Lynn C. Woolsey: “as thousands of our brave American soldiers continue to fight and die and receive serious wounds halfway around the…”

“as thousands of our brave American soldiers continue to fight and die and receive serious wounds halfway around the world, I want to speak about two Iraqs that are presented to the American people. There is the Iraq that President Bush and his administration want people to see, the one that is supposedly one small step away from becoming a peaceful democracy. And then there is the real Iraq, the quagmire halfway around the world that the rest of us know. In President Bush's Iraq, the war was never a mistake, never a failure, and never something to question, much less regret. The same war, which as of today has caused the deaths of 1,027 American soldiers and seriously wounded at least seven times that many, not to mention the thousands of Iraqi civilians that have been killed, President Bush says he would have gone to war in Iraq even if had he known 2 years ago what he knows now. That means he would have gone to war knowing that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program. He would have gone to war knowing that Saddam Hussein never harbored al Qaeda terrorists, and he would have gone to war knowing that thousands of our young soldiers would be killed. Somehow, and I do not know how, somehow President Bush fails to recognize the death, destruction, and deprivation that his war has caused. The rest of us see a different Iraq than President Bush.”