[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 143 (Tuesday, October 14, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12482-S12485]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          IRAQ AND THE DEFICIT

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we have come back from the break. Most 
Members, I imagine, have had the same kind of experience I have had in 
meeting with my constituents. We have discovered the question of what 
we should be doing in Iraq is foremost on our constituents' minds. 
Second, we have discovered--at least I have--that there is great 
concern about the size of the deficit. Those two issues were joined in 
debate in the Senate before we left for the break. I think it 
appropriate we talk about them together now that the break is over.
  Let me first turn to the question of the deficit and the debate that 
took place in this Chamber with respect to the $87 billion that has 
been requested by the President to pay for the war activities and the 
reconstruction of Iraq. We were told in this Chamber we had to raise 
taxes by $87 billion to pay for this, and that if we did not, we would 
see the deficit go up by $87 billion. We defeated that amendment, but 
there were those with whom I met during the break who still had that 
view.
  The interesting thing we discovered during the break was that the 
projections for the size of the deficit changed. This is no surprise to 
anyone who has spent time paying attention to the deficit. As I have 
said in this Chamber over and over and as I will repeat over and over, 
the one thing I know with respect to the deficit projections, or 
surplus projections when those were the order of the day, is that they 
are wrong. I do not know if they are wrong on the high side or wrong on 
the low side but I do know they are wrong.
  The other thing I know is that the further out they go, the more 
likely they are to be wrong. That is, a 10-year projection is 
absolutely certain to be wrong; a 5-year projection has a 99.94 percent 
chance of being wrong; a 3-year projection might be a little bit 
closer; and so on with a 2-year projection. The only ones that come 
really close to being accurate are the very near term projections.
  The interesting thing that happened during the break was that the 
near-term projections of the size of this year's deficit changed. They 
went down. In other words, we found out during the last week that those 
who spend their time looking at the size of the deficit have now looked 
at the numbers, now looked at the revenues coming into the Federal 
Government, and now project the current deficit will be roughly $85 
billion less than was projected when we had the debate.
  If we had had those numbers during the debate, obviously I would have 
referred to them to point out that it is not necessarily the size of 
the tax rate that determines the amount of tax revenue. That is a 
truth, again, that we repeat over and over but that gets forgotten over 
and over. What determines the amount of tax revenue is the amount of 
economic activity that takes place in the economy as a whole tied to 
the tax rate, not the tax rate itself. If you set the tax rate too 
high, you guarantee the economic activity will slow and the tax take 
will go down.
  We cut the tax rate at the beginning of this administration, we cut 
it again last year, and we are now seeing economic activity pick up to 
the point that tax revenues have gone up. As I say, according to those 
who are now projecting this year's deficit, the tax revenues have 
surprised us to the point that we are now going to have roughly $85 
billion more in revenue than was projected just a month ago.
  That is a coincidental number because it comes very close to the $87 
billion we are asking for. I will not suggest in any sense that we 
should tie those two together. The closeness is purely coincidental. 
Nonetheless, it demonstrates that those who want to use the deficit as 
the reason for support of their opposition to what we are doing in Iraq 
are going to have to find another excuse because the economy is 
responding to the tax treatment that came out of this Congress. In that 
response we are getting more tax revenue, and it is going to be less of 
a financial burden on this country than we thought it would be even as 
recently as a month ago.
  All right. Let me turn now to the other argument we hear, over and 
over and over, in a constant drumbeat, with respect to Iraq; that is, 
the argument that this administration somehow misled the American 
people, misled the world by claiming Saddam Hussein was a threat. Then 
you get into the details of that claim, and they say he had no weapons 
of mass destruction, his economy was in ruins, he did not have the 
ability to threaten his neighbors, he was no threat or, if we can go 
back to a phrase I have seen some columnists use: Saddam Hussein was no 
Hitler.
  I want to address that this morning. I would hope in this Chamber, of 
all places, we would have a sense of history, we would understand what 
really went on in times past, and what really is going on in a 
historical framework in our present time.
  Let me take that phrase, ``Saddam Hussein was no Hitler,'' and use it 
as the framework for this kind of examination. If we go back in history 
to the time of Hitler, we can discover a time when I think it could be 
said accurately that Hitler was no Hitler. Let me explain what I mean 
by that.
  The Hitler we think of when we look back in history now is the Hitler 
who stood at the head of a major army of a major nation state waging 
world war upon all of the other nations around him. Hitler did not 
start out as that kind of a Hitler. He started out as a politician with 
a relatively small following and a bitter message in a world of 
turmoil.
  When he became the chancellor of all of Germany, he was a minority 
politician leading just one party of a series of parties. The primary 
individuals in Germany at the time thought by making him chancellor 
they could buy him off and use him and his party in a way that would 
allow them to continue their power. They misjudged him. When he became 
chancellor, he, of course, moved to consolidate his power rather than 
to cooperate with anyone.
  He then led Germany into a very risky military operation. He moved to 
reclaim land that had been taken from Germany in the First World War 
and ceded to France. If the French Army--arguably the largest on the 
continent at the time--had confronted him in that move, it would have 
meant the end of his political career; it would have made sure that 
nazism, the Nazi party would have disappeared, and Hitler would have 
been gone. But the French were afraid of a little bit of combat, they 
were afraid of a little bit of confrontation, and they allowed Hitler 
to take over that territory.

  Well, without going into a complete history of the time, let's go 
forward to the pivotal event that preceded the Second World War, the 
Conference at Munich.
  Here are the circumstances that led to that event: Hitler had designs 
on Czechoslovakia. Hitler insisted that Czechoslovakia belonged to 
Germany and announced he was going to take it, and take it by force. 
The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, contacted Hitler and 
said: Can we meet one more time before you act to take Czechoslovakia 
by force? Hitler agreed, and they met in Munich, Germany.
  Chamberlain was terrified that war might break out. Chamberlain was 
afraid Great Britain was not ready for war. Chamberlain was anxious to 
give Hitler whatever he could, and, ultimately, Chamberlain gave Hitler 
Czechoslovakia. Without the British honoring the implied guarantee they 
would prevent any invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was free to take 
over that country.
  Now, again, if we look at it through the lens of Hitler at the top of 
his power, we would say, well, he proposed to swallow Czechoslovakia by 
his tremendous army. In fact, however, Hitler did not have a tremendous 
army prior to Munich. He had one on paper, but he did not have one in 
actuality. His generals were terrified as to what would happen to that 
army if, indeed, it was

[[Page S12483]]

ordered into the field against the combined forces of the British and 
the Czechs.
  Indeed, there is evidence that Hitler's generals were prepared to 
depose him, to overthrow him, and to take Germany out from under him 
if, in fact, the British stood firm in Czechoslovakia. But instead of 
standing firm, the British Prime Minister said: Why do we care about 
people who live so far away from us, with whom we have nothing to do? 
And he gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
  Now, it was not just that he swallowed a small country. If we look 
back on the history of the time, Czechoslovakia had some of the finest 
factories capable of producing war materiel of any country in Europe. 
It had some of the finest machine shops and other skills. By taking 
Czechoslovakia, Hitler obtained an absolutely vital strategic asset 
that made it possible for Hitler to become Hitler.
  May I draw some historic parallels. When Saddam Hussein took Kuwait, 
he was taking a small, defenseless country that had enormous revenues 
and that was strategically located. If he had been allowed to keep them 
Saddam Hussein might very well have been on his road toward becoming 
Hitler. However, the President of the United States at the time, the 
first President Bush, was not Neville Chamberlain. The first President 
Bush stood in the House of Representatives and told a joint session of 
this Congress: This shall not stand.
  There were those in this Chamber who opposed the first President Bush 
in his decision to confront Saddam Hussein. Indeed, there were those 
who, in their own words, said much the same as Chamberlain: What do we 
have to do with these people so far away? Why should we be concerned 
with something so far from our shores?
  Fortunately, the majority of the Members of this Chamber at the time 
supported the first President Bush in that decision and, if I may, 
denied Saddam Hussein Kuwait in a way that Neville Chamberlain failed 
to deny Hitler Czechoslovakia.
  In the aftermath of that first denial of Saddam Hussein's ambitions, 
inspectors went into Iraq and discovered Saddam Hussein had a serious 
program of producing weapons of mass destruction. About that there can 
be no doubt. Let us understand that. Let me underscore it one more 
time. Saddam Hussein was engaged in a serious program of producing 
weapons of mass destruction, and about that there can be no doubt. 
President Clinton affirmed that to the Congress. Madeleine Albright 
affirmed that to the Congress. The United Nations affirmed that to the 
Security Council in the form of not one but a dozen resolutions.
  Saddam Hussein, left unchecked in his first invasion of Kuwait, was 
on his way to becoming Hitler. It was the first President Bush who made 
the decision to stop it.
  There is some uncertainty as to what happened to Saddam Hussein's 
weapons of mass destruction program after those inspectors were removed 
from Iraq in 1998. President Clinton believed the program was ongoing; 
Secretary Albright believed the program was ongoing; Prime Minister 
Blair of Great Britain believed the program was ongoing; and Inspector 
Kay, who has been there, confirmed that the program was ongoing. 
However, we have been unable to find caches of the weapons.
  There are those who say: Well, since we can't find huge caches of 
weapons of mass destruction, the fact that the program was ongoing is 
immaterial; and, once again, when we went into Iraq the second time 
with the second President Bush, he did not represent a threat to us--he 
was not Hitler.
  Again, history says if previous leaders had had the resolve of the 
two Presidents Bush, Hitler would never have become Hitler himself.
  One of the things we have discovered in Iraq that says Saddam Hussein 
was, indeed, very much like Hitler is the mass graves. Estimates of 
those numbers of Iraqis who have ended up in mass graves have run as 
high as 500,000. Maybe there are still some to be discovered. There 
were efforts to hide those graves, just as Hitler made efforts to hide 
his concentration camps that became the instrument through which he 
sought the final solution to the Jewish problem.
  His final solution, of course, was to eradicate them all, to send 
them to gas chambers, and then to bulldoze over the graves and pretend 
they had never been there. Saddam Hussein was doing the same thing in 
his own country to his own people, and we stopped it. By virtue of the 
resolve of the second President Bush, we stopped it. We stopped Saddam 
Hussein from reaching the kind of statistical plateau of horror that 
Adolf Hitler made famous in the world.
  Am I sorry we stopped it? Do I now have to hang my head in shame when 
I meet my constituents who say the inspectors didn't find what you 
thought they would find and, therefore, you made a mistake in voting 
for this war?
  Quite the contrary. As I examine the history of this situation, I am 
filled with gratitude for the first President Bush who prevented Saddam 
Hussein from taking over Kuwait and perhaps invading Saudi Arabia and 
thus becoming Hitler. And I am grateful and proud of the fact that I 
stood with the second President Bush, who moved into Iraq to make sure 
the weapons program we all know was going on did not reach the point 
where it could produce huge caches of weapons and that the slaughter, 
the systematic destruction of the Iraqi people who disagreed with 
Saddam Hussein, has been stopped. Are those consequences of which 
Americans should be ashamed? Are those consequences from which we 
should back away?
  I believe, with Tony Blair, that history will look upon this action 
and say we did the right thing. We all were in the Chamber when he made 
the point that if we were wrong in assuming that the weapons of mass 
destruction were there in great numbers, the consequences of our 
actions, at being wrong, were the elimination of a brutal tyrant and 
the freeing of 20 million people and the possibility of stability in 
that region. He said history will forgive that error.
  But, he said, if our critics were wrong, and the program, which we 
know was in place and which has been confirmed to have been in place by 
Inspector Kay, had gone forward and produced those weapons, Saddam 
Hussein would have become Hitler and history would never forgive that 
mistake.

  I go back to Munich. At the time when Neville Chamberlain came back 
to Great Britain, polls were overwhelmingly in his favor. He was 
greeted with cheers everywhere he went. The one man in the House of 
Commons who stood up and said ``we have suffered a defeat of the first 
magnitude,'' whose name was Winston Churchill, got only a handful of 
votes in his opposition to Chamberlain. But, as Tony Blair said in our 
joint session, history has a harsh judgment of the mistake that Neville 
Chamberlain made. Neville Chamberlain's mistake allowed Hitler to 
become Hitler. George W. Bush made sure he would not make that same 
mistake in Iraq and allow Saddam Hussein to become Hitler.
  Over the break, during the weekend, the Washington Post addressed 
this issue in some depth. The Washington Post, as we all know, is a 
paper that did not endorse George W. Bush for the Presidency and has 
often, in its editorial pages, been fairly harsh in its criticism. But 
the Washington Post is also a paper with editorial writers who were in 
favor of moving ahead in Iraq. Perhaps they had the same historic 
perspective I have tried to offer this morning, that we had to do 
something to stop, prior to the time when Saddam Hussein became Hitler, 
the possibility that he might. That is a doctrine that has now been 
called ``preemptive war,'' about which everybody complains around the 
world and says: That is just terrible. We should never establish the 
precedent of attacking or using military force before the threat is 
imminent.
  Well, Neville Chamberlain would have been well served to have adopted 
the doctrine back in the 1930s, and the world would have saved millions 
of deaths if he had.
  The Washington Post addressed this in an editorial that ran on 
Sunday. It went from the top to the bottom of the page in two columns 
called ``Iraq in Review.'' I ask unanimous consent that it be printed 
in the Record following my remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. BENNETT. It begins:

       A reader asks: ``When are you going to admit you were 
     wrong?'' We've received a

[[Page S12484]]

     number of such inquiries (not all quite so polite) about our 
     position on the war in Iraq, particularly from readers who 
     were disappointed in our prewar stance.

  They then go through all of the issues. There are certainly times 
where they are critical of the administration, critical of the 
administration in ways with which I might disagree. But they do make 
the essential points about the issues that are in contention, the 
essential point about the weapons of mass destruction.
  They make the point that I have made here this morning, that 
Inspector Kay has demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had a program of 
developing weapons of mass destruction. Even if the caches of weapons 
have not been found, if the program had been allowed to go forward, the 
weapons would have come.
  They talk about Saddam and al-Qaida. They make the point that while 
there is no direct link between Saddam and al-Qaida--and they claim the 
administration exaggerated, by implication, the links--that nonetheless 
there was a threat from terrorism in Iraq, and they summarize it with 
this sentence:

       When combined with [Saddam Hussein's] continuing pursuit of 
     weapons of mass destruction, that seemed to pose exactly the 
     sort of threat that the Bush administration rightly focused 
     on as part of the war on terrorism.

  Then they talk about continuing costs. I have already addressed that 
this morning in my comment about the revision of the budget figures 
that says that the resurging economy we now have is going to give us a 
deficit that is going to be roughly $85 billion less than we were 
talking about as recently as the time before the break.
  In addition to their editorial in which the Washington Post says we 
still stand by our support of the decision to move ahead in Iraq even 
though things are not going as we had all hoped, they have five 
military men talking about the war in op-ed pieces. I will not put 
those in the Record or read them. My reading of the five is that three 
of them say we have to stay there and go forward and get it done in 
roughly the way the administration is asking us to. Two are saying, no, 
this is a quagmire; we should pull out now and walk away.
  How do I summarize my history lesson this morning? History comes in 
chunks bigger than 2-week periods. History comes in chunks bigger than 
a news site. The history of the last century and this one tells me the 
two Presidents Bush, in confronting Saddam Hussein in the way they 
did--the first in reversing Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and the second 
one moving in to preserve the lives of Iraqi citizens being slaughtered 
by a man with Hitlerian impulses, if not full Hitlerian power--acted 
properly.
  I am proud to have supported the second President Bush in his 
decision to do that. I say this to many who are saying now that it 
didn't go the way you said it would, so therefore we have to walk away 
from it: Take a little time to read history and understand that things 
never go as people propose they will, but ultimately those who make the 
right decisions, for the right reasons, even if they have to make 
adjustments--sometimes serious changes in the way they pursue those 
decisions--are those to whom history gives the banner of having done 
the right thing.

                               Exhibit 1

               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2003]

                             Iraq in Review

       A reader asks: ``When are you going to admit you were 
     wrong?'' We've received a number of such inquiries (not all 
     quite so polite) about our position on the war in Iraq, 
     particularly from readers who were disappointed in our prewar 
     stance. Now they cite several postwar surprises, or 
     ostensible surprises: the absence of weapons of mass 
     destruction, the absence of a proven connection between 
     Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and the continuing violence in 
     Iraq. In light of these developments, it's important for 
     supporters of military intervention to look back and, where 
     necessary, reevaluate--something the Bush administration so 
     far has resisted.
       We believe that there has been more progress in Iraq than 
     critics acknowledge, but also that the administration has 
     made serious mistakes. Before the war, we repeatedly urged 
     President Bush to plan postwar reconstruction more thoroughly 
     and to level with Congress and the American people about the 
     likely costs. We urged him to take the time to draw more 
     allies to the cause. Shortcomings in both cases have proved 
     highly damaging, as has the Pentagon's insistence on 
     monopolizing political control over Iraq.
       Yet simply to blame the administration is not a full answer 
     to our readers. Taking the measure of the administration, of 
     Congress and of their likely ability to see this through was 
     a pre-war obligation, one of the factors in calculating risks 
     and benefits. Moreover, postwar troubles and surprises were 
     to be expected, even if they could not be precisely foretold. 
     It's fair to ask now whether those troubles and surprises are 
     so great as to prove the intervention unwise.
       No matter how one answers that question, the critical 
     judgments now involve future policy. It is essential that the 
     United States do as much as possible to stabilize Iraq under 
     a peaceable, representative government. It seems to us that 
     opponents of the war ought to recognize, as some have, that 
     this mission could be critical to the fight against terrorism 
     and to the future of the Middle East. But insisting on doing 
     the right thing now does not excuse supporters of the war 
     from reexaming the judgments that led to this point.
       Weapons of mass destruction. David Kay's 1,200-member 
     survey team has reported that Saddam Hussein's nuclear 
     program was ``rudimentary'' and that no large-scale 
     production of chemical weapons occurred in recent years. We 
     believed otherwise before the war, especially as regards 
     chemical weapons, as did most governments with intelligence 
     services. We have called on the Bush administration to 
     account for what increasingly look like failures in the 
     intelligence agencies' assessment of the Iraqi threat, as 
     well as misstatements in the public case made for the war. 
     The importance of this is hard to overstate: At issue is 
     whether Americans, and the world, can believe U.S. 
     intelligence on the activities of hostile, dangerous, but 
     hard-to-penetrate states like Iraq; and whether this 
     president can be trusted not to distort that intelligence in 
     pursuit of his own agenda.
       But at issue also is whether the war should have been 
     fought. Don't we no know that Iraq posed no imminent threat 
     to the United States and that there was thus no need or legal 
     justification for an invasion? This question turns on the 
     phrase ``imminent threat,'' which was invoked before the war 
     by leading opponents of intervention, such as Sen. Carl M. 
     Levin (D-Mich). The Bush administration conveyed its own 
     sense of dramatic urgency, and that too is something it 
     should account for in light of what is now known. But we 
     argued that the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent 
     but cumulative: He had invaded his neighbors, used chemical 
     weapons and pursued biological and nuclear arms. He 
     threatened U.S. interests and security in a vital region and 
     would continue to do so as long as he was in power. A decade 
     of diplomacy, U.N. sanctions and no-fly-zone enforcement had 
     failed to end that threat. Instead the credibility of the 
     Security Council, along with constraints on the regime, had 
     steadily eroded.
       The debate over intervention was fraught precisely because 
     many people understood that Saddam Hussein was not an 
     imminent danger. We argued nonetheless that the real risk lay 
     in allowing him to defy repeated U.N. disarmament orders, 
     including Resolution 1441, the ``final opportunity'' approved 
     by unanimous Security Council vote.
       Though it pokes holes in U.S. intelligence and our 
     assumptions, Mr. Kay's report contains much to substantiate 
     this reasoning. Saddam Hussein, the report claims, never 
     abandoned his intention to produce biological, chemical and 
     nuclear arms--and he was aggressively defying Resolution 
     1441. He also was successfully deceiving U.N. inspectors. 
     They failed to discover multiple programs for developing 
     illegal long-range missiles as well as a clandestine network 
     of biological laboratories, among other things. From a legal 
     standpoint, the report shows that Iraq should have been 
     subject to the ``serious consequences'' specified by 
     Resolution 1441 in the event of noncompliance. More 
     important, it strongly suggests that in the absence of 
     intervention Iraq eventually would have shaken off the U.N. 
     inspectors and sanctions, allowing Saddam Hussein to 
     follow through on his intentions. He would have been able 
     to renew his attempt to dominate the region and its oil 
     supplies, while deterring the United States with the 
     threat of missiles topped with biological warheads. In 
     acting to enforce the U.N. resolution, the United States 
     eliminated a real, if not ``imminent,'' threat, while 
     ensuring that future Security Council ultimatums carry 
     some weight.
       Saddam and al Qaeda. Mr. Bush and other administration 
     officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, exaggerated 
     the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and 
     implied without foundation that Saddam Hussein may have had 
     something to do with the attacks of 9/11. Critics add that 
     since the invasion, terrorists seem to have flocked to Iraq, 
     where the occupation has had to cope with a series of car and 
     suicide bombings. The terrorism is worrisome, though the 
     principal group behind it appears to be Ansar al-Islam, which 
     was based in northern Iraq before the war and whose leader 
     spent time in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.
       For our part, we never saw a connection between Iraq and 9/
     11 or major collaboration between Saddam and al Qaeda. But we 
     did perceive a broader threat, in the sense that Saddam 
     Hussein had frequently collaborated with other terrorist 
     organizations and could be reasonably expected to continue 
     doing so.

[[Page S12485]]

     When combined with his continuing pursuit of weapons of mass 
     destruction, that seemed to pose exactly the sort of threat 
     that the Bush administration rightly focused on as part of 
     the war on terrorism.
       Continuing costs. The difficulty of rebuilding Iraq is 
     huge. The steady stream of U.S. dead and wounded is 
     agonizing. The strain on the U.S. military, its reserves and 
     the families at home is growing. But these developments, 
     while troubling, are not altogether surprising--except maybe 
     to those who believed the Bush administration's shallow 
     prewar rhetoric. The calculation on intervention required a 
     weighing of risks: the risk of allowing Saddam Hussein to 
     remain in power, defying U.N. demands, versus all the well-
     articulated risks of intervention. Before the war, these were 
     frequently said to include starvation, an outpouring of 
     refugees, a fracturing of Iraq, a descent into ethnic 
     conflict or simple chaos. We believed that reconstruction 
     would be long, costly and risky, and we judged nonetheless 
     that intervention would be less risky than allowing Saddam 
     Hussein to remain in power.
       Were we wrong? The honest answer is: We don't yet know. But 
     at this stage we continue to believe that the war was 
     justified and necessary, and that the gains so far have 
     outweighed the costs. Each of the 326 American servicemen and 
     women who have died in Iraq represents an irretrievable loss 
     for family and friends. But the nation already has reaped 
     great benefit from their sacrifice. One of the most 
     aggressive and brutal dictators in the history of the Middle 
     East has been eliminated, along with his proven programs to 
     acquire deadly weapons. Millions of Iraqis have been freed 
     from fear, and an opportunity has opened to bring much-needed 
     political change to a region that is the source of the 
     greatest security threats to the United States. Polls show a 
     sometimes grateful, sometimes grudging willingness by most 
     Iraqis to go along with U.S. plans for reconstruction.
       Many Americans understandably have been surprised by the 
     continuing casualties months after the president's appearance 
     on an aircraft carrier under the banner ``Mission 
     Accomplished.'' Mr. Bush's abrupt submission last month of a 
     large and poorly explained spending request to Congress also 
     has strengthened public support for the idea that the Iraq 
     mission must be failing. Yet the president's missteps have 
     merely obscured the facts that these costs were inevitable, 
     and that outside of the Sunni towns where support for Saddam 
     Hussein was strongest, there is no quagmire--only a slow, 
     slogging progress forward.
       Continued progress is far from guaranteed. In our view, the 
     administration could improve the odds of success by forging a 
     broader international coalition. For that to happen, the 
     administration must drop its insistence on monopolizing power 
     over Iraq's political transition, as well as the contracts 
     for reconstruction. It must compromise with those well-
     meaning allies who want Iraq to succeed but disagree with 
     U.S. tactics.
       Success or failure in the effort to stabilize Iraq under a 
     reasonably representative government that poses no threat to 
     the world will provide the ultimate answer to the question of 
     whether the war should have been undertaken. Because we 
     continue to believe that U.S. security is at stake, we also 
     believe that the United States must be prepared to dedicate 
     troops and financial resources to that goal until it is 
     achieved, even if it takes years. In our judgment success is 
     possible, but much will depend on whether the administration 
     and Congress face the magnitude of the challenge and summon 
     the political courage and diplomatic skills necessary to meet 
     it.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Collins). The Senator from Ohio is 
recognized.

                          ____________________