Candice S. Miller: “I am proud to be yielded time from a true American hero. If at any time while I am in the Congress and I am asked to…”

“I am proud to be yielded time from a true American hero. If at any time while I am in the Congress and I am asked to vote to authorize war, I will ask myself two fundamental questions, two caveats to such action. Number one, what are the United States' vital interests? How are our vital interests being advanced? Number two, what is the mission and how is the mission being defined? I was not in the Congress when the vote to give the President the authority to go to war in Iraq was taken, but as I remember the debate during that vote, it was heavily predicated on the fact that we thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and the mission seemed to be principally defined as finding WMDs. It is clear that he had them at one time because he used them on his own people. However, since we have gone into Iraq, whether it is because they have transited the country or they were destroyed, or whatever the reason, we have not found them. Then the mission was defined as toppling the oppressor, the butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein. And we have done so. We let the Iraqi courts exercise their due diligence in a court of law, and he is dead now. Good riddance, and hanging was too good for him. Then we defined the mission as providing a stable framework that would allow the Iraqis to build a democracy because we can all agree that having a democracy in an Arab country in the Middle East would be optimal for the entire world. They have had their elections.…”