Lynn C. Woolsey: “last month, despite my objections and many of my colleagues, Congress passed a bill to continue funding the occupation…”

“last month, despite my objections and many of my colleagues, Congress passed a bill to continue funding the occupation of Iraq. Now everyone is waiting for the next big event in the war, General Petraeus's report on whether the escalation, the surge, is succeeding. This report is due in September. But with our brave American troops and innocent Iraqis continuing to die, we are remiss if we twiddle our thumbs and wait for September. We need to hold this administration accountable for its actions in Iraq, and we need to do it today, not 3 months from now. So I want to go back to January 10 of this year, the night that the President announced his new surge policy in a speech to the Nation, to see if he is delivering on what he promised. On that night, he said, 'America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.' But here we are, Mr. Speaker, 6 months later, and the Iraqi government has made virtually no progress on any of its benchmarks.”