Senator Rand Paul - Dick Cheney Used 9/11 as an Excuse to Invade Iraq lyrics

When the Iraq war started, Halliburton had a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers who are over there dying in the shower from electrocution. I mean, it shouldn't be sloppy work, it shouldn't be bad procurement processes, but it really shouldn't be maybe that these people are so powerful they direct even policy. There's a great YouTube of Dick Cheney in 1995 defending Bush No. 1, and he goes on for about five minutes. He's being interviewed, I think, by the American Enterprise Institute, and he says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it'd be civil war, we would have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes. Dick Cheney saying it would be a bad idea. And that's why the first Bush didn't go into Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he's back in government and it's a good idea to go into Iraq. The day after 9/11, George Tenet is going in the White House and Richard Perle is coming out of the White House. And George Tenet should know more about intelligence than anybody in the world, and the first thing Richard Perle says to him on the way out is, "We've got it, now we can go into Iraq." And George Tenet, who supposedly knows as much intelligence as anybody in the White House says, "Well, don't we need to know that they have some connection to 9/11?" And, he says, "It doesn't matter." It became an excuse. 9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq. But the reason I bring up foreign policy is that you can't balance your budget by cutting off the welfare queen. You need to reform welfare, you need to reform entitlements, but the only coalition you're even going to get, and the only way you ever get close to balancing the budget is if you look at the entire budget, and that means looking at military procurement as well, which means looking at your foreign policy. You have to decide if we have an expansionist foreign policy that believes that we have to have 750 military bases and troops in 130 countries, or whether our foreign policy should be a little more direct and toward what the Founding Fathers talked about, and that is more defense of our country and less offensive type of foreign policy. What I'm telling you is that if you want to be consistently someone who believes in a balanced budget or be a fiscal conservative, you can't just say, we're gonna cut entitlements. Because, one, there's not enough money to balance the budget that way and, two, it's not believable, and, three, you're gonna have to have a coalition; you're gonna have to get some Democrats to cut waste that way also. And the way you'll get them on board is say, we're gonna cut waste across the board.