[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15720-15726]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2200
    THE MORAL COMPASS OF THE UNITED STATES IN ITS QUEST FOR VICTORY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Altmire). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the greatest 
deliberative body the world has ever known--the United States House of 
Representatives.
  I am pleased to be a part of this institution that has elections 
every 2 years, which requires us to put our fingers on the pulse of the 
American people. Even though most of us don't like the idea of a 24-24-
7 campaign, that being 24 months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you 
set up a perpetual motion machine, and you make sure that the people on 
your staff and those who are working with you are out there constantly 
with their fingers on the pulse, listening, talking.
  Part of my job is to listen, and part of my job is to project the 
things that I learn and the things that I know. We have people in this 
Congress who decide, well, their job is simply to vote the majority 
opinion of their districts. They don't necessarily consider whether the 
district is right or wrong as far as the majority is concerned. They 
just try to put their fingers on the pulse and decide, well, let's see. 
If 51 percent of the people think this way and if 49 percent of them 
disagree and think the other way, then if I come down on the side of 
the 51, then I'll be able to keep coming back here to Congress and sort 
out the opinions and be, let me say, the barometer of the people in 
their districts.
  Mr. Speaker, I think that's wrong; I think that's narrow, and I think 
that's shortsighted, but I do believe we have a responsibility to 
listen to our constituents. We have a responsibility to listen to the 
people in our States whether they're in our districts or not. We have a 
responsibility to listen to the American people across the board.
  In the end, each one of us--each of us 435 Members of the House of 
Representatives and every one of the 100 Senators on the other side of 
the rotunda--has a responsibility. We owe Americans and especially our 
constituents our best judgment. That means we listen to the people in 
the district and across the country. It also means that here we are 
where we are, in a way, the epicenter of information for the world, 
where information comes pouring in here, and if I need to find an 
answer to a question, I ask somebody and the answer comes, and it comes 
almost always in a form that I can use it and incorporate it into the 
argument that I'm making and further enlighten.
  So we have access to more information here than most people have, at 
least across the country, and they're out there doing a good job. 
They're on the Internet, and they're reading, and they're watching the 
news, and they're thinking and having these conversations across the 
country. Their conversations help shape the middle of America. If some 
people weigh in on the right and some people weigh in on the left, it 
kind of comes out to a balance. It's going to balance. It's a moving 
fulcrum in the middle.
  What we need to do is to take this access to information that we 
have--and we owe the people in this country our best judgment--and we 
need to weigh the information. We need to apply our best judgment to 
the real data that we have, and if we disagree with the majority of our 
constituents, that doesn't mean that we go vote the way they think we 
should. We may do so, but we have an obligation to let them know, 
perhaps, both sides of the argument and to step in and to make the 
case. Sometimes we're called upon to go back and to inform the people 
in our districts of the things that we know even though we know very 
well that they may disagree with our positions.
  The first thing we have to do is to do what is right for our country. 
The second thing we have to do is to do what's right for our States. 
The third thing we need to do is to do what's right for our 
constituents. I have said a number of times that, if it's good for 
America and not good for Mom, I'm sorry, Mom; we're going to find 
another way to take care of you. My first obligation is not with 
individuals but with the broader, overall good for the destiny of this 
country. Often those things come together, and almost always they do.
  I actually can't think of a time when I've had to put up a vote that 
was contrary to the wishes of my district or was contrary to the best 
interests of my district, but that's where I draw the line--an 
obligation. I owe the people in this country my best judgment because 
that's essentially what they have endorsed in the election, and I owe 
them my best effort.
  When you put those two things together and if we all did that, if we 
all stood on principle and offered our best judgments and our best 
efforts, if every motive in this place, Mr. Speaker, were an altruistic 
motive, this country would be a lot better off than it is today.
  I lay that backdrop, Mr. Speaker, because I'm watching what has 
unfolded as we near the Presidential election in November of this year. 
We've all seen on the news the massive media coverage of the trip that 
was made over to the Middle East and to other parts of the world by the 
presumptive nominee for President for the Democrat Party.
  I am troubled by what I read in the New York Times on January 14, in 
an article written by Senator Obama, where he laid out his plan and his 
strategy for Iraq. He was going to Iraq. He is there today on a 
factfinding mission. Today is the 21st or 22nd of July, but his article 
was posted on the 14th of July. It told everybody in America what he 
was going to find when he arrived over there on his factfinding 
mission, and it had been almost 900 days since he had been there. He 
had been there one time, Mr. Speaker, one time, and he drew 
conclusions. I don't actually know what he saw then, but he drew 
conclusions, and he had conclusions before he went. He didn't change 
his conclusions when he came back.
  So, this time, he posted an op-ed in the New York Times that said, in 
part: On my first day as President, I will order a troop withdrawal 
from Iraq. That's what he said a week before he arrived in Iraq on a 
factfinding mission.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I pose this question: I think he got it exactly 
backwards. I think, when you go on a factfinding mission, you can lay 
out what you think before you go. That's perfectly appropriate. To lay 
out the decision you're going to make after you're there and you gather 
the facts and you announce that before you go gets that exactly 
backwards. A factfinding mission needs to be just that. If you go into 
an area, you can say, ``Here is what I know. Here are my fundamental 
beliefs, but I'm going to talk to the people on the ground.''
  He met with General Petraeus. I would go and do that again myself. 
I've done it a number of times. I would meet with Ambassador Crocker. I 
would meet with General Odierno. I would meet with troops from my home 
State. I don't know if he did that.
  I have many times walked into a mess hall over in Iraq and also in 
Afghanistan and have just hollered out ``Anybody here from Iowa?'' Then 
they'll come around and gather around the table. That has actually been 
successful all but one time. There was once when I went into the mess 
hall when there wasn't anybody from Iowa, but that's how I find out 
what's going on over there. I know, when I sit down at the table with 
soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines from my home State, they will 
look me in the eye and will tell me the truth as straight as they know 
it. Sometimes they'll ask me to come off to the side, and they'll tell 
it to me real straight. They do that, and I can believe them because 
we're from the same State. We always know somebody whom we both know or 
somebody we're both related to or somebody whom they're related to or 
they're from a town where I'm from. As to this level of credibility 
that comes from people from the same locale, they're going to tell the 
truth because they know that those conversations go back and forth 
through the neighborhood.

[[Page 15721]]

Plus, they're honest people and they're solid people, and they're 
honorable soldiers and Marines who are over there with their lives on 
the line for us.
  I wonder what those soldiers from Illinois might have told the junior 
Senator from Illinois. I wonder if he gave them a chance to do that. I 
wonder how he interpreted it. I wonder what kind of message it would 
have been to a fellow who had served 147 days only in the United States 
Senate who had then decided that he had had enough experience to be 
President of the United States. I wonder if they told him what they 
tell me.
  I can tell you what they tell me, Mr. Speaker, and it is consistent, 
and it is without dissent from the people I talked to, and I'm open to 
all of them who come to me. They say, ``Let us finish our mission. You 
can't pull us out now. We are all volunteers. We're volunteers for this 
branch of the service. We knew there was a high likelihood that we 
would be ordered to deploy to this part of the world. We re-upped 
knowing that. Everybody in here signed up knowing this was a mission 
that they were most likely to be ordered on. We want to stay here and 
take on this fight and finish this fight to take the battle away from 
our children and grandchildren.'' That's the direct message that I've 
received over and over and over again in those parts of the world where 
we have troops deployed. I have an obligation to go over there and to 
visit with them and to pick that up from our line troops, from those 
people who are out there on patrols on a daily basis, from those people 
who are out there working in 125-degree heat with bulletproof vests on.
  I notice that the junior Senator from Illinois arrived and got off 
the plane in Baghdad and had some pretty good photo ops while in shirt 
sleeves. I listened to the former admiral from Pennsylvania who spoke 
in the media here in the last couple of days. He would be Joe Sestak, 
Congressman Sestak, who made comments on, I believe it was, Good 
Morning America and also on Hannity and Colmes that there were at least 
three points on which the President and John McCain had come to Obama's 
position. I listened to that and thought: How could that be?
  Well, he alleged that the President is adopting Obama's position on 
pulling out of Iraq and in setting a timeline. He also spoke about a 
couple of other issues there that he argued were Obama's positions--set 
a timeline, pull out of Iraq, et cetera.
  I'll submit this, Mr. Speaker: The junior Senator from Illinois could 
not have stepped off of the airplane in Iraq in shirt sleeves or in a 
bulletproof vest and wearing a helmet, which most had to do when they 
went over there during the height of this conflict. He could not have 
done that today or yesterday if it hadn't been for the surge, if it 
hadn't been for President Bush in ordering the surge and if it hadn't 
been for General Petraeus in designing the surge and if it hadn't been 
for John McCain in supporting the surge and if it hadn't been for 
people like me who also supported the surge.
  I introduced a resolution in this Chamber in February of 2007 that 
endorsed and supported the surge. I'm on record, Mr. Speaker, and I'm 
on record tonight in saying Barack Obama could not have set foot in the 
places that he did in Iraq if it hadn't been for President Bush's being 
bold enough to issue the order to follow through on Petraeus' idea and 
if it hadn't been for the support of Members of this Congress and of 
the Senate and of the support of people like John McCain who said this 
is a good alternative. It's a far better alternative than pulling out 
of Iraq and turning it over to al Qaeda.
  In fact, if we had followed the leadership of the junior Senator from 
Illinois, we would have pulled out of there in 2005, and we would have 
turned Iraq over to al Qaeda. Instead of saying, ``well, Prime Minister 
Maliki, I think you ought to adopt my timeline on 16 months to pull 
troops out,'' he wouldn't be over there. The prime minister wouldn't be 
Prime Minister Maliki if we'd followed the leadership of the junior 
Senator from Illinois. It would likely be Prime Minister Zarqawi who 
would be there. Al Qaeda would be in control, and the Iranians would 
have flowed over across the Strait of Hormuz, and their influence 
within the Shiia regions in the south would be controlling much of the 
oil in the southern part of Iraq.
  We have to think about what the consequences would have been had we 
pulled out when this supposedly visionary Presidential candidate, as 
the gentleman from Pennsylvania said, argued that the vision, the 
insight, of the junior Senator from Illinois is outstanding and 
impressive.
  I say, no, it's utter failure. It's failure to understand that Iraq 
is a strategic part in the world, and the consequences of failing there 
cannot be measured against the advantage of having a couple of extra 
brigades that can be deployed into Afghanistan. When America accepts 
defeat, other Americans die. Later generations of Americans die. Other 
people, free people in the world, lose their freedom, and many of them 
die.
  I have a constituent who is a refugee from Cambodia. She came here 
when she was 9 years old, and she lost a number of her relations in the 
killing fields in Cambodia, and she didn't see her father for years. 
She was kept away from her mother because she was put into a labor 
camp, a re-indoctrination camp, because the leadership in Cambodia 
concluded that the parents were a bad influence on the children. They 
wanted to change the culture of a generation, so they killed many. This 
is a result of our lack of will.

                              {time}  2215

  We didn't lose the war militarily in Vietnam. That didn't happen. We 
won every battle. We won every engagement. We tactically checked the 
North Vietnamese. We lost the battle in Vietnam right here on floor of 
the United States House of Representatives when they passed 
appropriations legislation that prohibited any dollars appropriated and 
any dollars heretofore appropriated, that means money that's already 
been sent that way and any new money, none of it could be spent on the 
ground or in the air over Vietnam, North or South Vietnam or Laos or 
Cambodia or offshore in the South China Sea.
  We could not support the South Vietnamese. We trained them up, we 
gave them munitions, and we made them available, and they were ready so 
they could defend themselves. This Congress shut off the money. They 
shut off the ammunition to the M-16s that were in the hands of South 
Vietnamese soldiers. They shut off the heavy weapons like tanks and 
artillery, and they shut off the air cover that we had guaranteed. We 
guaranteed them we will provide you with the equipment that you need, 
the munitions that you need, and the air cover so that you can defend 
yourselves.
  And we went through Vietnamization, and we trained the South 
Vietnamese military, and this Congress pulled the plug on them and 
broke that faith with the South Vietnamese people, and we wonder why 
they ran in front of the invasion when the North Vietnamese stormed 
down into South Vietnam? And the answer is, they didn't have a lot to 
shoot back with, Mr. Speaker. They didn't have anybody to support them, 
Mr. Speaker.
  And 10s of thousands of them died. Many of them got into boats and 
tried to get out of the country. Many of them were sunk in ships going 
off of South Vietnam. A lot of them, though, got here to the United 
States where they started new lives, and this calamity flowed over into 
Cambodia.
  All together, people in this Congress that were here then, a few, 
those that put up that vote, those that advocated for pulling the plug 
on our commitment to support South Vietnam seem to think that they 
saved American lives, and in reality, they probably temporarily saved 
American lives but 2 to 3 million of God's children died in the 
aftermath because we didn't keep faith with our word and we didn't keep 
faith with the South Vietnamese.
  And so I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that in General Giap's book, the 
North Vietnamese general who is credited with being the mastermind to 
what they celebrate as a victory over the

[[Page 15722]]

United States, wrote in his book on page 8: ``We got the first 
inspiration that we could defeat the United States because the United 
States didn't press for a complete victory in Korea.'' In Korea, Mr. 
Speaker.
  The Vietnamese understood that because we didn't press for a complete 
victory there, we settled for a negotiated settlement, and we set up a 
DMZ on, I think, it's the 38th parallel. When we did that, they saw 
that we did not have the resolve to finish the fight.
  And so they began a tactic of undermining American public opinion, 
and the people in this country that marched in the streets and those 
who would undermine our troops just assuredly empowered the enemy.
  And so this Congress put up the vote that shut off the support for 
the South Vietnamese, pulled all of our troops out of there, and in the 
collapse that happened, we saw the shame of lifting people off of the 
U.S. embassy in Saigon.
  The people in Iraq remember this. Our enemies across the world 
remember what happened in Vietnam. Al Qaeda and Pakistan, and to the 
extent that they're in Afghanistan, and the very few remnants of al 
Qaeda in Iraq, they all understand. They've been marketed to by their 
leaders. They know what happened. They believe the United States lacked 
resolve in Vietnam.
  They saw when the terrorists bombed the Marine barracks in Lebanon 
that we pulled out of there. They saw that even though there were all 
of 500 that were killed in the other side in the battle at Mogadishu, 
we lost 18 soldiers there, they saw us pull out of there. They saw us 
blink in the face of a conflict and not have the stomach for it. That's 
how they saw it.
  I saw brave Americans step up every time they were given the order to 
do so. I never saw an American back up. I saw American politicians back 
up. I didn't see our soldiers, airmen or marines or sailors back up.
  But when the politicians backed up, that put a marker down that 
inspired our enemies, and it may have, in Vietnam, saved some American 
lives, but in the long run, it put American lives at risk because our 
enemies were empowered throughout the generations.
  I know this to be fact. Osama bin Laden has said so. Some of his 
other leadership has said so, and on June 11 of 2004, I was in Kuwait 
waiting to go into Iraq the next morning. I had a television station 
on, Al Jazeera TV, and there was an English closed-caption going on 
while the language was in Arabic. Moqtada al-Sadr, the infamous leader 
of the Mahdi Militia who now seems to have taken a far lower profile, 
Moqtada al-Sadr came on television and he said on Al Jazeera TV, If we 
keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left 
Vietnam, the same way that they left Lebanon, the same way that they 
left Mogadishu. That's the message that he was pounding through Al 
Jazeera TV. Everybody in the Middle East could hear that message.
  Now think for a moment, Mr. Speaker, what kind of a message does that 
send out to all of the rest of the sympathizers of our enemies, the 
radical Islamists, the jihadists, the people that are inclined to be 
supportive--and by the way, I asked the question of Benazir Bhutto 
while she was in Iowa giving a speech after September 11, I said: What 
percentage of Muslims are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda? What 
percentage of Muslims are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda? A 
straight, objective question that some will say, well, there's a bias 
built into the question. I don't think so.
  I asked her that directly, and her answer was not very many, perhaps 
10 percent. And the way it came off of her tongue said to me she had 
been asked the question before, she had answered the question before. 
Daniel Pipes puts that percentage at 10 to 15 percent, Mr. Speaker.
  And so when you do the math, if it's 10 percent of 1.3 billion 
people, that's 130 million. That's a lot of people that are inclined to 
be supportive of al Qaeda. They are scattered across the world. And as 
we know, look in this country, the radicals in America show up, they 
come from really every State and many of the walks of life, and they're 
a small percentage, probably not 10 percent, but when they come to the 
streets of America, you get an entirely different message. And they 
recruit to each other, and they use the Internet to do that, and they 
come out on the streets and protest.
  And so think of it in those terms. If you're a radical and you are 
marketing, trying to recruit other radicals, you aren't going to get 90 
percent of the society. You're only going to be able to market to 10 
percent, maybe 15 percent, those that are inclined to be supportive, 
but from that 10 to 15 percent, you can recruit a lot of fighters.
  If you're al Qaeda and you are marketing to that 130 million people 
or maybe as many as 200 million people, if you take Daniel Pipes' 
number of going as far as 15 percent--let's just say 200 million 
people--on the planet that are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda, 
as high as 15 percent of the Muslim religion that are those inclined to 
be radical, and now what happens when you have Moqtada al-Sadr say, If 
we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they 
left Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu, some of those out there hear that 
message and some of them migrate towards the center, the center to 
where they can be recruited to fight for al Qaeda and attack and kill 
Americans.
  That's gone on. That's gone on in Iraq since the beginning of the 
operations in March of 2003. It goes on in a far weaker effort today, 
but think of this. Think what happens if we pulled out of Iraq. If we 
have a Commander in Chief who has said we can't win, it's a loss, we're 
already defeated, the surge is a failure--oh, yes, the junior Senator 
from Illinois said repeatedly the surge is a failure, it can't work. 
Now, today, he can't say that out loud, but he said that in the past. 
He tore the things down off of his Web site that declared the surge to 
be a failure. And now the posture is, well, some things have happened 
there that have provided better security, but we need to pull our 
troops out and we need to pull them out on a timetable.
  Well, here's something that you need to know. When there is a war, 
there is a winner and a loser. Both sides will seek to declare victory 
if there's any way that they can do that, but a declaration of victory 
does not constitute a victory. What constitutes a victory is achieving 
your objectives. Our objectives in Iraq were to provide freedom for the 
Iraqi people, leave them in control of their country, promote a 
moderate Islamic State that actually will have people going to the 
polls to elect their own leaders and direct their own destiny. And we 
hope against hope that they will be a strong ally to the United States.
  And Mr. Speaker, in the times that I've made the trip over there, I 
surely have concluded that the Iraqis do intend to remain a strong ally 
to the United States. When I talk with their leaders, when the Mayor of 
Ramadi comes in and begins to talk about needing sewer and needing more 
electricity, needing more power, needing some roads, that sounds to me 
like maybe the Mayor of Des Moines, as opposed to the Mayor of Ramadi.
  They do appreciate the sacrifice of the American people, and 4 years 
ago, the situation was this. Yes, all the Iraqis wanted the Americans 
to leave, just not anytime soon. They wanted to have control of their 
country. They wanted to be able to provide the security so that they 
didn't have violence going on constantly, and now that they're close 
enough, they are starting to feel like they can control their own 
country and provide security in their own country.
  So that's the political push that Maliki is playing to as he gets 
ready for the elections that come up there later on this year and which 
will be perhaps as late as December or January of next year. There's 
politics going on, and if Prime Minister Maliki needs to tell the Iraqi 
people that he would like to see a timeline by which the United States 
would pull troops out of Iraq, yes, I wish I had that timeline, too. I 
understand why he has to say that politically, but truly, it would be 
foolhardy to set a timeline and declare our troops are going to be out 
of Iraq and not prepare for the enemy.

[[Page 15723]]

  The enemy has a play in this, too. General Petraeus said the other 
day, The enemy has a vote, and not only does the enemy have a vote, but 
they are an independent variable. A very diplomatic way of saying you 
can't just declare that we are going to be in a position where we can 
draw our troops down to significant levels. It does look likely, and 
that's been the plan all along.
  And you can go back through the announcements that were made by the 
Secretary of Defense, and let's just go through Secretary Gates back to 
Secretary Rumsfeld, we can go back through the commanders on the ground 
in Iraq, General Odierno, General Petraeus, and General Casey and 
General Sanchez, all the way on back to the commanders on the ground, 
the core commanders there on the ground, and what you will find is that 
each of them have had a plan that draws troops down when violence is 
reduced to certain levels. That is nothing new.
  I mean, that's a plan, a strategy for all wars. You don't have to be 
a rocket surgeon to come up with the idea--and I said that on purpose, 
rocket surgeon--to come up with the idea that when you win the war, the 
troops come home. The idea was to win the war and bring the troops 
home, and bring them home while leaving enough of a force there to 
maintain security.
  The surge was about taking over control and security within Iraq and 
then setting up the Iraqi military which has been growing and being 
trained all along. I saw the first Iraqi troops being trained in Mosul 
in October of 2003, and guess who was training those troops, General 
David Petraeus. Now, that was October. They went in and liberated Mosul 
in March of 2003.
  Things not known by the American public, Mr. Speaker, General 
Petraeus set up elections in Mosul and two of the adjoining states, did 
so in May of 2003. They elected a governor, a vice governor and several 
other officers to be the civilian authority there in the country.
  And so, as this has unfolded and developed in Iraq, the situation has 
gotten worse because over through the mid-years of 2005, 2006 and parts 
of 2007, that happened I think because we left too much of it in the 
control of the Iraqis, and we didn't grab a hold of the bull by the 
horns and reset the destiny.

                              {time}  2230

  That happened when General Petraeus came back from writing his book 
on counter-insurgency and when he took charge and we gave him the 
resources he needed to put the surge in play. It happened when 
President Bush ordered it.
  And if it hadn't been for the surge, Obama wouldn't be able to set 
foot in many of those places that he's visiting today, pontificating on 
how right he was. He was utterly wrong. It was wrong to pull the troops 
out in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. It's wrong to immediately order them 
out today. But we are bringing troops out of Iraq on a timely basis. 
And it's going to likely be right to bring more troops out in 2009.
  And those levels that we can bring down, the concern we need to have 
is, what's the casualty rate there, and what does it take to sustain a 
level of stability? That's the questions that need to be answered, Mr. 
Speaker. And the very idea that because one junior Senator from 
Illinois has said that he disagreed with the war and that he disagreed 
with our troops there throughout the full duration, that we should pull 
the troops out immediately and that we should deploy some troops to 
Afghanistan, that he was right all along doesn't hold up, Mr. Speaker, 
because he's been wrong all along.
  He would have turned Iraq over to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda would own a big 
chunk of that country today if we had listened to the junior Senator 
from Illinois, and Ahmadinejad would own the rest. Except for the 
Kurds; they would have declared independence and been immediately in a 
two-front work, with the Iranians on one side, the Turks on the other 
side. All of that would have been wrong. It would have been a tactical 
blunder. And all of that to, what, free up a couple of brigades to go 
to Afghanistan and talk about the broader picture for the world?
  I think the American people have a better feel for the broader 
picture of the world than that. I think they understand this: If 
Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu are enough to inspire Muqtada al-Sadr to 
mount a Mahdi militia and fight the way they did and die the way they 
did, and enough to inspire al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi, if 
those three countries of the United States demonstrating lack of 
resolve were enough to inspire al Qaeda to attack the Twin Towers and 
the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania--which was 
either destined likely for the Capitol here where we stand or the White 
House--if our lack of resolve in Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu was 
enough to inspire all of that, think, Mr. Speaker, what kind of 
inspiration it would be to al Qaeda, to the Taliban, to all of our 
enemies if we lack the resolve to finish this war in Iraq that is so 
nearly finished.
  If we handed it back over to the enemy, if we let it collapse around 
the Iraqi people, and if millions of them died as millions in Cambodia 
died because we lacked resolve there, Iraq would be declared a victory 
for al Qaeda, it would be declared a victory for our enemies because, 
here's the fundamental truth: It's like a street fight. When there's a 
street fight, usually the one who loses is the one who runs away, maybe 
cursing and shouting or is carried away by his buddies. The one who 
wins is still standing on the corner. That's who wins a street fight, 
that's who wins a war. You've got to own the ground, Mr. Speaker, and 
you've got to destroy the will of the enemy to commit war.
  We've nearly destroyed the will of al Qaeda in Iraq. And I have set 
foot and walked around in most of the regions in Iraq, but particularly 
al Anbar Province, a place that I could not go a year and a half ago, I 
went there less than a year ago. I couldn't go there a year and a half 
ago because al Qaeda owned too much of al Anbar Province. That's a 
third of the real estate in Iraq. And the mosques were preaching then 
an anti-coalition, anti-American message. Today, there aren't any 
Mosques in al Anbar Province that are preaching an anti-American, anti-
coalition message. The last numbers I saw were 40 percent were 
preaching pro-coalition, 60 percent were preaching a neutral message.
  And the example of al Anbar Province, the very intensive Sunni 
Province, where the Sunnis joined up with us and provided intelligence 
and the Sunnis rose up and drove a lot of al Qaeda out and took them 
out, there was no place for al Qaeda to hide in al Anbar Province as 
long as the Sunnis were willing to team up with coalition American 
troops. And they did so. They did so because they believe that we're 
going to stick it out and we're going to be with them. They also 
believe that the future for Iraq is far better when the Iraqi people 
are determining their destiny rather than al Qaeda. They did so because 
of some of the very brutal tactics against civilians that were 
committed by al Qaeda. They did so for a lot of reasons. But in the 
end, people want their freedom. They want to be able to control their 
own destiny. They don't want to be ruled by a tyrant, and they don't 
want blood-thirsty al Qaeda in their regions.
  So the good work that got done in Iraq could be thrown away with the 
stroke of a pen of a potential future Commander in Chief who said, 
before he went on his fact-finding mission, ``On my first day in office 
I will order a troop withdrawal from Iraq.'' That says to me, 
regardless of the conditions on the ground, regardless of the input 
that comes from the commanders on the ground, regardless of the facts, 
regardless of the intelligence, regardless of whether he hears this 
message that I have described, that pulling out of there creates a 
vacuum that hands over some of the control on the Iraq side of the 
Straits of Hormuz to Ahmadinejad, and pulling out of there will open 
things up for al Qaeda to reestablish a base camp there, and pulling 
out of there sets up the temptation for the Kurds to declare 
independence and end up with a two-front war and pits the Iraqis 
against the Iraqis. And without anyone to keep order, that is a very,

[[Page 15724]]

very big gamble. And the most disagreeable consequence, Mr. Speaker, is 
that it would add Iraq to Muqtada al Sadr's list and make him right.
  Then, Osama bin Laden would say, we have won in Iraq. And if we keep 
attacking Americans, they will leave. They will leave Afghanistan the 
same way that they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the 
same way they left Mogadishu. And if Obama is elected President, they 
will say, and also the same way they left Iraq.
  Al Qaeda will declare victory and they will be right because we will 
not be standing on the ground. We will not be standing on the street 
corner. That's the measure of victory: If you're there, they can't 
declare victory, they have to come back and take it from you. It puts 
me in mind of a famous flag that I saw, it was an early flag during the 
Texas independence fight. The flag is a white battle flag, and it has 
on it the black silhouette of a canon, and it says, ``Come and Take 
It.'' It's an inspiring message that comes from Texas. And that's what 
they need to do if they're going to declare victory, they have to come 
and take it. But they have taken defeat in Iraq. We need to solidify 
our victory. We can't have a victory if we pull out, if we cut and run, 
if we order troops out of there regardless of the situation on the 
ground. It takes time to nurture this.
  It was interesting to compare the history of the insurgency in the 
Philippines with the battle that we have going on against al Qaeda 
globally today. A lot of the same kind of enemies, by the way, with 
some of the same kind of ideology. I will say, perhaps, the spiritual 
descendants, al Qaeda is likely the spiritual descendants of the 
enemies that we fought in the Philippines. That was from 1898-1902.
  We sent the Marines there and we sent the Army there. General ``Black 
Jack'' Pershing was there. We took on those insurgents and we fought 
them for 4 years, and we lost over 4,000 Americans during that period 
of time. And during that period of time we also sent, by the numbers 
presented to me by the President of the Philippines, 10,000 teachers 
there. We sent priests there, we sent pastors there. We sent our 
culture over to the Philippines to lift them up and help them out.
  It took a long time to put that insurgency down. And the violence 
went on several years after we were finished with our main part of the 
conflict going on in the Philippines. But a few years ago, President 
Arroyo of the Philippines came here to Washington, DC. She gave a 
speech in a downtown hotel, not to Members of Congress particularly, 
but to whoever happened to be in the crowd and attended that dinner. 
And she said, and I'll never forget it, ``Thank you, America. Thank you 
for sending the Marine Corps to our islands in 1898''--she forgot to 
say the Army. ``Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to our islands 
in 1898. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for freeing us. Thank 
you for sending 10,000 teachers. Thank you for sending your priests and 
pastors. Thank you for teaching us your way of life, including our 
economy and our culture,'' because she said today--and language, 
``thank you for teaching us your language'' because today, 1.6 million 
Filipinos go anywhere they want to go in the world to get a job, and 
they send the money back to the Philippines. And it's a significant 
percentage of their gross domestic product. She said the percentage, 
I've forgotten it, but I remember the theme and the rest of the things 
that she said. It was a clear thank you that came in more than a 
century later to thank America because we were there to give them their 
opportunity for freedom. And they hung onto that freedom and in fact 
fought with us through the Second World War and fought bravely and 
valiantly. And today, they're set up as a free and democratic country.
  That's the result of a battle against an insurgency when we had 
confidence in ourselves, when we weren't undermining our military with 
defeatist comments. And by the way, I happened to notice this in the 
USA Today newspaper today, the Presidential election that went on 
during that period of time was about whether we would stick it out or 
whether we would pull out. And the Presidential candidate that 
advocated for pulling out was William Jennings Brian, a young 
charismatic Presidential candidate who was essentially a populist who 
said, ``let's get out of there, it's wrong to be there.''
  I'll make this point, Mr. Speaker: Americans voted for McKinley in 
that election, and they did so because he was a tough, crusty fighter 
that was going to stand up for the values of the United States. He 
wasn't going to back off. Once we engaged in a conflict, he intended to 
win. We did win. The Philippines are free today, they're free today 
because of it. We could have handed it back over, we did not.
  The American people sided for freedom. And where American soldiers 
have gone, they've taken freedom with them. And by the way, wherever 
the English language has gone around this planet it has taken freedom 
with it as well, whether it was carried by the Brits, the Aussies, the 
Americans, the Canadians. I can't find an English-speaking country that 
is not a free country today. The English language is the best carrier 
of freedom that there is. And that doesn't mean if people speak 
English, they're free, but the culture of freedom goes with the 
language called English. That's the historical fact.
  Today, the Philippines are free. And we won the insurgency there and 
there are lessons to be learned. General Petraeus references the 
Philippine insurrection in his book on counter-insurgency. It's an 
instructive lesson, it's a lesson of resolve. But additionally, if you 
look through the conflicts and the history of America, while we had 
elections during those conflicts--and the most instructive is the 
election in 1864 during the height of the Civil War and the carnage 
that took place there. We lost over 600,000 Americans--that would be 
total from each side--during that conflict of the Civil War; bloody and 
brutal with thousands of casualties, actually thousands killed in a 
number of different battles.
  And the will of the American people was tested on the north side of 
the Mason-Dixon Line and on the south side of the Mason-Dixon Line. And 
when the election came up in 1864, America was tired of war. They 
didn't know whether they could win or not--and I'll talk about the 
North didn't know if they could overcome the South. But the candidate 
that ran against Abraham Lincoln was General George McClellan. And 
General George McClellan was not an aggressive commander. He commanded 
the Army of the Potomac. And the Army of the Potomac was a large and 
massive army that had a chance at victory south of here and didn't 
press the enemy or he might have been able to close on Richmond and end 
the war within the first year. He didn't do that.
  And so he went back and dug in and fortified Washington, DC to 
protect this city, and drilled and trained and fortified and drilled 
and trained and fortified until Abraham Lincoln sent him a letter that 
said, ``Well, if you're not going to use this Army, can I borrow it?'' 
That was the general that ran against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. And 
General McClellan's agenda was, ``we will sue for peace. We will 
negotiate a settlement so that this horrible war is over.'' And you 
know, if McClellan would have been elected, we wouldn't be one country 
today. The Mason-Dixon Line would have been the boundary between the 
United States of the North and the Confederate States of the South.
  If that had been the case, if the American people had chosen to side 
with the candidate who wanted to accept less than victory, the United 
States would not be the United States. We wouldn't be the great Nation 
we are today. We wouldn't have been able to engage in some of these 
large conflicts that have turned the destiny of the world. We wouldn't 
have been, perhaps--I'll say almost certainly we would not have gone 
into the Philippines. We would have fought a defensive war in the 
Spanish-American War. Who knows who would have prevailed in that. They 
might have pitted the South against the North; clearly, that's what 
happens. There would have

[[Page 15725]]

been residual animosity left over from the Civil War. We don't know the 
results of the Spanish-American War if we hadn't had a successful 
resolution to the Revolutionary War that tied this country back 
together.

                              {time}  2245

  If we were two countries instead of one, we wouldn't have engaged in 
World War I in the fashion that we did. An entirely different result 
might have happened. It might have been the Germans that won World War 
I instead of the Allied Forces. And when you get to World War II, the 
conflict that forced this country to mobilize, 16,000 men and women in 
an effort in uniform to win the global war, win the war in Europe and 
win the war in Asia, you put that all together, it would have been 
impossible to do so if there had been a United States of the North and 
the Confederate States of the South. We would not have been able to be 
one country. And when Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, I'd question 
whether there would have been a Pearl Harbor for them to attack. And 
who knows what would have happened if they had landed on our west coast 
which States would have been North and which ones would have been 
South. And would we have carried that resentment on to the next century 
and said, ``I'm not going to defend the Confederate States of America. 
After all, we fought a war with them less than 100 years ago.'' Who 
knows? But we could not have pooled our resources if we were two 
separate countries.
  Abraham Lincoln had the resolve. The greatness of the man was he 
saved the union. Yes, it was bloody and it was brutal and it cost a 
high price. But the millions of lives that have been saved because of 
that weigh in favor of Abraham Lincoln's resolve to save the union.
  And so who would have saved the world from the tyranny of Nazism, of 
Stalinism, the tyranny of the Cold War that would have washed over us, 
who would have saved the world from all of that if the United States 
had been two nations instead of one? I suspect it would have been 
nobody, and perhaps the last flames of freedom would have been snuffed 
out by the totalitarian regimes that came from imperialistic Japan and 
Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. How would anybody on this planet 
have stood up against that if we weren't one Nation under God, 48 
States pulling together with our vast resources and our strong spirit, 
the spirit of freedom, and the confidence of American destiny that we 
had then, that has since been besmirched by Vietnam, Lebanon, 
Mogadishu?
  But not, Mr. Speaker, not Iraq, I pray. Not another huge inspiration 
for our enemies. Let's seal the deal there. Let's demonstrate our 
resolve there. Let's stand on the principles that took us there. And 
when this country goes to war, it's our country, right or wrong, it's 
our country. And we need to sing off the same page of the hymnal and 
get to this point where we have a victory that is legitimately 
declared, not a retreat that we're going to try to redefine as a 
victory. We stay. We stand together. We finish the fight there. And 
when we do so, the legacy that's left will be one to build on instead 
of one to run away from. And let me just say we can never, never let 
leaders in the world, tyrants in the world, say, ``If we keep attacking 
Americans they will leave''--name your country. Let's say Afghanistan--
"the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Vietnam, the 
same way they left Mogadishu, the same way they left Iraq. Those ``the 
same way they left Iraq'' words can never be legitimately spoken. They 
must never be allowed to be legitimately spoken because if they are, 
more American lives will be lost, more of God's children across this 
planet will be lost, and the forces of evil and tyranny will be 
strengthened. Their resolve will be strengthened. Their recruitment 
will be strengthened. Ours will be diminished. And for the purposes of 
freeing up a couple of brigades to go to Afghanistan, it's not a bad 
idea to bolster some troops there, but NATO needs to send their people 
in there in big enough numbers and be willing to fight. The United 
States can't carry this alone.
  What happened to the argument that we needed to have coalitions to 
fight these wars? We had 30-some nations on the ground fighting in 
Iraq. I stood in a place in Basra, where the British commanded, and at 
random counted officers there from eight different countries. In fact, 
I lined them up and took their pictures because I thought nobody's 
going to believe that we have this kind of a presence here in this 
country. We did. We had coalition troops in Iraq. We still have a good 
presence of coalition troops in Iraq. And for the junior Senator of 
Illinois to talk about pushing more troops over to Afghanistan, which I 
will support when they're freed up and I think we can produce enough 
troops to do so, but I would say back to him what about a coalition? 
Let's put some troops in there from the NATO countries in the world. 
Let's ask for a little more from them instead of America carrying this 
load all the way. Those things I think are components of this entire 
discussion.
  So, Mr. Speaker, Americans wouldn't be walking around in the streets 
of Ramadi shopping, as I did, if it hadn't been for the surge and if it 
hadn't been for General Petraeus. Americans wouldn't be thinking of 
coming back home out of Iraq instead of being redeployed to Afghanistan 
if it weren't for the surge. Americans wouldn't be in a situation where 
we could say all of the indicators there define victory for us if it 
weren't for the surge.
  I mean this Congress, and I thought imprudently, set up 18 different 
benchmarks for the Iraqis to meet. Of those 18 benchmarks, the Iraqis 
have met at least 15 of them and they are working on the other 3. They 
have accommodated this rather skittish Congress that we've had, and 
they have done that in the face of--since Nancy Pelosi took the gavel 
as Speaker in January of 2007, since that time to this floor there have 
been brought 40 resolutions, 40 resolutions that undermined our 
military, weakened our support for our military and our troops, and 
sought to unfund the troops, 40 resolutions sending the message 
Congress doesn't support our troops in the field. And I can say that, 
Mr. Speaker, because it doesn't work to say ``I support the troops but 
I oppose the mission.'' It doesn't work to say ``Put your life on the 
line for me and my freedom and my security, but I think it's the wrong 
mission.'' When you ask somebody to put their life on the line, you've 
got to believe in their mission, you've got to stand with it, and 
you've got to make sure they have all of the equipment, all the 
training, all the support that's possible that can be generated by the 
treasure of a country that owes so much to its military people.
  This situation, the idea of declaring what he finds out and then 
going there to find it, that does not hold up in a logical society. And 
declaring his first order would be to order troops out of Iraq, 
regardless of the situation on the ground, and then still maintaining a 
standard that if things get bad, we'll go back in, if you don't have 
the will to stay there now when the war is essentially won, you won't 
have the will to go back in. The American people know that, Mr. 
Speaker.
  So there's much at stake. We need a strong Commander in Chief. We 
need a tough, ornery patriot.
  And, furthermore, to tie this all together, in the history of America 
in every election when we have had a conflict, when we have been at 
war, there has been a presidential candidate that was less aggressive, 
a presidential candidate that was more of a pacifist, and in all but 
one of the circumstances that I can think of, there has been an 
opponent that said end this war at any cost, shut down the violence, 
let's get out of there, let's bring our troops home. And in every 
single case that there's been a presidential election during a time of 
war, the Commander in Chief whom the American people had the most 
confidence in winning that war and boldly moving us to victory, that's 
the person who won the election. That's the person who was elected to 
be Commander in Chief or the person who was elected to another term 
like Abraham Lincoln. McClellan lost the election because the American

[[Page 15726]]

people are winners. We are winners because we know that when you engage 
in a war, you must win. The consequences for that multiply across the 
ages.
  I can remember growing up and asking my father, who served 2\1/2\ 
years in the South Pacific, ``Have we ever lost a war?'' And his answer 
was, ``No, the United States of America has never lost a war, son, and 
I pray we never do.''
  It's not that easy to say that today. I can make the argument. It 
wouldn't stick with a lot of people. But that's where we are. We must 
maintain the resolve. The American people will step up and they will 
elect a strong Commander in Chief who will see us through to the end in 
this war in Iraq. Someone who understands this global threat of al 
Qaeda, who understands that the infiltration that's coming in from 
Pakistan into Afghanistan is where the threat comes from; that the 
sanctuary that exists in Pakistan needs to be addressed; someone who 
understands that in the history of the world, it's hard, difficult, and 
maybe not even possible to come up with an example of an insurgency 
that was defeated when it had a sanctuary in another sovereign country 
that it could be armed from and deployed from. I can't think of an 
example, and I can't get an answer from others when I ask that 
question. Perhaps there is one.
  But as this lays out, the American people need to understand where we 
are in the continuum of history, and where we are is that we must be 
able to chalk Iraq up as a victory. It is in a critical strategic part 
in the world. Iran is developing nuclear weapons as fast as they can. 
And if we pull out our position to leverage Iran without warfare, it 
gets weaker and weaker, and it puts us strategically in a worse 
position to do something about it if we do pull out. Every indicator is 
negative if we pull out of there. If we stay and we finish this thing 
with honor and we can declare it a victory, a victory that historians 
will sustain as a victory, then under those circumstances we discourage 
our enemies. We shut off their recruitment.
  They are, by the way, on the run now, and they have a place to hide, 
and we need to eliminate their places to hide, and I will agree with 
that. But I'm looking forward to the American peoples decision, their 
verdict in November.
  And I just cap this off by shifting to an important piece, Mr. 
Speaker, and that is this circumstance right here, that is the number 
one issue on the minds of the American people. This, Mr. Speaker, is 
gas prices. And where we are today, and actually I haven't looked 
today, but I had them check the prices when we built this poster, $4.08 
a gallon. I listened to the rhetoric through this Congress as we moved 
through the Bush administration when gas was $1.49 back here when 
President Bush took office January 20 of 2001. And then gas prices went 
up not a buck, they crept up to $2.33 over time. As we tried to open up 
more energy, as this Congress passed six to eight bills out of this 
House when we had a Republican majority, every one of them provided 
more energy, more access to refineries. They would have built 
refineries. It would have opened up natural gas drilling, Outer 
Continental Shelf, ANWR. We passed all of that off the floor of this 
House, Mr. Speaker, and sent it over to the Senate, where the minority 
over there, the people who are opposed to energy development, 
filibustered our energy bills.
  If we would just simply apply all those energy bills, if they would 
have been applied at the time we passed them, this gas wouldn't be 
$4.08. It wouldn't even be $2.33. The Senate was blocking this 
legislation clear back here. This legislation in 2003, 2004, 2005, we 
passed smart energy legislation here, and I have given many speeches on 
the subject matter during that period of time and since. But what 
happened, Mr. Speaker, is they shut down the development of our energy.
  If we're not going to develop new energy in the United States, then 
the supply is going to diminish. For example, if you drill a well down 
into the zone and you start that well producing, that well is going to 
peak out about right then. When it does so, then what will happen is it 
diminishes in its production. So when you make your discovery, that's 
the peak. If you stop discovering, if you stop exploring, if you stop 
drilling new wells, or if you slow it down, our overall energy 
production goes down too.
  Well, gas was $2.33 when Nancy Pelosi took the gavel, and she said, 
We are going to get you cheap gas prices. I have no idea what the 
strategy was, any kind of a rational approach on that. So I'd leave 
that to them to answer that question.
  But my strategy is more energy of all kinds. Let's take this gas 
price back to $2.33. It's $4.08 today. Let's drill ANWR. Let's drill 
the Outer Continental Shelf. Let's drill the nonnational park public 
lands. Let's drill the Bureau of Land Management locations. Let's open 
up the oil shale. Let's produce more ethanol, more biodiesel, more 
wind. If you add up all of those sources of energy, grow the size of 
the energy pie, produce more Btus--we are only producing 72 percent of 
our energy consumption. Let's produce 100 percent of the energy that we 
are consuming.
  If we do that, these prices go down, and we get this gas price back 
to $2.33. And the people that are blocking energy production need to be 
held accountable by the American people. That is the bottom line.
  Supply and demand sets the price. You cannot suspend the law of 
supply and demand any more than you can suspend the law of gravity. If 
we do that and shore up the dollar, Mr. Speaker, we will see gas at 
$2.33 again. I will continue to work on that. I will sign every 
discharge petition I can to get there. And I will ask my colleagues to 
do the same. And I will ask the American people to have a referendum on 
who is producing a policy that will generate more electricity for the 
American people.
  It's my side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, not the other side of the 
aisle.

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