Congressional Record, Volume 160 Issue 21 (Tuesday, February 4, 2014)

[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.

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