WASHINGTON, DC– Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives during a day-long debate today, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) denounced the war in Iraq as an historic blunder with tragic consequences and called for an end to the war as quickly as possible. Miller’s printed statement and video of his floor speech follows below.

Mr. Speaker, there is no more pressing issue in our country today than bringing an end to the war in Iraq as quickly as possible.

I thank my colleagues on the other side who just completed their discussion of the war on terror. They remind us that it is a war in which we can never yield and about which we have no choice. They also remind us that Iraq has become a recruiting ground for those international terrorists; that Iraq has become a proving ground for those international terrorists; and that Iraq has become the motivation for many of those international terrorists, none of which existed before the President’s choice to go to war, a war not of necessity, a war that was unjustified based upon falsified intelligence.

In fact, we see the new CIA director said that the intelligence that the Administration used to make the case for war was, “wrong”, “inaccurate” and “misleading.”

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and there was no connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. The Administration used fear to scare this country into war based upon those lies. He refused to properly prepare for the war or for its aftermath. And now, our soldiers, their families, and our Nation are paying the enormous price of this President’s tragic blunder.

2,500 American soldiers, we are informed today, have died in Iraq.

19,000 American soldiers have been wounded, many of them losing limbs and suffering other debilitating injuries that will afflict them the rest of their lives.

The war has cost almost half a trillion dollars in taxpayer money, and America’s international reputation and respect in the world has been severely damaged.

The President often says that he makes decisions about the future of Iraq based on what the generals say, but when the time came to listen to the generals prior to Iraq, the President refused to listen to them. He refused to listen to them when they questioned the force structure that was available to us to go into Iraq at that time, but he went anyway. He refused to listen to them when questions were raised the day after we seized Baghdad.

What we now see is massive national chaos for which our soldiers were not trained, not given any instructions on how to deal with, and certainly did not have sufficient numbers to deal with. The President sent the troops into that war with poor planning, poor structure and poor understanding of what would take place afterwards.

The American public had to witness soldiers being forced to buy their own body armor, have their families buy it because we did not have a proper supply prior to going into that war.

Many men and women were sent into battle in unarmored old Humvees that were used for flood control in California rivers before they showed up in Iraq, and those soldiers died because of that inadequate equipment and because of the roadside bombs that are the number one killer in Iraq.

We see that the torture of Iraqi detainees was approved at the highest levels in the Pentagon, and this, again, has led to an undermining of our position in the world, our moral position in the war in Iraq and the war against terrorism.

This is a policy blunder of historic proportions by this President, and it is very important that we understand that we are paying a huge price for these mistakes by this Administration.

Tragically, we stand here on the floor of this Congress three years after the beginning of this war, but for 3 years questions were not raised in this Congress about that force structure, about the preparedness, about the detainee policy, about these actions that have so severely undermined us.

Yes, we saw the taking of Zarqawi, and what do we have there? We have the real use of smart intelligence on the war against terror. As you [my colleagues] pointed out, they are not going to come after the 130,000 troops. They are not going to come after our strengths. But that is what people have been saying for a long time. That is what people have been writing about at the military schools -- about the networking of terrorism and how you had to go after it. We went after it exactly the wrong way, in exactly the same way as people who made these historic blunders throughout history, when confronting this kind of force.

Yes, we should provide the special ops; yes, we should provide the surveillance; yes, we should provide the intelligence and we should work together. In the care of Zarqawi, we saw, once the Jordanians were insulted enough by the attacks on their land, they put their intelligence sources to work, combined with ours, and Zarqawi was run down, and we provided the 500-pound bombs. We provided the special ops.

That is not what is happening day to day in the war in Iraq, and our troops are paying a horrible, horrible price for the lack of preparation, the lack of planning, and the lack of prosecution of this effort and the initial mistake and lies by the President of the United States.

The President’s policies in Iraq have severely undermined America’s national security and made the world less safe.

In response to the clear failures in Iraq, the Republican Congress has acted like a rubber stamp for President Bush rather than as the elected representatives of the people of America.

Republicans in Congress hid their heads in the sand, and refused to question the President, sheepishly pretending instead that success is around the corner. As a result, Iraq is engaged in a civil war that threatens to consume the country.

Congress has done nothing to stop the civil war in Iraq, nothing to hold the President accountable for the failures in Iraq, and nothing to put our troops on a safe and speedy path toward home, or to other parts of the world where they are needed to fight against terrorism.

The President and his allies in the Republican leadership in Congress have made up their minds. They have a plan for Iraq. It is the same failed plan they started the war with. It is chaos with no end in sight.

The truth is that there is no more that we can ask of America’s troops in Iraq. They have done everything they have been asked to do. It is time for them to serve their nation where they are needed most, and that is surely not in Iraq. Now is not the time to stay the course of failure.

America desperately needs a new direction in Iraq -- a new direction that will make Americans safer.

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