Mr. Speaker, it is growing very tiresome to hear Republicans rewriting history and blaming all the ills of our society on the 1990s and the Clinton administration.
The gentleman from Oklahoma said the Army was too small, that in the 1990s it was reduced from 15 divisions to 10. Maybe so, but, you know, we have had 6 years of the Bush administration and 6 years of the Republican Congress to fix that if that is the problem. I have not seen any proposals to change that. I have not seen any proposals from that side of the aisle or from the administration to increase the Army to 11 or 12 or 15 divisions.
The real problem is that we are wasting the Army. The real problem is that Secretary Rumsfeld thought we could fight a war on the cheap. He sent the troops into Iraq with not enough troops, dismissed General Shinseki when he told him we need twice as many troops as you may think; otherwise, we will have a long-term war on our hands, and he was right. We sent the troops in without the proper body armor and without the proper equipment, and Americans died because of that.
The other real problem is that we are wasting our funds, $300 billion so far, not just funds, 2,700 lives in a foolish, counterproductive war in Iraq, a war started by the Bush administration under false pretences, after misrepresenting facts and intelligence to this Congress.
We were told that we had to go war to prevent the imminent development of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, the mushroom cloud by Iraq. That was not true.
We were told about the connection of Iraq to al Qaeda. That was not true.
If the President had told us the truth, that Saddam Hussein at that point in history, not 12 years earlier, at that point in history presented no real threat to us, there was no likelihood of weapons of mass destruction, there was no connection to al Qaeda but we should invade Iraq in order to make the Mideast democratic, would this Congress have voted for war? Would the American people have supported starting a war? I do not think so.
I am not going to get into a debate whether the intelligence was wrong or misrepresented. That is a question the American people can decide eventually on whether the Bush administration was a fool or an ape, because that is the question. Either they had it wrong or they misled us. I think it is the latter, but, either way, the fact is, as the gentleman from Ohio said, this war has not made us safer. It is to the contrary.
The national intelligence estimate says the war in Iraq has hurt our efforts in the real war, the war on terrorism. It is a cheap recruiting device of Islamic Jihadists all over the world; and, not only that, this war, the downfall of Saddam Hussein has done one other thing, it has liberated Iran to be the real menace, a far worse menace than Saddam Hussein ever could have been, a real menace to us and to liberty in this world.
The fact is, the foolishness, the stupidity of Iraq aside, we are fighting a real serious war, a very serious war on a much larger scale against the Islamic terrorists. That is the war we must fight and win, but the Bush administration, the Republican Congress does not take that war seriously. We get a lot of rhetoric about the war on terrorism, but they will not up put up the money, they will not put up the effort because they do not take it seriously.
The biggest threat that we are faced with is not Iraq. The biggest threat we are faced with is that al Qaeda or some other Jihadist group gets nuclear weapons. The knowledge is all over the place. The barrier to nuclear weapons is where do you get the nuclear material, where do you get the fissionable material. I tell you where. You get it in the former Soviet Union where there is enough material to build 40,000 nuclear bombs lying around, not properly guarded.
We have a program to get it out of there to protect ourselves from the Osama bin Laden nuclear bomb. We will get it out of there over 30 years. We removed more nuclear material from the former Soviet Union in the 5 years before 9/11 than in the 5 years since. For 15 or $20 billion, we could get it all out and would not have to worry about nuclear explosions in American cities as we must because of the stupidity of the Bush administration in not getting our stuff out of there.
Twelve million shipping containers a year come into this country. They are not inspected. We had a party-line vote on this floor against the Democratic proposal to insist on electronic screening of every container to make sure it does not have an atomic bomb or a radiological weapon in it, but they say we cannot do it; we will have a study of it. This is 1942. In 1942, we built aircraft carriers. We did not have studies of weather to build aircraft carriers.
And all the chemical and nuclear plants are unprotected which, if attacked or sabotaged, could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. They do not want to spend the money because they do not take the war on terrorism seriously enough. We do.