[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 11577]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     GLOBAL WAR NOT WORTH THE COST

  (Mr. MORAN of Virginia asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, the full day's debate yesterday 
was of no consequence because the premise of the resolution before us 
is a false one. It suggests that the goal of a secure, stable, and 
unified Iraq is an achievable one. It is not.
  Iraq has always been a failed state because it was created 
artificially by the British to serve the British interest, not the 
Iraqi's interest. The fact is, when you have no tradition of civil 
institutions at the local level, the only way that a country can be 
governed is by a brutal secular dictator or by a repressive religious 
theocracy, and neither of those options is going to be in America's 
interest, certainly not the pro-American liberal democracy that we have 
talked about.
  Neither of those options, most importantly, will be worth the cost of 
the thousands more of American men and women who will lose their lives, 
the tens of thousands who will be seriously wounded or the hundreds of 
billions of dollars that we will have to borrow to finance this war. 
This resolution is not in America's interest, and it should be 
defeated.

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