Chris Murphy: “This is a religious war that we helped to create in part. It did not exist until the bull sort of rushed into the China…”

“This is a religious war that we helped to create in part. It did not exist until the bull sort of rushed into the China shop, but I think we all find it appalling, some of us, this simplistic terminology that gets rolled out here that we cannot leave until victory has been achieved. Explain to me what victory is because if we have to stay there until we have completely eliminated a civil/ religious conflict, well, it was not raging for the decades before we got there and is one that has almost no historical bounds. That is a difficult victory to ask our brave men and women to achieve, to try to somehow remediate a dispute between Shia and Sunni that cannot be resolved through the military actions of our men and women. Victory is much broader than that. Victory is about going after the fight that really mattered in the first place which is in Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. Victory is about making sure that we secure our borders here at home; that every container that comes into American ports gets checked; that every airport has the proper screening technology to make sure that the ports of entry who brought in the terrorists who harmed this country have all the technology they need to make sure that it never happens again. That's victory in the end. So it's frustrating as a new Member to come down here and to listen to this new terminology get thrown out there that doesn't have any basis in reality.”