Lynn C. Woolsey: “I did not see any purple fingers in this Chamber so far this week. We all remember how the Iraqi elections in January…”

“I did not see any purple fingers in this Chamber so far this week. We all remember how the Iraqi elections in January were hailed by the President's supporters as the turning point in Iraq. Well, now there has been another election, a referendum on the Constitution. And what we are hearing from the pro-war forces is that we are still in for a long and deadly occupation in Iraq. It was all going to be so simple, remember? We would march into Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein. The grateful Iraqis would embrace the American presence, and a glorious democracy would spontaneously bloom. The Iraq situation was often compared to Germany and Japan after World War II where we were able to quickly fashion functioning democracy. The New York Times cites Richard Armitage, Bush's former deputy Secretary of State, who notes that those were homogeneous societies, whereas Iraq is a patchwork of rival ethnic groups. Armitage also points out that Germany and Japan, in 1945, were cowed populations, exhausted and deeply shocked by the war. Iraqis, however, were unshocked and unawed. They simply want their country back. So 2\1/2\ years and 2,000 body bags later, we are spinning our wheels and the President who drove us into this ditch in the first place has no plan for getting us out.…”