Five Years After "Mission Accomplished"

Five years ago, President Bush dressed up in a flight suit for a self-congratulatory photo op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner that proclaimed "Mission Accomplished". Certainly, the war was not over then and victory was not achieved. The mission has been redefined several times and what the president hopes to accomplish in Iraq is unclear.

Five years after "Mission Accomplished", the costs to human life continue to build. Since then, nearly four thousand brave American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, and over 5 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons have been forced from their homes.

Five years after "Mission Accomplished", the strain on our economy is becoming unbearable. Congress has appropriated over $500 billion, and we are spending an average of $245 million a day in Iraq. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate economist, has estimated the total costs to our economy, including caring for our veterans and rebuilding our military, will top $3 trillion dollars. The cost of the Iraq war to the average American family this year will be $16,000.

Five years after "Mission Accomplished", the fact remains that there is no military solution to the problems in Iraq. Instead of working to find political solutions that will calm the warring sects, our continued military presence has further entrenched the divisions on all sides of the conflict and may be creating the conditions for a further discord. In many cities, the president's solution is to literally erect concrete walls between neighboring communities. The administration is now threatening to compound its mistakes throughout the Middle East by employing the same saber-rattling scare tactics against Iran as those that led us into the Iraq war.

Those who oppose President Bush's policies must offer suggestions for a successful path forward, and we believe we can present a better vision for the foreign policy challenges our nation faces. As leaders of the Congressional Out of Iraq Caucus, we have worked hard to educate Members of Congress about the failures and mismanagement of the Iraqi occupation. We have challenged the president on his claim that there is a credible government in Iraq; we have raised questions about the promised Iraqi oil revenue paying for the rebuilding of Iraq; we have called for investigations of contractors who are allegedly ripping off the American taxpayers; and we have crafted legislation to address these problems and more. Most importantly, we have introduced legislation that would require that war funding only be spent to safely redeploy our troops from Iraq.

The Out of Iraq Caucus remains committed to ending this unconscionable, misguided, and costly war in Iraq. We will not give up until our troops are safely returned to their children and their families. Five years after "Mission Accomplished", the president is requesting more than $100 billion to continue this war in Iraq through 2008. We call on our colleagues in Congress to resist the president's request. It is time to end the war in Iraq.