voucher program and an additional $130 million from public housing. The President's budget even cuts, by 7 percent, programs designed to protect our drinking water, keep our air clean and other important environmental programs.

The budget even calls for imposing copayments and enrollment fees for our veterans in order to receive health care for their injuries sustained while protecting our Nation. I find it appalling that our President would require our veterans to pay up to $250 enrollment fees in order to receive the care they need. But these are just a few examples of the administration's policies that penalize working Americans. The war in Iraq is a continuation of these policies. It is the working American that is fighting, dying and paying for this war. The wealthiest of Americans, on the other hand, are not being asked to make any of these sacrifices. None are serving themselves, and few if any have sons or daughters in the U.S. Armed Forces. And they are the beneficiaries of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts which makes it increasingly difficult to pay for this war.

To date, the President has asked for and received $157 billion for this war in Iraq. Amazingly, recent press reports suggest that the President will ask for another additional $50 million shortly after the next election for military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will bring the total to $206 billion. What is so disappointing, though not surprising, is the difference between what we were told the costs would be for this war and what the costs are turning out to be. Throughout the buildup to the war, and even during the early stages, the American people were assured that the costs would be minimal. Who can forget Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz' statement in March of 2003 when he said, "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." But the sad reality is that it is the American people who are paying for this war.

Mr. Speaker, as we look at this administration and this war, we cannot help but now understand why the American people are finally waking up to how they have been misled and misdirected by this President and this administration. Of course, we heard references tonight to the reason we were told we were going into this war and we must say it over and over again; we did a preemptive strike because Saddam Hussein and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and we were in imminent danger. We were told this over and over again and Colin Powell even had some maps. He pointed to some sheds where chemicals were being made and the weapons of mass destruction were being developed.

But we have been misled on many things by this President and now we find ourselves in a terrible situation in Iraq. We are not in control. Our soldiers are dying, being picked off one by one. Suicide bombings are taking place. Soldiers are losing their lives. I am sure their families are asking, why? Or what does this all mean? Not only are they losing their lives, we were told after the President could no longer support or justify the weapons of mass destruction that we really needed a regime change, that we had to be about the business of creating democracy in Iraq. Now we are at the point where our President has said they are going to turn over governance to the Iraqis, only to find out that this President does not want free and fair elections, he does not want free and fair elections because, oh, somebody may win that he does not like. And I want you to know that the protests are growing in Iraq about the fact that this President now wants to select and choose who will be in charge of Iraq. He wants to put in a council through some kind of caucuses to avoid the Shiites being in control, because they may be the ones that get elected in this war as opposed to the Sunnis that they would like to have elected. But whether we are talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, we really did not have a plan. We really thought we could just bomb everybody into submission, take over the oil fields and chop up the spoils. And are we disappointed.

My goodness, how much more insult do the American people have to take from this administration? Here we have the Vice President of the United States of America, Mr. Dick Cheney, who is still receiving paychecks from his old company, Halliburton. And what have we found out about Halliburton? They are cheating us right and left. Not only have they overcharged us for the oil they are importing from Kuwait to Iraq, we find out they are cheating us on the amount of the food that they are serving to our soldiers. They are giving us extraordinary numbers, only to find out that they are not really serving the numbers that they represent.

I talked about some of this last night, but it goes on and on and on. We are paying for a war that we should not have been in in the first place. We are paying contractors who are cheating us like Halliburton, who are getting no-bid contracts, and there is no end to all of this. This administration is going to have to pay a price for what it has done. I am glad that we are here talking about it this evening.

Mr. Speaker, the administration's rhetoric does not support the situation we find ourselves in today. We were not welcomed as liberators, there are no weapons of mass destruction, hundreds of U.S. soldiers are dying, and taxpayers are paying billions of dollars for a war that need not be fought. Meanwhile, our responsibilities here at home are being neglected.

The Senate's ricin scare yesterday reminds us that our homeland is not as secure as it should be. Our schools continue to be in disrepair and hundreds of thousands of workers are losing their jobs.

Mr. Speaker, we need to reassess our priorities. Unfortunately, this budget does not do any of these things. There is so much more we can say, but I am going to yield my time to our leader here so that he can wrap this up tonight. But we have more to say and we will be back again because the American public wants to hear from us.

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