[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 124 (Friday, September 14, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H6054-H6055]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1430
                            FOREIGN AFFAIRS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Burton) for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam Speaker, I have been in this Congress 
for a long, long time, and I have been frustrated a lot. I think maybe 
I have learned a little bit. For any of my colleagues who are in their 
offices watching on television, I thought I would make a few comments 
about some of the things that I hope that they will take as a little 
bit of a lesson for them down the road.
  I have been on the Foreign Affairs Committee for 30 years, and the 
first thing I have learned is you can't make the world over in our 
image no matter how hard we try. There are different cultures, 
different people, different religions, tribal, all kinds of things.
  When we go into another part of the world and try to make them like 
us, we cause a lot of problems, we cost a lot of lives, and we lose a 
lot of money. We should always realize, in the back of our minds, that 
we should do what's in the interest of the United States of America 
first, last, and always and not try to make the world look like us.
  The second thing that I think my colleagues, I hope they realize is 
that we're going to have to work with some pretty unsavory persons 
sometimes.
  Muammar Qadhafi was a terrible, terrible tyrant in Libya. When Ronald 
Reagan had to deal with him after he bombed a nightclub that killed a 
lot of Americans in Germany, Ronald Reagan flew the planes over and 
bombed Qadhafi, and Qadhafi wasn't a problem any more. A lot of people 
were killed, he was almost killed, and he realized that terrorism from 
his country was not going to stand.
  Qadhafi was not a problem for the United States from then on. Now, he 
was a problem in his country. He killed a lot of people, and there 
might have been some more carnage, but it was in his country.
  Because of that, we went into Libya, spent billions of dollars of our 
money. We drove him out of office and had him killed. Now there's chaos 
over there, and they killed our Ambassador. They tortured him, I 
understand--I won't go into details, but it was pretty bad. They killed 
three other people, they burned our flag, and the place is in chaos.
  What did we get when we got rid of Qadhafi? He was a bad guy. He was 
terrible to his own people. But what we have now is a complete chaotic 
situation in that part of Africa. The same thing is true in Tunisia. 
Then, of course, our President went over to Egypt, and he gave a speech 
talking about how we had to all get along, and how there ought to be 
democracy in Egypt.
  Now, Mubarak, who was the dictator over there, was a bad guy; but he 
had lived up to what we call the Camp David accords. The United States 
and Egypt worked together to make sure there was peace in the Middle 
East, and there wasn't any war going on involving Israel or anything 
else.
  But we led the fight to get rid of Mubarak. We did it, along with 
some help, and now Mubarak is gone and we have the Muslim Brotherhood. 
A lot of people don't know much about the Muslim Brotherhood, but they 
have been judged a terrorist organization in the past. I was told, and 
everybody else was told, when the Muslim Brotherhood left that there 
was going to be democracy, freedom, and human rights in Egypt. We had 
78 Coptic Christians just murdered recently.
  As you know, they came over, and a mob--and it was planned, everybody 
knows about it--it wasn't because of that movie. They came over, and 
they scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy, they burned the American 
flag, and they ran around waving the radical Muslim flag. They touted 
their radical leaders as the future leaders of that area. Osama bin 
Laden, they were carrying his picture around saying, we support Osama 
bin Laden.
  Now, this is a country that we just gave $1.5 billion to, our money. 
The reason we gave them that money is because we've been paying them 
for years and years to make sure that they lived with the Camp David 
Peace Accords, which meant that there would be peace between Egypt and 
Israel and throughout the Middle East. Mubarak is gone, the Muslim 
Brotherhood's in charge, and there's chaos in Egypt, and the entire 
Middle East is threatened further.
  When you look across the northern tier of Africa, I hope my 
colleagues will realize, we've tried to create governments that agree 
with us and look like us and that will be tokens of the United States 
of America. Instead of leaving them alone, we have helped create chaos.
  Now, I just got back from the Persian Gulf recently. I was in 
Bahrain, and Bahrain is a friend of ours. We have the Fifth Fleet 
there, which patrols the entire Persian Gulf, protecting those 
waterways, and we get about 35 percent of our energy from that part of 
the world.
  Iran is sending people into that country to undermine that government 
and stir up the people. It's the same thing that happened in Libya, the 
same thing happened in Egypt, and now it's happening in the Persian 
Gulf states. We get a third of our energy from there. If we don't get 
that energy, if we don't become energy independent, we are going to 
have the lights off one of these days, and we're going to be paying 
about $5 or $6, $7, $8 a gallon for gasoline. It will hurt the entire 
economy.
  Now, this isn't baloney; this is fact. The radicals are working that 
entire region to take over, and we're trying to help these radicals or 
have helped these radicals or have helped these radicals in a number of 
countries, and now we've got a real chaotic mess on our hands.
  Yesterday, my colleagues overwhelmingly passed a continuing 
resolution. Most people don't know what that is, but it's a spending 
bill that takes us from now until March of next year. I came down to 
the floor when the discussion was going on the recommittal motion, and 
I said, tell me, is any of that money going to Libya or Egypt? Nobody 
would answer me. I can tell you right now additional monies are going 
to go to Libya, additional money is going to go to Egypt, and both of 
those countries are not friends of the United States.

  A gentlewoman from Congress told me yesterday she was in Egypt not 
long ago, and she talked to one of the members of the Muslim 
Brotherhood. She said, What are the goals that you have? He said, Our 
goal is the Muslim Brotherhood is to have the al Qaeda flag, the Muslim 
Brotherhood flag, fly over the White House in the United States.
  He may have been exaggerating a little, but if you look at what the 
Muslim Brotherhood has said just recently, and their new president, 
they said they weren't going to involve themselves so deeply in 
government over there. They took over the legislative branch, they have 
taken over the presidency. Their president recently said he wanted to 
model their government after Iran.
  Egypt is the biggest country in the Middle East, but we went in 
there. Our President went in there and gave a speech. We said we wanted 
to change that and get rid of the dictator, Mubarak, who was not a good 
guy. At least he supported the Camp David Peace Accords, which Jimmy 
Carter worked on, all the way up to now, and now we've got a chaotic 
situation over there. We can't make the world over in our image.
  We should not try to nation-build. You know, I supported it. I 
supported our efforts when we went into Iraq because I thought we had 
to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and I thought we had to stop the movement 
of radical Islam in its tracks. I thought democracy would be a good 
thing there.
  If you look at what's happened, the democracy there is, although it's 
a fledgling democracy, is very rocky, and they are very close to Iran. 
They have met with the Iranian leaders, Ahmadinejad, and so this 
nation-building we did in Iraq right now I think is still tenuous.

                              {time}  1440

  I'm not sure it's going to work out. And we spent billions and 
billions and

[[Page H6055]]

maybe trillions of dollars over there and lost a lot of lives. And then 
in Afghanistan. And I support going after the Taliban. I think we ought 
to get rid of those guys. We ought to stop the terrorists. It's 
extremely important. But the one thing that I think that's very 
important when we go after these guys is we make absolutely sure that 
we're going to get them and we're going to win. And the problem we had 
with Afghanistan after losing all these lives and costing all this 
money is that we're going to pull out in about a year and a half, and, 
in my opinion, that whole area is going to be again in a state of 
turmoil and we will have spent billions of dollars, our treasure, and a 
lot of lives, and it will still not be stabilized. And I think that's 
really unfortunate because of the problems that we thought we were 
going to solve by going in there.
  One of the things that bothers me is every time we have a war, we 
think we can have a war that's antiseptic. That we're not going to kill 
any civilians. You can go in and attack an area and kill the Taliban or 
al Qaeda, and you have to be real careful that you don't damage or kill 
civilians. And as a result, al Qaeda and the Taliban, they hide behind 
civilians. They go into schools and churches and they go into hospitals 
because they know that they can't be attacked unless we go in and there 
are innocent lives lost.
  We've faced the same thing in World War II. And people don't remember 
this, but we had to do things to win that war to stop Adolf Hitler, 
Mussolini, and Tojo that we would never want to do. We firebombed 
Dresden, Germany. We firebombed Berlin. We dropped nuclear weapons on 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We killed millions of innocent human beings. 
But that was the horrible cost of war.
  Now, today, with the television and the Internet and everything else, 
we go to war and the next day you see somebody that's injured, a woman, 
a child, and they say, This is horrible. We can't conduct this war. So 
our military is handcuffed. They say that they can't go in and go after 
these guys in certain areas because of the potential civilian 
casualties. And you can't run a war like that. You either go in to win 
or you don't go in at all. And we should not risk American lives and 
treasure unless we're going in to win.
  That's why when I think back on Iraq, I think that maybe we should 
have gone in and beat the hell out of Saddam Hussein, let them know 
that we weren't going to put up with that, and then pulled out and say, 
Hey, you've got a country, you run it properly. But if you conduct 
yourself in the way you did before, we'll be back. It would have scared 
Iran to death. It would have scared the Taliban to death. But instead, 
we went in there to nation build. And 10, 12 years later we face much 
of the same thing that we faced back then.
  The other thing I think that's important for Congress to do--and we 
don't do it--is when the administration, I don't care whether it's a 
Democrat or Republican administration, when they make a mistake, we in 
the Congress must speak out. We must not just go along with the 
administration, whoever it is, because we want to keep a good 
relationship with them. Our responsibility as Congress is to make sure 
that the Government of the United States doesn't go awry. And I've seen 
time and time again in the years I've been here where Presidents have 
made a mistake and we stay here and we're strangely silent.
  We have to speak up. We have to let the American people know when 
mistakes are made and that we have to correct them. And we must not let 
unelected bureaucrats decide all of our foreign policy. We have people 
at the State Department, people in our government, people who are 
unelected who make decisions that really lead us in the wrong 
direction. And I speak, again, for the administration and the State 
Department when I talk about Libya. We went in there and what did we 
get? We got rid of Qadhafi. Now there's chaos. Now they're attacking 
our embassy and burning our flag and waving around al Qaeda flags and 
talking about how the world will be better off if all the Muslim 
radicals are in charge.
  The same thing is true in Egypt. We went in and got rid of Mubarak. 
And what did we get? We got the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Muslim 
fundamentalist group that wants to destroy the freedoms that we believe 
in, not to mention our best ally in the entire region, Israel. And 
Israel is the only place over there that we can count on if everything 
goes wrong. And so our State Department and the administration and 
previous administrations have made these kinds of mistakes, and we've 
been strangely, strangely silent.
  So I would just like to end up by saying to my colleagues we should 
profit from our past mistakes. We should make sure that we don't try to 
nation build. We can't make the world over in our image. It's not 
possible. We have to work with unsavory leaders sometimes, people that 
we don't like, that we don't think are good people, because of 
stability in the region and because of America's interests. Our 
interests ought to be number one.
  The protection of our country ought to be number one. The protection 
of our soldiers and the people who go to war and the people of this 
country ought to be number one. And of secondary importance are the 
lives of these people in these countries that are radical. But we 
haven't been doing that. But that ought to be our number one goal, the 
United States, first, last, and always. And we should not turn over to 
unelected bureaucrats the control of our foreign policy. We should 
listen to them. We should have our ambassadors over there. We should 
have good people over there like the ambassador that just lost his 
life. But the final decisions ought to be brought before the committees 
of the Congress, and we ought to discuss them and we ought to 
participate in the decisionmaking process with the Commander in Chief 
and not let unelected leaders, bureaucrats make those decisions.
  Finally, we must remember we should never go to war unless we realize 
the cost that is going to be involved. You cannot win an antiseptic 
war. You can have a tenuous peace. We had that in Korea. We still have 
a potential war over there in the 38th parallel. We didn't go in, and 
we didn't win it, so now we have the Communists up north and the 
freedom-loving people down south. We went into North Africa, into 
Somalia, and we tried to nation build there. And we had to pull out 
because you couldn't get it done. We've gone all over the place and 
tried to nation build, and we've gone all over the world and tried to 
make the world over in our image, and we've gone all over the world and 
tried to fight antiseptic wars, and they just don't work.

  If you're going to fight a war, you have to go in and win it and then 
leave and do what is right for America. You can't stay there for 8, 10, 
12 years and try to nation build. Because ultimately you lose a lot of 
life, you spend our treasure, and you don't get the job done. And I'm a 
conservative. I'm one of those guys that is one of the strongest 
supporters of the military in the entire Congress, and I'm one of those 
people they call a hawk and one of those people that says: Get the bad 
guys, wherever they are.
  But I've learned over the past 30 years that you have to do certain 
things if you're going to make America great and survive as a Nation. 
And those things are very important. You can't make the world over in 
our image. You have to work with some leaders in other parts of the 
world that are not savory people because of our interests and our 
stability. You can't spend our money and our treasure and the lives of 
Americans without going in to win. And you can't fight an antiseptic 
war.
  If we go in, and we go in to win, we're going to have to take some 
innocent lives. And it's a tragic thing. But that's the way that war 
is. And the reason Dwight Eisenhower and the American forces were so 
great and so successful in World War II in Europe and in Japan was 
because we went in and we did what had to be done to win. And if we 
hadn't done that, we might all be speaking German today.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________