Even The Soldiers Will Tell You: "Nothing's Going To Help"
EVEN THE SOLDIERS WILL TELL YOU: ``NOTHING'S GOING TO HELP' -- (House of Representatives - January 17, 2007)
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I voted against going to war in Iraq when Congress voted on this in October of 2002, and I am opposed to sending more troops there now.
President Bush has said that he is going to listen mainly to his commanders. I wish he would listen to Specialist Don Roberts, 22, of Paonia, Colorado, now on his second tour in Iraq, who told the Associated Press, ``What could more guys do? We can't pick sides. It's almost like we have to watch them kill each other and then ask questions.'
Sergeant Josh Keim of Canton, Ohio, also on his second tour said, ``Nothing is going to help. It is a religious war and we are caught in the middle of it.'
Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but he had a total military budget a little over two-tenths of 1 percent of ours, most of which he spent protecting himself and his family and building castles. He was no threat to us at all.
But even before the war started, Fortune Magazine had an article saying that an American occupation would be ``prolonged and expensive' and would make U.S. soldiers sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists.
Now we have had more than 3,000 young Americans killed, many thousands more wounded horribly, and have spent $400 billion and the Pentagon wants $170 billion more. Most of what we have spent has been purely foreign aid in nature: Rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, giving free medical care, training police, giving jobs to several hundred thousand Iraqis, and on and on.
Our Constitution does not give us the authority to run another country as we have in reality been doing in Iraq. With a national debt of almost $9 trillion, we cannot afford it. To me, our misadventure in Iraq is both unconstitutional and unaffordable.
Some have said it was a mistake to start this war, but now that we are there we have to ``finish the job' and we cannot ``cut and run.' Well, if you find out you are going down the wrong way down the interstate, you get off at the next exit.
Very few pushed as hard for us to go to war in Iraq as did syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. Last week, he wrote that the Maliki government we have installed there cares only about making sure that the Shiites dominate the Sunnis. And he wrote, ``We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government,' Krauthammer wrote. ``Maliki should be made to know that if he insists on having this sectarian war he can well have it without us.'
There is no way we can keep all of our promises to our own people on Social Security, veterans benefits, and many other things in the years ahead if we keep trying to run the whole word.
As another columnist, Georgie Anne Geyer, wrote more than 3 years ago, ``Americans will inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire across the globe.'
We should help other countries during humanitarian crises, and we should have trade and tourism and cultural and educational exchanges, but conservatives have traditionally been the strongest opponents to interventionist foreign policies that create so much resentment around the world. We need to return to the more humble foreign policy President Bush advocated when he campaigned in 2000.
We need to tell all these defense contractors that the time for this Iraqi gravy train with its obscene profits is over. It is time to bring our troops home, Mr. Speaker.
I wrote that in a column that ran last Friday in Tennessee's highest circulation newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, but let me just add this: William F. Buckley, who has often been called the Godfather of Conservativism, wrote about 1 1/2 years ago, ``A point is reached when tenacity conveys not steadfastness of purpose but misapplication of pride.'
Mr. Speaker, we cannot win a civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis. There can be no victory for us in such a war.
Mr. Speaker, as a teenager I sent my first paycheck as a bag boy at the A&P grocery store as a contribution to the Barry Goldwater campaign. I have been a staunch conservative since high school. This war in Iraq went against every conservative position I have ever known. We need to return Iraq back to Iraqis and start putting our own people first once again.
http://thomas.loc.gov/