On the positive side, I have been so encouraged by and thankful for all the support you gave me during this week's Foreign Relations Committee hearings.
Monday, I asked you to vote on the questions you wanted UN Ambassador John Bolton to answer at his Tuesday hearing. More than 13,000 of you responded, overwhelmingly voting to ask Bolton about his effort to eliminate the UN's Millennium Goals that would reduce poverty, improve education, reduce mortality rates, protect the environment, and reverse the spread of AIDS. In fact, thanks to your feedback, that's the first subject I asked John Bolton about at Tuesday's hearing.
Of course, Bolton refused to answer the question directly. He said that he was only doing the bidding of the President, that he didn't mean any harm, and that the final outcome document published by the UN World Summit added the Millennium Goals back. But when you cut through all of his face-saving bluster, what you really see is that, fortunately, Bolton's cruel effort to block these important Millennium Goals was overridden by other UN leaders.
Then at Wednesday's hearing I presented Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with our Iraq petition, signed by more than 107,000 fellow Americans joining together to demand a credible success strategy and timetable for bringing our troops home from Iraq. I led off my questioning of Dr. Rice by talking about our petition and reiterating our demands, namely that the Bush Administration bring credibility, accountability, and responsibility to their Iraq policy.
But at the same time I felt so emboldened by your support during our questioning this week, I continue to be shocked and frustrated by the Administration's answers.
In fact, at the same hearing where I took Dr. Rice to task for the Administration's many false statements and changing justifications for the invasion of Iraq, I was extremely distressed to hear her lay out yet another even broader mission for our soldiers -- to remake the Middle East.
Even more unbelievably, Rice insisted that rebuilding the entire Middle East has been the Bush Administration's mission ever since 9/11. Well that is not what Congress voted for in either the resolution authorizing force in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it is not what the American people believed to be our goal. The Bush Administration is trying to perpetuate yet another classic "bait and switch," because Congress and the American people would never have supported an open-ended mission to remake the entire Middle East if the President had made his true intentions known up-front.
The Bush Administration's refusal to publicly discuss any timetable or even the specific conditions that must be met by the Iraqis in order to begin bringing our troops home leads me to believe that they envision a never-ending war in Iraq, and that is unacceptable to me and a majority of the American people.
Now more than ever, it's absolutely critical that we keep fighting, that we keep demanding answers to the hard questions, and that we hold the Bush Administration accountable for their failed Iraq policy.
We need to continue speaking out and adding more voices to our demands that the Bush Administration come clean with the American people about the war in Iraq. Otherwise, we may well find ourselves in a never-ending conflict, costing us thousands more American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars more.
That is absolutely unacceptable to me and to the American people -- so we will continue to fight the Bush Administration's failed Iraq policy until our brave men and women in uniform come home. I hope you'll continue to stand with me in this critical effort.
Thanks for everything you do.
In Friendship,
Barbara Boxer
Visit BarbaraBoxer.com today!
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