Thomas Mott Osborne: “I hadn't realized the juxtaposition that the speakers would have this evening. But my remarks, I think, dovetail…”

“I hadn't realized the juxtaposition that the speakers would have this evening. But my remarks, I think, dovetail somewhat with the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) in regard to addressing the issue of withdrawing from Iraq and exit strategy and so on. We hear a lot of debate about that. And I am not here to debate the merits of the war in the Middle East. I am not here to talk about the intelligence leading up to the war, but I would like to address the current reality of the situation, we are there. We made sacrifices. We have lost roughly 1,700 soldiers. We have spent billions of dollars. And yet as I traveled to the Middle East, I have been to Iraq three times, I have been to Afghanistan once, Kuwait once, I have been amazed at our soldiers' morale. And they often tell me this, they say there are two wars that we are fighting over here, there is the war that we see on CNN, the bombings, the beheadings, and then there is the war that we are actually experiencing. And I wondered if you please go home and tell the American people what we are seeing and what we feel about the situation. So as far as Afghanistan is concerned, I met with a Colonel this morning who just returned from Afghanistan. We realize we have disrupted the terrorist training camps, their funding for terrorists have been disrupted, the Taliban has been removed, they have a representative government, constitution, and a great leader in Karzai. So we have made considerable progress.…”