[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 14311-14312]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Madam Speaker, in the last 2 days there have been two 
major stories about comments made by the prime minister of Iraq. In the 
first, he said that terrorism in Iraq has been defeated. In the second, 
the Iraqi prime minister said he wants to negotiate a departure date 
for U.S. troops.
  Yet, because the Defense Department has requested more money for Iraq 
this year than any year of the war so far, you can rest assured that we 
will not be leaving any time soon. This war has always been more about 
money and power than about any real threat to the U.S. Saddam Hussein's 
total military budget was only a little over 2/10 of 1 percent of ours.
  As the conservative columnist Charley Reese wrote a few years ago: We 
attacked a country that had not attacked us, that had not even 
threatened to attack us, and was not even capable of attacking us.''

[[Page 14312]]

  Now some are gloating about the success of the surge as if this 
somehow justifies all the deaths, all the injuries, and all the waste, 
fraud, and abuse of previous years. Well, surely with the expenditure 
of hundreds of billions of dollars, there would be a few successes 
along the way.
  It is not criticism of the troops to say that this was a very 
unnecessary war that we should never have been in, in the first place. 
This war has meant massive foreign aid, huge deficit spending, and has 
put almost the entire burden of enforcing U.N. resolutions on our 
taxpayers and on our military. It has gone against every traditional 
conservative position I have ever known.
  The Democrats recently passed a budget raising our national debt 
limit to $10.5 trillion. We are still borrowing staggering amounts of 
money, and this war has been our largest single expense. The Defense 
Department, like any giant bureaucracy, always wants more money, yet we 
simply cannot afford to keep spending at the rate our military leaders 
want.
  Georgie Anne Geyer, the conservative foreign policy columnist, wrote 
a few months after the Iraqi war started that, ``Americans will 
inevitably come to a point where they have to choose between a 
government that provides services at home or one that seeks empire 
across the globe.''
  This war has already become the most expensive and wasteful war in 
American history. There has not been anything fiscally conservative 
about the war in Iraq. In fact, there has been so much waste of money, 
so much fraud, so much excessive and lavish spending that fiscal 
conservatives should be the ones most upset about all this.
  According to the Government Accountability Office, we already have 
$53 trillion to $54 trillion in unfunded future pension liabilities on 
top of our national debt, and this figure is going up every day. We are 
now spending at the rate of $500 million a day, every day, for our 
military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In just a few short years we 
will not be able to pay our Social Security and veterans pensions and 
all the other things we have promised our own people with money that 
will buy very much.
  Evan Thomas in the June 23 issue of Newsweek wrote, ``American 
politicians have gone to extraordinary lengths to be seen as Churchill, 
not Chamberlain, with results that have not always been in America's 
best interest.''
  He wrote that Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic were frequently 
compared to Hitler. ``But,'' Thomas wrote, ``the only real Hitler was 
Hitler. Saddam and Milosevic were murderers, but at most local 
menaces.''
  Both parties are falling all over themselves trying to prove their 
patriotism, and thus are afraid to question any Pentagon expenditure. 
And the Defense Department seems to know that no matter how wasteful or 
inefficient it becomes, that Congress will keep on giving it huge 
increases.
  Where are the fiscal conservatives? Where are those who will say 
that, since the surge has been successful, we need to spend less money 
in Iraq, not more? Where are those who supported this war who will not 
back up the Iraqi prime minister and say it is time to start bringing 
our troops home?
  Surely conservatives, who have always been the biggest opponents of 
world government, are not going to say we should keep on running Iraq 
and simply stay there forever regardless of how the Iraqis themselves 
feel.
  At some point we need to start putting our own people first once 
again. At some point, Madam Speaker, we need to stop borrowing hundreds 
of billions to spend in other countries, and take care of our own 
people.

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