Mr. Brown: Mr. President, recently we learned that the Ohio National Guard could face early redeployment. We learned the National Guard is being asked to train without the proper equipment. Our Guard will do the job well, General Wade and others in Ohio assure me, and their past history shows they will. Our Guard will do the job well regardless of the circumstances, but it is wrong to send them to Iraq with incomplete training, with inadequate equipment, with insufficient downtime.
The conference report released last night echoes what many of us in Congress and what so many military families across our great country have been saying: We need a new direction for Iraq.
Make no mistake, we take a back seat to no one in supporting the brave men and women fighting in Iraq, and we absolutely support their families. But more of the same is not a plan for our troops. More of the same, more involvement in this civil war, will not end the war in Iraq. This war has made our country, and our world, less safe. The Iraq war has cost 142 Ohioans their lives and wounded another 1,000.
General Colin Powell, talking about the President's surge, the President's escalation of this war, has said:
I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work.
Colin Powell, General Powell, recognizes this is a civil war, recognizes that the surge, the President's escalation will not result in a different outcome in Iraq.
Congress will continue, of course, to fight for our Nation's military by working to see that they have the resources and the support they need and the leadership they deserve. The conference report fully funds and fully supports our troops while establishing conditions that will bring our troops home. It provides desperately needed funding to the Veterans' Administration to help care for the hundreds of thousands of new veterans created by this war.
When we think of the carnage brought about by this war, when we think of the literally tens of thousands of men and women who serve this country and who are back from Iraq and who are in the Veterans' Administration health care system, we understand why we need from our Government literally a 50-year plan. What are we going to do for the next five decades for these injured men and women who have suffered psychological injury and physical injury? Yet this administration is not even funding our troops, the health care of our returning troops well this year, let alone planning into the future. This supplemental bill we will send to the President in the next few days begins the process of what we need to do to take care of the health and the welfare of these returning troops, these injured, psychologically and physically injured soldiers.
If the President won't take responsibility for his failures and lead our troops home, then Congress needs to and Congress will. We owe it to our soldiers, to our sailors, to our airmen and women and to our marines, and we owe it to their families.
The President should listen to military leaders and the American people and work with Congress to change course in Iraq instead of threatening vetoes. Vetoing this legislation would deny funding that our military needs in Iraq. It would deny funding our veterans desperately need who have returned home.
The President says there is too much pork, too much spending in this bill, as if every other supplemental bill that previous Republican Congresses, the House and Senate, have sent to the President every time with other supplemental emergency spending has not. Mr. President: Please read this bill. Don't dismiss it out of hand because you don't like some of the language about Iraq, even though it protects our soldiers, even though it takes care of our veterans, even though it does things such as spend $3 billion for the mine-resistant ambush- protected vehicles, vehicles that will make our troops considerably safer than the flat-bottomed vehicles where far too many of our troops have been killed or badly injured.
This supplemental bill we are sending to the President includes billions of dollars for BRAC, billions of dollars for military construction, the kind of work we need to do to make our military even more efficient, even more productive. It spends $1.6 billion for individual body armor, something the military and the civilian leadership in the White House and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon have fallen short on, providing the kind of body armor for our troops and the kind of up-armor for our humvee vehicles that is needed.
I ask again, Mr. President: Please read this bill before you decide what you are going to do, and then sign this bill. The VA would get $1.7 billion more than the VA proposal from the President, which was zero; it would have $39 million in polytrauma-related funding; it would have $10 million for blind veterans programs. It has $100 million for VA mental services. It has $25 million for prosthetics.
This legislation we are sending to the President--again we ask him to read it before making his decision instead of dismissing it out of hand--has all kinds of support for our troops, for their health care, for their supplies, for supplying them in the field. It has way more money for our troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and for those troops returning home in our VA system, way more resources than the President has allowed in his budget.
The President has set our Nation on a path that leads nowhere. He did not listen to the voters last fall. He has not listened to the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel of very distinguished Americans. He has not listened to many of the military advisers, free to speak freely, and he has not listened to the House and the Senate majorities about this legislation.
In addition, this legislation provides for help for mine safety. It provides for emergency spending for the LIHEAP program, for elderly indigent people who have had their heating or air-conditioning cut off because they simply can't afford to pay for their energy use at home. It has support for the pandemic flu. It has pandemic flu protections. As Senator Stabenow from Michigan said a few moments ago, it has a minimum wage increase, something this Senate or House has not done for 10 years.
Mr. President: Please read this bill before you decide whether you are going to sign it or veto it, and please listen again to General Powell, who said:
I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work.
We are on the wrong course in Iraq. If the President signs this bill, it will help us redeploy our troops more quickly out of Iraq in the most orderly and safest way possible. It will also equally and importantly provide for health care for our troops, for the tens of thousands of injured troops who have returned home from this war.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
