Chris Dodd: “in these 10 minutes I will address the issue of an amendment offered by my colleague from Michigan, and several others…”

“in these 10 minutes I will address the issue of an amendment offered by my colleague from Michigan, and several others including this Senator, which we have worked on over the last week or so. This amendment will be voted on tomorrow, and we have tried here to come up with some ideas that could build bipartisan support for how we go from where we are today in Iraq to a successful conclusion of that conflict. I think all of us recognize that we have ourselves in a mess in Iraq, no matter how one wants to characterize it. I was disappointed that the President used Veterans Day last week as an opportunity to attack those who have agreed with him at certain points and disagreed with him at others. It seems to me that what we need from the administration is far more clarity, a greater sense of vision, some concrete ideas on how we intend to conclude our involvement in Iraq, and a strategy for increasing the likelihood that the Iraqi people can build a stable government. As we know, from the very beginning, the rationale for going to war in Iraq was filled with misrepresentations, deceits, and the falsification of many facts. There was no Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger. There were no aluminum tubes being used to construct nuclear centrifuges. There were no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. We now know that allegations linking Iraqi officials to al-Qaida were untrue.…”