[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 3]
[House]
[Page 3737]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             {time}   1930
     EVEN THE SOLDIERS WILL TELL YOU THAT NOTHING IS GOING TO HELP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, as the previous speaker just mentioned, 
tomorrow we will begin debating the Iraq war surge resolution. George 
Will, the conservative columnist wrote in opposition to this surge and 
said it would take a miracle for the surge to succeed.
  Dick Armey, our former majority leader, in an interview with a major 
newspaper chain said just a few days ago that he deeply regretted 
voting to go to war in Iraq, and said, ``Had I been more true to myself 
and the principles I believed in at the time, I would have openly 
opposed the whole adventure vocally and aggressively.''
  William F. Buckley, Jr., often called the godfather of conservatism, 
wrote in 2004 that if he had known in 2002 what he knew in 2004 he 
would have opposed the war. Chris Matthews on Election Night said, 
``The decision to go to war in Iraq was not a conservative decision 
historically,'' and he said it asked Republicans, ``to behave like a 
different people than they intrinsically are.''
  And that confirmed what I have said many times on this floor, that 
the war in Iraq went against every traditional conservative position I 
have ever known. I would like to read into the Record at this time a 
column that I wrote for the Nashville Tennessean, Tennessee's largest 
circulation daily.
  I wrote this. ``I voted against going to war in Iraq when Congress 
voted on this in October of 2002. And I am opposed to sending more U.S. 
troops there now. President Bush has said repeatedly that he is going 
to listen mainly to his commanders. I wish he would listen to 
Specialist Don Roberts, 22, of Paonia, Colorado, now in his second tour 
in Iraq, who told the Associated Press: ``What could more guys do? We 
cannot pick sides. It is like we have to watch them kill each other 
then ask questions.''
  Sergeant Josh Keim, of Canton, Ohio, also on his second term said, 
``nothing is going to help. It is a religious war and we are caught in 
the middle of it.''
  Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but he had a total military budget 
only a little over two-tenths of 1 percent of ours, most of which he 
spent protecting himself and his family and building castles.
  He was no threat to us at all. As the conservative columnist Charley 
Reese has written several times, Iraq did not threaten us with war. 
They did not attack us, and were not even capable of attacking us.
  But even before the war started, Fortune Magazine had an article 
saying that an American occupation of Iraq would be ``prolonged and 
expensive'' and would make U.S. soldiers ``sitting ducks for Islamic 
terrorists.''
  Now we have had more than 3,000 Americans killed, many thousands more 
wounded horribly, and have spent $400 billion, and the Pentagon wants 
$170 billion more.
  Most of what we have spent has been purely foreign aid in nature: 
rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, giving free medical care, training 
police, giving jobs to several hundred thousand Iraqis and on and on. 
Our Constitution does not give us the authority to run another country 
as we have in reality been doing in Iraq.
  With a national debt of almost $9 trillion, we cannot afford it. To 
me our misadventure in Iraq is both unconstitutional and unaffordable. 
Some have said it was a mistake to start this war but that now that we 
are there we have to finish the job, and we cannot cut and run. Well, 
if you find out you are going the wrong way down the interstate, you do 
not keep going, you get off at the next exit.
  Very few pushed as hard for us to go to war in Iraq as did syndicated 
columnist Charles Krauthammer. Last week he wrote that the Maliki 
government we have installed there cares only about making sure the 
Shiites dominate the Sunnis. We should not be surging troops in defense 
of such a government, Krauthammer wrote. Maliki should be made to know 
that if he insists on having this sectarian war, he can well have it 
without us.
  There is no way we can keep all of our promises to our own people on 
Social Security, veterans benefits, and many other things in the years 
ahead if we keep trying to run the whole world. As another columnist, 
Georgie Anne Geyer, wrote more than 3 years ago, Americans ``will 
inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a 
government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire 
across the globe.''
  We should help other countries during humanitarian crises and have 
trade and tourism and cultural and educational exchanges. But 
conservatives have traditionally been the strongest opponents to 
interventionist foreign policies that create so much resentment for us 
around the world.
  We need to return to the more humble foreign policy President Bush 
advocated when he campaigned in 2000.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, we need to tell all of these defense 
contractors that the time for this Iraq gravy train with its obscene 
profits is over. It is time, Mr. Speaker, to bring our troops home.

                          ____________________