Bill Delahunt: “Well, there are some things that we do know. We know this, that there was a debate on this floor several years ago where…”

“Well, there are some things that we do know. We know this, that there was a debate on this floor several years ago where billions of dollars were appropriated to rebuild Iraq. And those of us on the Democratic side supported that funding, if, if it were going to be provided in the form of a loan because we were concerned about American taxpayers being repaid their money. But the Republican leadership, at the insistence of the White House, said, No way; we are going to give this money to Iraq. So what we have done, and I think there is an irony here, we have provided free of charge, no interest, no money to be returned, we have provided good health care for Iraqis. We have built 110 primary health care centers. We have educated 2,000 health care professionals. We have vaccinated 3.2 million children. And I think we all applaud that and support that. We have rehabilitated 2,700 schools. We have paid the salaries and trained 36,000 teachers in Iraq. We have provided $1 billion for safe drinking water and we have marshland restoration initiatives going on in Iraq. We have built, or we have completed some 3,100 community action programs. We have provided millions for the construction of housing and public buildings for Iraqi citizens. We have rebuilt railways for Iraqis. And you know what else we did? We rehabilitated a canal system. We built a dam, a beautiful dam, a dam that will hopefully serve well the Iraqi people. We built this dam in Mosul.…”