Louise Slaughter: “we meet on what is the fourth day of the fifth year of the war in Iraq. It is a war that has gone on longer than the war…”

“we meet on what is the fourth day of the fifth year of the war in Iraq. It is a war that has gone on longer than the war in Korea. America has been fighting longer in Iraq than we did during World War II--even though that was an international conflict fought on two fronts against some of the most dangerous threats to our national security ever known. Too many Members of this Congress and of this Administration have for years seen what they wanted to see in Iraq, and believed what they wanted to believe. But their conceptions couldn't matter less to the men and women of that nation, or to the men and women of the American military who are fighting there. Civilians and soldiers don't live in the world as politicians say it is. They live in the world as it really is. And they live, every day, with the consequences of the decisions made here in this chamber. During the first 4 years of the Iraq war, they had to live with an Administration and a Congress that either could not, or would not, see this conflict for what it really was: a war that was not being won, that was being fought by soldiers who often did not have the equipment they needed or the care they were owed, that was not improving the security of the Iraqi people, that was depleting our military and, as a result, endangering the long-term security of this nation, and that was based on a flawed strategy that desperately needed to be changed.”