End the War in Iraq

It’s time to end our involvement in the War in Iraq and bring our troops home.

The war in Iraq will go down in history as one of this nation’s greatest military blunders. It didn’t have to be this way. In February of 2003, six weeks before the first bombs fell on Iraq, I introduced a resolution to the Maine Senate calling for a halt to the impending attack and urging President Bush to pursue a diplomatic, not a military, solution in Iraq. The Maine Senate endorsed this resolution and became the first state legislative body in the nation to take a stance against war in Iraq.

I was proud to sponsor this resolution because I felt that a war in Iraq would be a mistake that would cost the lives of American soldiers and would kill many innocent Iraqi civilians. I was concerned that military action would destroy Iraqi civilian infrastructure and would result in a long-term United States occupation of Iraq, and that the cost of the war would place an unnecessary, heavy burden on American taxpayers. This money would be better spent keeping our factories open here in Maine rather than destroying factories in Iraq.

Now, four years later, the United States is mired in a conflict that American military power cannot resolve. The cost to our troops has been high. Nearly 4,000 American servicemen and women have died – including 20 from Maine – and over 27,000 have been wounded. Thousands of soldiers have lost a limb or suffered severe head or brain injuries. Twenty percent of our returning Iraq veterans struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, terrorism attacks have increased worldwide. According to the Bush administration’s National Intelligence Estimate of Global Terrorism, “the Iraq War has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

Our involvement in Iraq has stained this nation’s reputation worldwide, a blow to its international standing from which it will take years, perhaps decades, to recover. In our own country, the war has led to warrantless domestic surveillance and illegal wiretaps, the torture of war criminals, the leaking of classified information for partisan political purposes, and the suspension of habeus corpus allowing suspects to be held indefinitely without being charged and without a court hearing – things we thought could never happen in America.

Innocent Iraqi civilians have suffered tremendously. Over two million Iraqis have fled their country are now living as refugees in the Middle East. Horrific ethnic cleansing is taking place in areas of Iraq resulting in the displacement of almost two million people within the country. Hundred of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed. Seventy percent of Iraqis lack an adequate supply of water, and electricity is available, on average, less than half the day.

The Iraqi government is becoming increasingly fractured. Nearly half of the cabinet members have resigned. What began as a war on terror has devolved into a civil war, with American troops caught in the middle.

To date the war has cost American taxpayers over $450 billion dollars. For-profit independent contractors who have been allowed to operate in Iraq with little oversight or accountability have fleeced countless millions of these dollars. The war continues to cost well over $10 billion dollars a month. Just think of what we could have done here at home with that money.

We cannot go on sacrificing the lives of American troops and innocent Iraqi civilians. Even some of our most experienced military experts and commanders now question our strategy and goals in Iraq, whatever they may be. It is time to begin the total withdrawal of our troops from Iraq in a safe and orderly manner.

I have fought against this war from its inception and I will continue to do so. We need to pursue a diplomatic solution, one that will not cause the people of Iraq to suffer even more. We need to work to regain America’s prestige and standing in the world, to once again become the beacon of hope, opportunity and democracy.

And we need to bring our sons and our daughters home, now.