Four Years Later, DeWine Still Stays The Failed Course

AMHERST, OH -- Today marks the fourth anniversary of Senator DeWine's vote to go to war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  Four years later, Senator DeWine continues to support President Bush's failed stay-the-course strategy.  He failed to call for a winning exit strategy and said that troops should only be redeployed from Iraq if the country breaks out into civil war.  Today, Republican National Committee Chairman and former Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman is campaigning with DeWine in Columbus, rewarding him for rubberstamping the President's war strategy and voting with him more than 90 percent of the time in Congress.
 
"Senator DeWine is a roadblock to progress in Iraq," said U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown (D-OH).  "For four years, he stood by the President's failed stay-the-course strategy and voted against investigating intelligence failures.  It's time for a new direction in Ohio and a changed course in Iraq."

DeWine continues to miss critical intelligence hearings and voted against investigating intelligence failures.  DeWine has a record of failure and absence from the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He missed nearly 50 percent of the public meetings of the committee, including all of the public meetings in the two years leading to 9/11.  Even after the war in Iraq began, DeWine missed critical meetings - he has attended about 1/3 of public meetings in the past two years.  According to committee sources, DeWine is also regularly absent from classified meetings.
 
DeWine sided with the minority of members on the Intelligence Committee in dissenting from a bipartisan report last month which found no linkage between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.  He shelved for months a critical intelligence report which concluded that the war in Iraq was mobilizing jihadists and increasing the terrorist threat to the U.S., and then dismissed it as insignificant.
 
"Mike DeWine denied Ohioans answers about why our troops were sent into battle in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction," said Representative Brown.  "Staying the course has led the United States to referee a civil war in Iraq.  We must work with military leaders to develop a winning exit strategy that hands the security of Iraq back to the Iraqis."

10/11/2006 / Permalink / Iraq, (all tags)