Lynn C. Woolsey: “tonight on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, I cannot help but ask how the victims would have been helped had our National…”

“tonight on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, I cannot help but ask how the victims would have been helped had our National Guard and our military and our Corps of Engineers equipment been made available here at home, not across the world, making trouble instead of fixing troubles here as we responded to Katrina. Tonight I will discuss what is happening in Iraq since we were last in session 5 weeks ago. For the last 4 years, the Bush administration has often justified the war in Iraq by boasting of the new-found freedoms Iraqi women would supposedly enjoy thanks to our military intervention. Many of us remember that staple of the President's stump speech, that the first voter in the Iraqi elections was a 19-year-old woman. In this very Chamber, an Iraqi woman sat with the First Lady during the State of the Union address and flashed the victory sign in celebration of the election that had just taken place. Well, that was then, Mr. Speaker. That same woman, now Iraq's ambassador to Egypt, is one of several Iraqis now publicly criticizing their nation's draft constitution and its treatment of women's rights. ``When we came back from exile,'' she said, ``we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened. We have lost all of the gains that we made over the last 30 years.…”