Chris Van Hollen: “this is a deceitful resolution not for what it says, but for what it does not say. It is unfortunate that our Republican…”

“this is a deceitful resolution not for what it says, but for what it does not say. It is unfortunate that our Republican colleagues would once again use an issue that unites all Americans--support for our troops--into a naked political stunt that attempts to rewrite history in a divisive manner. The American people should understand that the Republican leadership in this House has prevented any Member of Congress from offering any change to this resolution. The main defect of this resolution is that it tells only a small part of the story about Iraq. In an obvious attempt to change the subject, the resolution contains absolutely no mention of the primary justification President Bush gave for going to war in Iraq--the alleged existence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the resolution attempts to justify the decision for war on humanitarian grounds alone. It cites, among other things, Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iraq's Kurdish citizens in 1988. No one needs to tell me about Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses against the Kurds. In 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, I traveled to the Iraq-Turkish border as a staffer on the U.S. Senate Foreign relations Committee with my colleague Peter Galbraith. At that time, thousands of Kurds were fleeing across the border to seek refuge in Turkey. We interviewed hundreds of those refugees and documented Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish people.”