[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 159 (Wednesday, November 5, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H10443-H10444]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE WAR IN IRAQ AND SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, since July I have come to the floor 
of this House night after night sharing letters from constituents and 
raising concerns about our policy in Iraq, raising concerns about the 
administration's failure to supply and to protect the troops, raising 
concerns about the $1 billion a week, now an increase to $87 billion a 
year for this Iraq reconstruction effort, raising concerns about the 
fact that there is no plan from the administration on how to deal with 
the problems for our troops and how to deal with an exit strategy in 
Iraq, letters expressing concern about the corruption in our government 
in Iraq where we are spending $1 billion a week and 30 percent of that 
$1 billion is going to private contractors, most of them friends of the 
President, Bechtel, Halliburton, other large corporations, most of them 
contributors to the President to the tune of hundreds of thousands of 
dollars, and one of them, Halliburton, particular concerns have been 
raised about from my constituents. Halliburton, the company that the 
vice President, when he was a private citizen, was CEO of, that company 
still pays Vice President Cheney $13,000 a month.
  Tonight, rather than reading letters from constituents, I thought I 
would read something else that I think is equally interesting. It was 
from a book that George Bush, Sr., the first President Bush, wrote with 
Brent Scowcroft in 1998. The name of the book was ``A World 
Transformed.'' On Page 489, the first President Bush tells us his views 
about Iraq and what he thought. This is President Bush the first 
speaking:
  ``Trying to eliminate Saddam'' Hussein, ``extending the ground war 
into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not 
changing objectives in midstream, engaging in `mission creep,' and 
would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.'' This is 
President Bush, Sr. writing in 1998: ``Apprehending him,'' Saddam 
Hussein, ``was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega 
in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to 
occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition,'' President 
Bush wrote in 1998, ``would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs 
deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those 
circumstances there

[[Page H10444]]

was no viable `exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our 
principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a 
pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in 
and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' 
mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response 
to aggression that we hoped to establish,'' President Bush the first 
wrote in 1998.
  ``Had we gone the invasion route, the United States would conceivably 
still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have 
been a dramatically different, and perhaps barren, outcome.'' Those are 
the words that President Bush, Sr. wrote only 5 years ago, 4 years 
before his son led an attack on Iraq.
  Mr. Speaker, those letters from constituents that I have discussed 
night after night here were particularly compelling, especially some 
letters I got from the families of men and women who are serving in 
Iraq. And a couple of weeks ago I met in Akron, the largest city in my 
district, with 25 families who have loved ones in Iraq; and they talked 
about our failure, the Bush administration's failure, to support the 
troops, to supply the troops, to protect the troops: not enough safe 
drinking water, either bottled water or purification facilities, not 
enough antibiotics. Soldiers and sailors had to pay for their trips 
home, pay for their airfare. Some soldiers were actually charged by the 
hospital, had to pay the hospital for their food when they were 
recovering. And some soldiers, about one fourth of them, we are told, 
do not have the body armor which will protect their lives.
  So on the one hand, these families said to me, our letters from 
constituents said to me, we have $300 million a week going to private 
contractors to do work that is not really very well accounted for. On 
the other hand, we have our soldiers simply not being protected, not 
enough safe drinking water, not enough body armor, not enough 
antibiotics. And I would hope that President Bush would have listened 
to his father, which he clearly did not, from his father's words, but 
would begin to listen to some of my constituents and other constituents 
who beg him to focus on protecting and supplying the troops with a 
little less focus on all these unbid contracts and the corruption that 
this has brought and the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer 
dollars that we are seeing literally every week in Iraq.

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