Tom Coburn: “I have not come to the floor, except once, in the 2 years I have been here to discuss the war in Iraq. I have been to…”

“I have not come to the floor, except once, in the 2 years I have been here to discuss the war in Iraq. I have been to Iraq and had experience in Iraq as a medical missionary during the first gulf war. I am very much concerned as to how the world will read us. What we know is that enemies try to defeat us not by trying to defeat us on the battlefield or in Iraq; they try to defeat our will, try to defeat the will of the American public. Senator DeMint talked about leadership. Leadership is laying out the real consequences of our action. What are those consequences? What next? What is going to happen next? What is going to happen? We heard this morning that we are trying to delay this resolution. We are not trying to delay it. As a matter of fact, they are saying we would not debate it. We are debating it right now. The fact is, we believe you ought to have a resolution that says we support our troops in this group of resolutions. Unless we get some semblance of saying we want to send a signal to our troops that we support them, we should not have a rule that precludes that. So politics aside, and the next election aside, and the Presidential election aside, what does it mean to the American people about what we end up doing in Iraq? That is the question we should be asking. We should be making sure that the mistake we do not make is to have an ill-informed American public about what the consequences will be.”