[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 4659-4661]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1730
   A LOOK BACK ON THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Porter). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.


                             General Leave

  Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks on the 
subject of my special order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Maryland?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight along with fellow members 
of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the ongoing war in Iraq. 
As you well know, tomorrow will mark the 1-year anniversary of 
Operation Iraqi Freedom. I am sure you would agree, Mr. Speaker, that 
this is one anniversary that will not be commemorated with a joyous 
celebration. Instead, this anniversary will be met with somber 
reflection upon those lives, both military and civilian, that were lost 
or forever changed as a result of this tragic war.
  Just last year, Mr. Speaker, President Bush told the American people, 
and I quote, ``I want Americans and all the world to know that 
coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians 
from harm.'' Yet just 1

[[Page 4660]]

year later, the New York Times is reporting that somewhere between 
3,000 and 5,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed as a result of this 
war. In fact, as of yesterday, there have been 566 Americans, 59 
Britains, 5 Bulgarians, 1 Dane, 1 Estonian, 17 Italians, 2 Poles, 10 
Spaniards, 2 Thai and 3 Ukrainians that have died in Iraq. And 
according to the Pentagon, there have been over 3,000 U.S. troops 
wounded. Those troops are some of the same people that I see in Walter 
Reed when I visit.
  I was just at Walter Reed 2 weeks ago. When I see the young men and 
women who have gone off into war, many of them coming back missing a 
leg, an arm, two legs, many of them feeling a bit disoriented, many of 
them feeling confused, many of them just simply trying to get, as one 
soldier said, from one day to another, again, this commemoration will 
not be a joyous one.
  Mr. Speaker, we in the Congressional Black Caucus wholeheartedly 
believe in the principles of peace. We also believe in the principles 
of freedom as well as a necessity for America to provide security for 
all of her citizens. But we also wholeheartedly believe in protecting 
the sanctity of human life.
  Mr. Speaker, just last year, President Bush convinced the Nation that 
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and thereby posed an 
imminent threat to our national security. And while there have been 
questions as to whether our data from the CIA and other organizations 
was accurate, the fact still remains to this day that no weapons of 
mass destruction have been found. I think, Mr. Speaker, that that is 
one of the things that makes it so painful for so many of the families. 
We see them on network television and we see them on the cable shows, 
those families who say that they believe in this country, that they 
raised their boys and girls as little children to put their hands up to 
their hearts and to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. They 
taught them to be patriotic. They taught them to stand up for what they 
believe in. They taught them to stand up for the Office of the 
President, but, more significantly, to stand up for one of the greatest 
countries in the world. And so from little children they stood up and 
they said, ``I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of 
America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, 
indivisible with liberty and justice for all.''
  Those parents who now see their sons and daughters in many instances 
sadly coming back in sealed caskets, coming back with limbs missing, 
some of them have begun to ask the question, Why is it that we went to 
war? For when we went to war, Mr. Speaker, they did not hear the term 
``regime change.'' That is not what they thought. They thought that 
there was imminent danger. They thought our country was in deep 
trouble. I am sure that as they stood at the air bases and as they 
stood at the train stations and as they waved good-bye to their sons, 
to their husbands, their wives, to their sisters, their brothers, their 
friends, they said they are going off because of these weapons of mass 
destruction that the President had told them about.
  Mr. Speaker, I am not here to beat up on the President because that 
is not appropriate. But I am here to remind us of why we went to war. I 
think that so often what happens is that we get so caught up in the 
political fray that is going on that we forget that when those parents 
stood at those various departing stations that they thought they were 
going for one reason, and then once the war got started and moved 
forward and as weapons of mass destruction were not found, we then 
began to hear new reasons.
  And so it is when the President said that we were going to destroy 
these weapons, and although I must say that the Congressional Black 
Caucus begged on this floor the President to think very carefully 
before going to war, this Congressional Black Caucus begged, because we 
said that the number one thing that we must always protect is the lives 
of human beings, be they American soldiers, be they American civilians, 
or be they the Iraqi innocent people, we must always look at life as 
the number one priority. But then we went to war.
  But before we went to war, we asked the President, Are American lives 
in imminent danger? We asked the question over and over and over again. 
Sadly, back then, we could not get an answer. But the implication was 
that we had major, major problems and that these weapons of mass 
destruction could be released at any time and could do so much harm.
  We asked other questions, too. One of those questions was as we 
proceed with this war, how is it going to be paid for? Who is going to 
pay for it? The President was very generous in an answer when he talked 
about the war.
  I shall never forget sitting in one of these seats as I listened to 
him. One of the things that he said was that this war had come to us, 
we did not go to it. He went on to say that we had to act now and we 
had to act so that our children and our grandchildren and their 
offspring would not have to deal with this issue and would not have to 
pay for this. And so again our soldiers went off to war, believing that 
as they marched onto the soil of Iraq that they were making sure that 
the weapons of mass destruction, when found, would be done away with so 
that no harm would not only come to the Iraqi people but to the world.
  But, Mr. Speaker, I cannot help but ask, if the ultimate goal of this 
preemptive war was to disarm Saddam Hussein, was our mission really 
accomplished? Could we have reached the same end by utilizing a 
different means? Day after day as I listen to my colleagues come upon 
this floor and talk about how it is that we now have Saddam Hussein in 
custody and how we have gotten rid of this tyrant and we have locked up 
this person who was just a person that did so much harm to so many 
people, I ask myself the question, Was that the reason that we went 
into war from the beginning? After all, we still have not yet found, by 
the way, the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to have 
caused this preemptive war.
  By the way, that is another issue that we brought up, the whole issue 
of preemption. The Congressional Black Caucus, before this war came 
about, said that one of our major concerns was that we were committing 
a preemptive strike; that is, that we were going into a war of more or 
less prevention and certainly one, if one goes away from what we 
normally would do, and this preemptive strike is a major thing because 
that is something that the United States does not do; but the fact is 
that going into a preemptive strike caused us a lot of concern because 
we began to ask the question, Well, what are we trying to prevent?
  That is where the question of imminent danger came in. Again, that 
question was never answered. And to be frank, when we look back at it, 
I do not think this country was in imminent danger. In essence, we have 
traded over 600 coalition lives and that of countless civilians for 
that one brutal dictator. One year later, we must ask, was it worth it? 
Was it worth it to the young man in my district, one of the first 
casualties of the war?
  I shall never forget, Mr. Speaker, as his father heard about his 
death and cried out, Why is it that my son has died? He wanted to know, 
that is, Sergeant Walters-Bey's father wanted to know why his son had 
died. I shall never forget going to the funeral and standing there as 
he begged me for an answer to the question with tears rolling down his 
face, Why has my son died? His father was very clear. He had read the 
papers, he had watched the newscasts. He said to me, Mr. Speaker, ``I 
am all for doing whatever is necessary to support this country. My son 
was for whatever was necessary to support this country. But I question 
what this war was all about.''
  And so, Mr. Speaker, I have asked time and time again if we had 
enough intelligence to determine that Saddam Hussein was hiding 
chemical and biological weapons then, why has the Intelligence 
Community not been able to lead us to those weapons? It is no wonder 
that the world leaders are now challenging our credibility.
  Mr. Speaker, I know that the truth hurts, but the President need not 
blame others for the predicament that

[[Page 4661]]

he has caused. It is no secret that our standing around the world has 
plummeted as a result of President Bush's foreign policy. Spain, a 
country that stood with President Bush just 1 year ago and supported 
this preemptive war, is now calling the United States occupation a 
fiasco.
  Just today, Poland, a country which has about 2,400 troops in Iraq 
and was a strong supporter of the invasion, is saying that it was 
misled about the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass 
destruction.

                              {time}  1745

  Unfortunately, the tide seems to be beginning to turn against the 
United States. Mr. Speaker, I contend that in a multicultural society 
bolstered by a global economy, there is absolutely no room for a 
unilateralist foreign policy.
  Following President Bush's pronouncement of war last year, the 
Vatican offered this response: ``Whoever decides that peaceful means 
under international law'' that was put at our disposition ``have been 
exhausted assumes a serious responsibility before God, his own 
conscience, and his country.''
  I have often said, Mr. Speaker, a hundred years ago none of us were 
here and a hundred years from now, none of us will be here. The 
question is what do we do to make our time on this Earth the best that 
it can be? And perhaps the greater question is, how do we make the 
lives of others the best that they can be?
  Let us seize upon this moment to begin working with international 
leaders to correct our current course in order that history would 
reflect kindly upon us as a Nation. One year later, Mr. Speaker, we 
must reclaim the moral high ground for the sake of our children and 
those generations yet unborn. I have often said that our children are 
the living messages we send to a future we will never see. Our children 
are the living messages we send to a future we will never see. We 
cannot allow our children, through our actions today, to send a message 
of war, arrogance, and bloodshed to that future.
  Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, ``The chain reaction of evil, hate 
begetting hate, wars producing more wars, must be broken; or we shall 
be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.''
  On this 1-year anniversary, let us not only contemplate how to better 
secure our homeland, but let us also contemplate how to secure the 
peace. One of the things that is so fascinating in an article that I 
recently read where a young man who was a medic in this war and is now 
home and he wished to remain anonymous, he was stationed at the Baghdad 
airport as a medic, and he talked about how he had served in previous 
wars, and he talked about how it was interesting how different it was 
because the young people that come back, the soldiers that come back 
today, a lot of times the public never has an opportunity to see our 
fallen. And he went on to say that ``from what I gather, it used to be 
that the President would go out to the area to meet the deceased 
soldiers coming in. They would drape caskets and they would actually 
watch and give a moment of silence as the coffins came in.'' He went on 
to say, and this is a soldier, ``The Bush administration felt that this 
was too much for Americans to handle. So they secured that part of the 
ceremony'' and he said that ``no one knows when that fallen soldier 
comes home.
  He went on to say, ``It is an injustice to the military because you 
gave your life to the country and the country should give something 
back to you. Even just a moment of silence. Every day that someone 
dies, the flag should be lowered to half staff, not just because a 
politician dies.'' He went on to say, ``Those guys are good people. 
They work hard. They do anything and everything that is asked of them, 
and they gave the ultimate sacrifice. It should not be that you have to 
go to a Web site to find out who died.''
  So on this 1-year anniversary, although we do not see their faces, in 
towns and communities all over our country, people are experiencing the 
pain of war. Many of them are going to funerals, and our prayers go out 
with them. Many of them finding themselves in hospitals, and our 
prayers go out to them. Our prayers go out to all the families who have 
suffered losses. Our prayers also go out to all of our military who 
have gone forth to do what they had been called upon to do by our 
Commander in Chief. We pause on this 1-year anniversary to simply say 
to them, we thank them. We thank them for putting their lives in harm's 
way. We thank them for standing up. We thank them for being counted.
  And as Swindoll, the great theologian, has often said, It is the 
things that you do when you are unknown, unseen, unappreciated, and 
unapplauded that truly matter.
  So we in the Congressional Black Caucus refuse, as we did before the 
war, to be silent. We must raise our voices as we said then, as we 
begged the President not to go to war, and now that so many of our 
soldiers have gone on, our civilians have gone on, innocent Iraqi 
people have gone on, so many have been injured, we again raise our 
voices. Only this time we raise our voices to recognize those whose 
names will appear in a local paper or may appear in one or two 
paragraphs of some article talking about casualties in Iraq. We raise 
them and say to all of them, to those who have gone on, to those who 
have been injured, to those who are still in Iraq, to those who have 
come home for the 2-week leave and are about to go back, to those who 
believe so strongly in our country, they are no longer unseen, 
unnoticed, unappreciated, and unapplauded. We pause to say to them 
``thank you.''
  And so, hopefully, Mr. Speaker, as America goes to bed tonight, 
perhaps all of us need fall on our knees and ask God or at least 
whisper a prayer or have a moment of silence to recognize all of those 
who I have just mentioned who have given so much to make sure this 
country stays strong.

                          ____________________