The Iraqi Government

Floor Speech

THE IRAQI GOVERNMENT -- (House of Representatives - May 09, 2007)

(Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, last January when the President was suggesting the need for the escalation of the numbers of troops in Iraq, he also told us that while we would provide the troops under his policy, the Iraqis would provide a series of benchmarks which they would meet to end the insurgency and to bring their country together politically so that the insurgency can be dampened down or ended.

Now we are told by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that it would be wrong to hold the Iraqi Government, the Malaki government, to those benchmarks because it would take away their flexibility, while President Bush said that if they did not meet these benchmarks in January, they would lose the confidence of the American people.

President Bush had it right. They haven't met the benchmarks. They are not holding up their end of the bargain. The Parliament is not meeting. A third of them are living in London, not in Iraq, and they have lost the confidence of the American people.

How is it that the Secretary of State and the President of the United States can continue to believe that we should continue to send American soldiers to die in Iraq when the Iraqi Government won't meet the benchmarks which were supposed to be the bedrock of this new policy, this new direction, that has turned out to be the same old stay-the-course policy where American soldiers die and the Iraqi Government dithers away day in and day out and not meeting the new policies to bring a unified Iraq together?

It is unacceptable to the American people. It is unacceptable to our soldiers. It is unacceptable to their families. And we ought to end this policy now.

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