[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 21 (Tuesday, February 4, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H1587-H1590]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             FOREIGN POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and this 
great deliberative body that we are part of. I appreciate the delivery 
of Mr. Gingrey a little bit earlier.
  I wanted to take us, if I could direct your attention, Mr. Speaker, 
to the situation in the Middle East. And we know that the implication 
in our Constitution is that the President conducts the foreign policy. 
I would teach that class if I had the time, and I don't disagree with 
that.
  But also, this Congress has responsibility. We have responsibilities, 
for example, that are specific within the enumerated powers of the 
Constitution. And if anyone thinks that the House of Representatives or 
the United States Senate or Congress itself, as a body, doesn't have a 
voice on foreign policy, I would direct them to the enumerated power of 
the power to declare war.
  Certainly, we have also foreign policy responsibilities here, and we 
appropriate funds for foreign aid and a good number of other resources 
that go to help out countries that are either our allies or hopefully 
will become our allies one day. There is a lot that we do that has to 
do with foreign policy. We have a Foreign Affairs Committee. We have a 
Select Committee on Intelligence. We have Armed Services. All of those 
things are committees that deal with issues that have to do with our 
foreign relations and our foreign policy.
  So, because of that, Mr. Speaker, a number of us in this Congress 
have taken a responsibility to step forward and be engaged in foreign 
policy, and also to have a voice and be better informed than simply 
letting the message come from the White House.


            San Joaquin Valley and the Drought in California

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I see that my friend from Utah has 
just filed the rule, and I appreciate the gentleman from Utah, not only 
what he has done here today, but his leadership. I want to take a 
moment to make the message here as the topic that is coming up now is a 
rule that was referenced by the gentleman from Utah about the San 
Joaquin Valley and the drought in California.
  I have traveled out there, and I have been there to see about 250,000 
of 600,000 acres that were manmade drought. And now we have nature-made 
drought that is coupled with the manmade drought, and I intend to 
support the legislation that comes to the floor tomorrow.
  I thank especially the California delegation for leading on this and 
helping the rest of the country understand how important the water 
issues are around the country.
  I have worked with water and water management all of my professional 
life, and these issues come close to home when you either need water or 
you can't get rid of it. And that is what this bill is tomorrow. It is 
about needing water and directing it to the best resources.
  But if I would, Mr. Speaker, revert back to the topic at hand, and 
that is the topic of the foreign policy and the very solid 
constitutional claim that Congress has to be engaged in foreign policy, 
to help manage that foreign policy and to appropriate resources to 
foreign policy.
  To that end, a number of us in this Congress, and not nearly enough 
of us, have been involved in foreign policy and free trade agreements 
and traveled to a good number of countries to engage with people in 
other parts of the world to help stitch together and knit together our 
relationships that are so important.

                              {time}  1700

  So if I could, Mr. Speaker, I would like to first paint the big 
picture of what the world looks like. I will offer a little bit of 
history first and then paint a picture of how the globe looks today.
  I will take us back to World War II, which was the most dramatic 
shift in power that the world has seen, at least

[[Page H1588]]

in my understanding of history. We saw the clash of the Imperial 
Japanese and the Nazi regimes that threatened to swamp the entire 
world. Having fought back a world war on two fronts, in Asia across the 
Pacific and in Europe, here in America, we see this as the time that 
America rose to become a superpower. As we saw then, immediately after 
World War II, we saw the Cold War begin, and the Soviet Union formed as 
a product, a part at least, a product of World War II, clashing with 
the United States in that Cold War that lasted for 45 years.
  It was two different ideologies. It is free enterprise, capitalism, 
it is God-given liberty challenged up against the forces of the former 
Soviet Union, which were atheistic and communistic and a managed 
economy from top down.
  We saw what happened. We saw how that was resolved, Mr. Speaker.
  It was described, I think, best by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the 
Ambassador for Ronald Reagan to the United Nations, when she said, some 
time around 1984, as she stepped down as Ambassador to the United 
Nations, she said, What is going on in the world, in this Cold War, in 
this clash, this competition between the two huge ideologies, what is 
going on between the Soviet Union and the United States is the 
equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the 
question is, Will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet 
Union economically in the Monopoly part of the game before the Soviet 
Union checkmates the United States of America in the chess component of 
the game?
  Monopoly and chess on the same board. The Russians, building missiles 
and expanding their military capability and trying to outdo the United 
States to the point where we would have to capitulate while we were 
pushing our economy. This growing, dynamic free enterprise economy was 
competing against the managed economy, the communist economy of the 
Soviet Union.
  And what happened was, the monopoly game, the monopoly winners won 
out, and the Soviet Union was bankrupted, and because of that, the 
country collapsed and imploded upon itself around about 1991, and they 
had to reform back around to--they could say former Soviet Union, 
Russia--Russia and some of its federation countries, safer for the 
world because that clash of the two huge ideologies has been diminished 
significantly. The threat of a nuclear war has been diminished 
significantly thanks to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John 
Paul II, and some will say Gorbachev.
  Those four personalities engaged together were the leadership that 
brought about the dynamic that brought an end to the Cold War. In the 
aftermath of the Cold War, there were those sitting around--cold 
warriors--to celebrate the end of the Cold War, a victory for the free 
world. Not only the United States, but our allies. A victory for the 
free world,
  As they celebrated, they got ready to raise their glasses, one of 
them, one of them said, Just a minute. Don't be too soon to celebrate 
because think of this: The world will not long tolerate a lone 
superpower. There will be allegiances and alliances made that you have 
not imagined that will line up against the United States, and if those 
forces line up against the United States--and they will--we will find 
ourselves with competition and enemies that we have not seen before in 
the world. Some of those will be an alliance that does include Islamic 
nations lined up against the United States.
  That statement was made in the late part of 1991, I believe it was, 
and that would be at least a decade, roughly a decade before the attack 
on the United States on September 11, 2001. That very prescient comment 
that was made before they celebrated the end of the Cold War, before 
the glasses went up, Mr. Speaker, there was a realization that we would 
have new enemies that would form, and they would form coalitions 
against us.
  So because of that, we should be aware of where we are today. Those 
enemies that have formed against us, a lot of them have been radical 
Islamists that have decided that they want to kill Americans because 
they disagree with our ideology. We should not believe that somehow it 
is just a matter of, we live in one place on the globe, and others live 
in another place, and we end up at war with each other with people 
trying to kill us. That is not the circumstances in that way.
  Instead, it is competing ideologies. People that have a different 
belief system. People that believe that they need to have enemies so 
that they could demonize those enemies and mobilize their people, and 
if they can mobilize their people against a demonized enemy, they have 
a better chance of hanging onto power.
  Those are the circumstances in Iran, where they describe the United 
States of America as being ``the great Satan,'' and it is the public 
policy of Iran to declare America to be the great Satan. They teach it 
in their schools, and they are spinning centrifuges for the purposes of 
developing nuclear weapons and a means to deliver them. The President 
has contended that his negotiations with Iran have slowed down their 
nuclear weapons effort, and perhaps they will be able to talk Iran into 
stopping their nuclear efforts.
  Mr. Speaker, I will take you back to September of 2003, where I sat 
in on a meeting with Ambassadors to the United States from France, 
Germany, and the United Kingdom, and they sat around with a group of 
Members. The discussion was about whether we should open up 
negotiations with Iran on their nuclear capability, and after I 
listened to the three of them and every Member that was around that 
table, of which there were not very many. I was the low man on the 
seniority totem pole at the time. I had to wait my turn to speak, of 
course. Then I asked the Ambassadors, Why are you here? What is your 
objective in meeting with us to have this discussion about opening up 
negotiations or a dialogue with Iran? Their answer was, We want to you 
open up dialogue with Iran so that you can help us because we think 
that our three countries--France, the United Kingdom, and Germany--at 
the table with the United States, we have a chance of convincing the 
Iranians not to continue any further with their nuclear endeavors. 
September 2003.

  I listened to that response, and I said, If we open up negotiations 
or open up dialogue with Iran, what are you prepared to do, then, if we 
take step one into these negotiations? Their answer was, We want to 
open up dialogue. That is our objective, as if there wasn't a step two, 
three, four, or five.
  But we know that once you have opened up the dialogue, you have to be 
willing to follow through with something. So I said, If the United 
States steps up to negotiate with Iran, and it is clear that they have 
an objective to develop a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it, if 
the United States steps up and opens that dialogue, then you are 
suggesting that we enter into formal negotiations. In those 
negotiations, you understand that if we fail to convince Iran that they 
should stop nuclear development, are you prepared, then, to go to the 
United Nations for a resolution? Are you permitting sanctions against 
Iran? If the sanctions aren't effective, are you prepared to blockade 
Iran? If you are prepared to blockade Iran, and the blockade is not 
effective, and they continue to develop a nuclear weapon, and somebody 
has got to step up to that line in the sand with men and equipment and 
munitions and military supplies and put blood on the line along with 
the treasure, are you prepared to step up to that line in the desert 
sand? Of course the Ambassadors were real nervous about that discussion 
long before I got to the part about the line in the sand in the desert.
  As they expressed their will, which was, Let's just open up dialogue, 
they had to also recognize that when you open up dialogue, you start 
down the path of dialogued negotiations, United Nations resolution, 
sanction, blockade, and eventually, if Iran is committed, there is 
going to be a showdown.
  I said to them, You see, if we start down this path, we have to be 
prepared to follow all the way through, and let's understand that we 
are prepared before we start because I will tell you that Iran is 
committed to developing a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it. 
They are committed. It isn't just a feint on their part. It isn't just 
a motion in that direction. They are committed, and if we aren't 
committed to go all the way to putting that line in the sand and lining 
up on that line in

[[Page H1589]]

the sand and following through--and I said these words this way--then 
Iran will play us like a fiddle, and when this is all done, they will 
have their nuclear weaponry, and they will have their means to deliver 
it, and we will just look like a bunch of foolish negotiators.
  Mr. Speaker, I bring this up because now here we are, these 10-plus 
years later. Iran is in a position where they would like to have the 
rest of the world think that they have slowed down and maybe given up 
on their efforts to develop nuclear. They still take a public position 
that they never really were developing a nuclear weapon, that they were 
just enriching uranium for the purpose of generating electricity in 
their oil-rich country. Of course no one should have ever bought that 
from the beginning.
  But our administration seems to think that if they negotiate in good 
faith, the Iranians are going to negotiate in good faith. I think it 
indicates some naivete about the minds of the people that want nuclear 
weapons.
  A nuclear weapon capability is far more valuable to Iran in their 
negotiations than talking nice to the United States. Especially, why do 
they care about us four friends if they are teaching their children to 
hate us? If we are the great Satan, they don't have a lot to gain in 
public opinion in Iran by talking to the United States.
  So we should understand their motives. Their motives are to dominate 
that part of the world with a nuclear capability to threaten that part 
of the world. They have already said that they have targets chosen in 
the United States. That is an Iranian public position today, and if you 
look at the method that they could have to deliver a nuclear weapon, 
which might only be weeks or months away--
  We can have inspectors in Iran that are examining anything that we 
want to examine, but that doesn't mean the Iranians don't decide that 
they are going to throw a public relations tantrum and kick all of the 
inspectors out of Iran and only be 2 or 3 months from having that 
nuclear weapon.
  So they can choose now when the time is right for them, when the time 
is right for them politically to make that move. Even if they have 
slowed this down and even if they are not putting more centrifuges in 
place, the question is, are they still spinning? What happened to the 
enriched uranium? Even if they dilute their enriched uranium down below 
20 percent, it is another chemical reaction to enrich it again--it 
doesn't take very long--at best, they have slowed their operations down 
in order to pick up $4 billion or more into their economy that they 
need. Their economy is suffering because of the sanctions.
  So we are being played again. It is just part of the fiddle. We are 
being played like a fiddle. We have been played like a fiddle for the 
last 10 years. The conviction and the resolve from our leaders isn't 
strong enough, and I have said from this floor, Mr. Speaker, that if I 
were the lead guy, the lead person on negotiations with Iran--and I 
will just take us back to the Ahmadinejad era so we can think of the 
personality on the other side of that--we would do it this way:
  I would just simply back-channel information probably through the 
Swiss in the diplomatic channel, back channel in to the Ahmadinejad and 
the mullahs, and it would be this, presuming that I were calling the 
shots here on foreign policy.
  It would be, Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iranian mullahs, I have decided--we, 
here in the United States--but I have decided the date beyond which you 
will not be allowed to continue your nuclear endeavor, and I have taken 
the liberty to put an ``X'' on the calendar that sets that date. Now, 
you don't know that date, but I do, and beyond that date, you will not 
be allowed to continue your nuclear endeavor whatsoever it takes to do 
so, and it will be dramatic, and the world will know. You will 
certainly be the ones to get the first announcement because that is 
when the kinetic action starts. That is the implication--not the word.

  Then I would say, But, you know, if you hustle up and decommission 
and tear down your nuclear development equipment and you do that with 
our inspectors to our satisfaction or with an intermediary that we can 
trust, we will help you with that, and we will help you with some 
resources to do so. We will even help you with public opinion so that 
you can save face as you back up from this clash of civilizations that 
is bound to come if we let you go down this path.
  Again, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you don't know that date, but I do, and we 
can forestall the inevitable if you decommission and tear this down. 
But you have got to mean it. It can't be a bluff. It has got to be a 
real ``X'' on the calendar. It has got to be a real date. Maybe no one 
else knows it. Maybe only the leader of the free world knows that date. 
But he has got to mean it.
  Short of that, we get played like a fiddle, and here we are, 
stretching this thing out again, with the world an ever more dangerous 
place in that part of the world. I can stand there and listen to the 
intellectuals and say--Europe, for example, and I mentioned the foreign 
travel, and listen to them say, Well, of course a nuclear capable Iran 
is preferable to a military strike to take it out. They utter that in 
the same fashion that people in this country would utter, Well, of 
course it is the CO2 emissions from U.S. industry that is 
one day going to cause the Earth's temperature to go up, as if somehow 
that was the conventional knowledge that was accepted by everyone.

                              {time}  1715

  Mr. Speaker, I reject that way of thinking. The idea that a nuclear-
capable Iran is peripheral to a military strike to take it out isn't a 
rational conclusion that one can draw. You have to start with a flawed 
premise to get to that conclusion and say it is rational. There are a 
lot of rational conclusions that are built upon false premises, I might 
add, and that would be one.
  A nuclear-capable Iran threatens all of the Middle East. Their 
immediate target would be Tel Aviv. And Tel Aviv, by the way, is not 
very highly populated with anything other than Jewish people, which 
would be their ideal target. So it is a short missile strike from Iran 
to Tel Aviv. They know that. They certainly know that in Israel. And 
today what they know is they don't have the level of confidence that 
the United States is standing quite as strongly next to Israel as we 
have in the past. That message has been sent by our President in our 
foreign policy for some time.
  The idea that Israel should go back to the '67 borders, as if somehow 
the '67 borders were defensible, well, they were defended in '67 and 
they were defended in '73, but they expanded their defensive borders 
because of that. Israel traded some land for peace. It didn't work out 
very well. The Gaza Strip is a place to launch attacks on the Israelis 
from Lebanon, and Hezbollah is occupying large chunks of Beirut in 
Lebanon. That becomes a place where there are now some tens of 
thousands of missiles that are lined up there aimed at Israel, an ever 
more dangerous place.
  Somehow we think that we can talk nice to the Iranians and they are 
going to treat us nice and somehow good reason is going to get 
something accomplished with negotiations. Mr. Speaker, it is very rare 
to ever see a diplomatic error take place in negotiations. Instead, you 
have to have leverage, and that leverage is going to be economic, 
military, or perhaps political. It could come mostly from other 
entities. If you don't have those forces in place and something that 
you can give, do, or give up, you are not going to just get, well, we 
like you, Mr. President, and you said that if we unclenched our fist, 
you will extend your hand. I didn't see Iran unclench its fist, but I 
saw our hand extended. And some of our hand was played, and some of our 
hand--or whole cards have been seen now and shown to the other side. It 
is a very, very dangerous proposition.
  Looking over there in the same neighborhood as Syria, it became the 
issue du jour that Syria had weapons of mass destruction. It is hard to 
make the case in this Congress that Syria had weapons of mass 
destruction, that, of course, none of them came out of Iraq, because it 
is conventional belief over on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, 
that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, regardless that 
Saddam gassed his own people, regardless that we did secure yellowcake 
uranium in Iraq. We did take it out of Iraq

[[Page H1590]]

and transport it across the Atlantic Ocean, down the St. Lawrence 
Seaway and up to Canada so it could be converted into power generation. 
In spite of all that, nobody seems to think that any of that could have 
gotten across the border or any weapons of mass destruction, such as 
gas, could have gotten across the border into Syria, even though we all 
agree that Assad used gas against his own people.
  We would like to put an end to that. But once the President showed 
his hand on that and the British lost the vote on the floor--I believe 
it was in the House of Commons--the President came to Congress and 
said, well, now I want to strike Syria, and why don't you give me the 
authority to do that? That was an implied directive, Mr. Speaker, not a 
direct one, not a formal one. It was clear that neither the House nor 
the Senate had an appetite to go into military action in Syria.
  So we fell back on Putin and the Russians to be the negotiators with 
the weapons of mass destruction in Syria. We saw the promise that the 
gas was going to be accumulated, picked up and transported out of Syria 
by the end of the year. That was the end of last year, not the end of 
this year, Mr. Speaker. So now it is going to take perhaps another 6 
months and another and another and another.
  It is a static position in the world now where Syria has digressed 
down to the point where it is hard to find a friend in Syria. The 
President said here in this very Chamber at his State of the Union 
address last week that we are going to oppose the regime and we are 
going to support our friends in Syria. It is hard to find friends in 
Syria. This conflict may have gotten to the point where there is 
nobody. Neither side is a side that is either going to support us or 
one that we should support. My message is that Syria has devolved 
downward into a very difficult, static, and ugly situation with a lot 
of blood and death that threaten to spill over.
  Of course, we have the nuclear threat that has slowed down but not 
necessarily been suspended in Iran. In the rest of our foreign 
relations around that part of the world, we are 2\1/2\ years or more 
into the Arab Spring, and in almost every one of those changes--some 
regime changes, some civil war, and some that reached a static 
impasse--the result of that hasn't been favorable to U.S. interests, 
and you can go country after country, the conflicts around.
  So several Members and I took a trip over into that part of the world 
right before Christmas to assess the situation. We need to do that 
because assessing the situation from here, it turns out that there is a 
lot of information that is not very reliable that comes out of the 
White House and the State Department with regard to that part of the 
world. So we traveled into Egypt, into Lebanon, into Libya, and into 
Israel, among other places. We met with their top leaders in most all 
of those countries and on down the line. Of course, we met with our 
State Department and got the in-country briefing.
  It works out that the short version is that Lebanon is a mess. I 
think it is intractable, and I don't know how you resolve it. In Libya, 
the civil war didn't resolve it. The radical militant Islamists still 
control Benghazi, and it is not safe enough to go there for their 
government, let alone for representatives of our government. So Libya 
is at an impasse. They would like to be able to put together a 
functioning government in Libya, and I am impressed with some of the 
people that are in leadership there. But if they can't control 
Benghazi, Benghazi militants can come in and threaten Tripoli, for 
example, and have.

  Egypt, though, Mr. Speaker, has turned, I think, in a very good and 
positive direction in that they rose up and threw Morsi out. Morsi--the 
face and the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country of the 
origin of the Muslim Brotherhood--was rejected by the Egyptian people, 
and 30 to 33 million of 80 million Egyptians went to the streets mid 
last summer to demand that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood be taken 
down and out of the government. It was a popular uprising. And with the 
pleadings of the popular uprising, then you saw the Egyptian military 
take charge. We have met with them, myself eye to eye at least twice 
and at different levels within the government and two different trips 
over there.
  They have written a constitution, one that protects even Christian 
religious interests there and commits resources to rebuilding our 
burned churches in a place like Egypt. They have ratified a 
constitution in that election the 14th and 15th of January. Now you 
have elections set up for a parliament, and behind that, a Presidential 
election. I expect we will see a legitimate civilian government in 
Egypt sometime in less than a half a year. At that point, the voice of 
the Egyptian people at least is structured to be heard through the 
government, a relatively new experience for the Egyptians.
  So there is a lot that has been turning in the world, Mr. Speaker. I 
mentioned the threat to Israel, that we need to stand more closely with 
them, shoulder to shoulder, and make an even stronger commitment to 
support them. They are going to have to face up to and they are going 
to have to decide if they have to take action against an existential 
threat, which is a nuclear-capable Iran.
  We need to decide whom we are going to be friends with. It is not the 
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Even though it looks like this 
administration has lined up with the Muslim Brotherhood, it is not the 
Muslim Brotherhood. The American people don't support the Muslim 
Brotherhood, and they don't support the militant wings and arms that 
are components of the Muslim Brotherhood and those affiliates of those 
militant wings and arms that might say they are not but operate in 
concert, especially in places like Syria.
  We need to understand that this world is lined up to some degree 
against us. We have had friends in that part of the world that go back 
deep and long. Egypt is one of those countries. It was 1954 when 
President Eisenhower made it clear that he was going to stand with the 
Egyptian people. We have had them as allies, and we have worked 
military operations in the Sinai for a long time. We need to restore 
those relationships with the Egyptian people and I think the soon-to-
be-legitimized civilian government of Egypt. We need to let people 
know, like the United Arab Emirates, that we are going to stand with 
them as they are going to stand with us. We want to stand with the 
moderate interests in the Middle East that want to engage in petroleum 
production, diplomacy, and the growth of their own economies.
  We have had a good strong interest in the Middle Eastern part of the 
world, and it has been fractured time after time after time by the 
results of radical Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood coming into these 
countries throughout this long, long period of the Arab Spring, summer 
and fall times 2.5.
  Mr. Speaker, this Nation is looked to by the rest of the world to 
lead. That means we need to have a strong State Department, a strong 
foreign policy, and a clear and coherent moral message. It has got to 
be that we stand with our friends. We should understand that just 
because there is an election in a country, that doesn't mean that 
democracy is going to be manifested or it is going to be the solution.
  Mr. Speaker, we need a stronger foreign policy, we need more Members 
of this Congress taking an interest, and we need a President that gets 
it right.

                          ____________________