Here’s how the San Francisco Chronicle reported it: “The House passed a resolution Wednesday praising American troops and the Iraqi people on the Iraq war’s first anniversary, but only after partisan wrangling between Bush administration supporters and minority Democrats angered over being shut out of the measure’s drafting and opposed to wording saying the war has made the world safer.
“The final 327-93 vote after more than five hours of debate masked the angry split in the House. Some Democrats eventually voted for the symbolic resolution even though they objected to pieces of it because they felt majority Republicans had set a trap for them.”
Would somebody explain to me how a resolution supporting troops and the people of Iraq after one year is in any way a partisan trap? Only Democrats could look at this as a partisan trap. Do you think this kind of thing would have ever happened in World War II? There is no way. We were unified. Politics ended at the water’s edge and all this sort of stuff.
So John Kerry, you can try all you want to make it sound like you’re big now on Iraq and big on terrorism, but your own party, which is not unified, is giving the lie to what it is you claim to say. Republican leaders said the measure was aimed at showing support for the 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and for the Iraqi people’s efforts to emerge for more than two decades under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
Henry Hyde, chairman of the International Relations Committee said, “Regardless of our disagreements on process, I will ask, dare I say it, in the spirit of patriotism, let’s stand as one with our military people.” And they did not stand as one, 93 Democrats remained seated. The San Francisco Chronicle version of the story runs with the headline: “Resolution praising U.S. troops angers Democrats. Measure said war made world safer.”
You see, my friends, the Democrats want you to think that the world is a more dangerous place because we went to Iraq, not because there are terrorists all over the globe attacking and killing innocent people; that’s why the world is a dangerous place, the world is a dangerous place today because too many people sat and did nothing from 1979 on, and particularly from 1993 on. Too many people say and did nothing or too many people cut and ran. Have you ever heard of Somalia? The Democrats believe that the presence of the U.S. military is what makes the world dangerous. The Democrats believe and have for a long time that the U.S. military is the focus of evil, is the primary agent, provocateur, for all of this, and that if we weren’t the way we are, the terrorists wouldn’t hate us. That if we weren’t as big as we are, if we weren’t as powerful as we are, if we weren’t the superpower that we are, then none of the rest of the world would hate us.
They’re more concerned with the Europeans who hate us than they are with the terrorists who kill us. And they choose to side with the Europeans who hate, and who say, “Try to persuade them not to hate us,” rather than take it to the people who are killing us and trying prevent it from happening again and again and again. Senator Kerry, you can say anything you want, but your allies in the House of Representatives are more concerned with what’s going on in Haiti than they are with what’s going on in Iraq.
