Tim Ryan: “All we really have to do is talk to some of the soldiers who are over there and who have come back, which I'm sure most…”

“All we really have to do is talk to some of the soldiers who are over there and who have come back, which I'm sure most of us have. And when they explain what's going on on the ground, it's mind-boggling to think in cities of 140, 150, 160, 170,000 we've got American troops, for example, on the west side of the city, with 1,000 Iraqi troops on the west side of the city, and 1,000 on the east side and 1,000 Iraqis; 2,000, 4,000 total for the whole city, 2,000 of the 4,000 being American. How are you going to control a city of 170,000 people? And a surge of an extra 1,000 or 2,000 is not going to make a difference. It's going to make it worse. This surge is not the first time we've tried this. This is like the fourth time, and every time that we've tried a surge in certain areas there has been an increase in the number of daily attacks, not a decrease, because it incites the area, and you still don't have enough. And we've all said from the beginning, if we went in there with 3- or 400,000 troops, where we were able, after the statue fell, to secure the State, to secure the country of Iraq, that would have been a different story, and all the looting was going on and the museums and everything, and then Secretary Rumsfeld said, well, they're just blowing off steam. At that point, you lost control and it went all downhill from there.”