[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 15]
[House]
[Page 21052]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE RIGHT THING TO DO

  (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, last night Vice 
President Cheney said he was proud of the record in Iraq, and this is 
exactly what he said: ``We did in Iraq what was exactly the right thing 
to do, and I recommend it all over again, I would.''
  And yet in today's Washington Post we learned that the most 
definitive accounts of Iraq's arms programs will show that Saddam 
Hussein possessed a diminishing threat at the time the United States 
invaded and did not possess or have concrete plans to develop nuclear, 
chemical, or biological weapons.
  This investigation found that the state of Hussein's weapon 
development program and knowledge was less advanced in 2003 when the 
war began than it was in 1998 when the international inspectors left 
Iraq. The fact of the matter is over 1,000 Americans have died in this 
war; thousands and thousands of Americans have been wounded; thousands 
and thousands of Iraqis have been killed and wounded, and they have 
been killed or wounded in a war of choice because Iraq was not an 
imminent threat to the United States. But this administration chose, in 
spite of all of the evidence to go to war, to put our young people at 
risk and to lose their lives because they wanted to manipulate the 
evidence. They wanted to manipulate the war on terror, and they wanted 
to frighten this Nation.
  Mr. Vice President, if you had to do it all over again, I hope you 
would not.

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