Elijah Lewis: “Mr. Speaker, I rise with deep concern that this President has chosen to escalate the war in Iraq instead of charting a…”

“Mr. Speaker, I rise with deep concern that this President has chosen to escalate the war in Iraq instead of charting a course towards peace. Today, I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam on April 4, 1967. He said, ``The world now demands a maturity of this Nation that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam,'' we could substitute Iraq, ``and that our actions have been detrimental to the people of that Nation.'' Mr. Speaker, war is messy. War is bloody. It tends not just to hide the truth but to sacrifice the truth. And the truth is that this was a war of choice and not a war of necessity. It was ill-fated from its inception at the highest levels of Government, and persisting in error will not fix a policy that was fundamentally flawed from the very beginning. Thousands of our sons and daughters have been left dead on the battlefield, and tens of thousands are changed forever, wounded physically and spiritually by the brutality of war. Our soldiers are the best men and women in the world, willing to sacrifice all they have at a moment's notice to protect our freedom. They do not deserve to pay with their lives for the errors of this administration. Mr. Speaker, we will never find the answer to the problem we have created in Iraq down the barrel of a gun.”