Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, well, I have some bad news. After this 3 miles is done, there is about another 4,000 miles unfortunately that remains at risk. I would just ask Members to consider what we just did on this floor. We just extended the time a little bit to get this debate right, and I appreciate the gentleman's courtesy in doing that. Do we know why Americans have accepted the Endangered Species Act? Because they recognize you can take just a bit more time and do it right. On October 26, when they have this meeting to get this resolved, we hope that is going to happen. We have built bridges, we have built highways, we built the most powerful military machine in world history with the Endangered Species Act. This is not endangering us. We should not go back to the days of ignoring this problem. Defeat this amendment.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further , I just wanted to make one point in response to the statement of our friend the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham). One of the most telling things in the debate of the two presidential candidates last night was where the President said that we had to attack Iraq because the enemy attacked us, and his opponent challenged that and said, ``Well, no, Osama bin Laden attacked us, not Iraq.'' The President said, ``Of course, I know Osama bin Laden attacked us.'' But the problem is this administration and the Vice President has been trying to create a misimpression from day one to tie Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11. I want to respond to the assertion of the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) to the contrary, to read from the Commission report that says, and the language they used was as categoric as you can get, there is ``no credible evidence,'' no credible evidence, ``of a link between Iraq and the al Qaeda attacks against the United States.'' They did not say that the evidence was suspect, they did not say the evidence is de minimis, they did not say the evidence is debatable. They said there is no, zero, zilch, nada, credible evidence of a connection that this Vice President for the last 2 years has been telling about, trying to create the impression that exists. He needs to get up in that debate tomorrow, and the first thing he needs to say is, ``You know what? We were wrong. Saddam Hussein for all his faults and his terrible heinous, terrible things he did to Iraqis, Iraq did not attack us on 9/11.'' He owes that statement to Americans. I will be surprised if we hear it, but I think it would be healthy if we did.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, let me suggest why that is important. It is not a matter of culpability. That is not the issue. But the fact of the matter is if we are going to have a success, we have to have people in the administration, when you have a failed policy, who are willing to evaluate it and change and decide they had said some things that were not true and admit it and change. But this administration refuses to accept failure. We continue to have simply more of the same, and they want to say, well, we are at least certain, we are at least sure, we are at least resolute. The best description I had of that is resolution is a good thing, certainty is a good thing, but it is not a good thing to have a firm grip on the wheel if the car is heading over the cliff, and this administration refuses repeatedly to recognize their errors so they can change their policy. I have a third question the Vice President owes Americans an answer to. Why did the Vice President on March 16, 2003, say, and this is a long quote, but I will get to the summation, ``And we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' Why did this Vice President want to create this massive cloud of fear in America about reconstituted nuclear weapons, when even the intelligence reports at that time, and they are now in the public domain, did not support that conclusion? I hate to think it was just to sort of support their predetermined effort to start a war, but it is very difficult to reach a different conclusion, when no one else was saying that except the Vice President. And why, if we now find that is inaccurate, why does the Vice President not just come clean and be candid with the American people, so that we can show some willingness to start a new policy in Iraq? But they keep clinging to these falsehoods, clinging to these misimpressions, clinging to this false information that they have spewed out across America. And they have been successful in fooling some Americans about the connection of Saddam with al Qaeda. Something like 40 percent of Americans believe that, because they want to believe their Vice President. We all want to believe our Vice President, but the fact of the matter is, as long as they cling to this, it will make it more difficult to be a successful policy in Iraq.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I think it is abundantly clear that the Vice President has some explaining to do to the American people about what happened and what his participation was in starting a war based on false information. And there are two people I have met in the last 24 hours who I think are deserving of an explanation. One was a mother whose son-in-law fortunately just got back from serving proudly in the Army in Iraq, and she told me she is just incredibly happy that her son-in-law came back healthy to the arms of his family and his wife, but she is not happy that others have not and that the Federal Government has not been candid about what happened in Iraq that got us into this war with such devastating consequences. That mother-in-law is entitled to an explanation from the Vice President of the United States about why he made repeated statements that are inaccurate that started a war that has cost over 1,000 American lives. Today, on the plane flying out here from Seattle, which I go home every weekend to Seattle, this morning sitting next to me was a major heading for Iraq to do an inspection tour. And I just tell my colleague that I feel so strongly that he and all of the 100,000-plus troops in Iraq deserve an explanation from their Federal Government of what happened here, and there are three questions I would like the Vice President to answer. Question number one, why on September 14, 2003, did the Vice President say this: ``If we're successful in Iraq, then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault for many years but most especially on 9/11''? Vice President Cheney went to the American people and told them that Iraq was responsible for the attack on 9/11, and he wanted the Americans to believe that. And there was no evidence to that then, as we have seen the intelligence. There was no evidence at the time we took the vote, and there is no evidence today that that statement was true. And a war was started based on a statement that this Vice President made to Americans. They deserve an explanation why this Vice President sold a bill of goods to the American people, specifically saying that the folks had us under assault but most especially 9/11? And we know exactly what he was trying to do, which was create an impression that we were going to attack the people who attacked us, which we did in Afghanistan, and that is why we supported it with a huge consensus in this body. The people who attacked us were based in Afghanistan. But why did this Vice President then gild the lilly and stretch the evidence and try to create this misimpression? We deserve an answer to that question in this debate tomorrow night. Second question for the Vice President: Why on August 26, 2002, did the Vice President say, ``simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction''? We know now, and many of us knew then from reading the intelligence, that there was massive doubt about this issue, that the Vice President again gilded the lilly, tried to say there was no doubt about this issue, and that simply was not an accurate statement, and a war occurred as a result. And the people serving then and our sons and daughters who might have to serve, goodness knows how many years if this administration continues in authority in Iraq, they deserve an answer why the Vice President said that when it was false.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I heard a very disturbing report today. While we are engaging in a very important and legitimate debate about our strategy in Iraq, one thing for sure we ought to be united on, and that is Americans ought to have access to the truth and not to be the subject of spin by their own government and should not have their own government suppressing the truth about Iraq. Things are difficult enough about Iraq without the Federal Government suppressing the truth about Iraq. Unfortunately, that appears to be what is going on in this administration. Today in the Washington Post an article related that the USAID ordered the restriction of preventing distribution of reports by the contractor Kroll Security International which had previously shown that the number of daily attacks by insurgents in Iraq had increased significantly. In response to the news that these insurgent attacks are increasing, about 5 weeks before this election, this administration decided apparently to suppress that information and the agency ordered that this information no longer be disseminated to the American public. This is information generated with U.S. American taxpayer dollars that this administration, 5 weeks before the election, does not want the American people to hear about. The article in The Washington Post says: ``The Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence.'' In response to that bad news, the agency official at USAID sent an e-mail to congressional aides stating, ``This is the last Kroll report to come in. After The Washington Post story, they shut it down in order to regroup. I'll let you know when it restarts.'' There is no excuse for this administration shielding information about Iraq and the fact that we have great difficulties there from the American people. We have a legitimate right to know this information. We have an important debate in our national body politic to figure out the right strategy in Iraq, and it is wrong to suppress this information. We cannot decide the right decision in Iraq by looking through rose- colored glasses anymore. Hope is not a strategy. Simply saying we are going to have the same old, same old in Iraq and shield and hide the ball from the American people just will not cut it. Tonight it would be nice if the administration and the President admitted that we have some difficulties in Iraq and admitted we need to make some changes in strategy or we are going to have deep trouble. But this is not the only symptom of an administration that is refusing to face reality in Iraq. In that same story in The Washington Post, I read that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office is now sponsoring a sort of happy talk, good news tour through our bases and that we are using taxpayers' money to bring Iraqis to spread the good news of Iraq to our military bases here in this country. The memo disclosing this tour paid for by taxpayer dollars says it is ``designed to be uplifting accounts with good news messages.'' Rumsfeld's office, which will pay for the tour, recommends that the installations seek local news coverage, noting that ``these events and presentations are positive public relations opportunities.'' We do not need a public relations campaign. We need a campaign for success in bringing our troops home in Iraq. We are not getting that from this administration. The memo went on to suggest that the commanders at each base ``are in the best position on how to market this voluntary attendance program effectively.'' We do not need a marketing campaign. We need an honest discussion of how to get a strategy to bring our troops home after success. But that is not what we are getting from this administration. Instead of recognizing and coming clean with the American people about their failures to find weapons of mass destruction, their failures to tell the accurate situation about connections with al Qaeda, their failures to have enough troops on the ground, their failures to have enough body armor, they have given us a marketing technique protocol paid for with taxpayer dollars. It is wrong. We need a strategy, not a marketing campaign.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, there are two very significant things which happened today regarding global warming. The first is that the U.S. Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, announced that they had completed the largest computer simulation of what will happen in global warming and how it will affect hurricanes. They concluded that the seas being warmed by rising atmospheric concentration of gases will result in a typical hurricane intensity increasing about an extra half step on the five- step scale. This is not good news, Mr. Speaker, particularly since our Nation, under this administration, is not doing anything significant to deal with global warming. In contrast, interestingly, today, Russia and their parliament indicated that it is likely they will join the Kyoto Protocol to deal with global warming. This is a difficulty for our businesses if this becomes a worldwide regime and we are not part of the international effort. We hope tonight there will be some discussion of this. And if not, one way or another, this November, Americans will vote for a president who will decide to take some action on global warming.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, have my colleagues ever noticed how reverential, how worshipful people are when they go over to the archives and they file in front of the Constitution? Have my colleagues seen what is in their eyes? Absolute worship of the U.S. Constitution. I think there is one reason for that, because they understand the Constitution does not belong just to us; it belongs to the ages. They realize for that reason they want us to be cautious and conservative about locking into the Constitution something for a fluid America. There are some lessons in history that show that is the right attitude. In 1912, Jack Johnson, an African American heavyweight boxing champion, had the temerity to marry a white woman. That offended the vast majority of Americans at the time. And as a result, a Congressman came down to this Chamber, and he introduced a constitutional amendment to make it illegal for States to allow an African American to marry a white person. And Congressman Seaborn Anderson Roddenbery stood where I am standing and said in 1912: ``Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of a pure Saxon government.'' Now that statement seems a bit unbelievable in 2004, but it was the majority opinion in 1912. Now, I am not suggesting that these issues are equivalent, but I am suggesting that we ought to be real slow before we put discrimination to prevent States to make their own decisions about employment and retirement benefits for themselves into the Constitution. Where would this country have been if majority sentiment had prevailed in 1912 and discrimination had been put permanently in the United States Constitution? But there is a more commonsense reason for rejecting this amendment. Anybody who is thinking about voting for this amendment, I would ask you to come down to the well and look at the five words that are carved on the rostrum of the House of Representatives. There are five words that are carved here, and of all the words that we could have chosen to carve on to the rostrum, do my colleagues know what those five words are? Union, liberty, peace, justice, and the fifth one may surprise some of my colleagues. The fifth value is tolerance. Tolerance is the value that was selected to put on here, and tolerance is as American as apple pie. Tolerance is carved into the rostrum of the U.S. House of Representatives and intolerance should not be carved into the U.S. Constitution. Reject this injury to the Constitution. Reject this amendment.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, we will note that we will continue our discussion about Iraq in the weeks to come. We owe this obligation to our men and women serving proudly tonight. We will not be intimidated into stopping to ask these hard questions of the Federal Government. Americans deserve these questions to be asked, and they will be answered.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, the gentleman brings up the issue of our relationship with these contractors. Let me make a third suggestion, and that is that this administration stop pouring money into Halliburton and start getting it to Iraqis so they can get to work rebuilding their own country. There is no reason for us to be giving our taxpayer dollars to Halliburton so they can hire Filipinos and take, I don't know what the percentage is, but to skim profits off the top in this cost-plus kind of contract, no-bid contracts. That is wrong to taxpayers. But, more importantly, it is wrong in our effort to stop the insurgency in Iraq. You have got thousands of idle young men in Iraq with no job, and yet we are paying our taxpayer money to hire Filipinos in Iraq? This makes no sense whatsoever. Whatever relationship the vice president had with Halliburton, it should not be driving bad decision making when it comes to contracting in Iraq. That has got to stop. That is my third suggestion. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) for a suggestion.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, let me add insult to injury. The President has essentially wanted to fight this war on the cheap and not pay for it, the first time in American history where a President has done massive tax cuts in the middle of a war. And as a result of that, what this President has done has put the real cost of this war and the reconstruction of Iraq not on our generation. It is all deficit spending. The $200 billion-plus is all deficit spending because the President has not had the gumption to go to the American people and ask them to pay for this war. Winston Churchill said, ``All I have to offer you is blood, sweat, toil, and tears.'' This President has not been willing to level with the American people to really say, I am asking them to buck up for the cost of this. And when one is not willing to be candid with the American people in that regard, how can we continue to maintain support for this operation? This deficit spending is wrong. I just want to summarize before we go to the future and use our remaining time talking about where we go in the future. I just want to summarize our discussion. We have asked ten questions tonight, the ten critical questions about this President's performance in Iraq, was he right or wrong? Here is the summary of the answers: He was wrong on WMD. He was wrong about al Qaeda's links. He was wrong about our being greeted as liberators with rose petals. He was wrong about the number of troops that we would need to maintain security in Iraq, despite the advice of his own generals. He was wrong about not saying that we needed body armor for everyone. He was wrong about saying, as soon as mission is accomplished and there is a new government, things would get better. He was wrong about saying it is better to give deals to his friends at Halliburton than it is to Iraqis working to get this work done. He was wrong about saying there would be a decrease in violence. He was wrong about saying that the majority of the people essentially are outside of Iraq. He was wrong about not providing enough trainers early enough to get an army of Iraqis up to face this threat. And, lastly, he was wrong in not facing the real cost of this operation and wrong in making this all deficit spending. Those are ten very serious failures of leadership by this American President. And these are not peripheral issues. And it shows a pattern. And one thing the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) said and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) both, these are difficult issues. We can all make mistakes. But this is a pattern of repeated failure that has now resulted in a terrible situation where things are getting worse rather than better in Iraq. There has been one person in the administration who has said that, and that is the Secretary of State. Exactly one person in the administration has recognized how dire this situation is. And now the American people are going to be called to ask, was this good enough performance in difficult situations? And that is a decision they will make in November. I hope we can turn our discussion for our remaining time now about our suggestions about where we go from here, what we suggest we need to do because we are in this pickle together. Democrats and Republicans, we are all in the lifeboat together. Let me just make one quick suggestion I would make. I believe it is important for the American President to make very clear to the Iraqi people that we are not going to be in Iraq forever. We are not going to be a permanent presence in Iraq. Unfortunately, he is sending different messages and building 14 permanent military bases in Iraq that obviously are going to be there for decades, the way they are under construction. We need Iraqis to realize their destiny is in their hands, that they cannot rely on us. They need to get on their own two feet and shoulder these burdens. These groups we are putting in the army have to decide they might have to engage for their own benefit, they cannot rely on us as a crutch forever. We need to make that statement very clear to the Iraqis to encourage them to take responsibility for their own destiny. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I have heard it said that he is really ``Osama been forgotten,'' and unfortunately that has some truth to it. Let me ask my tenth question about whether the President has been right or wrong on these critical issues. Was the President right or wrong when he told us that the American taxpayer would not have to pay for this effort because the Iraqi oil fields would be producing enough to essentially pay for this operation in the reconstruction of Iraq? Something Mr. Wolfowitz told I think every single Member, 435 Members of Congress, looked us in the eye and said not to worry, the Iraqi oil revenues will pay for this; the American taxpayers are not going to have to sacrifice a dime for this operation. Madam Speaker, I yield to Mr. Delahunt to answer that question, was the President right or wrong in that regard?

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I really think that is a perceptive comment, what he said, which I agree with, that while Iraq may not have presented a terrorist threat before this invasion, it does now. And I think that is a very perceptive thing to say and I agree.

Mr. INSLEE. I think the ninth question dovetails with what you are saying so eloquently that all of us can make mistakes. It is human. And these are difficult situations, obviously. But my ninth question, I think, goes to an issue that exposes why we are in such a difficult situation in Iraq. The ninth question is, Is the President right or wrong when he tells us, or leads us to believe that most of this violence against Americans in Iraq are outside forces of Iraq, sort of these outside terrorists who are coming into Iraq to commit this horrendous violence against us? The reason he has said this, I think, is he wants to believe that because he does not want to believe that the Iraqis themselves do not view us as liberators, because he always believed that apparently we would be greeted as liberators. He apparently cannot get out of that mind-set that some Iraqis view us as occupiers. So was the President right or wrong when he says that most of the violence against Americans is caused by people from outside of Iraq? The President is wrong. The reason I know that is they finally did an evaluation of the people in custody in our prisons, Abu Ghraib where we obviously had a lack of leadership as far up as the Secretary of Defense; but what they found was of all the people we had in custody, less than 2 percent were from outside of Iraq. Less than one out of 50 of these people that we had in custody were from outside Iraq. What does that tell you? That is bad news for us, because what it means is that 49 out of 50 of those people are Iraqis who are fighting, who are domestic and who live there. That means that the President's working assumption from day one that we would be seen as liberators simply is not the case, and he refuses to recognize that reality.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, the sixth question: Was the President right or wrong when he told Americans that, after the mission was accomplished and the President made his grandiose landing on the aircraft carrier in full regalia with the wonderful flight suit and helmet on, and stood in front of a banner that said ``Mission Accomplished'' and led Americans to believe it was going to be a decreased violent situation, was he right or wrong? And let me suggest that it was 800 lost American heroes ago. He was wrong sadly. But the problem with this is this is a repeated circumstance with this administration. The administration said that after the Iraqi Army collapsed, things would get better. They got worse. The President said that when we had the turnover, the purported turnover to a provisional Iraqi government, things would get better. They have gotten worse. We are having an accelerated loss of men and women since the turnover. The President says after the election, things will get better. The President simply has been wrong time and time again with his rose- colored glasses and not facing the truth of the situation in Iraq. The seventh question: Was the President right or wrong when he decided that the way he was going to do the reconstruction of Iraq was not to hire Iraqis, not to hire Iraqi personnel to do the work, not to hire poor Iraqis which he might get off the street and reduce unemployment, but instead give the contracts to his friends at Halliburton so Halliburton could hire people from the Philippines with our taxpayer money? He was wrong in giving the money to Halliburton and the reason he was wrong is we know that every employed Iraqi is one less potential recruit for the insurgency, and we have been wasting billions of American taxpayer dollars, not using it effectively in the reconstruction of Iraq. Madam Speaker, my final question, my eighth question is: Was the President right or wrong in saying now that we have done enough, at a proper rate of training the new Iraqi security force, was he right or wrong? I am going to give Members one tidbit that I read today. Today, a year and a half after the invasion, this administration still has less than 40 percent of the infrastructure for the military necessary to train the Iraqi Army. So here we are with our GIs in harm's way and a year and a half later this administration has less than half of the people they need to do the training of the Iraqi Army, and they expect to have an election in 3 months. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, my fifth question: Was the President right or wrong when he said or the assumption was made that not all of our troops needed body armor and we did not need heavy armor in the streets of Baghdad because only the people in the front lines would be targets? He was wrong. Anyone who knows anything about insurgency should have reached that conclusion. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) has done yeomen's service in fighting this administration to get that body armor to our people.

Mr. INSLEE. Let us go to question number three: Was the President right or wrong when he led the American people to believe that we would be welcomed as liberators, with rose petals aplenty, with joy in the streets for months welcoming us, which would reduce the need for American troops? Was he right or wrong? He was wrong, unfortunately. And he was wrong not just in hindsight but he was wrong in not listening to his own intelligence reports that we now know that he had. A report came out last week about the intelligence report he had at that time that predicted because of the ethnic tensions in Iraq that we would be seen as occupiers from day one. He was wrong. Question number four: Was the President right or wrong in rejecting the advice from his own military personnel that we would need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq to provide security immediately after the collapse of the Iraqi Army or else loitering would run crazy and anarchy would run through the streets? Was he right or wrong when he sent out his hit men to defame General Shinseki, to say that General Shinseki did not know what he was talking about when he said we would need at least 300,000 or 400,000 troops to do this job?

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, this Congress needs to ask an additional question. Do we have the right people making the decisions that have exposed our sons and daughters to this life-and-death situation? It is certainly appropriate to ask at least ten hard questions in that regard to see whether this administration has been right or wrong in Iraq. So I will ask quickly ten questions and posit an answer, and they all are very simple. Was the President right or wrong on various issues in Iraq? I will ask these ten questions, and then I have pretty clear answers that should be pretty obvious to anyone. Question number one: Was the President right or wrong when he started a war under the statement clearly made to the American people that there is no doubt, no doubt, he said, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Was he right or was he wrong on this life-or-death question? The fact simply is, he was wrong. He was wrong not only in hindsight, which is easy, but in foresight, because we now have seen the intelligence, and we know there was lots of doubt. This President says there was no doubt, and he was wrong. Then when he made that statement, and over 1,000 Americans have died as a result of that misstatement. The President was not right. He was wrong. Question number two: Was the President right or wrong when he led Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to the attack on America on September 11? Was he right or wrong when he led Members to believe that?

Mr. INSLEE. Reclaiming my time, Madam Speaker, I want the gentleman to know that it is not only our sort of hard military assets, when we think of soldiers and tanks and ships that have been pulled away from the real threats that we face, it is our intelligence services. Our intelligence services were pulled off of hunting Osama bin Laden to deal with Iraq. They actually took the Predator aircraft that was searching for Osama bin Laden up in Afghanistan and moved it to Iraq. And we still have not found Osama bin Laden. We actually diverted intelligence sources that could have been used to find out what Iran is actually doing with their nuclear program, a real threat to this country, a real statement that Iran wants to develop fissionable material. But we moved it to Iraq. Instead of having intelligence services in North Korea to find out what they are really doing, it is in Iraq. Our intelligence services have been malpositioned as a result of this. Before we go on into a lot of detail, I would like to suggest ten questions that we in Congress have a duty to ask the administration, and I think the American people have a duty to ask the President of the United States. I think, during the next 5 weeks, this is a very important time to ask these ten questions, and I will posit these ten questions and maybe even hazard an answer about the President's performance in Iraq. The President's performance is a life or death matter, and we have to ask whether the President's performance has been up to snuff or whether it has been something below expectations and whether it has cut the mustard.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I just want to add to the point backup for what you are saying. I read in the last 3 days two very disturbing things. Number one, for the first time in 15 years, the National Guard has fallen over 5,000 people short in their recruiting, for obvious reasons, that we see the stretch that has resulted in a silent draft already of pulling people back repeatedly, and 50-year-old people who have gone to Iraq once for a year, come back for several months, now have to go back again, leaving their families and careers. Of course, the National Guard is going to fall short. We already have a silent draft because now the Army's pulling people back who served 4- and 5-year terms already, who never understood that they could realistically thought they would be pulled back, and it is disturbing to show you how bad this is. I think something like 25 percent of those people have not appeared for duty. They are so upset about what has happened. This is a major problem in our military because the President planned so poorly about what was going to be involved in Iraq.

Mr. INSLEE. Madam Speaker, I come to the floor tonight and will be joined shortly by my colleagues who have been consistent in manning our stations in the Iraq Watch. Now, for several months, my colleagues and I in the Iraq Watch have been coming to the floor of the House of Representatives to discuss our policy in Iraq and to ask if we are on the right course in Iraq. I am reminded why we have been doing that when just before I came to the floor in the cloakroom, watching the TV, I saw a tribute to another fallen American hero in Iraq. That is all too regular an occurrence recently and reminds us why we come here for the Iraq Watch, because we are dedicated to the proposition that the men and women who fall in Iraq should not be shuttled off to page 12 and 14 and forgotten by Americans and have this trial and tribulation in Iraq somehow become sort of a back-burner issue. We who have participated in the Iraq Watch are committed to the proposition that we need to be diligent in asking hard questions of our government as to whether or not our government is doing the right thing or making mistakes in Iraq. This is important to do for a variety of reasons. The Vice President of the United States has suggested that only Members of Congress should just act as good little Members of Congress and be silent about Iraq and simply defer to the administration. The Vice President has suggested, at least implicitly, that whatever the administration is doing must be right and that all good Americans must fall in line and be silent about the Iraq policy and to do otherwise would give somehow aid and comfort to the enemy. Let me suggest that that would be the least patriotic thing for Americans to do, from the U.S. Congress all the way down to the voting booth on November 2, because the people in Iraq serving tonight deserve the right American policy. That is only going to happen if Americans stand up on their hind legs and speak their minds about what we should be doing in Iraq. So we are doing that, and representing my 600,000 constituents, and I know I will not be alone in expressing some sentiments tonight, to suggest that this administration has not made the right decisions in Iraq and, in fact, has repeatedly made the wrong decisions in Iraq that have now been responsible for us being in this terrible situation that we are now in tonight in Iraq. Before I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland), I would suggest in our discussion tonight there will be two parts of our discussion. One, we will ask whether or not this administration has been right or wrong on a variety of decision-making in Iraq. That is the first part of our discussion. The second part of our discussion is what should we do now to get a fresh approach in Iraq to increase our chance of success in bringing our troops home in a reasonable fashion. Those are both important parts of our discussion. I have some questions that I would like to pose to the administration, but before I do so, I would like to yield to my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland), who has been a very stalwart member of the Iraq Watch to start our discussion this evening.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, yes, we are one Nation under God, and we are one Nation under the Constitution, until today. I voted some time ago to keep the words ``under God'' in the Pledge, and I will vote today to keep the Supreme Court in its constitutional business of enforcing the Bill of Rights. The Republican Party today intends to treat the Bill of Rights the way the Soviet Union operated during their long tyranny. Because in the Soviet Union, one could go next to Lenin's grave and see their beautiful bill of rights nicely illuminated, looked fine. But the Soviet Union lacked one thing: they stripped their courts of the ability to enforce their own bill of rights. And today the Republican Party intends to do the same thing in America. In America we should not abandon what we learned as kids in school, that checks and balances are necessary to our fundamental liberties. And sometimes the Supreme Court gets it wrong, but heaven help the day that one trusts liberty to Congress, where the day that Congress is in session, their life and liberty is in danger. We have got to depend on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, there is another aspect of this $87 billion that we need to point out, of whose money the President wanted to spend. He wants to spend our grandchildren's money. Because every single one of those $87 billion he committed to Iraq, which had to be spent in some sense, but instead of us paying for it and dealing with it with taxes, he wanted, and he consciously decided to make it all deficit spending. We had a proposal to pay for it so that our grandchildren would not have that deficit spending obligation on them. Now, why is this? I think this is symptomatic of why we need a new administration with a fresh policy. Winston Churchill said, all I have to offer you is blood, sweat, toil, and tears. This President said, you can fight this battle on the cheap. It will be sugar candy, roses, and champaign corks all the way. And as a result of that, we got $87 billion deficit spending, 1,000 dead, and a silent draft that is going on now drafting our people to serve longer times than they really did sign up for when they went into the military. That is why everybody in this chamber is hearing stories about 50-year old people who left their career for a year, came back, now have to go back for another year, and goodness knows how many years, because they have not committed the troops that are necessary to get this job done like General Shinseki told them. This President wanted to fight this war on the cheap. It has cost us in lives, it has cost us in deficit spending, and we need a new policy. We do not say this just to be critical; we say this to get a new policy in Iraq. Unless we get that, we are heading into deep, deep trouble.