[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18836-18837]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        SMART SECURITY AND 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. Mr. Speaker, as thousands of our brave American soldiers

[[Page 18837]]

continue to fight and die and receive serious wounds halfway around the 
world, I want to speak about two Iraqs that are presented to the 
American people.
  There is the Iraq that President Bush and his administration want 
people to see, the one that is supposedly one small step away from 
becoming a peaceful democracy. And then there is the real Iraq, the 
quagmire halfway around the world that the rest of us know.
  In President Bush's Iraq, the war was never a mistake, never a 
failure, and never something to question, much less regret. The same 
war, which as of today has caused the deaths of 1,027 American soldiers 
and seriously wounded at least seven times that many, not to mention 
the thousands of Iraqi civilians that have been killed, President Bush 
says he would have gone to war in Iraq even if had he known 2 years ago 
what he knows now.
  That means he would have gone to war knowing that Iraq did not have a 
nuclear weapons program. He would have gone to war knowing that Saddam 
Hussein never harbored al Qaeda terrorists, and he would have gone to 
war knowing that thousands of our young soldiers would be killed. 
Somehow, and I do not know how, somehow President Bush fails to 
recognize the death, destruction, and deprivation that his war has 
caused.
  The rest of us see a different Iraq than President Bush. In the real 
Iraq, America preemptively waged a war that was never a war of 
necessity and never a war to protect our Nation. Instead, President 
Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress led this country into a war 
that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan recently called 
``illegal.''
  In the real Iraq, hundreds of soldiers have died because they were 
not given the battle armor that would have stopped bullets from 
entering their bodies, even after Congress made funds available for 
that very specific purpose. This was a drastic mistake made by the 
Pentagon.
  In the real Iraq, President Bush, as Commander in Chief, has failed 
to properly address the insurgency that is killing scores of troops and 
civilians every day. This is a failure that could have and should have 
been addressed during the planning stages of the war.
  In the past week, four Republican Senators have bucked their party 
line and acknowledged the sweeping problems that exist in the real 
Iraq. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said, ``I don't think we're 
winning . . . we're in trouble. We're in deep trouble.''
  Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, went further. When asked why only $1 billion of the $18 
billion appropriated for Iraq's reconstruction has been spent, he said, 
``Well, this is the incompetence of the administration.''
  This did not have to be an unmitigated disaster. But Iraq is woefully 
unstable largely due to planning failures by the Bush administration: 
the failure to enlist most of our allies as partners in the war, the 
failure to anticipate the anger and intensity of the insurgency, and 
the failure to allocate the billions of dollars in reconstruction funds 
that could have helped secure that country.
  Fortunately, we have opportunities to fix this awful mess. Earlier 
this week Senator John Kerry offered a better, smarter solution to 
fixing the real problems in Iraq. John Kerry's plan includes soliciting 
and enlisting support from our allies, properly training Iraq's 
security forces, and carrying out a viable reconstruction plan that 
truly involves the Iraqi people, instead of giving companies like 
Halliburton the benefit of America's investment, while leaving Iraqi 
companies without contracts and the Iraqi people without jobs.
  We need to engage in smarter policies if we want to stop the bleeding 
in Iraq. That is why I have introduced H. Con. Res. 392, to create a 
smarter security resolution for the 21st century. SMART stands for 
Sensible, Multilateral American Response to Terrorism. With SMART 
security, we would not be in the mess that we are in today. SMART 
security treats war as an absolute last resort. It fights terrorism 
with stronger intelligence and multilateral partnerships, and it 
controls the spread of weapons of mass destruction with aggressive 
diplomacy, strong regional security arrangements, and vigorous 
inspection regimes.

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