Posted on 7/17/2008, 8:09:24 PM by kristinn
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Mr. HUNTER. So, Mr. Speaker, thanks for letting me take this time. It's always fun to come down and take a big bite out of somebody else's time, and I want to thank the gentleman from Iowa for letting me take some of his minutes here. I really appreciate it.
And the gentleman from Iowa, incidentally, is a very wonderful friend and a great colleague and a guy who really has been working this energy issue with great energy and was a wonderful host to those of us who spent our time in Iowa in that Presidential race, including those of us like myself who had rather short-lived campaigns. The gentleman from Iowa was always there, always gracious, always willing to put a group together, and helped to create that great forum that is Iowa politics. I want to thank the gentleman.
And I want to thank him, also, for his great help on the border fence, a very important issue. And he helped to push this bill that we finally got passed in 2006. We got a mandate to build 854 miles of double-border fence, got watered down a little bit by the other body, but we're still constructing. And we've got projects now in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. And the gentleman did a lot of work to make sure that happens.
So I want to thank him.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, I really thank the gentleman from California as I reclaim my time, and I'd be glad to yield however much time might be needed to continue the compliments to myself. I'll be quite as generous with that particular time.
But I want to say, Mr. Duncan Hunter from California is a brave and great patriot and has poured forth his appreciation for many of his colleagues, and I'm sure as the months unfold we'll hear this emerge in many accolades for the accomplishments of Duncan Hunter.
And I want to say as you came to Iowa to campaign for the Presidency, and sometimes it was late nights, and it was often early mornings. And I remember this situation, the night of the straw poll, August 11, 2007, when it was the big test. And everybody had to count their straw polls and votes that came in, and however that shook out, that gave some people momentum, and other people lost momentum. And some people that had momentum had already left the State before the votes were counted.
But I had an early press call to be down to the State Fair on the east side of Des Moines fairly early the following morning. It was a Sunday morning. I arrived there, but I had to wait in line because Duncan Hunter was there with his cowboy hat, and he was already working the State Fair. I don't know if it was before the sun came up, but it was right away in the morning. That's the kind of tenacity that we expect in your successor, and I yield back to you.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank you, and let me tell you, the State Fair in Iowa was wonderful. It was also wonderfully hot. That was a good little scorcher, the State Fair, but man, you had a tremendous State Fair. I've never seen one like it.
[Time: 22:45] So I just want to thank you and all of the wonderful people of Iowa. The great thing about them, they'll always listen to you and they'll let you make your point. And they very much, I think, treasure the fact that they're one of the first primaries in the Nation. And where they point this thing has a lot to do with the final nominations for both parties.
It was a lot of fun. And let me tell you, campaigning in a State where you get to go to a lot of State fairs is not a bad deal. We had a great, great time in Iowa. And also going to the county fairs in the various counties. And I will say that in some counties there's a lot of road between fairs. But the gentleman takes that in stride.
Mr. KING of Iowa. There is that. And we have some county fairs that are larger than a lot of State fairs.
We live our fairs there in the State and we live our politics. And it's all politics all the time, 24/7. And that brings people to where they're paying attention to the issues and they take it seriously. And we have a statewide conversation going on constantly--over the telephones, the e-mail, over the back yard, in the coffee shop, at the fairs, all the activities that are going on.
Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman. Thanks a lot for letting me take that time to talk about Carole Starr and Terry Everett and Jimmy Saxton.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Thanks for your comments. I thank, again, the gentleman from California as I reclaim the balance of my time.
I think that my transition, as I watch the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee walk from the floor, I take this over to the subject matter of Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. It's been a little while since we've had intense discussions on that here on the floor.
I would point out, as a matter of refreshment to those who haven't been so focused on our situation, we are a country at war. And we were attacked on September 11, 2001 and we lost 3,000 Americans in those three locations where we were attacked.
The President then launched an offensive in Afghanistan, drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and people on that land voted for the first time in the history of man. Ever since Adam and Eve there hadn't been people go to the polls in Afghanistan. That happened fairly quickly; I believe it was about a little more than 1 year from the time that we went in.
And in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was violating, let me say, the United Nations Resolution 1441--and many others--the decision was made, based upon global intelligence, to go in and remove that tyrant who was killing his own people on a regular basis. He had started a war against Iran, where there were more than 1 million killed. And he had used weapons of mass destruction to destroy thousands of his own country men, women and children.
I have made a number of trips into Iraq. I sat with the chief justice who was on the panel that was lined up to try Saddam. And I asked the chief justice and the other justices, what is the penalty that Saddam is looking at? Now, he was in jail, and no one knew whether he was going to face the death penalty. And one of the other junior judges tried to explain to me, and he said that the penalty that Saddam is facing, well, we have a series of penalties; we have prison terms, we have life without parole--well, actually, he said we have the death penalty, then we have life in prison, and then we have other shorter terms, and it goes on down just like it does in the United States.
And as I watched the chief justice listen to the more junior justice explain that to me--which didn't explain a lot, actually--the chief justice, sitting there with a big white mustache, was tapping his pencil on the table and he wanted to be recognized. And I turned
[Page: H6668]to him for clarification and he said, Saddam is charged with crimes against humanity. Under Iraqi law, there is only one penalty, and that's death. And that's, ladies and gentlemen, when the world found out that Saddam was actually facing a death penalty. And about a year later then he did meet the end of his rope. And that was a dramatic time in the history of Iraq. It took the fear away from the Iraqis. They were never sure whether he was going to emerge, whether he would be found not guilty and released onto the streets. They were never sure if he would light up again or reconfigure his Baathist political machine, reestablish his force of tyranny across the country, take over the control of the people and terrorize the Shias, and control the oil again and use that country for his own evil purposes. They knew that Uday and Qusay were dead, but they didn't know that Saddam would not come back until they knew he was dead as well. That changed the dynamics in Iraq. And thousands, in fact, millions of Iraqis are grateful for the sacrifice that's been made by coalition troops, American troops and American taxpayers, who have given up a fair amount of treasure to match a significantly large loss of blood and humanity in that country.
But what do we have today and where are we today and how did we get here? Well, in this Congress, this 110th Congress, Mr. Speaker, when Nancy Pelosi took the gavel--I will not forget that moment in time--and they began, on that side of the aisle, to bring resolutions to the floor in an attempt to unfund the war in Iraq. A whole series of pieces of legislation came raining down in this 110th Congress, directed to the floor, approved to coming to the floor by Speaker Pelosi, forty resolutions to undermine our military effort in Iraq. Forty different resolutions on the floor of this Congress calling for votes, trying to divide us, trying to see where they could find a way where they could squeeze off the resources to our military and ensure defeat, which is what it surely would have done. But we stood up, and we put the pressure back on the other side. And enough Democrats voted with Republicans to save this agenda that so many have sacrificed their lives and their blood for.
When I talk to the soldiers that serve there, and the airmen and the Marines and the Navy personnel, and when I talk to the parents who have lost a son or a daughter, they say, You can't pull us out of this fight. Don't do this to us, please. We're all volunteers.
We're all volunteers here to carry out this mission. We want to take this fight away from our children and our grandchildren. We want it done in our time.
They put their lives on the line and they set aside years of their lives, many of them multiple deployments to go over there, 100 percent of them volunteers. Not just for the military. They didn't just sign up, they knew when they signed up or when they re-upped that the odds were good that they would be deployed into the theater of either Iraq or Afghanistan.
And so they're all volunteers, Mr. Speaker. And they volunteer because they love this country, they understand our history, and they understand that we need to direct its destiny, not people that live in foreign countries, not the people that hate America, but the people that love America are the ones that protect our destiny. They're in uniform, they're in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, they're standing up and defending our freedom, and we need to stand with them.
And so I'm troubled, Mr. Speaker, when I pick up an op-ed, and it was written by the junior Senator from Illinois, the junior Senator who served 147 days in the United States Senate, his only Federal office exposure, until he decided that he wanted to be the President of the United States. That junior Senator has been to Iraq one time, one time almost 900 days ago, but for more than 900 days he said, We've got to get out of Iraq, we've got to get out now, we've got to pull our troops immediately out of Iraq. And the only conditions are leave a rear guard there to guard their backs so they don't get shot in the back on their way out of Iraq. That's what I heard. I heard it not exactly in those words, but I heard that theme over and over again. And it was exactly the words ``immediately pull our troops out of Iraq.'' That's what the junior Senator from Illinois said. That's the position he holds today.
He does understand that to pull 142,000 troops out of Iraq takes a little bit of time. He has said in his op-ed that's printed July 14 in the New York Times that he would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi Government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely and our interests protected. Well, that's the only consultation he's willing to accept is if somebody else will plan the logistics of the retreat.
And I would remind the body that victory in a war is defined by who's standing on the ground that was fought over when the war is over. It's like a street fight; whoever is standing there on the corner won the fight, and the one whose buddies drug him off or walked or ran away is the one that lost. We all know that. You can't run away from a fight and declare victory. It doesn't work in a street fight, it doesn't work in a battle, and it doesn't work in a war. And you can say what you want to about history, but they're going to write history according to the facts; and the facts will be who was standing in Iraq at the end of the war, not who declared defeat and pulled troops out.
But it is not just tantamount to a declaration of defeat to pull troops out and run away from an enemy, it is a declaration of defeat itself by any measure, by any judgment of history. I would just remind, again, Mr. Speaker, that we pulled out of Vietnam, ``peace with honor,'' I remember, ``peace with honor.'' And I remember this Congress voting to shut off all dollars to go to the South Vietnamese where they were, by then, trained to defend themselves. And we had made a sacred oath to the South Vietnamese people that we would provide for them all of the military equipment, all the munitions, and all of the air cover that they would need and use to defend themselves. And they were trained and equipped and they had their military squared away to do that. And this Congress passed legislation on an appropriations bill that said, ``These monies in this appropriations bill and any monies heretofore appropriated shall be prohibited from being spent to defend any military mission in Vietnam, on the ground of Vietnam, in the skies over Vietnam, in the seas around Vietnam''--North or South Vietnam it actually said--``or in the skies or land around Laos and Cambodia, neighboring counties.'' They covered it pretty good.
Any money that was in the pipeline was prohibited from being spent to allow the South Vietnamese people to defend themselves. And any money in the Department of Defense appropriations bill would be prohibited from being used to let the South Vietnamese people defend themselves with those resources.
We failed the South Vietnamese people. We gave them a solemn promise and a solemn oath, and we pulled out on them. And this country remembers people hanging on to the struts of helicopters as they lifted off of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a disgraceful image in the minds not just of patriotic Americans who saw that, sadly, but an image in the minds of people like al Qaeda who are inspired now because we didn't stick it out then.
And I read General Giap's book, the general who is credited with being the mastermind that set up the strategy that historians will describe as the defeat of the United States in South Vietnam. I would argue that we were not defeated there, but we were defeated here on the floor of this Congress. That's the fact of it, Mr. Speaker.
And on page eight of General Giap's book, he writes that he got his first inspiration that they could defeat the United States because we were willing to settle for a negotiated settlement in Korea. Because we didn't press forward for a complete 100 percent total victory over North Korea, he got the sense that we didn't have the stomach to finish a war that we were in. And so he set about with a strategy of the war of attrition, and they lost over 100,000 of their troops, killed in the Tet Offensive in 1968. And Walter Cronkite turned that into a defeat for the United States rather than a victory for our troops that so gloriously defended their positions and their compounds and the
[Page: H6669]South Vietnamese people. Over 100,000 North Vietnamese troops killed in the Tet Offensive, and Walter Cronkite interpreted that as a defeat for the United States because he didn't know why there were sappers inside the wall but not inside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. That's how history turned. History turned because it was redefined by liberal media people, and has since then been redefined by historians. And it's defined this way in the minds of Osama bin Ladin, General Giap, and also people like Muqtada al Sadr. And as I was actually in Kuwait, June 11, 2004, watching al Jazeera TV, Muqtada al Sadr came on and he said--and I was watching the closed caption going underneath the screen, he was speaking, I presume, in Arabic, the closed caption said--and I heard the voice of Muqtada al Sadr, he said, ``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.''
The inspiration for our enemies doesn't come from some ideology that causes them to rise up and move in a fashion that--they're not seeking a better world or a better life, it's hatred for us. And they think they can defeat us because they believe we're soft and we lack resolve. And they go back and keep score of our history and they say, well, they pulled out of Vietnam, they pulled out of Lebanon, they pulled out of Mogadishu, surely they'll pull out of Iraq. Well, they're dealing with a different Commander in Chief today than who was in charge in any of those circumstances. This time it's George W. Bush who is sticking this out. And I'm sticking it out with him, Mr. Speaker, because he's right. The central battle in this global war on terror is now and has been for a long time Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
[Time: 23:00] That's changing. It's transitioning over to Afghanistan, perhaps Pakistan, but today it's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. And we have everything but a sewed-up victory there.
When I look at the statistics that come out of Iraq, it tells me this: that civilian violence is off. It's down by about 80 percent from its peaks. Our military casualties are down dramatically as well. There has been 1 week where the accidental deaths in Iraq, 1 by my record so far, where the accidental deaths in Iraq were greater than the combat deaths in Iraq. That means you're getting down to one or two or three for the week. The casualties in Afghanistan have been for the last 4 to 6 weeks roughly equal to or greater than they are in Iraq.
Now, I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that you consider this: that we have about 140,000 to 142,000 troops in Iraq; we have about 26,000 troops in Afghanistan. So the numbers work out to be that there are about 5.38 times more troops in Iraq than there are in Afghanistan. And if the casualties are roughly equivalent in each of the two countries, the casualty rate in Afghanistan is 5.38 times greater than the casualty rate in Iraq. That is a dramatic sea change, Mr. Speaker, in the numbers of casualties within the two countries. And it isn't just because the casualties have gone up in Afghanistan, which they have, but it's because they have gone down dramatically in Iraq.
And the Department of Defense issued a couple of weeks ago sectarian attack statistics. Now, if you remember, we had people like the gentleman from Pennsylvania, who professes to be an expert on these issues, the one who said pull the troops out now, let's cut and run out of there and move them back to their horizon, who said that we had a civil war in Iraq and we had sectarian violence in Iraq and the place was melting down in shambles and chaos and the war could not be won. It was already lost. That from a retired Marine, that we already lost. Well, the sectarian violence, the violence that was described as uncontrollable, unmanageable, and going to get worse, the last report that came from the Department of Defense was sectarian violence, Shias killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shias for the sake that they are opposite sects, sectarian violence: zero. No recorded cases of attacks for sectarian reasons. Civilian violence off at least 80 percent, our casualties down to a level below where they are in Afghanistan for the last couple of weeks at least and spanning over the last 6 weeks equivalent roughly to Afghanistan. But the casualty rates in Afghanistan are 5.38 times higher than they are in Iraq.
Now, why is anybody unsatisfied with this? When I kept asking the question: Describe for me, define for me a victory in Iraq. How do you define that victory in Iraq? These folks over here are pretty cagy, Mr. Speaker, because they're not going to define a victory in Iraq. They know that we can achieve that. So they set up these benchmarks, 18 benchmarks for the Iraqis to reach, and if they didn't meet the benchmarks, then they were going to pull the plug on the funding and shut off the support for the troops and bring them all home. That was the strategy. And that was the strategy when General Petraeus came here to Congress--I think it was the 12th or 15th of September last year--and he gave a report on the situation in Iraq. And the junior Senator from New York said, ``It would require the willful suspension of disbelief to believe you, General Petraeus.'' ``The willful suspension of disbelief.''
Well, look where we are today, Mr. Speaker? Who was telling the truth then? Was it the skeptic that came forward and denied the facts that were in front of her? Was it the general that laid out objectively the circumstances, with proper cautions, with proper caveats, but still with the proper strategy? And he sat down at Leavenworth and spent months writing the manual, the coun ter in sur gency manual. And I have that manual, and I have pored through it. I haven't read every word of it, but I have read a lot of the pieces in it. And that strategy was put together, as I sense it, as I read it, from the experience that General Petraeus had in Iraq and other experiences around other locations where he had been deployed, plus a lot of reading, a lot of experience, a lot of activity with other officers.
I remember going to Iraq for the first time in 2003, and I talked to the officers. They didn't know very much about the culture in the Middle East, and they didn't have a lot of books that they'd read about it. And I came home and started to read. I went back to Iraq, and I saw the bookshelves in their offices in places like Baghdad and Fallujah with more books on the Arabic culture, on the Muslim religion, on ways to understand the culture and the religion and the military tactics. We saw our officers start to get up to speed and learn, and they got up to speed and learned. And no one has learned that I can tell any more or any faster than General Petraeus.
And when I read this op-ed in the New York Times, written by the junior Senator from Illinois, who spent 147 days in the Senate and decided he should be the leader of the free world, he writes a few things in here that are quite disturbing. I will just take this kind of from the top. This is his op-ed that says what he is going to learn when he goes to Iraq. Now, this is a classic case of really getting the sequence of things wrong.
Now, I'm a cynical person sometimes. That's what it takes to maintain sanity in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and I would say that I could name more than one individual in this Congress that decided that they were getting enough pressure from their constituents that they wanted to flip and change their position on the war on terror and particularly the central battlefield of that, which is Iraq. And I can name more than one individual that I believe decided they wanted to change their position, turn against the war, and so they set up a trip to go to Iraq so that they could learn what was going on over there, having already made up their mind that they were going to flip and turn against it. I could name more than one person. I choose not to do that, but I can do that. And they aren't all Democrats either, Mr. Speaker. That is a cynical thing to do. It's a cynical thing to do to come to a conclusion without the facts and then set up a trip so that you can validate the conclusion that you've already come to and come back and say, ``Well, here's what I've learned. I've learned that we've got to pull out and pull out now, and since I have been there, I really am convinced of that.'' That has happened in this Congress multiple times actually from both sides of the aisle.
[Page: H6670] Well, Senator Obama takes it way another level. He goes to way another level, and he decides, I'm going to go to Iraq for the first time in 900 days. For more than 900 days, he has said we're going to pull the troops immediately out of there. And he's already decided what he's going to find out when he gets there. That's not exclusive new. I said I can name some people who have done that, and I think it's cynical and it's wrong. And remember when he said ``the audacity of hope''? Now, that's kind of an oxymoron. Hope is not in an active sense. Wishful thinking is what hope is. ``The audacity of hope.'' Well, what about the audacity of declaring to the world what he's going to learn when he gets there in a couple of weeks and putting it in an op-ed in the New York Times and telling us, well, I will go there and I am going to learn what's there, and then here's what I am going to do when I come back after I learn what it is I don't know. He's going to pull the troops out immediately. And he writes in his op-ed, dated the 14th of July: ``But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.''
How does he know that, Mr. Speaker? How can he know that the same factors that led him to oppose the surge, the same factors presumably that led him to oppose our operations in Iraq, still hold true? What factors? What factors has he verified today that he thinks are going to be confirmed when he gets there? And if he already has his mind made up, why waste the jet fuel? Why put those global warming greenhouse gasses up in the atmosphere and fly over to Iraq if you already know what you think? What is going to be validated by his presence there when he already invalidates his own objective judgment by writing the op-ed that tells the world what it is that he wants us to know that he has concluded after he actually goes there but tells us before?
And he says of the Iraqis that the ``leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country.''
Not so. They are investing now tens of billions of dollars. I know that they were in a situation where they had about $60 billion in revenue and they were working furiously to get it so that they could get it down and out to the people. And we are getting that revenue out to the people. I met with the mayor of Ramadi some months ago. He sounded like, let's say, the mayor of Altoona: ``I need more resources. I can't quite get the bureaucrats out of the way. I've got to build a sewer. We need a water plant. We have got to fix some streets.'' That's what it sounded like to me. And those are the streets that al Qaeda owned them less than a year before, and we went shopping in downtown Ramadi. It was the center of death for a long time there.
So the Iraqis are investing tens of billions of dollars. But if they weren't, is the punishment for not taking your tens of billions of dollars and investing it, is the punishment turning your back over to al Qaeda? What kind of a foreign policy is that?
And then we go on and he says: ``They have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.'' Well, what is that political accommodation? He does not say. And he doesn't say because he can move that ball of string in front of the kitten again. He can play Lucy with Charlie Brown and the football in the fall, set the ball, and when Charlie comes along, the Iraqis, to make their political accommodations and they get ready like Charlie Brown to kick the football, then Lucy, the junior Senator from Illinois, can say, ``Whoops. Nope, that wasn't the target. That was a different political accommodation. I'll tell you what it is if you hit it.'' Well, you're not going to hit it with this man. He already has his mind made up. No amount of accomplishments, no amount of statistics, no amount of real data on the ground, no amount of sacrifice is going to change his mind because politically he has concluded that it strengthens his hand to, let me say, invalidate the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of Americans who have either given their lives; their limbs; parts of their bodies; their health, mental and physical; their treasure; and years out of their lives. To take that fight from us, to take that fight from our children and grandchildren would all be invalidated because it would strengthen his hand politically. That's the calculus.
So it says here, and again I am reading from this New York Times op-ed dated July 14 by the junior Senator from Illinois, 147 days in the Senate and decided he wanted to be President--it says here in his op-ed: ``The good news is that Iraq's leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops.''
Well, that's an opinion on an opinion. And my opinion on that opinion is, Mr. Speaker, that the Iraqis are starting to feel their oats a little bit. Yes, we have made a lot of progress, and a very good sign of the progress is that at least politically Prime Minister Maliki needs to say, ``I want to negotiate a timetable.'' That tells me that the Iraqis are building in their confidence, and that's good news.
Two other things that have happened in the last 1 1/2 years that didn't exist before is the Iraqi people understand we are not there for their oil and they understand we are not there to occupy, and that has helped dramatically in helping the Iraqis to make progress moving forward. But ``the good news is that Iraq's leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops,'' he could have chosen his words a little better. That sets a little wrong with me, that word ``removal.'' But what that says is we are succeeding in Iraq. And a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago, the answer was did all the Iraqis want us to leave? Yes. All of the Iraqis wanted us to leave, just not anytime soon. They wanted to make sure that their country was stable. We have been training troops there for a long time, Mr. Speaker, and I don't know that the junior Senator knows that.
But in any case, the timetable for American troops coming home needs to be set upon the security levels in Iraq, not some arbitrary date. But the dates that are being proposed by the Iraqi leadership are well beyond the date that is in this op-ed that's written by the junior Senator from Illinois. So they are not on the same page. Maybe he doesn't know that because he hasn't gone there for 900 days. And when he sits down and talks to them, and I hope he does, is he going to come back and correct this? I don't think so because he already has his mind up. He has given us a report from Iraq, sent to us a couple weeks before he goes to Iraq. That's kind of being a little bit trigger happy with your op-ed, I would say.
[Time: 23:15] Now here is another piece that I underlined. Obama says, ``Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis' taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition.''
Really? If he had gone to Iraq like I have and dozens and dozens of Members of Congress have and thousands upon thousands of Americans in uniform have, he might have been exposed to some of the things I have seen. For example, October 2003, Mosul, Iraq, General Petraeus commanding the 101st Airborne showed us, and this would be about 11:30 at night, he brought Iraqi troops into formation that had been training. And those Iraqi troops stood at attention. And we reviewed the Iraqi trainee troops October 2003. May, 2003, they had elections in Mosul. Liberation took place about the 22nd and 23rd in that area of March 2003. Just a little over a month later, there were elections in Mosul, Iraq, where they elected a governor, a vice governor and other officers there. That was all under the direction of General Petraeus.
And so if you go there, Mr. Speaker, and you witness those things, you understand the reality on the ground is significantly different than the reality imagined by the gentleman who penned this op-ed. And I would continue, by the way, I repeat the statement where he says, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition to Iraqi security forces providing the security in Iraq. They are the people that invented it, Mr. Speaker. It has been the President and his appointed officers who have
[Page: H6671]made sure that we had the resources to train Iraqi troops and to get Iraqi troops stood up so our troops could stand down. Do you remember that phrase? When the Iraqi troops stand up, we can stand down. That statement came out over and over again. And I have met with Iraqi troops across that country over and over again. And sometimes they train pretty good. And sometimes they didn't perform so well. But today, we know they fight well for Prime Minister Maliki. And because of that, the day is coming where we can transition. And we've drawn the surge volume of the troops down now, and we're back to the more stable number of 100,000 to 142,000 troops. We think those numbers will be diminished some more throughout the summer.
But let it be a strategic decision, not a political decision. Politicians don't do a good job of fighting wars. I've described what we did on the floor of this Congress to pull the rug out from underneath the South Vietnamese. I just didn't tell you about the 2 or 3 million who died in the aftermath. That blood is on the hands of the people who didn't keep their promise to the South Vietnamese. And I don't want the blood on our hands for not following through on our mission that we committed ourselves to. Once you engage, you're with the troops 100 percent. You're with the mission 100 percent. You cannot separate the troops from their mission. And it doesn't work to say, I'm for the troops but I oppose their mission. It doesn't work to say, I celebrate our brave troops, but I brought a resolution to the floor, an amendment to try to cut the funding for them. I tried to cut their food, their fuel, their bullet-proof vests, M-4s and their Humvees. That is not support. And they need moral support as well as financial support, Mr. Speaker.
And under the next paragraph in his op-ed in the New York Times it says, ``It is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people.'' Really? How would he know what the will of the Iraqi people is?
It helps to go there and find out. You can get somebody in this country to tell you anything you want to hear. And you can repeat it over and over again. When you go there and you see the faces of the Iraqi people and you move among their troops and among their civilians, you get an entirely different idea. You get an idea of gratitude. I have gotten written letters from them where they have profoundly thanked us for the sacrifice of our American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. We've given them a lot. We've given them our treasure. And we've given them our sons and daughters. And they're willing to step up to this freedom. We cannot squander it.
This is another comment made by Obama in this op-ed to the New York Times. It says, ``It is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people.'' And moving forward it says, ``That is why, on my first day in office, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.'' That is the definitive statement made by the junior Senator from Illinois: ``On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.''
Regardless of the circumstances on the ground, Mr. Speaker, regardless of how badly we might need to have troops there to stabilize the Iraqi defense forces, regardless of the threat, regardless of the threat across the Straits of Hormuz, Iran and their nuclear efforts and Ahmadinejad's lunatic approach to the world, denying the holocaust, declaring that he wants to annihilate Israel and annihilate the United States, and have him sitting there on one side of the Straits of Hormuz where 42.6 percent of the world's oil supply comes through and take our troops and skedaddle out of Iraq, and hand southern Iraq over to the influence of the Iranians perhaps? Where 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil is? And again, right on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz, on both sides of the Straits is where most of the oil is in Iran, on the east side of the Straits of Hormuz and Iraq on the west side of the Straits of Hormuz, in there is a mother lode of oil. Those oil fields are developed, that oil is coming out of there, and it's coming down the Straits now. And if Iran follows through on their threat to close the Straits of Hormuz, they have a stranglehold on the oil supply for the world. Not only do they have that, but they have a stranglehold on the valve that turns the economy off or on if they choose to do so. And they have threatened to close the Straits. And we have in the past put our Navy in there to keep the Straits open.
That, Mr. Speaker, is the time for the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, to declare that we should open up our Strategic Petroleum Reserves, dump that oil on the market where we have, I understand, about 2 months of supply in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and use that to drive the price down? What do we do when those reserves are empty and the oil production in the world hasn't gone up, and we haven't developed our energy supplies in the United States? What do we do then? What do we do if Ahmadinejad then closes the Straits of Hormuz after our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is empty and we have taken a dime or so off the gas price in the United States, taken some pressure off the world demand for oil because we wouldn't be quite so much in the market which would give the Chinese a better deal on oil, that would be the strategy that we're working with?
Our national security is at risk. The destiny of this Nation is at risk. And if we pull out of Iraq, if we elect an Obama for President, and he follows through on this thing that he is about to learn in a couple of weeks when he goes to Iraq and he has already concluded and he writes in the op-ed, I'm going to editorialize this part, and I will be straight about that, he writes in the op-ed, I'm going to Iraq, and I'm going to learn all this, and I'm going to come back, and these are the decisions I have already made, and I'm going to remake them when I come back. ``That is why on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: Ending this war.'' That means get out of Iraq. Pull out immediately. He said it over and over again, leave that blood and treasure there and leave the disgrace of pulling out there, and let the world declare it to be a defeat for the United States. Let al Qaeda use it as a recruiting tool, a recruiting tool for them to pick up terrorists around the world. That is what would happen, Mr. Speaker, if we pull out.
And I do think we're close to where the Iraqis can stand on their own and it is far more stable. But to just simply betray the judgment of General Petraeus before setting foot on the ground that has been liberated by the surge and the people who have given their lives, their blood and their treasure is a disgrace to do. And so I urge this body to urge some of their Presidential candidate to shift his position.
In the meantime, I intend to stand with a man who is an authentic American hero, a man who has served America for every day of his adult life, a man who sat in the Hanoi Hilton for at least 5 1/2 years, that served there with our own great Sam Johnson in this Congress, served with the most decorated living American hero who happens to be from Sioux City, Iowa, and a man whom I call a friend, Colonel Bud Day, a Medal of Honor and 69 other medals on down. Those men stand up with John McCain for his service. And they know that that he has character. It can't be challenged. The background of John McCain is a solid background all the way through. And the background that we have, that we follow for the junior Senator for Illinois, we're having trouble finding the place that would give us encouragement that he would have the tools necessary to lead the United States.
Mr. Speaker, I want somebody that stands up for our freedom. I want somebody who has got an attitude of an east Texan serving us in the United States, in the White House. I want somebody with an attitude like President Bush has. Sometimes you have to be a lit bit ornery, a little cussed, a little belligerent and a little bit of an enigma. And that will keep our enemies off of our back and keep them guessing a little bit. But they need to know. Our enemies need to know we're committed to victory. And we're going to stick with victory. And we're not going to let up, that Iraq cannot be our Alamo. And it will not if we send a Commander in Chief that will stand for victory. I would conclude, Mr. Speaker, that America has never elected a President who was for retreat at a time of war. We will not do it again in 2008.
[Page: H6672] I yield back the balance of my time.
END
Hooray for Steve King!!!
Ping.
Ok Ok I give, ping for later consumption.
Is it too late to swap out McCain for Hunter?
You won’t regret it.
Duncan Hunter for VP! Call John McCain’s office and bombard him with e-mails...Hunter is the man for this time!
No, but good luck. I’d support it.
Hate me if u want, my presidential vote WILL be a write in and it’ll be someone like hunter or thompson.
There aren’t many Senators or Representatives willing to make speeches like this any more. Bravo Rep. King.
A fellow Iowan “Hell-Ya” for Rep.King!!!!
A Kingster Ping
Three cheers for Steve King! Naw. That’s too few. Too bad most people won’t know about this great speech! Keep up the great fight, Steve!
Yep.
I thank our Lord that this man was re-elected so that he could keep a firm guiding hand on Iraq even when things were not looking very good. He deserves tremendous credit for that. Because had the Frenchman been elected, M. Jean Francois Kerry, we'd be talking about Iraq as another humiliating defeat for the United States, rather than a victory.
Wow! I wonder how long it will be before Nancy asks him over for dinner? Nice to see a politician with some rocks boulders between his legs.
I wish he was still in the race!
Ping for later.
Ann Coulter gets my vote. The only Conservative with b*lls to tell it like it is. Her and Rep. King.
Excellent! A smart, informed, reasoned Conservative with guts! I love this man, and we need more like him in Congress.
Great read. Thanks..
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