[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 14588-14594]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          SPREADING FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Schmidt). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for half the remaining time until midnight.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being 
recognized here in the United States House of Representatives. And I 
came to the floor to talk about a number of things that I am convinced 
are of importance to Americans.
  And as I sat through this discussion over the last 45 minutes or so 
that I have tuned an ear to this, I cannot help but move into some of 
my disagreements with the remarks that were made by some of my esteemed 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
  And I want to state first that I appreciate the tone of their remarks 
tonight. Sometimes they are not so tolerant, they are not so patient, 
and the tone gets a little more intense than it was. It does not change 
my disagreement. I just appreciate the approach that they bring in our 
disagreement. And that is what we are supposed to do here. We are 
supposed to air our differences, Madam Speaker, and lay those things 
out, and the American people tune in on what we do, and they weigh in 
with each of us, and we draw our conclusions based upon our convictions 
plus the input that comes from all over this country.
  So I would first say that the statement was made consistently that we 
invaded Iraq totally on false premises. And, first, I would remind the 
body of resolution 1441, the last United Nations resolution that 
finally was the last straw. There were a number of other resolutions 
that Saddam Hussein violated. And we know that it was not our 
responsibility to prove that he did not have weapons of mass 
destruction. It was his responsibility to comply with the United 
Nations, to comply with the weapons inspectors. He did not do that.
  The war that took place in 1991, Desert Storm, that war was never 
over because it was not completed because Saddam did not comply with 
the conditions of the cease-fire.
  So the resolutions came before the United Nations. Resolution 1441 
was the last-straw resolution, and that was supported by, of course, 
all members of the Security Council, and it passed the United Nations. 
Someone needed to enforce the resolution if the United Nations was to 
have any teeth in anything that they did. If there was to be peace in 
the Middle East, someone had to enforce that resolution. And if we were 
going to keep Saddam Hussein out of his neighbors' territory, like 
Kuwait that he went into that began this in the first place, someone 
had to enforce the resolution.
  So the second generation of Bushes stepped forward and built a 
magnificent coalition, a coalition of more than 30 countries, a 
coalition of the willing that went in and liberated Iraq beginning in 
March of 2003 and crossed that country with armored columns into 
Baghdad, the largest city ever in the history of the world to be 
liberated and occupied by a foreign power. That happened in a matter of 
weeks, Madam Speaker. It was a magnificent military accomplishment. And 
it was done with fewer troops than the first time, I agree.
  But as I listened too, I will not call it the dissent on this side 
because certainly we have not read the majority opinion. I hear from 
this general, he disagreed with the number of troops, and this general 
thought that we could not probably keep the Iraqis on our side, and 
this one thought there was going to be a civil war, and some of the 
people in the CIA disagreed, and a GAO analysis tells us that we really 
should not be there.
  Who are these people, Madam Speaker? Who are they to be directing our 
foreign policy? Are these elected individuals that are the voices of 
the people? Are they the Commander in Chief? Do they speak for the 
Commander in Chief, Madam Speaker? What business do they have weighing 
in? Is their voice in the wilderness of any more volume or any more 
credibility than the next person on the street, the next person that 
might be your neighbor? Do they have any more credibility than the 
elected Members of the United States House of Representatives or the 
United States Senate?
  My answer to that is no. Some of them were involved in foreign 
policy. Some of them were involved in military policy. I will grant 
that. I heard three generals that were named. I think I could probably 
come up with six to nine generals that disagree with the President's 
policy. But if it is nine generals, I will see your nine generals and I 
will raise you 9,000 generals who do not disagree with the President's 
policy and have not disagreed with the President's policy.
  And I would like to lay this out for the mission that it is. There is 
a Bush doctrine, and this Bush doctrine was finally recognized by the 
national news media when on the west portico of this Capitol building, 
President Bush gave his second inaugural address, and in that second 
inaugural address, he laid out his vision.
  Now, it was laid out prior to that. It was laid out at least in his 
State of the Union address January 28, 2003. It was laid out in his 
defense strategy for the United States of America, which came out in 
the previous September, 2002. And he made it clear that his vision was 
to promote freedom, to promote liberty, especially in these countries 
that fostered and bred terrorists. It was a clear policy established. 
``The Nationality Security Strategy of the United States'' was the name 
of the document published in September of 2002. Very consistent with 
the President's speeches. Freedom beats in the heart of every person. 
All people yearn to breathe free. Free people do not go to war against 
other free people.
  And I have often, on the floor of the House of Representatives, Madam 
Speaker, talked about the similarities and the corollaries between the 
end of the Cold War and how we can get to the end of this global war on 
terror. And I point out that November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came 
down. It came down from the force of a people that wanted to be free. 
They yearned to get out of that trap that they were in.

                              {time}  2220

  They yearned to reach across to their fellow man, their neighbors, 
their family members that were divided by that wall down through the 
middle of Berlin. But it was the yearning for freedom that made the 
difference.
  When they climbed up on top of that wall, they took hammers and 
chisels and chipped the stone out and the concrete out, and when they 
broke bottles of champagne on there and climbed up on top and danced 
and sang and celebrated, it was a glorious day.
  Much of the world missed the point. Much of the world, and I remember

[[Page 14589]]

watching the network news media at the time, much of the world was 
talking about how families were being reunited, how important it was 
that we saw this joy of the reunification of families that had divided 
since after World War II.
  As I sat and watched that, it occurred to me that when the Berlin 
Wall came down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down with it. The Cold 
War, the beginning of the end of the Cold War was over. In fact, it was 
over on that day. It took a little while to clean up the mess, but what 
happened when that wall was breached by people that yearned for freedom 
was the echo of freedom. Once they got past that wall, once they got 
through the Brandenburg Gate, it echoed across Eastern Europe. It 
echoed across Eastern Europe with a crescendo. And it was almost a 
blood-free revolution. For practical purposes, it was virtually blood-
free.
  As country after country yearned for freedom, Romania and Poland and 
Czechoslovakia, country after country, the Soviet Union collapsed, 
Madam Speaker and they had a measure of freedom far greater than they 
had ever seen before, and they still have a measure of freedom greater 
than they had seen prior to the end of the Cold War.
  Hundreds of millions of people breathe free today because the Berlin 
Wall came down, because Ronald Reagan's vision, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear 
down this wall.'' When that happened, when that vision was realized and 
freedom echoed across Eastern Europe and hundreds of millions of people 
became free, they stood in the square in Prague and rattled their keys 
together by the tens of thousands and came to power and later had their 
velvet revolution and separated those two countries without blood, and 
they live compatibly today as two separate countries, the Czech 
Republic and Slovakia.
  Those things happened in the blink of a historical eye, and it was a 
historical miracle. But that miracle that we look back on now from a 
period of 15 years or so, 17 years, that miracle that took place was 
the kind of miracle that can be emulated again.
  The second George Bush, Bush 43, came to power, and this Nation was 
attacked. And when this Nation was attacked, it was clear that we had 
an enemy that was determined to annihilate us. They attack our value 
system, they attack our culture, they attack Western Civilization 
itself. And they believe that their path to salvation is in killing 
people who are not like them. In fact, they kill more Muslims than they 
do Christians or Jews, it is just that Jews are their preferred tar 
gets, Christians are their second preferred targets, but they will kill 
whatever target is in front of them if they think they can sow some 
kind of discontent that might breakdown social order, and if the social 
order gets broke down, then they think they can somehow emerge into 
power.
  So this is how this thing unfolded from 1989 quickly until today. The 
Bush doctrine is the vision of freedom echoing across the Arab world 
the way it echoed across Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down 
in 1989.
  Now, I direct the attention of the Speaker and the public to the 
vision of what the world looks like today What has changed in the world 
since September 11, 2001? How much different is the map of the world 
today?
  If we would paint that map with freedom, you can go to Afghanistan. 
When we made a decision to go into Afghanistan, people on that side of 
the aisle said it will be another Vietnam, it will be another quagmire. 
No nation has ever been able to go into Afghanistan and invade, occupy, 
liberate, be able to operate in that foreign country in an effective 
fashion. Everybody has been defeated, everybody has been run out. The 
British have lost, the Russians have lost. You can go back through 
history and no one has succeeded in Afghanistan.
  Yet a month, actually less than a month after September 11, we had 
operations beginning in Afghanistan. And just a few months later, the 
Northern Alliance, coupled with coalition forces, routed the Taliban, 
surrounded and destroyed many al Qaeda and liberated Afghanistan.
  There is a proud National Guard unit from my district that was on the 
ground in Afghanistan that protected the voting locations, the voting 
booths and the routes to them, and some of the areas other troops from 
our coalition forces protected in the rest of the areas, and on that 
date and that location, the people in Afghanistan went to the polls for 
the first time in all of history and cast their ballots for a free 
government and they ratified a Constitution that now directs a free 
people, and Afghanistan is an up-and-running free country.
  This up-and-running free country has its problems, yes. And now that 
there has been an acceleration in the violence that has taken place in 
Afghanistan, the people who were afraid to criticize over these last 3 
to 4 years or more are now starting to criticize again.
  The level of their criticism goes up in direct proportion to the 
number of casualties that go up in Afghanistan. And it is the same in 
Iraq. You could index it. If you could listen to the decibels from the 
other side of the aisle, the decibels of criticism of our Commander-in-
Chief, undermining our efforts to free the rest of the world and free 
this burden of terror off the American people, if you could measure the 
decibels of objection from your side, you could index that directly to 
the number of casualties of American and coalition troops, because it 
is political opportunism that raises the objections.
  When the casualties go down, the objections go down, because the 
credibility diminishes. The casualties go up, the critics get up here, 
come to the floor and unload more and more. And when they do that, they 
are undermining our military who are on the line.
  But some of these other points that were made. Interesting things. 
Why does it matter if people like us in the first place? I would ask 
that question. There is much concern about the rest of the world 
doesn't like us. We need to do something so people can like us again.
  I recall going to the Greenbriar on a weekend that would have been 
the latter part of February in 2003. We had a bipartisan retreat where 
we got to know each other. We had breakout sessions and we brought in 
experts, especially from around the Middle East.
  There was an entire handful of experts that had lived in the Middle 
East and knew the culture and history and had a sense of how they could 
explain to us what was going on. We hadn't studied the Middle Eastern 
culture very much as a nation. We know a lot more about it today.
  But as these experts sat around and they started up the discussions 
and we had these sessions, and I didn't know the other colleagues very 
well, I had only sworn into this job a month earlier. So I spent a lot 
of time listening. It was important for me to learn what my colleagues 
didn't know and also to find out what they knew that they could impart 
to me. But I wanted to make sure that when I shared my viewpoint, that 
it was going into a place where there was a knowledge void so we could 
help fill that up. I hope they are doing the same thing with me. That 
is one of the ways things work.
  The author and journalist Tom Friedman gave an address to start that 
weekend out, and that set the tone for the whole weekend. The question 
was, well, they don't like us very well, and they are not going to like 
us any better when we get done with them. If we go into Iraq, and 
hadn't gone in at that point, if we go in, they are going to start to 
hate us even more.
  So we sat around and spent the weekend agonizing about how to make 
people like us. Well, how in the world can you decide to go make people 
like you when they just got finished bombing us, flying four airplanes 
into America, killing 3,000 Americans and believing that the 19 
hijackers that were on those planes are now off in the next life with 
their 72 virgins each.
  That is their belief system. And we are worried about people like 
that liking us? I will submit that you can't worry about that. You 
can't negotiate with people like that. The only thing you can do is 
stall them off with fear or take them out with force. Those are our 
alternatives.

[[Page 14590]]

  A statement was made over here tonight, Madam Speaker, that we are in 
the middle of a civil war and we are being asked to protect the Sunnis 
from the Shiites. The middle of a civil war. There was a revolution 
that was introduced here that declared we are in a civil war. The 
junior Senator from Iowa introduced a resolution in the Senate that 
declared we are in the middle of a civil war in Iraq. The middle of a 
civil war.
  They have declared that now, oh, since, 3, 4, 5 months ago. I haven't 
noticed that there has been an acceleration in the Iraqi-on-Iraqi 
violence in the 3 to 4 to 5 months since they began to talk us about 
being in a civil war.
  Wishing it were so does not make it true. I can define ``civil war'' 
so the American public can identify this easily. We go back and look at 
our own Civil War. That was when brother was fighting against brother. 
Yes, it was North against South, but sometimes they lined up on 
opposite sides of the line and they shot at each other, and sometimes 
brother shot at brother, and I imagine that occasionally brothers 
actually killed brothers.

                              {time}  2230

  Friends that went to the military academy met on the line. I am 
thinking about General Armistead, and I believe it was General Reynolds 
on the line at the corner and the angle, at the battle of Gettysburg, 
facing each other, unit to unit. That was the Civil War. Half of the 
people in the military, or a number approaching that, took off their 
blue coats and put on grey coats, and they went to war against each 
other. They chose up sides and went to war against each other, Madam 
Speaker
  If there is going to be a civil war in Iraq, it will be when the 
Iraqis who are in uniform today, 257,000 strong, trained, in action, 
defending the security of that nation, all wearing the same uniform, 
some Kurds, some Shiias, some Sunnis all mixed up in their different 
units.
  Unlike the local police that more reflect the ethnicity and the 
religion of their locality, the military is mixed up with about an even 
mix and unit by unit of Kurds, Shiias and Sunnis. I ask them, when I go 
over there, what is most important, the fact that you are a Shiia, the 
fact that you are a Sunni, the fact that you are a Kurd, or the fact 
that you are an Iraqi?
  And they have always answered, Madam Speaker, it is the fact that I 
am an Iraqi. And these Iraqis, 257,000 strong, defending Iraqis from 
terrorists who are within their midst, in ever-reducing numbers and 
ever-reducing resources are standing together shoulder to shoulder, 
fighting together.
  They are not fighting each other. They are fighting together against 
the terrorists in their midst. This is not a civil war. A civil war 
would be when the Iraqis that are in uniform defending Iraqis, 257,000 
strong, choose up sides and start to shoot at each other. That is not 
happening. It has not happened. And if it begins to happen, that does 
not mean that they are certainly in a civil war, but that would be an 
indicator to start watching pretty close, Madam Speaker.
  So also the argument from the gentleman from Massachusetts, we cannot 
secure Afghanistan with less than 150,000 more troops than we have, 
quoting some expert, well, I think the experts that the President has 
employed in both Afghanistan and Iraq have done pretty well.
  In fact, it was essentially the same people that planned Afghanistan, 
that planned Iraq. They had the right number of troops in Afghanistan. 
They said it could not be done, but it was done. And it is a 
magnificent success. The troops that they sent into Iraq were 
absolutely adequate for the job of liberating Iraq.
  Now, the circumstances that follow afterwards apparently are not bad 
enough for the people on the other side to say, well, I thought you 
should have had 500,000 troops there, but now I think you ought to have 
no troops there. And how can you say that we should have more but yet 
we should not have any? There is not a consensus on the other side of 
the aisle. I believe we need to follow our Commander in Chief.
  The other statement, we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Madam Speaker, I was sitting in the Cloakroom, and I 
heard my good friend and colleague from Iowa refer to the gentleman 
from Massachusetts. And I just wanted to clarify for him it was not I 
that said to stabilize Afghanistan what is needed is 150,000 more 
troops; that was the defense minister of Afghanistan.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. Madam Speaker, I did refer to 
him as some expert, because I did not pick out how you defined that. 
But I did attribute it to an expert.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. If you continue to yield for just a moment, I do not 
want to interfere with the gentleman's hour.
  But I would suggest to my dear friend that the defense minister of 
the country in question, Afghanistan, should be considered the ultimate 
expert. And, again, my good friend earlier indicated that there were 
Members on this side of the aisle that were reluctant, or were critical 
before we went into Afghanistan.
  Again, with all due respect, I would suggest that the vote in this 
institution was something along the lines of 430-1. So that that 
particular authorization received unanimous support. And I dare say it 
was a good decision and a right decision.
  The problems that I and I know some of my colleagues on this side, as 
well as some of your colleagues on the other side, have is that we left 
there too early and that is why the expert in this case, who is the 
defense minister of Afghanistan, said that for the country to be 
stabilized so that democracy, which we both, I think we all want to see 
for the Afghanistan people can really take hold, five times the 
security forces that exist today are necessary.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I pose the question to the 
gentleman from Massachusetts, and that is, Are you advocating that we 
send 150,000 troops to Afghanistan? I yield.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. No. What I am suggesting is that we should participate 
in training Afghans to meet those particular numbers, because we had 
set a benchmark of some 70,000. And that benchmark has been revised 
downward, downward from 70,000 to under 50,000.
  And the defense minister in Afghanistan says we need more resources. 
In fact, I am sure the gentleman is aware of this, but President Bush 
just recently said that he would take under consideration, Madam 
Speaker, doubling the $2 billion that were appropriated so that more 
training could be provided. My problem is we should have done it 4 or 5 
years ago.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I do appreciate the gentleman's 
sentiment on this. I know that you are right on the vote. I am 
confident that I can go back through the Congressional Record and pick 
out the rhetoric that supports my remarks.
  But I guess it is a balance that there was one vote against the 
resolution. I do recognize the gentleman's point. I look forward to 
bringing all of the resources necessary to protect America in the 
future anywhere we have to in the world.
  I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts. Picking up on my next 
point, it is that the statement made here on the floor that we are not 
winning the war on terror, ``the rest of the world believes we are 
losing the war on terror.''
  I do not believe that is true at all. In fact, who would want to 
trade places with the other side? How would you like to try to conduct 
or construct an optimistic scenario if you were, say, Zarqawi before he 
was sent to the next life by the United States Air Force?
  How would you put together a scenario by which you could possibly 
win? I would point out that listening to one of our experts, one who is 
actually under the command of our Commander in Chief, General Casey, 
who said the last time I was over there, he said the enemy cannot win 
if the politicians stay in the fight. That is what I am about, Madam 
Speaker, is seeing to it that the politicians stay in the fight.

[[Page 14591]]

  Our solders and marines deserve it. They deserve everything we have 
to support them. When they approach me in Iraq and say to me, I am 
proud to put my life on the line and commit a year out of my life to 
defend freedom and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom, but why 
do I have to fight the United States news media too, why do I have to 
fight the anti-war detractors, my answer to them has been, you should 
not have to do that. That is my job. And it is a job of all of us, to 
stand up together.
  But also the criticism that we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq. 
That is not a criticism that sets on very solid ground from my 
perspective. I support the President in that. You cannot give people a 
date that you are going to pull out. And so I would submit to the other 
side of the aisle that has found some experts to support the position 
that they are advocating, they should listen to an expert that I would 
think that they should support, and that would be the expert called 
former President Bill Clinton, who said, and agreed with President 
Bush, that we cannot give the enemy an exit date or they will just 
simply go underground.
  He said, you cannot give them a date. Bill Clinton, 2 days ago 
supporting President Bush and his position not to telegraph when we 
might be ready to deploy out of Iraq. And so the selective process is 
going on, pick the people that support your position and then declare 
them to be experts. And I generally stand with my position. But, let's 
see. The people who got it right were ignored; the people who got it 
wrong were rewarded.

                              {time}  2240

  I think it is a bit early to declare such a thing. I think historians 
will make that decision. I think the advisers that got us into 
Afghanistan successfully and successfully have managed the liberation 
of Afghanistan got it right.
  I think the same advisers were there to put together the strategy for 
Iraq, and given the military operations that are there, the liberation 
of Iraq, they got it right. To maintain the safety and security in that 
country has been difficult, but the strategy, there is not a consistent 
viewpoint here, to get Americans out is what we hear from people like 
Mr. Murtha, because they are targets of the enemy.
  If we pull out to the horizon, which we found out, I thought the 
horizon might be over there where the sun sets or where the sunrise is 
or up on the hill, the other side of the hill, just some place out of 
sight would be the horizon. We found out a month ago their horizon is 
really Okinawa. He said let us redeploy our troops to Okinawa, then if 
things get bad, we can go back in there.
  So the Out of Iraq Caucus, I wonder how large a caucus that is, but 
their position doesn't have a futuristic view. What takes place in the 
Middle East?
  I would say this: We need to be looking at the Bush doctrine, we need 
to be looking at when the Berlin Wall went down, and that echo of 
freedom that I talked about earlier, we need to be looking at the way a 
map of the world looks today, and a free Afghanistan, 20, 25 million 
people and a free Iraq; 25 million people, an Iraq that is far safer 
than the news media would have us believe, that cameras are trained on 
the IEDs before they go off, but they are not trained on the happy 
Iraqi playing children.
  We have a new conflagration in the Middle East. We have the 
circumstances with Israel, an Israel that has been trading land for 
peace. When there is no rational reason to trade land for peace, there 
is no historical model of somebody trading off land and getting peace.
  We could go back to the prior, to World War II, you would think the 
focus on that, if that history would be pretty acute, the trade-off for 
the Sudetenland, to Hitler, to get peace, and finally, the carving up 
of Poland between the Germans and the Russians, and ultimately war.
  It always happens, you can never trade land for peace, and yet the 
Israelis pulled out of Lebanon, and I understand why. It was costly to 
be there, but the agreement was that Hezbollah would not be operating 
in southern Lebanon or in Lebanon at all.
  Finally, most of the Syrian troops got out of there, not the Syrian 
intelligence people, but the Syrian troops. Hezbollah accelerated and 
built up their forces there, and they smuggled in missiles from Syria, 
probably from Iran to Syria and into Lebanon. Israel sits there today 
in a two-front war, being shot at from Gaza and being shot at from 
Lebanon, missiles raining down from the north, raining up from the 
south.
  I would submit that if they had succeeded in moving the Israeli 
people, the Jewish people out of the West Bank, moved them up against 
the fence, or inside the fence, if they had succeeded in allowing an 
autonomous West Bank, they will be firing missiles from the West Bank 
as well, and the only area Israel would not be shot at from right now 
would be from the sea.
  The sea, of course, is the place where the neighbors of Israel would 
like to drive all Israelis, and they don't have very long. They cannot 
make very many mistakes. I am glad that they have stepped up to defend 
themselves, and I am glad that they began operations north and in the 
south.
  It is the right thing to do, and talk of negotiating for peace 
without the eradication of Hezbollah in Lebanon would be a mistake. 
They must go in, and they must take out Hezbollah, take them out, take 
out their entire ability to conduct military operations there, pacify 
southern Lebanon, before they can come back out of there again. It has 
got to happen. If it doesn't happen, there will not be peace. The 
missiles will continue to rain in.
  The Syrians, complicit in this, sitting up there, providing military 
weapons; and Iranians, we believe, were down in Lebanon helping advise 
and helping to fire off some of the rockets that were fired, especially 
the one that went to the Israeli ship.
  We have acts of war being conducted by Iran against Israel, and I 
believe acts of war being conducted against Israel by Syrians. The 
Israelis have to be looking to the south to Gaza, to the north to 
Lebanon, and over to Syria and on over to Iran.
  They have got to look at their sites at four different locations. We 
must stand with them every step of the way. We have got to do so with a 
vision, with a vision of how this end game might work. We need to be 
thinking that the nuclear capability, the growing nuclear capability of 
Iran in the very belligerent hands of Ahmadinejad is far too dangerous.
  We have to believe that if he had the capability to drop a nuclear 
warhead into Tel Aviv, this would be about the time. We have to 
understand that Hezbollah is conducting operations and firing missiles 
into Israel at the direction of Iran.
  Iran has been and is providing the supplies. Iran has recruited, 
founded, recruited and trained Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of Iran. 
They cannot shake the responsibility that when Hezbollah acts in an act 
of war against Israel, it is really an act by a surrogate of Iran.
  I came to the conclusion in September of 2004 that there was a 95 
percent probability that we would have to go in and take out the 
nuclear capability of Iran. We cannot sit and let a rogue nation have 
that capability, a nation that deals with, trades with, and probably is 
able to swap nuclear secrets with North Korea.
  These two axes of evil are still out there, and they are still 
dangerous, and they are getting ever more bold. When we have people 
here in this Congress, that say we are losing this war on terror, that 
Iran is a winner, that Hamas is a winner, that Hezbollah is a winner, I 
don't know how they can be winners when they are being taken out 24 
hours a day by the IDF.
  But that scenario gives them hope. Members of Congress think they are 
winning. Then their optimism will be stronger, or they will probably 
lack the defeatism that we think they are getting.
  So we must look at Israel, we must look at this end game with the 
idea that if we have to take action, then we may have to do it in a 
more urgent fashion than we might otherwise, because of the war that is 
breaking out in

[[Page 14592]]

the Middle East, the war that is breaking out with Israel.
  On that subject matter, I trust our Commander in Chief to be putting 
an end game in mind. I stand with him in his vision on this safety and 
this security and on a strategy to get to the end of this global war on 
terror. I would ask the American people to envision this, envision how 
freedom echoed across Eastern Europe in 1989.
  Country after country after country became free, and today they go to 
the polls, and they choose their leaders. They direct their national 
destiny, and they join the European Union, and they join NATO, and they 
are good allies, and they join the coalition and our operations in 
Afghanistan and the coalition of our operations in Iraq.
  The people who are the newest to freedom are the first to fight for 
the freedom of others. I stood in a military base in Basra some time 
back, where a British general was commanding the region down in the 
southern part of Iraq. In that group, that group of soldiers, if you 
look at the flags on their shoulders, there were British soldiers, 
Australians, Romanians, Polish, Danish, Netherlands, I am forgetting 
one or two, but that was all, just happened to be those in a group. I 
lined them up and took a picture. That is the true coalition forces. 
They are there.
  Shortly after I came back from Iraq, the Australians doubled their 
troop involvement in Iraq. They doubled it, just simply doubled their 
troops. Do you think it made the news in the United States of America? 
Only one or two news outlets when we did a LexusNexus search, but, you 
know, al Jazeera picked it up. You know, al Jazeera scooped the major 
news media in the United States, because they were paying attention.

                              {time}  2250

  So, Madam Speaker, we will stand with the Commander in Chief with the 
vision for freedom, and we will look forward to the day that the Arab 
world breathes free, and when that day comes, country by country, piece 
by piece, the people that get up in the mornings there then can turn 
their outlook from teaching hatred, from making bombs and trying to 
kill others to try to drag the rest of the world down, they can turn 
that focus to building their homes, building their families and their 
communities and their mosques or their churches, building their country 
into a model of prosperity instead of a model of destruction.
  I think in the amount of time that I have, I am going to shift 
subjects, and we will talk about the security on the other side of the 
United States. I would point out that we have also a security concern 
on our southern border; and down there, that 2,000-mile long border 
that runs from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that border has, 
according to the Border Patrol testimony at the Immigration 
Subcommittee hearing, as many as 4 million people pouring across that 
southern border annually. That is about 11,000 people a day, 4 million 
people annually.
  In the past year, in 2005, they stopped and turned back 1,188,000 
people, most of them run through, identified, put on a bus, taken to 
the border and sent back through the turnstile into Mexico. The year 
before, there was 1,159,000. The number has been growing. It has crept 
up from 900,000 on up to now nearly 1.2 million, 1.2 million people 
caught when we are catching a fourth to a third, by most of the 
testimony that comes here.
  But when I go down on the border and I meet with the Border Patrol 
officers down there, Madam Speaker, I ask them and I propose that 
number, are you stopping 25 percent. I found no one down there on a 
regular basis that told me that they stopped 25 percent of the illegal 
border crossings. Most of them, they gave me the number of 10 percent, 
and one, when I submitted the 25 percent number, actually went into 
hysterics and said, oh, it is not more than 3, perhaps 5, percent; 3 
percent of illegal crossers and 5 percent of the illegal drugs that are 
coming across the border.
  Now, when we talk about numbers of those size, it is hard to put it 
into perspective. So I would put it this way: every time an illegal 
comes into the United States across the Mexican border, that is an 
average of one every 8 seconds. In the United States, every 8 seconds, 
there is a baby born in America, and it might be an anchor baby and a 
baby born to an illegal mother. That baby will have citizenship here in 
the United States. I am opposed to that policy, but every time a baby 
is born, an illegal walks across the border into the United States. As 
our population grows, half of it is an illegal population.
  A bull ride is 8 seconds long. For the length of a bull ride, a baby 
is born, and an illegal crosses a border. A cowboy rides a bull another 
8 seconds, only they are not riding 24 hours a day, we are having 
babies and having illegals come across every day, 24 hours a day.
  How many people are 11,000 daily? To measure 11,000, I would put it 
this way. Santa Ana's army that entered into Texas that began the great 
war that ended up in a free Texas and ultimately Texas, a great State 
in this Union, Santa Ana's army was about 6,000 strong. When they 
stormed the Alamo, they were 2,500 to 3,000. He had split his forces; 
2,500 to 3,000 storming the Alamo, and we think that was a massive 
armed force, and it was. But Santa Ana gathered all his army up 
together and he came across the border one time and wreaked havoc 
across Texas; twice that number marches across that border every single 
day. And what does America have to say about that? Ho-hum.
  Well, we can find a way. They have absorbed themselves into our 
society. Somebody needs somebody to do some cheap work, and so we 
really should not concern ourselves with this. I disagree with that, 
Madam Speaker. I think that a country that does not control its borders 
cannot very much longer declare itself to have borders, and a country 
without borders is not a country, a simply amorphous mass of a North 
American continent.
  We have to have borders and we defend them, and we have to defend 
those borders for all the reasons that we know, but there are other 
reasons that most of America does not know, and that is, as we hear the 
President say, we cannot stop people from coming across the border that 
just want to come here for a better life. Well, we cannot? Of course, I 
think we can.
  And yet, if he will concede that point, that point that we cannot 
stop them unless we legalize them so that they can come back and forth 
in some legal fashion, if that cannot be done, how in the world then 
does the President or anyone else propose that we can stop the force of 
$65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming into America? Ninety percent 
of the illegal drugs in America cross our southern border and that is 
according to the DEA. That is $65 billion worth. That is marijuana, 
methamphetamine, and heroin that comes in from China and gets funneled 
up this way. It is cocaine that comes from Colombia.
  Colombians used to have a pretty lucrative trade on cocaine until the 
Mexican methamphetamine brought their market down; and on top of that, 
when September 11 came, we tightened up the security of our airports, 
and it is a lot harder for them to smuggle cocaine into the United 
States. So now they have a transportation route that comes up around 
the inside of the gulf, along the rail line in Mexico, a lot of it 
controlled by MS-13, the most brutal gang this continent has ever seen.
  But you have Colombian cocaine, you have Mexican methamphetamine, you 
have Chinese heroin and Mexican marijuana coming into this country, 
totaled up value, $65 billion. Now, the force of a $7- or $8-an-hour 
job for someone that wants to come and pick lettuce, tomatoes or apples 
or whatever it might be, that is one thing. Somebody wanting to walk 
across the desert to pick apples, it is hard to fathom somebody that 
wants a better life that much, although we have to sympathize with that 
and solution-wise in fixing Mexico, not in draining off all of the 
discontent, and the poor people that are in Mexico and in the United 
States. But the problem is we can deal with that.
  What we have not done is taken steps against the $65 billion worth of 
illegal

[[Page 14593]]

drugs; and as I go down there, Madam Speaker, and I sit along that 
border at night and listen to the infiltration of the illegals sneaking 
through the brush, being unloaded out of the vehicles, picking up their 
packs and marching off through the brush, when it gets light and I go 
and look at the tracks and see where they are marching off through the 
desert and they are carrying a 50-pound pack of marijuana, pack trains 
of people, 10 or a dozen or 50 or even as high as 100 people, each with 
50 pounds of marijuana on their back, marching across the desert 
because they cannot drive a vehicle across there in some of those 
locations now because we put in vehicle barriers, well, the vehicle 
barriers are environmentally friendly. They have let the desert 
antelope crawl through. And a man with 50 pounds of marijuana can throw 
his pack through there, crawl through, put on his pack and walk across 
the desert. That is what is going on.
  So we need to force all traffic through the ports of entry. That is 
my mission. That is why I believe we need to build physical barriers to 
do that, Madam Speaker.
  So I have designed one. I have spent my life in the construction 
business. We build things, design things, pour structural concrete, 
make it out of steel. You name it, we have done it. Mostly it is 
earthwork of all kinds. So I submit that on this desert floor, when I 
go down there, it lays pretty good for this job.
  I would, Madam Speaker, dig a trench like this in the desert floor, 
dig a trench down through that desert floor, and I will demonstrate 
another thing. As that trench is dug, we pull a slip form trencher 
right along behind it. It will be pouring concrete right in the trench. 
As you move the trench, the concrete would move along like that. You 
come along in a couple of days when this cures, leave a slot in the 
middle, and start setting precast panels right up in this slot that I 
have. These would be already made, already cured. They would be about 
10 feet wide or 13\1/2\ feet long, and they are designed to be a 12-
foot high constructed height.
  And we just pick them up with a crane, set them in like that. You can 
see how easy this is, Madam Speaker. Once you get the trench and the 
footing poured, it is a simple task to set the precast concrete panels 
right into the footing and into the slot.
  Now, that builds us a 12-foot high concrete wall. I do not submit 
that this wall be built right on the border because I think it is 
important for us to be able to do surveillance on both sides of this 
wall.

                              {time}  2300

  I would submit that right on the border, we put up a 10-foot-high 
chain link fence, a chain link fence with about four barbs tipped out 
to the south. I would hang a sign about every quarter of a mile, in 
Spanish, that tells people go to this Web site or go to the U.S. 
consulate and here is where you apply to come into the United States 
legally. That would be my approach.
  And then, when they cut through the fence, when they dug under the 
fence, when they went around it, over it, or through it, whatever they 
did, that would tell us that is a location where we need to beef it up.
  And I would pull back 60 feet. I would put this footing in, and I 
would drop this concrete fence, and they will have demonstrated that we 
need it because they have violated the one that was the lighter fence 
that they didn't respect.
  And so, we have this concrete wall. It is about 6 inches thick. It 
ends up 12 feet high, 10-foot-wide panels, one after another. And our 
little construction company could toss together about a mile a day of 
this once we got going. Now, we won't be bidding any project like this, 
but we have the capability of doing it is my point.
  And certainly there would be a little bit of engineering design that 
would be touched up on it. But this is basically the design that I 
believe we would be ending up with. It costs about $1.3 million a mile.
  Now we are spending $8 billion on our southern border, $8 billion. 
That is $4 million a mile every year, and we are paying Border Patrol 
people to drive back and forth on HUMVEES, to park and look at it and 
be a deterrent just for being there, and we are paying all the 
administration that it takes to support the people and, of course, 
their weapons and all the technology.
  And I am for supporting this wall with additional technology. And it 
is okay with me if they want to fly drones around and let us know when 
people are approaching the wall. But I will tell you, they will find 
that this wall doesn't let them cross it.
  And people will say, well, if you build a 12-foot wall, I will show 
you a 12-foot ladder. And that might happen, Madam Speaker. So I have a 
little bit of a solution for that. And that solution consists of, this 
is actually a little piece of solder, but just a little nice little 
concertina wire to put on top of this wall as a deterrent. Easily 
installed. And you can see that it can provide that deterrent effect.
  Now, I also submit that we run a little current through this wire, 
and that provides also as a deterrent. Now it is up there where you 
would have to have a ladder to get your hands on it. But that will keep 
people from putting a ladder up against it. And then we will have our 
borders respected and protected.
  And if we fail to do this, Madam Speaker, we are going to continue to 
see 11,000 people a day, one every 8 seconds, $65 billion worth of 
illegal drugs pouring across this border.
  Whenever we built the fence in San Diego they went around the fence. 
And each time that you do that they will go around it because the money 
is too great, $65 billion. We have got to shut it off. And we will 
build this thing where they don't respect a more modest barrier, and 
continue to build until such time as all traffic goes through the ports 
of entry. And that means legal and illegal, through the ports of entry. 
And then we will beef up our people there. We beef up our technology 
there.
  And if we do that we can then finally say we have control of this 
border. And if we enforce there, if we end birthright citizenship, and 
if we enforce employer sanctions, those three things will solve this 
issue.
  And I would ask the President commit to enforcing our immigration 
laws, commit to controlling the border, spend the next years of your 
administration establishing that. And when that is done, while the next 
President is campaigning for the 2008 election to be sworn into office 
here in 2009, that campaign can be about whether or not we need guest 
workers in this country and how many we might need and of what skills 
they might come from.
  But we cannot build a guest worker plan on a false foundation, a 
foundation of the promise of enforcement. And the only way we can ever 
know that we have enforcement is to actually enforce, prove it can be 
done. If we prove it can be done, then we will have something solid to 
build this guest worker plan on. But without that, we are building a 
guest worker plan on hypotheticals. The hypothetical will be that we 
will enforce the law. That has not happened. It has diminished over the 
last 20 years. An employer under Bill Clinton was 19 times more likely 
to be sanctioned for hiring illegals than under our current President. 
And so I am asking, let's enforce the law. Let's demonstrate that we 
can do it. Let's put fixtures on the border, because this $1.3 million 
per mile is a one-time investment that will free up other people.
  As I asked in the testimony down in Laredo of the sector chief for 
the Border Patrol there, I said, if you have a wall like this, does it 
take more or less border patrol officers to protect that border? And 
his answer, even though it isn't the administration's position to 
support this, was it takes less border patrol officers to enforce this 
wall.
  So, Madam Speaker, that is my encouragement for the President. That 
is my encouragement for our Commander in Chief. That is my 
encouragement for the American people. Stand up and support our 
military in the Middle East and defend this country, and we will 
continue to be a great Nation.

[[Page 14594]]



                          ____________________