Political Quotes

“I will vote today for a resolution that would finally draw the war in Iraq to a close, and that would for the first time put conditions of self-determination on the Iraqi government that has benefited from our country's generosity. While I was not yet in Congress at the time of the original authorization debate in 2002, I have concluded that the authorization decision was wrong and that too many American lives have been sacrificed for the dubious cause of advancing the interests of one side of an Iraqi civil war over the other. It is also my belief that Congress has the unmistakable authority to put time limits on the commitment of American forces and to attach strings to the manner in which military funds are spent: Congress has used this power before in Lebanon, Vietnam, and Somalia, and most recently, during the second term of the Clinton Administration, when Republican congressional majorities imposed restrictions on the use of ground forces and on the duration of the force commitment made during the Balkan conflict. Some of my colleagues who share my opposition to the war have suggested that this resolution has the defect of not going far enough in that it does not require an immediate withdrawal of American forces. I disagree: for the sake of regional stability, any withdrawal should be more orderly and more measured than the haphazard way American forces were deployed in the first place.”