The Problem

It is now clear to nearly everyone that President Bush lied to Congress and to the American people when he spoke of weapons of mass destruction as the premise to go to war in Iraq. To make matters worse, the Bush Administration has mishandled the war so badly that it is seen as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in U.S. history.

So, why did so many members of Congress fall for the lie?  That could be a lengthy discussion.  The bottom line is, the Iraqi people do not want us there. Other nations do not want us there. Most Americans do not want us there.  And the longer we stay, the more American lives will be lost, and the staggering cost of the war will continue to escalate. By the end of this fiscal year (September 30, 2008), the price tag will be $845 billion. 

My opponent in this race, Leonard Boswell, has defended his vote in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq, saying: 

And it is very sobering and so when my president looks me right in the face and says that there is a threat of mass destruction weapons – I said to him in return if you have hard intelligence on that then you've got to do something and he nodded they had hard intelligence. That's a serious matter so are you saying to me, are any of you saying to me that in those conditions Mr. Fallon would say no? I don't think so. I don't think so.[i] 

But I was one of the tens of millions of Americans who did oppose the war in Iraq, even before it began, who did not buy the President’s justification for invasion. In fact, most of Boswell’s Democratic colleagues in the House voted against the authorization to go to war, 126-81.

The Center for Public Integrity published a study recently documenting that:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser  Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.[ii]

But even after it became clear that President Bush misled us into war, Congressman Boswell has continued to vote for additional funding for the war with no timetable for bringing the troops home. Because I have pointed this out, he recently said, “A number of times I have voted for us to bring our troops out of there and, of course, he says I don't but I do.”[iii]  

Yet when high school students recently visited his Des Moines office and refused to leave until he spoke with them by telephone, Boswell said, “I advocate for an orderly plan. In the last year or so, I’ve voted five or six times for that.” When a student questioned Boswell’s vote for H.R. 2206 (05/10/07), Boswell “assured the group the bills he voted for this year were for withdrawal of troops.” One of the students is quoted as saying, “we were hoping for a more concrete promise, but he did allude to the fact that we did have his word, which is enough for us” [Des Moines Register, 03/08/08]. 

Let’s look at Boswell’s votes within the last year alone:

·         Early in the year it looked as if he might have changed his mind on the war. He voted for a bill calling for a timetable for partial withdrawal (H.R. 1591 on 03/23/07, which he voted for three times).

·         But after President Bush was able to sustain his veto of it, Rep. Boswell changed his mind back. He sided with Bush and voted against H.R. 2237, a bill to establish a timetable for partial withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, even though House Democrats supported the bill 169-59 (05/10/07).

·         He voted in favor of H.R. 2206, which continued funding without a timetable for withdrawal (05/10/07).

·         He voted for H.R. 2764, which continued funding without a timetable for withdrawal (06/22/07). 

Only after Congressman Boswell learned I would be challenging him in the primary did he finally vote for a funding bill that contained language for a partial withdrawal – H.R. 4156 (11/14/07). The truth is that, despite his claims to the contrary made on Iowa Press and to the high school students in his office, from the beginning of the war until quite recently, Boswell has consistently sided with President Bush and House Republicans against the majority of his fellow Democrats and the clear desire of the American people to end the war.  

The Surge

Supporters of the war claim that the surge in troops has turned around the situation on the ground, but this is misleading. While our troops are doing what is asked of them and doing it well, a major factor in reducing the violence has been the “Awakening,” which began before the surge. This refers to the decision by many Sunnis to turn their efforts from fighting against us to fighting Al-Qaeda. We are paying each and every one of these ‘Iraq Security Volunteers’ (ISVs) $300 a month or more for their support. Except for a few thousand Shiites, the 80,000 or so ISVs are Sunnis at odds with the Shiite government. As one journalist reported in early March of this year: 

The American forces responsible for overseeing “volunteer” militias … have no illusions about their loyalty. “The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence office. The 2^nd squadron, 2^nd Stryker Calvary Regiment … is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to “make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight.[iv]

Another important factor is the cease-fire declared by Muqtada al-Sadr, a powerful, anti-American Shiite cleric. It is likely this will not last, so any positive effect will be temporary.

The Cost of the War in Iraq

 The war in Iraq has now gone on longer than World War II. The costs of this war are staggering.

The Human Cost: As of March 4, 2008, the number of American military casualties in Iraq stands at 3,974. The number of our military wounded is 29,320. In the first Gulf War, 45% of veterans filed disability claims. This percentage is likely to be higher for veterans from the current war given the high numbers of non-fatal injuries caused by improvised explosives devices (IEDs). Cases of physical and mental disabilities have skyrocketed.

These are figures for only American military personnel; they do not include the deaths and disablements of American private contractors. And they do not include the civilian deaths that have resulted from our invasion of Iraq. Almost 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died from violence.

The Financial Cost: When the Iraq war began, the Bush Administration estimated the cost of the war would be as little as $50 billion. That’s what we spend now in “up front” costs every three months. But these up-front costs are only a small fraction of the actual costs. The Nobel prize-wining economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes recently published their book-length study of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[v] Using very careful, conservative methodology, they estimate the realistic cost of the Iraq war alone, once you include veterans costs and interest to be $2.655 trillion. The same methodology estimates the cost of the war in Afghanistan at $841 billion. Together, the Bush wars are likely to cost us at least $3.496 trillion.

One of the injustices in this war has been the disparity between what our military personnel are paid and what private contractor workers are paid.

In 2007, private security guards working for companies such as Blackwater and Dyncorp were earning up to $1,222 a day; this amounts to $445,000 a year. By contrast, an Army sergeant was earning $140 to $190 a day in pay and benefits, a total of $51,100 to $69,350 a year.[vi]

Most of the cost of these wars is hidden. Even though we have been in Iraq for five years, we continue to finance it by emergency appropriations. For the most part, the costs don’t show up in the budget. The national debt, which as of March 11^th was over $9.4 trillion, has been growing daily on average by $1.69 billion, and about a billion of that daily addition is owed to China.[vii]

Reconstruction of Iraq: Shortly after the war began, the Bush Administration insisted that the total cost of the reconstruction of Iraq would amount to only $1.7 billion. The next year, Congress appropriated $18.4 billion for reconstruction costs – civilian projects such as schools and sanitation. As it happens, most of that money was either diverted to military projects or never spent.[viii]

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The effects of the Iraq War will be with us for our lifetimes. We cannot undo the tragedy of President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. But we must change course in order to mitigate the length and severity of those effects.
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Cost to our economy: In addition to the trillions of dollars the war in Iraq is costing us, there can be no doubt that this tremendous expenditure has had and will continue to have a serious, negative impact on our economy. This is money that could have been used to make Social Security solvent, fund health care for all Americans, improve infrastructure such as roads and bridges, pay down the national debt, etc. At the same time we are entering a recession and undergoing a home mortgage crisis, our nation’s economic health is being held hostage by an ill-advised, badly managed, discretionary war into which the Bush Administration misled us.

Our reputation: Due to the war in Iraq and President Bush’s mismanagement of it, America’s reputation is in tatters around the world. Compounding everything else about this war, the Bush Administration has diminished our moral stature through its use of torture. These last five years have seen an unending series of revelations of American misconduct — the horrendous photographs revealing torture and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the ongoing scandal of our detention center at Guantanamo in Cuba, the ‘outsourcing’ of torture by ‘extraordinary rendition,’ Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s refusal to admit that the technique of waterboarding is torture (even though the U.S. prosecuted Japanese soldiers as war criminals for using it on our military during WWII), and, most recently, President Bush’s veto of the latest anti-torture bill to pass Congress.

Security cost: The Iraq War, as many predicted, has created more terrorists and has destabilized the region, including increasing Iran’s power and influence.

My Background

While I am not a pacifist and believe that U.S. involvement in WWII was needed to stop Adolf Hitler, I am critical of a post-WWII U.S. foreign policy that has emphasized military force over diplomacy. In 1985, I volunteered with the nuclear weapons freeze campaign and the next year organized most of the Iowa stretch of the Great Peace March. In 1997, I founded Des Moines Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and worked for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, reducing military spending, and promoting conflict management programs. In 1990-91, I worked with other groups in opposition to the Gulf War, and in the lead-up to President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, I participated in several events opposing the war.

The Solutions

Ending the War:  As General David Petraeus, our commanding general in Iraq, has said, “There is no military solution to a problem like Iraq” (March 2007). As a first step, I’ve endorsed A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq, an initiative supported by many congressional candidates, retired military officers (including a former commanding general in Iraq), and assistant secretaries of defense. This plan will end U.S. military action in Iraq, use U.S. diplomatic power, address humanitarian concerns, restore our Constitution, restore our military, restore independence to the media, and create a new, U.S.-centered energy policy.

 Helping our veterans: I am grateful to Congressman Boswell for his work on behalf of veterans. I concur that more must be done for the men and women who have served in our military, and commit to continue the Congressman’s legacy in this area. Please see my position paper on veterans for more details.

 Avoiding a similar mistake in the future: Ending this debacle isn’t enough – we need to prevent the mistakes that have been made in this war. The first thing we need is to elect members of Congress who are willing to stand up to a president when that president is wrong, and who will not abdicate their constitutional authority to declare war. I will be such a congressman. At the same time, the current wars have revealed a number of structural changes that need to be made in order to assure honesty, transparency, and fairness to the conduct and funding of any future military conflicts. I support a program of reforms including the following, taken verbatim from those recently proposed by Stiglitz and Bilmes:

·         Wars should not be funded through “emergency” supplementals.

·         War funding should be linked to strategy reviews.

·         The administration should create a comprehensive set of military accounts, which include the expenditures of the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Labor, as well as Social Security and health care benefits that arise from military service.

·         The Department of Defense should be required to present clean, auditable financial statements to Congress, for which the Secretary of Defense and the Chief Financial Officer are held personally accountable.

·         The administration and the Congressional Budget Office should provide regular estimates of the micro- and macroeconomic costs of a military engagement.

·         The administration should be required to notify Congress of any procedural changes that might affect the normal bureaucratic checks and balances on the flow of information. The Freedom of Information Act (which enshrines the basic principles of citizens’ right to know what their government is doing) should be strengthened, with a more narrow carving out of exceptions, and with congressional oversight on these exceptions.

·         Overall, Congress should review the heavy reliance on contractors in wartime. In particular, the use of contractors for “security services” should be limited, both in number and in duration, with a detailed justification provided for why the military itself cannot provide these services. Careful attention should be paid to hidden costs borne by the public … such as the payment for disability and death through government-provided insurance.

·         The military should not be permitted to call upon the National Guard or the Reserves for more than one year, unless it can demonstrate that it is not feasible to increase the requisite size of the armed forces.

·         In the event National Guard or Reserve troops do serve more than one tour, the military would be required to pay double wages on a second tour of duty and triple on a third. Double pay should be given to any individual required involuntarily to extend his or her time in service beyond the originally contracted amount.

·         There should be a presumption that the costs of any conflict lasting more than one year should be borne by current taxpayers, through the levying of a war surtax.[ix]

The effects of the Iraq War will be with us for our lifetimes. We cannot undo the tragedy of President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. But we must change course in order to mitigate the length and severity of those effects. And finally, we must learn from these mistakes and do our best to prevent them in the future.