Providing for Consideration of HR 1591, US Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, 2007
Floor Speech
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 1591, U.S. TROOP READINESS, VETERANS' HEALTH, AND IRAQ ACCOUNTABILITY ACT, 2007
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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 12 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, why are we here? We are here because 4 years ago the President plunged us into a preemptive war in Iraq, a country that had not attacked the United States, and we took that action on the basis of bad information, manipulated intelligence, with no visible plans for governing after the war was over.
Mr. Speaker, that attack diverted us from the hunt for bin Laden, the person who did attack us.
The war has now gone on for 4 years and, as a result, we have seen chaos and carnage. We have seen over 3,000 American service men and women die, many times more wounded and maimed. We have seen our influence decimated throughout the Middle East. We have seen our reputation as the democratic hope of the world tarnished by stories about torture and rendition.
I voted against that war. There were 215 Republicans who voted for it and 6 that voted against it. There were 81 Democrats who voted for it and 126 Democrats who voted against it. We had 132 votes, in total, against going to war. And ever since that time, we have been trying to get to 218 votes so we can turn this country and this war around.
Over the last 4 years, this war has been fought with virtually no sense of shared sacrifice. Military families have done double and triple duty, while the rest of America has had to accept the sacrifice of a tax cut. That is about all that has been asked of most Americans.
We have spent a huge amount of our national treasure, and now the President is asking for another almost $100 billion for this war and asking for an additional $3.5 billion for his own domestic priorities.
This bill is our response. It says to the President: ``Okay, you can have that money, but only under certain terms and conditions.'' And we try to do three things: number one, to redirect a greater effort to the right war in Afghanistan, rather than the wrong war in Iraq. Secondly, we try to protect our troops to the maximum extent possible and correct the neglect that they have suffered as they have returned from the battlefield. And, thirdly, we are trying to send a message to Iraq politicians that they need to change direction; that we will no longer tolerate an open-ended, interminable babysitting job; that they must get together and begin to resolve their own differences.
This bill sets a timetable for repositioning our troops out of Iraq. The exact timetable will be determined by the performance of the Iraqis and whether or not they meet important political and military benchmarks.
And this bill establishes a target for finishing our redeployment in any circumstance. It recognizes that our troops won the war, but it also recognizes that the President's plan calls upon troops to do something that they do not have the power to do, namely, to convince Iraqi factions to reach reasonable compromises on their own turf.
It sets reasonable conditions for moving our troops into a different posture. It holds Iraqis accountable to standards that the President himself has laid out. And it puts us on a new direction with respect to the war in Iraq.
And it does some other things, too. It completes action on a number of leftover pieces of business that the previous Congress left to this new incoming Congress.
The President himself asked for $3.4 billion to deal with the needs of FEMA. We are also finishing action on the BRAC action which requires $3.1 billion in additional funding. We are finishing action on the need to improve family military housing to the tune of $3.4 billion. We are finishing action on rebuilding the lives and providing other assistance to the Katrina victims after the most devastating natural disaster in the history of our country.
We are finishing the action on the agriculture disaster problem that Congress wrestled with for well over a year in the previous Congress without coming to resolution. And we are providing the final $1 billion in funds to combat a potential pandemic flu, funds which the President himself requested in an emergency appropriation in the year 2005.
And we are also finishing action on the action begun last year by the Congress in trying to deal with the fact that 14 States are going to run out of child health money; and we need, therefore, to provide $750 million to see to it that low-income families and children in low-income families are not pushed off those State health care rolls. This is a request that has come in from Republican and Democratic Governors alike.
And we have also provided some additional funding, above what the President asked for, items which are not last year's business, but which we think are important in terms of this year's business.
We are increasing funding for veterans health and defense health by $3.4 billion. We are, on the homeland security front, increasing funding substantially. The President, since days after 9/11, has been resisting virtually every congressional effort to add funding for homeland security, for border security, for cargo security and the like.
We are continuing the effort to provide significantly more money than the President has asked for. If anybody wants to argue with that, I would suggest they take it up with the 9/11 Commission. I would suggest they take it up with the Hart-Rudman Commission. I would suggest they take it up with the 9/11 families. Everybody but Anne Coulter, I think, would be responsive to what those families think.
And then we are also providing $1.2 billion in additional funding for our war in Afghanistan. Mr. Speaker, I sat at CIA headquarters and watched, right after 9/11, as our predator aircraft were searching Afghanistan for bin Laden. And I know what the people at that agency were saying when they expressed their frustration that the President was diverting a huge share of our resources in the hunt for bin Laden to prepare for the unilateral attack on Iraq.
What this bill is trying to do is to correct that by, again, refocusing additional attention on the war against Afghanistan. And I make absolutely no apology for the funds that we have in here.
Now, some will say this is not a perfect instrument. They will differ with the time line that we have for the repositioning of troops, and they will differ with the benchmarks. But what I would say to them is that what is important in this document today is not the exact wording. What is important is not the exact timetable. What is important is not the exact enumeration of benchmarks. What is important is that, for the first time, this Congress will be exercising its constitutional responsibilities to provide real oversight on the executive branch of government, and we will be trying to set this country on a new direction.
Someone in this House said last week that we are similar in our position to a board of directors for a corporation. He said the President is the CEO. The President's Cabinet represents his management team, and we are the board of directors. And when a board of directors of a corporation sees that the management of the corporation is leading it down a disastrous path, it has a fiduciary responsibility to its stockholders to step in and correct the problem. That is what we are trying to do in this legislation. In this case, we have a fiduciary responsibility and a representational responsibility to the taxpayers and to our constituents, and we are trying to meet that responsibility today.
Now, there are some who have criticized us for doing so, some in newspapers and some on this floor. Very frankly, I am getting a bit tired of those who were consistently wrong from the beginning on the issue of Iraq, I am getting tired of them lecturing those of us who were consistently right from the beginning in our opposition to this war.
And when people ask me why we don't have a better solution, I tell them of the old story about Eddie Stanky, who used to play second base for the New York Giants many years ago. And one day, Leo Durocher, the manager, was hitting ground balls to the infield, and Stanky dropped two in a row. And so Durocher grabbed a glove and said, ``Here, kid, I'm going to show you how it's done.'' And he went out to second base, and the very first ball Durocher dropped. And he turned to Stanky, and said, ``Kid, you got second base so screwed up, nobody can play it.''
The fact is, if you substitute George Bush for Eddie Stanky and Iraq for second base, you have got the picture of what the problem is today.
Now, this Congress cannot run foreign policy, but it has an obligation to try to influence the policy and influence the conduct of that policy when we see it headed down the wrong path. Mr. Murtha has tried to lead the way in seeing to it that we face up to those responsibilities, and this legislation will give us an opportunity to do that.
I would hope it would be supported on a bipartisan basis.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.
The gentleman talks about how we need to support General Petraeus. Let me quote from Thomas Friedman, who has had years of experience in understanding the Middle East. He said: I hope the Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi keep pushing to set a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq because they are providing two patriotic services that the Republicans failed to offer in the previous 4 years. The first is policy discipline. The other useful function Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are performing is to give the President and General David Petraeus, our Commander in Iraq, the leverage of a deadline without a formal deadline. How so? The surge cannot work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, which means Sunni-Shiite negotiations, and such negotiations are unlikely to work without America having the leverage of telling the parties that if they do not compromise, we will leave. Deadlines matter. At some point Iraqis have to figure this out themselves. Since Mr. Bush refuses to set a deadline, Speaker Pelosi is the next best thing. Do not underestimate how useful it is for General Petraeus to be.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of time.
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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.
Mr. Speaker, the gentleman can have charts, but the charts don't change facts. I would also observe that the important thing is not what happened 7 or 8 years ago. The important thing is what we are going to do today and tomorrow.
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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. Again, we can debate yesterday until the cows come home. What Mr. Murtha and I are trying to focus on is what we do in this bill today to make tomorrow better for our servicemen and our country. That is the issue, and that is the issue that this bill tries to address.
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Mr. OBEY. I yield myself 1 minute.
I would say to the gentleman who just spoke, for the last 4 years we have tried it your way. For the last 4 years we have had a Congress that did whatever George Bush wanted it to do, rubber-stamp, lock-step all the way.
Today is different. Today we have a Congress that is responding to what the public asked for in the last election. What you are seeing today is the new world of checks and balances. Get used to it. It is what the public asked for, and it is what they are going to get out of this Congress.
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