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Hagel: "The Longer We Stay, The More Problems We Are Going To Have"
Think Progress
August 21, 2005

This morning on ABC's This Week, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) explains the problems with Bush's policies in Iraq:

Stay the course is not a policy. Part of the problem that we have as Henry Kissinger pointed out here in the last few days in an op-ed in The Washington Post is we have no measurement for progress, for success.

And so I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded. Electricity production down, oil production down.

Any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we're not winning.

Hagel also explains why we need a fundamental shift in our policy:

The reason that I don't think more troops is the answer now is we're past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged down problem, not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam.

The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have, the more occupying force dynamics flow into this, the more influence of the outside people, as well as the inside people

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