Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I would like to speak about a bipartisan amendment that passed the full Committee on Armed Services, and also had to go through the Foreign Affairs Committee to be approved. It calls on the administration to report to Congress on a comprehensive political and military strategy for our fight against ISIS in the Middle East. Mr. Chairman, we are sending troops back into Iraq today, just 7 or 8 years after we pulled the last troops out. Many of the battles they are fighting have familiar names--Fallujah, Ramadi, and Haditha--battles that we fought and won a long time ago. But we did not have a strategy to ensure the peace. Mr. Clausewitz taught us about 200 years ago that war is an extension of politics. We have to have a political endgame for our fight in Iraq, or we will find ourselves continually going back there again and again. When Iraqi politics fail, a new terrorist group sweeps in; and American troops are left to pick up the mess. If you think about what happened when ISIS swept in from Syria and entered western, then northern Iraq, the Iraqi army wasn't just defeated by ISIS. The Iraqi Army put their weapons down and went home because they had lost faith in the Iraqi Government. We must have a long-term, comprehensive political and military strategy. We owe it to the troops to ensure that their efforts will not be in vain.…”