Goldmark raps Iraq war

The Bush administration is writing a “blank check” for military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan while it cuts back on services for Americans, congressional candidate Peter Goldmark said Tuesday evening at a forum in West Spokane.

“We have to address the problems in our own country,” he said.

Spending on overseas wars is forcing the government to scrimp on everything from health care and education to services for veterans, he contended.

“This war, this occupation, goes on in Iraq , it goes on in Afghanistan, with no end in sight,” Goldmark told a friendly crowd of about 40 at the West Central Community Center. “There’s no plan to bring it to an end.”

The Democratic challenger to Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris, Goldmark refused to call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops or a timetable to bring them home.

“I’m not in favor of pulling out right now, but I’m not in favor of staying indefinitely,” he said. Rather than announcing a timetable, he added in an interview after the forum, the U.S. government should tell Iraqi leaders that they need to “take care of their country” and figure out a strategy to withdraw.

” ‘Stay the course’ doesn’t do it for me,” he said. “They’ve become dependent on us. We can’t figure out how to run their country any more than they can figure out how to run ours.”

Afghanistan is different because there is a heavier involvement by the United Nations, he said. “But what’s the strategy there?”

Goldmark, an Okanogan rancher and former Washington State University regent, will face McMorris, a freshman Republican House member, in the Nov. 7 election because neither has a challenger in the Sept. 19 primary.

Although she wasn’t in the House when Congress voted to give President Bush the authority to enter Iraq to enforce United Nations sanctions, McMorris has been a supporter of the administration’s Iraq policy and visited the troops in the Middle East. She has said she believes former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did pose a threat to the United States, and it is better to be fighting terrorists in Iraq than fighting them in the United States.

At Tuesday’s forum, Goldmark called for more investments in renewable energy so that the United States could someday export that energy rather than import oil from the Middle East. He said the country should also work toward a “single-payer” health insurance system, although it’s not clear who should run it.

In many countries, including Canada, a single-payer health care system is run by the government.