| Republican Senator Chuck Hegel breaks with the White House on the Iraqi War. More and more people are coming to grips with the facts that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq. Senator Hegel is the first Republican Senator to break with the "stay the course" policy.
The White House's "stay the course" policy would lead to many more unnecessary American deaths and injuries and will lead ultimately to failure.
Senator Hegel on ABC’s "This Week":
Stay the course is not a policy. Part of the problem that we have as Henry Kissinger pointed out here in the last few days in an op-ed in The Washington Post is we have no measurement for progress, for success.
And so I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900
Americans, over 14,000 wounded. Electricity production down, oil production down.
The reason that I don’t think more troops is the answer now is we’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged down problem, not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam.
The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have, the more occupying force dynamics flow into this, the more influence of the outside people, as well as the inside people are going to hurt this country.
Any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we’re not winning.
Other than Senator Feingold from Wisconsin, where are the Democrats?
by John Legler, Guest Columnist
August 21, 2005
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