On the recordMay 25, 2011
I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. Somebody asked me, as an Iraq war veteran, if I had learned any lessons from that war, and I said, Yes, never do it again. But I volunteered for Iraq because I believed that once we were involved in the fight that we had to reasonably finish that job. And my concern about Afghanistan is the fact that we are pretty far down this road. We know that the President's going to reduce the conventional footprint in July of this year. The President has already stated, as Commander in Chief, that he expects Afghan security forces to take operational control by 2014. And let me tell you something that I think we're not thinking about tonight, and that is, as a United States Marine Corps civil affairs officer working in Iraq, part of my job was to convince Iraqis to cooperate and to side with us, knowing that if we left expeditiously before the situation stabilized that they would be killed. And my counterparts, doing the same job in Afghanistan that I did in Iraq, have that challenge of convincing the people, the civilian population, to cooperate and to side with us. And if, in fact, we do an expeditious withdrawal and revert to counterterrorism, there will be many lives lost unnecessarily due to our conduct here tonight.
