Madam Speaker, I have a few questions for my colleagues.

What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interests.

What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable

consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous.

What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States

and Israel.

What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan is directly

related to the hatred directed toward us.

What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9-11 is not a fair trade-off

for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens no matter how many Iraqi-Pakistanian-Afghan

people are killed or displaced.

What if we finally decide that torture, even if called enhanced interrogation technique,

is self-destructive and produces no useful information and that

contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil. What if it is

finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy.

What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of

inflating and borrowing? What if we finally see that wartime conditions

always undermine personal liberty? What if conservatives who preach small government wake up and realize that our intervention

as foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests.

What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire

eventually destroys all great nations?

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