HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS
Before the U.S. House of Representatives
January 18, 2007
Everybody Supports the Troops
Mr.
Speaker, I have never met anyone who did not support our troops.
Sometimes, however, we hear accusations that someone or some group does
not support the men and women serving in our armed forces.
This is pure demagoguery, and it’s intellectually dishonest.
The accusers play on emotions to gain support for controversial policies,
implying that those who disagree are unpatriotic.
But keeping our troops out of harm’s way, especially when war is
unnecessary, is never unpatriotic.
There’s no better way to support the troops.
Instead of questioning who has
the best interests of our troops at heart, we should be debating which policy is
best for our country.
Defensive wars to preserve our liberties, fought only with proper
congressional declarations, are legitimate.
Casualties under such circumstances still are heartbreaking, but they are
understandable.
Casualties that occur in undeclared, unnecessary wars, however, are
bewildering. Why
must so many Americans be killed or hurt in Iraq when our security and our
liberty were not threatened?
Clichés about supporting the
troops are designed to distract us from failed policies, policies promoted by
powerful special interests that benefit from war.
Anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in
Iraq will not end anytime soon.
Many now agree that we must change our policy and extricate ourselves from the
mess in Iraq. They
cite a mandate from the American people for a new direction.
This opinion is now more popular, and thus now more widely held by
politicians in Washington.
But there’s always a qualifier: We can’t simply stop funding the war,
because we must support the troops.
I find this conclusion bizarre.
It means one either believes the “support the troops” propaganda put
out by the original promoters of the war, or that one actually is for the war
after all, despite the public protestations.
In reality, support for the
status quo (and the president’s troop surge) in Iraq means expanding the war
to include Syria and Iran.
The naval build up in the region, and the proxy war we just fought to
take over Somalia, demonstrate the administration’s intentions to escalate our
current war into something larger.
There’s just no legitimacy to
the argument that voting against funding the war somehow harms our troops.
Perpetuating and escalating the war only serve those whose egos are
attached to some claimed victory in Iraq, and those with a determination to
engineer regime change in Iran.
Don’t believe for a minute
that additional congressional funding is needed so our troops can defend
themselves or extricate themselves from the war zone.
That’s nonsense.
The DOD has hundreds of billions of dollars in the pipeline available to
move troops anywhere on earth-- including home.
We shouldn’t forget that the
administration took $600 million from the war in Afghanistan and used it in
Iraq, before any direct appropriations were made for the invasion of Iraq.
Funds are always available to put our troops into harms way; they are
always available for leaving a war zone.
Those in Congress who claim they want the war ended, yet feel compelled to keep
funding it, are badly misguided.
They either are wrong in their assessment that cutting funds would hurt
the troops, or they need to be more honest about supporting a policy destined to
dramatically increase the size and scope of this misadventure in the Middle
East. Rest
assured one can be patriotic and truly support the troops by denying funds to
perpetuate and spread this ill-advised war.
The
sooner we come to this realization, the better it will be for all of us.