|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Sen. Sam Brownback: Debate 'More Than One Option' on Iraq
Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said in Mississippi on Monday night that the Senate deserves a chance for an open debate on GOP-sponsored resolutions about the handling of the Iraq war. "We need to debate and vote on the Iraqi war resolutions, but we need to have more than one option before us," Brownback said at a news conference at the Hilton Hotel in north Jackson. He was scheduled to speak at a President's Day dinner sponsored by the suburban Madison County Republican Party. Brownback said it was "highly unusual" and "inappropriate" of the Democratic majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, to allow a vote only on a Democratic-sponsored resolution against President Bush's effort to boost troop levels in Iraq.
Story Continues Below On Saturday, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic push for a resolution to repudiate Bush's deployment of additional combat troops. The 56-34 vote fell four short of the 60 needed. Democrats claimed victory, noting that a majority of senators voted against the escalation. Brownback voted with the majority of Republicans to block the resolution, though he has said he is against the idea of sending more troops to Iraq. On Monday, he said it would be a "travesty" to cut funding for the war. Brownback also said, "I think in some respects the war on terrorism is misnamed." "Terrorism is a tactic," he said. "It doesn't describe who it is that we're fighting. And I think we have to recognize who we're fighting. "We're fighting this militant interpretation of Islam. We are confronting them in many places around the world. They have an objective. Number one is to remove us from the Middle East. And number two is to establish an Islamic caliphate, which would be an Islamic dictatorship. We do not have a role in a war or a fight between Sunni and Shia in Islam. We have no dispute with Islam." Brownback said that's why he is pushing for "a three-state, one-country solution" in Iraq, creating a Kurdish region, a Sunni region and a Shia region, and having Baghdad as the federal city. Brownback is the third 2008 Republican presidential candidate to appear in Mississippi in the past several months. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney visited before officially declaring his candidacy. And Sen. John McCain of Arizona was in the state last year. Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman, appeared at the news conference with Brownback. But Barbour says he is not publicly supporting any presidential candidate yet. Instead, he said he is focusing on his own race for re-election this year. Brownback also touched on issues important to the conservative base of the Republican Party, speaking against same-sex marriage and for restraint in federal spending. "All human life at all its points is sacred. It's beautiful. It's unique. It's a child of a living, loving God," Brownback said. "And that means yes, the child in the womb. But it also means the child in Darfur, and it means somebody that's in poverty. And we need to fight for life, period. And not to be ashamed at all about it."
© 2007 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2012 NewsMax.Com |