Tim Ryan: “We heard a lot in the last few weeks, you know, that you are sending the wrong signal to the troops. You are sending the…”

“We heard a lot in the last few weeks, you know, that you are sending the wrong signal to the troops. You are sending the wrong signal to the troops, when we want to have a discussion about when we are going to actually pull the troops out and end the war and redeploy and how things are going to work and what does it look like and how is this all going to end. You are unpatriotic, you should not have that discussion. You are not allowed to talk about that kind of stuff, you know. The people may find out that maybe things are not going as well as we think they are going, so let us not talk about it because it will affect the morale of the troops. I have got to tell you, when we went to Iraq, it was probably the first meeting, as soon as we got there in Baghdad, Mr. Meek was in the meeting with the troops and there was about 20 of us sitting there, and I specifically asked one of them, I think we were with the marines, specifically asked, does the debate that we are having now in the United States, that was shortly after Mr. Murtha came out for his redeployment efforts in 6 months and figuring this out, and I asked one of the kids, I said, does this hurt your morale over here? Does this offend you? The kid said to me, this is why we are here, so the Iraqis can have this kind of discussion. We expect people in Washington to be having a debate in a democracy, in a representative democracy. The great Republic should have these debates.…”