[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 16275]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     WE CANNOT RUN THE MIDDLE EAST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, over the past 15 years, we have 
had thousands of young Americans killed and thousands more maimed and 
trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent in our failed attempts at 
nation building in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle 
East.
  Surely, surely, we have learned a very expensive lesson, that we 
cannot run the Middle East. In fact, in some ways, our good intentions 
have made things worse.
  Now some companies and people who make money off of an 
interventionist foreign policy are clamoring for us to get in an even 
bigger way in bloody Syria.
  Mr. Speaker, this is not true conservatism.
  Mr. Speaker, the conservative columnist Thomas Sowell wrote recently 
and said: ``What lessons might we learn from the whole experience of 
the Iraq War? If nothing else, we should never again imagine that we 
can engage in `nation-building' in the sweeping sense that term 
acquired in Iraq--least of all building a democratic Arab nation in a 
region of the world that has never had such a thing in a history that 
goes back thousands of years.''
  David Keene, the conservative opinion editor of the Washington Times, 
wrote:

       The concept of U.S. national interests was stretched beyond 
     any rational meaning. America took on more than we could 
     possibly handle. The result is a generation of young 
     Americans who have never known peace; a decade in which 
     thousands of our best have died or been maimed, with little 
     to show for their sacrifices; our enemies have multiplied; 
     and the national debt has skyrocketed.

  Mr. Speaker, President Kennedy said in one of his most famous 
speeches at the University of Washington in 1961:

       We must face the fact that the United States is neither 
     omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only 6 percent of the 
     world's population, that we cannot impose our will on the 
     other 94 percent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong 
     or reverse each adversity, and that, therefore, there cannot 
     be an American solution to every world problem.

  The only difference now, Mr. Speaker, is that we are 4 percent of the 
world's population instead of 6 percent that he mentioned. But I would 
repeat those words of President Kennedy: ``We cannot right every wrong 
or reverse every adversity and that, therefore, there cannot be an 
American solution to every world problem.''

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