[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 3]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 3767-3768]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




       GEORGE McGOVERN SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, February 12, 2007

  Mr. McGOVERN. Madam Speaker, last month, on January 12th, Senator 
George McGovern spoke at the National Press Club about what he would 
advise President Bush to do on the Iraq War.
  At 84 years of age, and as a veteran of World War II, Senator 
McGovern has the experience and knowledge that leads him to focus on 
the important questions surrounding this critical policy question. I 
hope all my colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, will review Senator 
McGovern's remarks and ask the same questions of our president.

     Remarks by Senator George McGovern to the National Press Club

                            [Jan. 12, 2007]

       I'm glad to be back at the National Press Club. Indeed, at 
     the age of 84, I'm glad to be anywhere. In my younger years 
     when the subject of aging came up, trying to sound worldly 
     wise, I would say, ``It doesn't matter so much the number of 
     years you have, but what you do with those years.'' I don't 
     say that anymore. I now want to reach a hundred. Why? Because 
     I thoroughly enjoy life and there are so many things I must 
     still do before entering the mystery beyond. The most urgent 
     of these is to get American soldiers out of the Iraqi 
     hellhole Bush-Cheney and their neo-conservative theorists 
     have created in what was once called the cradle of 
     civilization. It is believed to be the location of the Garden 
     of Eden. I mention the neo-conservative theorists to recall 
     Walter Lippman's observance, ``There is nothing so dangerous 
     as a belligerent professor.''
       One of the things I miss about my 18 years in the U.S. 
     Senate are the stories of the old Southern Democrats. I 
     didn't always vote with them, but I loved their technique of 
     responding to an opponent's questions with a humorous story. 
     Once when Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina had to handle a 
     tough question from Mike Mansfield, he said, ``You know, Mr. 
     Leader, that question reminds me of the old Baptist preacher 
     who was telling a class of Sunday school boys the creation 
     story. `God created Adam and Eve and from this union came two 
     sons, Cain and Abel and thus the human race developed.' A boy 
     in the class then asked, `Reverend, where did Cain and Abel 
     get their wives?' After frowning for a moment, the preacher 
     replied, `Young man--it's impertinent questions like that 
     that's hurtin' religion.'''
       Well, Mr. Bush, Jr. I have some impertinent questions for 
     you.
       Mr. President, Sir, when reporter Bob Woodward asked you if 
     you had consulted with your father before ordering our army 
     into Iraq you said, ``No, he's not the father you call on a 
     decision like this. I talked to my heavenly Father above.'' 
     My question, Mr. President: If God asked you to bombard, 
     invade and occupy Iraq for four years, why did he send an 
     opposite message to the Pope? Did you not know that your 
     father, George Bush, Sr., his Secretary of State James Baker 
     and his National Security Advisor General Skowcroft were all 
     opposed to your invasion? Wouldn't you, our troops, the 
     American people and the Iraqis all be much better off if you 
     had listened to your more experienced elders including your 
     earthly father? Instead of blaming God for the awful 
     catastrophe you have unleashed in Iraq, wouldn't it have been 
     less self-righteous if you had fallen back on the oft-quoted 
     explanation of wrongdoing, ``The devil made me do it?''
       And Mr. President, after the 9-11 hit against the Twin 
     Towers in New York, which gained us the sympathy and support 
     of the entire world, why did you then order the invasion of 
     Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11? Are you aware that 
     your actions destroyed the international reservoir of good 
     will towards the United States? What is the cost to America 
     of shattering the standing and influence of our country in 
     the eyes of the world?
       Why, Mr. President did you pressure the CIA to report 
     falsely that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction 
     including nuclear weapons? And when you ordered your 
     Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to go to New York and 
     present to the U.N. the Administration's ``evidence'' that 
     Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, 
     were you aware that after reading this deceitful statement to 
     the U.N., Mr. Powell told an aid that the so-called evidence 
     was ``bullshit''?
       Is it reasonable to you, President Bush, that Colin Powell 
     told you near the end of your first term that he would not be 
     in your administration if you were to receive a second term? 
     What decent person could survive two full terms of forced 
     lying and deceit?
       And Mr. President, how do you enjoy your leisure time, and 
     how can you sleep at night knowing that 3014 young Americans 
     have died in a war you mistakenly ordered? What do you say to 
     the 48,000 young Americans who have been crippled for life in 
     mind or body? What is your reaction to the conclusion of the 
     leading British medical journal (Lancet) that since you 
     ordered the bombardment and occupation of Iraq four years 
     ago, 600 thousand Iraqi men, women and children have been 
     killed? What do you think of the destruction of the Iraqi's 
     homes, their electrical and water systems, their public 
     buildings?
       And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while neither of you has ever 
     been in combat (Mr. Cheney asking and receiving five 
     deferments from the Vietnam War), have you not at least read 
     or been briefed on the terrible costs of that ill-advised and 
     seemingly endless American war in tiny Vietnam? Do you 
     realize that another Texas President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 
     declined to seek a second term in part because he had lost 
     his credibility over the disastrous war in Vietnam? Are you 
     aware that one of the chief architects of that war, Secretary 
     of Defense Robert McNamara, resigned his office and years 
     later published a book declaring that the war was all a 
     tragic mistake? Do you know this recent history in which 
     58,000 young Americans died in the process of killing 2 
     million Vietnamese men, women and children? If you do not 
     know about this terrible blunder in Vietnam, are you not 
     ignoring the conclusion of one of our great philosophers: 
     ``Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat 
     it.'' And, Mr. President, in your ignorance of the lessons of 
     Vietnam, are you not condemning our troops and our people to 
     repeat the same tragedy in Iraq?
       During the long years between 1964 and 1975 when I fought 
     to end the American war in Vietnam, first as a U.S. Senator 
     from South Dakota and then as my party's nominee for 
     President, my four daughters ganged up on my one night. 
     ``Dad, why don't you give up this battle? You've been 
     speaking out against this crazy war since we were little 
     kids. When you won the Democratic presidential nomination, 
     you got snowed under by President Nixon.'' In reply I said, 
     ``Just remember that sometimes in history even a tragic 
     mistake produces something good. The good about Vietnam is 
     that it is such a terrible blunder, we'll never go down that 
     road again.'' Mr. President, we're going down that road 
     again. So, what do I tell my daughters? And what do you tell 
     your daughters?
       Mr. President, I do not speak either as a pacifist or a 
     draft dodger. I speak as one who after the attack on Pearl 
     Harbor, volunteered at the age of nineteen for the Army Air 
     Corps and flew 35 missions as a B-24 bomber. I believed in 
     that war then and I still do 65 years later. And so did the 
     rest of America. Mr. President, are you missing the 
     intellectual and moral capacity to know the difference 
     between a justified war and a war of folly in Vietnam or 
     Iraq?
       Public opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of the 
     American people think that the war in Iraq has been a mistake 
     on your part. It is widely believed that this war was the 
     central reason Democrats captured control of both houses of 
     Congress. Polls among the people of Iraq indicate that nearly 
     all Iraqis want our military presence in their country for 
     the last four years to end now. Why do you persist in defying 
     public opinion in both the United States and Iraq and 
     throughout the other countries around the globe? Do you see 
     yourself as omniscient? What is your view of the doctrine of 
     self-determination, which we Americans hold dear?
       And wonder of wonders, Mr. President, after such needless 
     death and destruction, first in the Vietnamese jungle and now 
     in the Arabian desert, how can you order 21,500 more American 
     troops to Iraq? Are you aware that as the war in Vietnam went 
     from bad to worse, our leaders sent in more troops and wasted 
     more billions of dollars until we had 550,000 U.S. troops in 
     that little country? It makes me shudder as an aging bomber

[[Page 3768]]

     pilot to remember that we dropped more bombs on the 
     Vietnamese and their country than the total of all the bombs 
     dropped by all the air forces around the world in World War 
     II. Do you, Mr. President, honestly believe that we need tens 
     of thousands of additional troops plus a supplemental 
     military appropriation of 200 billion dollars before we can 
     bring our troops home from this nightmare in ancient Baghdad?
       In your initial campaign for the Presidency, Mr. Bush, you 
     described yourself as a ``compassionate conservative.'' What 
     is compassionate about consigning America's youth to a 
     needless and seemingly endless war that has now lasted longer 
     than World War II? And what is conservative about reducing 
     the taxes needed to finance this war and instead running our 
     national debt to nine trillion dollars with money borrowed 
     from China, Japan, Germany and Britain? Is this wild deficit 
     financing your idea of conservatism? Mr. President, how can a 
     true conservative be indifferent to the steadily rising cost 
     of a war that claims over seven billion dollars a month, 237 
     million dollars every day? Are you troubled to know as a 
     conservative that just the interest on our skyrocketing 
     national debt is $760,000 every day? Mr. President, our Nobel 
     Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, estimates that if 
     the war were to continue until 2010 as you have indicated it 
     might, the cost would be over a trillion dollars.
       Perhaps, Mr. President, you should ponder the words of a 
     genuine conservative--England's 19th Century member of 
     Parliament, Edmund Burke: ``A conscientious man would be 
     cautious how he dealt in blood.''
       And, Mr. President at a time when your most respected 
     generals have concluded that the chaos and conflict in Iraq 
     cannot be resolved by more American dollars and more American 
     young bodies, do you ever consider the needs here at home of 
     our own anxious and troubled society? What about the words of 
     another true conservative, General and President Dwight 
     Eisenhower who said that, ``Every gun that is made, every 
     warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final 
     sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those 
     who are cold and not clothed.''
       And, Mr. President, would not you and all the rest of us do 
     well to ponder the farewell words of President Eisenhower: 
     ``In the councils of government; we must guard against the 
     acquisition of the unwarranted influence of the military-
     industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of 
     misplaced power exists and will persist.''
       Finally, Mr. President, I ask have you kept your oath of 
     office to uphold the Constitution when you use what you call 
     the war on terrorism to undermine the Bill of Rights? On what 
     constitutional theory do you seize and imprison suspects 
     without charge, sometimes torturing them in foreign jails? On 
     what constitutional or legal basis have you tapped the phones 
     of Americans without approval of the courts as required by 
     law? Are you above the Constitution, above the law, and above 
     the Geneva accords? If we are fighting for freedom in Iraq as 
     you say, why are you so indifferent to protecting liberty 
     here in America?
       Many Americans are now saying in effect, ``The American war 
     in Iraq has created a horrible mess but how can we now walk 
     away from it?'' William Polk, a former Harvard and University 
     of Chicago professor of Middle East Studies and a former 
     State Department expert on the Middle East, has teamed up 
     with me on a recent book requested by Simon and Schuster. It 
     is entitled, ``Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal 
     Now.'' I feel awkward praising it, so I give you the 
     respected journalist of the New York Times, and now of 
     Newsweek, Anna Quindlen who told Charlie Rose on his 
     excellent TV program: ``There is a wonderful book I am 
     recommending to everyone. It's a very small, readable book by 
     George McGovern and William Polk called ``Out of Iraq''. And 
     it just very quickly runs you through the history of the 
     country, the makeup of the country, how we got in, the 
     arguments for getting in--many of which don't withstand 
     scrutiny--and how we can get out. It's like a little primer. 
     I think the entire nation should read it and then we will be 
     united.''
       If you need a second for the judgment of Anna Quindlen, I 
     give you the esteemed Library Journal: ``In this crisp and 
     cogently argued book, former Senator McGovern and scholar 
     Polk offer a trenchant and straightforward critique of the 
     war in Iraq. What makes their highly readable book unique is 
     that it not only argues why the United States needs to 
     disengage militarily from Iraq now . . . but also clearly 
     delineates practical steps for troop withdrawal . . . 
     Essential reading for anybody who wants to cut through the 
     maze of confusion that surrounds current U.S. policy in Iraq, 
     this book is highly recommended for public and academic 
     libraries.''
       Professor Polk is a descendant of President Polk and the 
     brother of the noted George Polk, is here today from his home 
     in southern France and he will join me at the podium as I 
     conclude this impartial interrogation of President Bush. And 
     now, members of the National Press Club and your guests, it' 
     s your turn to cross-examine Bill Polk and me in, of course, 
     an equally impartial manner.

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