WHY IT IS NEEDED: It has been argued that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are but two fronts in the global “war on terror.”  The reality is something different.  The United States, under the direction of the Bush administration and supported by both houses of Congress invaded Iraq and Afghanistan for the sole purpose of gaining access to each country's energy reserves. Afghanistan was invaded under the pretext of retribution toward the Taliban government for “harboring” Osama bin Laden for his role in the attacks on the United States in September of 2001.  What had not been said was that as recently as 1999 every member of the Taliban government had been on the payroll of the United States government.   Having recently discovered large natural gas reserves in the Caspian Sea, the US supported the Taliban government in hopes of building a pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea for transportation of those reserves to international markets.   After the Taliban government proved incapable of stabilizing the country and the United States was attacked on September 11, the Bush administration had the justification it needed to remove the Taliban from power and install a former Unocal executive as president, Hamid Karzai.  The result, the pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Arabian Sea was completed.
    Iraq  was invaded two years later with the intention of controlling that country's oil reserves which rank second in volume to only those controlled by the Saudi Arabian government.  In the case of Iraq, the United States under the urging of the Bush administration invaded a sovereign country that had not been responsible for the death of one US citizen prior to the start of the war in 2003.  Yet, the war itself has been quite costly to the American and Iraqi people, alike.  Indeed, more than 5,000 US soldiers have lost their lives during the war in Iraq.  Of those soldiers that have returned to the United States, some one third have returned home with a loss of their sense of emotional and psychological well-being.  The Iraqi people, on the other hand, have seen the destruction of many of their homes, businesses, and places of worship as a result of the war in their country.  More troubling, according to the ORB Polling Survey, the war has led to the deaths of more than one million Iraqi citizens.  
    Nevertheless, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no clear end in sight with a price tag now estimated at some $3 trillion dollars; a number that is equal to our entire federal budget for fiscal year 2008. 

HOW IT WILL BE DONE: One of the United States House of Representatives most important powers is the "power of the purse."  In Vietnam, Congress ended the war by eliminating funding for the war.  We propose to eliminate funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which will end the wars in each country.