[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 95 (Thursday, July 14, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H5886-H5887]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE WAR IN IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Madam Speaker, when the doctrine of preemptive war was 
first introduced, I suggested that it was unconscionable. Then the 
original case for war, weapons of mass destruction and a link between 
al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, turned out to be erroneous at best and a 
pack of lies at the very worst.
  So the war was immorally conceived. That is strike one. And 
deceptively marketed, that is strike two.
  Strike three is the incompetence, the bungling, the repeated 
misjudgments in the execution of the war plan. From the dismantling of 
the Iraqi army to the lack of protective armor, to the failure to 
safeguard munitions and on and on.
  The most recent proof of mismanagement appeared in a story in this 
weekend's Washington Post. Americans shooting at Americans in Iraq in 
the President's war that has become so mismanaged that I believe we are 
fighting ourselves. Have we become our own prisoners of war?
  Now, finally, someone has begun to own up to the mistakes. Outgoing 
Pentagon official Douglas Feith in an interview with the Washington 
Post conceded that, among other things, we may have gone to Iraq with 
too light a force. The amazing part of that insiders' information and 
others like Mr. Feith's is that they have been cooking up the Iraq 
invasion since the early 1990s, more than a decade in the making. And 
they still could not get it right. It is inconceivable to me that we 
would send our troops into battle not only under-equipped but also 
undermanned.
  One way the military has tried to keep troop levels down is by 
outsourcing many functions to private contractors. By some estimates, 
there are as many as 100,000 contractors roaming around Iraq. Many of 
them armed, apparently accountable to no one, acting independently of 
the military chain of command without any oversight, unbound by an 
official code of conduct.
  Let us leave aside the issue of how contractors are paid much more 
than our troops or whose pockets are getting lined here. It has been 
documented that companies with close ties to the administration have 
been rewarded with these lucrative contracts, and the government has 
been, shall we say, very forgiving when their buddies overcharge and 
bilk American taxpayers.
  But think about what it means to our troops on the ground to have 
well-healed contractors co-existing with underpaid active duty soldiers 
who are cogs in a rigid hierarchy, who are doing the unglamorous work, 
who are lucky if full health care benefits are awaiting them when they 
get home. The result is resentment, low morale, and a weakened 
military.
  The only real solution is to bring our troops home from Iraq as soon 
as possible. I have been calling for an end to the occupation for many 
months now, and nothing has happened in Iraq that would force me to 
reconsider. Ending the war would be the beginning of a complete 
reassessment of U.S. national security policy. I have offered what I 
call SMART Security. That stands for Sensible, Multilateral, American 
Response to Terrorism.

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  At the heart of SMART is the belief that military action should be an 
absolute last resort, to be reluctantly pursued only after every 
channel has been exhausted.
  SMART Security means fighting terrorism with strong diplomacy, robust 
multilateral alliances, and improved intelligence capabilities. It 
means being vigilant about nuclear proliferation and the spread of 
other weapons of mass destruction. It means more investment in homeland 
security and energy independence, and less in obsolete, Cold War 
weapons systems. And SMART Security is about attacking terrorism at its 
very roots with an ambitious, international development agenda that 
brings education, debt relief, democracy-building, and economic 
development to the impoverished nations of the world.
  SMART is tough, pragmatic, and patriotic. It protects America by 
relying on the very best of American values: our commitment to freedom, 
our compassion for the people of the world, and our capacity for global 
leadership.
  Mr. Speaker, there was nothing smart about a war plan that tried to 
cut corners by sending in too few soldiers. In fact, there is nothing 
smart at all about this war. Nearly 2,000 Americans dead, a recharged 
insurgency, political and economic chaos in Iraq, and no end in sight; 
an immoral war, a dishonest war and, now, even a senior Pentagon 
official, Douglas Feith, admits, a mismanaged war. That is strike 
three, they are out.

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