[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 66 (Wednesday, May 12, 2004)]
[House]
[Page H2888]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, we should have no more talk about 
resignations. We should not talk about Donald Rumsfeld resigning his 
office. We should not let him resign his office. He ought to be fired. 
He ought to be fired, and George Tenet ought to be fired. I do not know 
that there has ever been two Cabinet Secretaries in the history of this 
Nation that have given their President more bad information, more bad 
intelligence, more bad advice than Don Rumsfeld and George Tenet. And 
while the President is at it, he ought to clean house at the Pentagon. 
He ought to get rid of Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, all of the 
architects of this failed policy in Iraq.
  It is astonishing to me that the President is so loyal to people who 
have given him such bad advice. If you look back on the failures in 
Iraq, and I speak as one who voted in favor of the military authority 
that the President sought a year and a half ago, I voted ``yes'' 
because I believed we had to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass 
destruction. I am now convinced that I was misled, that the Congress 
was misled, that the people of this country were misled.
  And you look back on the failures of intelligence and planning and 
advice from George Tenet and Don Rumsfeld and the list is very long. 
The weapons of mass destruction have not been found. The intelligence 
was bad coming from George Tenet, and the intelligence was hyped by Don 
Rumsfeld and the other civilian leadership of the Pentagon. Don 
Rumsfeld tried to do this war on the cheap. We did not send enough 
troops over there. General Shinseki said we needed several hundred 
thousand troops. He was virtually run out of the Army for saying so. He 
was right. We have got 135,000 troops in Iraq today, and we have not 
secured the country. The country is not secure. Clearly more security 
is needed. We tried to do this on the cheap without enough troops, 
without enough armor.
  The troops left their armor at home, and our soldiers have been 
sitting ducks killed by roadside bombs that armored personnel carriers 
and tanks would not have to worry about but unprotected Humvees, which 
is what our troops have been given, do have to worry about.
  There was no plan to deal with the looting. There was no plan to deal 
with the violent insurgency that has come up. We were told by Don 
Rumsfeld we would be greeted as liberators. Instead, we have become 
occupiers. Donald Rumsfeld believed Ahmed Chalabi and the other leaders 
of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi, one of the great four-flushers 
of all time. You ask me what a four-flusher is. I am not sure. It is a 
phrase my grandfather used to use. I think it has something to do with 
having four cards to a flush and that you cannot trust a guy who is a 
four-flusher. Well, that is Ahmed Chalabi. He is a spinner. He has not 
given us good advice. But our leadership believed him in the Pentagon 
and we have paid a heck of a price because of it. We have no notion of 
how long we are going to stay or any notion of how much we must pay.
  And now the prison abuse scandal has come. Clearly, the privates and 
the sergeants were completely wrong in the steps they took and they 
need to be punished, but I do not think the accountability stops with 
them. It goes up the chain of command. Because the training was 
inadequate; the supervision was inadequate. There has been no 
accountability in the chain of command at this point. Secretary 
Rumsfeld did not listen to the International Red Cross who apparently 
started complaining about this a year ago. He did not listen to the 
Secretary of State who began complaining to the Pentagon and to Mr. 
Rumsfeld several months ago. The Secretary of Defense did not read the 
report that he ordered. And he did not even tell the President. He did 
not even tell the President.
  We do not need to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Speaker. We need to 
change the course in Iraq. We are not winning. We want to create a 
stable and peaceful Iraq with a representative self-government, 
hopefully a democracy. There can be no reconstruction without security. 
There can be no transfer of authority and government without security. 
There can be no elections without security. There can be no democracy 
without security. And there is no security in Iraq today. We cannot 
stay the course. We must change the course.
  We have three choices. We can pull out, declare victory, or say it 
does not matter and pull out; and I think that would be a great 
mistake. We cannot leave Iraq worse than we found it. We did get rid of 
a murderous tyrant, and I am glad we did, but we cannot leave Iraq in 
shambles. We can stay the course, but we are not winning. We won the 
military victory, but we are not winning the peace. Or we can mobilize 
more troops, international troops from NATO and Arab nations 
preferably, our troops if necessary, in order to stabilize that country 
and achieve our goals.

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