Political Quotes

“I was hopeful that we could bring both sides of this House together on this bill because our goal is a common goal, to achieve real strength and real security for America. We all honor our troops. We have a difference in opinion, apparently along party lines primarily, about how best to achieve that. Our friends on the other side of the aisle, and the President, apparently, think that an open-ended commitment and putting more troops into a city of 7 million people into a civil war is the way to do it. We believe that there is a smarter way to help the Iraqis step up and to achieve that security. Let me just talk briefly about what this bill does, because it really does three important things. First, it adopts the military's own guidelines for troop readiness, training and equipment. We've been sending our soldiers without the right equipment, without adequate training, and without enough rest between deployments. They're stretched. They've been deployed two times, three times, four times. The length of their deployments have been stretched. And we've adopted the military's own guidelines to say that before troops are sent to Iraq they must be properly equipped, they've got to be trained, they've got to be ready to go. I can't understand why the President would veto a bill that adopts the military's own guidelines for troop readiness.”