This is a ping-pong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad, are not beans. They're real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.

On the Iraq troop surge of 2007, "Excerpts From Senate Iraq Meeting". The Bellingham Herald. 24 January 2007. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.