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Good afternoon, and welcome to my e-town hall meeting on the War in Iraq.
For me, as a veteran of the Korean War, our continued occupation of Iraq is the most heartbreaking of issues. Placing our young men and women in harm's way is always difficult. But it is devastating to ask them to sacrifice their lives when every reason, every justification for war given by their leaders is proven false.
No issue is more important to me and to our nation. More than 1,750 American troops have been killed and 12,000 wounded, many maimed for life. Though seldom mentioned, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi's have been bombed and strafed to their deaths. The land we swore to liberate is now the world's leading training ground for terrorists, and as proven recently in London, a provocation to attackers abroad. Iraq is the most devastating military catastrophe to our nation since the Vietnam War, and there is no end in sight.
More than one million servicemen and women, many from the Reserves and National Guard, have been deployed, some two, and even three, times, resulting in extreme disruptions in the lives of these citizen soldiers, particularly the loss of civilian jobs and, in many cases, their spouses.
Like the soldiers who signed up with me for Korea, today's volunteers, typically from depressed urban and rural areas, are attracted by the financial and educational benefits available in the military. They are targeted by recruiters and enticed with enlistment bonuses as high as $40,000. Seasoned combat veterans are being offered up to $150,000 to reenlist.
This "economic draft" has hardly any impact on people who are better off, especially when casualties on the ground are running high. Refusing to ask the country to share in the wartime sacrifice, the President has left the entire burden of the conflict to these brave fighting men and women.
Instead, the President and Republican Congress have cut taxes for the wealthy and misled the country about the reasons for the conflict. Official commissions have concluded that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction or nuclear capability. Saddam Hussein was not involved in the Nine-Eleven attack, as the President and his men repeatedly insinuated. The Downing Street memos and revelations by former administration officials bolster the argument that evidence of the Iraqi threat was "fixed" to justify an invasion that the administration was itching for.
Saddam Hussein was a terrible and hateful dictator. But the slaughter and bedlam in Iraq today, the loss of lives, the growing $200 billion price tag for the war, the weakening of our military capability, and the anger aroused at the U.S. around the world--raise the question: was his removal worth it?
For those who wanted war, Hussein, who had brutalized his own people, was a perfect ready-made villain. But in fact, regime change in Baghdad was part of a larger plan--the so-called Project for the New American Century--to secure U.S. domination of the Middle East. The scheme was laid out in a series of documents espousing world-wide projection of U.S. power after the Cold War. Drafted in the late 1990's by some of the same officials occupying high positions in the Bush administration, including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the plan provided the blueprint for Bush's foreign policy, from Iraq to the axis-of-evil.
That is the sad, horrible situation in which we find ourselves. The public has now turned against war, but the President who dragged us there has no plan to end it. The people will have to insist on a solution, and soon. When our grandchildren ask us what we were doing during the war in Iraq, all Americans should be proud to say that they spoke out for what was right, instead of leaving it to someone else.
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