Congressman Duncan denounces "mind boggling" spending in Iraq
March 14, 2008
Washington, DC -- Mr. Speaker, first I want to commend David Walker for his years of service as U.S. Comptroller General, heading up the Government Accountability Office.
Mr. Walker is a highly respected CPA from Atlanta and for the last few years has been trying to be a Paul Revere about the horrible financial condition of the Federal Government.
He has appeared before many Congressional committees and on television and has traveled around the
country trying to sound the alarm about our $9 trillion national debt, and, even worse, our $53 trillion in unfunded future pension liabilities.
Two days ago in the Washington Times he was quoted from testimony he gave about Iraqi oil revenues. “The Iraqis have a budget surplus,” Mr. Walker said. “We have a huge budget deficit. One of the questions is who should be paying.”
Stewart Bowen, Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction, said increased production, along with the highest oil prices in history, “coalesce into an enormous windfall for the Iraqi government.”
Mr. Bowen said Iraqi oil revenue is now around $60 billion, and probably headed higher. Most estimates are that we have been spending approximately $12 billion a month on the war in Iraq, a really astounding figure if you stop to think about it.
However, even worse, the request for this fiscal year is $189 billion, or $15.75 billion a month. This comes out to $500 million a day. There is certainly nothing fiscally conservative about the war in Iraq.
William F. Buckley, Jr., was an inspiring figure to almost every conservative Republican. In the current issue of the New Republic, John Judis begins an article about Mr. Buckley in this way: “In the last years of his life, William F. Buckley, Jr., who died on February 27 at the age of 82, broke with many of his fellow conservatives by pronouncing the Iraq war a failure.
He even expressed doubt about as to whether George W. Bush is really a conservative, and he asked the same about neoconservatives.” Mr. Buckley wrote in 2004 that if he had known in 2002 what he then knew, he would have opposed the war in Iraq.
More significantly, in June of 2005, he wrote, “A respect for the power of the United States is engendered by our success in engagements in which we take part. A point is reached when tenacity conveys not steadfastness of purpose, but misapplication of pride.”
Mr. Buckley continued, “It can't reasonably be disputed that if in the year ahead the situation in Iraq continues as bad as it has done in the past year, we will have suffered more than another 500 soldiers killed.
Where there had been skepticism about our venture, there will then be contempt.”
The major difference is that instead of just 500 more soldiers killed, we have had more than 2,000 killed since Mr. Buckley wrote that. Earlier in 2005 he had written that the time had come to get out.
There is nothing traditionally conservative about the war in Iraq. It is huge deficit spending. It is massive foreign aid. It is placing really the entire
burden of enforcing U.N. resolutions on our taxpayers and our military, when conservatives have traditionally been the biggest critics of the U.N.
This war has gone against every traditional conservative position. In addition, our Constitution does not give us the authority to govern Iraq, which is what in reality we have been doing.
All this against an enemy whose military budget was only a little over two-tenths of one percent of ours, most of which was used by Saddam Hussein to build castles and protect himself and his family. Iraq was no threat to us whatsoever.
As the conservative columnist Charley Reese wrote, “The war in Iraq was against a country that was not attacking us, did not have the means to attack us, and had never expressed any intention of attacking us.
And for whatever real reason we attacked Iraq, it was not to save America from any danger, imminent or otherwise.”
Similarly, nationally-syndicated columnist Georgie Ann Guyer wrote a few months after the war started, “Critics of the war against Iraq have said since the beginning of the conflict that Americans, still strangely complacent about overseas wars being waged by minorities in their name, 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 empires across the globe.”
Finally, Mr. Speaker, we have to choose. Do we keep spending mindboggling amounts of money in Iraq, or do we keep our promises to our own people? We cannot afford to do both.
