[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 23031-23032]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    BRING OUR TROOPS HOME FROM 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, I did not see any purple fingers in this 
Chamber so far this week. We all remember how the Iraqi elections in 
January were hailed by the President's supporters as the turning point 
in Iraq.
  Well, now there has been another election, a referendum on the 
Constitution. And what we are hearing from the pro-war forces is that 
we are still in for a long and deadly occupation in Iraq.
  It was all going to be so simple, remember? We would march into 
Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein. The grateful Iraqis would embrace 
the American presence, and a glorious democracy would spontaneously 
bloom. The Iraq situation was often compared to Germany and Japan after 
World War II where we were able to quickly fashion functioning 
democracy.
  The New York Times cites Richard Armitage, Bush's former deputy 
Secretary of State, who notes that those were homogeneous societies, 
whereas Iraq is a patchwork of rival ethnic groups. Armitage also 
points out that Germany and Japan, in 1945, were cowed populations, 
exhausted and deeply shocked by the war.
  Iraqis, however, were unshocked and unawed. They simply want their 
country back. So 2\1/2\ years and 2,000 body bags later, we are 
spinning our wheels and the President who drove us into this ditch in 
the first place has no plan for getting us out.
  Instead, according to a New York Times article on Monday, he seems to 
be preparing us for, and I quote, ``a struggle of Cold War 
proportions.'' Does that mean we can look forward to a half century of 
American boots on the ground in Iraq?
  One of the President's aids says in the article that this is a 
struggle of ideologies that is not going to end with one election or 
one constitution, or even a string of elections. Is this what

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the American people signed up for, a titanic ideological struggle with 
no end in sight? No, they were told Saddam Hussein had to be removed 
because he had deadly weapons pointed at American cities.
  As he has repeated over the last few years, the President is mixing 
apples and oranges. The President is saying that there is a threat of 
Islamic terrorism which is real and must be addressed, and that is 
true. Though I would argue we need to use more diplomatic and fewer 
military tools in that struggle.
  Then there is the war in Iraq, which is and was not a country of 
Islamic terrorists until we actually invaded that area and actually 
inflamed Muslim extremists and served as a recruiting tool for al 
Qaeda.
  In a twisted way it turns out that the Bush administration was right. 
You cannot separate Iraq from the war on terrorism. What they did not 
tell us is that invading Iraq has helped the wrong side of the war on 
terrorism.
  That same Times article quotes Kenneth Pollack, a scholar who 
initially supported the Iraq invasion. Pollack now says, and I quote 
him, ``The theory that democracy is the antidote to insurgency gets 
disproven on the ground every day.''
  So if we cannot defeat the insurgents by continuing to hold 
elections, what can we do? There is only one answer. We can take away 
the one thing that animates the insurgency in the first place, that is, 
our perceived military occupation of Iraq.
  Mr. Speaker, I traveled to Iraq a few weeks ago to meet with our 
military and to learn more about their mission. I cannot tell you how 
impressed I was with their courage, their loyalty, their intelligence. 
From the officers down to the citizen soldiers of the National Guard, 
they are indeed the best America has to offer.
  Unfortunately, they have been let down by their civilian superiors 
who sent them to Iraq on false pretenses, on a poorly defined mission, 
without all of the tools they needed, and without a plan to get them 
out of there.
  Our soldiers deserve better. They deserve a clear strategy from their 
President. They deserve a one-way ticket back home.

                          ____________________