Political Quotes

“Mr. President, George Washington, in his farewell address to the Nation, warned us against foreign entanglements and costly wars. He and the other Founders knew firsthand the danger that enduring engagement abroad posed to our Republic and to the cause of freedom. Despite those warnings, we, the United States, have been embroiled in a directionless, trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan for the past 20 years. And after all that investment--the American blood and treasure poured into that cause--Americans watched in horror as any semblance of the so-called progress and investment in a democratic Afghanistan crumbled in a matter of weeks. Haunting images demonstrating this failure tragically played out before us. Americans hadn't seen tragedy of this type since the Fall of Saigon. The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that the total monetary cost of our war in Afghanistan amounts to $2.3 trillion, counting U.S. military spending, both on and off budget. U.S. manpower, resources, and expertise were dedicated for decades to the war in Afghanistan. So we must ask ourselves: What went wrong? I rise today to explain how the erosion of Congress's constitutional war-making role permitted and, in fact, enabled these failures. In the early years of the war, Congress shrugged as the President transformed the mission in Afghanistan.…”