mr. speaker , i yield myself 8 minutes .  mr. speaker , this bill before us today makes clear that we have now spent $ 284 billion in iraq and afghanistan since the war began .  the money that has been spent in afghanistan is certainly legitimate and justified .  after all , that country harbored the people who attacked us on 9/11 .  the problem is , however , that $ 165 billion has now been spent to deal with a country that did not attack us .  we have spent some $ 240 billion on this entire endeavor since the president first landed in his jumpsuit on that carrier and addressed the country under the banner `` mission accomplished. '' there has been quite a bit of that mission left since it supposedly was over .  we have now been involved in iraq longer than we were involved in world war i , and respectable and responsible experts have told me that they expect that we will be involved for at least another 5 years .  this whole operation has been brought to us by the same people who erroneously told us that we had to go to war because iraq had weapons of mass destruction and it was implied that they had , or were close to having , nuclear capability .  that was all demonstrated not to be true .  this has been brought to us by the same people who believed the assertions that our troops would be welcomed with open arms .  it has been brought to us by the same people who thought they were so smart that they knew more than general shinseki when the good general warned us that we would need substantially more troops and boots on the ground than we were scheduled to have if the postwar occupation was to go well .  and it has been brought to us by the same people who provided to our troops insufficient armor for humvees , insufficient body armor and insufficient jammers to prevent our troops from having their faces and their legs and their arms blown off by remotely detonated bombs and mines .  i want to make quite clear i will support this bill because i feel that i have no choice but to participate in cleaning up the mess which somebody else left .  but i do not relish it .  i believe that the entire operation in iraq has been accompanied by incredibly naive romanticism on the part of the white house and on the part of the civilian leadership in the pentagon , and that has left the people fighting the war to bear the brunt of the miscalculations that have been made by the civilian leadership of our government .  we have lost the lives of 1 , 500 american service men and women .  we have seen more than 11 , 000 be injured .  and this bill understates , in my view , the amount of money that will be needed eventually to restore the readiness of the u.s. armed forces and to minimize their casualties .  the second thing this bill does is to demonstrate once again how we , on both sides of the aisle , have had to work doubly hard to overcome the resistance of the white house in adequately funding homeland security operations .  they have been especially resistant to providing the adequate funding along the borders , especially the canadian border .  and it has taken a bipartisan effort on the part of a wide variety of people in this congress in order to overcome that resistance .  this bill falls far short of the funding that is necessary to provide a secure set of borders for the united states .  the new bill that is going to be offered by the gentleman from kentucky will help fill that gap , but that is forced to play catch-up because we have met a steady resistance effort on the part of the white house .  lastly , i simply want to say that while i am certainly no expert on the subject , i note that there is being attached to this bill a provision which many experts in the field feel has the potential to construct a nationwide database that could be very harmful in terms of people 's efforts to engage in identity theft .  i hope that proves not to be the case .  i would simply make the point that certainly no one on our committee on either side of the aisle has the expertise that you would hope would be found in the authorization committees , and i wish that that provision had been dealt with on a separate bill rather than solving an internal problem within the republican caucus by having it attached to an unrelated bill , and i want to make one point about that .  we are being lectured almost daily by the majority that we should not add ungermane riders to appropriation bills .  i want to serve notice that if the majority feels free to add unrelated authorization bills such as this to a must-pass bill , that then i feel fully within my rights in offering whatever authorization legislation we feel appropriate on this side of the aisle and asking that it be attached to appropriation bills .  if sauce is going to be okay for the goose , then it ought to be good for the gander .  so we will see in the coming months what the attitude of the majority is when we seek to add what we feel are legitimate efforts to strengthen appropriation bills by adding various pieces of so-called legislation to appropriation bills .  so since the majority has chosen to proceed down that path , i hope they raise no objection when we seek to follow it .  with that , mr. speaker , again , i repeat i intend to vote for this bill with all of my misgivings .  mr. speaker , i reserve the balance of my time .  