[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 194 (Monday, December 10, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H9814-H9818]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           IGNORANCE OR EVIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bergman). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Virginia (Mr. Garrett) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GARRETT. Mr. Speaker, over Thanksgiving, I had the amazing 
opportunity to accompany some impressive individuals and thought 
leaders from the Freedom Research Foundation, on my own dime and my own 
time, into Iraq and northeastern Syria.
  There was a debate that ran between myself and one of these 
individuals over what was more dangerous, ignorance or evil. 
Ultimately, I suggest that perhaps ignorance is dangerous and evil is 
dangerous, but the most dangerous thing might be the ignorance of evil 
itself. In order to vanquish evil, we must first vanquish ignorance. We 
must recognize the evil that exists in order to correct it.
  Tonight, to that end, I will speak to the realities on the ground, 
not only in the Middle East, but in so many parts of the world, but 
specifically in Iraq and Syria right now as I speak. If we don't get 
this right, not only will innumerable lives vanish, but entire cultures 
will vanish.
  To my left is an image of individuals restrained and then set on 
fire, one of many barbaric acts that I could have chosen to visually 
depict the horrors that have been visited upon this region since the 
rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war began.
  Edmund Burke once said--and I will paraphrase, ``The only thing 
necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.'' I 
might submit that the only thing worse than doing nothing is doing the 
wrong thing. All too often in the Middle East Western governments' 
policies are some combination of the two: nothing and the wrong thing.
  There are any number of ways to illustrate this, but one might be 
this depiction of an individual who was actively committing atrocities 
against

[[Page H9815]]

their fellow man and who was later welcomed into a Western nation as a 
refugee. That he went through a vetting process and was deemed to be a 
refugee from the very horror which he perpetrated is an anecdotal but 
very real evidentiary indicator of the fact that sometimes governments 
get it wrong.
  We have gotten it wrong enough in this part of the world recently 
that we have seen not only ethnic cleansing but genocide on a scale 
that really and truly is hard to imagine the mirror of--perhaps 
Cambodia, certainly during the Second World War. In fact, I spent the 
better part of a year living in a tent in the former Yugoslav Republic 
of Bosnia because of ethnic cleansing and genocide. But let's put this 
in light.

                              {time}  2030

  We look the other way or do nothing so often that it becomes almost 
second nature. In 70 years, as civil war has raged in Burma, minority 
peoples--the Chin; the Kachin; the Wa; the Shan; and now, finally, 
receiving some attention, the Rohingya--are persecuted, exterminated, 
and displaced by a raging government.
  And the West is quiet, perhaps not because we condone it but because 
we are not aware of it.
  In Rwanda, over a period of 100 days, we lost about 10,000 lives a 
day. That is a million people.
  In Bosnia, 8,000 were killed in Srebrenica in 1995.
  These war crimes begat the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal 
for the former Yugoslavia. Yet, as we see ISIS rolled up into its final 
stronghold in the Deir ez-Zor province of Syria, with fighting 
currently going on as we speak around Hajin, no similar thing exists.
  In fact, we see individuals whom we can identify who have immigrated 
to Europe who have not at all been held to account. That, in itself, is 
a shame and a tragedy and something that I would hope to see corrected.
  But in Syria and Iraq not only have we done nothing; we have gotten 
it wrong. We gave roughly a billion dollars to the Free Syrian Army. 
Components of the Free Syrian Army included Jabhat al-Nusra, which was 
essentially al-Qaida--we have now armed and funded al-Qaida to fight 
ISIS--components now of antiregime forces like al-Sham, which has been 
co-opted by an expansionist, arrogant, hostile, evil Turkish leader 
named Erdogan. And, in the meantime, we have seen any number of 
minority communities persecuted, displaced, murdered, and raped across 
the region.
  To my left, your right, you will see a pie chart. It is 100 percent 
of a pie chart. That represents the approximately 3 million Christians 
in Iraq and Syria at the high point of their population in the 21st 
century. What remains of that pie chart is that: 2.7 million human 
beings displaced, raped, murdered, tortured, et cetera. And we have 
done nothing, truly, to effectively stop this.
  There was lament from the White House and many others, myself 
included, about the disproportionate numbers of individuals admitted as 
refugees by virtue of how it reflected the total population of these 
areas and their faith. But the answer is not to remove Christians or 
Yazidis or Circassians or Armenian minorities from Iraq and Syria; it 
is to create a circumstance where they can live in their home safely 
without fear.
  Yet we haven't done that. Mr. Speaker, 2.7 million, ballpark. Again, 
you can go to CIA World Factbook or any number of sources. That is 
three people displaced, killed, et cetera, roughly, for every one in 
Rwanda. That is 325 people displaced or killed for every one in 
Srebrenica.
  And we sit. And our foreign policy seems to be driven, oftentimes, by 
whatever the largest interests at play are. We are much more concerned 
with what the Russians are doing, with what the Turks are doing, with 
what the Iranians are doing. I could say what the regime was doing, but 
I have already mentioned the Russians.
  I understand that from a geopolitical sort of big-picture scale, but 
I would submit the following, Mr. Speaker: If you want to get the big 
things right, you must first start by getting the small things right. 
If you want to understand what is going on in the world and get it 
right for tomorrow so that we can prevent this sort of suffering and 
inhumanity in the future, then you must first find those who share your 
values and align with them today.
  What are these atrocities that have been committed, specifically 
against the Christian community but not exclusively, against the Yazidi 
community, against Shia or Sunni, depending upon who had the upper 
hand, where, and when--crucifixions?
  There is a cottage industry in kidnapping and ransom. At one point, 
over 200 Christians were kidnapped and ultimately ransomed off for 
millions of dollars, which then went to fund the very entities that 
kidnapped them to begin with.
  And when things didn't move quickly enough, Mr. Speaker, three 
innocent people were murdered just to make a point. We didn't hear 
about it on the nightly news.
  We see a displacement and an ethnic cleansing taking place 
particularly in Iraq, where collaborators search through titles and 
then find a cousin and take a deed and sell it to someone who has been 
selected by entities that seek to change the demographic makeup of an 
area, who is of a particular faith.
  So the Shabak population, perpetually a victim population in itself, 
has been moved into Christian areas to repopulate them with those who 
will be complicit in the rearrangement of entire regions.
  In fact, before the conflict in Iraq, there were vibrant, thriving 
Christian communities in Bosra, in Baghdad and Mosul. Now we have seen 
them rolled up, pushed out of the country, murdered, and then, now, 
essentially contained, by and large, in an end of a plain.
  The Khabur River area in Syria was under siege by ISIS, where 
churches and homes were destroyed, but where, also, the regime of 
Bashar al-Assad dropped bombs from aircraft.
  And if this victimization isn't bad enough, it is multiplied by the 
fact that ISIS and those who fight against ISIS, in the case of the 
Free Syrian Army, hold with great disdain the West. And so, therefore, 
if you happen to be Christian, you are identified by default as pro-
Western, and, therefore, the argument is let them help you.
  Well, these people are not any more Western than I am Middle Eastern, 
but they are victims of that perception. And we do nothing.
  So we know that minority groups have been victimized by Sunni 
extremists and ISIS, Shia extremists, Hezbollah, radical elements of 
the PMU, the Hashd al-Shaabi, by the Free Syrian Army, by Turkey and 
their co-opting of some of these very elements, by Russia, and by the 
regime, who not only drops chemical weapons on those who oppose them in 
regime-controlled areas, but also in the areas that are not.
  All of these exploit or target religious minorities in order to 
maintain political power. And it is a play that is as old as tyranny 
itself, that you would find a minority group that was large enough that 
everyone might know someone in that minority group and then ascribe to 
them all the problems of your society; and then, in creating a victim, 
unite your society against that minority group in order to maintain 
your own power.
  It is the face of evil.
  And who does this? Well, the regime, Russia, but Turkey. Turkey, in 
particular, has been guilty and, I think, is egregiously so by virtue 
of the fact that we refer to them constantly as our NATO ally.
  Turkey has taken the occasion of calamity in Syria in order to 
enhance and expand Turkey itself. This is absolutely, positively, 
unequivocally undeniable.
  To my left, your right, you see pictures of the entrance to the 
hospital in Afrin, along with al-Bab and Jarabulus areas that the 
Turkish have taken military control of under the auspices of a cleverly 
named marketing ploy called Euphrates Shield, which tacitly was 
designed to help root out ISIS.
  If indeed this was designed to help root out ISIS, why do Turkish 
flags fly above the buildings in Afrin as opposed to Free Syrian flags?
  Why is it that the sign in front of the hospital is no longer in 
Kurdish and Arabic but now in Turkish and Arabic?
  Why are they changing the names of the streets in Afrin to Turkish 
names?
  Why have they changed the language in which students are taught in 
school?

[[Page H9816]]

  Why is the police force in Afrin equipped with Turkish equipment 
swearing allegiance to Erdogan, speaking Turkish, and imposing a 
Turkish will upon a people who are not even ethnically Turkish?
  In fact, to compare Afrin or Jarabulus or al-Bab to the Sudetenland 
is to forget the fact that there were actually Germans in the 
Sudetenland when it was ceded to Hitler.
  So we have seen an expansionist Turkey use the calamity of ISIS and 
the Syrian civil war to grab land and then impose upon a people a 
language that is not their own, rules that are not their own, 
enforcement that is not their own, and tyranny that is not their own.
  And this is the tip of the iceberg. These are our NATO allies. They 
spend millions of dollars a month in this city to influence policy and 
opinion. They put our air base at Incirlik under siege, quite 
literally, cutting water and power to that facility where nuclear 
weapons are stored and, candidly, were a scintilla away from storming 
the gates and visiting unimaginable terror on our servicemen and -women 
stationed there.
  They brutalized, kicked, stomped, punched, and hit with ASPs and 
wands American citizens on American soil.
  They attacked and killed civilians in Syria with U.S.-made weapons, 
F-16s, and now we are going to sell them F-35s?
  Erdogan speaks in favorable terms of the Nazis. Turkey, our NATO 
ally, is engaged in three-party talks regarding the future of Syria 
with such global good actors as Iran and Russia, negating the thoughts 
or interests of their ``NATO allies'' or, more importantly in my 
estimation, the very people who suffer under their jackboot.
  They have imprisoned over 50,000 people as a result of an uprising 
and have been rated to have one of the least free presses on the planet 
Earth.
  They conflate truth with fiction, and they manipulate U.S. policy by 
conflating the YPG with the PKK and the PKK in Syria with the PKK in 
Turkey and, even now, are demanding a ``Kurdish withdrawal'' from 
Manbij, where I met with members of the military council, suggesting 
that the YPG unilaterally controls Manbij.
  Well, I have news for you, Mr. Erdogan. It has already been done. The 
SDF controls Manbij, and the leaders of that military council might 
have some Kurds among them, but they also include Arabs and Christians 
and everyone else who lives in that region.
  And we are negotiating with them over this because they play word 
games and they are a step ahead of us.
  One of the most amazing stories I heard was outside Jarabulus at the 
front lines from a local commander who said that when the Turks came 
into Jarabulus, the ISIS fighters that the Turks said they had 
vanquished never actually vanished but only changed uniforms.
  In fact, where I stood, machine-gun fire had impacted that same very 
day from forces of the Free Syrian Army who sat about 3 kilometers in 
front of the Turkish military base on that side of the line.
  In other words, and I can tell you this based on my time in a 
uniform, if Turkey didn't want them to be there, they wouldn't be 
there. And what was ISIS that the Turkish said they would vanquish is 
now the same people in different uniforms working for Turkey, spreading 
the same sort of terror.
  And they have the hubris to demand that the Syrian Democratic Forces, 
which are a multiethnic, tolerant, pluralistic group which represents 
the various ethnicities and religions of the individuals on the ground, 
is synonymous with the Kurdish element, the YPG, which, yes, indeed, 
had a great deal to do with liberating Manbij from ISIS but is no 
longer responsible for that area. Why? So that they can co-opt control 
of that area without firing a shot.
  And I can assure you of this: The people there are rightly afraid.
  And as if Turkey was not bad enough, Mr. Speaker, Iran. We, the 
United States, withdrew from Iraq to maintain a political promise, thus 
creating a vacuum, and everyone knows that power abhors a vacuum. And 
so when that vacuum was created, the Iranian regime took advantage of 
years of exploitation of Shia in Iraq by Sunni and the Hussein the 
Ba'athist administrations and essentially flipped the script.
  Now, there are people in Baghdad who are working very hard to get 
this right. We have friends in Baghdad, but Iran is working, as we 
speak, to undermine this fact.
  They promote and fund ethnic cleansing. They help to move properties 
where Christians or other minorities have been displaced into the hands 
of other groups, which will change the composition of the area, thus 
allowing them greater ease in control. They have killed, maimed, 
injured innumerable of our brothers and sisters, Iranian weaponry on 
the battlefield in Iraq.
  And then there is the regime and Russia. So many people suggest that, 
perhaps, in the Middle East, in Syria in particular, there are no good 
guys. Well, there are. And the regime and Russia have sought to play 
this to their advantage.
  Make no mistake; the Russians don't care so much about the Assad 
regime as they do about a warm-water port in the Mediterranean, which 
has been a dream in Russia since the czars, transit to the Atlantic 
through the Mediterranean without the need to cross the Bosporus out of 
the Black Sea.
  But they have also weaponized religious leaders against their own 
people, essentially creating circumstances wherein, if bishops and 
patriarchs told the whole story about what was happening to their flock 
on one side of an imaginary line, they might endanger their flock on 
another.

                              {time}  2045

  They have bombed not only their own civilians but the Khabur River 
Valley in areas they didn't control, and then stood back and gladly 
blamed those atrocities on other parties. And they do this because we 
don't understand exactly what is being done.
  So we have identified the problems, but what are the solutions? Long-
term solutions mean getting the little things right first. To get the 
little things right, we have to find the people who share our values. 
And they do exist.
  What can we do to this end? In Iraq, I think, recognizing the KRG as 
a self-governing subentity of a greater Iraq, their legitimacy, and 
then fostering and encouraging their devotion to pluralism.
  We talk about atrocities committed. It is interesting how many times 
I heard the story of a million Christians murdered at the hands of the 
Ottoman Turks, having contracted the Kurdish population in 1915. And so 
the Christians said when the Iraqi government forces pulled out from in 
front of the Christian towns, particularly the Nineveh Plains, and left 
them exposed and defenseless to the rise of ISIS, they knew--they just 
knew that no one would help because the Kurds had not been their 
friends 100 years earlier. And yet it was these Kurds who stepped in 
and stopped ISIS, at least long enough for people to flee with their 
lives.
  And so this commitment to religious minorities to other minorities is 
perhaps bred of the fact that the Kurds themselves, within the greater 
nation of Iraq, are a minority. But I am not terribly concerned with 
where it comes from. I have more concern with what the result is.
  So if there is a commitment to tolerance anywhere that has been 
demonstrated on the ground in Iraq, it is in the subregion of Iraqi 
Kurdistan. This is a shared value. These are people with whom we can 
work.
  We should insist that Iraqi authorities in the central government in 
Baghdad adhere to their own constitution. What I do mean by that? Well, 
in the Iraqi constitution, there is a revenue-sharing agreement that 
creates a federalist system by virtue of funneling moneys to areas 
based on population, et cetera. And for years on end, this very money 
was lorded over the Kurdish regions in order to demand compliance.
  And, again, I am not advocating for an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. I 
am advocating for a self-administrating subentity of a greater Iraq. 
But if we are going to help the Iraqis, we need to demand that they 
actually follow their own constitution, because they are right now 
weaponizing against the very people that they purport to serve.
  We should direct U.S. aid in any form that it is administered to the 
government at the closest level to the people. Decentralize--as Thomas 
Jefferson once said, that government closest to

[[Page H9817]]

the people governs best and is most easily held to account.
  Too often American aid is pilfered along its way from the United 
States through a central government to a regional government to a local 
government or entity. Let's find the good guys. Send it straight to 
them.
  How do you do this? Well, within these subregions, we can find other 
subregions. For example, the Nineveh Plains in Iraq. I have spoken with 
Prime Minister Barzani, with the interior minister, with the finance 
minister--entire communities, literally towns and cities pushed free of 
their generational inhabitants that could come back and create a 
bastion of tolerance and adversity inside of a region that knows far 
too little of both.
  And so the establishment of a Nineveh Plains Council and the 
directing of aid to that Nineveh Plains Council, not as an independent 
entity of a nation of Iraq or from Iraqi Kurdistan, but there within, 
in the Federalist construct, we would be siding with those who share 
our values to create outcomes that are consistent with our values.
  And let me articulate briefly on what those values are: that all 
people are created equal and endowed by their creators with inalienable 
rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness.
  Now, if I could spend 11 days in the United States of America and 
hear Jefferson and Locke and Hobbes and Madison and Mason quoted nearly 
as often as I did in north and eastern Syria or northern Iraq, I would 
think we were getting civics and history right. But these common values 
are what we will build a sustainable and peaceful future on.
  Support concrete steps to establish a true multiethnic, 
multireligious, pluralistic government in Iraq. The framework exists. 
So, for example, if Iraq is the United States, then Iraqi Kurdistan is 
California, and Nineveh Plains is Los Angeles, and separate, between 
these entities, into the appropriate realms, those government 
structures of each.
  In other words, the political leaders shouldn't be making religious 
decisions. The religious leaders shouldn't be making political 
decisions. The economic leaders shouldn't be making security decisions. 
And security leaders shouldn't be making economic decisions. This isn't 
Tom's idea. These folks have figured this out. What we are not doing is 
helping them get it right.
  Again, if Iraq is the United States, then the KRG is California, and 
Nineveh Plains is Los Angeles. Get Los Angeles right, it will help 
California. Get California right, it will help Iraq.
  And the same can be said in Syria. What does right look like? Again, 
repeatedly, people coming to me saying: Well, Mason said; Madison said; 
the Declaration said; the Constitution said. The SDC, the Syrian 
Democratic Council, governs north and eastern Syria, again, just like a 
State government might govern a subentity of the United States. There 
is not some desire for independence from Syria, but instead for a 
greater Syria that respects basic human rights and freedoms. These are 
American values and ideas.
  And it is not just the SDC in north and eastern Syria. They have 
separate councils in every single town, and these towns' councils look 
like the towns.
  If a population of Circassians exist, the Circassians have 
representation. There are more women in leadership positions by 
proportion in north and eastern Syria than there are in the United 
States House of Representatives. The Turks tell us that north and 
eastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Council, is a subentity of the 
Kurds. The Turks are lying.

  Let me tell you what the Syrian Democratic Council looks like. It 
looks Arab. It looks Kurdish. It looks Christian. It looks Yazidi. It 
looks Circassian. It looks like a man. It looks like a woman. It looks 
liberal. It looks conservative. It looks like you and me.
  And what do we do to get it right? Well, the first thing that we 
could do that wouldn't involve spending a single dime of taxpayer money 
is recognize the right of the Syrian Democratic Council to exist as an 
independent subentity of a greater Syria. Mr. President, you could do 
this with one tweet.
  Again, I am not advocating on behalf of an independent nation in 
north and eastern Syria. I am advocating on behalf of a Syrian nation 
that shares values based on what the leaders in this land that have 
undergone so much tragedy, so much dying, so much rape, have suffered 
through to beget.
  Instead, we shape our policy on what might the Turks do, what might 
the Iranians do. I have got bad news. There is not a darn thing we can 
do to make them like us. Meanwhile, we have got people who inherently 
are drawn to us by virtue of an idea that everyone has a right to go to 
sleep in his or her own community without fear that they won't wake up 
in the morning; who just need us to say: Yes, you have a right to be 
there.
  What other steps? Allow visas for the SDC leaders to get to the 
United States. That is right. They have essentially what is a state 
government. Their leaders aren't allowed to come here. Their leaders 
aren't allowed to walk the halls of this building like leaders from 
every other nation in the world and tell their story.
  Stroke of a pen. Suggest that the values articulated in the SDC 
social contract be mirrored in foundational documents for a new Syria. 
These values include tolerance, pluralism, secular government--not 
secular society--freedom of religion, freedom from religion, equal 
rights for women, no persecution of people based on sexual orientation, 
the right to aspire and attempt and endeavor and succeed. These are 
American values.
  I am not suggesting that we say that the SDC social contract should 
be adopted by all of Syria. I am suggesting that we suggest that when 
we negotiate this, because heretofore they are not even invited to the 
table, that they look at those values and seek to mirror those as part 
of any source of a sustainable future in that country.
  To that end, we should insist on the inclusion and recognition of the 
SDC in any peace negotiations. We should establish immediately a no-fly 
zone over north and eastern Syrian. If the north and eastern Syrian SDC 
doesn't want you flying and the United States doesn't want you flying, 
you can't fly. Why? Well, because the Turks have stationed artillery on 
the border. They have shelled across the border. They have killed 
civilians across the border. The regime has dropped barrel bombs in the 
Khabur River Valley and killed civilians across the border, and the 
SDC--God bless them for trying--doesn't have any way of stopping it.
  We should inform Turkey that the YPG is already out of Manbij and 
that the SDF isn't the YPG. We should inform Turkey, ultimately, that 
they can get out of Syria or they can get out of NATO.
  The farce that suggests that Euphrates Shield is somehow in operation 
where Turkey collaborates with the world to rid it of the evil of ISIS 
is proven false by virtue not only of the horrific atrocities committed 
by the Turks, not only of the allowing of the Turks--of the forces that 
are ostensibly under their control to continue to attack peaceable 
peoples in the region, but also by the renaming of the streets, the 
hospitals, the schools, the police departments in the areas which they 
have occupied under the auspices of combating ISIS.
  When was the last time the United States Army ever liberated an area 
and then changed the language to English and flew the U.S. flag over 
the hospital and the county administration building? These are not our 
allies.
  What can we do to help not only in Syria and Iraq but in both? Make a 
concrete commitment to governments at whatever level--at the local 
level as embodied by the conceptual Nineveh Plains Council; the state 
level as embodied by a KRG, who, while not perfect, is acting a whole 
lot more in alignment with values of tolerance and secularism than 
anyone else in the region; and the Federal level in the instances of 
places like Jordan, make concrete commitments to these people who share 
our values.
  This means more than money. Support Iranian opposition groups, insist 
that our allies ought to do business with us or with the Iranians, 
suspend the sale of weapons to Turkey until the Turks begin to behave 
like a nation that belongs amongst the community of nations.
  In closing, Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be an American. I am proud of 
American values. But we, like all human beings, are imperfect.

[[Page H9818]]

  Contrary to the thoughts of some, America is not the source of all 
the world's problems, we are also not the solution. But with great 
power comes great responsibility, Mr. Speaker, and we have been given 
great power.
  It is our duty to get this right. Just like in the parable of the 
talents--to whom much is given, from whom much is expected. There is no 
excuse in remaining ignorant. People are dying. We need to get this 
right.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________