[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 994]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         BRING OUR TROOPS HOME

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Hall) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HALL of New York. Mr. Speaker, before being sworn in, I was home 
in my district for a couple of weeks doing a listening tour traveling 
around the five counties that I represent, and I had dozens of my 
constituents come up to me and say, Please bring them home, bring our 
troops home.
  I didn't have one person in my district in New York come up to me and 
say, Please send more over there.
  I am proud and honored and humbled, and I must say saddened at the 
same time, at the prospect that as a member of the Veterans' Affairs 
committee of this House that I will be able and be responsible to help 
returning veterans from this war deal with their physical, 
psychological, economic, housing and other problems.
  It is an honor. It is an important service to provide. But what is a 
shame is that we are creating so many more veterans that have so much 
more grievous problems, that this war is producing injuries that in 
previous wars might not have been survivable.
  The good news is that the soldiers, our servicemen and -women, are 
surviving in greater numbers. The bad news is that when they come home, 
they have to deal with much longer periods of rehabilitation or much 
more serious injuries and limitations on their mobility and on their 
other physical capabilities.
  I am reminded, standing here, of the State of the Union address 3 
years ago when Ahmed Chalabi was sitting in the Presidential box next 
to the First Lady. At the time he was the fair-haired boy that we had 
picked out of Iraq to stake our hopes for creating a government in our 
image and likeness and our country on. So no longer is it Chalabi; it 
is Maliki.

                              {time}  1645

  The President is telling us we can to take his word and trust that he 
can produce 18 brigades to spread out across the country and to work 
side by side with our troops.
  I am not so sure that 18 brigades that are reliable and 
independently-functioning of Iraqi Army and police actually exist. I am 
also not so sure that in another couple of years it won't be somebody 
else besides Maliki; that there will be a new Prime Minister that we 
will be told we should stake our hopes on.
  There was a front-page story in the Baltimore Sun yesterday that said 
that 20,000-some new troops heading to Iraq will have to go with the 
old, lesser armored vehicles, the flat-bottomed HMMWVs, because the new 
V-hulled transports that deflect the power of a roadside bomb or a land 
mine are not available in sufficient numbers because the money has not 
been available to bring the production lines up to where they need to 
be to have them ready.
  It just bespeaks of the same incompetent planning, the same lack of 
thorough thinking of the problem through that leaves us with six fluent 
Arabic-speaking translators in the embassy according to the Baker-
Hamilton Report.
  If you believe our national intelligence estimate from this past fall 
that says all 16 of our intelligence agencies in this country report 
that so far the Iraq war has created more terrorists than it has 
disposed of, where is the logic in continuing that war? Where is the 
logic in escalating that war?
  I would like to see a surge of interpreters and a surge of religious 
and historical experts in the region and a surge of trained 
negotiators, and I would like to see a surge of diplomacy, of us 
treating other countries as sovereigns and talking to them. There are a 
couple of examples of that working.
  One might remember, for instance, a President from the other side of 
the aisle from me, President Reagan going to South Africa which at the 
time was a rogue state that had nuclear weapons, and I was on the side 
that was saying, Let's sanction them. Let's not talk to them. And let's 
cut off all interaction. And what he called constructive engagement was 
sending ballet troupes and sending artists and having as much 
commercial and cultural exchange as possible to bring them to our way 
of thinking. It worked in that case, a nuclear power disarmed. And I 
would like to see that kind of emphasis and diplomacy returned to our 
country's foreign policy.

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