I support the foreign policy laid down by George Washington in his farewell address to the nation he founded: "Friendship and commerce with all nations, entangling alliances with none." This is the only foreign policy consistent with American values of liberty, prosperity and peace.

Over the course of the last century or so, our nation has more and more frequently strayed from a Washingtonian foreign policy. As a result, we've been forced -- or sometimes we've simply chosen -- to fight wars we might otherwise have avoided, at enormous cost in both blood and treasure; and we've enslaved our political and economic system to what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex."

Like all of you, I watched in horror as the World Trade Center Towers fell on 9/11. Like all of you, I thirsted for revenge against the vicious terrorists who murdered 3,000 innocent civilians. And, like all of you, I support defending the United States against those who would destroy it.

Unfortunately, our politicians used 9/11 as an excuse to continue and escalate the very policies which made those attacks not only conceivable, but inevitable. Rather than reconsidering a century of error, they chose to carry that error into a second century.

As a result, instead of decapitating and liquididating al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the US focused on "regime change" and "nation-building" while Osama bin Laden and his henchmen moved their headquarters, decentralized their command structure, and expanded their recruitment and operations efforts into new areas.

Nearly seven years later, the US and its NATO allies remain bogged down in a failed occupation. The Karzai government which we installed in Kabul governs only about 30% of the country. The Taliban and al Qaeda remain at large, with a larger support base than ever.

Having announced a policy of failure in Afghanistan, we next moved to extend that same policy to Iraq -- a country which represented no threat to the United States, a country which no longer had a substantial capacity for military aggression even in its own region, and a regime which Osama bin Laden placed second only to the United States itself on his list of enemies.

On the basis of false claims -- claims which can only be attributed to reckless negligence or intentional dishonesty -- the US invaded Iraq in March of 2003. Five years and more than 4,000 American lives later, Iraq is now a primary center of al Qaeda activity. Its US-installed government is effectively a proxy for our other regional enemy, Iran. Estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties run from a low of around 90,000 to as high as a million or more.

Through all of this, we have strained the capabilities of our armed forces -- the armed forces created and intended to defend the United States -- to the breaking point. We are less secure from foreign attack today than we were on September 10th, 2001. Our leaders -- including Congressman Todd Akin, who voted in favor of both of these failed military adventures and who has subsequently supported nearly a trillion dollars in funding to compound those errors -- have failed in their duty to see to the defense of the United States.

As your representative in Washington, I will vote "no" on any further funding for US operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. I will support legislation requiring US withdrawal from both countries. I will work without stint to bring our troops home and put them back to work at the job they were hired for: Defending America.

I will also work to reform the composition of the armed forces to accord with that mission.

At this time, the US "defense" budget is bigger than those of every other country in the world combined -- and some of those other countries' "defense" budgets are made up primarily of US foreign aid dollars. The US maintains a military presence in more than 100 countries around the globe.

A US military establishment which confined itself to its legitimate mission of defending the United States would be much smaller and much less expensive for two reasons:

First, it would not have to maintain bases and presences in Germany, South Korea and all the other countries which currently allow the American taxpayer to cover their defense costs. Since WWII, much of the world has cowered under an American "defense umbrella" -- and you are the ones who pay for that "umbrella."

Secondly, it would not create new enemies, and curry popular support for those enemies, with its constant interventions around the globe. Most people around the world are not naturally inclined to seek war or to hate America. It is the presence of American troops on their soil and of American ships off their coasts which drives them into the arms of those few whose purpose is our destruction.

From our nation's founding until the Spanish-American War in 1898, America largely avoided involvement in the world's arguments -- and we built a prosperous nation by doing so. It was our abandonment of that policy which led directly to our involvement in two world wars, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and numerous smaller engagements around the world ... and to our acceptance of a large government which consumes much of our national income in order to maintain the machinery for such activities. It's time to return to the sound and wise foreign policy which made our nation great.