Message From The Senate

MESSAGE FROM THE SENATE

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Mr. THORNBERRY. I thank the chairman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, part of the job of intelligence is to understand our enemy, and what we should clearly understand about our enemy in the war on terrorism is that they are very sophisticated. They are sophisticated users of technology using, as Chairman Hoekstra just mentioned, the Internet in order to recruit, in order to train its people, in order to intimidate populations to go along.

They use Internet video games in order to help train and indoctrinate people in the Arab world to their way of thinking. They use the Internet for communication. They use videotapes and DVDs to get their message out. They have very adept users of technology.

But they are also adept at using media. As a matter of fact, Prime Minister Blair said recently that they play our own media with a shrewdness that would be the envy of many a political party. They know, for example, that one horrific act of cruelty shown on video will get far more attention than a thousand acts of kindness or patience from our soldiers.

They are agile and clever in using cruelty through the media in order to achieve their ends; and, Mr. Speaker, I think maybe the most important point we can make on their sophistication is that they know they cannot beat us militarily, and that is not their object. They are sophisticated enough to know that the way they can beat us is to influence our political decisions, to impact our political will.

There has been a very, what has now really become a classic study of this sort of warfare, often called 4th-generation warfare, a book called ``The Sling and The Stone,'' which traces this sort of attack from Mao's Tse-tung all the way through al Qaeda and its affiliated groups. One of the key points that the author makes, unlike previous generations of war, it does not try to win by defeating military's forces. Instead, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision-makers to destroy the enemy's political will.

That is what is going on. Their use of technology, their use of cruelty, their use of the media has a target which is us because, as another author has written, it only takes a few hundred people in Washington, DC, to decide that this war is lost. So they are focusing their attention not on our strength, but on our weakness, which is potentially our political will.

That is why this resolution is important. It is why in order to meet a sophisticated threat, a political threat, which al Qaeda and its affiliated groups try to pose to us, we have to resist that sort of manipulation. Part of that resistance occurs on the floor of the House.

I thank the chairman for yielding.

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Mr. THORNBERRY. Mr. Speaker, I have listened to the first 5 hours of this debate, trying to listen carefully to each speaker. And it seems to me that some people try, as best they can, to isolate Iraq from the rest of the war on terror.

Now, that may be politically convenient for them to do, but it is not what the real world is like. As a matter of fact, it was not long ago that we found a letter from Zawahari, Osama's number two, to Zarqawi in Iraq talking about tactics.

Just as the Cold War had several battles across the globe, the war on terrorism has several battlefields across the globe. And I believe that it is clear from their own words, the terrorists see Iraq as the central front in our war against them now and into the future.

Secondly, we seem to have a lot of armchair strategists who want to redeploy this way or redeploy that way, because they say nothing is going right. I would recommend they read the document found this morning, or released this morning, that was found in Zarqawi's house.

It says that things are going pretty well for us, and not so well for them. I think it is a little early to give up.

Thirdly, there are a lot of people who want to debate the procedures or debate Congress's job or debate past decisions. And it is true, history will have to pass judgment on decisions that the military commanders and the President and the Congress have made in the past. They will do so when the air of partisanship has faded.

But the truth is, however you feel about where we are, we are where we are. And the question is, do we leave a job half done? Do we leave early, and leave those Iraqis who are willing to put their lives on the line by being part of the government or part of the police force or part of the military, do we abandon them when they are trying to build a country? I think that would be a mistake.

In fact, I think to retreat at this point, whether you call it a strategic retreat, a strategic redeployment, or whatever word you want to use to back up now, will only embolden the terrorists. We have seen time after time, when they sense political vacillation, they strike. They struck in Istanbul in 2003, in Madrid in 2004, in London in 2005.

Where they sense weakness, it is like an animal. Where they sense fear, they attack. We have got to do better and make sure we win this war.

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