María Elvira Salazar: “I rise this morning, first of all, to congratulate my colleagues. Senator Alexander has worked tirelessly with us in…”

“I rise this morning, first of all, to congratulate my colleagues. Senator Alexander has worked tirelessly with us in putting together the legislation on the implementation of the Iraq Study Group recommendations. He has been a key leader in trying to pull a group of us together to try to develop a new direction going forward in Iraq. I thank him for his leadership. I also wish to thank both Senator Pryor and Senator Casey for joining us as cosponsors of this legislation. They are people who are trying to search for a solution on the Democratic side, and I very much appreciate their efforts. As for Senator Gregg and Senator Bennett, I appreciate also their statements, their cosponsorship of this legislation, and their desire to come forward to a solution that might unite us in the Senate on a way forward. Let me say at the outset that when we think about what it is we are trying to do with respect to Iraq at this point in time, we have a lot of people who are looking backward and saying there are lots of problems, lots of failures that have happened--from prewar intelligence, to decisions going into Iraq, to the prosecution of the war, et cetera--but the fact is we are there now. The fact is, we have 140,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq today. So the real question for us ought to be, as the Congress, how it is we are going to move forward together.”