From Tuesday's GOP Debate.
Mr. Matthews: Do you believe that, Senator Brownback, that we wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq if we weren't so dependent on Middle East oil?
Mr. Brownback: I don't believe that in the least. We went to Iraq -- on the war in Iraq -- what I voted for was the war on terrorism. And Afghanistan was where the Taliban was -- where Al Qaida was located. It was run by the Taliban. And we saw, in Iraq, what we thought was the mixture of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. And it was in 2003. This was in close proximity to 2001 when we had the 9/11 crisis. And I wasn't about to trust that Saddam Hussein wasn't going to mix terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. Now, we haven't found the weapons of mass destruction. But that doesn't mean we leave. And I think the Bush administration has generally done well militarily. And I think the military has done a fabulous job.
(APPLAUSE)Mr. Brownback: I think we have done poorly on the political side. And this Friday Joe Biden and I are getting together in Des Moines and we're going to be talking about the political side, a three-state solution in Iraq. This is what ultimately is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdish north, a Sunni west, a Shia south, within one country, federalism with a weak federal government, the federal government headquartered in Baghdad. Joe and I don't agree on hardly anything, but this is what we need to do to get the political equation. That's what has been poorly done by the Bush administration, starting with General Garner and moving on through the succession. It hasn't been well handled politically. We've got to get a better, bipartisan political solution. We can.
We need to admit why we're there, how badly we've screwed up and that we're not their ultimate solution. We need to collectively exit stage left and declare our primary mission(s)*, accomplished. Instead, we're going to re-usurp their new government and force the Iraqis to change their representative model while slicing and dicing the country? If Osama hates us primarily for meddling in the region, wouldn't this behavior not ratchet up the din considerably and add more weight to the argument?
* Erradication of the military, de-Baathification of the country, the shock and awe of them into the Middle Ages, enforcement of no immediate law, loss of national artifacts, creation of porous borders, reduction in power, water and sewer and the disbanding of the police.