Christopher Shays: “I do not think I am going to take the full 5 minutes, but I have been in this House Chamber almost all day and I hear…”

“I do not think I am going to take the full 5 minutes, but I have been in this House Chamber almost all day and I hear these arguments that we don't have a plan to end the war in Iraq and succeed, and that is just simply not true. It is not true at all. The fact is the plan was wrong in the sense that there was the anticipation that it would happen more easily. But the plan is very clear. It is not simple. It requires that the Iraqis have their own police, their own border patrol, and their own army in order to secure themselves. And since we did not allow for their police to be restood, we had to start from scratch and train them. And it is simply not possible to train a police and border patrol, an army, in 1 year or 2 or 3. There are 26 million Iraqis in a country the size of California. But every day we train more and more of them, so that now they control about 42 percent of the land that includes 42 percent of the population. So as we continue with our plan, as we continue to train more and more Iraqis, we are able to move our troops out and move their troops in. We are able to move their police in and our troops out. We are able to move their border patrol in and our troops out. Now, it is clear that they do not have the logistics, so we will still have to be there later, but not in the numbers that we have now. That is all part of the plan; to train their troops, train their border patrol, train their army, and allow them to take our place.…”