[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 43 (Wednesday, April 13, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H1952]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             AMERICA AT WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dent). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow a funeral will be held for Staff 
Sergeant Stephen Kennedy, the second soldier killed in Iraq who was a 
member of an Army National Guard unit headquartered in my hometown of 
Knoxville.
  Both of these young men who were killed were from just outside my 
district; but I was able to attend the funeral for the first, Sergeant 
Paul Thomason, as we were not in session in Congress at the time.
  Both of these men leave wives and each had four small children and 
many other relatives. I admire and respect their service. There are 
many ways one can serve this country, but certainly one of the most 
honorable is by serving in our Nation's Armed Forces.
  I am pro-military and believe we should have a strong national 
defense, but I emphasize the word national. It goes against every 
traditional conservative belief for the U.S. to try to be the policemen 
of the world and to place all of the burden and cost of enforcing U.N. 
resolutions on our military and our taxpayers.
  It is no criticism of anyone in the military to say that the war in 
Iraq was a very unnecessary war. The more than 1,500 soldiers who have 
died there were simply doing their duty in the best way they could, 
probably hoping to come home as soon as they could, but certainly 
hoping to come home safely rather than in a body bag.
  Now this past Saturday we saw headlines about anti-American 
demonstrations all over Iraq. One wire service story said more than 
300,000 demonstrated in Baghdad.
  Last year, our own government took a poll and found that 92 percent 
of Iraqis regarded us as occupiers rather than liberators. An earlier 
poll had a similar, but slightly lower, figure of 82 percent; and these 
were polls taken by us, or at least by the Coalition Provisional 
Authority, which is 95 percent U.S.
  Obviously, the great majority of people in Iraq do not appreciate 
what we have done there and do not want us there. They do want our 
money, and that is the only reason some will say good things about us 
being there because we do still have several hundred thousand Iraqis on 
the U.S. payroll.
  This is a nation that Newsweek said had a GDP of only $65 billion the 
year before the war. By the end of this year, we will have spent $300 
billion in just 3 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, but mostly in Iraq. 
Iraq had a total military budget of just a little over two-tenths of 1 
percent of our military budget in the year before we attacked. They 
were no threat to us whatsoever. Just a few weeks ago, a report came 
out saying our prewar intelligence was dead wrong. At that time, 
Richard Perle, one of the main architects of this war, appeared before 
the House Committee on Armed Services to say that everyone at that time 
thought there was a threat. This was not correct.
  Just before the House voted to authorize the war in October 2002, I 
was asked to come to the White House for a briefing with Condoleezza 
Rice, George Tenet, and John McLaughlin. I asked at that time how much 
Hussein's military budget was in comparison to ours and was told the 
two-tenths of 1 percent figure I mentioned a few minutes ago. I asked 
was there any evidence of imminent threat. I said one man cannot 
conduct a war by himself, it would have to involve many others, was 
there any movement toward war. I was told there was none. George Tenet 
later confirmed there was no imminent threat in his speech at 
Georgetown University just after he resigned as head of the CIA.
  There were just five other Members at that briefing, so we got to ask 
a lot of questions. I asked about former economic adviser Lawrence 
Lindsey's prediction that the war would cost 100 to $200 billion. Ms. 
Rice said the war would not cost nearly as much. Now we know that Mr. 
Lindsey's prediction was far too low. Most of what we have spent and 
are spending in Iraq is pure foreign aid, megabillions to provide free 
health care and rebuild Iraqi roads, schools, water and power plants, 
airports and railroads, and provide law enforcement, among many other 
things.
  At the White House briefing, I said most conservatives have always 
been against massive foreign aid and huge deficit spending. The war in 
Iraq has led to foreign aid and deficit spending on unprecedented 
scales.
  There is nothing conservative about the war in Iraq, and many 
conservative columnists and activists have now realized this. Columnist 
Georgie Ann Geyer wrote in 2003, ``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 empire across the globe.''
  The first obligation of the U.S. Congress should be to our own 
citizens, not the citizens of Iraq. In 1998 when Saddam Hussein was not 
even in the news, I voted to give $100 million to the Iraqi opposition 
to help them begin the effort to remove Saddam Hussein. We should have 
let Iraqis fight this war instead of sending our kids over there to 
fight and die and be maimed, and the sooner we bring our troops home 
the better. I hope we have learned that we should never be anxious to 
go to war and should do so only when we are forced to do so and there 
is no other reasonable alternative.

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