Iraq Assessment

IRAQ ASSESSMENT -- (House of Representatives - January 29, 2008)

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Mr. BURGESS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady from Tennessee for yielding to me.

It is kind of ironic. We were here on the floor of this House last night. The House was full, Members on both sides. We heard the President deliver his final State of the Union address, and of course, as is typical for a State of the Union address, he touched on subjects near and far, went through the domestic agenda, went through the foreign agenda.

When he got to talking about the conditions on the ground in Iraq, I don't know about the gentlelady from Tennessee, but I was just absolutely struck by the scene in this House when he commended the troops for the activities and the success that they had achieved on the ground. One-half of the House stood up and applauded; the other half sat on their hands.

And Mr. Speaker, I don't know if there's been another time in American history when America goes to war, sends their sons and daughters to war, America is winning the war, and it's become something we don't want to talk about. There's other things that command our attention now, and we'll go on to other things.

The gentlelady was right, it was a year ago that we stood on the floor of this House and debated for hour after hour after hour on the efficacy of sending additional troops to Iraq. We were told by the majority leader over in the Senate, the Democratic majority leader, that the war was lost; there was no need to send additional men because we had already made the decision in the Senate, or the other body in the Capitol of the United States, that the war was over and the war was indeed lost.

The gentlelady's right, you can pick data points to prove whatever you want to prove in Iraq. They're all over the map, but if you look at trend lines over time, you begin to see a story taking shape, and that is the story that began to take shape in April of last year, perhaps a little reinforced in June of last year, July of last year.

My most recent trip to Iraq, my sixth trip, I wasn't sure what I was going to find because when you picked up the papers, the data points were scattered all over the place, but little by little, the story came out. And

about a week after I was there in July, the New York Times finally broke the story, hey, there's a war we just might win going on in the country of Iraq, written by two individuals who, quite frankly, aren't always on the side of the President of the United States, so it seems, in their writings in the New York Times. The New York Times itself is not always on the same page as the President in a lot of foreign policy issues, but there it was in black and white for all to see.

Now, I went to Iraq in July of 2007. I very much wanted to go because I knew that the surge had started. I knew that General Petraeus had committed to come back and present data to Congress in September of 2007 to talk about the success, or lack thereof, of the additional reinforcements that were sent into the country of Iraq. And I knew that this House, I knew myself as a Member of this House, was going to have to come to some decisions or some conclusions, if it's working it or it's not working; if it's not working, we will have to rethink the strategy.

So it was an important trip for me to take because I knew on every other trip that I had taken to Iraq what I saw on the ground bore no resemblance to what I was seeing on my television screens on CNN and CBS and the evening news and the morning shows. You have to go and look at it for yourselves to be able to understand what is happening.

You know it's not an easy job. It was a brief war, but it's been a long hard slog to get to where we are today, and history will have to decide whether the investment in time, the investment in lives, the investment in families who are deprived of their loved ones during these long deployments, history will decide the accuracy of the words that we speak tonight.

But I will tell you from the strength of that last trip in July and what I have seen reported since that time, I have to believe that this country going forward is going to be in far better shape in 10 years', 20 years', 30 years' time because we have an Iraq that has an opportunity now to be a stable partner in a quest for peace in the Middle East, as opposed to a haven and an outpost for continued terrorism in that part of the world.

In July of 2006, I took a trip to Iraq. Peter Chiarelli on that trip said, you know, it's funny, I don't know want to make of it, but in a part of the country of Iraq that is very, very dangerous, al

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Anbar province, a city called Ramadi, we don't know what to make of it but some insurgents that were in the hospital yesterday turned over all of their arms to our soldiers, and we'll just have to wait and see what develops. In fact, he asked me not to talk about it when I got back in July of 2006 because, again, he was not sure what that meant.

July of 2007, fast forward to that time. We got off the C-130 in Baghdad International Airport, get on the helicopters and are immediately taken to Ramadi. Ramadi, that was too dangerous a place to travel to a year before, was our first stop. We met General Gaston of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force there on the ground in Ramadi. Ramadi is a city about the size of Ft. Worth. Ft. Worth, Texas, is the largest city in my district back home. It was the provincial capital of the resurgent caliphate as established by al Qaeda in western Iraq.

The reality, though, was that things had changed enormously over that past year and in ways that, quite honestly, had not been reported in the press back here at home. Again, I didn't know what I was going to find when I went there, but I have to tell you the job that was done by the Marines in the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, the job that was done by the troops on the ground on these long deployments that they were undertaking, the job was truly phenomenal.

A year before I would not have been able to travel to the city of Ramadi. Now, not only could I travel to the city of Ramadi, after the briefing, after the endless Power Point that the military always gives you when you go over there, we got in vehicles and drove to downtown Ramadi.

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I've got to tell you, I was a little concerned; General Gaston, are you sure that it's okay for us to go to downtown Ramadi? Last year, General Chiarelli said it's kind of dangerous out there. He said, ``Let's go.''

We drove downtown. It was a Saturday morning, early on a Saturday morning. We drove to the market. It looked like a market any other place in the Middle East. There was a lot of activity. In fact, there were the typical sights and sounds of a city that has, perhaps, seen better days. They were working on some sewer pipes. There was, in fact, a little bit of construction going on.

But this photograph was taken last July 17th in the city of Ramadi. This shows the shops. I don't know where all this stuff came from. If this was an American market, I would assume all this stuff came from China. I'm not sure where it was made. But all of these wares were for sale, and there was shop after shop after shop lined up and down either side of the street.

You can see the faces of the young men there; a little bit of curiosity, all of these Americans showing up and walking through their streets. I'm sure for them it was a sight that they had not seen too often. But again, you see on the faces of these young men, these are not faces that are suspicious, these are not faces that are fearful, these are faces that are smiling. They were, in fact, glad to see us. And I found out a few minutes later why they were glad to see us; they were hoping that we had a pen or a quarter. They had apparently been well coached by our marines. Their school was going to start in a few weeks, and because they would be attending their classes, they were anxious to know if we had a writing instrument that we might part with that they could have.

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