Chuck Grassley: “following the other two speakers in regard to Iraq, I want to say a couple things. No. 1, anybody who criticizes what…”

“following the other two speakers in regard to Iraq, I want to say a couple things. No. 1, anybody who criticizes what the President is proposing or anybody else is proposing or what has been done cannot get away with criticizing. There has to be another plan. I want to hear plans from people who think that what the President is doing is wrong. What would they do? The second thing is that even the Iraq Study Group, which is very bipartisan, said there should not be a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. In regard to what my distinguished leader of the Republican caucus had to say, that there has not been any attack on Americans in the 5 years since 9/11, those who are criticizing our efforts on the war against terror would be the first ones, if we had an attack this very day, of criticizing the President of the United States: Why wasn't he on top to prevent some sort of attack? And because America has not been attacked, there tends to be a short memory about the fact that we did lose 3,000 Americans. And we know it can happen again. We know that terrorists came into O'Hare with the idea of a dirty bomb in America. We know there were people who were going to blow up bridges in New York City who were caught and the plans known. We individual Senators have been told by the CIA and by the FBI about many instances of where terrorist attacks against Americans have been stopped, and American lives have not been lost because of that.”