Mr. Speaker, over the past 5 years, the Bush administration has repeatedly asked the American people to put their faith and their judgment in the judgment of the White House, especially as it pertains to our position in Iraq.

But as we have seen, and we have seen it time and time again, that judgment is based on ignoring voices of dissent and the reality on the ground in favor of a stay-the-course mentality.

When General Petraeus presents his report on Iraq next week, we cannot allow the voice of the American people to be ignored. We watched this administration relaunch its public relations campaign to sell ``the escalation'' to the American people, and now they insist that the escalation is working. All this in spite of the Iraqi Government's failure to achieve most of its key benchmarks for military and political progress and the dramatic increase in American and Iraqi casualties since the escalation began.

The administration continues, Mr. Speaker, to resist all attempts supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans to bring our troops home. In essence, we are in the middle of another PR campaign, this one to stifle the will and undermine the judgment of the American people again.

Today Congress is again faced with the choice of trusting its own judgment or the claims of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the past miscalculation and failed predictions of the administration have resulted in tragic consequences.

In 2003, the administration insisted that an invasion force of 130,000 troops would be enough to secure Iraq and restore peace after the invasion. They claimed Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction to use against our country. They promised that we would be greeted as liberators, and in May 2005 we were told that the insurgency in Iraq was in its last throes. Time after time, they have been wrong, wrong, wrong.

Earlier this year when Congress passed the emergency spending bill for Iraq, the Bush administration argued that benchmarks are the only way to measure progress in Iraq. As a result, the Government Accountability Office released a report this week showing that Iraq has failed 11 out of 18 benchmarks. And those seven that did not fail were barely, barely worked upon at all. In response, the administration now claims that these benchmarks should no longer be used to measure progress. It is clear that the administration will never accept the reality about Iraq. The only way to end the violence is to fully fund a safe and orderly redeployment from Iraq.

The shallow fortune-telling of the Bush administration cannot replace what every American knows: The only right course in Iraq is to bring our troops home by fully funding a safe redeployment of our troops and military contractors. The American people want bold leadership, and they have called on the Congress to take action, action now. The occupation has been a total failure and the American people will not accept taking a wait-and-see attitude. They know that the only sensible moral and responsible course is to fully fund the redeployment of our American troops and military contractors. And they want us to get started on it now.