[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 93 (Monday, July 17, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H5267-H5272]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[[Page H5267]]
SPREADING FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Schmidt). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is
recognized for half the remaining time until midnight.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being
recognized here in the United States House of Representatives. And I
came to the floor to talk about a number of things that I am convinced
are of importance to Americans.
And as I sat through this discussion over the last 45 minutes or so
that I have tuned an ear to this, I cannot help but move into some of
my disagreements with the remarks that were made by some of my esteemed
colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
And I want to state first that I appreciate the tone of their remarks
tonight. Sometimes they are not so tolerant, they are not so patient,
and the tone gets a little more intense than it was. It does not change
my disagreement. I just appreciate the approach that they bring in our
disagreement. And that is what we are supposed to do here. We are
supposed to air our differences, Madam Speaker, and lay those things
out, and the American people tune in on what we do, and they weigh in
with each of us, and we draw our conclusions based upon our convictions
plus the input that comes from all over this country.
So I would first say that the statement was made consistently that we
invaded Iraq totally on false premises. And, first, I would remind the
body of resolution 1441, the last United Nations resolution that
finally was the last straw. There were a number of other resolutions
that Saddam Hussein violated. And we know that it was not our
responsibility to prove that he did not have weapons of mass
destruction. It was his responsibility to comply with the United
Nations, to comply with the weapons inspectors. He did not do that.
The war that took place in 1991, Desert Storm, that war was never
over because it was not completed because Saddam did not comply with
the conditions of the cease-fire.
So the resolutions came before the United Nations. Resolution 1441
was the last-straw resolution, and that was supported by, of course,
all members of the Security Council, and it passed the United Nations.
Someone needed to enforce the resolution if the United Nations was to
have any teeth in anything that they did. If there was to be peace in
the Middle East, someone had to enforce that resolution. And if we were
going to keep Saddam Hussein out of his neighbors' territory, like
Kuwait that he went into that began this in the first place, someone
had to enforce the resolution.
So the second generation of Bushes stepped forward and built a
magnificent coalition, a coalition of more than 30 countries, a
coalition of the willing that went in and liberated Iraq beginning in
March of 2003 and crossed that country with armored columns into
Baghdad, the largest city ever in the history of the world to be
liberated and occupied by a foreign power. That happened in a matter of
weeks, Madam Speaker. It was a magnificent military accomplishment. And
it was done with fewer troops than the first time, I agree.
But as I listened too, I will not call it the dissent on this side
because certainly we have not read the majority opinion. I hear from
this general, he disagreed with the number of troops, and this general
thought that we could not probably keep the Iraqis on our side, and
this one thought there was going to be a civil war, and some of the
people in the CIA disagreed, and a GAO analysis tells us that we really
should not be there.
Who are these people, Madam Speaker? Who are they to be directing our
foreign policy? Are these elected individuals that are the voices of
the people? Are they the Commander in Chief? Do they speak for the
Commander in Chief, Madam Speaker? What business do they have weighing
in? Is their voice in the wilderness of any more volume or any more
credibility than the next person on the street, the next person that
might be your neighbor? Do they have any more credibility than the
elected Members of the United States House of Representatives or the
United States Senate?
My answer to that is no. Some of them were involved in foreign
policy. Some of them were involved in military policy. I will grant
that. I heard three generals that were named. I think I could probably
come up with six to nine generals that disagree with the President's
policy. But if it is nine generals, I will see your nine generals and I
will raise you 9,000 generals who do not disagree with the President's
policy and have not disagreed with the President's policy.
And I would like to lay this out for the mission that it is. There is
a Bush doctrine, and this Bush doctrine was finally recognized by the
national news media when on the west portico of this Capitol building,
President Bush gave his second inaugural address, and in that second
inaugural address, he laid out his vision.
Now, it was laid out prior to that. It was laid out at least in his
State of the Union address January 28, 2003. It was laid out in his
defense strategy for the United States of America, which came out in
the previous September, 2002. And he made it clear that his vision was
to promote freedom, to promote liberty, especially in these countries
that fostered and bred terrorists. It was a clear policy established.
``The Nationality Security Strategy of the United States'' was the name
of the document published in September of 2002. Very consistent with
the President's speeches. Freedom beats in the heart of every person.
All people yearn to breathe free. Free people do not go to war against
other free people.
And I have often, on the floor of the House of Representatives, Madam
Speaker, talked about the similarities and the corollaries between the
end of the Cold War and how we can get to the end of this global war on
terror. And I point out that November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came
down. It came down from the force of a people that wanted to be free.
They yearned to get out of that trap that they were in.
{time} 2220
They yearned to reach across to their fellow man, their neighbors,
their family members that were divided by that wall down through the
middle of Berlin. But it was the yearning for freedom that made the
difference.
When they climbed up on top of that wall, they took hammers and
chisels and chipped the stone out and the concrete out, and when they
broke bottles of champagne on there and climbed up on top and danced
and sang and celebrated, it was a glorious day.
Much of the world missed the point. Much of the world, and I remember
watching the network news media at the time, much of the world was
talking about how families were being reunited, how important it was
that we saw this joy of the reunification of families that had divided
since after World War II.
As I sat and watched that, it occurred to me that when the Berlin
Wall came down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down with it. The Cold
War, the beginning of the end of the Cold War was over. In fact, it was
over on that day. It took a little while to clean up the mess, but what
happened when that wall was breached by people that yearned for freedom
was the echo of freedom. Once they got past that wall, once they got
through the Brandenburg Gate, it echoed across Eastern Europe. It
echoed across Eastern Europe with a crescendo. And it was almost a
blood-free revolution. For practical purposes, it was virtually blood-
free.
As country after country yearned for freedom, Romania and Poland and
Czechoslovakia, country after country, the Soviet Union collapsed,
Madam Speaker and they had a measure of freedom far greater than they
had ever seen before, and they still have a measure of freedom greater
than they had seen prior to the end of the Cold War.
Hundreds of millions of people breathe free today because the Berlin
Wall came down, because Ronald Reagan's vision, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear
down this wall.'' When that happened, when that vision was realized and
freedom echoed across Eastern Europe and hundreds of millions of people
became free, they stood in the square in Prague and rattled their keys
together by the tens of thousands and came to power and later had their
velvet revolution and separated those two countries without blood, and
they live compatibly today as two separate countries, the Czech
Republic and Slovakia.
[[Page H5268]]
Those things happened in the blink of a historical eye, and it was a
historical miracle. But that miracle that we look back on now from a
period of 15 years or so, 17 years, that miracle that took place was
the kind of miracle that can be emulated again.
The second George Bush, Bush 43, came to power, and this Nation was
attacked. And when this Nation was attacked, it was clear that we had
an enemy that was determined to annihilate us. They attack our value
system, they attack our culture, they attack Western Civilization
itself. And they believe that their path to salvation is in killing
people who are not like them. In fact, they kill more Muslims than they
do Christians or Jews, it is just that Jews are their preferred tar
gets, Christians are their second preferred targets, but they will kill
whatever target is in front of them if they think they can sow some
kind of discontent that might breakdown social order, and if the social
order gets broke down, then they think they can somehow emerge into
power.
So this is how this thing unfolded from 1989 quickly until today. The
Bush doctrine is the vision of freedom echoing across the Arab world
the way it echoed across Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down
in 1989.
Now, I direct the attention of the Speaker and the public to the
vision of what the world looks like today What has changed in the world
since September 11, 2001? How much different is the map of the world
today?
If we would paint that map with freedom, you can go to Afghanistan.
When we made a decision to go into Afghanistan, people on that side of
the aisle said it will be another Vietnam, it will be another quagmire.
No nation has ever been able to go into Afghanistan and invade, occupy,
liberate, be able to operate in that foreign country in an effective
fashion. Everybody has been defeated, everybody has been run out. The
British have lost, the Russians have lost. You can go back through
history and no one has succeeded in Afghanistan.
Yet a month, actually less than a month after September 11, we had
operations beginning in Afghanistan. And just a few months later, the
Northern Alliance, coupled with coalition forces, routed the Taliban,
surrounded and destroyed many al Qaeda and liberated Afghanistan.
There is a proud National Guard unit from my district that was on the
ground in Afghanistan that protected the voting locations, the voting
booths and the routes to them, and some of the areas other troops from
our coalition forces protected in the rest of the areas, and on that
date and that location, the people in Afghanistan went to the polls for
the first time in all of history and cast their ballots for a free
government and they ratified a Constitution that now directs a free
people, and Afghanistan is an up-and-running free country.
This up-and-running free country has its problems, yes. And now that
there has been an acceleration in the violence that has taken place in
Afghanistan, the people who were afraid to criticize over these last 3
to 4 years or more are now starting to criticize again.
The level of their criticism goes up in direct proportion to the
number of casualties that go up in Afghanistan. And it is the same in
Iraq. You could index it. If you could listen to the decibels from the
other side of the aisle, the decibels of criticism of our Commander-in-
Chief, undermining our efforts to free the rest of the world and free
this burden of terror off the American people, if you could measure the
decibels of objection from your side, you could index that directly to
the number of casualties of American and coalition troops, because it
is political opportunism that raises the objections.
When the casualties go down, the objections go down, because the
credibility diminishes. The casualties go up, the critics get up here,
come to the floor and unload more and more. And when they do that, they
are undermining our military who are on the line.
But some of these other points that were made. Interesting things.
Why does it matter if people like us in the first place? I would ask
that question. There is much concern about the rest of the world
doesn't like us. We need to do something so people can like us again.
I recall going to the Greenbriar on a weekend that would have been
the latter part of February in 2003. We had a bipartisan retreat where
we got to know each other. We had breakout sessions and we brought in
experts, especially from around the Middle East.
There was an entire handful of experts that had lived in the Middle
East and knew the culture and history and had a sense of how they could
explain to us what was going on. We hadn't studied the Middle Eastern
culture very much as a nation. We know a lot more about it today.
But as these experts sat around and they started up the discussions
and we had these sessions, and I didn't know the other colleagues very
well, I had only sworn into this job a month earlier. So I spent a lot
of time listening. It was important for me to learn what my colleagues
didn't know and also to find out what they knew that they could impart
to me. But I wanted to make sure that when I shared my viewpoint, that
it was going into a place where there was a knowledge void so we could
help fill that up. I hope they are doing the same thing with me. That
is one of the ways things work.
The author and journalist Tom Friedman gave an address to start that
weekend out, and that set the tone for the whole weekend. The question
was, well, they don't like us very well, and they are not going to like
us any better when we get done with them. If we go into Iraq, and
hadn't gone in at that point, if we go in, they are going to start to
hate us even more.
So we sat around and spent the weekend agonizing about how to make
people like us. Well, how in the world can you decide to go make people
like you when they just got finished bombing us, flying four airplanes
into America, killing 3,000 Americans and believing that the 19
hijackers that were on those planes are now off in the next life with
their 72 virgins each.
That is their belief system. And we are worried about people like
that liking us? I will submit that you can't worry about that. You
can't negotiate with people like that. The only thing you can do is
stall them off with fear or take them out with force. Those are our
alternatives.
A statement was made over here tonight, Madam Speaker, that we are in
the middle of a civil war and we are being asked to protect the Sunnis
from the Shiites. The middle of a civil war. There was a revolution
that was introduced here that declared we are in a civil war. The
junior Senator from Iowa introduced a resolution in the Senate that
declared we are in the middle of a civil war in Iraq. The middle of a
civil war.
They have declared that now, oh, since, 3, 4, 5 months ago. I haven't
noticed that there has been an acceleration in the Iraqi-on-Iraqi
violence in the 3 to 4 to 5 months since they began to talk us about
being in a civil war.
Wishing it were so does not make it true. I can define ``civil war''
so the American public can identify this easily. We go back and look at
our own Civil War. That was when brother was fighting against brother.
Yes, it was North against South, but sometimes they lined up on
opposite sides of the line and they shot at each other, and sometimes
brother shot at brother, and I imagine that occasionally brothers
actually killed brothers.
{time} 2230
Friends that went to the military academy met on the line. I am
thinking about General Armistead, and I believe it was General Reynolds
on the line at the corner and the angle, at the battle of Gettysburg,
facing each other, unit to unit. That was the Civil War. Half of the
people in the military, or a number approaching that, took off their
blue coats and put on grey coats, and they went to war against each
other. They chose up sides and went to war against each other, Madam
Speaker
If there is going to be a civil war in Iraq, it will be when the
Iraqis who are in uniform today, 257,000 strong, trained, in action,
defending the security of that nation, all wearing the same uniform,
some Kurds, some Shiias, some Sunnis all mixed up in their different
units.
Unlike the local police that more reflect the ethnicity and the
religion of their locality, the military is mixed up
[[Page H5269]]
with about an even mix and unit by unit of Kurds, Shiias and Sunnis. I
ask them, when I go over there, what is most important, the fact that
you are a Shiia, the fact that you are a Sunni, the fact that you are a
Kurd, or the fact that you are an Iraqi?
And they have always answered, Madam Speaker, it is the fact that I
am an Iraqi. And these Iraqis, 257,000 strong, defending Iraqis from
terrorists who are within their midst, in ever-reducing numbers and
ever-reducing resources are standing together shoulder to shoulder,
fighting together.
They are not fighting each other. They are fighting together against
the terrorists in their midst. This is not a civil war. A civil war
would be when the Iraqis that are in uniform defending Iraqis, 257,000
strong, choose up sides and start to shoot at each other. That is not
happening. It has not happened. And if it begins to happen, that does
not mean that they are certainly in a civil war, but that would be an
indicator to start watching pretty close, Madam Speaker.
So also the argument from the gentleman from Massachusetts, we cannot
secure Afghanistan with less than 150,000 more troops than we have,
quoting some expert, well, I think the experts that the President has
employed in both Afghanistan and Iraq have done pretty well.
In fact, it was essentially the same people that planned Afghanistan,
that planned Iraq. They had the right number of troops in Afghanistan.
They said it could not be done, but it was done. And it is a
magnificent success. The troops that they sent into Iraq were
absolutely adequate for the job of liberating Iraq.
Now, the circumstances that follow afterwards apparently are not bad
enough for the people on the other side to say, well, I thought you
should have had 500,000 troops there, but now I think you ought to have
no troops there. And how can you say that we should have more but yet
we should not have any? There is not a consensus on the other side of
the aisle. I believe we need to follow our Commander in Chief.
The other statement, we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Madam Speaker, I was sitting in the Cloakroom, and I
heard my good friend and colleague from Iowa refer to the gentleman
from Massachusetts. And I just wanted to clarify for him it was not I
that said to stabilize Afghanistan what is needed is 150,000 more
troops; that was the defense minister of Afghanistan.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. Madam Speaker, I did refer to
him as some expert, because I did not pick out how you defined that.
But I did attribute it to an expert.
Mr. DELAHUNT. If you continue to yield for just a moment, I do not
want to interfere with the gentleman's hour.
But I would suggest to my dear friend that the defense minister of
the country in question, Afghanistan, should be considered the ultimate
expert. And, again, my good friend earlier indicated that there were
Members on this side of the aisle that were reluctant, or were critical
before we went into Afghanistan.
Again, with all due respect, I would suggest that the vote in this
institution was something along the lines of 430-1. So that that
particular authorization received unanimous support. And I dare say it
was a good decision and a right decision.
The problems that I and I know some of my colleagues on this side, as
well as some of your colleagues on the other side, have is that we left
there too early and that is why the expert in this case, who is the
defense minister of Afghanistan, said that for the country to be
stabilized so that democracy, which we both, I think we all want to see
for the Afghanistan people can really take hold, five times the
security forces that exist today are necessary.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I pose the question to the
gentleman from Massachusetts, and that is, Are you advocating that we
send 150,000 troops to Afghanistan? I yield.
Mr. DELAHUNT. No. What I am suggesting is that we should participate
in training Afghans to meet those particular numbers, because we had
set a benchmark of some 70,000. And that benchmark has been revised
downward, downward from 70,000 to under 50,000.
And the defense minister in Afghanistan says we need more resources.
In fact, I am sure the gentleman is aware of this, but President Bush
just recently said that he would take under consideration, Madam
Speaker, doubling the $2 billion that were appropriated so that more
training could be provided. My problem is we should have done it 4 or 5
years ago.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I do appreciate the gentleman's
sentiment on this. I know that you are right on the vote. I am
confident that I can go back through the Congressional Record and pick
out the rhetoric that supports my remarks.
But I guess it is a balance that there was one vote against the
resolution. I do recognize the gentleman's point. I look forward to
bringing all of the resources necessary to protect America in the
future anywhere we have to in the world.
I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts. Picking up on my next
point, it is that the statement made here on the floor that we are not
winning the war on terror, ``the rest of the world believes we are
losing the war on terror.''
I do not believe that is true at all. In fact, who would want to
trade places with the other side? How would you like to try to conduct
or construct an optimistic scenario if you were, say, Zarqawi before he
was sent to the next life by the United States Air Force?
How would you put together a scenario by which you could possibly
win? I would point out that listening to one of our experts, one who is
actually under the command of our Commander in Chief, General Casey,
who said the last time I was over there, he said the enemy cannot win
if the politicians stay in the fight. That is what I am about, Madam
Speaker, is seeing to it that the politicians stay in the fight.
Our solders and marines deserve it. They deserve everything we have
to support them. When they approach me in Iraq and say to me, I am
proud to put my life on the line and commit a year out of my life to
defend freedom and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom, but why
do I have to fight the United States news media too, why do I have to
fight the anti-war detractors, my answer to them has been, you should
not have to do that. That is my job. And it is a job of all of us, to
stand up together.
But also the criticism that we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq.
That is not a criticism that sets on very solid ground from my
perspective. I support the President in that. You cannot give people a
date that you are going to pull out. And so I would submit to the other
side of the aisle that has found some experts to support the position
that they are advocating, they should listen to an expert that I would
think that they should support, and that would be the expert called
former President Bill Clinton, who said, and agreed with President
Bush, that we cannot give the enemy an exit date or they will just
simply go underground.
He said, you cannot give them a date. Bill Clinton, 2 days ago
supporting President Bush and his position not to telegraph when we
might be ready to deploy out of Iraq. And so the selective process is
going on, pick the people that support your position and then declare
them to be experts. And I generally stand with my position. But, let's
see. The people who got it right were ignored; the people who got it
wrong were rewarded.
{time} 2240
I think it is a bit early to declare such a thing. I think historians
will make that decision. I think the advisers that got us into
Afghanistan successfully and successfully have managed the liberation
of Afghanistan got it right.
I think the same advisers were there to put together the strategy for
Iraq, and given the military operations that are there, the liberation
of Iraq, they got it right. To maintain the safety and security in that
country has been difficult, but the strategy, there is not a consistent
viewpoint here, to get Americans out is what we hear from people like
Mr. Murtha, because they are targets of the enemy.
If we pull out to the horizon, which we found out, I thought the
horizon might be over there where the sun sets or where the sunrise is
or up on the
[[Page H5270]]
hill, the other side of the hill, just some place out of sight would be
the horizon. We found out a month ago their horizon is really Okinawa.
He said let us redeploy our troops to Okinawa, then if things get bad,
we can go back in there.
So the Out of Iraq Caucus, I wonder how large a caucus that is, but
their position doesn't have a futuristic view. What takes place in the
Middle East?
I would say this: We need to be looking at the Bush doctrine, we need
to be looking at when the Berlin Wall went down, and that echo of
freedom that I talked about earlier, we need to be looking at the way a
map of the world looks today, and a free Afghanistan, 20, 25 million
people and a free Iraq; 25 million people, an Iraq that is far safer
than the news media would have us believe, that cameras are trained on
the IEDs before they go off, but they are not trained on the happy
Iraqi playing children.
We have a new conflagration in the Middle East. We have the
circumstances with Israel, an Israel that has been trading land for
peace. When there is no rational reason to trade land for peace, there
is no historical model of somebody trading off land and getting peace.
We could go back to the prior, to World War II, you would think the
focus on that, if that history would be pretty acute, the trade-off for
the Sudetenland, to Hitler, to get peace, and finally, the carving up
of Poland between the Germans and the Russians, and ultimately war.
It always happens, you can never trade land for peace, and yet the
Israelis pulled out of Lebanon, and I understand why. It was costly to
be there, but the agreement was that Hezbollah would not be operating
in southern Lebanon or in Lebanon at all.
Finally, most of the Syrian troops got out of there, not the Syrian
intelligence people, but the Syrian troops. Hezbollah accelerated and
built up their forces there, and they smuggled in missiles from Syria,
probably from Iran to Syria and into Lebanon. Israel sits there today
in a two-front war, being shot at from Gaza and being shot at from
Lebanon, missiles raining down from the north, raining up from the
south.
I would submit that if they had succeeded in moving the Israeli
people, the Jewish people out of the West Bank, moved them up against
the fence, or inside the fence, if they had succeeded in allowing an
autonomous West Bank, they will be firing missiles from the West Bank
as well, and the only area Israel would not be shot at from right now
would be from the sea.
The sea, of course, is the place where the neighbors of Israel would
like to drive all Israelis, and they don't have very long. They cannot
make very many mistakes. I am glad that they have stepped up to defend
themselves, and I am glad that they began operations north and in the
south.
It is the right thing to do, and talk of negotiating for peace
without the eradication of Hezbollah in Lebanon would be a mistake.
They must go in, and they must take out Hezbollah, take them out, take
out their entire ability to conduct military operations there, pacify
southern Lebanon, before they can come back out of there again. It has
got to happen. If it doesn't happen, there will not be peace. The
missiles will continue to rain in.
The Syrians, complicit in this, sitting up there, providing military
weapons; and Iranians, we believe, were down in Lebanon helping advise
and helping to fire off some of the rockets that were fired, especially
the one that went to the Israeli ship.
We have acts of war being conducted by Iran against Israel, and I
believe acts of war being conducted against Israel by Syrians. The
Israelis have to be looking to the south to Gaza, to the north to
Lebanon, and over to Syria and on over to Iran.
They have got to look at their sites at four different locations. We
must stand with them every step of the way. We have got to do so with a
vision, with a vision of how this end game might work. We need to be
thinking that the nuclear capability, the growing nuclear capability of
Iran in the very belligerent hands of Ahmadinejad is far too dangerous.
We have to believe that if he had the capability to drop a nuclear
warhead into Tel Aviv, this would be about the time. We have to
understand that Hezbollah is conducting operations and firing missiles
into Israel at the direction of Iran.
Iran has been and is providing the supplies. Iran has recruited,
founded, recruited and trained Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of Iran.
They cannot shake the responsibility that when Hezbollah acts in an act
of war against Israel, it is really an act by a surrogate of Iran.
I came to the conclusion in September of 2004 that there was a 95
percent probability that we would have to go in and take out the
nuclear capability of Iran. We cannot sit and let a rogue nation have
that capability, a nation that deals with, trades with, and probably is
able to swap nuclear secrets with North Korea.
These two axes of evil are still out there, and they are still
dangerous, and they are getting ever more bold. When we have people
here in this Congress, that say we are losing this war on terror, that
Iran is a winner, that Hamas is a winner, that Hezbollah is a winner, I
don't know how they can be winners when they are being taken out 24
hours a day by the IDF.
But that scenario gives them hope. Members of Congress think they are
winning. Then their optimism will be stronger, or they will probably
lack the defeatism that we think they are getting.
So we must look at Israel, we must look at this end game with the
idea that if we have to take action, then we may have to do it in a
more urgent fashion than we might otherwise, because of the war that is
breaking out in the Middle East, the war that is breaking out with
Israel.
On that subject matter, I trust our Commander in Chief to be putting
an end game in mind. I stand with him in his vision on this safety and
this security and on a strategy to get to the end of this global war on
terror. I would ask the American people to envision this, envision how
freedom echoed across Eastern Europe in 1989.
Country after country after country became free, and today they go to
the polls, and they choose their leaders. They direct their national
destiny, and they join the European Union, and they join NATO, and they
are good allies, and they join the coalition and our operations in
Afghanistan and the coalition of our operations in Iraq.
The people who are the newest to freedom are the first to fight for
the freedom of others. I stood in a military base in Basra some time
back, where a British general was commanding the region down in the
southern part of Iraq. In that group, that group of soldiers, if you
look at the flags on their shoulders, there were British soldiers,
Australians, Romanians, Polish, Danish, Netherlands, I am forgetting
one or two, but that was all, just happened to be those in a group. I
lined them up and took a picture. That is the true coalition forces.
They are there.
Shortly after I came back from Iraq, the Australians doubled their
troop involvement in Iraq. They doubled it, just simply doubled their
troops. Do you think it made the news in the United States of America?
Only one or two news outlets when we did a LexusNexus search, but, you
know, al Jazeera picked it up. You know, al Jazeera scooped the major
news media in the United States, because they were paying attention.
{time} 2250
So, Madam Speaker, we will stand with the Commander in Chief with the
vision for freedom, and we will look forward to the day that the Arab
world breathes free, and when that day comes, country by country, piece
by piece, the people that get up in the mornings there then can turn
their outlook from teaching hatred, from making bombs and trying to
kill others to try to drag the rest of the world down, they can turn
that focus to building their homes, building their families and their
communities and their mosques or their churches, building their country
into a model of prosperity instead of a model of destruction.
I think in the amount of time that I have, I am going to shift
subjects, and we will talk about the security on the other side of the
United States. I would point out that we have also a security concern
on our southern border; and down there, that 2,000-mile long border
[[Page H5271]]
that runs from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that border has,
according to the Border Patrol testimony at the Immigration
Subcommittee hearing, as many as 4 million people pouring across that
southern border annually. That is about 11,000 people a day, 4 million
people annually.
In the past year, in 2005, they stopped and turned back 1,188,000
people, most of them run through, identified, put on a bus, taken to
the border and sent back through the turnstile into Mexico. The year
before, there was 1,159,000. The number has been growing. It has crept
up from 900,000 on up to now nearly 1.2 million, 1.2 million people
caught when we are catching a fourth to a third, by most of the
testimony that comes here.
But when I go down on the border and I meet with the Border Patrol
officers down there, Madam Speaker, I ask them and I propose that
number, are you stopping 25 percent. I found no one down there on a
regular basis that told me that they stopped 25 percent of the illegal
border crossings. Most of them, they gave me the number of 10 percent,
and one, when I submitted the 25 percent number, actually went into
hysterics and said, oh, it is not more than 3, perhaps 5, percent; 3
percent of illegal crossers and 5 percent of the illegal drugs that are
coming across the border.
Now, when we talk about numbers of those size, it is hard to put it
into perspective. So I would put it this way: every time an illegal
comes into the United States across the Mexican border, that is an
average of one every 8 seconds. In the United States, every 8 seconds,
there is a baby born in America, and it might be an anchor baby and a
baby born to an illegal mother. That baby will have citizenship here in
the United States. I am opposed to that policy, but every time a baby
is born, an illegal walks across the border into the United States. As
our population grows, half of it is an illegal population.
A bull ride is 8 seconds long. For the length of a bull ride, a baby
is born, and an illegal crosses a border. A cowboy rides a bull another
8 seconds, only they are not riding 24 hours a day, we are having
babies and having illegals come across every day, 24 hours a day.
How many people are 11,000 daily? To measure 11,000, I would put it
this way. Santa Ana's army that entered into Texas that began the great
war that ended up in a free Texas and ultimately Texas, a great State
in this Union, Santa Ana's army was about 6,000 strong. When they
stormed the Alamo, they were 2,500 to 3,000. He had split his forces;
2,500 to 3,000 storming the Alamo, and we think that was a massive
armed force, and it was. But Santa Ana gathered all his army up
together and he came across the border one time and wreaked havoc
across Texas; twice that number marches across that border every single
day. And what does America have to say about that? Ho-hum.
Well, we can find a way. They have absorbed themselves into our
society. Somebody needs somebody to do some cheap work, and so we
really should not concern ourselves with this. I disagree with that,
Madam Speaker. I think that a country that does not control its borders
cannot very much longer declare itself to have borders, and a country
without borders is not a country, a simply amorphous mass of a North
American continent.
We have to have borders and we defend them, and we have to defend
those borders for all the reasons that we know, but there are other
reasons that most of America does not know, and that is, as we hear the
President say, we cannot stop people from coming across the border that
just want to come here for a better life. Well, we cannot? Of course, I
think we can.
And yet, if he will concede that point, that point that we cannot
stop them unless we legalize them so that they can come back and forth
in some legal fashion, if that cannot be done, how in the world then
does the President or anyone else propose that we can stop the force of
$65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming into America? Ninety percent
of the illegal drugs in America cross our southern border and that is
according to the DEA. That is $65 billion worth. That is marijuana,
methamphetamine, and heroin that comes in from China and gets funneled
up this way. It is cocaine that comes from Colombia.
Colombians used to have a pretty lucrative trade on cocaine until the
Mexican methamphetamine brought their market down; and on top of that,
when September 11 came, we tightened up the security of our airports,
and it is a lot harder for them to smuggle cocaine into the United
States. So now they have a transportation route that comes up around
the inside of the gulf, along the rail line in Mexico, a lot of it
controlled by MS-13, the most brutal gang this continent has ever seen.
But you have Colombian cocaine, you have Mexican methamphetamine, you
have Chinese heroin and Mexican marijuana coming into this country,
totaled up value, $65 billion. Now, the force of a $7- or $8-an-hour
job for someone that wants to come and pick lettuce, tomatoes or apples
or whatever it might be, that is one thing. Somebody wanting to walk
across the desert to pick apples, it is hard to fathom somebody that
wants a better life that much, although we have to sympathize with that
and solution-wise in fixing Mexico, not in draining off all of the
discontent, and the poor people that are in Mexico and in the United
States. But the problem is we can deal with that.
What we have not done is taken steps against the $65 billion worth of
illegal drugs; and as I go down there, Madam Speaker, and I sit along
that border at night and listen to the infiltration of the illegals
sneaking through the brush, being unloaded out of the vehicles, picking
up their packs and marching off through the brush, when it gets light
and I go and look at the tracks and see where they are marching off
through the desert and they are carrying a 50-pound pack of marijuana,
pack trains of people, 10 or a dozen or 50 or even as high as 100
people, each with 50 pounds of marijuana on their back, marching across
the desert because they cannot drive a vehicle across there in some of
those locations now because we put in vehicle barriers, well, the
vehicle barriers are environmentally friendly. They have let the desert
antelope crawl through. And a man with 50 pounds of marijuana can throw
his pack through there, crawl through, put on his pack and walk across
the desert. That is what is going on
So we need to force all traffic through the ports of entry. That is
my mission. That is why I believe we need to build physical barriers to
do that, Madam Speaker.
So I have designed one. I have spent my life in the construction
business. We build things, design things, pour structural concrete,
make it out of steel. You name it, we have done it. Mostly it is
earthwork of all kinds. So I submit that on this desert floor, when I
go down there, it lays pretty good for this job.
I would, Madam Speaker, dig a trench like this in the desert floor,
dig a trench down through that desert floor, and I will demonstrate
another thing. As that trench is dug, we pull a slip form trencher
right along behind it. It will be pouring concrete right in the trench.
As you move the trench, the concrete would move along like that. You
come along in a couple of days when this cures, leave a slot in the
middle, and start setting precast panels right up in this slot that I
have. These would be already made, already cured. They would be about
10 feet wide or 13\1/2\ feet long, and they are designed to be a 12-
foot high constructed height.
And we just pick them up with a crane, set them in like that. You can
see how easy this is, Madam Speaker. Once you get the trench and the
footing poured, it is a simple task to set the precast concrete panels
right into the footing and into the slot.
Now, that builds us a 12-foot high concrete wall. I do not submit
that this wall be built right on the border because I think it is
important for us to be able to do surveillance on both sides of this
wall.
{time} 2300
I would submit that right on the border, we put up a 10-foot-high
chain link fence, a chain link fence with about four barbs tipped out
to the south. I would hang a sign about every quarter of a mile, in
Spanish, that tells people go to this Web site or go to the U.S.
consulate and here is where you apply to come into the United States
legally. That would be my approach.
And then, when they cut through the fence, when they dug under the
fence,
[[Page H5272]]
when they went around it, over it, or through it, whatever they did,
that would tell us that is a location where we need to beef it up.
And I would pull back 60 feet. I would put this footing in, and I
would drop this concrete fence, and they will have demonstrated that we
need it because they have violated the one that was the lighter fence
that they didn't respect.
And so, we have this concrete wall. It is about 6 inches thick. It
ends up 12 feet high, 10-foot-wide panels, one after another. And our
little construction company could toss together about a mile a day of
this once we got going. Now, we won't be bidding any project like this,
but we have the capability of doing it is my point.
And certainly there would be a little bit of engineering design that
would be touched up on it. But this is basically the design that I
believe we would be ending up with. It costs about $1.3 million a mile.
Now we are spending $8 billion on our southern border, $8 billion.
That is $4 million a mile every year, and we are paying Border Patrol
people to drive back and forth on HUMVEES, to park and look at it and
be a deterrent just for being there, and we are paying all the
administration that it takes to support the people and, of course,
their weapons and all the technology.
And I am for supporting this wall with additional technology. And it
is okay with me if they want to fly drones around and let us know when
people are approaching the wall. But I will tell you, they will find
that this wall doesn't let them cross it.
And people will say, well, if you build a 12-foot wall, I will show
you a 12-foot ladder. And that might happen, Madam Speaker. So I have a
little bit of a solution for that. And that solution consists of, this
is actually a little piece of solder, but just a little nice little
concertina wire to put on top of this wall as a deterrent. Easily
installed. And you can see that it can provide that deterrent effect.
Now, I also submit that we run a little current through this wire,
and that provides also as a deterrent. Now it is up there where you
would have to have a ladder to get your hands on it. But that will keep
people from putting a ladder up against it. And then we will have our
borders respected and protected.
And if we fail to do this, Madam Speaker, we are going to continue to
see 11,000 people a day, one every 8 seconds, $65 billion worth of
illegal drugs pouring across this border.
Whenever we built the fence in San Diego they went around the fence.
And each time that you do that they will go around it because the money
is too great, $65 billion. We have got to shut it off. And we will
build this thing where they don't respect a more modest barrier, and
continue to build until such time as all traffic goes through the ports
of entry. And that means legal and illegal, through the ports of entry.
And then we will beef up our people there. We beef up our technology
there.
And if we do that we can then finally say we have control of this
border. And if we enforce there, if we end birthright citizenship, and
if we enforce employer sanctions, those three things will solve this
issue.
And I would ask the President commit to enforcing our immigration
laws, commit to controlling the border, spend the next years of your
administration establishing that. And when that is done, while the next
President is campaigning for the 2008 election to be sworn into office
here in 2009, that campaign can be about whether or not we need guest
workers in this country and how many we might need and of what skills
they might come from.
But we cannot build a guest worker plan on a false foundation, a
foundation of the promise of enforcement. And the only way we can ever
know that we have enforcement is to actually enforce, prove it can be
done. If we prove it can be done, then we will have something solid to
build this guest worker plan on. But without that, we are building a
guest worker plan on hypotheticals. The hypothetical will be that we
will enforce the law. That has not happened. It has diminished over the
last 20 years. An employer under Bill Clinton was 19 times more likely
to be sanctioned for hiring illegals than under our current President.
And so I am asking, let's enforce the law. Let's demonstrate that we
can do it. Let's put fixtures on the border, because this $1.3 million
per mile is a one-time investment that will free up other people.
As I asked in the testimony down in Laredo of the sector chief for
the Border Patrol there, I said, if you have a wall like this, does it
take more or less border patrol officers to protect that border? And
his answer, even though it isn't the administration's position to
support this, was it takes less border patrol officers to enforce this
wall.
So, Madam Speaker, that is my encouragement for the President. That
is my encouragement for our Commander in Chief. That is my
encouragement for the American people. Stand up and support our
military in the Middle East and defend this country, and we will
continue to be a great Nation.
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