Relating to the Liberation of the Iraqi People and the Valiant Service of the Unitd 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)

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 561, I call up the resolution (H. Res. 557) relating to the liberation of the Iraqi people and the valiant service of the United States Armed Forces and Coalition forces, and ask for its immediate consideration.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the time.

Mr. Speaker, if all we were doing here on the floor today on the House was commending our troops for their valor, there would be no debate. There would be no disagreement and there would be no opposition. This resolution, however, says something more than that we honor our troops.

What this resolution says is that we, the House of Representatives, affirm that "the United States and the world have been made safer with the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime from power in Iraq." There is not a Member of this body that mourns the fact that Saddam Hussein and his regime have been removed from power. We all agree that Saddam was a brutal thug. The problem is that America was told before the war that we would be made safer by fighting to find and destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. We now know that those weapons either did not exist, in which case we fought a war based on flawed intelligence, or that there really were weapons of mass destruction, in which case they are now in the hands of Saddam's Baathist henchmen or al Qaeda terrorists or some other party, and that would put us in greater peril than we were before the war started.

Moreover, if we switch our TV from C-SPAN to CNN, we will see that another bomb has gone off in Baghdad today, killing more than 25 and wounding nearly 50 innocent people. We will see that two American missionaries have been assassinated in Iraq. We will see reports of more and more targeted assassinations of civilian employees of the Coalition Authority, as well as continued attacks on our military forces in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the real terrorist threat to America, al Qaeda, continues to organize and plan future terrorist attacks against our country. Osama bin Laden and some of his top lieutenants remain at large. Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, remains at large.

What is happening on the House floor today is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Washington. Instead of working together in a bipartisan fashion to congratulate the troops for the wonderful job which they did, they seek to divide this House by forcing us to vote on something which, in fact, is not an accurate representation of what has happened across this world.

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