Four Years Later (Page 2 of 5)
March 8, 2007By:
And Sergeant 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, TN, said, ‘Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years’ and that after our raids melt insurgents away, ‘two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they’ll come back.’
Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but he had a total military budget only a little over two-tenths of 1 percent of ours, most of which he spent protecting himself and his family and building castles.
He was no threat to us at all. As the conservative columnist Charley Reese has written several times, Iraq did not threaten us with war. They did not attack us, and were not even capable of attacking us.
But even before the war started, Fortune Magazine had an article saying that an American occupation of Iraq would be ‘prolonged and expensive’ and would make U.S. soldiers ‘sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists.’
Now we have had more than 3,000 Americans killed, many thousands more wounded horribly, and have spent $400 billion, and the Pentagon wants $170 billion more. And as one previous speaker said with all the added medical and veterans’ costs, the ultimate cost of this war could reach $2 trillion. There is nothing fiscally conservative about this war.
Most of what we have spent has been purely foreign aid in nature: rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, giving free medical care, training police, giving jobs to several hundred thousand Iraqis and on and on. Our Constitution does not give us the authority to run another country as we have in reality been doing in Iraq.
With a national debt of almost $9 trillion, we cannot afford it. To me our misadventure in Iraq is both unconstitutional and unaffordable. Some have said it was a mistake to start this war but that now that we are there we have to finish the job, and we cannot cut and run. Well, if you find out you are going the wrong way down the interstate, you do not keep going, you get off at the next exit.
We should help other countries during humanitarian crises and have trade and tourism and cultural and educational exchanges. But conservatives have traditionally been the strongest opponents to interventionist foreign policies that create so much resentment for us around the world.
We need to return to the more humble foreign policy President Bush advocated when he campaigned in 2000.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, we need to tell all of these defense contractors that the time for this Iraq gravy train with its obscene profits is over.
It is certainly no criticism of our troops to say that this was a very unnecessary war. It has always been more about money and power and prestige than any real threat to us or to our people. And this war went against every traditional conservative position I have ever known.
It is time, Mr. Speaker, to bring our troops home.”
Tireless Dissent
Local protesters stay the course
By Jessica Guice
The four-year anniversary of the United States occupation in Iraq will be marked March 17 by a local demonstration against the war.
Several area social justice organizations including the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and the Knoxville Green Party will march down Kingston Pike to protest the ongoing war and promote peace.
“The main goal of the fourth-anniversary protest is to rally a large number of East Tennesseans to the demonstration site to show our community that this war is wrong and that we stand against it,” Bob Grimac, a member of the planning committee, says.
