Charles Rangel on War & Peace Dem./Lib./Working-Families

2003: Lonely voice opposing pre-emptive war

The pre-emptive strike on Iraq has been a historic watershed for the US. It's established a new precedent in our putative role as a leader of the UN. Under our new doctrine, you don't have to go to the UN to determine your right to go to war when you haven't been attacked. All you have to do is convince a majority of citizens that such a war is in our self-interest; consent or cooperation from any and all nations is welcome but not required. Dissent or opposition may not be tolerated.

Sometime early in 2005 the serious questions about how and why we got into Iraq really began to penetrate the American consciousness.

Troops suffer by not knowing when they'll come home

That's one reason our troops are suffering so terribly in Iraq: they keep getting told that their service there will be limited in some way, but they keep sending them back, holding them in place with stop-loss orders and the like. This mismatch between the clear duty to serve one's country in time of war and the cloudy objective--military and political--of this war is taking a toll on the junior military officers we may desperately need 10 or 15 years from now, when a real war comes along.

Without an honest and true statement of who the enemy is, and a definite yardstick for measuring his defeat, our soldiers are to some extent just sitting ducks.

Opposes war politically, out of respect for soldiers

As I arrived at the funeral of a young Dominican soldier in my district, I saw a dead soldier who was about twenty years old. He had on the same brown uniform that I had worn with such swagger over fifty years ago. When I saw how much he looked like me when I was his age, my knees buckled. The sight of that young Dominican put me right back to my beginnings as cannon fodder in a questionable war.

Voted YES on investigating Bush impeachment for lying about Iraq.