Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act Of 2007

Floor Speech

STEM CELL RESEARCH ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2007 -- (Senate - April 10, 2007)

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Mr. BOND. Mr. President, this is a very important debate, but I have another very important subject that I need to bring to the attention of this body. First and foremost, as I address this body, Congress has yet to take the necessary steps to approve emergency funding for our troops serving in a war zone. While I applaud the steps taken by the leadership of the Senate to appoint conferees moments after passing the supplemental appropriations bill, Speaker Pelosi and the House leadership have been too busy conducting foreign policy to appoint conferees.

I am here. We are ready--I, along with a number of my colleagues--to get to work and get the funds where they are needed. As I said time and time again on the Senate floor, our generals and military commanders are in the best position and are best suited to know the needs of our forces. When they tell us they need the funds urgently, I do not believe they are leaving much room for interpretation.

General Schoomaker, Army Chief of Staff--a no-nonsense operator--said:

Without approval of the supplemental funds in April, we will be forced to take increasingly draconian measures which will impact Army readiness and impose hardships on our soldiers and their families.

Secretary Gates, whom war critics and opponents alike embraced this straight-talking, candid Secretary of Defense, said:

This kind of disruption to key programs will have a genuinely adverse effect on the readiness of the Army and the quality of life for soldiers and families.

In addition, this, too, would degrade the already perilous State of the National Guard's home front mission to support civil authorities. We are told that 88 percent of the Guard units at home are not equipped to respond to natural disasters or a potential terrorist attack.

That is why I was proud to support, with my friend and National Guard Caucus cochairman, Senator Leahy, inclusion of a billion dollars in the supplemental for Guard equipment.

The most significant and important constitutional role this Congress is supposed to be undertaking is exercising its power over the purse. Yet, ironically and most detrimentally to our troops, that one paramount duty seems to be the last one on the to-do list of some in Congress. Instead, the retreat-and-defeat crowd has sought to micromanage the war from 8,000 miles away, setting timetables and prescribing troop movements. This same message will discourage our allies, who are beginning to help, obviously, our troops, and only encourage our enemies.

The recent action taken by the retreat-and-defeat crowd would suggest they are vested in defeat in order to achieve the goals of the far left wing of the Democratic Party where Michael Moore, George Soros, and others who support their party with tens of millions of dollars for 527s will do anything to undermine President Bush, even if it means losing the war that radical Islam and al-Qaida have declared on us.

As we have seen in recent weeks since the implementation of General Petraeus' plan, there is movement in the right direction. It cannot be changed overnight and nobody should expect an immediate turnaround, but it is the best hope we have. Senator McCain, who just returned from Iraq, reports that Sunni sheiks in Anbar are now fighting al-Qaida, more than 50 joint United States-Iraqi stations have been established in Baghdad, Muqtada al-Sadr has felt the heat, and his followers overall are not contesting them. Finally, Senator McCain observed that Iraqi Army and police forces are increasingly fighting on their own, with their size and capability growing.

While Senator McCain and I would agree that there are no guarantees for victory and we have a long way to go, we certainly need to make every effort to achieve it. Yet some Members of this body and the other body say the real war on terror is in Afghanistan, not Iraq. If that is so, why are our marines fighting in Al Anbar against al-Qaida?

Charles Krauthammer, on March 30 in the Washington Post, wrote on this very topic:

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer--a Martian--and point out to him that the U.S. is involved in two hot wars against radical Islam insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources and no industrial or technical infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure that, though suffering decay in the later years of Saddam Hussein's rule, could easily be revived if it falls into the wrong hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf States. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question.

The war in Iraq is a very important front on the larger global battlefield. If anyone doubts this, then all we need to do is to listen to what Osama bin Laden had to say back in December 2004 in a message to Muslims in Iraq.

Bin Ladin said: I now address my speech to the whole of the Islamic Nation. Listen and understand. The issue is big, and the misfortune is momentous. The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War which the crusader Zionist coalition began against the Islamic Nation. It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is in Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate.

That is what Osama bin Laden said. He has gone on to say: The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries--the Islamic Nation, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation.

Now, obviously we did not declare war on radical Islam; it declared war on us.

In addition, some in the House have sought to strike the term ``global war on terror,'' pandering again to the likes of the George Soros wing of the party, undercutting U.S. efforts.

The global war on terror is a real mission that 9/11 showed us has no geographical boundaries and one that so many of our brave men and women have died for since the attacks of 9/11.

The terrorists have been targeting the United States throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The United States never responded to those attacks, and the message sent was one of weakness, not strength. We would be repeating the same mistake today by communicating a weakness of our will by our political leaders. We withdrew from Vietnam, we withdrew from Beirut, we withdrew from Mogadishu. These repeated withdrawals signal to our enemies all over the world that if they inflict enough damage on our most heroic citizens, the marines will never surrender, but Washington will.

A precipitous withdrawal, such as that being prescribed by the wannabe generals here in the Congress, would be disastrous. The Iraq Study Group's recommendations reached the same conclusion. James Baker, the group's cochairman, just wrote:

The report does not set timetables or deadlines for the removal of troops as contemplated by the supplemental spending bills the House and Senate passed. In fact, the report specifically opposes that approach. As many military and political leaders told us, an arbitrary deadline would allow the enemy to wait us out and would strengthen the positions of extremists over moderates. A premature American departure from Iraq, we unanimously concluded, would almost certainly produce even greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions in Iraq and possibly other countries.

The intelligence community, in open hearing, said precipitous withdrawal on a political timetable would lead to heightened killings of Shias and Sunnis, offer a safe haven for al-Qaida to reestablish itself, and likely a region-wide war between Sunni and Shia countries.

To ignore these questions and considerations simply because they are unpalatable is shortsighted at best and dangerous at the worst. Those who want to end the war precipitously because they want to embarrass the President do not want to talk about the fact that the war in Iraq will do anything but end--in fact, would only grow even more dangerous. If we leave, radical Islamists will follow us home.

What I say to those who want to get out either immediately or on a political timetable, not based on the conditions on the ground, is if you want to run the war on terror from this body, you will own it. Even if some would-be generals in this body think they are smarter than General Petraeus and can devise a better plan in legislation--and I doubt that they can--how can they adjust their legislation conditions on the battlefield? To micromanage a war is to ensure defeat.

When a newly revitalized al-Qaida carries out renewed 9/11-scale attacks, you will own those attacks as well. There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers, marines, guardsmen, and reservists and their families who will remember, and I will help remind everyone.

As you may know, I proudly hail from the Show Me State. If all of the rhetoric in Washington about supporting the troops is true, and I believe people mean it, then I suggest that the Congress show our troops we do support them by getting them the funds and giving them a chance to succeed and not taking away management from the hands of our capable generals in the field and bringing to it this body where, in our great military wisdom, we know better than the troops, the officers, and the commanders on the ground what the conditions are in Iraq and the other battlefields.

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