[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 21573]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     CLOSING REMARKS ON IRAQ WATCH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to take the 5 minutes. 
I would like to defer to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel) 
for such concluding remarks as he might like to make.
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Chair, and I thank the 
gentleman for his cooperation. I would like to thank the gentlemen that 
joined in the discussion this evening. We will be back next week, and 
the Iraq Watch will continue to ask questions about our policies in 
Iraq. We need to discuss some legislative proposals such as the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) has made, his American Parity 
Act, which would require the spending of equivalent dollars on our 
American domestic needs for each dollar spent on domestic needs in 
Iraq. If we are going to spend $10 billion on housing in Iraq, we want 
to do the same in America. If we are going to spend money on water 
systems or infrastructure improvements in Iraq, we are suggesting we do 
the same in America.

                              {time}  2340

  That legislation deserves consideration during our next weekly 
discussion. We will ask more questions about the administration's 
policies. We hope we will get answers. I think it is a consensus view 
of all of us that we need to know what the plan is in Iraq. And we need 
to know what our exit strategy is in Iraq before this Congress will be 
comfortable in appropriating another $87 billion. We need to know what 
our strategy is, what conditions we are trying to achieve, what 
yardsticks we can use to measure our progress, how we can 
internationalize the situation in Iraq, how we can get Iraqis back in 
charge of Iraq because that must be the ultimate goal for all of us.

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