The Speaker pro tempore: Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Yarmuth) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Yarmuth: Madam Speaker, some years ago I heard someone say that the secret to life is how you handle plan B. That resonated with me because so few things in this world go exactly as planned. Tragically, for the 3,300 American soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq, there will never be a plan B. And for more than 20,000 other soldiers, plan B, sadly, will include a wheelchair, a prosthetic limb, a serious brain injury, or a lifetime of posttraumatic stress disorder. And the even greater tragedy is that the sacrifices of many of those courageous men and women could have been avoided had President Bush had a plan B in Iraq.
Many of us saw this coming back in 2002. It was evident that the President's team was either so brazenly self-confident or so badly misinformed that they never saw the need for an alternative strategy, and certainly not for an exit strategy. And now, 4 years after "mission accomplished," there is still no plan B coming from the White House, only a transparent appeal to the national pride that we must win, without regard to cost or duration, and without the slightest understanding of what a victory might look like.
Last night, this body took an important step in the Iraq tragedy. We set a new direction for our effort because the President has refused to do so. We not only provided the resources requested by the President to ensure the safety of our troops, we added funding needed to fulfill our obligations to those troops who have been wounded in action, and to the veterans who have sacrificed so much for all of us. But more important, we have provided the framework for bringing our troops home.
Like many of my colleagues, I would have preferred a stronger measure. While I have never advocated a fund cutoff as a way to end our combat activity in Iraq, I would have liked to have forced the redeployment of our troops out of harm's way as soon as reasonably possible. But as our extraordinary Speaker has said, we must not let our search for the perfect become the enemy of the good. And last night we passed a good and reasonable approach to ending the war in Iraq.
The President has said that he will veto this bill, and it is clear to me that after 4 years of refusing help or advice from anyone who has not bought into his policy, he is not about to welcome our assistance now. But he should. This bill provides President Bush with the exit strategy he has never had, but which the American people so desperately want. He would be foolish not to sign it.
