Ed Markey: “Mr. Speaker, if all we were doing here on the floor today on the House was commending our troops for their valor, there…”

“Mr. Speaker, if all we were doing here on the floor today on the House was commending our troops for their valor, there would be no debate. There would be no disagreement and there would be no opposition. This resolution, however, says something more than that we honor our troops. What this resolution says is that we, the House of Representatives, affirm that 'the United States and the world have been made safer with the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime from power in Iraq.' There is not a Member of this body that mourns the fact that Saddam Hussein and his regime have been removed from power. We all agree that Saddam was a brutal thug. The problem is that America was told before the war that we would be made safer by fighting to find and destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. We now know that those weapons either did not exist, in which case we fought a war based on flawed intelligence, or that there really were weapons of mass destruction, in which case they are now in the hands of Saddam's Baathist henchmen or al Qaeda terrorists or some other party, and that would put us in greater peril than we were before the war started.”