[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11790-11791]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          THE IRAQI GOVERNMENT

  (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute.)
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker and Members of the 
House, last January when the President was suggesting the need for the 
escalation of the numbers of troops in Iraq, he also told us that while 
we would provide the troops under his policy, the Iraqis would provide 
a series of benchmarks which they would meet to end the insurgency and 
to bring their country together politically so that the insurgency can 
be dampened down or ended.
  Now we are told by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that it would 
be wrong to hold the Iraqi Government, the Malaki government, to those 
benchmarks because it would take away their flexibility, while 
President Bush said that if they did not meet these benchmarks in 
January, they would lose the confidence of the American people.
  President Bush had it right. They haven't met the benchmarks. They 
are not holding up their end of the bargain. The Parliament is not 
meeting. A third of them are living in London, not in Iraq, and they 
have lost the confidence of the American people.
  How is it that the Secretary of State and the President of the United 
States can continue to believe that we should continue to send American 
soldiers to die in Iraq when the Iraqi Government won't meet the 
benchmarks which were supposed to be the bedrock of this new policy, 
this new direction, that has

[[Page 11791]]

turned out to be the same old stay-the-course policy where American 
soldiers die and the Iraqi Government dithers away day in and day out 
and not meeting the new policies to bring a unified Iraq together?
  It is unacceptable to the American people. It is unacceptable to our 
soldiers. It is unacceptable to their families. And we ought to end 
this policy now.

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