Message From The Senate

MESSAGE FROM THE SENATE

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. WILSON of New Mexico. Mr. Speaker, it is important for Americans to understand that the war on terror did not begin on a cool September morning, that this was something that had been building over a decade or longer, that in February of 1993, radical Islamist operatives drove a truck into the basement of the World Trade Center and blew it up. One thousand people were injured and six people died, and we treated it as a crime, not an act of international terror.

On June 25, 1996, American airmen who were conducting operations in the southern no-fly zone in Iraq were settling in for the night in their quarters in Saudi Arabia in a building known as the Khobar Towers when a sewage truck drove into the compound, backed up to the wall of that building, and the people who drove it fled in a white car.

They were seen from the roof of the building by the security forces, and they started evacuating the building. They were about three floors down when the truck exploded and 19 airmen were killed.

In August of 1998, we were here in this House when we got word that our two embassies, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, had been attacked by bombs. The U.S. Attorney in the District of New York got 17 indictments, one of them for a man whose name wasn't really well known at the time. His name was Osama bin Laden.

In October of 2000, the USS Cole was in port in Aden, in Yemen when a small boat came up to it and exploded, tearing a gash 40 feet by 60 feet long midships on the USS Cole, and 17 sailers died.

All of these actions we treated as isolated instances. We played defense ineffectively against a transnational, loosely connected movement against extremists who exploit Islam and use terrorism to bring about their dark vision of the future.

The adherents to this movement are parasites who thrive in weak states and in failed regimes. That is why the terrorists made Iraq a central front in their war. If they could foment civil war, if they could keep self-government in Iraq from being born, then they could thrive in the chaos and continue their attacks on us.

That is why it is important to see it through in Iraq. We made a decision after 9/11 that we would play offense and not defense. As Americans, we know the enterprise that we are engaged in is difficult and requires persistence and resolve. That is very hard on some days. It is very hard for us to understand why it is important to stay the course.

But we know this. Our enemies are persistent and will stay the course. They will not stop if we ignore them.

So that is the choice we face as a nation and why this debate today is so important. It is a choice between resolve and retreat. For me and my family, I choose resolve.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

http://thomas.loc.gov