[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15311-15318]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            GREAT AMERICANS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Patrick J. Murphy of Pennsylvania). 
Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman 
from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you 
here on the floor of the United States Congress.
  All of this subject matter that we have before us, we have weighty 
decisions here before this Congress. As we prepare to go forward into a 
Presidential election, these issues come more and more to the focus.
  But also I know that while we are deliberating on our intense issues 
that will set the destiny of America, we have great Americans that have 
served in this Congress that have helped set the destiny and direction 
of this country as well. And as we move towards those dates, it's 
important that we recognize those people.
  One of those folks that is among that group I'm talking about is with 
us here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and that's the gentleman from California, 
the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, the former chairman 
of the Armed Services Committee, a brave patriot in his own right.
  I would be happy to yield so much time as he may consume to Mr. 
Duncan Hunter of California.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I'm ready to give 
him more time with that wonderful introduction, one that I don't 
deserve. But I thank the gentleman.
  I asked Mr. King to let me take a little time from his time tonight 
to talk about a couple of wonderful individuals. The first person I 
would like to mention is, of course, a lady who has been a wonderful 
representative from my office for many years in Imperial County, which 
was a big part of my congressional district for many years, and that's 
Carole Starr. And Carole Starr, when I got my congressional district 
moved out to Imperial County from San Diego County and went literally 
all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the Colorado River to Arizona, 
taking in the entire Mexican-California border, I found that I had a

[[Page 15312]]

brand new constituency. It's a lot like the gentleman's from Iowa.
  I had a large farming constituency, a community in Imperial County 
with people of great character and people with lots of issues that were 
vastly different than the issues of folks who live in San Diego, but 
also people with a wonderful sense of patriotism. In that big valley, 
Imperial Valley, we had the Naval Air Facility where the Blue Angels 
train in the wintertime, and where we now have one of the best training 
grounds of any location in the United States. We're adjacent to the big 
Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range, and an airplane or a group coming 
from any part of the United States to train can get up there and train 
365 days a year in that good desert air.
  We also have that wonderful farming constituency, probably the most 
productive land in the world, acre-for-acre, under irrigation from the 
Colorado River. It's a place where we have lots of people with great 
character. And communities like Brawley and El Centro and Calexico and 
Imperial and lots of other wonderful communities in Imperial County.
  Running that entire county for our office was a wonderful lady named 
Carole Starr. I lost the Valley a few years ago, Imperial Valley, in 
redistricting, but Carole Starr was such a fantastic person, and today 
is quite ill, she's under the weather right now and is home resting in 
Imperial County with a very difficult ailment. But I just thought it 
would be important to take the floor and talk about Carole for a minute 
because she was such a big part of our operation in Imperial County and 
such a wonderful leader in that county.

                              {time}  2230

  You know, I had a pretty full office in San Diego County and usually 
seven or eight folks there in the office. Carole Starr ran the Imperial 
County office all by herself, and whether you were a person of means in 
Imperial County, or if you just hitchhiked in and just came in off of 
the freeway off-ramp, you could walk into our congressional office in 
Imperial Valley Airport in Imperial and knock on that door, and Carole 
Starr would greet with you with a smile and say, ``How can I be of 
service to you?''
  And Carole weathered all these very difficult issues that we had, 
from the carnal bunt disease that took down our green crop one year, to 
the myriad problems with the Colorado River, the desalinization plant 
there at Yuma, the ongoing water struggles that always engulfed 
California politics, and of course, all of the day-to-day work that you 
find in any congressional office where you have folks that need to get 
that Social Security check or make sure that they get that particular 
veterans' service or have some help with the IRS.
  Anybody could walk in Carole Starr's door, and they would be greeted 
with great professionalism, a warm smile, and a ``How can I help you'' 
attitude, and I always called Carole Starr the ``Star of the Valley.''
  And you know, over the years, Mr. Speaker, when I would visit 
Imperial Valley with my family, and especially my two boys, Duncan and 
Sam, Sam started out when we got Imperial County. Really, he had just 
been born. He was a brand new baby, and over the years, he grew, and 
one of the things that we did many times when we were in Imperial 
Valley was we would always match up Carole, who stood about five three, 
with Sam. And Carole always wanted to see how fast he was growing and 
try to estimate when he would surpass her height.
  I know one time, back when Dick Cheney came to Imperial County to 
work with me on some of the desert issues, and Carole Starr would 
always do a back-to-back with my son Sam to see how much he had grown 
over the last month or so. And on that occasion--and that was about, 
oh, I don't know, about 1992 or 1994--in fact, my son Sam Hunter at 
that point surpassed Carole Starr in height, and of course, he's been 
growing ever since. He's now about six two.
  But Carole Starr was just a warm, wonderful person who had a 
trademark of directness and honesty and good will. And today, she lies 
quite stricken by a very severe ailment, and I just hope that God will 
hold her in the palm of his hand and take care of her and give comfort 
to her family because Carole Starr represented the very best of our 
outreach to our community.
  And I know every Member of this body has several dimensions to their 
service. One dimension is what we do here on the House floor and what 
we do with respect to legislation and bills and the administration, 
whether it's Democrat or Republican. But the other dimension is how we 
relate to our constituents in our district, and just like the gentleman 
from Iowa, we all have about 700,000 folks in our district. And some of 
them have real pressing problems, and in some cases, we are the last 
resort for those constituents who have been to Federal agencies and 
have been turned down or stiff-armed or have no other options, and they 
come to us.
  And sometimes we're able to help them, but we're only able to help 
them when we have great, wonderful people serving us in our district 
offices, and Carole Starr, who ran the entire Imperial County--and I 
called her the ``Star of the Desert'' because she truly was one of 
those people with a great, great heart and great professionalism.
  Mr. Speaker, I'd also like to mention a couple of other individuals 
who are very important to me, and I know we've got lots of people 
retiring this year. We've got a lot of folks that have served here for 
many years. I just want to mention a couple of people, Jimmy Saxton and 
Terry Everett, two great personal friends and two great servants of 
this country on the House Armed Services Committee are, in fact, 
retiring.
  You know, Jimmy Saxton came in, I believe it was in 1982 when he came 
into office, and I remember he replaced Ed Forsythe. In fact, when he 
went in to get the obligatory picture taken with then-President Ronald 
Reagan when he was a candidate for Congress, Ed Forsythe had passed 
away. And he was that well-known Congressman who had a butch haircut, 
and he wore a bow tie and was quite well-known on Capitol Hill.
  And when Jimmy Saxton walked up to Ronald Reagan and said I'm running 
for Ed Forsythe's seat, Ronald Reagan, not having read the Washington 
Post all that much, said ``Go get him,'' and of course, Jimmy Saxton 
said, ``I can't do that, he's a decedent, and I'm running for the open 
seat.''
  But Jimmy Saxton started a career in which he represented his Third 
District in New Jersey so ably, and he worked on environmental matters. 
He worked on local issues, and he protected those important military 
bases and gave them their best shot at surviving base closure, which he 
did very effectively, I might add, and he helped to bring the New 
Jersey back to New Jersey, that great battleship.
  But I think Jimmy's most important work was done in the Armed 
Services Committee, in that committee and on the House floor. He 
chaired that very important Subcommittee on Terrorism. He traveled 
around the world. Every time you found two Green Berets or Navy SEALs 
or Army Rangers, Jimmy Saxton was there talking to them, learning what 
they needed, learning about operations, and then making a difference 
when we marked up the Defense bill.
  And Jimmy Saxton will be sorely missed. He's now the ranking member 
on the Air and Land Forces Subcommittee that makes important decisions. 
To Chairman Abercrombie, he's the ranking member, and he of course is 
still the Jimmy Saxton of great diligence who puts in lots of hours, 
working these important issues.
  And I'm going to miss Jimmy Saxton. He's one of those great public 
servants who gives so much more to this country than he gets, and he 
likes it that way.
  And he's got a little bit of a back ailment right now. I think that's 
because he was probably the only guy in the history of New Jersey 
athletics who was about a 5-foot-9 shot-putter, held the State shot put 
record as a high schooler, weighing a whopping 160 pounds. And maybe 
Jimmy Saxton started out at six two or six three, but

[[Page 15313]]

right now he's got a little bit of an ailing back because of that great 
prowess that he had with the shot put.
  Jimmy Saxton is just a great, wonderful person, and he's helped to 
make the Special Operations that is now so important to war fighting 
and especially important to the war on terror, to make our Special 
Operations effective and to make it not only a leading command in many 
of the theaters, a command that is to be supported by the combatant 
commanders in those particular theaters, but also a supporting force 
when it's necessary.
  And the way the Special Operations has laminated and integrated and 
worked with the line units in our war-fighting theaters has been a real 
part of the success of the American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
A lot of that was due to Jimmy Saxton. He is a guy who can look at an 
issue, without becoming parochial and without becoming polarized, get 
all the information and try to make a wise decision, using that great 
judgment.
  And so I'm going to miss Jimmy Saxton, and more than that, I think 
this is country going to miss him.
  You know, the other guy I'd like to talk about just briefly is Terry 
Everett. Here's a guy who came from a working background, went to work 
for a newspaper, was a writer and editor and, finally, a publisher and 
an owner of a little string of newspapers in Alabama and then ran for 
Congress and got elected. And Terry Everett is another one of those 
guys who, like Jimmy Saxton, has gone right to the heart of national 
security.
  And as the chairman of the Strategic Subcommittee, and also a member 
of the Armed Services Committee who's on the Intelligence Committee, he 
has a unique understanding of the importance of space assets and what 
we have to do with space assets to maintain our economy and our 
security. And there's probably very few people, if anybody else, in the 
Congress who understands space as well as Terry Everett.
  Terry Everett's not a guy you will find making speeches. He's always 
the guy with the shortest remarks at the press conference when he 
attends a press conference. But when you close the doors, when you're 
working on the Intel Committee or the Armed Services Committee, or a 
combination of issues that affect both those committees, he's one of 
the hardest working guys that you will ever see.
  It's guys like Terry Everett that make this country's security 
apparatus run so well. They don't put out a lot of press releases, but 
they put out a lot of hard work.
  And also, Terry's got that great sense of being able to work with 
people, gain their trust, find out what the issues are, and then work 
to resolve those issues. That's so important when you work with lots of 
intelligence officers, when you work with the Special Operations 
Command, when you work with the space command, and you have to not only 
do that but you've got to serve the people back home.
  And Terry also, incidentally, is a master woodworker. I remember I 
was in his little woodworking studio there at his house in Alabama, and 
I was going to ask Terry if I could work on some cabinets in his 
woodworking studio. And he said sure, and I looked down and there were 
some spots of blood on the floor. I said, ``What's that?'' He said, 
``Well, that's just where I cut my hand kind of badly with that machine 
over there.'' He said, ``I leave that blood there just to remind me to 
be careful.'' I haven't completed my woodworking course with Terry 
Everett, but I look forward to that.
  So, Mr. Speaker, those are a couple of great individuals who have 
really made their mark in this House, and they're going to be leaving 
us. We're sorry to see them go.
  And incidentally, another guy who's done a great job on this 
committee, Rob Andrews from New Jersey, also. Great, great, wonderful 
individual, often was really a center of bipartisan cooperation on 
important issues. And you know, we'd be sometimes polarizing on the 
Armed Services Committee, with a Democrat position and Republican 
position. Most of the time we're bipartisan, but then we'd start to 
polarize. We'd all kind of wait to listen to Rob Andrews because he 
would look at the issue on the merits. And sometimes he'd come down on 
one side and sometimes he'd come down on the other, but you knew that 
his position was always a result of reason and was not necessarily a 
result of looking over and kind of counting the votes and trying to 
figure out where his team was going or where the other team was going.
  We need folks like that in these difficult, partisan times to bring 
us together, find that common ground and move the country forward. And 
I always thought Rob was the very representative of that style that is 
so important to the success of this House.
  So, Mr. Speaker, thanks for letting me take this time. It's always 
fun to come down and take a big bite out of somebody else's time, and I 
want to thank the gentleman from Iowa for letting me take some of his 
minutes here. I really appreciate it.
  And the gentleman from Iowa, incidentally, is a very wonderful friend 
and a great colleague and a guy who really has been working this energy 
issue with great energy and was a wonderful host to those of us who 
spent our time in Iowa in that Presidential race, including those of us 
like myself who had rather short-lived campaigns. The gentleman from 
Iowa was always there, always gracious, always willing to put a group 
together, and helped to create that great forum that is Iowa politics. 
I want to thank the gentleman.
  And I want to thank him, also, for his great help on the border 
fence, a very important issue. And he helped to push this bill that we 
finally got passed in 2006. We got a mandate to build 854 miles of 
double-border fence, got watered down a little bit by the other body, 
but we're still constructing. And we've got projects now in Arizona, 
New Mexico, Texas, and California. And the gentleman did a lot of work 
to make sure that happens.
  So I want to thank him.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, I really thank the gentleman from California 
as I reclaim my time, and I'd be glad to yield however much time might 
be needed to continue the compliments to myself. I'll be quite as 
generous with that particular time.
  But I want to say, Mr. Duncan Hunter from California is a brave and 
great patriot and has poured forth his appreciation for many of his 
colleagues, and I'm sure as the months unfold we'll hear this emerge in 
many accolades for the accomplishments of Duncan Hunter.
  And I want to say as you came to Iowa to campaign for the Presidency, 
and sometimes it was late nights, and it was often early mornings. And 
I remember this situation, the night of the straw poll, August 11, 
2007, when it was the big test. And everybody had to count their straw 
polls and votes that came in, and however that shook out, that gave 
some people momentum, and other people lost momentum. And some people 
that had momentum had already left the State before the votes were 
counted.
  But I had an early press call to be down to the State Fair on the 
east side of Des Moines fairly early the following morning. It was a 
Sunday morning. I arrived there, but I had to wait in line because 
Duncan Hunter was there with his cowboy hat, and he was already working 
the State Fair. I don't know if it was before the sun came up, but it 
was right away in the morning. That's the kind of tenacity that we 
expect in your successor, and I yield back to you.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank you, and let me tell you, the State Fair in Iowa 
was wonderful. It was also wonderfully hot. That was a good little 
scorcher, the State Fair, but man, you had a tremendous State Fair. 
I've never seen one like it.

                              {time}  2245

  So I just want to thank you and all of the wonderful people of Iowa. 
The great thing about them, they'll always listen to you and they'll 
let you make your point. And they very much, I think, treasure the fact 
that they're one of the first primaries in the Nation. And where they 
point this thing has a lot to do with the final nominations for both 
parties.

[[Page 15314]]

  It was a lot of fun. And let me tell you, campaigning in a State 
where you get to go to a lot of State fairs is not a bad deal. We had a 
great, great time in Iowa. And also going to the county fairs in the 
various counties. And I will say that in some counties there's a lot of 
road between fairs. But the gentleman takes that in stride.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. There is that. And we have some county fairs that 
are larger than a lot of State fairs.
  We live our fairs there in the State and we live our politics. And 
it's all politics all the time, 24/7. And that brings people to where 
they're paying attention to the issues and they take it seriously. And 
we have a statewide conversation going on constantly--over the 
telephones, the e-mail, over the back yard, in the coffee shop, at the 
fairs, all the activities that are going on.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman. Thanks a lot for letting me take 
that time to talk about Carole Starr and Terry Everett and Jimmy 
Saxton.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thanks for your comments. I thank, again, the 
gentleman from California as I reclaim the balance of my time.
  I think that my transition, as I watch the former chairman of the 
Armed Services Committee walk from the floor, I take this over to the 
subject matter of Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. It's been a little 
while since we've had intense discussions on that here on the floor.
  I would point out, as a matter of refreshment to those who haven't 
been so focused on our situation, we are a country at war. And we were 
attacked on September 11, 2001 and we lost 3,000 Americans in those 
three locations where we were attacked.
  The President then launched an offensive in Afghanistan, drove the 
Taliban out of Afghanistan, and people on that land voted for the first 
time in the history of man. Ever since Adam and Eve there hadn't been 
people go to the polls in Afghanistan. That happened fairly quickly; I 
believe it was about a little more than 1 year from the time that we 
went in.
  And in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was violating, let me say, the 
United Nations Resolution 1441--and many others--the decision was made, 
based upon global intelligence, to go in and remove that tyrant who was 
killing his own people on a regular basis. He had started a war against 
Iran, where there were more than 1 million killed. And he had used 
weapons of mass destruction to destroy thousands of his own country 
men, women and children.
  I have made a number of trips into Iraq. I sat with the chief justice 
who was on the panel that was lined up to try Saddam. And I asked the 
chief justice and the other justices, what is the penalty that Saddam 
is looking at? Now, he was in jail, and no one knew whether he was 
going to face the death penalty. And one of the other junior judges 
tried to explain to me, and he said that the penalty that Saddam is 
facing, well, we have a series of penalties; we have prison terms, we 
have life without parole--well, actually, he said we have the death 
penalty, then we have life in prison, and then we have other shorter 
terms, and it goes on down just like it does in the United States.
  And as I watched the chief justice listen to the more junior justice 
explain that to me--which didn't explain a lot, actually--the chief 
justice, sitting there with a big white mustache, was tapping his 
pencil on the table and he wanted to be recognized. And I turned to him 
for clarification and he said, Saddam is charged with crimes against 
humanity. Under Iraqi law, there is only one penalty, and that's death. 
And that's, ladies and gentlemen, when the world found out that Saddam 
was actually facing a death penalty. And about a year later then he did 
meet the end of his rope.
  And that was a dramatic time in the history of Iraq. It took the fear 
away from the Iraqis. They were never sure whether he was going to 
emerge, whether he would be found not guilty and released onto the 
streets. They were never sure if he would light up again or reconfigure 
his Baathist political machine, reestablish his force of tyranny across 
the country, take over the control of the people and terrorize the 
Shias, and control the oil again and use that country for his own evil 
purposes. They knew that Uday and Qusay were dead, but they didn't know 
that Saddam would not come back until they knew he was dead as well. 
That changed the dynamics in Iraq. And thousands, in fact, millions of 
Iraqis are grateful for the sacrifice that's been made by coalition 
troops, American troops and American taxpayers, who have given up a 
fair amount of treasure to match a significantly large loss of blood 
and humanity in that country.
  But what do we have today and where are we today and how did we get 
here? Well, in this Congress, this 110th Congress, Mr. Speaker, when 
Nancy Pelosi took the gavel--I will not forget that moment in time--and 
they began, on that side of the aisle, to bring resolutions to the 
floor in an attempt to unfund the war in Iraq. A whole series of pieces 
of legislation came raining down in this 110th Congress, directed to 
the floor, approved to coming to the floor by Speaker Pelosi, forty 
resolutions to undermine our military effort in Iraq. Forty different 
resolutions on the floor of this Congress calling for votes, trying to 
divide us, trying to see where they could find a way where they could 
squeeze off the resources to our military and ensure defeat, which is 
what it surely would have done. But we stood up, and we put the 
pressure back on the other side. And enough Democrats voted with 
Republicans to save this agenda that so many have sacrificed their 
lives and their blood for.
  When I talk to the soldiers that serve there, and the airmen and the 
Marines and the Navy personnel, and when I talk to the parents who have 
lost a son or a daughter, they say, You can't pull us out of this 
fight. Don't do this to us, please. We're all volunteers. We're all 
volunteers here to carry out this mission. We want to take this fight 
away from our children and our grandchildren. We want it done in our 
time.
  They put their lives on the line and they set aside years of their 
lives, many of them multiple deployments to go over there, 100 percent 
of them volunteers. Not just for the military. They didn't just sign 
up, they knew when they signed up or when they re-upped that the odds 
were good that they would be deployed into the theater of either Iraq 
or Afghanistan.
  And so they're all volunteers, Mr. Speaker. And they volunteer 
because they love this country, they understand our history, and they 
understand that we need to direct its destiny, not people that live in 
foreign countries, not the people that hate America, but the people 
that love America are the ones that protect our destiny. They're in 
uniform, they're in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, they're standing 
up and defending our freedom, and we need to stand with them.
  And so I'm troubled, Mr. Speaker, when I pick up an op-ed, and it was 
written by the junior Senator from Illinois, the junior Senator who 
served 147 days in the United States Senate, his only Federal office 
exposure, until he decided that he wanted to be the President of the 
United States. That junior Senator has been to Iraq one time, one time 
almost 900 days ago, but for more than 900 days he said, We've got to 
get out of Iraq, we've got to get out now, we've got to pull our troops 
immediately out of Iraq. And the only conditions are leave a rear guard 
there to guard their backs so they don't get shot in the back on their 
way out of Iraq. That's what I heard. I heard it not exactly in those 
words, but I heard that theme over and over again. And it was exactly 
the words ``immediately pull our troops out of Iraq.'' That's what the 
junior Senator from Illinois said. That's the position he holds today.
  He does understand that to pull 142,000 troops out of Iraq takes a 
little bit of time. He has said in his op-ed that's printed July 14 in 
the New York Times that he would consult with commanders on the ground 
and the Iraqi Government to ensure that our troops were redeployed 
safely and our interests protected. Well, that's the only consultation 
he's willing to accept is if somebody else will plan the logistics of 
the retreat.

[[Page 15315]]

  And I would remind the body that victory in a war is defined by who's 
standing on the ground that was fought over when the war is over. It's 
like a street fight; whoever is standing there on the corner won the 
fight, and the one whose buddies drug him off or walked or ran away is 
the one that lost. We all know that. You can't run away from a fight 
and declare victory. It doesn't work in a street fight, it doesn't work 
in a battle, and it doesn't work in a war. And you can say what you 
want to about history, but they're going to write history according to 
the facts; and the facts will be who was standing in Iraq at the end of 
the war, not who declared defeat and pulled troops out.
  But it is not just tantamount to a declaration of defeat to pull 
troops out and run away from an enemy, it is a declaration of defeat 
itself by any measure, by any judgment of history. I would just remind, 
again, Mr. Speaker, that we pulled out of Vietnam, ``peace with 
honor,'' I remember, ``peace with honor.'' And I remember this Congress 
voting to shut off all dollars to go to the South Vietnamese where they 
were, by then, trained to defend themselves. And we had made a sacred 
oath to the South Vietnamese people that we would provide for them all 
of the military equipment, all the munitions, and all of the air cover 
that they would need and use to defend themselves. And they were 
trained and equipped and they had their military squared away to do 
that. And this Congress passed legislation on an appropriations bill 
that said, ``These monies in this appropriations bill and any monies 
heretofore appropriated shall be prohibited from being spent to defend 
any military mission in Vietnam, on the ground of Vietnam, in the skies 
over Vietnam, in the seas around Vietnam''--North or South Vietnam it 
actually said--``or in the skies or land around Laos and Cambodia, 
neighboring counties.'' They covered it pretty good.
  Any money that was in the pipeline was prohibited from being spent to 
allow the South Vietnamese people to defend themselves. And any money 
in the Department of Defense appropriations bill would be prohibited 
from being used to let the South Vietnamese people defend themselves 
with those resources.
  We failed the South Vietnamese people. We gave them a solemn promise 
and a solemn oath, and we pulled out on them. And this country 
remembers people hanging on to the struts of helicopters as they lifted 
off of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a disgraceful image in the minds not 
just of patriotic Americans who saw that, sadly, but an image in the 
minds of people like al Qaeda who are inspired now because we didn't 
stick it out then.
  And I read General Giap's book, the general who is credited with 
being the mastermind that set up the strategy that historians will 
describe as the defeat of the United States in South Vietnam. I would 
argue that we were not defeated there, but we were defeated here on the 
floor of this Congress. That's the fact of it, Mr. Speaker.
  And on page eight of General Giap's book, he writes that he got his 
first inspiration that they could defeat the United States because we 
were willing to settle for a negotiated settlement in Korea. Because we 
didn't press forward for a complete 100 percent total victory over 
North Korea, he got the sense that we didn't have the stomach to finish 
a war that we were in. And so he set about with a strategy of the war 
of attrition, and they lost over 100,000 of their troops, killed in the 
Tet Offensive in 1968. And Walter Cronkite turned that into a defeat 
for the United States rather than a victory for our troops that so 
gloriously defended their positions and their compounds and the South 
Vietnamese people. Over 100,000 North Vietnamese troops killed in the 
Tet Offensive, and Walter Cronkite interpreted that as a defeat for the 
United States because he didn't know why there were sappers inside the 
wall but not inside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
  That's how history turned. History turned because it was redefined by 
liberal media people, and has since then been redefined by historians. 
And it's defined this way in the minds of Osama bin Ladin, General 
Giap, and also people like Muqtada al Sadr. And as I was actually in 
Kuwait, June 11, 2004, watching al Jazeera TV, Muqtada al Sadr came on 
and he said--and I was watching the closed caption going underneath the 
screen, he was speaking, I presume, in Arabic, the closed caption 
said--and I heard the voice of Muqtada al Sadr, he said, ``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.''
  The inspiration for our enemies doesn't come from some ideology that 
causes them to rise up and move in a fashion that--they're not seeking 
a better world or a better life, it's hatred for us. And they think 
they can defeat us because they believe we're soft and we lack resolve. 
And they go back and keep score of our history and they say, well, they 
pulled out of Vietnam, they pulled out of Lebanon, they pulled out of 
Mogadishu, surely they'll pull out of Iraq. Well, they're dealing with 
a different Commander in Chief today than who was in charge in any of 
those circumstances. This time it's George W. Bush who is sticking this 
out. And I'm sticking it out with him, Mr. Speaker, because he's right. 
The central battle in this global war on terror is now and has been for 
a long time Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.

                              {time}  2300

  That's changing. It's transitioning over to Afghanistan, perhaps 
Pakistan, but today it's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. And we have everything but a 
sewed-up victory there.
  When I look at the statistics that come out of Iraq, it tells me 
this: that civilian violence is off. It's down by about 80 percent from 
its peaks. Our military casualties are down dramatically as well. There 
has been 1 week where the accidental deaths in Iraq, 1 by my record so 
far, where the accidental deaths in Iraq were greater than the combat 
deaths in Iraq. That means you're getting down to one or two or three 
for the week. The casualties in Afghanistan have been for the last 4 to 
6 weeks roughly equal to or greater than they are in Iraq.
  Now, I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that you consider this: that we have 
about 140,000 to 142,000 troops in Iraq; we have about 26,000 troops in 
Afghanistan. So the numbers work out to be that there are about 5.38 
times more troops in Iraq than there are in Afghanistan. And if the 
casualties are roughly equivalent in each of the two countries, the 
casualty rate in Afghanistan is 5.38 times greater than the casualty 
rate in Iraq. That is a dramatic sea change, Mr. Speaker, in the 
numbers of casualties within the two countries. And it isn't just 
because the casualties have gone up in Afghanistan, which they have, 
but it's because they have gone down dramatically in Iraq.
  And the Department of Defense issued a couple of weeks ago sectarian 
attack statistics. Now, if you remember, we had people like the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania, who professes to be an expert on these 
issues, the one who said pull the troops out now, let's cut and run out 
of there and move them back to their horizon, who said that we had a 
civil war in Iraq and we had sectarian violence in Iraq and the place 
was melting down in shambles and chaos and the war could not be won. It 
was already lost. That from a retired Marine, that we already lost. 
Well, the sectarian violence, the violence that was described as 
uncontrollable, unmanageable, and going to get worse, the last report 
that came from the Department of Defense was sectarian violence, Shias 
killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shias for the sake that they are 
opposite sects, sectarian violence: zero. No recorded cases of attacks 
for sectarian reasons. Civilian violence off at least 80 percent, our 
casualties down to a level below where they are in Afghanistan for the 
last couple of weeks at least and spanning over the last 6 weeks 
equivalent roughly to Afghanistan. But the casualty rates in 
Afghanistan are 5.38 times higher than they are in Iraq.
  Now, why is anybody unsatisfied with this? When I kept asking the 
question: Describe for me, define for me a victory in Iraq. How do you 
define that

[[Page 15316]]

victory in Iraq? These folks over here are pretty cagy, Mr. Speaker, 
because they're not going to define a victory in Iraq. They know that 
we can achieve that. So they set up these benchmarks, 18 benchmarks for 
the Iraqis to reach, and if they didn't meet the benchmarks, then they 
were going to pull the plug on the funding and shut off the support for 
the troops and bring them all home. That was the strategy. And that was 
the strategy when General Petraeus came here to Congress--I think it 
was the 12th or 15th of September last year--and he gave a report on 
the situation in Iraq. And the junior Senator from New York said, ``It 
would require the willful suspension of disbelief to believe you, 
General Petraeus.'' ``The willful suspension of disbelief.''
  Well, look where we are today, Mr. Speaker? Who was telling the truth 
then? Was it the skeptic that came forward and denied the facts that 
were in front of her? Was it the general that laid out objectively the 
circumstances, with proper cautions, with proper caveats, but still 
with the proper strategy? And he sat down at Leavenworth and spent 
months writing the manual, the counterinsurgency manual. And I have 
that manual, and I have pored through it. I haven't read every word of 
it, but I have read a lot of the pieces in it. And that strategy was 
put together, as I sense it, as I read it, from the experience that 
General Petraeus had in Iraq and other experiences around other 
locations where he had been deployed, plus a lot of reading, a lot of 
experience, a lot of activity with other officers.
  I remember going to Iraq for the first time in 2003, and I talked to 
the officers. They didn't know very much about the culture in the 
Middle East, and they didn't have a lot of books that they'd read about 
it. And I came home and started to read. I went back to Iraq, and I saw 
the bookshelves in their offices in places like Baghdad and Fallujah 
with more books on the Arabic culture, on the Muslim religion, on ways 
to understand the culture and the religion and the military tactics. We 
saw our officers start to get up to speed and learn, and they got up to 
speed and learned. And no one has learned that I can tell any more or 
any faster than General Petraeus.
  And when I read this op-ed in the New York Times, written by the 
junior Senator from Illinois, who spent 147 days in the Senate and 
decided he should be the leader of the free world, he writes a few 
things in here that are quite disturbing. I will just take this kind of 
from the top. This is his op-ed that says what he is going to learn 
when he goes to Iraq. Now, this is a classic case of really getting the 
sequence of things wrong.
  Now, I'm a cynical person sometimes. That's what it takes to maintain 
sanity in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and I would say that I could name 
more than one individual in this Congress that decided that they were 
getting enough pressure from their constituents that they wanted to 
flip and change their position on the war on terror and particularly 
the central battlefield of that, which is Iraq. And I can name more 
than one individual that I believe decided they wanted to change their 
position, turn against the war, and so they set up a trip to go to Iraq 
so that they could learn what was going on over there, having already 
made up their mind that they were going to flip and turn against it. I 
could name more than one person. I choose not to do that, but I can do 
that. And they aren't all Democrats either, Mr. Speaker. That is a 
cynical thing to do. It's a cynical thing to do to come to a conclusion 
without the facts and then set up a trip so that you can validate the 
conclusion that you've already come to and come back and say, ``Well, 
here's what I've learned. I've learned that we've got to pull out and 
pull out now, and since I have been there, I really am convinced of 
that.'' That has happened in this Congress multiple times actually from 
both sides of the aisle.
  Well, Senator Obama takes it way another level. He goes to way 
another level, and he decides, I'm going to go to Iraq for the first 
time in 900 days. For more than 900 days, he has said we're going to 
pull the troops immediately out of there. And he's already decided what 
he's going to find out when he gets there. That's not exclusive new. I 
said I can name some people who have done that, and I think it's 
cynical and it's wrong. And remember when he said ``the audacity of 
hope''? Now, that's kind of an oxymoron. Hope is not in an active 
sense. Wishful thinking is what hope is. ``The audacity of hope.'' 
Well, what about the audacity of declaring to the world what he's going 
to learn when he gets there in a couple of weeks and putting it in an 
op-ed in the New York Times and telling us, well, I will go there and I 
am going to learn what's there, and then here's what I am going to do 
when I come back after I learn what it is I don't know. He's going to 
pull the troops out immediately. And he writes in his op-ed, dated the 
14th of July: ``But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge 
still hold true.''
  How does he know that, Mr. Speaker? How can he know that the same 
factors that led him to oppose the surge, the same factors presumably 
that led him to oppose our operations in Iraq, still hold true? What 
factors? What factors has he verified today that he thinks are going to 
be confirmed when he gets there? And if he already has his mind made 
up, why waste the jet fuel? Why put those global warming greenhouse 
gasses up in the atmosphere and fly over to Iraq if you already know 
what you think? What is going to be validated by his presence there 
when he already invalidates his own objective judgment by writing the 
op-ed that tells the world what it is that he wants us to know that he 
has concluded after he actually goes there but tells us before?
  And he says of the Iraqis that the ``leaders have failed to invest 
tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own 
country.''
  Not so. They are investing now tens of billions of dollars. I know 
that they were in a situation where they had about $60 billion in 
revenue and they were working furiously to get it so that they could 
get it down and out to the people. And we are getting that revenue out 
to the people. I met with the mayor of Ramadi some months ago. He 
sounded like, let's say, the mayor of Altoona: ``I need more resources. 
I can't quite get the bureaucrats out of the way. I've got to build a 
sewer. We need a water plant. We have got to fix some streets.'' That's 
what it sounded like to me. And those are the streets that al Qaeda 
owned them less than a year before, and we went shopping in downtown 
Ramadi. It was the center of death for a long time there.
  So the Iraqis are investing tens of billions of dollars. But if they 
weren't, is the punishment for not taking your tens of billions of 
dollars and investing it, is the punishment turning your back over to 
al Qaeda? What kind of a foreign policy is that?
  And then we go on and he says: ``They have not reached the political 
accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.'' Well, what is 
that political accommodation? He does not say. And he doesn't say 
because he can move that ball of string in front of the kitten again. 
He can play Lucy with Charlie Brown and the football in the fall, set 
the ball, and when Charlie comes along, the Iraqis, to make their 
political accommodations and they get ready like Charlie Brown to kick 
the football, then Lucy, the junior Senator from Illinois, can say, 
``Whoops. Nope, that wasn't the target. That was a different political 
accommodation. I'll tell you what it is if you hit it.'' Well, you're 
not going to hit it with this man. He already has his mind made up. No 
amount of accomplishments, no amount of statistics, no amount of real 
data on the ground, no amount of sacrifice is going to change his mind 
because politically he has concluded that it strengthens his hand to, 
let me say, invalidate the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of 
Americans who have either given their lives; their limbs; parts of 
their bodies; their health, mental and physical; their treasure; and 
years out of their lives. To take that fight from us, to take that 
fight from our children and grandchildren would all be invalidated 
because it would

[[Page 15317]]

strengthen his hand politically. That's the calculus.
  So it says here, and again I am reading from this New York Times op-
ed dated July 14 by the junior Senator from Illinois, 147 days in the 
Senate and decided he wanted to be President--it says here in his op-
ed: ``The good news is that Iraq's leaders want to take responsibility 
for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of 
American troops.''
  Well, that's an opinion on an opinion. And my opinion on that opinion 
is, Mr. Speaker, that the Iraqis are starting to feel their oats a 
little bit. Yes, we have made a lot of progress, and a very good sign 
of the progress is that at least politically Prime Minister Maliki 
needs to say, ``I want to negotiate a timetable.'' That tells me that 
the Iraqis are building in their confidence, and that's good news.
  Two other things that have happened in the last 1\1/2\ years that 
didn't exist before is the Iraqi people understand we are not there for 
their oil and they understand we are not there to occupy, and that has 
helped dramatically in helping the Iraqis to make progress moving 
forward. But ``the good news is that Iraq's leaders want to take 
responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the 
removal of American troops,'' he could have chosen his words a little 
better. That sets a little wrong with me, that word ``removal.'' But 
what that says is we are succeeding in Iraq. And a year ago, 2 years 
ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago, the answer was did all the Iraqis want 
us to leave? Yes. All of the Iraqis wanted us to leave, just not 
anytime soon. They wanted to make sure that their country was stable. 
We have been training troops there for a long time, Mr. Speaker, and I 
don't know that the junior Senator knows that.
  But in any case, the timetable for American troops coming home needs 
to be set upon the security levels in Iraq, not some arbitrary date. 
But the dates that are being proposed by the Iraqi leadership are well 
beyond the date that is in this op-ed that's written by the junior 
Senator from Illinois. So they are not on the same page. Maybe he 
doesn't know that because he hasn't gone there for 900 days. And when 
he sits down and talks to them, and I hope he does, is he going to come 
back and correct this? I don't think so because he already has his mind 
up. He has given us a report from Iraq, sent to us a couple weeks 
before he goes to Iraq. That's kind of being a little bit trigger happy 
with your op-ed, I would say.

                              {time}  2315

  Now here is another piece that I underlined. Obama says, ``Only by 
redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive 
political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis' 
taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. 
Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the 
Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this 
transition.''
  Really? If he had gone to Iraq like I have and dozens and dozens of 
Members of Congress have and thousands upon thousands of Americans in 
uniform have, he might have been exposed to some of the things I have 
seen. For example, October 2003, Mosul, Iraq, General Petraeus 
commanding the 101st Airborne showed us, and this would be about 11:30 
at night, he brought Iraqi troops into formation that had been 
training. And those Iraqi troops stood at attention. And we reviewed 
the Iraqi trainee troops October 2003. May, 2003, they had elections in 
Mosul. Liberation took place about the 22nd and 23rd in that area of 
March 2003. Just a little over a month later, there were elections in 
Mosul, Iraq, where they elected a governor, a vice governor and other 
officers there. That was all under the direction of General Petraeus.
  And so if you go there, Mr. Speaker, and you witness those things, 
you understand the reality on the ground is significantly different 
than the reality imagined by the gentleman who penned this op-ed. And I 
would continue, by the way, I repeat the statement where he says, the 
Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this 
transition to Iraqi security forces providing the security in Iraq. 
They are the people that invented it, Mr. Speaker. It has been the 
President and his appointed officers who have made sure that we had the 
resources to train Iraqi troops and to get Iraqi troops stood up so our 
troops could stand down. Do you remember that phrase? When the Iraqi 
troops stand up, we can stand down. That statement came out over and 
over again.
  And I have met with Iraqi troops across that country over and over 
again. And sometimes they train pretty good. And sometimes they didn't 
perform so well. But today, we know they fight well for Prime Minister 
Maliki. And because of that, the day is coming where we can transition. 
And we've drawn the surge volume of the troops down now, and we're back 
to the more stable number of 100,000 to 142,000 troops. We think those 
numbers will be diminished some more throughout the summer.
  But let it be a strategic decision, not a political decision. 
Politicians don't do a good job of fighting wars. I've described what 
we did on the floor of this Congress to pull the rug out from 
underneath the South Vietnamese. I just didn't tell you about the 2 or 
3 million who died in the aftermath. That blood is on the hands of the 
people who didn't keep their promise to the South Vietnamese. And I 
don't want the blood on our hands for not following through on our 
mission that we committed ourselves to. Once you engage, you're with 
the troops 100 percent. You're with the mission 100 percent. You cannot 
separate the troops from their mission. And it doesn't work to say, I'm 
for the troops but I oppose their mission. It doesn't work to say, I 
celebrate our brave troops, but I brought a resolution to the floor, an 
amendment to try to cut the funding for them. I tried to cut their 
food, their fuel, their bullet-proof vests, M-4s and their Humvees. 
That is not support. And they need moral support as well as financial 
support, Mr. Speaker.
  And under the next paragraph in his op-ed in the New York Times it 
says, ``It is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of 
the Iraqi people.'' Really? How would he know what the will of the 
Iraqi people is? It helps to go there and find out. You can get 
somebody in this country to tell you anything you want to hear. And you 
can repeat it over and over again. When you go there and you see the 
faces of the Iraqi people and you move among their troops and among 
their civilians, you get an entirely different idea. You get an idea of 
gratitude. I have gotten written letters from them where they have 
profoundly thanked us for the sacrifice of our American soldiers, 
sailors, airmen and marines. We've given them a lot. We've given them 
our treasure. And we've given them our sons and daughters. And they're 
willing to step up to this freedom. We cannot squander it.
  This is another comment made by Obama in this op-ed to the New York 
Times. It says, ``It is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to 
the will of the Iraqi people.'' And moving forward it says, ``That is 
why, on my first day in office, on my first day in office, I would give 
the military a new mission: Ending this war.'' That is the definitive 
statement made by the junior Senator from Illinois: ``On my first day 
in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.''
  Regardless of the circumstances on the ground, Mr. Speaker, 
regardless of how badly we might need to have troops there to stabilize 
the Iraqi defense forces, regardless of the threat, regardless of the 
threat across the Straits of Hormuz, Iran and their nuclear efforts and 
Ahmadinejad's lunatic approach to the world, denying the holocaust, 
declaring that he wants to annihilate Israel and annihilate the United 
States, and have him sitting there on one side of the Straits of Hormuz 
where 42.6 percent of the world's oil supply comes through and take our 
troops and skedaddle out of Iraq, and hand southern Iraq over to the 
influence of the Iranians perhaps? Where 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi 
oil is? And again, right on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz, on 
both sides of the Straits is where most of the oil

[[Page 15318]]

is in Iran, on the east side of the Straits of Hormuz and Iraq on the 
west side of the Straits of Hormuz, in there is a mother lode of oil. 
Those oil fields are developed, that oil is coming out of there, and 
it's coming down the Straits now. And if Iran follows through on their 
threat to close the Straits of Hormuz, they have a stranglehold on the 
oil supply for the world. Not only do they have that, but they have a 
stranglehold on the valve that turns the economy off or on if they 
choose to do so. And they have threatened to close the Straits. And we 
have in the past put our Navy in there to keep the Straits open.
  That, Mr. Speaker, is the time for the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi from San 
Francisco, to declare that we should open up our Strategic Petroleum 
Reserves, dump that oil on the market where we have, I understand, 
about 2 months of supply in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and use 
that to drive the price down? What do we do when those reserves are 
empty and the oil production in the world hasn't gone up, and we 
haven't developed our energy supplies in the United States? What do we 
do then? What do we do if Ahmadinejad then closes the Straits of Hormuz 
after our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is empty and we have taken a dime 
or so off the gas price in the United States, taken some pressure off 
the world demand for oil because we wouldn't be quite so much in the 
market which would give the Chinese a better deal on oil, that would be 
the strategy that we're working with?
  Our national security is at risk. The destiny of this Nation is at 
risk. And if we pull out of Iraq, if we elect an Obama for President, 
and he follows through on this thing that he is about to learn in a 
couple of weeks when he goes to Iraq and he has already concluded and 
he writes in the op-ed, I'm going to editorialize this part, and I will 
be straight about that, he writes in the op-ed, I'm going to Iraq, and 
I'm going to learn all this, and I'm going to come back, and these are 
the decisions I have already made, and I'm going to remake them when I 
come back. ``That is why on my first day in office, I would give the 
military a new mission: Ending this war.'' That means get out of Iraq. 
Pull out immediately. He said it over and over again, leave that blood 
and treasure there and leave the disgrace of pulling out there, and let 
the world declare it to be a defeat for the United States. Let al Qaeda 
use it as a recruiting tool, a recruiting tool for them to pick up 
terrorists around the world. That is what would happen, Mr. Speaker, if 
we pull out.
  And I do think we're close to where the Iraqis can stand on their own 
and it is far more stable. But to just simply betray the judgment of 
General Petraeus before setting foot on the ground that has been 
liberated by the surge and the people who have given their lives, their 
blood and their treasure is a disgrace to do. And so I urge this body 
to urge some of their Presidential candidate to shift his position.
  In the meantime, I intend to stand with a man who is an authentic 
American hero, a man who has served America for every day of his adult 
life, a man who sat in the Hanoi Hilton for at least 5\1/2\ years, that 
served there with our own great Sam Johnson in this Congress, served 
with the most decorated living American hero who happens to be from 
Sioux City, Iowa, and a man whom I call a friend, Colonel Bud Day, a 
Medal of Honor and 69 other medals on down. Those men stand up with 
John McCain for his service. And they know that that he has character. 
It can't be challenged. The background of John McCain is a solid 
background all the way through. And the background that we have, that 
we follow for the junior Senator for Illinois, we're having trouble 
finding the place that would give us encouragement that he would have 
the tools necessary to lead the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, I want somebody that stands up for our freedom. I want 
somebody who has got an attitude of an east Texan serving us in the 
United States, in the White House. I want somebody with an attitude 
like President Bush has. Sometimes you have to be a lit bit ornery, a 
little cussed, a little belligerent and a little bit of an enigma. And 
that will keep our enemies off of our back and keep them guessing a 
little bit. But they need to know. Our enemies need to know we're 
committed to victory. And we're going to stick with victory. And we're 
not going to let up, that Iraq cannot be our Alamo. And it will not if 
we send a Commander in Chief that will stand for victory. I would 
conclude, Mr. Speaker, that America has never elected a President who 
was for retreat at a time of war. We will not do it again in 2008.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________