Eliot Engel: “Mr. Speaker, it's time to get our troops out of the middle of an Iraqi civil war. It's time to start bringing our troops…”

“Mr. Speaker, it's time to get our troops out of the middle of an Iraqi civil war. It's time to start bringing our troops home. My friends on the other side of the aisle are essentially saying ``stay the course.'' At what point, I would ask my friends, do we say that the administration's policies in Iraq have failed and it is time to change course? I think that time is now. Even the Bush administration's interim assessment of whether the Iraqis are meeting basic benchmarks shows that they have failed to achieve any level of political and economic success. Here we are in the fifth year of the war, longer than World War II, more than half a trillion dollars and 3,600 American lives lost, and Iraqi politicians seem further apart than ever. Indeed, the evidence that our soldiers are involved in an Iraqi civil war is mounting and a solution seems even further from our grasp. Young American service personnel cannot solve the problem of Iraq, because, ultimately, Iraq is not a military problem anymore; it is a political crisis. And if the Iraqis cannot solve their political problems, we cannot do it for them. Only Iraqi politicians can bring about a solution, and our military personnel should not be dying to hold together the collapsed Iraqi state.”