Floor Speech Regarding Iraq War Resolution
February 14, 2007
U.S. House of Representatives
Dick Armey, our former Majority Leader, said in an interview with a major newspaper chain last week that he deeply regretted voting for the War in Iraq.
Mr. Armey said: "Had I been more true to myself and the principles I believed in at the time, I would have openly opposed the adventure vocally and aggressively."
Chris Matthews, on MSNBC on election night said: "The decision to go to war in Iraq was not a conservative decision historically," and he added that it "asked Republicans to behave like a different people than they intrinsically are."
William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in 2004 that he felt he should have opposed the war, and in 2005, he wrote that to continue there beyond another year would indicate "not steadfastness of purpose, but rather, misapplication of pride."
But what about this surge? The conservative columnist George Will wrote in opposition to it and said it would take a miracle for it to succeed.
Very few people, Mr. Speaker, pushed harder for us to go to war in Iraq than the columnist Charles Krauthammer. A few weeks ago, he wrote that the Maliki government we have installed there cares only about making sure the Shiites dominate the Sunnis.
"We should not be surging troops in defense of such a government," Krauthammer wrote. "Maliki should be made to know that if he insists on having this sectarian war, he can well have it without us."
But listen to what the enlisted men say: Specialist Don Roberts, 22, of Paonia, Colorado, now in his second tour in Iraq, told the Associated Press: "What could more guys do? We cannot pick sides. It is like we have to watch them kill each other, then ask questions."
Sergeant Josh Keim, of Canton, Ohio, also on his second tour said, "nothing is going to help. It is a religious war and we are caught in the middle of it."
PFC Zack Clauser, 19, of York, PA, told the McClatchy News Service: "This isn't our war-we're in the middle."
Sergeant Clarence Dawalt, 22, of Tulsa, Okla., said, "They can keep sending more and more troops over here, but until the people here start working with us, its not going to change."
And Sergeant 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, TN, said: "Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years" and that after our raids melt insurgents away, "two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they'll come back."
Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but he had a total military budget only a little over two-tenths of 1 percent of ours, most of which he spent protecting himself and his family and building castles.
He was no threat to us at all. As the conservative columnist Charley Reese has written several times, Iraq did not threaten us with war. They did not attack us, and were not even capable of attacking us.
But even before the war started, Fortune Magazine had an article saying that an American occupation of Iraq would be "prolonged and expensive" and would make U.S. soldiers "sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists."
Now we have had more than 3,000 Americans killed, many thousands more wounded horribly, and have spent $400 billion, and the Pentagon wants $170 billion more. And as one previous speaker said with all the added medical and veterans' costs, the ultimate cost of this war could reach $2 trillion. There is nothing fiscally conservative about this war.
Most of what we have spent has been purely foreign aid in nature: rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, giving free medical care, training police, giving jobs to several hundred thousand Iraqis and on and on. Our Constitution does not give us the authority to run another country as we have in reality been doing in Iraq.
With a national debt of almost $9 trillion, we cannot afford it. To me our misadventure in Iraq is both unconstitutional and unaffordable. Some have said it was a mistake to start this war but that now that we are there we have to finish the job, and we cannot cut and run. Well, if you find out you are going the wrong way down the interstate, you do not keep going, you get off at the next exit.
There is no way, Mr. Speaker, we can keep all of our promises to our own people on Social Security, veterans' benefits, and many other things in the years ahead if we keep trying to run the whole world. As another columnist, Georgie Anne Geyer, wrote more than 3 years ago, Americans "will inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire across the globe."
We should help other countries during humanitarian crises and have trade and tourism and cultural and educational exchanges. But conservatives have traditionally been the strongest opponents to interventionist foreign policies that create so much resentment for us around the world.
We need to return to the more humble foreign policy President Bush advocated when he campaigned in 2000.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, we need to tell all of these defense contractors that the time for this Iraq gravy train with its obscene profits is over.
It is certainly no criticism of our troops to say that this was a very unnecessary war. It has always been more about money and power and prestige than any real threat to us or to our people. And this war went against every traditional conservative position I have ever known.
It is time, Mr. Speaker, to bring our troops home.
