Christopher Shays: “I have strong concern about the lack of any dollars for economic development in the fiscal year 2008 budget, and that is…”

“I have strong concern about the lack of any dollars for economic development in the fiscal year 2008 budget, and that is what we are talking about. We are not talking about an emergency supplemental, which, by the way, has lots of strings attached, which may mean, ironically, money may not be spent ever. We Republicans and Democrats, want to succeed in Iraq, economically, politically, socially and militarily. We want to succeed. The challenge is I feel like we are pulling the rug out from under the chance to succeed economically and politically. The reason why I say 'politically' is I have been there before, during and after the elections. This money helped educate the Iraqis on how to have elections. They did their elections better than we do our elections in the United States. When I was outside the umbrella of the military, people would say, why have you put my father, my uncle, my brother, my cousin, my son out of work, when we abolished all of their military. So when I hear we spent $18 billion to reconstitute their military, that is not a large number. It is money that had to be used because of what we did. We attacked them. They did not attack us.”