[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17756]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      SMART SECURITY AND ELECTIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the 1,000th American soldier was 
killed in Iraq; 1,000 young men and women who will never again return 
to their homes and experience the warm embrace of their parents and 
others who love them.
  Young men and young women have died for a war the United States 
entered not of necessity, but out of choice. An attack against a 
country that never possessed the illegal weapons it was accused of 
possessing, a war in a country that never once threatened the United 
States. And this war is not over.
  Worst of all, of the 1,000 soldiers that have died in Iraq, over 850 
of them were killed after President Bush declared the ``end of major 
combat operations.'' He made his now-infamous speech aboard a Navy 
vessel displaying a banner that read ``Mission Accomplished.'' That was 
15 months ago yesterday.
  Obviously the Bush administration has failed, failed dramatically in 
its postwar custodianship of Iraq.
  The abuses at Abu Ghraib have emboldened our enemies and provided 
them with ammunition for the war of images waged on the front pages of 
newspapers worldwide. The moral support shared by countries around the 
world in the months after September 11, 2001, has long since 
evaporated.
  When it comes to supporting our troops abroad, we have not done much 
better. A recent Pentagon study acknowledged that about one-third of 
all American casualties in Iraq could have been prevented if the 
military had outfitted every soldier with state-of-the-art body armor. 
Thirty thousand troops, most of them members of the Army Reserve and 
National Guard, did not have vital equipment for several months after 
facing battle situations in Iraq.
  In addition to the 1,000 soldiers killed in the war in Iraq, this war 
has cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, which some 
estimate to be as high as 15,000. And it is estimated that 7,000 of our 
troops and our civilian forces have died, or 20,000 have been evacuated 
out of Iraq for medical reasons.
  This is a failure. This is a war that has failed. It has taken a huge 
economic toll in the form of a whopping $200 billion in congressional 
appropriations, money that should have been invested here at home and 
used to pay for the real war against terrorism, a war that never has 
included Iraq. The Bush administration's line is that the war in Iraq 
was essential in fighting the so-called war on terrorism. Bush Press 
Secretary Scott McClellan, commenting on the number of troops killed, 
claimed that ``the best way to honor all those who lost their lives in 
the war on terrorism is to continue to wage a broad war and spread 
freedom throughout a dangerous part of the world.'' What a shameful 
thing that was to say.
  It is clearly time for a new national security policy. I have 
introduced H. Con. Res. 392 to create a SMART security platform for the 
21st century. SMART stands for Sensible Multilateral American Response 
to Terrorism. SMART security treats war as an absolute last resort. It 
fights terrorism with stronger intelligence and multilateral 
partnerships. It controls the spread of weapons of mass destruction 
with aggressive diplomacy, strong regional security arrangements, and 
vigorous inspection regimes. SMART security invests in the development 
of impoverished nations to prevent terrorism from taking root in the 
first place.

                              {time}  2030

  SMART security is about preventing war, as opposed to preemptive war. 
It emphasizes brains over brawn. It is tough, but diplomatic; 
aggressive, but peaceful; pragmatic, but idealistic.
  President Bush loves to think that those who support his efforts in 
Iraq are patriotic, and those that think there is a better way are 
unpatriotic, or, worse, un-American. But I can think of nothing more 
patriotic than pursuing a national security policy that protects 
America by relying on the noblest of American values: our capacity for 
global leadership, our compassion for the people of the world, our 
commitment to peace and freedom.

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