Relating to the Liberation of the Iraqi People and the Valiant Service of the United States Armed Forces and Coalition Forces

RELATING TO THE LIBERATION OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE AND THE VALIANT SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES AND COALITION FORCES -- (House of Representatives - March 17, 2004)

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(Mr. ACKERMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. ACKERMAN. Mr. Speaker, this resolution is extraordinary, not for what it says but for what it deliberately refuses to admit. The President took us to war. An immediate nuclear threat was the bait. This resolution is the switch.

In the aftermath of the war, we found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and with shifting justifications coming from the President and memorialized here in this Republican-crafted resolution, I cannot help but feel, as my constituents do, that we were sold a bill of goods. Not surprisingly, today's feel-good pep-rally resolution does not
speak to these issues. What it does provide is the background music for justification revisionists.

But since we have not discovered the promised stockpiles of weapons, we have a big problem. Not that our failure to find the weapons is not a big problem or that al Qaeda forces sneaking into Iraq is not a big problem or that nation building a place the size of California is not a big problem. The real problem is an utter lack of White House credibility. It is gone. Having not just cried wolf, but rabid wolf, this administration has lost its credibility with the Congress, with the American people, with the people of Europe, even with the people of "New Europe," and with the international community.

And the credibility gap extends to the plans for what we would do after the war. We won the war. The Secretary of War makes good war. And for the peace we were assured, the American people were assured that there was a plan. In fact, there was. It was crafted by the State Department. It spoke to all of the issues and problems that we have come up with until today, and it was scrapped by the Secretary of Defense. So how are the American people supposed to believe that the current plan to hand over power to the Iraqis on June 30, ready or not, come hell or high water, will actually work when all the expertise the United States Government could muster in advance has been summarily dismissed? I have concluded that the administration's plans to get us into the war was bait and switch, and the plan to get us out looks like cut and run.

Finally, I am deeply concerned that the war against Iraq has undermined our stated Bush national security doctrine on preemption. Surely we face a new and different world in the wake of September 11 and we must think differently about how to win the war on terror, but preemption as a valid and legal doctrine for self-defense depends on imminence, an imminent threat to our national security. What we have discovered in Iraq is that there was no imminent threat and that our intelligence about Saddam's weapons was far from the mark. The administration has destroyed its credibility with the world community, and if by our actions we have transformed preemptive war into preventative war, then despite what today's resolution says, we have not made the world a safe place but a more dangerous place in the long run.

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