Important Issues to the Country

IMPORTANT ISSUES TO THE COUNTRY -- (House of Representatives - December 08, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Poe). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized on the floor of the United States Congress, and have this opportunity to address you on the issues that I think are important to this great country, this great country that all of us on the floor of this Chamber, all 435 of us, love so much and so desperately try to do our best to represent.

Just a reflection upon the conclusion of the remarks made by the folks ahead of me in the previous hour and seeking to go to the new C words of cooperation and coming together. It is quite incongruous for me to try to understand how that would be when 1 or 2 hours a night there can be a relentless drumbeat challenging the motives, the integrity, the character and the intelligence, the planning and the convictions of the entire team over here on the Republican side of the aisle.

In fact, I said Republican here, and that is the first time that word has been said on this floor in over an hour that did not sound like a word that was based on some type of profane term.

This has gone on day after day, hour after hour, week after week, again relentlessly trying to undermine the hard work being done by the people here in the trenches, doing the work out on the floor, in committee, and behind the scenes.

There is an awful lot that goes on behind every one of those office doors in Congress. Many, many things are happening behind those doors; the staff that multiplies the efforts of the Member, the grapevine that is out here feeding this information; the network; the information-gathering process, the analysis of that; the input that comes from our constituents, and the trips back home of many of us every weekend to get our feet on the ground and look our constituents in the eye and listen to them to hear what they have to say.

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I am one of those people that I am pledged to listen. I am pledged to hear what they have for input. But I am also pledged to owe my constituents my best judgment. My best judgment includes, if I happen to disagree with them, but I will absolutely lay out the case as to why and hear their rebuttal. So far we have had a pretty good working relationship over the years that I have had the privilege to serve here, Mr. Speaker.

Yet this undermining of our national effort that goes on continually is not conducive to coming together. It is not conducive to cooperation. It is not conducive to comity. It is not conducive to any type of cooperation that I can think of. It draws a bright line and drives a wedge between the two parties. We should try to find things we can agree on.

I heard the gentlewoman from Florida say there were only a handful of things when she was in the State legislature in Florida that she disagreed with, and that the two parties disagreed with, and the rest of that they came together and found common ground. Well, I am wondering if that was the case.

I have served in the State legislature myself, Mr. Speaker, and I did not find that every one on the other side of the aisle sat their alarm in the morning, got up and read the newspaper to figure out what they could do to attack the other side. I did not see the State legislators focus their energies from the first sunup in the morning to try to identify what they could do to undermine the other side. They actually came to work to try to find how they could come together. They tried to find common ground and how to move their State forward. That is the way it was in Iowa, and I suspect that is how it was in Florida, at least I have not heard otherwise.

That is not the way it has become in this United States Congress. In fact, in the time I have been here, this is as partisan as I have ever seen it. There is as much partisan disagreement as I have ever seen.

An example might be our trade agreements, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement would be one. There was a time when we negotiated trade agreements and they were bipartisan agreements. There was a good sized group of Members from the Democratic side of the aisle that would support a free trade agreement. They believed in free enterprise. They believed in world trade. They knew if we traded with other countries, that whenever you make a deal with anyone, whenever it comes to free enterprise, if you trade a dollar with one entity or two or more entities, everybody involved in that circle all has to have profit. It is good for all of us, and that is why we agree to those trade agreements. But it has become a sharp, bright-line partisan issue.

Many, many more things have become partisan here in the last couple of years that, to my recollection, were not. And so to argue for cooperation is one thing, but the actions and the words over the months of this relentless effort here down on the floor have done the exact opposite. They have driven a wedge between us, Mr. Speaker. So that means we have to try to move this Nation forward sometimes without the help of the people on the other side of the aisle, and then it turns into a partisan debate. It also forces us to do the best we can with the votes we have to move this Nation forward.

So a free trade agreement is one thing. This Nation has a large economy and we can recover from a few mistakes and the few difficulties that come with partisan opposition to some of those things that were, before this, bipartisan.

But when it comes to a time of war, when it comes to a time that our United States military is deployed overseas and their lives are on the line 24/7, and have been ever since March of 2003; at a time when the destiny of the world hangs in the balance; at a time when the presence of the United States in the Middle East itself has brought Lebanon towards freedom, and caused Qaddafi in Libya to turn over all his hold cards, to play his cards face up on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, which had developed far ahead of where we thought it was, but Qaddafi contacted us and said I want to drop this. I do not want to play this game any more.

Our presence in the Middle East meant too much. The threat was so great, he figured we would find out about his weapons and go eliminate his weapons, so he decided he would simply cease to develop them and eliminate the foundations he had built for those weapons of mass destruction. That came because the United States has a positive image in the world, in spite of the message that comes from this other side of the aisle.

I have stood here on this floor, Mr. Speaker, for the third time, this is the third hour I have initiated to come down here and talk about the President's agenda, the Commander in Chief's agenda, the mission of our troops and the destiny of the entire world that is part of this plan that has been laid out by President Bush. I laid this out last night, Mr. Speaker, and I spent some time doing it in not necessarily a concise fashion, but a thorough fashion. And anybody that was listening should have understood.

I walked off this floor, perhaps after 10 o'clock last night, and another hour of this relentless criticism flowed down here again, and they picked up the same old drumsticks and began beating the same old drum with the same old song: WMD, WMD, WMD. Weapons of mass destruction. Everything that goes on is illegitimate because, according to them, it has been proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, you would think that anybody that arrived in this Congress and went through the crucible and testing process and was elected to owe their best judgment to their constituents, as I do, would know one of the most simple principles of rational logic, and you do not have to be a Rhodes Scholar or a Harvard lawyer to know this, but many are and still do not know this; that you cannot prove a negative. Yet they continually say it has been proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

I would say tell that to the people up there in the region of Kirkuk and the area that is Kurdistan. Tell that to the swamp Arabs in the south; those that have lost perhaps 75 percent or more of their population because of the attacks of Saddam Hussein.

Try and carry on this argument as the trial of Saddam Hussein goes on and this 140 or so people that he allegedly murdered in the one small city because of the assassination attempt on him. When that becomes the larger, there will be 180,000 or more deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein and the people who took orders from Saddam Hussein.

In fact, as I was in Baghdad in the month of August, I met with the judges that are trying Saddam Hussein today, and we talked about the upcoming trial. They could not be specific about it, in order to protect the integrity of the system, but I did understand and learn in that room that the charges of killing 180,000 people that are charged against the person whom we know, or are familiar with his moniker as Chemical Ali, that he protested and said, that is not true, I did not kill more than 100,000 people. It was not 180,000 people. So how do you kill 180,000, or even 100,000 people, which is apparently the confession of Chemical Ali, how do you do that without weapons of mass destruction?

How do you convince someone who lost their family in a gas attack in Halabja that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction? I met a young lady that was raised up there near Kirkuk, in an area I will call Kurkistan, about an hour from Kirkuk. She has a friend who survived that gas attack in Halabja. He was able to get on a tractor and maybe went upwind and got away from it somehow and survived. A random act, I am sure, that kept him alive, and he probably wonders why he survived and not his family. His family was all wiped out in this.

I would submit that you could take that individual or any other survivors that are there, and if they could come down on this floor and listen to this, I think they would plug their ears. They would plug their ears because they would not know how to react to this relentless drumbeat of ``there were no weapons of mass destruction.''

Well, what caused all those deaths? Why is Saddam Hussein on trial? Why are there 180,000 people that have died

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and that are part of these court records and which will be part of this prosecution as it unfolds?

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Why does Chemical Ali say ``I did not kill any more than 100,000. I was not so bad.'' That is his defense?

There are more deaths than that. There are hundreds of thousands of deaths, and some of the Members of Congress have been to the mass graves. I have not seen those mass graves. I have been to Iraq a number of times, but I have not seen the graves. But I have seen the pictures, seen the film, and I have read the reports and I have talked to the people that have been there. I cannot be convinced that anyone can kill that many people without weapons of mass destruction. Hitler could not. Neither could Saddam Hussein.

So this drumbeat of no WMD, no WMD. Well, the King law of physics is everything has to be somewhere. And since we do not know where it is, it has to still be somewhere. If you find something you lost, it is always in the last place you looked. So perhaps we just have not looked in the last place yet. Perhaps it is buried in Iraq. Perhaps it has gone to Syria.

We know before the Desert Storm operations in 1991, Saddam Hussein took his fighter jets and flew those to Iran. I remember the flight pattern that showed those jets going up and landing. I have never gotten a report that they ever came back. It may be that the ayatollahs in Iran kept them and maybe thought this is a nice way for us to get even for the war we had in the 1980s. He has a modus operandi of spiriting things out of the country when conflict is imminent.

So if he would fly the MiGs out of Iraq into Iran, why would people not presume that he would haul weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq into perhaps Syria, or why would they think that he would not bury those weapons of mass destruction when, in fact, we discovered a fully operational MiG-29 buried in the desert, not because of any intelligence report, not because of some detector, not because David Kay was over there scouring that countryside for weapons. No, we found that fully operational MiG-29 because the wind blew the sand off the tail fin. They buried it in the desert.

So he has an MO of bearing weapons and spiriting them out of the country when times get tough. Why would we presume that he did not do one or the other or both? We know everything has to be someplace. You cannot prove a negative. No one can honestly say with a rational mind that there were no weapons of mass destruction, because we know he used them at least 11 times. There are survivors from those attacks. The only way a rational person could contend there were not weapons of mass destruction would be to believe that Saddam Hussein used his last canister of gas on the Kurds and simply depleted his inventory and he decided not to rebuild it, but he decided to keep a system in place so he could reestablish that inventory any time he chose.

He kept the system in place for both chemical and biological weapons. We know that. That is all in the David Kay record and the Duelfer Report. It is the same report that came to this Congress that is being quoted by the other people that says it proved that they had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no proof that there were no weapons of mass destruction. What there was not was a great big warehouse full of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, we found some canisters of nerve gas and we found munitions designed for gas, small quantities, not great warehouses. Out of the million tons of munitions that we found in Iraq, some of them were weapons of mass destruction components. Not in large volume. If there had been, we would have stacked them all up in the middle of a warehouse and brought in the inspectors, and maybe there would be a different story on this part.

But I would contend if that were the case, if there had been warehouses of weapons of mass destruction there, then these people who are continually pulling down our national spirit every night with this massive, relentless pounding of pessimism, and they need to get away from the ``p'' words over there and get to the optimistic words, they would have moved the bar. They would have raised the bar and said maybe there were weapons of mass destruction, but. And I do not know their argument. I cannot think like they do; and I am grateful I cannot. But they would have raised the bar.

Mr. Speaker, I submit this: if we ever get them now to set the standard on how to define a victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, if we could compel them to set a standard, then you would see that it would be such a high bar that they would know it could never be achieved. They would always find a way to define themselves away from that high bar because they will never admit that the President of the United States made a decision that could result in something that would be a fantastic result, a noble thing for this country to do, and an ultimate result that freed 50 million people and has every prospect of freeing hundreds of millions more throughout the Arab world, which is the only formula for ever getting to a victory on this war on terror.

No, they say we are in this war on terror and they will keep attacking us until we get out of the Middle East. We were not in the Middle East when we were attacked on September 11.

A couple other principles, Mr. Speaker. Since there was not a warehouse full of weapons of mass destruction that we have yet identified, and they make the allegation that they did not exist and do not seem to be quite up to that 8th grade level of ``you cannot prove a negative,'' since that seems to be the standard, what is wrong with liberating 50 million people, 25 million in Afghanistan and 25 million in Iraq? That is a noble thing. Is that not something that the United States has done throughout history?

Do they not know that the Civil War was fought to save the Union? Do they not know that Abraham Lincoln's effort was to keep this Union intact? Do we not call it the war to free the slaves? Did we not liberate every black American, and it took a while to get it right, and we are still working on getting some of those pieces right. Do we call it the war to free the Union? No we call it the war to free the slaves. That was the result of the war. It was a noble thing.

I will pick up some of these other issues, Mr. Speaker, and I would like to go back to that; but I see my colleagues here on the floor, and I wonder if maybe the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is prepared to speak.

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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that narrative. I wanted to be there that day. I was not able to set the trip up to make it work; but I recognize, as you clearly did and Mr. Shays clearly did, that was the best place in the world to be on that day.

Mr. POE. No question about it. It was a very moving experience.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I remember watching the pictures as they unfolded on television and the Iraqis coming out of their polling booths with their purple fingers in the air, proud that they had made a mark for freedom and defiant about the threat to their lives that was supposed to keep them away from the polls.

As I recall that day, 50 people were murdered, 108 polling places were attacked. And I believe on the October 15 elections, we were down to about 19 polling places were attacked. I do not know how many casualties there were. It is far safer for the ratification of the Constitution on October 15 than it was in January when you were there.

On top of that, you did not go to Baghdad or on up to Kirkuk or down to Basr or some place where it might have been more stable. You went to Fallujah. What a place to be to see that happen. I know that is a memory you will never forget.

I appreciate the gentleman's contribution down here night after night, the things the gentleman stood for, the things I stand for, and I sometimes wonder, if I have to check my conscience, I will go down to Texas and check with you.

I have a number of thoughts to roll out here. But I think before I go on into those thoughts, I have an opportunity, I see the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) here, my good friend, another individual that if I need to check my conscience, I know where to go down to Arizona and check with that. But also the gentleman's vision and his commitment to this country and this Constitution, he is a fine colleague that sits with me on the Constitution Subcommittee of Judiciary, where we stand up for those foundational values together.

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks).

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Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman's contribution to this debate. And you have really, you set the tone, I think, that I am going to need to have to carry out the balance of this time that we have here.

I think too about parts of history and how far back we go and how our military set such a tradition for so many years. And as I stepped away from this microphone the last time, I had taken us to this point, I think I made the point that it cannot be stated that there were no weapons of mass destruction and be rational about it, because you cannot prove a negative. And we know that they existed.

So setting that argument aside, I will just say when it comes out, it is bogus, they will pound on it until they get embarrassed and embarrass themselves. So we will hear it more. We will hear it every night down here. But one of the things that I can move along to, maybe expand this discussion a little bit is to go back then to that point that I was making earlier, that point about why we went to war in the civil war and what the objective of that war was.

Now, the objective was to save the union. And anything that you read about Lincoln in his earlier debates and his efforts and his decisions that he made along that process, it was a super human effort all targeted to save the union. And part of freeing the slaves, yes, it was something that was in his heart.

He conceded that Dred Scott was actually a constitutional decision, but we needed to amend the constitution to eliminate slavery. Lincoln had so much respect for the constitution that he made that point. But he had so much respect for the binding nature of our Constitution that it was an irrevocable agreement between the States, that he was willing to stay at war and the cost in that civil war was over 600,000 American lives, over 600,000 American lives at a time when our population was perhaps a third of what it is today or less.

So that was the greatest loss of humanity ever in a conflict in this country, and yet, he stuck to the central purpose, save the union, save the union, save the union. In 1863, the subject came up on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. A great and powerful leader and one of the most profound stories of leadership that I have ever read throughout history comes back to the question, as he sat down with his cabinet, and there was the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves, and he asked his cabinet, gentlemen, what say you? And they started on his left and it went around the table at the cabinet table and the first member of his cabinet said Mr. President, I advise you do not sign it, and here are the reasons why.

And the second and the third and the fourth and so on until it got around to the last member of the cabinet. And each member of the cabinet said, Mr. President, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Some of the reasons were we are at this to save the union. Some other, well do not confuse the issue. Some of them were political reasons of the time that I do not have a feel for today. But as President Lincoln, in his singular motivation to save that union, listened to their recommendation, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, well, gentlemen, the ayes have it. And he stepped forward with great courage and leadership and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He did not really free anybody south of the Mason Dixon line because we did not have jurisdiction down there at the time. We were at war with the South.

It didn't really free anybody north of the Mason Dixon line because the people north of the line were free. But what it did is it set up an image and a goal and a dream and it mobilized some people that had been mobilizes for a long time to abolish slavery, and it became historically, looking back on that, now we are taught we fought the civil war to free the slaves. So how can it be that here we are today, when a civil war began to save the union, it ended to save the union, but history interpreted it to mean that it was about the freedom of slavery, which I absolutely think it was worth the price. How can we sit here today and say we did not find mass quantities, great warehouses full of weapons of mass destruction, therefore all the rest of this is illegitimate. When did the United States decide that we did not free people? When did we decide that liberation of humanity was not a worthy cause? When did we decide that going to war, if it had multiple reasons, if one of those reasons did not meet your standard over here on the other side of the aisle, then all the rest of it is illegitimate.

There were plenty of reasons and whole constellations of reasons to go into Iraq and, in fact, there really was not a choice. If you sit down and analyze the circumstances at the time, there really was not a choice. Saddam Hussein did not give President Bush a choice. And I think, well, I do not know what Saddam was actually thinking. But if we went to the war to save the union in the Civil War and it became to free the slaves, and by the way, in about 1898, when the USS Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor, it is still at the bottom of that harbor, by the way, and the mast and the anchor are out here at Arlington Cemetery. But the Maine is at the bottom of the harbor.

And we went to war against the Spaniards because, and history can reanalyze this, we believed that we were attacked by the Spaniards and the ship was scuttled in a hostile act and that triggered the Spanish American War. Sure, there was tensions that brought that about and you can argue about the details. Some will say that the USS Maine really was not sunk by a hostile attack. Some will say it was an explosion in the magazine that sunk it to the bottom of Havana harbor. Some will say it was a pretext for war. We went to war just the same and defeated the Spanish in the Spanish American War that began in 1898. And I will tell you that one of the things we did as a result of that war, we went to the Philippines. Now, was that consistent with the reason for the war in the first place?

Was there something about sinking the Maine down there in Havana Harbor that would cause us to send the Marines to the Philippines? Well, you can argue that either way too, but I can tell you that I listened to a speech by President Arroyo of the Philippines a couple of 3 years ago here in Washington, D.C. at a hotel. She said thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for bringing us freedom. Thank you for teaching us your free enterprise, your way of life, your rule of law. Thank you for sending the missionaries over here that made us a Christian Nation. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers to the Philippines so that we would learn your way of life and the American values and we could learn English. And English is the national language of business and commerce. And today, 1.6 million Filipinos go throughout the world. They can get a job about wherever they want to because they have the language skills that are universal. They send their money back to the Philippines. A result of a detonation of an explosion in the hull of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 where it sits at the bottom of that harbor yet today. The result are free people in the Philippines. When did the United States give up on liberating a people? When did we give up on our culture and our way of life and projecting that way of life throughout the world? When did we give up on our legacy of western civilization? Whose idea is that, to cut and run because what?

The reasons that you think maybe were what justified it do not quite uphold the way you would analyze that today. What kind of idea is that? What were the circumstances when we were attacked by Pearl Harbor? And by the way, September 11, 2001, I remember where I was, I was on the road on my way up to a county fair. My wife called me on the phone and said turn on the radio, there has been a plane that crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I turned on the radio and a few minutes later a second plane crashed into the Twin Towers. And the individual that was riding with me was a World War II veteran and the first words out of his mouth were Pearl Harbor. I will never forget that tone in his voice. The second plane into the Twin Towers made it clear it was not an aerial accident. It was a planned, stealth attack against civilians in the United States of America, the worst attack ever on our soil, and it was not against a military installation. It was against civilians. Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor happened December 7, 1941. It was the anniversary just a couple of days ago, Mr. Speaker.

We went to war. We declared unconditional war against our enemies, and a few days later, Hitler declared war on us from Europe. Now we were involved in a two-front war. What was the objective of our declaring war on the Japanese in the first place? Unconditional war, that it would be total and unconditional surrender of the Japanese. Then we found ourselves in Europe, fighting a two-front war, which the Germans had found was not very successful, but for the United States it has been. We put troops on the east, we put troops in the west and in the South Pacific. And we were successful on both fronts of that war. Was there a clamor in this country at the time to say we were attacked at Pearl Harbor; what are we doing fighting Germans? What was the idea of that?

And, by the way, all the people that were liberated around this globe as a result of the Second World War are all beneficiaries. Look at the Japanese today, their culture, their economy, their prosperity. The size of their economy compared with the rest of the countries' in the world is fantastic considering the population and the limitations that they have geographically living on that island. They are well off today as a country, and a big part of that has been the result of the reconstruction afterwards and the liberation that came to them. They were living under an imperialistic Japan.

So this idea that the American people do not liberate anyone, that freedom is not a goal of a war is just simply false throughout history.

And there are other examples throughout history, and I am wondering if the gentleman from Arizona might have one to add to that. I noticed the look in his eye.

I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

He did bring up another war that I did not include in this when he mentioned the Cold War. The Cold War went on for perhaps 45 years, beginning shortly after World War II and ending, I am going to say, November 9, 1989, when the wall went down in Berlin. And it took about 2, 2 1/2 years for freedom to echo all the way across Eastern Europe. But the liberation that took place at the culmination at the Cold War, and it was a glorious victory. We say a bloodless victory, and I have stood on this floor and called it a bloodless victory.

But it was not without price. The mutually assured destruction, the millions of men and women that needed to be mobilized, the capital that had to be poured into the research and development to be ahead of the Soviet Union it came to the arms race, and not just the price in treasure but the price in blood as well.

There is a price in blood as a price to be ready, Mr. Speaker, and we do not often talk about it. I asked the Pentagon to put some numbers together for me so I had a sense of that. I wanted to know how many of our soldiers in uniform die in the line of duty not at the cause of combat but perhaps at the cause of an accident, a training accident, for example, an on-duty accident, an in uniform on-duty accident. And I had them look back through a whole number of years, and I put that together and I boiled it down into a figure that I could at least commit to memory so that I could put it into proportion and talk about it in a way that made sense.

The number that they gave me worked out to be an average of 505 American lives lost every year during peaceable activities in uniform, deaths as a price to be ready to go into combat. Five hundred and five Americans a

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year. Now, that is the average that takes place during the 1990s up until the year 2001. The average prior to that, during the Cold War, I do not know that number, and their records were not very available. But I would suspect it would be greater, not less because we have more safety, not less, and we had more people in uniform, not less. But I took that number and just said 500 a year, and as the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) was talking, I multiplied it across the 45 years of the Cold War. And the number I came up with was 22,500 American lives. That gives us a sense of the magnitude of the price of winning the Cold War, not to add the treasure. That is the blood. That is the sacrifice. There is a price to be ready.

There is another whole price out here that is paid for our freedom that is never acknowledged by the pessimists on the other side of the aisle, and that is that price to be ready. And it is measured in this victory in the Cold War, 22,500 lives perhaps. A quick scratch here on the paper is all that supports that statement and some good information to support it. But with that number of lives, hundreds of millions of people were liberated in the aftermath of the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain descended down across Europe and those people lived for 45 years behind the Iron Curtain in a kind of a world where we were in full technicolor and they were living in black and white, it gives us a sense of how bad it was where they did not have free enterprise, did not have opportunity, did not have freedom. And today they do.

And, by the way, the most recent people who have achieved freedom are the ones that cherish it the most. They are the ones that are the most eager to be part of our coalition forces in Iraq to defend the freedom of the Iraqi people.

So this price for freedom has been great, but the value has been astonishing. The pessimism on the other side of the aisle has been stupendous. And I have brought some posters along to talk about what happens when we send a pessimistic message from this Congress; from the leaders of this country; from the people who are viewed, at least on the other side of the ocean, as the quasi-leaders of the United States of America. And I will start with Muqtada al-Sadr.

This individual here, Mr. Speaker, decided to put his own militia together, Sadr City, Baghdad, in a region south of Baghdad. And his militia attacked coalition troops, American troops. His militia did not fair very well, and it took some really severe, and he has decided a few times that he kind of likes getting involved in politics as opposed to being a general of a militia because it is far less hazardous to be in politics there in Iraq. But I was sitting in Kuwait City on one of my trips over there at night, waiting to go into Iraq early the next morning. I turned the television on to al-Jazeera TV. I always, when I am in a foreign country, want to know what is going on; so I turn on the local channel.

Al-Jazeera is the local channel for the Arab world. And there in Arabic out of his mouth came, with English subtitles, what I will never forget. And this is the date that I was sitting in that hotel room, June 11, 2004, al-Jazeera: ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.''

Where does Muqtada al-Sadr get an idea like that? What encourages him to continue the insurgency and the attacks on Americans and the recruitment of his people and his militia? What encourages him to raise the money and build the bombs and do the things that they have done? And this is not the worst enemy we have over there, by the way. He is not the biggest demon that we have. But it was just the circumstance that I heard this from the television screen while I was in Kuwait. Where

does he get his motivation? Why does he think this is true?

Well, there is the legacy of Vietnam. And these people over here every night that are dragging down our administration and undermining our military are the political descendants of the ones that dragged down our devotion to our military and our support for them during the Vietnam era. In the aftermath of Vietnam when Congress voted to shut off all funding for all military efforts in all of South Vietnam and ground every airplane that was flying air cover over the South Vietnamese, and a few months later, we saw the North Vietnamese army sweep through there, and we were lifting people off the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Why? Not because the South Vietnamese would not fight any longer but because the will and the commitment to support them disappeared over here, and the rug was jerked out from underneath not just our military but underneath the military of South Vietnam. And in the aftermath, they say they saved lives. We know 3 million people died in that part of the world in the aftermath of not keeping our commitment with the South Vietnamese military.

That message resounds today and echoes throughout the Middle East, echoes throughout al Qaeda. ``The Americans will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu.'' Is that hard to figure out, then? They watch American TV too. I imagine they turn on C-SPAN and watch this every night and cheer and pop their popcorn and they have a good time seeing that their argument is being supported on the floor of this Congress every night for 1 or 2 hours. They build more bombs, not less, Mr. Speaker. That puts American soldiers' lives at risk. Bombs cost American soldiers lives. That is on the conscience of the people that are leading this country in that wrong direction.

Now, on the chance that one might think that this is a coincidence that Muqtada al-Sadr just picked up this Vietnam idea on his own, maybe he read a comic book somewhere or watched C-SPAN or watched the Congress here and our Special Orders. Here is a statement made by Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second in command. He is al Qaeda. He is a more dangerous enemy than Muqtada al-Sadr. In February of 2004, in a letter to al Qaeda, he wrote: ``The collapse of American power in Vietnam,'' they ran and left. It sent a message, did it not, to Zawahiri? We know it sent a message to Osama bin Laden. It sent a message to Muqtada al-Sadr. It sent a message also to other leaders of al Qaeda. It gave them hope. It gave them spirit. It caused them to have more energy, more courage, more will, more resourcefulness to attack coalition troops and to attack Americans. Is that a hard thing to figure out?

If that is a hard thing to figure out, Mr. Speaker, then I need to make this point very, very clear. In all of those wars that Mr. Franks and I talked about throughout this course of history, in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the Second World War, and the Cold War and other wars in between, what are the conditions by which a war is over? Not because somebody over here passes a resolution and says we are going to pick a date on when we are going to be deployed out, the cut-and-run date. We cannot set a date for the end of a war if the war is not finished. Wars are over when the losing party realizes and understands that they have lost. That is how a war gets over. You have got to convince the enemy that they cannot win, and you do that through violence.

Yes, all history knows that. But when it is a relentless pounding from the other side of the aisle and the quasi-leaders of the United States of America and they stand up here and say the war cannot be won, people like Zawahiri, Muqtada al-Sadr, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, do they not hear that message? Is it not something that encourages them? Do they not think that the will of the American people is being broken because they hear that relentless message every single day coming out of this Congress, coming out through the media? In fact, I would suspect that Saddam Hussein probably has a higher opinion of the United States of America than some of our mainstream media do, listening to some of them out there.

The pessimistic message that gets pounded out of here, that gets run through the mainstream media, that is supported by some people from the other body, that is supported by other leaders, quasi-leaders in this country, gets through to people like Zawahari, Zarqawi, Muqtada Al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden. If you doubt that, Mr. Speaker, if any one doubts that, I have another poster for you.

There he is. The face and the voice of the Democratic Party, the leader of the left. One of the inspirational voices that mobilizes the other party for pessimism, negativism, and attacks. This individual whom we know pretty well, Howard Dean, DNC chairman, spent a lot of time in my home State of Iowa, about a year and a half in there.

He was there most of the time going through the counties and the cities. I will grant him, he worked very hard running for President. And this is the picture that I think has been made famous by that mainstream news media that finally did turn on one of their own. I do not think he quite deserved the hit that he took over that.

But that frustration from the scream, his failure to win the caucuses in Iowa and his failure to win the nomination on through that process did not really come from the scream. The scream was a result of, but the people who met him in the coffee shops and the living rooms understood the real man here, the man here that says, ``The idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong.''

Do you not think these other people I put up here see this man as a leader of the United States of America, the voice of the Democratic Party, the almost-majority in the House of Representatives? Of course they do. And they hear this message: the idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong.

Now, if you had seen your troops decimated like al Qaeda has, if you had watched 3,000 of them disappear from your ability to utilize them in combat, in battle, 3,000 every month, those that are either killed or captured, and you do not see that in the mainstream news media, that is a number that does not come out here anywhere that I can find. But I can tell you that that is the number that has been the average over the last several months, 3,000 of the enemy off the streets, killed and captured.

So that has got to be dispiriting to them. We are losing casualties. It hurts us. It breaks the confidence of the people on the other side of the aisle. What would our confidence be if it were 3,000 of ours lost every month instead of the numbers that we are facing today?

So what happens? This man stands up and says the idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong. Well, if you are all beaten down after your 3,000th casualty for the month, and if you are looking for some optimism, here is the place to go. There are plenty of voices over here that bring this optimism for the other side.

They keep mentioning the Vietnam War. That is the only war that the liberals ever won; they just won it for the wrong side, Mr. Speaker, and are trying to win another one. They have got so much invested in failure in Iraq, they could not abide by that.

So I would ask this other side of the aisle, define victory. I will define it. We have had this sequence of it that took place. We listened to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) talk about being in Iraq during the elections, the first free elections in January, with the purple fingers in air, 8 1/2 million Iraqis voted.

We went through sequence of liberations, martial law, a Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer and handed over to a civilian government until such time as they could set up the elections, which they did in January, and they elected then a provisional parliament, an interim temporary parliament whose job it was to write the Constitution. On October 15 then they ratified their Constitution.

And 10 days later we had leaders of this country that were speaking against the effort and undermining their freedom. And now here we are just a few days from a real election in Iraq that finally culminates this whole process and gives them a legitimate sovereignty in Iraq, one that will select a prime minister, gives them the ability now to take this massive amount of oil wealth that they have, market some oil contracts for development so that they can start to get this cash-flow coming back into Iraq, lift that country up.

They are just dilapidated and depreciated from 35 years of neglect. We have given them a little shot in the arm, $18.5 billion. The number was wrong over here, by the way, last night. It was not 87 billion that went in there to rebuild Iraq. It was 18.5. The balance was for the military. But 18.5 billion of that, 12 1/2 the Army invested, and the balance of that was scattered through some other entities. That was like the down payment on your house that gets them started.

They will be certified December 15. There is hope. There is freedom. We must stick it out.

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