[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1563-1570]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        BALANCED BUDGET PROPOSAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
the time remaining before midnight.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as was stated earlier, I do consider 
it an honor and a privilege to come to the floor of this House to 
address you, Mr. Speaker, and to carry this message across the waves to 
the American people.
  I would first take up the issue of a balanced budget, and I would 
submit that we can balance this budget, Mr. Speaker, and we do not need 
to do so by raising taxes. We need to do so by fiscal responsibility.
  I raised an issue today, I testified before the Budget Committee here 
in the House of Representatives, and I laid out a scenario by which we 
can balance this budget for this year. And I also acknowledge that it 
is quite painful. It is not realistic from a political perspective, but 
I think it is important that the Budget Committee produce a balanced 
budget so that we can measure the pain to so many of the programs that 
would have to be cut.
  But a simple version, and it is a quick version, it is not the thing 
that I would propose as a balanced budget, Mr. Speaker, but it is one 
the ways that we can easily understand the magnitude of the budget 
situation we have.
  First of all, if you would reinstate the Bush tax cuts and calculate 
those back into the revenue side, it almost does not show at all on the 
bottom line as to whether we are running a deficit or a surplus in our 
spending; and I have a calculator in my computer that allows me to do 
that. It almost does not show on the graph when you calculate that.
  But if you look what the Bush tax cuts have done, they have grown 
this economy and they have grown this economy at 3 percent or better 
growth each quarter for at least the last 10 consecutive quarters, and 
that is a growth rate that has been met or exceeded since the early 
Reagan years. And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, those early Reagan 
years were the years when we had high interest and high inflation. So 
this is a real growth in a very low inflation environment with a low 
unemployment environment with unemployment rates below 5 percent.
  It is a very, very good economic time, Mr. Speaker; and it is as good 
a time as one could ask for. It is the best

[[Page 1564]]

economic run that we have had in a long, long time. It eclipses any 
economic run in the last 2 decades, and it also is a controlled growth. 
It is a growth that has not gotten out of hand, Mr. Speaker. It is a 
growth that grows from 3 to 4.7 percent quarter after quarter, with an 
inflation rate that is 2 percent or less and unemployment rates that 
are in the 5 percent and less range. That is where we want, not too hot 
and not too cold, a nice steady accountable growth.
  And I would point out this that growth that we have in our economy is 
growing in spite of the fact that 3.5 percent, perhaps, of our GDP is 
going off the top to the litigation that goes on in this country. We 
have to overcome that and still grow at a rate of about 3 to 3.5 
percent to match a targeted growth rate that will deal with population 
growth and to deal with inflation and help us develop our 
infrastructure in this country to accommodate the future as our 
infrastructure depreciates. That is what it is going to take to grow.
  And what it is going to take to balance the budget, should we have 
the will to do that, would be to go into the nondefense discretionary 
spending. Recognizing that we have three large entitlements in our 
budget, and those are the spending that just goes on year after year 
that is growing at a rate of about 6.2 percent a year and that is 
aggregate, and that is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those 
three entitlements are essentially, unless we change some of the 
parameters, Mr. Speaker, are the right now the untouchable budget 
items; and eventually this Congress will have to look at them. But 
those three entitlements will grow at about 6.2 percent of their 
aggregate. The interest rate will grow perhaps even faster than that in 
the outyears.
  You add all those things up, and if you recognize that to make 
changes in that for this year is very difficult to do and also 
recognizing that we have defense spending that is critical to our 
national security and we need to take that off the table from a cut 
perspective and what is left is the nondefense discretionary spending. 
That is the items of all, everything else that we spend that I have not 
identified as being an entitlement of Social Security, Medicare, 
Medicaid defense spending, that nondefense discretionary spending. We 
will call that other.
  To balance the budget Mr. Speaker, we would need to simply cut the 
nondefense discretionary spending by 5 percent, a real 5 percent cut, 
and that would be $0.95 on the dollar. That would be asking Americans 
to get along with $0.95 out of every dollar that they have right now, 
today, not grow in relation to inflation and not grow with any kind of 
a COLA.
  Now, if I were looking at this from a business perspective, I would 
advocate that we just simply balance our budget in that fashion, Mr. 
Speaker. But I am also aware that the votes on the floor of this 
Congress will not accommodate for that. So I will be seeking to put 
together a budget that looks at some of the other components and gets 
us to the point where we can reasonably, practically and, in fact, part 
of the equation here is politically balance this budget. It cannot and 
should not be done by simply raising taxes. By doing so it would stifle 
growth, and it would get a reverse effect beyond in the opposite 
direction that my colleagues who just got finished speaking would say.
  I am just going to go backwards, Mr. Speaker, through some of the 
remarks that I heard made over this past hour and address some of them. 
I certainly cannot address them all, Mr. Speaker.
  But the argument that all of the money that was spent, all, this is a 
quote, all that money is wasted, meaning the money that was spent for 
reconstruction in Iraq, all wasted? With no oversight, no oversight, 
Mr. Speaker? I take exception to a statement such as that.
  I went over to Iraq with three of my colleagues last August and 
returned here about August 20 with the very mission in mind to take a 
look at where the $18.5 billion that we allocated out of this Congress 
had been spent, where the practices were, where the projects were, how 
the money was being spent and what was the return on that investment. 
And Mr. Speaker, I brought a chart along with me, coincidentally, not 
knowing that would be the subject matter that was brought up here on 
the other side of the aisle this evening, a chart that illustrates 
where these project dollars have gone.
  I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that these red dots on this map of 
Iraq represent 2,200, more than 2,200 completed projects in Iraq. And 
these projects will be road projects, they will be sewer projects, 
water, drinking water, potable water projects. They will also be some 
bridge projects and some pipeline work for the oil pipe lines that are 
there. You will see along on this border with Iran, the red dots along 
there, many of those are border defense stations. And what you will not 
see are the 250 planned border defense stations that are under 
construction or in planning around these other borders that we have. 
There is another 1,100 projects that are either in planning or under 
construction that do not show up yet on this chart, Mr. Speaker. I will 
have a chart that reflects the projects that are planned, the projects 
that are started.
  Then this one reflects just the projects that are completed, over 
2,200; and I visited a number of these. Of course, it would not be 
possible to visit them in their entirety, but I stopped up here in this 
region around Kirkuk and there went to the mother of all generators. I 
forget just how many kilowatts that generator does put out, but I 
remember what it weighed, 750,000 pounds, brought in on two large 
loads, and then the other loads would be the rest of the generating 
plant across about 10.7 kilometers.
  Excuse me. It was more than that. It was a long stretch at least 
across the northern part of Iraq with that kind of a long trail of a 
convoy to deliver the generator and the turbine that drives that 
generator down to this location just south of Kirkuk.

                              {time}  2310

  And that being one of two huge generation plants that are now in a 
position where they are up and running in Iraq, this one is fed by a 
natural gas pipeline. Some of them are using different types of fuel; 
but up in this area around Kirkuk, there is so much oil that it 
actually seeps to the top of the ground in some places.
  Where I come from, the area, we call it the prairie pothole region 
where we have these potholes of water that are collected because of the 
dips that are cut out in the prairie from the last glacier, well, the 
water that collects there reminds me of the oil; and certainly the oil 
is in smaller quantities that collects in the depressions within the 
desert up there around Kirkuk.
  And that is not the largest oil location up around Kirkuk; but down 
here in the southern part, in the Basra region, there is far more oil. 
And I look at the system of collection, the well system, the collection 
system, the refinery system, distribution system. All of it is old, 
tired, dilapidated, has not been reconstructed or modernized in at 
least 35 years; and yet the oil production out of Iraq is greater than 
it was, Mr. Speaker.
  We keep hearing, no, they are not producing as much oil now as they 
were then. Not true. The royalties that Iraq was receiving prior to the 
war were $5 billion a year. The royalties that are coming from the oil 
that is pumping today are $26 billion a year. That does not necessarily 
reflect that they are pumping five times as much oil, but it reflects 
that they are selling perhaps more oil than they did then and pumping 
more oil than they did.
  The electricity that is being generated in Iraq is a number that is 
close to twice as much electricity at their peak days as it was on a 
standard day in Iraq at the beginning of the liberation back in March 
of 2003, Mr. Speaker. And as I measure project after project, benefit 
after benefit, it cannot be said that, and I will quote again, ``all 
that money is wasted.'' How could all that money be wasted when we have 
2,200 completed projects, 3,300 projects altogether, people that have 
potable water that never had it before, people that have flush toilets 
that did not

[[Page 1565]]

flush before, they did not have water to flush in them?
  Looking at the infrastructure that is there in places in Baghdad 
where they had the sanitary sewer, and I would point out for the lay 
person listening, Mr. Speaker, that a sanitary sewer is not really all 
that sanitary. That is what you run your sewage through. And yet that 
sewer was an easy place for some people to pull a waterline through in 
those days before the liberation of Baghdad. So their drinking water in 
many areas was delivered through a black piece of plastic pipe that was 
pulled through the sewer itself, and they would pull it through, and 
then the distribution runs out to the locations where it was being 
used. And that is all fine as long as you keep your waterline in 
condition, and it does not ever get a leak in it, and you do not ever 
let the pressure go down.
  But both of those things invariably happen; and when that happens, 
the pressure goes down in your drinking waterline, and the sewage then 
is drawn into that drinking waterline, and it then pollutes the 
drinking water. That has happened in a number of areas in Baghdad. We 
are reconstructing that. We are providing them with clean new sanitary 
sewer systems and sewer plants to be able to handle their systems in a 
modern fashion and an environmentally friendly fashion. So the Iraqi 
people that were living without services now have services.
  I will say that the electrical service that was up to 10, 11, perhaps 
even 12 hours a day in Baghdad at the beginning of the liberation is 
down to less than that now, perhaps even as low as 4 to 6 hours a day. 
But the rest of Iraq was getting 2 to 4 hours a day, and now they are 
up to 10, 11, 12 hours of electricity a day. The next wave is to 
increase the generation capacity and the distribution so that Baghdad 
can get back up again to a level that they were before.
  But overall there is more electricity being provided into Iraq today 
than there ever was. The demand is perhaps twice as great as it was, 
Mr. Speaker, because you know what happens when people get electricity. 
They figure out a way that they can put another appliance to work and 
plug it into a wall and use it. Like air conditioners that did not 
exist in any significant numbers, now they are there in significant 
numbers, tapped into that electricity.
  We also know that satellite televisions were against the law in March 
of 2003, and today Iraq is replete with satellite dishes on rooftop 
after rooftop. In fact, I did a survey from the air by helicopter over 
the top of a region up in Kirkuk where many homes were built in about 
the same style, and I had done so over the rooftops of Mosul in the 
fall of 2003; and there my survey showed that about two-thirds of the 
homes then already had satellite TVs, and now I am seeing that in some 
of the neighborhoods in Kirkuk there actually are more satellite dishes 
than there are roofs.
  So you will see sometimes two or even three satellite dishes on a 
single roof that look like they are single-family dwellings from the 
air. Everyone in Iraq has access to satellite TV, which means access to 
the outside world. There is access to Internet, cell phones. Those 
things have grown dramatically. Landline telephones have grown 
dramatically. The number of newspapers are up to over 175 newspapers in 
Iraq. Television stations up and running, communication is flowing, 
free enterprise is robust in the streets of Baghdad. People that are 
running shops out there, making furniture out alongside the streets, 
set it out on the side of the street and sell it.
  And, yes, Mr. Speaker, a bomb goes off once in a while, and it is sad 
and it is tragic. But the people of Iraq clean things up and they 
grieve and they go back to work, Mr. Speaker, because they are 
optimistic about the future of Iraq. They are more optimistic about the 
future of Iraq than the surveys show people are in the United States of 
America. What went wrong here where people that we say do not have hope 
have more hope than those of us folks that have the great blessing of 
living in the United States of America with all of this hope that we 
take for granted and cannot apparently appreciate?
  So the effort that has been put forth there, Mr. Speaker, it is not 
all that money that is being wasted, not by a long shot, Mr. Speaker: 
3,300 projects, all of them worthy and worthwhile. And, no, they were 
not all cheap. There was money that was spent for security, and there 
were some projects that were sabotaged that had to be reconstructed 
again.
  There is a project over here on the Tigris River south of Kirkuk 
where there were nine pipelines that went across the Tigris River, and 
those pipelines were cut in the liberation operations with the U.S. Air 
Force. And we went back to patch those pipelines together, did so. They 
were sabotaged again. They were put across the river on a bridge, and 
so we undertook the effort to put them all underneath the bottom of the 
Tigris River. They are backfilling that now, Mr. Speaker, and it is 
nearly completed; and those lines will be opened up and running by, I 
believe the target date is February 28.
  So another big day to turn those valves on and get that oil flowing 
south into parts where it can be converted back to cash and be able to 
help the funding in the great country of Iraq, this emerging free Arab 
country that has now at least brought forth the name of a prime 
minister, and I do not think formally has elected him yet. But on that 
day that that happens and they seek this duly elected parliament, Iraq 
becomes the most representative Arab nation in the world.
  When they sit down at the United Nations and their representative 
speaks on behalf of the Iraqi people, it will truly be a voice of the 
Iraqi people, quite unlike the voice of much of the rest of the Arab 
world where the voice that speaks for the countries that represent 
those parts of the Arab world in the United Nations often is the voice 
of a tyrant that would cut the tongues out of its own citizens if they 
spoke up in criticism of the regime that is there in many of those 
countries.
  But this country can become the lodestar of a free Arab people, an 
inspiration to the rest of the Arab world, an inspiration that can 
cause the rest of them to see what Iraq is stepping into, what they are 
earning along with the coalition forces' efforts and sacrifice to be 
able to be that inspiration for the rest of the Arab world. And if that 
day comes, and I pray it comes, Mr. Speaker, we may well see freedom 
echo across the Arab world in the same fashion that it echoed across 
Eastern Europe when the Wall went down in Berlin November 9, 1989, on 
that glorious day that symbolized the end of the Cold War, a victory 
for the United States and the forces of freedom.
  And the forces of freedom could not be stopped, Mr. Speaker. Almost 
bloodlessly they echoed across Eastern Europe, and we saw country after 
country be liberated.

                              {time}  2320

  Since that time, we have noticed that those who knew freedom the 
least hungered for it the most. The people on the east side of the wall 
stepped up to help all of our efforts, our coalition forces in Iraq, in 
greater numbers than the people on the west side of the wall.
  The people on the west side of the wall had the privilege of living 
with freedom since the end of World War II. The people on the east side 
of the wall remember the days they weren't free. They remember the day 
of November 9, 1989, when they had that opportunity to grasp their own 
freedom, and within a couple of years that freedom did echo across 
Eastern Europe, and it needs to echo across the Arab world.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I submit that there is a vision and mission in this 
overall War on Terror, and we need to do a far better job of 
articulating why we are in this war. I would point out that the loss of 
Americans on September 11 was right at 3,000 Americans. That is more 
Americans lost there than was lost December 7, 1941, in that day that 
would live in infamy.
  We cannot forget September 11. We cannot forget that we were attacked 
without cause. We didn't provoke anyone who attacked us. They attacked 
us because they hate our way of life. They attacked the very center of 
western civilization.

[[Page 1566]]

  And no amount of negotiation, understanding, no amount of sitting 
around and talking, is ever going to resolve this disagreement. These 
people want us dead. They have demonstrated that, and we saw the 
celebrations in the streets in other parts of the world as the Twin 
Towers fell. That should tell us that they will give us no quarter.
  If anyone doubts that, take a look at Israel. Take a look and see the 
circumstances there when the Israelis thought they could trade land for 
peace, and yet they are still attacked. Hamas won the election there. 
That means the terrorists, the people who are sworn to annihilate the 
land of Israel, are running the government of the region that may or 
may not be a nation called Palestine.
  That is a chilling concept, but it also should tell us that there is 
no negotiated settlement, we must defend ourselves. The Israelis have 
had to guard every theater, every bus stop, every hospital, every 
school, every synagogue, and still the infiltrators come in and 
detonate their bombs and blow their women and children to pieces.
  That happens out of a deep hatred that we don't understand in this 
country, and I don't claim to understand it. But I know that hatred is 
directed at us. We saw it September 11. We saw it on 18 to 20 other 
attacks, including the USS Cole. We saw it in the U.S. embassy bombings 
in Africa. We have seen the first attack also on the Twin Towers, in 
other efforts shut off by good intelligence work in this country.
  We cannot rest. Our choices though are guard every theater, every bus 
stop, every school, every hospital, every church, every synagogue and 
pull back into the shores of the United States and somehow think that 
we can protect every center in this country, and we won't be able to, 
and we will see the attacks come, and we will see our women and 
children and our men blown into pieces.
  Or we can take this battle to them, we can fight this war where they 
are. But going out just to kill the enemy, Mr. Speaker isn't enough. It 
is not a solution. It is something that has to be done in certain areas 
of the world and under those circumstances where there are training 
camps and active leaders that are plotting and planning to attack and 
kill Americans, that must be done, Mr. Speaker.
  But to go out and think that we could kill all of our enemies is the 
equivalent of realizing that we had a lot of flies on our porch and in 
our kitchen and then go out to the barn with the fly swatter and think 
we are going to take care of all those flies in the barn with the fly 
swatter. No. You can swat flies in the barn all day every day, and you 
will never accomplish the task. You have got to change the habitat that 
breeds that many flies. You have to clean the barn, Mr. Speaker, and 
you need to leave an environment in there that doesn't breed those 
flies, and then they will leave you alone on the porch and in your 
kitchen as well.
  So I submit that the plan of the United States and the mission that 
has been laid out by our Commander-in-Chief President Bush is to create 
a new habitat, to promote a new habitat in the region. This is a 
habitat called freedom. We happen to know that where there is freedom, 
there isn't a habitat that breeds terrorists. We have never gone to war 
against another free people. It has never happened in the history of 
this country, and I don't think it has actually happened in the history 
of the world.
  So to the extent that freedom can be promoted and we give people that 
opportunity to reach out and grasp and earn their own freedom, is also 
the extent to which we can be safer as a people, western civilization 
can be safer, and the people in that part of the world can learn some 
tolerance for Christianity, for Judaism, for capitalism, for free 
enterprise, for this whole idea of western civilization that they seem 
to take such exception to. There are good people in that part of the 
world, Mr. Speaker, and those good people need to be empowered and we 
need to be supportive of them.
  The allegations that were made here on the other side of the aisle, 
Mr. Speaker, about corruption in Iraq with millions of U.S. dollars, we 
don't know that. And I won't tell you that you can go into an 
environment with a $18.5 billion mission and spend every dollar that 
would be competitive with a project in the United States, because I 
know that some of that money had to go for security, and some of that 
money had to go for a high price to get the work done, because who 
would go into that environment and do that work? But, Mr. Speaker, that 
work was necessary. And to the extent that anyone has defrauded this 
government, yes, we need to search that out. We need to have oversight.
  But Democrats in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, are not absolved from 
that responsibility. I did not hear a single solution come out here on 
the other side of the aisle, not one. All I saw was complaints, 
lamentations, objections, because all things that go wrong are all 
Republican responsibility according to the other side of the aisle, 
and, of course, if they were just in power, then everything would be 
all fine.
  But we don't know what they would do, because they haven't proposed a 
solution, not a single specific solution. They are absolutely without 
an agenda. But they have enough energy, they have enough air velocity 
in their lungs to every night come down here and beat up on the people 
that are out here trying to move America ahead.
  One statement was said that I will agree with, made by the gentleman 
from Florida. He said, ``I am so glad that I am not a member of the 
majority.'' Well, to the gentleman from Florida, I want to say I am so 
glad you are not a member of the majority as well, and so are the 
majority of the American people who have seen to it that there is 
majority in charge in this Congress.
  We do have our work to do, Mr. Speaker. I won't shirk that 
responsibility. I step up to it gladly. But we need to have our eyes 
wide open. We need to promote a responsible budget, and I will be 
promoting a balanced budget and a path we can get to a balanced budget 
in a way that we can get the votes in this Congress to get it done. If 
we do that, we can ensure financial security for our children and our 
grandchildren. But that financial security that can come with fiscal 
responsibility here in this Congress and a solid pro-growth tax policy 
isn't security if we have to be continually under attack from an enemy 
that the other side of the aisle would not have the will to challenge.
  This President, our Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Speaker, has had the will 
to challenge. He has had the will to lay out the vision and he has had 
the commitment to stand in the face of a tremendous amount of 
criticism.
  It has been a disappointment to me, Mr. Speaker, to hear that 
criticism. When I go to the hospitals and visit our wounded soldiers, 
when I visit our soldiers in the field in Iraq and over in the Middle 
East, when I stop at Landstuhl at the hospital there and land at 
Ramstein and go over to Landstuhl, Germany, to visit wounded in the 
hospital there, where I have been three times; when I go to Bethesda 
Naval Hospital to visit the wounded, generally the wounded Marines and 
the corpsmen that are there; when I go to Walter Reed to visit the 
wounded soldiers that are there, and I listen to them talk to me, Mr. 
Speaker, and there has been a certain Member of Congress from 
Pennsylvania that has gotten a lot of press relating to the public 
criticism that he claims comes from wounded soldiers, I have never 
heard a word of that kind of criticism from a single soldier that I 
visited, and I do not let a quarter go by without being to one of those 
hospitals to visit our wounded, and I will always go in an visit. As 
long as there are soldiers that need to be visited, I will visit them.
  I have never heard one soldier tell me that he regretted volunteering 
for the United States militarily or that he regretted serving or he 
didn't believe in this mission or in this cause. Not one.
  I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a nurse who spent a year-and-
a-half at Landstuhl and dealt with hundreds of wounded that came 
through. Most all of the wounded come through from Iraq into Landstuhl 
in Germany and then come to the United States.

[[Page 1567]]

  I asked her if she had heard any of that sentiment about wounded 
soldiers regretting serving their country or not believing in this 
mission. And her answer was, no, she had never heard a single soldier 
utter such a thing. In fact, she said, almost all of them feel guilty 
that they were wounded and they can't be back with their troops. They 
want to take that responsibility of going back with their troops into 
the theater, back to Iraq, to finish their tour of duty. That is the 
kind of patriotism and dedication that comes with our military. And 
these are people that some of them have been burned badly, some of them 
have very severe wounds, some of them are amputees.
  I have had more than one amputee tell me, ``I am going to make the 
military my career. I am going to get this prosthetic, get my leg up 
and going, I am going to take the therapy, and I am going make a career 
out of the military. I have come this far.''
  I had one tell me, ``This wound where I lost my leg isn't going to 
change my life in any way except I am going to start a family now.'' 
That level of vision, that level of commitment, Mr. Speaker, is what we 
have out there.
  Perhaps the best quality people that have ever gone to war for a 
country are the people that are out there defending our freedom today, 
and we owe them everything we have, all the support we have, all the 
best training, all the best equipment. But we owe them a voice of 
support here on the floor of the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  2330

  We owe them that voice in our national media. We owe them that voice 
in our schools, in our town squares, in our town halls, in our coffee 
shops, in our churches. Everywhere across this land we owe them a voice 
of support.
  And I would point out that Clausewitz, the great writer, his 
philosophy on war, and I believe that was his work, ``On War,'' stated 
that the object of war was to destroy the enemy's ability and will to 
wage war. Destroy their ability and their will.
  But we are at war, Mr. Speaker. And our troops are over there in 
harm's way. And they are actively destroying the enemy's ability to 
wage war. And as they lose their ability, it destroys their will.
  But what, Mr. Speaker, puts the energy back in our enemy? What gives 
them back their will as their will is destroyed on the battlefield in 
Iraq, that is being destroyed because their ability is being taken away 
from them? Their will is being replaced by the voices of some of the 
people that are quasi-leaders of the United States of America that make 
such statements as, and I will quote Howard Dean, the chairman of the 
DCCC, he said the idea that we are going to win in Iraq is just plain 
wrong. Well, how wrong can that be? How wrong can that be to encourage 
the enemy, discourage our military, to make that statement over and 
over again? And that voice comes out of people from the other side of 
the aisle day after day after day, a constant drum beat of despair.
  It has been a constant drum beat of despair over here for the 
previous hour before I came to the floor, and it will be a constant 
drum beat of despair every single night that they have an opportunity 
to have this platform here on the floor of the United States Congress, 
Mr. Speaker. A constant drum beat of despair that encourages our enemy, 
discourages our own troops, and works to be counterproductive.
  Clausewitz said the object of war is to destroy the enemy's ability 
and will to wage war. Well, the key to this, they are both tied 
together. Ability and will are tied together. If you have a lot of 
ability, you also have enough confidence to have the will.
  As your ability diminishes, if you lose your munitions and if your 
troops are being destroyed, you do not have so many tools to work with 
anymore so you begin to lose your will; you lose your self-confidence.
  But I would submit that it is even simpler than Clausewitz said. It 
is this simple, Mr. Speaker: war is never over until the losing side 
realizes that they have lost. It is that simple. When the enemy 
understands that they have lost, that is when they will give up, not 
before. They have to realize that they have lost. That requires us to 
destroy their ability and their will to wage war.
  But if their will is weak, and if their will is utterly weak, it does 
not matter how much ability they have, it does not matter how many 
tanks they have, how many IEDs they have, how many guns, how many 
soldiers. If they do not have the will to use them, the war is over.
  So if we can win a war simply by sending a letter to the enemy that 
says, why do you not quit now, because we will not, and we have the 
ability and we have the will, so you need to have the understanding 
that it will not pay for you to fight, at that point the war could be 
over. If we convinced the enemy that they could not win, they would 
lose their will to fight.
  Well, part of that will to fight comes from the voices here on this 
side of the Atlantic Ocean. And I point out, Mr. Speaker, that on an 
evening, as I was in the hotel in Kuwait, I was watching al Jazeera TV. 
On that television show came Muqtada al Sadr. I think we know who he 
is: Bushy beard, rotten teeth, leader of a militia that has been 
attacking Americans. He is a Shiaa rather than a Sunni.
  And he was saying into the al Jazeera camera, if we keep attacking 
Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the 
same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. That 
should tell us what is going on in the minds of the enemy. They have 
been encouraged by the incidents of Vietnam, by pulling our troops out 
of Lebanon, about pulling out of Mogadishu. They think that Americans 
will pull out.
  So the voice of the people here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. 
Speaker, echoes through al Jazeera, and in seconds it goes through the 
satellite dishes that are on the tops of nearly every one of those 
houses in Iraq, and down into the insurgent's homes, and they will hear 
the English voices, probably will not understand it, and it will come 
out in Arabic subtitles, and it will say wrong war, wrong place, wrong 
time. The idea that we are going to win in Iraq is just plain wrong.
  Those kinds of quotes that we know from the other side have 
encouraged our enemy over and over again, and our enemy makes more and 
more bombs, extends this conflict longer and longer, and it costs 
American lives. That is the bottom line.
  Our job is to convince them that they cannot win, destroy their will. 
And when they understand that they have lost, that is when they will 
quit, not before, Mr. Speaker. So it is imperative that we stick 
together on this. We had a debate in this Congress. It was a 
significant majority that endorsed the President's authority.
  We are there. We are committed. And we cannot pull out. And we are 
winning. And the statistics are good. You know, we do not wage war by 
body count anymore, so we do not ever hear the casualty rates that are 
actually being inflicted on the enemy in Iraq. The numbers that I am 
about to give are numbers that are several months old. I have not been 
briefed on those numbers since prior to Christmas sometime.
  But I will tell you that the Iraqis themselves on a monthly average 
for about a 3-month average were losing about 200 of their uniformed 
soldiers that were killed and most of them killed in action every 
month, Mr. Speaker, about 200. They were losing about 400 civilians 
every month.
  The enemy was losing, between those killed and captured, taken out of 
the battlefield, about 3,000 a month. I also point out that the overall 
casualties of those killed, those numbers that were up there that added 
up to a number of more than 650 a month on our side, our coalition side 
with Iraqi civilian, coalition troops and Iraqi troops, that number 
that was around 650 a month then, now has diminished dramatically, and 
those casualties are down to around 50 a month.
  So big progress is being made. The sad part is statistically that is 
not showing up in American casualties; they are still suffering a 
greater proportion of these casualties. Progress is

[[Page 1568]]

being made, though, Mr. Speaker; and there is great light at the end of 
this tunnel.
  It has almost moved out into the dawn. It has always been a three-
component operation going on in Iraq. And the first component has 
always been the military component, liberation, provide first regime 
change. Get Saddam out of power, and then provide security in the 
country.
  And that has been an ongoing battle. It has been difficult. I do not 
think anybody predicted how difficult it would be. But the American 
soldiers and marines have persevered. And now the second phase of this, 
and think of them really as intertwined efforts, but the military 
security effort first.
  The second effort that needed to come along behind that and partially 
intertwined with it is the political solution. If we just have a 
military security solution and a political solution, that does not get 
Iraq where they need to go. They need to have an economic solution as 
well.
  So the phases of this, we are nearing the end of the phase of the 
security military solution, where more than 237,000 Iraqis are now in 
uniform defending Iraqis, where more than 30 bases have been handed 
over to the Iraqis to man and maintain and take care of and operate out 
of.
  Those things are happening. That transition is taking place. It is 
all consistent with a plan that has been in place for more than a year. 
And so the military solution is coming along. Remember, within a 12-
month period of time, Iraq had three elections. They pulled off three 
elections.
  They elected an interim parliament, they brought forth a Constitution 
and ratified the constitution and under that constitution they elected 
seats for a new parliament, and just now promoted the nomination for a 
new prime minister. That is a great long stride into the political 
solution, coming right intertwined with and intermixed with, but on the 
heels of the security solution that comes from the military side.
  And now I hope that the Iraqi people, once they have the formal 
election, they elect a prime minister, I hope they sit down and go to 
work. I hope one of the first items on their agenda is the item that 
says look at this country that we have. Look at all of this oil up here 
around Kirkuk. We have got all of this oil down here around Basra. We 
have got all of these resources that have been producing $26 billion in 
royalty revenues in oil from this dilapidated structure that we have. 
We need to find a way to inject foreign capital in here and punch new 
wells down into the desert and bring that oil to the top of the ground 
and run it through refineries and down pipelines and out into the gulf 
and onto tankers that are sitting down here off the gulf in that area, 
Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  2340

  They need to realize that that is their economic solution. So I would 
submit the plan that I would submit would be to have a competitive 
bidding process. Bring in the large oil companies in the world. Give 
them a chance to come in and bid and have them pay royalties for the 
oil that they would take out of the ground. And if they need cash up 
front to continue their reconstruction effort, and they do, I would ask 
that those bids come with upfront money so they would be adequate, that 
Iraq could continue their reconstruction efforts and still open up the 
oil fields and get this cash coming.
  This $26 billion a year, I will not say it is a drop in the bucket, 
that is a lot of money, Mr. Speaker, but it can be a lot more money, 
and it needs to be a lot more money.
  As this situation unfolds and the Iraqis provide for more and more of 
their own security and the political solution comes into place where it 
is on the cusp of having a ratified parliament seated with a prime 
minister, a voice in the world that is credible and a voice in the 
world for a sovereign Iraq that really represents the people in Iraq, 
will be controlling their own destiny, and an oil revenue that gives 
them a measure of financial independence and can actually make them a 
very wealthy country, then you will see some of these other things 
happening.
  For example, about the only thing being exported from Iraq right now 
are dates, and the date exports have been cut perhaps in half as to 
what they were prior to the liberation of Iraq. That can come back. A 
number of other industries can come back and a dynamic free enterprise, 
the economy that you see that all over the streets in Baghdad and 
around the country can be rejuvenated.
  I want to also point out an interesting experience, and that is they 
asked if I would give a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce. Of 
course, I always say yes if anyone gives me any speech time, Mr. 
Speaker, so I said I would if we could fit it in the schedule. I 
believe it was at three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon. So we came 
rolling into Baghdad, and we hustled into the Al Rasheed Hotel. They 
were starting to introduce me, and I was not ready because I had not 
identified the interpreter. I said, Just a minute. Before you introduce 
me, I would like to know who the interpreter is so I can speak to the 
interpreter and I will know how to interact with him. And they said, 
You will not need an interpreter. I said, Well, I do not speak a word 
of Arabic. They said, You will not need to. These people, there are 
about 56 or 57 members of the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce, you will not 
need to have an interpreter and you will not need to speak Arabic 
because this group of people speaks English. And I thought, This is 
sweet.
  I spoke English to them for 30 minutes or so. They reacted. They 
smiled at the right times, frowned at the right times, clapped 
occasionally. They got up and asked questions. It was like being at 
home in Iowa.
  I thought, if they can pull off this English here in Baghdad, we 
ought to be able to handle this in most of the places in the United 
States of America. They have got a great start on their economy there, 
and it has been a very rough time for them, but we are committed, and 
we will stay there.
  Mr. Speaker, to the people from Iraq who will one day look up this 
Congressional Record of perhaps tonight or tomorrow, they need to know 
that there is a broad, solid core of support in this Congress. We took 
a vote on whether to stay with them or whether to pull out, and this 
Congress voted 403 to 3 to stick with you in Iraq. We will be there, 
Mr. Speaker, and we will be there until this is done. And they are 
picking up this on their own.
  I want to say a few words then about the necessity. While they are 
providing more energy coming out of Iraq, how come it is so important 
for us here in the United States to have a better energy policy than we 
have? We passed a couple of energy bills last year, neither of which 
was I satisfied with, and I voted for them both because they move us 
down the road a little ways. They did not get enough done. I want to 
see more done, Mr. Speaker.
  We sit here with a shortage of energy in this country, and Hurricane 
Katrina certainly illustrated that. The shortage of energy that was 
shut off when Katrina hit in the Gulf drove gas prices up over $3 a 
gallon. In some places, gas was not even available. In places like 
Pennsylvania I think diesel fuel was not available, and there were 
trucks parked there, and I believe there were also trucks parked in 
places in Georgia. But it shut down this fuel down, and prices went up, 
and we understood how vulnerable we were to losing that supply of fuel 
that comes up from the Gulf Coast and Louisiana area.
  It is not just that. It is the fact that we have not produced energy 
to keep up with the increase in our consumption. So we import more and 
more foreign oil. The last number that I saw that I had confidence in 
was 61 percent of our oil comes from overseas. I see that number 
published sometimes significantly higher than that, and sometimes it is 
predictions. Sometimes they say it is a real number.
  Regardless, Mr. Speaker, we need to be less dependent on foreign oil; 
and I am certainly more concerned about the oil that we purchase from 
countries who have leaders who take positions that are just contrary to 
that of the United States.
  Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela has often given public statements that

[[Page 1569]]

have been very, very critical to the United States. He leans towards 
Marxism. He is agitating for those kind of governments in South 
America. There have been elections in South America that leaned a 
number of countries in that direction. Hugo Chavez has allied with 
Castro.
  The direction that has taken place in the Western Hemisphere because 
of the politics of the people that we are enriching by purchasing 
natural gas and oil from them causes me to ask, why are we enriching 
the people who would position themselves to be our enemies? Why are we 
losing the fertilizer industry in the United States? The cost of 
nitrogen fertilizer, 90 percent of that cost is the cost of natural gas 
that it is produced from. We have watched those fertilizer prices go up 
4 and 500 percent in the last few years. We have watched natural gas 
prices go from $2 to $15. They dropped back down some in the last 
several years as well but peaked out at $15 here within the last couple 
of months.
  We cannot produce fertilizer with natural gas prices like that. 
Farmers cannot afford to buy the fertilizer. So what is happening is 
our fertilizer industry is going offshore, and it is a real industry 
that is being built down in Trinidad Tobago. Also the fertilizer 
industry coming from Venezuela and Russia, Russia where their natural 
gas is 95 cents, ours was $15. You can see that we cannot compete with 
that. One day we will see a fertilizer cartel in the hands of the 
people that are positioning themselves not to be our friends, Mr. 
Speaker.
  It is important that we have that kind of independence for our food 
supply. It is important that we have independence for our energy 
supply. It is important that we develop the natural gas reserves that 
we have in this country, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the 
north slope of Alaska, sitting there, waiting to be run down to the 
lower 48 States in a pipeline. A few political glitches in the way from 
building that pipeline, Mr. Speaker. I think that should have been done 
a long time ago.
  I am not as concerned about that any longer as I am about our ability 
to drill on the Outer Continental Shelf like they do offshore in Texas, 
like they do offshore in Louisiana, like they do not offshore going 
around Florida and up the East Coast and up the West Coast as well. The 
Outer Continental Shelf, comparing the fertilizer inventory on the 
north slope of Alaska, which is 38 trillion cubic feet, with 406 
trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore. And that is what we have a 
pretty good idea of without going out to inventory that natural gas. A 
tremendous amount.
  It is sitting next door to the distribution system off the Louisiana 
coast. We could just drill our way on around Florida on up the coast. 
We need to do that. We need to drill for that gas where the market is, 
where the population centers are. Yes, I am told that Florida plans 33 
generation plants coming up within this next year or two, and 28 of 
them plan to be natural gas and they will not let us drill a single 
well, not even 199 miles offshore of Florida, anywhere, because someone 
on a tall tower with a powerful telescope could somehow see the top of 
that derrick over the curvature of the Earth. And somehow someone would 
find out about that and they would not go to Florida to sit on the 
beach when there has never been any kind of environmental negative 
impact with natural gas anywhere in the world. It just simply vaporizes 
and goes off in the air, Mr. Speaker.
  So I contend that on energy we need to do a number of things, all in 
the context of grow the size of the energy pie. If you think of all the 
energy as a pie, and that would include our nuclear, our coal, our gas, 
our diesel fuel, our ethanol, our bio-diesel, our wind, our hydrogen, 
and a number of other components of energy that we use and produce, 
that can all be laid out now. The percentage of each would dictate the 
size of the piece of the size of the overall pie.
  We need to look at that. That is the finite amount of energy that we 
are producing in this country. We need to grow that. We need to expand 
the amount of energy that is available to the consumers in America, and 
we need to change the proportion of those slices of the pie. So, for 
example, why do we use natural gas to generate electricity when it is 
becoming a more scarce product that we need for fertilizer, for 
example?
  So I would submit that we would change the overall size of that to 
more fertilizer, less electrical production. We probably hit the limit 
that we can build hydroelectric dams in order to generate electricity.

                              {time}  2350

  The limit has been the environmentalists' limit that we would hit 
there. We need to go back to nuclear and generate a lot more 
electricity with nuclear. There is a clean coal concept that can be 
used for baseline, coal-fired plants, and that can be used almost all 
over this country to produce a tremendous amount of electricity.
  All those things need to happen, and as the President said in this 
chamber just the last day of January, that we need to expand the use of 
ethanol, and he is very credible when he says that, Mr. Speaker, 
because a fellow that comes from the oil patch, that is promoting 
ethanol and renewable fuels, is a person that you know believes in it.
  In Iowa, and the congressional district that I have the privilege and 
honor represent, they will be at nine ethanol production facilities 
there by the end of this year, perhaps even one more. That will take us 
to the position where we are producing from corn all of the ethanol 
that we have the corn to supply. It means we can cannot use all of our 
corn for ethanol production. We can perhaps use 25 percent of our corn 
for ethanol production, and ethanol is, of course, going all over the 
country to be blended with gasoline.
  Our markets in Iowa are voluntary. When people go in and pull out the 
pump and the nozzle and put it in their tank, they choose ethanol 81 
percent of the time. It was 42 percent just a few years ago. So it has 
almost doubled, and that is a voluntary usage because people understand 
that it is economical, it is environmentally friendly, and it reduces 
our dependence on foreign oil.
  So the President has advocated that within 25 years we reduce our 
dependence on foreign oil by 75 percent. I think that is a doable goal, 
especially with some of the technology that is out there, making 
ethanol out of cellulose. So that would be wood fiber and chips and 
even weeds and switch grass, and yet corn stalks and all of that kind 
cellulose that grows up out of the ground is all renewable. We can be 
energy independent if, in fact, we had to be. It would not take us very 
long to get there, Mr. Speaker.
  We need an overall strategy to grow the size of the energy pie to 
change the proportions of the size of those pieces so that we use more 
of certain kinds of energy, and I will advocate, as I said, nuclear and 
coal and ethanol to be three of those that I would advocate we use a 
lot more of. We can do some things with solar panels. That is an 
emerging technology, but change the proportion of the size of the 
pieces of the energy pie so that we have a prudent, long-term policy 
that can reduce and, one day, eliminate our dependence on foreign oil.
  It also includes not just drilling for oil and gas on the Outer 
Continental Shelf, not just bringing a pipeline down from Alaska to 
deliver the natural gas from Alaska, but it also includes drilling for 
oil in ANWR. That stretch up there, Mr. Speaker, that is 19.6 million 
acres. Out of that we are going to tap into 2,000. Only 2,000 acres, 
.01 percent of that region, used to tap into the oil that we know is 
there. That could bring 1 million barrels or more of oil down to the 
lower 48 or actually down to Valdez and out on the tanker. That could 
happen in a very short period of time if we would just step up here on 
the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and have the people in the 
other body do the same thing. The President would sign the bill, and we 
would be one huge step closer to energy independence.
  All of these things need to happen in a country that should be able 
to plan its future, in a country that should be

[[Page 1570]]

able to debate its future and take action on the floor of this 
Congress.
  We have stepped forward and taken on quite a task in this overall war 
on terror. This place called Iraq is not the war on terror. This is a 
battlefield in the overall global war on terror, but our military has 
stepped forward and done their job. We need to stand with them. We need 
to know and realize that we are in a time of war and that means that we 
need to tighten our belt. That requires sacrifice. That sacrifice needs 
to let us find the will in this Congress to move towards a balanced 
budget, a balanced budget that makes the Bush tax cuts permanent 
because that fixes this growth rate in place so it has a sense of 
permanency and a sense of predictability. We need to put those tax cuts 
in place, move towards a balanced budget, and provide a sense of 
financial security so that this continuity of this long period of 10 
consecutive quarters of growth can go on another 10 consecutive 
quarters.
  I would go further with the taxes, Mr. Speaker. Given the time that 
is allowed here tonight I will simply tie this back with the energy 
side of this. So, if good things are happening in the overall war on 
terror, if we control our spending on this budget, tighten our belt and 
if we sacrifice the way our military sacrifices, we can keep funds and 
resources going to them so they can do their job. If we provide for 
more energy, grow the size of the energy pie, we have laid out a 
destination for America's future that is an economic and a security 
destiny, and without going into the social side of this, the 
constitutional aspects of it, that is most of what we need, Mr. 
Speaker, to get this country where it needs to go.
  So I want to thank the Speaker for the privilege to address this 
House of Representatives.

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