[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 4416-4417]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              KEEPING OUR PROMISES TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  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, first I want to commend David Walker for his 
years of service as U.S. Comptroller General, heading up the Government 
Accountability Office. Mr. Walker is a highly respected CPA from 
Atlanta and for the last few years has been trying to be a Paul Revere 
about the horrible financial condition of the Federal Government. He 
has appeared before many Congressional committees and on television and 
has traveled around the country trying to sound the alarm about our $9 
trillion national debt, and, even worse, our $53 trillion in unfunded 
future pension liabilities.
  Two days ago in the Washington Times he was quoted from testimony he 
gave about Iraqi oil revenues. ``The Iraqis have a budget surplus,'' 
Mr. Walker said. ``We have a huge budget deficit. One of the questions 
is who should be paying.''
  Stewart Bowen, Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction, said 
increased production, along with the highest oil prices in history, 
``coalesce into an enormous windfall for the Iraqi government.'' Mr. 
Bowen said Iraqi oil revenue is now around $60 billion, and probably 
headed higher.
  Most estimates are that we have been spending approximately $12 
billion a month on the war in Iraq, a really astounding figure if you 
stop to think about it. However, even worse, the request for this 
fiscal year is $189 billion, or $15.75 billion a month. This comes out 
to $500 million a day.
  There is certainly nothing fiscally conservative about the war in 
Iraq. William F. Buckley, Jr., was an inspiring figure to almost every 
conservative Republican. In the current issue of the New Republic, John 
Judis begins an article about Mr. Buckley in this way: ``In the last 
years of his life, William F. Buckley, Jr., who died on February 27 at 
the age of 82, broke with many of his fellow conservatives by 
pronouncing the Iraq war a failure. He even expressed doubt about as to 
whether George W. Bush is really a conservative, and he asked the same 
about neoconservatives.''
  Mr. Buckley wrote in 2004 that if he had known in 2002 what he then 
knew, he would have opposed the war in Iraq.
  More significantly, in June of 2005, he wrote, ``A respect for the 
power of the United States is engendered by our success in engagements 
in which we take part. A point is reached when tenacity conveys not 
steadfastness of purpose, but misapplication of pride.'' Mr. Buckley 
continued, ``It can't reasonably be disputed that if in the year ahead 
the situation in Iraq continues as bad as it has done in the past year, 
we will have suffered more than another 500 soldiers killed. Where 
there had been skepticism about our venture, there will then be 
contempt.''
  The major difference is that instead of just 500 more soldiers 
killed, we have

[[Page 4417]]

had more than 2,000 killed since Mr. Buckley wrote that. Earlier in 
2005 he had written that the time had come to get out.
  There is nothing traditionally conservative about the war in Iraq. It 
is huge deficit spending. It is massive foreign aid. It is placing 
really the entire burden of enforcing U.N. resolutions on our taxpayers 
and our military, when conservatives have traditionally been the 
biggest critics of the U.N. This war has gone against every traditional 
conservative position.
  In addition, our Constitution does not give us the authority to 
govern Iraq, which is what in reality we have been doing. All this 
against an enemy whose military budget was only a little over two-
tenths of one percent of ours, most of which was used by Saddam Hussein 
to build castles and protect himself and his family. Iraq was no threat 
to us whatsoever.
  As the conservative columnist Charley Reese wrote, ``The war in Iraq 
was against a country that was not attacking us, did not have the means 
to attack us, and had never expressed any intention of attacking us. 
And for whatever real reason we attacked Iraq, it was not to save 
America from any danger, imminent or otherwise.''
  Similarly, nationally-syndicated columnist Georgie Ann Guyer wrote a 
few months after the war started, ``Critics of the war against Iraq 
have said since the beginning of the conflict that Americans, still 
strangely complacent about overseas wars being waged by minorities in 
their name, 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 empires across the globe.''
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, we have to choose. Do we keep spending mind-
boggling amounts of money in Iraq, or do we keep our promises to our 
own people? We cannot afford to do both.

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