[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 847-848]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, following the other two speakers in 
regard to Iraq, I want to say a couple things. No. 1, anybody who 
criticizes what the President is proposing or anybody else is proposing 
or what has been done cannot get away with criticizing. There has to be 
another plan. I want to hear plans from people who think that what the 
President is doing is wrong. What would they do?
  The second thing is that even the Iraq Study Group, which is very 
bipartisan, said there should not be a precipitous withdrawal from 
Iraq.
  In regard to what my distinguished leader of the Republican caucus 
had to say, that there has not been any attack on Americans in the 5 
years since 9/11, those who are criticizing our efforts on the war 
against terror would be the first ones, if we had an attack this very 
day, of criticizing the President of the United States: Why wasn't he 
on top to prevent some sort of attack? And because America has not been 
attacked, there tends to be a short memory about the fact that we did 
lose 3,000 Americans. And we know it can happen again.
  We know that terrorists came into O'Hare with the idea of a dirty 
bomb in America. We know there were people who were going to blow up 
bridges in New York City who were caught and the plans known. We 
individual Senators have been told by the CIA and by the FBI about many 
instances of where terrorist attacks against Americans have been 
stopped, and American lives have not been lost because of that. But 
they cannot talk about it because we do not want the terrorists to know 
what we know about them.
  Too much attention on Iraq detracts from the fact that there are 
terrorists in 60 different countries around the world waiting to kill 
Americans. Evidence of that was American military people working with 
the Filipinos over the weekend to kill two terrorists connected with 
radical religious groups.
  We finally were able to get at some of the people who should have 
been arrested in the previous administration, if a proper relations 
with Saudi Arabia had brought it about, who thought up the bombing of 
the embassies in east Africa when 12 Americans were killed and 200 
other people were killed. We believe one of those persons was killed in 
a strike we were making in Somalia

[[Page 848]]

over the weekend. So we are involved in more than just Iraq in the war 
on terror.
  People who forget what happened to America on 9/11, and if it 
happened again, some of the people who are criticizing what the 
President is doing would be there saying, as they were soon after 
September 11: Why wasn't the President on top of what happened on 
September 11 so it wouldn't happen again, when there were five 
instances of Americans being killed: 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, before 
2001, and this body passed the Iraqi Liberation Act unanimously in 1998 
because President Clinton was saying what a threat Saddam Hussein was 
to the United States or to the world as well and that he had to go.
  When you have that bipartisan support at a time when Americans are 
being attacked and killed--in 1993, 1995, 1997, and 1999, before 9/11 
somewhere around the world--you have to stop to think, it isn't just 
Iraq. It isn't just Afghanistan. It isn't just 9/11. These religious 
radicals have been out to kill Americans going way back to 250 marines 
being killed in Lebanon in 1983. And there are individual instances of 
terrorism before that.
  The war on terrorism isn't something new. What is going on in Iraq is 
not the war on terrorism. What is going on in Afghanistan is not the 
war on terrorism. The war on terrorism covers many nations, many 
threats to American people. The life of every one of us in this Chamber 
right now, if we were to go over to some parts of the world, would be 
threatened. We expect the President of the United States to protect us 
because he is Commander in Chief and because the responsibility of the 
Federal Government under the Constitution, No. 1, is the protection of 
the American people.

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