Eliot Engel: “I support our soldiers. I support the war against terror, but I rise in support of this resolution which is Congress'…”

“I support our soldiers. I support the war against terror, but I rise in support of this resolution which is Congress' responsibility. We have to look, Madam Speaker, at the current situation in Iraq as it is, not as we might wish it to be, but as it is. Several years ago, I voted to give the President the authority to go to war in Iraq based on what we were told then. I must say that I regret that vote. I regret it not only because no weapons of mass destruction were found or that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq at that time, even though we were told there was. There was obviously faulty intelligence. We will never quite know if we were misled or if our intelligence was bad. But one thing is very, very clear to me, that this war has been mishandled from the beginning. The President is now talking about a surge of sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq. When we first went into Iraq, I am a big believer if you are going to do something, you do it right or you do not do it at all.”