National Security

NATIONAL SECURITY -- (House of Representatives - September 06, 2006)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Price of Georgia). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for half the remaining time before midnight.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress. I am pleased to be back in Washington, D.C., where we can join together and work together to resolve the issues that are in front of us between now and the election and after the election.

As I awaited this opportunity to address you, Mr. Speaker, and I listened to the remarks made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I have to say that it is a bit depressing to listen to that litany, but as I look back across these Presidents that have done such a fantastic job, I think in terms of who was in charge when we got into those wars that were ended when they were in charge, it is the same person.

I don't take a great issue with the way the Second World War was conducted by FDR. In fact, I am quite proud of the way Harry Truman had enough vision and courage to do what he did to end the Second World War. But as I listened through the rest of that, who was in charge when the war in Vietnam began, and the first troops were sent over there by John F. Kennedy, who was in charge at the Bay of Pigs when air power was taken off to protect the lives of the Cuban freedom fighters who were caught out in the open and slaughtered in the Bay of Pigs, that was John F. Kennedy who decided not to provide the air cover that he had guaranteed them. They went in there thinking they had air cover, they didn't have air cover, and Castro has been in power ever since down there in Cuba.

I would go further. Not only did Kennedy send the first troops into Vietnam, but Johnson accelerated the operations that were there. As I listened along throughout some of these Presidential candidates, and I am just simply giving the balance on the other side, Mr. Speaker. I didn't come here to make a case to denigrate any of our proud Presidents that we have, just to put some balance in this perspective that we have here and hopefully I can get that done and then move on to some other subjects that I came here to talk about.

But the Johnson administration got to the point where Lyndon Johnson would not run for a second term of office. Those of us that were here remember that. He knew he couldn't win. The streets were full of demonstrators. Things had melted down in Vietnam to the point and melted down in this country to the point that he had lost confidence, and he came to the American people and said I will not be a candidate for a second term for President.

So that some characterize as a failed Presidency, and I just point this out to bring some balance to the reality of it all.

I also recall what happened in the aftermath of the issue that nobody is proud of, and that is the Watergate break-in. That put political power in the hands of the people on the other side of the aisle. And what was the first thing that they did with it? They passed legislation that said there won't be a dollar spent in Vietnam helping anybody defend anybody from the North Vietnamese. There won't be a dollar spent for a meal or a bullet or a tank or a gallon of fuel for air cover to protect the people that we pledged to protect.

And in a matter of a few months, the North Vietnamese stormed through South Vietnam. And you wonder why they couldn't defend themselves. They didn't have munitions to work with. They didn't have air cover support which we had pledged them. And there were hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions that died in the aftermath because we made a commitment and didn't keep that commitment because of political fighting here in Congress. Not because of the lack of the will of the American soldier or the lack of the will of the South Vietnamese soldier, for that matter, at least during that era.

And as we move forward throughout history and we bring ourselves up to the Clinton era, I just have a little note in my pocket from a speech that I gave a couple of nights ago. In fact, it was last night. Someone remarked in that meeting that I was at that they knew what the meaning of the word ``is'' is. Well, all I have to do is say that, Mr. Speaker, and I think it brings back to mind all kinds of images of things that went on through the 8 years of the Clinton administration.

I didn't notice that there were some strong remarks there, but I do remember the remarks that were made with regard to Sandy Berger, the proud adviser to the Clinton administration, and how he had provided for a strong military.

Mr. Speaker, there is something about the image of Sandy Berger with his socks full of secret documents at the National Archives that just belies any kind of image of Sandy Berger contributing to a strong military. In fact, on his watch, and on the watch of Bill Clinton, we saw our military be reduced from 2.4 million military down to about 1.4, perhaps even 1.3 million in our military. Now, that is not what you call contributing to a stronger military. That is reducing the military. That is what they called the peace dividend.

If you remember when the Wall went down on November 9, 1989, most of the people in the mainstream media thought that had to do with a family reunion between East and West Berlin families. But what it was, when that wall went down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down at the same time and peace echoed across Europe almost bloodlessly in what I would consider to be nearly a historical miracle.

But in that period of time after a couple of years and that soaked in and we got around to the 1992 elections, people in Congress then coupled with the President decided, and that would be President Clinton, decided we have this great peace dividend. Now the Soviet Union is no more. There is no evil empire out there. Of course, they wouldn't have called it an evil empire. That was Ronald Reagan that defined our enemy there. But the evil empire had fallen apart and been separated into its parts. And, of course, it wasn't equal to the sum of its parts. Each part was separate. They didn't pull together anymore. And the threat from a superpower from without diminished substantially.

When that happened, the decision was made here, Mr. Speaker, in this Congress, to dramatically reduce our military and take the savings and spend them on growing government programs. That is what was going on during the reign of Sandy Berger. I don't know how he was the guide that propped up and beefed up our military.

There are compliments that we can lay into every administration and criticism that we can lay into every administration, but it is pretty difficult to lay out a clear perspective that is subjective because all of us have a different viewpoint. We have that different viewpoint. It has driven us to come here to help serve the American people.

But out of this Congress needs to come a consensus that can help direct the American people, Mr. Speaker. It doesn't serve us well to be tearing down our effort of our military when they are overseas, when their lives are on the line for our safety, for our freedom, to win this

global battle and this war on terror and provide an opportunity for freedom for the Iraqi and the Afghani people.

And who knows what might be next. Who knows what people might be next. Who knows who might be attacked next. But we are on the eve of the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, and I am standing tonight on the floor of Congress listening to a lamentation of sadness and despair because the resolve to finish this appears to not be there with some of my esteemed colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I regret that, and it saddens me.

But I ask: if they say staying the course is not a plan, and I am looking for some direction that can resolve this thing more quickly myself, Mr. Speaker, but if they say staying the course is not a plan, I have to tell you, it is no plan to tear down the effort. You had better have a positive message. You better have a way to resolve this issue. Or it works against the American people and it works against the American soldier to stand on the floor of this Congress and say, This is not a plan. We're going to take a new direction. We will fight the war wiser than President Bush fights the war. But we're not going to tell you how. We're going to keep that classified.

That would be one of the few things kept classified that had to do with military, but that is because there is nothing to uncover. There is not an idea. There is not a plan. They don't have a way to fight the war smarter than it is being fought now, or they would tell you. They would surely tell you between now and the elections in November. But that seems to be still a secret.

So I say to them, gentlemen, what is your plan? Please tell the American people what is your plan. How would you resolve the issue in Iraq? How would you resolve the issue across the world where about 1.3 million Muslims have within them, maybe 10 percent that are sympathetic to, or actively supporting, al Qaeda? How would you resolve this issue?

And if as some of the people on the other side of the aisle say, Mr. Speaker, and that would include the minority leader, that Iraq was a diversion, that it really didn't have anything to do with the global war on terror, that the terrorists weren't in Iraq, that they weren't operating in there. Saddam Hussein, they claim, was not harboring terrorists and he was not fomenting any kind of terror. He was essentially a benign dictator that just tortured and murdered, in mass fashion, with weapons of mass destruction, his own people. That is the argument, Mr. Speaker.

I would submit this, then: If Iraq was a diversion and didn't have anything to do with the global war on terror, why did you vote for military operations to go in there? Don't tell me that you were duped by the intelligence of the United States, that you were given misinformation. That was the intelligence that all the world had, that all the world concurred with. This was the intelligence of America and the United Nations and Great Britain and Israel, and probably the intelligence that Saddam Hussein had as well.

We made a decision based upon the very best information that was available, all of us together. And now you want to say, No, it was a diversion. It was a distraction. We should have been somewhere else. Where? Well, anywhere else.

If Iraq could have been taken off the map, and I would challenge you on this, as a nation that didn't threaten us and didn't foment terror and didn't have weapons of mass destruction, all these things we know did happen, they are true, but you want to argue that they are not. If you could have taken Iraq off the map and wouldn't have had to worry about Iraq, what other countries out there, gentlemen, would you name that are nice and safe and we can cozy up to and we can take them out of the equation as a nation that might harbor terrorists, breed terrorists, foment terror, fund them or sympathize with them or have the kind of habitat that breeds them? Who can we take off our list?

Could it be Syria? I don't think so.

Iran? No, I don't believe so.

Even Saudi Arabia? Well, there are a lot of Saudis that were here 5 years ago in the air, came in to blow up Americans. So I don't think so.

Pakistan? There are thousands of madrassas teaching hatred there. Even though Musharaf has been doing a very good balancing job within Pakistan and he is making progress there, but we can't turn our back and conclude that the Pakistanis are all our friends. A lot of them are. They have done a good job of working with us. But there are elements from within.

What about Great Britain, speaking of elements from within? Can we take them off the list? It would have been a foolish mistake to do so, Mr. Speaker, as we found out just a few weeks ago as a plan was foiled to blow up as many as 10 or more airliners across the Atlantic Ocean that would have flown out of Great Britain towards the United States. That plot was put together and led by, some of them, born citizens of the United Kingdom, second generation people, who were taught hatred in their home and in their schools that didn't assimilate into the society.

So the argument that Iraq was a diversion just simply does not hold up, Mr. Speaker, because you could not have taken Iraq out of that equation any more than you could take Syria or Iran out of the equation today.

It is a false and specious argument and the American people know it, Mr. Speaker. The more it gets repeated by the other side of the aisle, the broader the margins of victory are going to be for the Republicans in November, because at least we have a rational process of thinking. We are a reasonable people. Even though we disagree, we understand a logical and rational argument, and we understand when one is not logical and it is not rational. It is not rational to argue that we didn't have to worry about Iraq if you can't name a country that we don't have to worry about today. You didn't have the vision then, you don't have the vision now, and that is where it stands.

Moving along now, Mr. Speaker, as I listened to the argument that we need to go to Brazil to figure out what to do about our energy crisis here in the United States of America, I went down to Brazil to take a look at that. I wish the gentlemen over there would sit down and have a conversation about this or maybe just simply, Mr. Speaker, tune into C-SPAN and I will fill them in on what one can find out in a place like that. You can go to Brazil believing that they have replaced 100 percent of their gasoline with ethanol that is produced from sugar cane. But you can't go to Brazil and come home believing that, because it is simply not true. And it is obvious from your first moments within the country.

I can give you some real numbers that put this in perspective. Of all of the fuel that is burned on the roads in Brazil, only 15 percent of it is ethanol. Only 15 percent out of the 100 percent pie chart, 15 percent is ethanol, of all the fuel burned on the roads by all the vehicles in Brazil. When you take the trucks and the diesel fuel vehicles out of there so you are just dealing with the ethanol gas market, now the number goes up to 37 percent. Not 100 percent. Even when you take the diesel vehicles out of it. That is respectable, though, I have to say. But it is only a little bit more than a third of what most people think is the reality in Brazil.

But 37 percent of the gas-burning vehicles that have the option of gas and ethanol, 37 percent of the fuel burned is ethanol. Then they burn a blend. You can either go in, pull in and buy a 100 percent blend of ethanol, or you can buy the blend.

The blend is actually a 25 percent blend. While I was there, they reduced it down to 20 percent because they didn't have enough ethanol to fuel their own vehicles. So I don't think Brazil has got the answer for us all here. They want $8 billion to build the capital to invest in their ethanol production because they want to double this production that they have, but they don't have the sugar cane to make enough ethanol to even blend their fuel up to 25 percent.

I would rather have that capital invested in this country where we can build an infrastructure here that is going to produce the ethanol that will replace the gasoline from the Middle East.

So I would simply submit that there is $1 billion worth of private capital that is being invested in this construction year in my little congressional district to produce renewable fuels, between ethanol, biodiesel, and wind, $1 billion in that sliver, that western third of Iowa, and we are kicking up our ethanol production. And if you want to see how to do it, come out there where we are doing it in America.

I see my esteemed colleague on the floor this evening, and I am quite interested to hear what my friend and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, DUNCAN HUNTER, might have to say, and I would be happy to yield to him.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my good colleague, Mr. King, for yielding.

And I listened, as you probably did, to some of the Democrat Members who were decrying the state of the world and ``woe is me'' and things are going terribly, according to them. And as the gentleman took the floor, as I watched him take the floor, and started talking about the Republican legacy in national security that they were complaining about and the Republican legacy of peace through strength, I was reminded about coming here in 1980 when a guy named Ronald Reagan was running for President. And we just finished with a President who was very, very similar to Jimmy Carter, the gentleman who had his tenure in office somewhat truncated by Ronald Reagan, and that was Bill Clinton. And I thought of the fact that the Democrats entered the Clinton administration with 15 Army divisions, combat divisions, and when they walked out of the White House and that administration left, they had cut the United States Army by about 40 percent. They were down to 10 divisions, and many of those divisions were undermanned, and then I was reminded that they were the same people that complained that we didn't have enough people on the ground when we went into Iraq. And then I was reminded that, as we are talking about Iraq, and today there is a big hue and cry to get rid of Secretary Rumsfeld among the Democrats, in the Democrat cloakroom, thankfully, 6,000 miles away that sentiment is not shared by the Americans who are reenlisting in the combat zone, in places like the Sunni triangle, where the 101st is well over 100 percent of their expected reenlistment rate. The First Marine Division out in the very dangerous Anbar Province is up well over 100 percent of their expected reenlistment rate. So the people that serve in combat under Don Rumsfeld seem to like him.

But I was reminded, as I listened to that ``woe is me'' discussion by the Democrats, that it is the Republican Party that is the party of peace through strength, and the American people rely on us to do that. And I think that is one reason they are trying to pull down Secretary Don Rumsfeld.

And I thought it was interesting today, as the President announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the attack that drove those planes into New York, into Washington, D.C., and into Pennsylvania, will soon be coming to a courtroom near us in the United States because he was captured and he was interrogated and others were interrogated in what the Democrats call inhumane methods, even though our lawyers and all of the people who scrutinized the methods of interrogation found that they were legal methods of interrogation, uncomfortable but legal and not torture, and that that person and others who joined him, his team of terrorists who joined him in masterminding the 9/11 attacks on America, will be coming to a courtroom near us, soon to be prosecuted, truly brought to justice because of the leadership of this administration and because of some of these methods of interrogation that have been associated with Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. And the President laid out today how thousands of Americans had their lives spared, how we stopped attacks and we stopped plots to attack our country in mid course, including not only attacks that would include explosives but also attacks that would include things like anthrax, because we had a forward-leaning, tough, aggressive posture in this war against terror.

So as the Democrats sip their lattes and find themselves very comfortable in what they describe as a very uncomfortable world, the reason they are able to be here having enjoyed almost 5 years after the 9/11 attack with no further attacks on the United States is partly because we had a President with an aggressive, forward-leaning policy against terrorism; that he went out and took them on; that he hunted them down in places where they didn't think they would ever be found, with the leadership of Don Rumsfeld, and we kept them off balance. And because of that, because they were kept off balance, because we penetrated them, because we were able to get into their cells and we were able to discover who was masterminding these plots against the United States, we were able to keep our people safe.

And I am further reminded that when Don Rumsfeld's military, our military, led by General Tommy Franks, was driving that iron spearhead up toward Baghdad, you already had the Democrats complaining that there were not enough troops and that he would get bogged down. And as you saw them on talk shows, the talk shows in which Democrats were complaining that he would get bogged down were interrupted by news announcements that Tommy Franks had taken yet other stronghold of Saddam Hussein. And they would seem to be almost disappointed rather than joyous when they would hear that American troops had, in fact, mowed down another line of defense by Saddam Hussein; so they stopped criticizing for a while. Then after we took Baghdad, the criticism started again. And this time the criticism was what I called the ``both ways criticism.'' In the same discussion, a Democrat leader would say we need to have more troops on the ground and in the next sentence he would say we want to have an Iraqi face on the security apparatus. Well, how do you have an Iraqi face on a security apparatus if you stuff enough troops into that country to have a GI on every corner? The facts are you cannot have it both ways.

And then the other criticism was, we should have kept the Iraqi military intact.

The Iraqi military had over 10,000 Sunni generals. What do you do with 10,000 Sunni generals? You don't do anything. And that is what the army would have done to secure Iraq: nothing. The idea of having that army where corruption was the order of the day, where you had people who were simply following their own political agenda and making their own way and making their own profits and the idea that we would maintain that army as the new safeguard or security force in Iraq to protect this fledgling, newly elected, democratically elected government coming up makes no sense at all. The smartest thing we ever did was starting with scratch with that military and teaching the new army the chain of command; teaching them respect both up and down the chain of command; teaching them to take responsibility; teaching them to have a thing called NCOs, noncommissioned officers; teaching them to be decent to people; teaching them not to be corrupt. And that is why today the best force that we have in Iraq is not the police force, is not the security force. It is the military. And even people who have criticized this administration in the way they conducted the war concur that there is a strong core in this Iraqi army. That is because we built it from scratch, and we didn't start with 15,000 Sunni generals.

Now, the last thing, and I have mentioned it, that the administration was condemned for and that Don Rumsfeld became a lightning rod for was uncomfortable interrogation methods. Well, you know, the world is a tough place, and the people that we are dealing with are not made out of cotton candy. And the fact that we were able to get information from terrorists because they are the ones that have the information, not Americans, but because the terrorists are the ones that have the information, the fact that we were able to get that information from them and use that to stop other actions against the United States before they could mature, before they could result in American casualties accrued to the benefit of America's security.

So when I look at this ``woe is me'' and we have got the real security plan and if we had only taken the other road, you will notice that the road not taken is always the smoothest one, where we had all the Sunni generals, that we would have used those to somehow bring security to Iraq, or if we had stuffed enough GIs into Iraq that somehow there would not be any car bombings or would not be any violence, or if we would just ask people politely to give up the names of their co-terrorists, they would do that and we wouldn't have to be tough on them in interrogations. All those positions, I think, define why the American people, Democrats and Republicans, rely on Republicans for national security.

And I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for coming to the floor and speaking on behalf of our military men and women. And as I listened to his presentation, it was very welcomed from my perspective.

I wonder if the chairman would yield for a question.

Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Chairman Hunter, I would ask you, would you care to comment on the remarks on the position that Iraq is a diversion on this global war on terror and it didn't have anything to do with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda?

Mr. HUNTER. I think that comment that somehow this is a neat, tidy package and if we just confined ourselves to Afghanistan, somehow we would win the war against terror and we wouldn't have to worry about Iraq is a naive position.

The facts are that we learned after 9/11 that if we didn't change the world, the world was going to change us. And having an Iraq that has a modicum of freedom, that is not an enemy of the United States and will not be a springboard to future terrorism accrues to the benefit of generations of Americans. It is not something you can put on a bumper sticker, but having some change in that part of the world.

And one manifestation of that change that was little noticed was when, during the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Hezbollah sought rearmaments from Iran, and Iran, according to reports, sent off a plane full of new missiles to throw at the defenseless civilian populations in Israeli cities, and Iraq would not let them fly over. So they said, okay, we will try to fly over Turkey. And Turkey said, You can come into our aerospace but only if you land and we can search your plane. And Iran then turned the plane around and took it back home and did not deliver the missiles.

Now, that is only a small thing. On the other hand, it could be a big thing for the people who might have felt the impact of those warheads in Israeli cities. But that was an Iraq whose government was not friendly to terrorists. That was an Iraq whose government was supportive of free people. And that was because of the American position in Iraq and the fact that we have changed the face of Iraq.

Now, there is something I think all American troops should see because they are hearing this constant drumbeat now from the Democrats that the casualties have been in vain, that their efforts have been in vain, that this is all a terrible fiasco. I think that every American who serves should be shown the excavations that are taking place in Iraq right now, those mass graves wherein if you watch the History Channel, you might have seen some of this about a month ago where American anthropologists and scientists are excavating the mass graves, where Saddam Hussein's people would herd hundreds and thousands of people and in many cases would shoot the mother holding her baby in the back of the head. And then when the scientists would examine the skull of the little baby, they would notice it too would have a pistol bullet hole in the back of its head. Double execution, mother and baby. I think all Americans that serve over there should see the photos of those Kurdish mothers whose bodies are strewn out across the hillsides still holding their babies, killed in mid stride by Chemical Ali.

And I am reminded of a Democrat President who stood on the west steps of this Capitol many years ago and said, Let the word go out, let friend and foe alike know that America will bear any burden to support the cause of freedom. And I am paraphrasing, of course, John Kennedy. What happened to those Democrats? What value do they place on those thousands of people who were pushed into mass graves?

In fact, I think one farmer testified about Saddam Hussein's executioners that they had an execution squad that would show up at about 9 o'clock on his farm. They had an excavation squad or team that would show up with construction equipment, and they would dig these big trenches on his farm in the morning, and then the execution squad would arrive, and then they would truck in the unfortunate villagers who were going to be executed. They would line them up and shoot them in the back of the head, push them into this big cut that they had made in the Earth, and then they would cover them up with bulldozers.

As I recall at one point, the farmer said that one day the execution squad, the logistics guy did not show up so they did not have any bullets. So he said, what the heck. They just pushed the people in alive and covered them up without shooting them. It did not make a lot of difference to them.

Those historical excavations, and that record of human suffering and human tragedy that was visited on those people, that should be shown. Because that is the work of Saddam Hussein. That should be shown to every GI, every marine, every navy corpsman that serves out there in that tough Fallujah area, and al Ramadi with the marines, every airman who flies those long lifts, bringing and keeping that logistical train going between American bases and that area of operation.

Every one of them ought to be shown the full story of what Saddam Hussein did and what he was. And the idea that we can turn that country where the ruler did that to those people, to a country who, when Iran says we want to fly these missiles over your air space so we can kill people in Israel says ``no, we are not going to let you do that. Go back''.

To me that is a remarkable thing. Now, you know, the freedom of the Iraqi people is not guaranteed by this operation in perpetuity. Nobody's freedom is guaranteed in perpetuity including our own. We are developing them, a freedom for that country. We are giving them a running start at freedom. I think it was Ben Franklin one time who said, we have our freedom, now if we can keep it. It will be up to them to keep it.

But we learned after 9/11 that if we did not change the world, the world was going to change us. This is far-reaching. This is visionary. This is going beyond Fortress America that somehow we must have said something wrong to these extremists to come after us and bomb us and do these things to us.

And you know, I have thought about this idea that somehow what did we do wrong to invite this strike against America? I thought about that. I thought about the last couple of wars we fought. Two wars ago it was the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Kuwait is a Muslim country. We saved it.

And then we went in and we saved hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Balkans, in Bosnia. We had that record. And the reward that we got from the extremists was for them to attack the United States of America. So what more could we do? So this idea of this flagellation of America is something that is reviving in the Democratic party. I think you probably noticed that. It is coming to the fore. It is, we did something wrong. And it is not Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the real devils in this operation, according to the Democrats, are not these people that we are going after who have tried to kill thousands of Americans, it is really our leaders.

Those are the people that they say are the bad people. And it is not the guys that our great intelligence agencies and military people manage to bring to justice that we will soon see in a court of justice being tried I believe for murder, among other things.

But it is the methods of these uncomfortable methods that were used to get them to tell about people that were planning to kill Americans and fly planes into our country loaded with explosives and do the other things that the President talked about today. This blame America first thing is reviving on the Democrat side of the aisle.

I do not think the American people are going to buy it.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would take this to another level of this vision too. Before I do that, I would point out that I sometimes have some opportunities to sit down and talk to people who were raised in Iraq. Some of them are refugees that have found their way here. There is just a certain bond and affinity between Iraqi and Americans today because they understand and they appreciate the sacrifice and the commitment that has given them now an opportunity.

I recall a conversation with a young lady who was raised in the north up near Kirkuk. And she said that no one admitted that they had any boys in the family. The houses in that town all had hidden compartments in them. If they had a boy they had hidden compartments. So when Saddam's men came to town, those boys crawled into those hiding places within those homes to hide from the military recruiters.

They would pick those young men up and haul them off to the military and they would never know where they went and they would never see them again. The girls could go out and play, but the boys could not. They had to be kept in hiding, like young little Anne Frank hiding in their home and growing up and trying to make a happy life out of this.

But I would take this image, that we had Iowa Guard troops on the ground in Afghanistan helping to guard the routes to and those polling places that were there. The first time in the history of the world that those people had ever voted on that place in the planet.

And we have seen the Iraqi people go to the polls, and three times pull off a successful election, when the naysayers on the other side of the aisle said it cannot be done, there is too much violence, and the Iraqi people really cannot handle this Democratic process.

Think about what this means. The inspiration that Afghanistan is today, and the inspiration that Iraq is becoming. I see those two nations as the loadstar for the world of Islam. And if Islam can see that they can live in compatibility with freedom and prosper and turn their focus, as Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan told me shortly after September 11, she came to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, and gave an outstanding speech.

And we sat down afterwards one on one and had a conversation. And I asked her a couple of questions, that I remember, at least. And one of them was, what percentage of the Muslims are really inclined to be supportive of or sympathetic to al-Qaeda? And her answer was, not very many, perhaps 10 percent. A very quick answer which told me that she had thought about it.

Daniel Pipes used the number 15 percent in his book Radical Islam, I think, Visits America or something very close to that. 15 percent. So when you think about what that means, I said how can we get to this point? How do we define victory, and how do we achieve victory?

And she said, you have got to give them freedom, you have got to give them a chance at democracy. And if you do that, they will turn their focus then from hatred and killing and jealousy, and the kind of things that motivate people to evil, their focus will be to good.

It will be to build their families and build their communities and build their countries and make that stronger. Take those goals, and now they have an opportunity to reach for. But today, their energy is being used in hatred and being taught in madrassas to hate people that are not like them.

So when you think about it in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan becoming the lodestar nations, they are the inspiration for the world of Islam. I want to say to the Arab world, but then we have got countries like Iran that are really not Arab they are Persian. But the inspiration for those countries to know that they can become free, and then index that to that historical miracle that I referenced a little earlier about how freedom echoed across eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall and the Iran Curtain came crashing down, that historical miracle can be replicated in the Middle East, probably not as fast, certainly not as easy, maybe it takes a lot longer, maybe it is not as pretty when it is done, but there is an opportunity there to find a way to finally win.

Our alternatives become, promote freedom as the President has done, that is the Bush doctrine. And in that freedom, change the habitat that breeds terror. And if we go the other route, if we go the route to the poor me's, the lamentations, the everything is wrong and we would have been smarter, we just cannot tell you even in hindsight how, and we certainly are not going to give you any foresight as to how to be smarter, if we go that route, then our alternative, and there only being two, the first one is the road to freedom, to change the habitat that breeds terror.

The other road is for the United States of America to curl up in a fetal position and guard every bus stop and every school and every hospital and every football stadium, and still be attacked and still see our families blown to bits by people that hate us. We cannot prevail in this war, this clash of these two civilizations by simply playing defense and thinking it is a law enforcement mission. It is a matter of defending ourselves militarily, putting our resources at the tip of the spear, but it is also a matter of changing that habitat, so that freedom can grow and prosper.

When that day comes, and I believe that freedom burns in the heart of every person, and I believe it is in the future of everyone on this earth. When that day comes, we will be a lot closer to freedom than we are today. Free people never go to war against other free people.

I particularly appreciate the chairman and ask him if he has any other remarks to make.

Mr HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I think the last thing the gentleman said, and I appreciate you letting me come in and butt in here and talk a little bit. But you know Great Britain has nuclear weapons. But we do not fear Great Britain because Great Britain is free. France has nuclear weapons. We do not fear France because France is free.

The Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, now Russia has nuclear weapons, residual from their days as the center of the Soviet Empire. But they are becoming free. They are still a fragile country that is trying to move in that direction. Still with lots of problems. We have less worry about them today because they have more freedom than they had before.

So clearly bringing freedom to the world is an important part of America's own future, and an important part of our own security. And for those who think we can hold back in Fortress America and not change the world, and not worry about what the rest of the world is doing, that is a naive position.

It is one that politicians had a number of occasions in the last century, in which 619,000 Americans died on battlefields around the world. In many places and cases where we had forgotten that we achieved peace through strength, where we let our guard down, where we thought we could pull back into the United States and not worry about what was going on around the world.

This president is aggressive. He has been tough in the war against terror. He has been determined. That is probably his best quality. He does not read the polls every day. He does not check the wind every day to see which direction it is blowing. But his aggressive stance against the terrorists, running them down in places where they never thought that our forces could get to them, killing them at 10,000-foot elevation mountains in Afghanistan, taking them out in safe houses where they had no idea that we were on to them, going after them and taking them out and keeping them off balance is one reason that we have had 5 years without attacks on this United States.

So I thank the gentleman for talking about the Republican position on national security. It is too bad. I think it is too bad when we have to politicize or put a partisan face on national security. But I think it is appropriate when the Democratic leadership gets up and talks about the Republican position on security.

I think it is appropriate to remind them that we rebuilt our national security after we had the hollow army of the 1970s, we had 1,500 petty officers a month leaving the navy because they could not make enough money to feed their families. We had about 35 percent of our ships that could not sail, about 50 percent of our combat aircraft that were not fully mission capable.

And we rebuilt America from those days. We stood up to the Soviet Union and we disassembled the Soviet Union and we made the world a lot safer because we did that. We stood up to the Communist intrusion in Central America. When on this side of the aisle, the Democrats were writing Dear Commandante letters and talking about appeasement in Central America.

Because of that, those countries that were dictatorships when Ronald Reagan came into office are now fragile democracies where people get to vote, where they settle things with ballots not bullets. That is the legacy of the Republican Party. And it is the Republican party that rebuilt national security.

You know, we put $40 billion extra into the defense budgets during the Clinton years because President Clinton took our defenses down like a rock falling off a cliff. As I said, we had over 15-plus Army divisions when he came into office. When he left we only had 10. When he needed money for other things in the budget, he just cut the military. We had to rebuild that force after that gentleman left office. We did it.

Today we are spending more than $100 billion more, not counting the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq than we did under the Clinton administration.

We still need to spend more. We are spending about 4 percent of GDP on defense today. Under John Kennedy, a conservative Democrat who believed in peace through strength, we were spending 9 percent of GDP on defense, and under Ronald Reagan, we were spending 6 percent. Probably, we are going to need to go up to about 4 1/2 or 5 percent of GDP being spent on defense to make sure that we ensure security for the coming decades.

I thank the gentleman for his allowing me to come down and say a word or two this evening.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman. It is for a good cause, and as I recall, I believe that the percentage of our GDP during the Second World War was perhaps up to 26 percent for a period of time there. There was a real, real commitment, and as those numbers go down and you see the numbers in the military shrink, our commitment to our military has not been as strong as it might have been and needs to be stronger again.

We do not have a real handle on how broad and how deep this is going to have to be, but we must be ready at every quarter, and especially, this homeland security side has been for these 5 years, it has outstripped the expectations and the aspirations I think. I did not hear anybody say back on September 11, 2001, we can go a half a decade without an attack in this country. Everyone believed that there would be another attack. Now, heaven forbid it happens at this point or beyond, but I am grateful for work that has been done that has kept us safe to this point.

I would take us to another aspect of this issue, too. One of the things that this administration decided to do was we are not going to touch the oil in Iraq, and we set that aside for the Iraqi people. Now, that system over there is not shaping up the way it might be. There is a lot of oil in Iraq. It seeps to the top of the ground, and the wells they have drilled, there have not been new ones in years and years, and a lot of the infrastructure has not been rebuilt. That needs to all happen and get that oil online.

One of the first things I would do, if I were the prime minister of Iraq, would be to hold a bidding conference and bring in the oil companies and get them to inject international capital into the development of the fields and the development of the infrastructure so they can get that cash flow running, and if the cash flow runs, capitalism will take over.

I gave a speech in Baghdad a while back to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce in the Al Rasheed hotel. As I walked in there, they started to introduce me. I said, just a moment, I would like to know who my interpreter is before you introduce me. They said, no, you do not have an interpreter. I said, but I do not speak Arabic. They said, you do not need to; these businesspeople speak English. There were 57 members there of the Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, and you could tell by the way they laughed and smiled and applauded, it was all timed just right. They understood English.

Afterwards we had a great gathering over on the side of the room, handing out business cards like frantic businessmen in a way. They wanted to exchange information and ideas. They are ready to do business in that country, and they are doing business in that country. The more dollars can come in and the faster that can get turned over, the closer they are to their own solution in Iraq. So I am optimistic that we get a solution out of there that bodes well when judged by history.

Sometimes we lose confidence in who we are as a Nation. I would take us back to a little over 100 years ago, and actually in 1898, we sent the military over to the Philippines. I recall being in this city about 3 years ago in a hotel when the President of the Philippines, President Arroyo gave a speech. She was not speaking to Members of Congress. I was kind of a random dinner guest, but she said, speaking of this random crowd in a hotel here in Washington, she said, Thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for freeing us. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for sending the priests and the pastors there. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers that taught in our schools and you taught your language to us and we learned your language. We learned your culture, and today, there are 1.6 million Filipinos that go anywhere in the world to work and send their money back to the Philippines because they have the language skills and they have the cultural skills that came because of the liberation that came from the American military.

How often do we read that in our history books, Mr. Speaker, that kind of an impact that, a century later, the expressions of gratitude that come from a national leader? That was an insurgency. That was an insurgency we fought in the Philippines and defeated at insurgency in the Philippines. That does not seem to be part of our national memory.

We can often learn from history, and we need to understand the economics and the sociology and the military tactics and put this all together, but we must have faith in who we are as a people. We must have faith in what has made us great. We must hang on to those things that are going to enhance that greatness and move America to the next level of our destiny. Once in a while we have got to discard some of those things that are not assets to us.

We have got to move into the future with technology. We have got to hang on to those core things that give us strength, and those things I believe are free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization and our biblical values, tied together as the three pillars that make America great.

So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address this chamber and address you tonight. I especially appreciate the chairman coming down to stand up for American fighting men and women, and the job that you have done to lead us through these difficult years from September 11 and on into the future, and I will stand with you and our military men and women when one day hopefully it will be us, and if it will not, it will be our children and grandchildren that realize there has been a victory in this global war on terror and the face of the world will have changed and the world will be a freer place. A freer place is a safer place, and that is the goal and that is the call of the trumpet for us in this country.

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