Roscoe Bartlett: “when the original resolution that brought our military to intervention in Iraq came to the Congress, I interpreted it as…”

“when the original resolution that brought our military to intervention in Iraq came to the Congress, I interpreted it as asking the Congress to turn over to the President our military to use anytime he wished, anywhere he wished, against any country he wished, now and forever more. Feeling that this was patently unconstitutional, I was very pleased when the International Relations Committee, chaired at that time by Henry Hyde, revised the resolution and narrowly focused it on Iraq. That resolution had strong encouragement for the President to obtain a U.N. resolution so that when we went into Iraq it would be a part of a U.N. coalition. The U.N. would own that war; we wouldn't own it. When the President did not get the U.N. resolution so strongly encouraged by that original resolution that we voted on, I then voted for the Spratt substitute because I felt that if we were going to send our young men and women into war, that it needed to be with the full support of the American people through their elected officials, and we needed to have that additional debate. That didn't happen. I felt that we went in with unrealistic expectations. There is no country around Iraq that has anything like the government that we would like for them to have. Several of the countries have dictatorships. We call them royal families. Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, but they are dictatorships. Several countries, Jordan and Syria, have kings.”