Politicians weigh-in on Iraq
STATEMENT BY JIM NEAL, CANDIDATE FOR U.S. SENATE, ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WAR IN IRAQ:
America has been in Iraq for five years – longer than we spent in either World War. American troops were sent into Iraq with inadequate planning and inadequate force levels.
This war has already cost nearly 4,000 American lives, more than 29,000 American wounded, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It will cost American taxpayers more than $3 trillion. It has cost our nation the trust and respect of nations around the world. We will bear the scars for generations.
Senator Elizabeth Dole has blindly backed the policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration which took us away from the hunt for Osama Bin-Laden and entangled us in Iraq’s religious civil war.
Five years after committing the greatest military error in the history of America, the Bush Administration still does not have a strategy for ending our involvement in Iraq’s religious civil war, for rebuilding our overstretched military and caring for our troops who have been wounded in action.
It’s past time to begin planning for the sensible redeployment of our forces away from Iraq and back towards Osama Bin Laden and his followers.
We have a duty to our troops and their families to ensure they receive the medical care, education and career opportunities they have earned by putting their lives and their comfort at risk for us. We need to spend our tax dollars here at home on what matters most - providing job security for middle-class families, ensuring the health of our families, and leading the fight to protect the air, water and soil which sustains us.
I am committed to ending this war. Now is the time for North Carolina to have a Senator who will stand by our troops and stand up to the Bush Administration.
Time to stop the bleeding and start the recovery
To see this statement on video, please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU7fRYdhleg
It’s time to stop the bleeding and start the recovery
Five years ago today, I was scheduled to talk to the Forsyth County Democratic Women about why it would not be in America’s best interests to invade Iraq. Unfortunately, President Bush launched that invasion the night before.
Five weeks earlier, I had sponsored the resolution opposing that war, adopted unanimously by the N.C. Democratic Party State Executive Committee on February 8, 2003. We were the first state Democratic Party in the nation to take that formal action, and we were encouraged-the tide of public opinion was with us, against an unnecessary and destructive war. Yet, by mid-March it was clear that George W. Bush was determined to have his war, and he did.
There is no satisfaction today in seeing all the dire predictions come to pass. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost unnecessarily, with more deaths-Americans, allies, and Iraqis-continuing every week. Repeated lengthy deployments have stretched our armed services paper thin, and our readiness to respond to a major emergency elsewhere in the world is at its lowest state since the Vietnam era. The cascading effects of an ill-advised and unjustified war have undermined our influence and credibility as a nation around the world. Our returning veterans and their families will continue to suffer the stresses and traumas for many years. And the ongoing cost to our economy of the war and its aftermath is beyond staggering.
It is now years past time to stop the bleeding, admit the Bush mistakes, and stop feeding our best and bravest young men and women into the insatiable maw of an Iraqi religious and ethnic civil war. Next year, we will have a new President and Congress, and I pray that they will have the wisdom and moral courage to bring this madness to an end.
As North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor, I will share the responsibility in our state to support our veterans, our National Guard and Reserve, our active duty military personnel and their families, and our communities who rely on our bases here.
I pledge to see that we honor their sacrifice-and our commitments to them. We will support them all through the recovery from political leaders’ errors for which our service men and women are not responsible, but for which they are still paying the price.
The time to begin that recovery is now.
Dan
Dan Besse
Democrat for Lieutenant Governor
http://www.danbesse2008.org
