About your Search  English 58 and afghanistan. and my belief
that there is a smarter way to achieve our national security
goals. and so, madam speaker, since that day i stood here in
this spot to say over and over again that these wars are eroding
our spiritual core. bankrupting us morally and fiscally.
teaching our children that warfare is the new normal. i have
delivered these speeches as a member of the majority and the
minority when the president was a member of my party and when he
was not, and today i am doing it for the 400th time. when i
began the war in iraq was still quite popular. as was the
president who launched it. but we spoke out anyway, refusing to
bend on principle because we knew that we did not belong there.
my colleagues, representative barbara lee and representative
maxine waters and i, we called ourselves the triad, started the
out of iraq caucus. we first -- forced the first house vote to
bring our troops home. along the way i visited iraq, i tried and
i learned on that trip and my opi