We need you to speak up, right now, in defense of your country's most precious assets — the lives of its citizens who are in harm's way.
If you do not, you are not serving this nation's interests — nor your own.
Last November should have told you this.
The opening of the new Congress tomorrow and Thursday, should tell you this.
Next time, those missing Republicans, will be you.
And to the Democrats now yoked to the helm of this sinking ship, you proceed at your own peril, as well.
President Bush may not be very good at reality, but he and Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rove are still gifted at letting American troops be killed, and then turning their deaths to their own political advantage.
The equation is simple. This country does not want more troops in Iraq.
You have insisted, Mr. Bush, that we must not lose in Iraq, that if we don't fight them there we will fight them here — as if the corollary were somehow true, that if by fighting them there we will not have to fight them here.
And yet you have re-made our country, and not re-made it for the better, on the premise that we need to be ready to "fight them here," anyway, and always.
In point of fact even if the Civil War in Iraq somehow ended tomorrow, and the risk to Americans there ended with it, we would have already suffered a defeat — not fatal, not world-changing, not, but for the lives lost, of enduring consequence.
But this country has already lost in Iraq, sir.
Your policy in Iraq has already had its crushing impact on our safety here.
You have already fomented new terrorism and new terrorists.
You have already stoked paranoia.
You have already pitted Americans, one against the other.
We… will have to live with it.
We… will have to live with what — of the fabric of our nation — you have already "sacrificed."
The only object still admissible in this debate, is the quickest and safest exit for our people there.
But you — and soon, Mr. Bush, it will be you and you alone – still insist otherwise.
And our sons and daughters and fathers and mothers will be sacrificed there tonight, Sir, so that you can say you did not "lose in Iraq."
Our policy in Iraq has been criticized for being indescribable, for being inscrutable, for being ineffable.
But it is all too easily understood now.
First, we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush.
Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego.
If what is reported is true — if your decision is made and the "sacrifice" is ordered — take a page instead from the man at whose funeral you so eloquently spoke this morning — Gerald Ford: Put pragmatism and the healing of a nation, ahead of some kind of misguided vision.