Chris Murphy: “For all that we disagree on here today, we agree on one thing: We all want a stable, independent Iraq. What I can't…”

“For all that we disagree on here today, we agree on one thing: We all want a stable, independent Iraq. What I can't understand is how anyone can still believe that our continued, open-ended military intervention there will lead to a stable nation. In fact, it's doing the opposite. The Iraqi Parliament and ministries are in unprecedented disarray. The President's own report to Congress will say that we haven't met any of our political benchmarks there, and an estimated 13,000 Iraqis are dead since the escalation began. The fact is, as someone much wiser than I said, the Iraqis today are paying wholesale rather than retail for their political decisions. So long as we are the military bodyguard for every major Iraqi political group, so long as we are subsidizing the political decisions of Iraqi political leaders, they will never make the difficult political concessions necessary to create a stable society there. I support this bill, Mr. Speaker, because not another American soldier should die for a strategy that is unfathomably making Iraq less safe and less stable.”