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Iraq
Congressman Eliot Engel said Thursday (7/12) that it was time for U.S. troops to get out of the middle of an Iraqi civil war and, “It is time to start bring our troops home.”
The debate is on the "Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act" (HR 2956) ordering the Secretary of Defense to begin withdrawing American troops 120 days after the bill becomes law and finishing by April 1 2008. The bill passed by a vote of 223 to 201.
In a speech highly critical of the Administration’s conduct of the war, Rep. Engel said, “The war has turned into a great strategic fiasco, from the lack of planning to insufficient number of troops, to incompetent management or reconstruction projects, to the use of torture in military prisons. Our blunder in Iraq will affect our ability to succeed in the Middle East and elsewhere or years to come.”
He said that the Administration’s assessment of the Iraqi government’s progress “shows they have failed to achieve any level of political and economic success. Here we are in the fifth year of the war, longer than World War II, more than half a trillion dollars spent and 3,600 American lives lost, and Iraqi politicians seem further apart than ever. Indeed, the evidence that our soldiers are involved in an Iraqi civil war is mounting and a solution seems ever further from our grasp.”
He said Iraq was not a military problem anymore, it is a political crisis and, “Young American service personnel cannot solve the problem of Iraq.”
“And if the Iraqis cannot solve their political problems, we cannot do it for them”
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