Report on Iraq by General Petraeus

Floor Speech

REPORT ON IRAQ BY GENERAL PETRAEUS -- (House of Representatives - September 10, 2007)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. AKIN. Thank you very much, and thank you for taking some time to run through a series of events that actually in the last couple of days seem a little puzzling to me, I might have to say.

My recollection is is that General David Petraeus, his credentials were reviewed over in the other body, and they took a vote as to whether or not he was the guy that we're going to put front and center to be in charge of the entire campaign in Iraq, and he got a unanimous vote in the other legislative body. That says an awful lot of people had to vote for him to get a unanimous vote over there.

Also, as I recall, it was just not so long ago that the Democrat party, who's in charge of both the House and the Senate, made the request that in September General Petraeus would come before the legislature and would make a report as to what the findings were, would let us know how things were going. Many people were very skeptical about the reorganization, the restructuring of our war in Iraq, around the idea of the surge, but people trusted General David Petraeus. They trusted him because he has an excellent reputation and record as a soldier, but he also is a straight shooter. He doesn't sugarcoat things. He explains it the way it is.

And so it was with some sense of alarm and a little bit, I have to say, with a sense of frustration that we saw in the New York Times this calling General Petraeus where they say ``General Betray Us.''

What we're doing is taking somebody that before we thought they had good credibility, we're going to guess what they may say to us, we think we may not like what he has to say, so now we're going to try to destroy his reputation. I think that's a shame.

My son has served over in Fallujah. As you have mentioned, I also am on the Oversight Committee.

One of the things that has been consistent with every witness, week after week over a period of months, every witness we could scrounge up, conservative, Republican, liberal, Democrat, you name it, the one thing those witnesses said was, first of all, they said if we pull out of Iraq rapidly, there is going to be a huge bloodbath there.

The second thing is that the whole region will be destabilized. Everybody agreed to that. Now, some people said, well, there is nothing we can do about it, so we ought to pull out now and cut our losses. Other ones said, no, there are some things we could do about it. But everybody agreed that a rapid drawdown of troops is not what we should be doing in America.

After listening hour after hour to all these experts, I came to the conclusion of this simple fact, and that is, it is the least-cost, most logical best alternative for us to just go ahead and win the war in Iraq.

We are more than halfway, and trying to turn around and back out, make excuses and try to lose is just going to be much more costly than moving forward and doing a good job.

That's what the general has outlined today in very credible testimony. I was very thankful that he is here. I am thankful that you took the time to help us to be able to talk about this very important subject about how we proceed and the sense of good news. There is a little light at the end of the tunnel is what it seems like to me.

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