[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 828-829]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Thompson of Pennsylvania). The Chair 
recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, today I've heard Ms. Woolsey and Mr. 
McClintock talk about the war in Afghanistan, and it kind of reminds me 
this morning about 8 o'clock I did a call-in show down in my district, 
Jacksonville, North Carolina, the home of Camp Lejeune Marine base.
  The topic of the call-in show was proposed budget cuts to our 
military. The emcee of the show said to me: I'm coming around to your 
thinking. It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are spending $10 
billion a month in Afghanistan. Let's say that we start bringing them 
home this year in 2012, at least start the process of bringing them 
home. The host said: I guess if we did that, we would save at least 
probably $240 billion in a 2-year period of time. If they are proposing 
cuts of $490 billion in next year's budget for the Department of 
Defense and we save $240 billion, then we are almost cutting in half 
what we are going to require of the military. I said, You're exactly 
right.
  Not only did I hear this from a talk-show host, but I hear it 
throughout the eastern part of the State that I have the privilege to 
represent.
  I hope that Mr. Panetta, who I have a lot of respect for, will keep 
to that 2013 timeframe. I share with Ms. Woolsey that I don't trust it, 
and it has nothing to do with the person. I want to make that clear. He 
is an honorable man, but there are too many factors that are planned 
into this issue of staying in Afghanistan. There are too many people 
that sadly are making money on war. I won't get into that because I 
don't have enough time.
  As the host said to me today, if we would just spend money on the 
defense of America instead of building empires around the world, we 
probably would save a lot of money and we would have a strong defense, 
which we need.
  That brings me to this poster. I have a book called ``The Three 
Trillion Dollar War'' that was written by a Nobel Prize winner in 
economics named Dr. Joe Stiglitz. His coauthor Linda Bilmes is an 
economics professor at Harvard. They testified a year ago before the 
Veterans Health Committee. I do not serve on that committee, but Mr. 
Filner at the time was chairman. Now Mr. Miller is chairman because 
Republicans are in the majority.
  As they finished their discussion, they were saying that if they 
wrote the book today--this was written 5 years ago--the title would go 
from the ``The Three Trillion Dollar War'' to ``The Five Trillion 
Dollar War.'' That is what it is going to cost to take care of our 
young men and women.
  The poster to my left is a young Army sergeant, who has lost both 
legs and an arm, with his wife going into a new apartment. I have seen 
four young men at Walter Reed that have no parts below their waist and 
they are living. God bless them, and I hope they have a good life. I 
don't know. I cannot make that judgment. I know one thing: Uncle Sam, 
you're going to have to spend a lot of money to take care of those 
young men because they earned it. They earned it because of our failed 
policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  It is my hope that sometime this spring, in a bipartisan way, we will 
have an amendment on the floor that the House will pass and it will 
say: you need to start bringing our troops home beginning the end of 
2012 because the process will take a long time.
  In closing, as I always do, I have signed over 10,000 letters to 
families who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan and Iraq because I was 
not strong enough to vote my conscience on the request by the Bush 
administration to go into Iraq. I have asked God to forgive me by 
signing these letters, and I think He has forgiven me.
  God, please continue to bless our men and women in uniform. God, 
continue to bless the families of our men and women in uniform. God, in 
Your loving arms hold the families who have given a child dying for 
freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq. God, please bless the House and 
Senate, that we will do what is right in Your eyes for this country. 
God, please continue to bless the leader of our country. Let him know 
that he is doing what is right in Your eyes. Three times I ask God, 
please, God, please, God, please continue to bless America.

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