Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. An additional hour and a half, I ask?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk on behalf of myself and Senator Kohl and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Interior conference report and urge its approval. While there are a number of important matters addressed through this bill, I would like to make particular note for the record the absence of any limitation on the Memorandum of Understanding, MOU, between the State of Utah and Department of the Interior regarding the use of a process for resolving R.S. 2477 claims through the Federal Land Policy Management Act, FLPMA disclaimer of interest authority. This agreement establishes a process through which the State will identify State- and county-owned roads that run across public lands and meet certain criteria. The State will then apply to the Department of the Interior, DOI, for disclaimers on those roads. Each application will be examined and determination will be made as to whether each road meets the strict standards set forth in the MOU. If the road qualifies, DOI will issue a recordable disclaimer of interest for that road. While there had been some action in the House to prevent this process form going forward, I am pleased that effort was rejected and that, upon approval of the conference report and its approval by the President, the State of Utah and the Department of the Interior will be free to pursue this agreement without limitation. I believe that this bill is an affirmation of the good faith effort that the parties have made to resolve some of these long standing questions through the MOU, and affirms limitations imposed by the parties themselves in the MOU. Those limitations imposed by the parties ensure that claims in national parks, national wildlife refuges, congressionally designated wilderness, and wilderness study areas will not be considered through this MOU. I also believe that it is important that they move forward with this process and give the counties an opportunity to have a local transportation system with certainty. The conclusion reached by the conferees, to allow this MOU to go forward, will allow the parties to resolve these issues through the recordable disclaimer authority as designed under FLPMA, rather than through the court system. This will bring the issue to resolution faster, provide for public participation, and will be less costly to the taxpayer than litigation. Mr. INOUYE. Mr. President, I regret that I must rise to speak in opposition to certain provisions of the conference report to the Interior appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2004 relating to litigation now pending before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in a class action lawsuit entitled Cobell v. Norton. In the Cobell case, a class of several hundred thousand individual Indians are seeking an accounting of funds held in trust for them by the United States. As early as 1876, a Philadelphia newspaper reported that the government was unable to account for the funds it held in trust for individual Indians and Indian tribes. Since that time, the amount of funds for which the government cannot account has grown exponentially. The parties to the litigation agree that more than $13 billion have gone into the individual Indian trust accounts, but in the aggregate, the outstanding balance in those accounts today is little over half a million dollars. As you know, the United States acts as the trustee for thousands of individual Indians who did not ask to be removed from their aboriginal lands, to be forcibly placed on reservations, to have their lands allotted against their will, or to have this trusteeship imposed on them. And yet these people who have suffered great deprivation at the hands of the government seek not to hold the government liable for the loss of their funds--they seek only to have a proper accounting of the funds that the United States holds in trust for them. However, today, with the adoption of this conference report, the United States Government will again deal the Indians yet another blow-- by denying them the right to seek a simple accounting in a court of law of the funds that are rightfully theirs. And people in Indian country are asking, and I think justifiably so, would the Congress single out any other group of Americans for such treatment? The relevant language of the conference report seeks to prevent the provisions of the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act, or any other statute, or any principle of common law from being construed or applied to require the Department of the Interior to commence or continue the conduct of an historical accounting of individual Indian money accounts until the earlier of the following shall have occurred: No. 1, Congress shall have amended the American Indian Trust Fund-- Management Reform Act of 1994 to delineate the specific historical accounting obligations of the Department of the Interior with respect to the Individual Indian Money Trust; or No. 2, December 31, 2004. We have consulted with Senate legal counsel on the language and we are advised that this provision is of questionable constitutionality as it relates to the separation of powers amongst the three branches of government. Contrary to the principle established by the U.S. Supreme Court more than 150 years ago in Marbury. v. Madison, that it is the exclusive task of the Judicial Branch to determine the application of the law to a case, this provision of the conference report reaches into the province of the Article III courts by restricting those courts in what law they may apply in the Cobell litigation. On several occasions, I have joined the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in urging the parties to the Cobell litigation to enter into negotiations that would enable them to reach a fair and voluntary settlement to this litigation. I deeply regret the fact that thus far negotiations between the parties have not borne fruit. Nonetheless, I remain committed to working with the administration, the Cobell plaintiffs, and our colleagues in the Senate and the House of Representatives to enact legislation that will provide a process for reaching a fair and voluntary settlement. Accordingly, I cannot support this effort to deny to our Nation's First Americans a right that is guaranteed to all other citizens of the United States, while providing them with no alternative means of obtaining full and fair relief.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, one of the facts that those of us who live in the Washington area have grown accustomed to is that the world looks different through the eyes of the reporters for the Washington Post and the reporters for the Washington Times. My wife and I sometimes play the little game of opening both papers simultaneously and looking at the two headlines side by side. Usually, the Washington Times says things that sound good from the Republican point of view and the Washington Post says things that sound good from the Democratic point of view. The interesting thing this morning is that both papers covered the same story, and both papers said basically the same thing. I went into the cloakroom, and I gathered some other papers to see if the headlines were the same there as well. I have them here. Let's start with the Washington Times and the Washington Post. The Washington Times says: Growth Erupts in Summer Order. Consumers, Businesses, Go on a Spending Spree. Out of the Washington Post--they treat that not quite as enthusiastically, but they say: U.S. Economic Growth Surges. Output Rises at the Highest Rate Since 1984, but Jobs Still Decline. So the Washington Post puts in a little bash there for the President that the Washington Times does not. If we go to the Wall Street Journal, which some think of as a mouthpiece for the Republican National Committee, their headline is: Higher Gear, Economy Turned in its Best Quarter in Nearly Two Decades. GDP Surged 7.2 Percent in Quarter on Broad Based Gains. Bush Team Trumpet Data. To balance that from the Wall Street Journal, let's go to the newspaper some consider the house organ of the Democratic National Committee, the New York Times, and their headline is: Economy Records Speediest Growth Since the Mid-80's. Is Good News Here for Good? Bush Hopes So. Third Quarter Data Surge in Spending Helped by Rebates May Not Persist. Then I picked up USA Today, the screaming headline: 7.2 Percent GDP Growth, Fastest in 19 Years. Economists Credit Tax Relief and Shoppers. For one day at least, everybody agrees that the No. 1 story is the tremendous performance turned in by the American economy in the third quarter, and the headlines trumpet the numbers, 7.2 percent GDP growth. I would like to go behind the numbers. I would like to add a few numbers and do what I can to try to put this performance in perspective. No. 1, we have to recognize what even the New York Times has recognized, which is this is an extraordinary accomplishment, and this is a sign of very good times. I notice a quote from Howard Dean, who is running for President on the Democratic side, that indicates he is a little disappointed in this; he is a little unhappy that Americans are earning more money, that disposable income is up, that the economy is booming. Perhaps he was hoping he could ride into the White House on a wave of consumer dissatisfaction. If that is his hope, at least the third-quarter numbers say he has to find something else for which to hope. But it is true that the numbers we have here are not sustainable long term, and that is not necessarily bad because what we are looking for is not a single quarter of extraordinary growth. What we are looking for is a sustained period of recovery. The signs are there that we are, indeed, in such a period. It is not just the 7.2 percent growth in GDP we need to pay attention to; it is some other numbers. Let me address some of those numbers. They are in the newspaper stories, some of them buried a little further than I would do it if I were writing the story, but the first number that is of significance is the growth in business investment. Yes, as the headlines indicate, the tax relief and the shoppers are responsible for this, but the tax relief is, indeed, something of a one-time phenomenon. The mailing out of the checks for the child tax credit put more money in the hands of parents just before back-to- school shopping, and that showed up in the shopping figures. Furthermore, the combination of the lowering of withholding rates along with the child tax credits causes people to go out and make some very significant purchases. New cars went up as a significant part of this performance in the third quarter, and you don't buy a new car every quarter. Undoubtedly, you will see some tapering off of some of these major purchases. So we can say that the fourth quarter will not be at the 7.2 percent level as far as GDP is concerned. One of the newspapers says it will fall all the way down to 4 percent. Madam President, 4 percent on an annual basis is very robust and wonderful growth for an economy as mature as ours. If we could maintain a 4 percent average for the next 2 or 3 years, we would all be very happy about that. So those who are saying the 7.2 won't last and we will fall all the way down to 4 percent should remember there was a time not far distant in our history when we would have been very happy with 3.5 percent. I will take 4 percent any day as a steady, stable growth in the economy. Let's go back to the business investment number, the number that did not get as much attention as the 7.2 percent GDP number. Business investment grew at 11.1 percent, up from 7.3 percent the previous quarter. The thing to remember is that 7.3 percent is, in and of itself, considered a very strong indication of further growth, and this is the number that holds the promise of future jobs because if business is investing, business eventually is going to have to start hiring. Let me put the 7.3 percent number in some perspective. As I say, in historic terms, 7.3 percent would be a good number, but we have seen business investment go down, not a positive number of any kind, a negative number for 9 out of the last 11 quarters. To have it come out of negative territory, be so strongly positive as to be at 7.4 percent, and then see the next quarter come in at 11.1, this is as strong a signal as we are going to get that the economy, which has been in recovery but struggling ever since the recession ended, is now in a period of takeoff for sustained growth for the coming year. One of the other numbers the economists always look at is the question of inventories: How many goods do you have on the shelf, Mr. or Mrs. business person? How many goods do you have that are waiting to be sold? If the shelves are full, you are probably not going to be buying any more until they start to come down, until your inventories start to fall. Usually when you have a period of growth like we have experienced in the third quarter, your inventories go up because people are stocking their shelves as the sales are strong. Inventories went down in the third quarter. The sales were so strong that they not only took everything we could produce but they reduced inventories that were already low even further, which means that for the fourth quarter and into the next year--first, second, and third quarters--businesses have a major challenge to restock those depleted inventories, which is another sign that there will be growth, another sign that there will be jobs, another sign that this recovery is well underway and has firm traction. Take the three numbers and put them together: 7.2 percent increase in GDP, substantially more than anybody anticipated; 11.1 percent increase in business investment, substantially more than anybody had anticipated; and a reduction in inventory of .67 percent from the previous level, and you have the profile of a recovery that is very robust. What caused this recovery? Certainly, one can say it was due. Certainly one can say this was part of the business cycle reasserting itself. We had the excesses of the 1990s that felt so wonderful while we were in them but that were so excessive that the reaction to them felt painful when it came. It now appears we have worked through most of those excesses. We have paid the price for the bubble of the late 1990s and we are beginning to get back on solid footing. However, one must credit President Bush's initiative in pushing tax cuts at the right time and at the right level to accelerate this growth. Virtually every one of these papers I have gone through at one place or another in the story will admit, triumphantly in the case of the Washington Times, grudgingly in the case of the New York Times, that the Bush tax cut made a significant contribution to this growth. I have already recited how it works with respect to consumer spending, but the consumer spending could be a one-time phenomenon and not hold if it is indeed tied to the receipt of checks such as the child credit. However, if the consumer spending has been accelerated by virtue of the reduction in withholding rates, something President Bush insisted on over and over again and that had the greatest resistance in this Chamber, we can say that portion of the tax cuts will, in fact, have a permanent impact on the growth; that that is a gift that will, in fact, keep on giving and we will see continued consumer spending as people have more money left in their paychecks. What is the outlook in terms of the other political number we hear over and over again in this Chamber, which is the deficit? One of the greatest arguments that was made as we were debating the Bush tax cut was it would make the deficit swell and soar beyond all comprehension and ultimately leave us bankrupt as a nation. There is another interesting number, one that has not received this kind of headline throughout the country but that is very important. At one point, as the economists were making their projections with respect to the deficit, they said the deficit for this fiscal year, the year that ended September 30, 2003, would be as high as $455 billion. That was a number that came out of the Office of Management and Budget at one point, as they made their guess as to what the economy would be doing and how much money would be available. We have heard that $455 billion figure repeatedly, particularly from those who were opposed to the President's tax cut and who have been opposed to the supplemental appropriation for Iraq. They are saying we have a $455 billion deficit and we are going to try to add $87 billion on top of it; that is irresponsible; we cannot possibly do that. Well, an interesting thing happened on the way to the closing of the books. With a stronger economy and with spending coming in at lower levels, we began to see higher revenues and, therefore, lower estimates. As the year got nearer to its close, some economists were saying the deficit might even be as low as $400 billion instead of the $455 billion; we might even be below the magic $400 billion number. I do not know what is magic about the $400 billion number, but it sounds good to pick that number. Then we began to hear from the Congressional Budget Office: yes, the deficit will clearly be below $400 billion. How much? It could be as much as $20 billion below $400 billion. It could be as low as $380 billion. The numbers are now in. The books have been tentatively closed, and it is $374 billion. It is $26 billion below the $400 billion mark and it is $81 billion below the $455 billion that was being talked about just a few months ago. It is purely a coincidence--there is no connection whatsoever--but it is interesting that the actual number below the highest amount that was forecast is almost identical to the $87 billion of the Iraq supplemental. In other words, if we take the actual number of $374 billion and add the $87 billion, we come to the theoretical number close to the $455 billion we were talking about. All of us would love to sponsor legislation that could cut $80 billion a year out of the deficit. We would stand before our constituents and take enormous credit. We would say, are we not wonderful? We have eliminated $80 billion of the deficit. The economy did it for us. I think we have to credit the combination of the Bush tax cuts with the growth of the economy in the business cycle, with making us a little bit humble, of telling the politicians we do not control the events nearly as much as we pretend to in our speeches. The most important thing to remember is it is the economy itself that creates all Federal revenue. Money does not come from the budget. Money comes from the economy. Our job is to do whatever we can to get out of the way of intelligent market forces and allow the economy to grow as strongly as it can on its own. I think that is what Alan Greenspan has done at the Federal Reserve. I think that is what President Bush has led us to do in the Congress with the tax cuts, and I think the unanimous statements out of all of the papers today indicate it is working. I send my congratulations to Chairman Greenspan, my congratulations to President Bush, and my best wishes for all of us that this will, in fact, continue. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I have enjoyed listening to this debate either in person or over the television. I will not try to add to it with a plethora of statistics, forecasts, or predictions. Rather, I want to deal with some of the statements that have been made including some we have just heard from the Senator from New York and try to do a little math of a very simple and direct kind and ask a few questions. First, the Senator from New York said the United States produces most of the greenhouse gasses. My understanding is the correct number is 25 percent of the greenhouse gasses produced in the world as a whole. That is the largest of any single country. It does not constitute most. But it is a plurality and pluralities win elections so that puts us in first place. Now let us assume for the sake of following this through that we achieve a savings of 10 percent. I am not sure we will. No one is really sure in all of the predictions, dire and rosy, that are made with respect to this legislation how much the savings will be, but we will pick a number easy to calculate, 10 percent. That means, if the laws of mathematics have not changed, we would reduce the world emissions by 2.5 percent because 10 percent of 25 percent is 2.5 percent. The question then arises, will the rest of the world stay static while we reduce the total by 2.5 percent or will a combination of China, India, Russia, Australia, what have you, increase the total by 2.5 percent so that the net effect in the atmosphere of America doing this is zero. That is a very likely scenario. The net effect of the United States doing this as far as manmade emissions are concerned would be zero. Yes, we could reduce theoretically ours by 10 percent. That would be made up by the rest of the world. The question arises, how much benefit is there to see to it that the overall world situation is as it is now with the United States producing no significant impact on the total? The next question, what do we do if we reduce it by 10 percent? How do we do that? Obviously, we will need the power. Indeed, we will need substantially more power between now and the year 2010 if we are going to reduce the emissions that come from fossil fuel to generate the power we will have to go someplace else. There are a variety of places we can go. One we hear often is we should use natural gas. We should replace coal with natural gas. That is a good idea. But let us understand something right now. We have in the United States currently a shortage of natural gas. As Alan Greenspan pointed out, that is one of our major economic challenges. He also has pointed out, natural gas is the one fossil fuel we cannot import. In order to import natural gas we have to have a pipeline, unless you liquefy it, and that is tremendously expensive, and we do not have the ports available to receive natural gas in liquefied form. The only places we can import natural gas are Mexico and Canada, and we are doing that. If you look at a geological chart of the United States you find there is plenty of natural gas in the United States, but a very large percentage of that is on public land. Now the people who are telling us we must reduce greenhouse gas, namely the environmental groups, are the same people who are telling us we cannot drill for natural gas in the United States because that somehow will desecrate the public lands. I am not sure the land cares whether there is a drilling rig on it or whether there is a pipeline running across it, but certainly the Sierra Club cares. They say absolutely no drilling for natural gas on public lands. If we cannot get to the natural gas, we will continue to use coal. Let's use clean coal. We have enough clean coal in the State of Utah to heat, light, drive the city of San Francisco for the next 300 years. We proposed mining that. Clean coal, low-sulfur coal would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Who got very upset at the idea we might start to use clean coal? The Sierra Club. They got President Clinton to declare a national monument right on top of the potential clean coal to make sure there would never be any coal mined from that place because environmentally they do not want any coal mines. Well, we cannot use natural gas because we cannot get it off our public lands. We cannot use the clean coal in the West because we cannot get it off our public lands. What is our alternative? Nuclear. That will do it. That is what they do in Europe. That is why Europe is in favor of Kyoto because they do not use fossil fuel to generate electricity; they use nuclear power. So let's have nuclear plants all over the United States in order to produce the 10 percent reduction called for in this bill. Is the Sierra Club ready to endorse and embrace nuclear? They will not let us drill for natural gas. They do not want us to use the clean coal and they absolutely do not want us to build nuclear plants. All right. Where else do we go? Well, in the West, we get a portion of our power from hydroplants. Dams have been built to store water. And as the water tumbles down the front of the dam, why, we get power. And it is the goal of the Sierra Club, and other groups that are supporting this bill, to dynamite these dams. They want to drain Lake Powell and dynamite the dam. It is very interesting, if I could make a quick historic aside, when my father was in the Senate, and they were talking about building the Glen Canyon Dam that would produce this power, the Sierra Club opposed it and said: We will never, ever need that much power. But, they said, if for some reason we are wrong, and we should need that power, there is no point in building the dam to provide the power because look at all the coal that is there. The coal is the coal that they moved to make sure would never get mined. I could embrace the idea of reducing the emissions in a test fashion to see if it did indeed have any impact on global warming if I could see the way clear to produce the power some other way than the way we are doing it now. I would say to the Senator from Connecticut, who has excellent contacts in the environmental world, if he would go back to those who are supporting this bill and say to them, ``In return for support of this bill, will you agree to drill for natural gas on public lands, to exploit low-sulfur coal where it exists on public lands, and to explore the possibility of more nuclear plants so that we don't become dependent on fossil fuel?'' I might very well be interested in cosponsoring and voting for this bill. But until those who are driving the debate publicly are willing to address the question of how you replace the sources of power that would have to be eliminated if this bill should pass, I intend to vote against the bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I appreciate the comments made by my colleague from Idaho and I rise to give a case study example of what he is talking about. We will give States and specifics here. They are similar to those that came from the Senator from Alaska. In 1991, a forest health aerial detection survey was made in Utah that discovered the bark beetle in certain parts of the Dixie National Forest. Forest health specialists advised that it might be necessary to suppress the epidemic by removing some of the infested trees and thinning some of the standings. At the time they made that decision, this photo depicts what the forest looked like: healthy, green, a place that was of some pride to the people who lived there. This is called the Sidney Valley Recovery Project, proposed as part of the strategy to suppress the spread of the epidemic into that area. As soon as this was announced, three different environmental groups filed appeals of the project and, naturally, it was delayed while those appeals were heard. Finally, after the delay, the Forest Service was upheld, so the appeals were examined and found to be without merit. The Forest Service was upheld. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance chose to file a suit in Federal court. There were the typical delays connected with litigation, and the Federal court finally threw out the lawsuit. So you had the appeals to begin with; they were disavowed; and then you had a lawsuit. When that was disavowed, OK, now you can go ahead with your effort to protect the forest. The only trouble was, at that point, this picture depicts what the forest looked like. These are not trees with leaves turned because it was fall. These are pine trees. The reason they are brown is that they are dead. If you drive through the Dixie Forest, which I have done, it almost makes you sick at how terribly decimated the forest has become. The only reason is that the Forest Service's professional managers, trained in dealing with these kinds of epidemics, were prevented from going in there by special interest groups until it was too late. I am sure there were mailings made in these environmental groups saying: Help save the Dixie Forest from the people who would build roads. Well, they saved the Dixie Forest from the people who might put in logging roads, but they killed it in the process. The epidemic has now spread and there is no stopping it now. There is no going back. There is no saying, let's reverse this. The trees are dead and the Dixie Forest is a blight. The people who live there and know how to take care of these things are sick at heart at what has been done, while those special interest groups, most of whose members do not live in Utah, can claim victory. Well, they cannot claim victory in the lawsuit because they lost the lawsuit. They can only claim victory if their goal was to destroy the forest. It is summarized by one of the former managers of the Dixie Forest who says: ``It leaves us with the strategy of win the lawsuit, lose the forest.'' I have a terrible time understanding why people who claim to be ``friends'' of the forest, ``friends'' of the environment, end up producing this kind of result. That is why I have joined as a cosponsor of this amendment. I applaud the administration for their initiative in saying let's have healthy forests. Fortunately, the Dixie Forest has not yet caught fire. But the trees are just as dead either way. The blight is there just as much either way. We may have been spared the devastation of fire for the communities around the Dixie, but we have not been spared the devastation of the epidemic that has destroyed this portion of the Dixie Forest. For that reason, I am proud to be a cosponsor of this amendment, and I urge all of my colleagues to vote in favor of it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Miller and I be added as cosponsors of amendment No. 1828.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, thank you. I thank the Senator from Colorado for the opportunity to speak about Utah's Governor. In a way, I hope he will soon not be Utah's Governor because he has been nominated by the President to be the head of the EPA. On the other hand, we will be sorry to lose him as Utah's Governor because he has done a truly outstanding job. Many of his qualifications have already been discussed here. As I did in the hearing, I would like to speak of him a little bit personally so Members of the Senate can get an understanding of who he is and what qualifications he brings to this particular assignment. Governor Leavitt and I first became well acquainted when we served together on a strategic planning group formulated to come up with a plan for the Utah State Board of Education. At the time, we were both considerably younger. He particularly looked quite young. He has the advantage of looking younger than he really is. As the Presiding Officer can relate, those of us who are bald look like we are 60 regardless of how old we may be. That is a disadvantage when you are 30 or 40. It becomes an advantage when you get beyond 60 because people think you are younger. Governor Leavitt, with a full head of hair, struck me as, frankly, quite a young man when we first got acquainted. I thought, What is somebody so young and, by implication, inexperienced doing on this particular committee? As soon as he opened his mouth and we started having a conversation, it became very clear what he was doing on that committee; he was very bright; he was extremely well informed; he had many exciting ideas about what ought to be done with respect to Utah's schools and Utah's education. I derived a great sense of respect for him in that situation and said to people: This is a young man who has a great future. This is a young man who will be doing important things for the State. Then he showed up in my office one day and said he wanted to talk to me. When I asked why, he said, Well, I am planning to run for Governor and I am here to get your support. I said, Well, I am not going to be able to give you my support for Governor because I am planning to run for the Senate, and it is appropriate that I not endorse any candidate for Governor and I understand it is appropriate that you not endorse any candidate for the Senate. But we began our campaigns together in 1992 and went through the gauntlet of conventions and primaries that is part of the Utah political scene. I watched him in that situation. I watched him grow. I watched him flourish. I watched him get engaged in the battle of ideas and emerge from a second-place position to the first-place position where he won the nomination, became the candidate, and then in a three-way race for Governor won the governorship. He started out with those same kinds of ideas and energy and excitement I had seen when we were talking about school issues some years before. He has been very inventive as Governor. He has come up with ideas that, frankly, a lot of people scoffed at that have come to fruition. He is the driving force, for example, behind the creation of the Western Governors University--a virtual university on line where people can and now have received degrees and graduate degrees that have allowed them to improve their economic standing and their professional standing. Not only has he brought the Western Governors University from an idea to fruition in a very short period of time, but he has also seen to it that the caliber of the material offered by the Western Governors University is of sufficiently high status that it is now fully accredited. A degree from the Western Governors University carries the same accreditation as a degree from the University of Utah or the University of Kansas or, for that matter, the private universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, whatever. This is the brainchild and the product of the energy of Michael Leavitt--an idea of taking something that is new in the field and turning it into a final product. I cite that because I think what we need at the Environmental Protection Agency is someone who has some creative ideas and the drive to try something new and see it through to fruition. That is Michael Leavitt. He is the perfect person for this kind of assignment. I talked to him when the newspapers first broke the idea that he might receive this position and said, Should I call the White House on your behalf and weigh in to say I think you would be good for this job? He said, No, don't bother. He said, They have talked to me about it and I have told them I don't have any interest. I said, Why don't you have any interest? I was thinking that was probably a good idea on his part, given the difficulties of this position. He suggested the reason he didn't have any interest was because it seemed to him people were looking for a business-as-usual administrator of the EPA, someone who would continue to go through the motions of previous administrators who went through the motions of the administrators who preceded them. No. He said, I told them if you are thinking about doing something else and breaking some new ground, then call me back. But if all you want to do is what you have been doing, I don't have any interest. That is a very dangerous thing for a nominee to say because it leaves the door open for them to come back after you have refused the position. Obviously, the folks in the White House--particularly the President himself--decided they liked the idea of someone who would attempt to do something a little differently. They liked the idea of someone who would try to break new ground, who would use the experience he had had in breaking new ground in State government to see if there could be some changes for the better at the EPA. The President himself got hold of Michael Leavitt. It wasn't just someone in the personnel office. These two who had served together as Governors sat down and talked about it. I am not privy to that conversation, but I am sure Governor Leavitt made the same kind of pitch he described to me. If all you want, Mr. President, is business as usual at EPA, I am not your man. But if you are interested in breaking some new ground and doing things a little differently, then I might consider it. I am assuming that was the conversation which took place between the former Governor of Texas and the then existing Governor of the State of Utah. Whatever the conversation, Michael Leavitt has agreed to take on this assignment. I have talked to him since he made that agreement. I am delighted with his attitude. He is excited about it. He is determined to view it as a challenge, he is determined to view it as an opportunity, and he is determined to go at it with the same vigor and with the same enthusiasm he went at his new assignment as Governor of the State of Utah. I can think of no better set of qualifications for someone to have in tackling the position at EPA than the background Governor Leavitt has and the attitude and sense of challenge he possesses. For that reason, I was delighted the EPA committee reported this nomination by a 16-2 margin, indicating that even though there are people who had serious reservations about the past performance of EPA, they were willing to give Governor Leavitt a chance to show us what will happen with respect to the future. I urge all of my colleagues in the Senate to recognize the background, the enthusiasm, and the attitude this particular nominee has. It would be a great shame if we were to allow this nomination to be derailed because of people's concern about previous administrations at EPA. This nomination, as with all appointments, has to do not so much with the past as with the future. This nomination has to do with the job Michael Leavitt can do, not with the job that some other Administrator may have done. So I am very hopeful that in this Chamber we will invoke cloture, we will shut off debate and allow Michael Leavitt to have a vote. If he has a straight up-or-down vote, I think we will see much the same kind of margin we saw in committee with the 16-to-2 vote in favor of reporting him to the Senate. I am hoping for a 70- to 80-, even 90- Member positive vote in the Chamber to give this young man from Utah an opportunity to show the country what he can do in this position. The people from Utah have seen what he can do. He has maintained an approval rating 70 to 80 percent normally through his entire period of time as our Governor. I believe he can do the same kind of thing for the country. I urge all of my colleagues to vote for cloture, and then, when it is invoked, to vote for Michael Leavitt.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we have a continual drumbeat going on in this Chamber. It came to a crescendo during the debate over the Iraq supplemental, but it goes on even when there is no legislation on the floor dealing with Iraq. There are several themes of this drumbeat that I would like to address this morning. The first theme we hear over and over and over again is the theme of faulty intelligence. How could the President have been so stupid as to have acted on faulty intelligence? Occasionally, the enthusiasm for this theme gets carried away to levels that are inappropriate, as we have the accusation that the President was not just misled by faulty intelligence, he deliberately lied. We hear this again and again, particularly in the media: The President is a liar; he deliberately misled the country. I would like to address that theme for a moment and then another theme we hear over and over which is that the President has made a terrible mistake when he has endorsed the concept of preemptive war. We have these two themes: No. 1, the President is either stupid or a liar because he mishandled the intelligence; and No. 2, he has embraced a historically repugnant doctrine, the doctrine of preemptive war. On the issue of intelligence, let us understand something about intelligence. It is never hard and fast. It is always an estimate. It is also a guess. It is also the best view of the people who are making intelligence decisions and assessments. And it is often wrong. Let me give you an example of a President who acted on intelligence that turned out to be wrong. No, let me back away from that, not necessarily a President who acted, a commander who acted on intelligence that turned out to be wrong that had significant international effect. I was traveling in China with the then-senior Senator from Texas, Phil Gramm, and we met with the Prime Minister of China, not long after the Americans, under the command of GEN Wesley Clark, had bombed the Chinese Embassy in Serbia. The Chinese were understandably very concerned about that. We said: It was a mistake. It was an error. And the Chinese Ambassador, with whom we were talking at the time, said: You have the best intelligence in the world. You must have known that was the Chinese Embassy. That was not a hidden fact. That was not a secret. You have the most accurate military in the world. You did that deliberately. Then he pointed out to us that was not just the Chinese Embassy; that was, in fact, the headquarters of the Chinese intelligence operation throughout Central Europe. So we bombed an embassy and we took out their intelligence capability. They said: You did that deliberately. We said: No; it was a mistake. I remember Senator Shelby saying: The proof of the fact that it is a mistake is that nobody would have been stupid enough to do that deliberately. Then the Chinese Ambassador said: If it was a mistake, why hasn't somebody been fired? And for that, we had no particular answer. Checking into it, we found the reason that happened is because GEN Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO, was demanding targets: I need more targets. I'm running out of targets. And under the pressure of those demands from that commanding general, the CIA came up with targets, and they came up with an old target with bad information, under the pressure from a commander who was anxious to keep bombing even though he had run out of legitimate targets. In that pressure, a tragic mistake was made, and America's relationship with China was seriously damaged in that situation. So intelligence is not always perfect. But in the postmortem of 9/11, we have seen how people want to have it both ways. They look at the intelligence that was available pre-9/11, and they say: How can you have missed this clue? You should have taken action, Bush administration, on the basis of this clue. Then, when we have information with respect to Iraq that turns out not to be exactly accurate, we are told: How could you have been so misled? How could you have interpreted this way? One CIA official said: If we had not acted on the basis of the information that we had prior to the war in Iraq, if we had not warned the President in the way we did, we would have been held in violation of our duty, particularly if something had happened. Then the naysayers, who are saying, ``How could you be misled by this intelligence,'' would be saying, ``How could you have missed this clue?'' They attempt to put the President and this administration in a no-win situation. No matter what the President does, he is attacked by the people on the other side of the aisle. Now, finally, this issue of preemptive war. I will not take the time to go into a full discussion, but I say, particularly to those Senators who pride themselves on their sense of history, let us look back in history and ask ourselves, what would have happened if Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, had adopted the attitude of preemptive war when he went to Munich? What would have happened if he had sat down with Adolph Hitler and done what Winston Churchill was urging him to do, which is the same doctrine that George W. Bush had put forward, and said to Hitler: If you attack Czechoslovakia, there will be war. If you move ahead, there will be war? Neville Chamberlain and some of the people around him said: Hitler does not represent an imminent threat. Hitler is not talking about bombing London now. If we give him Czechoslovakia, he will feel nice towards us. We need to worry about international opinion. We need to see to it that everybody gets together in the international community. And Czechoslovakia does not affect us. Chamberlain said: Those are people far away from us with whom we have nothing to do, a speech that could have been made on the floor of this Senate as people talk about Iraq: They are far away from us, people with whom we have nothing to do. And the threat is not imminent. Churchill was long-headed enough to know that if Hitler got control of Czechoslovakia, he would get control of the finest machine shops in Europe, he would add to his military machine, and he would be prepared to wage world war. If Hitler were denied Czechoslovakia, we now know in history, his own generals would have deposed him for being too risky. But Neville Chamberlain said: No. We can't wage any kind of preemptive war. We have to wait until he attacks us before we can justify it. And 6 million Jews went to the concentration camps and into the ovens, and countless millions were killed in the Second World War because we did not take preemptive action when we could have. I say ``we''--the Western World did not. Chamberlain was hailed as a hero when he came home, and the motion to support the action that he had taken went through the House of Commons by huge margins. When Winston Churchill stood up and said: We have suffered defeat of the first magnitude, he got only a handful of votes. But history has not been kind to Mr. Chamberlain. History has validated the position that Winston Churchill took, a position which George W. Bush is applying to modern conditions. Those who value history should read all of history before they stand on the Senate floor and attack the President of the United States for a doctrine that they say is repugnant. I yield the floor. Mr. FEINGOLD addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, it was my privilege to be in the chair during the exchange of views between the two Senators from Illinois. I could not resist the opportunity to take the floor now and add my experience to that which has been referred to. The senior Senator from Illinois spoke of those who did not have a legal background, and I fit into that category. I have never been in court, except as a juror and occasionally as a witness. I have never been to law school. However, I would just share this one experience with the Senate with respect to class action lawsuits and how they can be abused. When my father left the Senate, he was invited, as is often the case for those who have senior experience in business, to serve on a number of boards of directors. He went on one particular board, thinking it was a relatively safe kind of activity for him, only to be distressed at the beginning of the next calendar year when he was served with this pile of papers. There was a lawsuit being filed on behalf of the shareholders of that particular company, and my father was named as the principal defendant. Somewhat disturbed by this, he called the general counsel of the firm and asked what was going on. Oh, said the general counsel, nothing to worry about. You are named because members of the board of directors are listed alphabetically and Bennett comes ahead of any other name. So you are named: Bennett et al. Don't worry, we will take care of this. He said: Of what am I being accused? Of what is the board being accused? Well, said the general counsel, this happens every year. He said: The members of the board have a compensation plan that is tied to the profitability of the company. Whenever the company increases its profitability by formula, the directors' pay increases by a similar formula amount. My father said: That's very clear. It's outlined. What is the cause of this class action lawsuit being brought on behalf of all of the shareholders of the company? Well, said the general counsel, this lawyer every year files a lawsuit on behalf of the shareholders, claiming that the board of directors is looting the company for its own purposes. That is, members of the board are trying to enrich themselves on the basis of this increase in compensation at the expense of the shareholders. My father said: What do we do? Do you go to court and prove that this is a legitimate activity? No, said the general counsel, that costs too much money. For us to go to court would cost us more in legal fees than the amount the lawyer will settle for. What amounts are we talking about, my father asked. He was told by the general counsel: The lawyer who files this suit will settle for $100,000. It would cost us more than $100,000 to defend our position, so every year when the formula kicks in and the directors' compensation is increased, the lawyer files his lawsuit, we send him a check for $100,000, the lawsuit goes away, and we forget this until the next year. That is extortion, plain and simple. Yet the general counsel would say, with some accuracy, the shareholders are better served if we simply pay him his $100,000 than if we go to court and defend ourselves. Even though we would win, we would end up paying $200,000 or $250,000 or some number like that. So, he said, we have come to the conclusion the best thing to do for the shareholders is simply settle this class action lawsuit every year for $100,000. The lawyer knows we will do that. So every year he files the lawsuit, we send him the check, the plaintiffs in whose behalf he is suing get nothing because his legal fee for filing the suit is $100,000, and we simply go through this charade every year. I am happy to report that this particular lawyer, as I understand it, decided to do this in some other instances and Merrill Lynch, the large brokerage firm, took him to court. They spent close to $1 million in legal fees proving he was wrong and, furthermore, proving he had acted in a frivolous manner and ultimately put him out of business. The shareholders of Merrill Lynch were paying for an action that benefited the shareholders of the company on whose board my father sat, and many others. We can be grateful that Merrill Lynch was willing to accept that financial burden in order to put a stop to this practice. But it demonstrates that standing on the floor of the Senate and deciding how valuable class action lawsuits are does not properly address the problem that this, and similar legislation, has sought to solve. I wanted to add that personal experience to the debate that has been going on here so anybody who is following the debate will understand that it is not a question of whether one should allow class action lawsuits. It is not a question of whether plaintiffs are entitled to relief as a result of joining a class. It is a question of cleaning up abuses that are carried on by lawyers who say, in the words of one of them: I have a perfect law practice. I have no clients. They file class action lawsuits on behalf of classes, but they are not in fact real clients. The lawyers benefit, ultimately to the detriment of the shareholders of the companies that are being sued. These shareholders are individuals. We are not talking about companies as if they were abstract entities. They are individuals who are being hurt by improper practices. Those are the kinds of practices this legislation seeks to resolve. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Chair. I understood that it would go back and forth between Republicans and Democrats.

Mr. BENNETT. I am glad to have the Senator tell me of his schedule and I shall cut it as short as I possibly can, because I do not want to disconcert the Senator in any way.

Mr. BENNETT. No, I do not need to go on further because it has all been said. I will conclude. Mistakes have been made. I think both sides can admit that and should recognize that. People have been offended by the administration on both sides of the aisle. I think we can recognize that and admit that. The fundamental question to me is whether the overall direction in which the President is trying to take the country is the right one. As I study history and as I listen to the reports that come back from Iraq, as I talk to the people in Utah who are serving there--we have a higher percentage of our Armed Forces who are Reserve and Guard in Iraq than any other State--I am convinced the President is right in his overall direction. Whatever course corrections need to be made we can talk about, but when all is said and done, this President has done the right thing. I am proud to have voted to give him the authority in the first instance, and I am proud to be one of the 87 Senators today who have voted to give him the continuing support he requires. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I take the floor to make a few personal observations. I don't want to revisit all of the arguments that have been made over and over again. But I do want to make a few statements just for the record. I want to make it very clear, speaking for myself--and I think for other Members of the Senate, but they can speak for themselves--that I have never challenged the patriotism, the motives, or the rights of any Senator who has disagreed with the President on this vote. I have utmost respect for the senior Senator from West Virginia. I have watched him serve for many years. I watched him serve while I was a staff member for my father. He and my father served together in this body for many years. I would never, under any circumstances, suggest that I was challenging his patriotism in any way. I do think he is profoundly wrong in the decision he has made with respect to this war. But I recognize that he has every right to make that decision. He has every right to defend that decision in as vigorous language as possible, but I want to make it clear to him and to any who may have misunderstood that under no circumstances and at no time have I ever challenged his patriotism. I am not sure I know of any other Senator who has ever challenged his patriotism. I hope we will understand that as we disagree, as vigorously as we do on this issue, we are not, in fact, engaging in what has been called the politics of personal destruction. I believe the Senator from West Virginia is wrong because I think his world view is wrong with respect to where the world is and where the President is going in the postwar world. We all celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. There were books written about it. One was entitled ``The End of History.'' We found that history did not come to an end with the end of the cold war, that the challenges to American lives and American interests around the world did not disappear with the Soviet Union, and that we have additional challenges today. I will not suggest that the Bush administration has done everything right. I have had my moments of disagreement with this administration, some of them relatively serious and some of them relatively recent. But I am behind the President in this effort because I think his overall global view is the correct one. The primary challenge to peace in the world right now is coming out of the Middle East. For a variety of reasons, for a variety of historic patterns, that part of the world is producing the principal challenge to peace everywhere. Europeans feel more secure than they have ever felt in their lives, and perhaps accurately and properly so. The Soviet Union is gone. The age-old rivalries between the Germans and the French and the other principalities in Europe are over. They are striving to write a European constitution and bring themselves together in a legitimate economic way. They feel more secure after centuries of war than they have ever felt in their lives. They are no longer the target. We are. They are no longer the focus of those who would bring instability to the world. We are. And we saw that happen in dramatic fashion on September 11, 2001. The President has said there is no connection between what happened on September 11, 2001, and Iraq, and that is true, and the President never claimed such a connection. But there is an overall connection in the sense that those warriors for their cause who attacked us on September 11, 2001, came out of an area and a culture and an attitude that exist in the Middle East that must be addressed in the Middle East, even if there are no direct links, even if there was no direct funding, even if there was not a case that a law enforcement official could make in a court of law. We must recognize the significance of the Middle East as the source of instability in the world and recognize those players in the Middle East who are part of that instability. I believe Saddam Hussein was a principal player for instability. We can argue, appropriately, and we can go back and examine the mistakes that were made with respect to Saddam Hussein. We can say there are statements made prior to the attack on Iraq which, in retrospect, turned out not to be true. I can list some of them. No. 1, I heard in this Chamber that we were going to get body bags coming back from Iraq by the thousands. We were told in this Chamber that we were going to have house-to-house fighting in Baghdad, door-to- door assaults. We were told that our troops were going to be gassed-- that from people who voted against the resolution to give the President the authority to go forward. It turns out all of those predictions are not true. Do I attack the people who made those predictions as having botched it? I suggest they read the intelligence and came to the wrong conclusion. I also recognize that whenever this Nation or any nation goes to war, you never know exactly what is going to happen. This is perhaps a small example, but it has struck me, as I read the history of the Second World War. As carefully as we planned the assault on Normandy, as carefully as we did the disinformation to get Hitler to think we were going to attack someplace other than we did, the disguises, the false information that was put out, all of the rest of the intelligence that was done, we made one very fundamental and, in retrospect, stupid mistake. In all of the training of our troops in advance of the Normandy invasion, we assumed that the hedgerows between fields in France would be the same height as the hedgerows between fields in Great Britain. So as we trained in Great Britain, we trained with hedgerows that were about knee height and then found ourselves in France with hedgerows that were almost as high as a building. It completely disrupted all of our tank assaults and plans because as a tank would try to go up and over one of those hedgerows, it would be vulnerable to fire from the other side. They could hit the underbelly of the tank because its tracks were exposed and the base of the tank itself was exposed and an artillery shell could take it out instantly. It was improvisation on the field from a GI who used to work on a farm who helped create what would be a version of a snowplow on the front of a tank to drive the tank through the hedgerow. An incredible intelligence mistake of something as simple as that, and they could have determined that if they could have found a French farmer to talk to. Did this Chamber ring with accusations that President Roosevelt had lied to the American people about our plan in Normandy? Were there denunciations of General Marshall or General Eisenhower because they made that intelligence error? Some would say the analogy doesn't hold, and certainly there are many aspects of it that do not, but the point I think is legitimate. The intelligence failures that we now know occurred with respect to Iraq were not deliberate lies. The intelligence failures that have accompanied every American military action are the best efforts of human beings doing the best they can under pressure and always making mistakes. What matters is the overall world view and strategic direction, and, as I said, I believe George W. Bush has the right strategic direction. He recognizes that the instability in the world is coming from the Middle East; that we must do everything we can to deal with those characters who are responsible for that instability. And he made the decision that one of those characters was Saddam Hussein. I cannot believe anyone can look back on it and say that particular decision was the wrong one. As I have said here before, one of the first people who alerted me to Saddam Hussein and his capacity to spread instability throughout the world was Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State, as we met with her in S-407 and heard her outline the description of weapons of mass destruction that were in Iraq. We heard her boss, the President of the United States, President Clinton, do the same thing in public fora. Was there any reason to believe they were for any purpose trying to mislead the American people? We might say they were wrong based on what we now know, but they were wrong, if they were, because of the fog of uncertainty over the intelligence reports all of us had. They made the best judgments they could make on the basis of the best information they had, and then they moved ahead. President Bush did exactly the same thing. There are those who say he has squandered our good will in the world. Everybody loved us after September 11. There were demonstrations in the streets in Europe, demonstrations of support, demonstrations of sympathy. How long would those demonstrations have nourished our position if indeed we had done nothing following September 11? Oh, it is all right to do something as long as everybody is with you. It is all right to do something as long as everybody agrees. Well, it seemed to me the United Nations agreed. Fifteen to nothing strikes me as a fairly definite vote in the Security Council for resolution 1441. Then when the United States said, all right, resolution 1441 is not being complied with, resolution 1441 says if it is not complied with, there will be serious consequences--serious consequences is U.N. speak for war--how about it, U.N.? Oh, no, no, said members of the Security Council.

Mr. BENNETT. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Denese Merritt, a congressional fellow in Senator Gordon Smith's office, be granted floor privileges during the debate.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise in support of the amendment by the Senator from Oklahoma, and I think perhaps a little discussion about the history of debt and debt repudiation, debts being placed upon countries that have been defeated or liberated, might be in order. In anticipation perhaps of this debate, a member of the staff of the Joint Economic Committee, Melanie Mickelson, prepared a memo for me and other members of the committee entitled ``Iraqi Debt and Reconstruction.'' I ask unanimous consent that this memo be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, when we think of forgiveness of debt or repudiation of debt, we think back usually to Germany, to the debt that was placed on Germany at the end of the First World War by the Versailles Treaty and the great political hay Adolf Hitler was able to make out of this debt as he told the people of Germany that the Versailles Treaty had been a stab in the back and the people who had imposed that debt on Germany were the people who were Germany's primary enemies. I do not want to make too much out of that aspect of Hitler's rise to power, but there was no question but what the enormous debt placed on Germany at the end of the First World War was destabilizing on the country and made it very difficult for Germany to bring itself back as a viable nation and made Germany potentially vulnerable to the kind of political appeal Adolf Hitler represented. Let us put this in some perspective with respect to Iraq and what we are talking about here. At this time, the debt that was placed upon Germany was roughly two times Germany's gross domestic product, or GDP. To put that into perspective for the United States, right now our debt is roughly half of America's GDP. If we assume the GDP is running at $11 trillion in round figures, we would say the debt Germany faced by comparison would be similar to putting a debt on the United States of $22 trillion. That, of course, takes one's breath away when you think about the impact of that on the United States. Twenty-two trillion dollars. How in the world, even with as vital and vibrant an economy as we have, would we be able to survive if we had a national debt of $22 trillion? That was the debt that had such significant historic impact on Germany in the last century. What are we talking about with respect to the debt Iraq currently faces? Is it half their GDP, as it is in the United States? Would it be as burdensome as the German debt at two times GDP? No, neither of those figures applies. When we talk about the size of the debt Iraq currently carries compared to their present GDP, we are talking about ten times GDP; not two times but ten times current GDP. Again, to translate that into numbers we can compare to America, that would mean that America, the strongest economy in the world, with our present GDP of roughly $11 trillion, would be saddled with a debt in excess of $120 trillion. How prosperous would America be if we were faced with that kind of a debt load? Obviously, it would sink us, even though we have the strongest economy in the world. We have people around here who are worried because our current debt is roughly half of GDP, and to talk about ten times GDP is absolutely impossible. So the logical thing to do is for all of the countries to respond to the call that is represented by the amendment of the Senator from Oklahoma and forgive the debt. Why? Let us go through the reasons. One of them has been raised by Senator Dorgan. That is, this debt was incurred on behalf of a brutal regime which has been overthrown. Some of the debtor countries might say, when there is a coup in a country and the government is overthrown, whoever takes over takes over the obligations. Saddam Hussein was not overthrown by a coup from the Iraqis. He was overthrown by the 82nd Airborne. He was overthrown by the United States of America and the marines, by the British troops, the Polish troops, and the other coalition members that joined us in overthrowing that government. So while the Iraqi people are very grateful Saddam Hussein has been overthrown, while the Iraqi people rejoice that Saddam Hussein has been overthrown, the Iraqi people by no means are responsible for the debt that survives because he was overthrown. They were the victims of the debt, not the beneficiaries or perpetrators of the debt. For that reason, they should not be held accountable. There are other reasons. There are sound economic reasons. We have a principle of bankruptcy in this country. When, as a result of circumstances, whether they were caused or just out of somebody's control, someone finds himself absolutely incapable of repaying the debt, we go through bankruptcy court and say we are going to give you an opportunity for a fresh start. We are going to give you an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and move forward. We are going to discharge your debt through bankruptcy. If any country has been reduced to bankruptcy, it is Iraq. The GDP I described is substantially below what their potential earning power will be, but they can never realize that earning power if they are not free from their past debts by virtue of a bankruptcy action. What the Senator from Oklahoma is proposing is essentially the countries that hold the debt allow the Iraqis to file bankruptcy; that the countries that hold the debt say, we recognize reality. We recognize we are never, ever going to get this money. There are some who might say, yes, but Iraq has all that oil and eventually maybe they will be able to give us this money, so let's just restructure the debt. Let's just say okay, no payments for a while, no payments on principal, interest is deferred, we will give you a chance to get on your feet, and then we will collect the debt. That is not a principle that applies in reality with respect to most bankruptcy situations. Even those who have the ability to earn money later on can get everything discharged with bankruptcy if it is clear the existence of the debt as it stands is going to prevent them from earning money later on. The most significant return that can come to the countries that are currently holding Iraqi debt will come from a vibrant Iraqi economy with which they can open meaningful trade relations. Think of what the potential of Iraq is in terms other than oil. We held a hearing on this in the Joint Economic Committee. Of course, the primary focus was on oil revenue, but I was interested to discover that Iraq has other things besides oil. Iraq is blessed with fertile soil. Iraq is blessed with water. Iraq has a history, pre-Saddam Hussein, of being a net exporter of food. In other words, an economically healthy Iraq, rebuilding its infrastructure, reclaiming its opportunity to move water around the country through canals and pipelines and starting irrigation can be an Iraq that can have a vibrant agricultural sector; an Iraq that can then create a manufacturing sector to provide the farm implements that are necessary to support its agriculture; an Iraq that can have a middle class that can buy things; that can have a society that is not just based on oil. It can become, properly reconstructed, one of the most vibrant economies in the region. It can outstrip some of the economies around it that are dependent solely upon oil and thereby become an example of capitalism in the region, from which we and others around Iraq can reap enormous benefits. Those benefits, properly reaped, will establish greater economic value than the collection of the debt. This is the prospect you have here. If we wipe out all of the debt, if the countries respond to the plea contained in the amendment by the Senator from Oklahoma and forgive their debts so a vibrant Iraq can be built without the shadow of debt hanging over it, those very countries that currently hold the debt can benefit with the opportunity for trade with a vibrant and vital Iraq. I congratulate the Senator from Oklahoma in proposing his amendment. I hope it will pass overwhelmingly as a message to those countries that do hold Iraqi debt, to say to them the United States recognizes the importance of allowing Iraq to declare bankruptcy as if it were, if you will, an American corporation. The United States recognizes that the hope of the future will come from allowing all of this to happen, allowing these debts to disappear, and allowing Iraq to get on with their reconstruction. Exhibit 1 Joint Economic Committee Memo: Iraqi Debt and Reconstruction. Date: October 9, 2003. The ABC's of Iraqi Debt Dealing with debt accrued by Saddam Hussein and the Baath party is a lynchpin to Iraqi reconstruction. According to Businessweek, Iraq owes $216 billion. Of that, $32 billion is war reparations, owed mainly to Kuwait. Loans comprise $127 billion of the debt, and contracts agreed to during the past ten years racked up $57 billion. Other estimates of total debt skate from $95 billion to $350 billion (the Bush administration calculates Iraqi debt to be $200 billion, as reported by CRS). The debt's creditors include a long list of nations, as compiled by Jubilee Iraq, an organization of British origin dedicated to the repudiation of Iraqi debts. Table 1 displays the list of nations as well as amounts owed. In addition to these nations and organizations, Iraq also owes the IMF and World Bank a total of $150 million, as reported by Representative Carolyn Maloney at the June 11, 2003 JEC Hearing. A Second Germany? In American history, precedents of debt repudiation focus on post-war Germany. Following WWI, Germany's economy was shallow with debts amounting to two times German GDP. The Treaty of Versailles pointed out German guilt and obligation to pay war reparation, however the United States renounced all reparations and did not sanction the treaty. Due to German government resistance and inability to collect funds, the Dawes Plan of 1924 reorganized the Reichsbank under Allied supervision and created a tax system to fund reparation payments. Reparations to the European Allied nations made the bulk of their lend-lease payments to the United States. Germany staggered under heavy debt as Europe suffered through the 1920 depression. The Young Plan (1929) reduced the sum Germany owed, delineating a distinct dollar amount as well as how to collect it through budgeting and a transportation tax. In 1931, President Hoover issued a one- year moratorium on all international debts. The Lausanne Pact of 1932 substituted bond issues for reparation debt, but Adolf Hitler repudiated all WWI reparations while in office. Payment resumed in 1953 by West Germany. The debts owed to the U.S. by our WWI allies were defaulted by 1934 excepting Hungary, which did so in 1939, Finland, which paid in full, and Russia. Russia repudiated the debt, owing to its becoming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After WWII, the Allies received German reparations in the form of assets and industrial equipment. Because of disagreements between the USSR and U.S. regarding payments, West and East Germany formed, each paying reparations to their respective political counterpart. The U.S. ended German payments in 1952, the USSR ended payments in 1953. Germany paid reparations to its former allies, against U.S. advisement. The United States collected war reparations from Germany's ally, Japan, through 1949, and renounced all further payments in 1951. economic implications Iraqi debt differs from German post-war debt in a major way. Germans dealt with a debt twice the size of the country's GDP. Iraq faces debt estimated to be ten times national output (BusinessWeek). The payment of such an amount is near impossible, even with the development and future revenues of oil resources. Placing this burden on a new government cripples Iraq's ability to accumulate capital, expand production, and increase the standard of living. Repudiating this debt also sends the red light to creditors who loan to sketchy governments, in this case, nations whose loans were used to amass Hussein's weaponry and technology. Some argue the new government will have trouble obtaining loans with such history of repudiation. However, no moral hazard issue exists; the loans forgiven belong to Saddam, not the Coalition Provisional Authority or the government that may follow. Those on the opposing bench feel repudiating Saddam's debt will jostle the credit market and create uncertainty now and whenever government turnovers occur. This cannot be the case. Iraq is such a unique situation; few countries, if any, can follow this paradigm. On a side note, Basil Al-Rahim, founder of the Iraq Foundation, Spoke of creating a debt trading system in Iraq. At the June 11, 2003 JEC hearing on transforming Iraq's economy, Al-Rahim spoke of trading debt for points in a system that would use the points in dealings of concessions, licenses, and contracts (see p 20-21 of the JEC transcript).

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. It begins: A reader asks: ``When are you going to admit you were wrong?'' We've received a number of such inquiries (not all quite so polite) about our position on the war in Iraq, particularly from readers who were disappointed in our prewar stance. They then go through all of the issues. There are certainly times where they are critical of the administration, critical of the administration in ways with which I might disagree. But they do make the essential points about the issues that are in contention, the essential point about the weapons of mass destruction. They make the point that I have made here this morning, that Inspector Kay has demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had a program of developing weapons of mass destruction. Even if the caches of weapons have not been found, if the program had been allowed to go forward, the weapons would have come. They talk about Saddam and al-Qaida. They make the point that while there is no direct link between Saddam and al-Qaida--and they claim the administration exaggerated, by implication, the links--that nonetheless there was a threat from terrorism in Iraq, and they summarize it with this sentence: When combined with [Saddam Hussein's] continuing pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, that seemed to pose exactly the sort of threat that the Bush administration rightly focused on as part of the war on terrorism. Then they talk about continuing costs. I have already addressed that this morning in my comment about the revision of the budget figures that says that the resurging economy we now have is going to give us a deficit that is going to be roughly $85 billion less than we were talking about as recently as the time before the break. In addition to their editorial in which the Washington Post says we still stand by our support of the decision to move ahead in Iraq even though things are not going as we had all hoped, they have five military men talking about the war in op-ed pieces. I will not put those in the Record or read them. My reading of the five is that three of them say we have to stay there and go forward and get it done in roughly the way the administration is asking us to. Two are saying, no, this is a quagmire; we should pull out now and walk away. How do I summarize my history lesson this morning? History comes in chunks bigger than 2-week periods. History comes in chunks bigger than a news site. The history of the last century and this one tells me the two Presidents Bush, in confronting Saddam Hussein in the way they did--the first in reversing Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and the second one moving in to preserve the lives of Iraqi citizens being slaughtered by a man with Hitlerian impulses, if not full Hitlerian power--acted properly. I am proud to have supported the second President Bush in his decision to do that. I say this to many who are saying now that it didn't go the way you said it would, so therefore we have to walk away from it: Take a little time to read history and understand that things never go as people propose they will, but ultimately those who make the right decisions, for the right reasons, even if they have to make adjustments--sometimes serious changes in the way they pursue those decisions--are those to whom history gives the banner of having done the right thing. Exhibit 1 [From the Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2003] Iraq in Review A reader asks: ``When are you going to admit you were wrong?'' We've received a number of such inquiries (not all quite so polite) about our position on the war in Iraq, particularly from readers who were disappointed in our prewar stance. Now they cite several postwar surprises, or ostensible surprises: the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the absence of a proven connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and the continuing violence in Iraq. In light of these developments, it's important for supporters of military intervention to look back and, where necessary, reevaluate--something the Bush administration so far has resisted. We believe that there has been more progress in Iraq than critics acknowledge, but also that the administration has made serious mistakes. Before the war, we repeatedly urged President Bush to plan postwar reconstruction more thoroughly and to level with Congress and the American people about the likely costs. We urged him to take the time to draw more allies to the cause. Shortcomings in both cases have proved highly damaging, as has the Pentagon's insistence on monopolizing political control over Iraq. Yet simply to blame the administration is not a full answer to our readers. Taking the measure of the administration, of Congress and of their likely ability to see this through was a pre-war obligation, one of the factors in calculating risks and benefits. Moreover, postwar troubles and surprises were to be expected, even if they could not be precisely foretold. It's fair to ask now whether those troubles and surprises are so great as to prove the intervention unwise. No matter how one answers that question, the critical judgments now involve future policy. It is essential that the United States do as much as possible to stabilize Iraq under a peaceable, representative government. It seems to us that opponents of the war ought to recognize, as some have, that this mission could be critical to the fight against terrorism and to the future of the Middle East. But insisting on doing the right thing now does not excuse supporters of the war from reexaming the judgments that led to this point. Weapons of mass destruction. David Kay's 1,200-member survey team has reported that Saddam Hussein's nuclear program was ``rudimentary'' and that no large-scale production of chemical weapons occurred in recent years. We believed otherwise before the war, especially as regards chemical weapons, as did most governments with intelligence services. We have called on the Bush administration to account for what increasingly look like failures in the intelligence agencies' assessment of the Iraqi threat, as well as misstatements in the public case made for the war. The importance of this is hard to overstate: At issue is whether Americans, and the world, can believe U.S. intelligence on the activities of hostile, dangerous, but hard-to-penetrate states like Iraq; and whether this president can be trusted not to distort that intelligence in pursuit of his own agenda. But at issue also is whether the war should have been fought. Don't we no know that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United States and that there was thus no need or legal justification for an invasion? This question turns on the phrase ``imminent threat,'' which was invoked before the war by leading opponents of intervention, such as Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich). The Bush administration conveyed its own sense of dramatic urgency, and that too is something it should account for in light of what is now known. But we argued that the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent but cumulative: He had invaded his neighbors, used chemical weapons and pursued biological and nuclear arms. He threatened U.S. interests and security in a vital region and would continue to do so as long as he was in power. A decade of diplomacy, U.N. sanctions and no-fly-zone enforcement had failed to end that threat. Instead the credibility of the Security Council, along with constraints on the regime, had steadily eroded. The debate over intervention was fraught precisely because many people understood that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent danger. We argued nonetheless that the real risk lay in allowing him to defy repeated U.N. disarmament orders, including Resolution 1441, the ``final opportunity'' approved by unanimous Security Council vote. Though it pokes holes in U.S. intelligence and our assumptions, Mr. Kay's report contains much to substantiate this reasoning. Saddam Hussein, the report claims, never abandoned his intention to produce biological, chemical and nuclear arms--and he was aggressively defying Resolution 1441. He also was successfully deceiving U.N. inspectors. They failed to discover multiple programs for developing illegal long-range missiles as well as a clandestine network of biological laboratories, among other things. From a legal standpoint, the report shows that Iraq should have been subject to the ``serious consequences'' specified by Resolution 1441 in the event of noncompliance. More important, it strongly suggests that in the absence of intervention Iraq eventually would have shaken off the U.N. inspectors and sanctions, allowing Saddam Hussein to follow through on his intentions. He would have been able to renew his attempt to dominate the region and its oil supplies, while deterring the United States with the threat of missiles topped with biological warheads. In acting to enforce the U.N. resolution, the United States eliminated a real, if not ``imminent,'' threat, while ensuring that future Security Council ultimatums carry some weight. Saddam and al Qaeda. Mr. Bush and other administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, exaggerated the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and implied without foundation that Saddam Hussein may have had something to do with the attacks of 9/11. Critics add that since the invasion, terrorists seem to have flocked to Iraq, where the occupation has had to cope with a series of car and suicide bombings. The terrorism is worrisome, though the principal group behind it appears to be Ansar al-Islam, which was based in northern Iraq before the war and whose leader spent time in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad. For our part, we never saw a connection between Iraq and 9/ 11 or major collaboration between Saddam and al Qaeda. But we did perceive a broader threat, in the sense that Saddam Hussein had frequently collaborated with other terrorist organizations and could be reasonably expected to continue doing so. When combined with his continuing pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, that seemed to pose exactly the sort of threat that the Bush administration rightly focused on as part of the war on terrorism. Continuing costs. The difficulty of rebuilding Iraq is huge. The steady stream of U.S. dead and wounded is agonizing. The strain on the U.S. military, its reserves and the families at home is growing. But these developments, while troubling, are not altogether surprising--except maybe to those who believed the Bush administration's shallow prewar rhetoric. The calculation on intervention required a weighing of risks: the risk of allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power, defying U.N. demands, versus all the well- articulated risks of intervention. Before the war, these were frequently said to include starvation, an outpouring of refugees, a fracturing of Iraq, a descent into ethnic conflict or simple chaos. We believed that reconstruction would be long, costly and risky, and we judged nonetheless that intervention would be less risky than allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power. Were we wrong? The honest answer is: We don't yet know. But at this stage we continue to believe that the war was justified and necessary, and that the gains so far have outweighed the costs. Each of the 326 American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq represents an irretrievable loss for family and friends. But the nation already has reaped great benefit from their sacrifice. One of the most aggressive and brutal dictators in the history of the Middle East has been eliminated, along with his proven programs to acquire deadly weapons. Millions of Iraqis have been freed from fear, and an opportunity has opened to bring much-needed political change to a region that is the source of the greatest security threats to the United States. Polls show a sometimes grateful, sometimes grudging willingness by most Iraqis to go along with U.S. plans for reconstruction. Many Americans understandably have been surprised by the continuing casualties months after the president's appearance on an aircraft carrier under the banner ``Mission Accomplished.'' Mr. Bush's abrupt submission last month of a large and poorly explained spending request to Congress also has strengthened public support for the idea that the Iraq mission must be failing. Yet the president's missteps have merely obscured the facts that these costs were inevitable, and that outside of the Sunni towns where support for Saddam Hussein was strongest, there is no quagmire--only a slow, slogging progress forward. Continued progress is far from guaranteed. In our view, the administration could improve the odds of success by forging a broader international coalition. For that to happen, the administration must drop its insistence on monopolizing power over Iraq's political transition, as well as the contracts for reconstruction. It must compromise with those well- meaning allies who want Iraq to succeed but disagree with U.S. tactics. Success or failure in the effort to stabilize Iraq under a reasonably representative government that poses no threat to the world will provide the ultimate answer to the question of whether the war should have been undertaken. Because we continue to believe that U.S. security is at stake, we also believe that the United States must be prepared to dedicate troops and financial resources to that goal until it is achieved, even if it takes years. In our judgment success is possible, but much will depend on whether the administration and Congress face the magnitude of the challenge and summon the political courage and diplomatic skills necessary to meet it.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we have come back from the break. Most Members, I imagine, have had the same kind of experience I have had in meeting with my constituents. We have discovered the question of what we should be doing in Iraq is foremost on our constituents' minds. Second, we have discovered--at least I have--that there is great concern about the size of the deficit. Those two issues were joined in debate in the Senate before we left for the break. I think it appropriate we talk about them together now that the break is over. Let me first turn to the question of the deficit and the debate that took place in this Chamber with respect to the $87 billion that has been requested by the President to pay for the war activities and the reconstruction of Iraq. We were told in this Chamber we had to raise taxes by $87 billion to pay for this, and that if we did not, we would see the deficit go up by $87 billion. We defeated that amendment, but there were those with whom I met during the break who still had that view. The interesting thing we discovered during the break was that the projections for the size of the deficit changed. This is no surprise to anyone who has spent time paying attention to the deficit. As I have said in this Chamber over and over and as I will repeat over and over, the one thing I know with respect to the deficit projections, or surplus projections when those were the order of the day, is that they are wrong. I do not know if they are wrong on the high side or wrong on the low side but I do know they are wrong. The other thing I know is that the further out they go, the more likely they are to be wrong. That is, a 10-year projection is absolutely certain to be wrong; a 5-year projection has a 99.94 percent chance of being wrong; a 3-year projection might be a little bit closer; and so on with a 2-year projection. The only ones that come really close to being accurate are the very near term projections. The interesting thing that happened during the break was that the near-term projections of the size of this year's deficit changed. They went down. In other words, we found out during the last week that those who spend their time looking at the size of the deficit have now looked at the numbers, now looked at the revenues coming into the Federal Government, and now project the current deficit will be roughly $85 billion less than was projected when we had the debate. If we had had those numbers during the debate, obviously I would have referred to them to point out that it is not necessarily the size of the tax rate that determines the amount of tax revenue. That is a truth, again, that we repeat over and over but that gets forgotten over and over. What determines the amount of tax revenue is the amount of economic activity that takes place in the economy as a whole tied to the tax rate, not the tax rate itself. If you set the tax rate too high, you guarantee the economic activity will slow and the tax take will go down. We cut the tax rate at the beginning of this administration, we cut it again last year, and we are now seeing economic activity pick up to the point that tax revenues have gone up. As I say, according to those who are now projecting this year's deficit, the tax revenues have surprised us to the point that we are now going to have roughly $85 billion more in revenue than was projected just a month ago. That is a coincidental number because it comes very close to the $87 billion we are asking for. I will not suggest in any sense that we should tie those two together. The closeness is purely coincidental. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that those who want to use the deficit as the reason for support of their opposition to what we are doing in Iraq are going to have to find another excuse because the economy is responding to the tax treatment that came out of this Congress. In that response we are getting more tax revenue, and it is going to be less of a financial burden on this country than we thought it would be even as recently as a month ago. All right. Let me turn now to the other argument we hear, over and over and over, in a constant drumbeat, with respect to Iraq; that is, the argument that this administration somehow misled the American people, misled the world by claiming Saddam Hussein was a threat. Then you get into the details of that claim, and they say he had no weapons of mass destruction, his economy was in ruins, he did not have the ability to threaten his neighbors, he was no threat or, if we can go back to a phrase I have seen some columnists use: Saddam Hussein was no Hitler. I want to address that this morning. I would hope in this Chamber, of all places, we would have a sense of history, we would understand what really went on in times past, and what really is going on in a historical framework in our present time. Let me take that phrase, ``Saddam Hussein was no Hitler,'' and use it as the framework for this kind of examination. If we go back in history to the time of Hitler, we can discover a time when I think it could be said accurately that Hitler was no Hitler. Let me explain what I mean by that. The Hitler we think of when we look back in history now is the Hitler who stood at the head of a major army of a major nation state waging world war upon all of the other nations around him. Hitler did not start out as that kind of a Hitler. He started out as a politician with a relatively small following and a bitter message in a world of turmoil. When he became the chancellor of all of Germany, he was a minority politician leading just one party of a series of parties. The primary individuals in Germany at the time thought by making him chancellor they could buy him off and use him and his party in a way that would allow them to continue their power. They misjudged him. When he became chancellor, he, of course, moved to consolidate his power rather than to cooperate with anyone. He then led Germany into a very risky military operation. He moved to reclaim land that had been taken from Germany in the First World War and ceded to France. If the French Army--arguably the largest on the continent at the time--had confronted him in that move, it would have meant the end of his political career; it would have made sure that nazism, the Nazi party would have disappeared, and Hitler would have been gone. But the French were afraid of a little bit of combat, they were afraid of a little bit of confrontation, and they allowed Hitler to take over that territory. Well, without going into a complete history of the time, let's go forward to the pivotal event that preceded the Second World War, the Conference at Munich. Here are the circumstances that led to that event: Hitler had designs on Czechoslovakia. Hitler insisted that Czechoslovakia belonged to Germany and announced he was going to take it, and take it by force. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, contacted Hitler and said: Can we meet one more time before you act to take Czechoslovakia by force? Hitler agreed, and they met in Munich, Germany. Chamberlain was terrified that war might break out. Chamberlain was afraid Great Britain was not ready for war. Chamberlain was anxious to give Hitler whatever he could, and, ultimately, Chamberlain gave Hitler Czechoslovakia. Without the British honoring the implied guarantee they would prevent any invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was free to take over that country. Now, again, if we look at it through the lens of Hitler at the top of his power, we would say, well, he proposed to swallow Czechoslovakia by his tremendous army. In fact, however, Hitler did not have a tremendous army prior to Munich. He had one on paper, but he did not have one in actuality. His generals were terrified as to what would happen to that army if, indeed, it was ordered into the field against the combined forces of the British and the Czechs. Indeed, there is evidence that Hitler's generals were prepared to depose him, to overthrow him, and to take Germany out from under him if, in fact, the British stood firm in Czechoslovakia. But instead of standing firm, the British Prime Minister said: Why do we care about people who live so far away from us, with whom we have nothing to do? And he gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Now, it was not just that he swallowed a small country. If we look back on the history of the time, Czechoslovakia had some of the finest factories capable of producing war materiel of any country in Europe. It had some of the finest machine shops and other skills. By taking Czechoslovakia, Hitler obtained an absolutely vital strategic asset that made it possible for Hitler to become Hitler. May I draw some historic parallels. When Saddam Hussein took Kuwait, he was taking a small, defenseless country that had enormous revenues and that was strategically located. If he had been allowed to keep them Saddam Hussein might very well have been on his road toward becoming Hitler. However, the President of the United States at the time, the first President Bush, was not Neville Chamberlain. The first President Bush stood in the House of Representatives and told a joint session of this Congress: This shall not stand. There were those in this Chamber who opposed the first President Bush in his decision to confront Saddam Hussein. Indeed, there were those who, in their own words, said much the same as Chamberlain: What do we have to do with these people so far away? Why should we be concerned with something so far from our shores? Fortunately, the majority of the Members of this Chamber at the time supported the first President Bush in that decision and, if I may, denied Saddam Hussein Kuwait in a way that Neville Chamberlain failed to deny Hitler Czechoslovakia. In the aftermath of that first denial of Saddam Hussein's ambitions, inspectors went into Iraq and discovered Saddam Hussein had a serious program of producing weapons of mass destruction. About that there can be no doubt. Let us understand that. Let me underscore it one more time. Saddam Hussein was engaged in a serious program of producing weapons of mass destruction, and about that there can be no doubt. President Clinton affirmed that to the Congress. Madeleine Albright affirmed that to the Congress. The United Nations affirmed that to the Security Council in the form of not one but a dozen resolutions. Saddam Hussein, left unchecked in his first invasion of Kuwait, was on his way to becoming Hitler. It was the first President Bush who made the decision to stop it. There is some uncertainty as to what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program after those inspectors were removed from Iraq in 1998. President Clinton believed the program was ongoing; Secretary Albright believed the program was ongoing; Prime Minister Blair of Great Britain believed the program was ongoing; and Inspector Kay, who has been there, confirmed that the program was ongoing. However, we have been unable to find caches of the weapons. There are those who say: Well, since we can't find huge caches of weapons of mass destruction, the fact that the program was ongoing is immaterial; and, once again, when we went into Iraq the second time with the second President Bush, he did not represent a threat to us--he was not Hitler. Again, history says if previous leaders had had the resolve of the two Presidents Bush, Hitler would never have become Hitler himself. One of the things we have discovered in Iraq that says Saddam Hussein was, indeed, very much like Hitler is the mass graves. Estimates of those numbers of Iraqis who have ended up in mass graves have run as high as 500,000. Maybe there are still some to be discovered. There were efforts to hide those graves, just as Hitler made efforts to hide his concentration camps that became the instrument through which he sought the final solution to the Jewish problem. His final solution, of course, was to eradicate them all, to send them to gas chambers, and then to bulldoze over the graves and pretend they had never been there. Saddam Hussein was doing the same thing in his own country to his own people, and we stopped it. By virtue of the resolve of the second President Bush, we stopped it. We stopped Saddam Hussein from reaching the kind of statistical plateau of horror that Adolf Hitler made famous in the world. Am I sorry we stopped it? Do I now have to hang my head in shame when I meet my constituents who say the inspectors didn't find what you thought they would find and, therefore, you made a mistake in voting for this war? Quite the contrary. As I examine the history of this situation, I am filled with gratitude for the first President Bush who prevented Saddam Hussein from taking over Kuwait and perhaps invading Saudi Arabia and thus becoming Hitler. And I am grateful and proud of the fact that I stood with the second President Bush, who moved into Iraq to make sure the weapons program we all know was going on did not reach the point where it could produce huge caches of weapons and that the slaughter, the systematic destruction of the Iraqi people who disagreed with Saddam Hussein, has been stopped. Are those consequences of which Americans should be ashamed? Are those consequences from which we should back away? I believe, with Tony Blair, that history will look upon this action and say we did the right thing. We all were in the Chamber when he made the point that if we were wrong in assuming that the weapons of mass destruction were there in great numbers, the consequences of our actions, at being wrong, were the elimination of a brutal tyrant and the freeing of 20 million people and the possibility of stability in that region. He said history will forgive that error. But, he said, if our critics were wrong, and the program, which we know was in place and which has been confirmed to have been in place by Inspector Kay, had gone forward and produced those weapons, Saddam Hussein would have become Hitler and history would never forgive that mistake. I go back to Munich. At the time when Neville Chamberlain came back to Great Britain, polls were overwhelmingly in his favor. He was greeted with cheers everywhere he went. The one man in the House of Commons who stood up and said ``we have suffered a defeat of the first magnitude,'' whose name was Winston Churchill, got only a handful of votes in his opposition to Chamberlain. But, as Tony Blair said in our joint session, history has a harsh judgment of the mistake that Neville Chamberlain made. Neville Chamberlain's mistake allowed Hitler to become Hitler. George W. Bush made sure he would not make that same mistake in Iraq and allow Saddam Hussein to become Hitler. Over the break, during the weekend, the Washington Post addressed this issue in some depth. The Washington Post, as we all know, is a paper that did not endorse George W. Bush for the Presidency and has often, in its editorial pages, been fairly harsh in its criticism. But the Washington Post is also a paper with editorial writers who were in favor of moving ahead in Iraq. Perhaps they had the same historic perspective I have tried to offer this morning, that we had to do something to stop, prior to the time when Saddam Hussein became Hitler, the possibility that he might. That is a doctrine that has now been called ``preemptive war,'' about which everybody complains around the world and says: That is just terrible. We should never establish the precedent of attacking or using military force before the threat is imminent. Well, Neville Chamberlain would have been well served to have adopted the doctrine back in the 1930s, and the world would have saved millions of deaths if he had. The Washington Post addressed this in an editorial that ran on Sunday. It went from the top to the bottom of the page in two columns called ``Iraq in Review.'' I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. On behalf of the Senator from Texas, Mrs. Hutchison, I yield myself the first 30 minutes in morning business.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Of course. The net amount I reported after the deductions was $1 million. So as far as the IRS was concerned, my income was $1.14 million. Under the Tax Code, the deductions to which the Senator from Delaware referred that go to people in these categories were all wiped out by the $1 million. All of my credits, all of my deductions--everything was wiped out. If we were to take the numbers the Senator from Delaware was talking about, and say, OK, you have someone with a $400,000 gross income, and that means his after-tax income is $312,000 because of the standard deduction, if he has a chunk of 401-K income on this from either an S corporation or an LLC corporation, or a partnership, all of those standard deductions go away very quickly as the number goes up. The point of this is not to argue one way or the other about how the tax structure is; it is to say the Senator is inadvertently targeting a large number of small businesses where profits and growth money are being reported on individual returns rather than through corporate returns. The S corporations were made substantially worse after the Reagan years because of the summit at Andrews Air Force Base, and then what was done with the Clinton tax increases. There are not as many people using the S corporations as there used to be because the advantage is not as great. But there is a still a very substantial amount of small business income that will be hit by the Senator's amendment. We are not just talking about Donald Trump and Jennifer Lopez. We are not talking about Michael Jordan. We are talking about people who are building businesses for whom $400,000 a year for the income of the business is a demonstration of a struggle. It is not a demonstration of the kind of opulence you find at the Delaware country club. It is survival. We didn't get to the point with the business I have described where we felt comfortable in cash flow until our earnings were well into the $10 million, $12 million, or $15 million area because of the demand for capital.

Mr. BENNETT. I would be happy to.

Mr. BENNETT. I am happy to yield to the Senator.