Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think that is a key word that we need to spend time on, maybe not tonight, but that the American people and our colleagues need to think about. Are we really at war? It was not that long ago that we had the opportunity to be at an event where one of the deputy Secretaries of the Defense Department, Steve Cambone, spoke and was very definitive. And he said we are a Nation at war, that we do not know exactly how long it will last, but it will not be short, recognizing that we are at war in that the situation that we face is very different, and we should realize it is different than how we treated it during the 1990s which was what my colleague and I talked about earlier, saying that these are just random criminal activities. This is much more serious.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Going back to the speech by then-Vice President Al Gore in May of 2000: ``As Senator I voted for the use of force, as Vice President I supported the use of force. If entrusted with the presidency, my resolve will never waver.'' And then, going on, talking about this time in the case of Iran, but it is also true for Iraq: It is still a major sponsor of terrorism, a seeker of weapons of mass destruction. That is a deadly and an unacceptable combination. There is no doubt that the Clinton administration and, at that point in time, Vice President Al Gore got it right. Iraq was a threat to the United States, Saddam Hussein had to go and that was a policy and a vision that was carried through under President Bush and his new administration with one big difference. Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, bin Laden, the war on terrorism were seen through a very different lens. They were seen through the lens of 9/11. And so what we had to do is we had to take a look at the broad expanse of terrorism and the threats that were out there, recognizing that terrorists do not take a break. They do not take a vacation. 24/7 they are looking at how they are going to attack the United States, when, how and where. There is only one way you can respond to that kind of a threat with people who are, I believe, fully committed. If they got their hands on weapons of mass destruction, the technology, they would manufacture them, they would use them against us, they would use them against the West and against our allies. And the only way to stop them is not to negotiate with them, but is to put the pressure on them 24-7, 365 days a year.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I yield to the gentleman from New Mexico.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of discussion about the progress, and I applaud my colleagues for talking about the issues, with Iraq and the war on terrorism. I have got to tell you when I flew out here on Tuesday afternoon, and you have a question as to whether of not we are winning the war on terrorism, but the question is whether we are making progress. Just a small note in USA Today, on Tuesday, on page 8, ``Inspectors complete the Libya arms inventory.'' It was only about 4 or 5 weeks ago that I had the opportunity to travel to Libya and to meet with Colonel Qaddafi. We had planned the trip to Iraq and Afghanistan in December, never expecting that 6 short weeks later we would be invited to go to Libya and to meet with Colonel Qaddafi to talk about the change in the attitude that has been highlighted for the last 6 or 8 weeks. Qaddafi's mea culpa on terror. Libya explains reversal, sees new era with the United States. What does that mean? What does that mean for the war on terrorism? Here is a real benefit that I think is an indication that we are making progress. The inspectors complete Libya arms inventory. International inspectors completed their inventory of Libya's chemical weapons stockpiles and confirmed that the country's only chemical weapons factory had been disabled, a watchdog organization said Monday. The inspectors said Libya had more than 20 tons of mustard gas and the materials to make thousands of tons of saren nerve gas. The Organization For the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it had inventoried materials at two storage facilities. Libya announced in December that it was scrapping its nuclear and chemical weapons programs in hopes of ending international sanctions. Washington has already lifted most sanctions. Libya is also working with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs. Who would have thought that a few short months ago, who would have thought a few short months ago that we would have made that type of progress with Libya? For more than a decade, probably closer to 2 decades, Libya had been identified and characterized as a state sponsor of terrorism. It is obvious that with what the experts have found in Libya, the tons of mustard and saren gas, that they had an active chemical weapons program. Also, through the negotiations and through the relations that they have made, we have got much better insights into their nuclear program, not only the status of how far their nuclear program had advanced, but perhaps more importantly, how they had gained access to the nuclear materials, the nuclear technology and the equipment to get into the nuclear business. By learning how they gained access to these materials, we have a better sense of what other countries might have been able to acquire, when they might have been able to acquire it, and how far they might have progressed in their own nuclear weapons programs, countries like Iran and countries like North Korea. Once we have identified the distribution network, the marketing network, the group of individuals, the organizations that made these materials available, it has given us an insight into the nuclear proliferation program that we never had before. There is no doubt that we are making progress in the war on terrorism that has been identified through much of the 1990s. Some say that this President, President Bush, was the one that after September 11 identified this new threat. Some say he pulled it out of the air; but when you take a look at the evidence, you see that a war on terrorism and the threat of terrorism had been identified through much of the 1990s. President Bill Clinton, February 17, 1998, here he is talking about Iraq. They have harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors. Continuing, and they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There should be no doubt, Saddam's ability to produce and deliver weapons of mass destruction poses a grave threat to the peace of that region and the security of the world. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His regime threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region and the security of all the rest of us. A rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists who travel the world if we fail to respond today, Saddam will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity. I have no doubt he would use them again if permitted to develop them. So during much of the 1990s, President Clinton identified not only the threat of Iraq but the threat of terrorist organizations coming from rogue states or coming from safe havens who would threaten the lives of American citizens and the security of the United States. What did others say? Some of our Senators have said, Iraq possesses a chemical weapons program and a biological weapons program. Name another leader on the face of this Earth who has decided not once but on numerous occasions to use weapons of mass destruction against his own people and his neighbors. Name one other country. Only Iraq, only Saddam Hussein. Another Senator has stated, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs and the means to deliver them are a menace to international peace and security. They pose a threat to Iraq's neighbors, to U.S. forces and the Gulf region, to the world's energy supplies and to the integrity and credibility of the United Nations Security Council. Now, because of the customs of the House and the rules of the House, I cannot identify the specific individuals who have made those statements; but the interesting thing to me, and I can share the names with my colleagues off-line, not here on the floor of the House, but I can share the names with my colleagues, and now it is some of these same individuals who are saying it was all made up. Excuse me. These individuals were saying the same thing and identifying the same issue that President Bush identified when he took action after September 11; but more importantly, almost immediately after taking office, President Bush identified that terrorism was a threat and that maybe the United States should consider alternative strategies. During much of the 1990s, we treated terrorist attacks as criminal acts. We waited for the attacks to occur. We put in place our policing authorities and our police resources, and then we prosecuted them as crimes, tried to find the bad guys and to prosecute them as crimes. In 2001, after watching what happened during the 1990s, the successful attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on our barracks in Saudi Arabia, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the attacks on the USS Cole, all together creating a devastating loss of life, this President said, you know, maybe it is time that we should at least consider alternative strategies rather than treating these as criminal activities, recognizing them for what they are.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, there is not much I can add to Daniel Webster or the gentleman's rendition of Daniel Webster. On occasion I have an opportunity to give a tour of the Capitol at night. One of the places I go to is the other body. I go to the desk that was Daniel Webster's desk and tell the stories about him. He was a great orator, a very wise man, as the gentleman has quoted him. I think his quotes would be a very appropriate place to end this Special Order.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I believe the gentleman is absolutely right. I do not believe we have even begun to tap the full potential to reform K-12 education with the technology that is out there today. How can we really revolutionize K-12 education? Rather than accepting the status quo, what can we do? We have some tremendous needs. We have a much more diverse society than what we had before, so we need to assimilate children. We need to get them to learn English. I sit on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The other thing we need to have happen, as we have more kids who need to learn English, we have a tremendous need for children here to learn another language because we are in a global marketplace. How do we explore what they are doing in Europe where many kids speak two, three, four different languages? That is not done here. I think there is a tremendous opportunity to investigate different means of learning. I think one of the ways that will happen is by allowing educational opportunities and choices to flourish and then empowering parents so they can align their child with the school that they best believe fits their child's needs.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, it is kind of interesting, the gentleman brings up the judicial pronouncements, and they have been going on since the early 1960s with school prayer, and there has been a very serious unintended consequence. I was at a school in Michigan for a graduation. I looked at the program. It said opening prayer. I kind of looked at the superintendent and nudged him and said, You cannot do that. He kind of looked at me and laughed and said, We can here. Then I looked over at the diploma table and there were a stack of books over there. I said, What book are you handing out? He said, Well, we are handing out the Bible to all of our graduates. I had a smile on my face and said, You cannot do that here. And he kind of laughed and said, We do. What some of the court pronouncements have done, they have broken the bond between the school and the community because public schools represented local community values, not to an extreme; but when you get a pronouncement from some judge in California about what some school in Arizona or some rural school in Michigan or Illinois or Indiana can do, and that now becomes the law of the land, and the people in Indiana or Michigan or Arizona never had any problem, they look and see what book is being handed out, and for 100 years this school has been handing out a Bible at graduation, and we are not telling people what to believe or whatever. It breaks the bond. Again, it is one of those barriers that comes up between a local public school and their community, and these are the barriers that I think are making it so difficult for our local public schools that have been so successful, but we are creating all sorts of barriers. We are creating judicial rulings from California and other places that break that bond. We are moving funding away from the local level. We are moving rules and regulations in from Washington that tell them how to do their business, and all of that gets in between a local school, a parent and their child. That is a huge problem. We ought to talk about what you are planning on doing here in Washington. We have talked about all of the money spent here in Washington on K-12 education, all of the money for the rapid acceleration on Federal spending on K-12 education, and it is all going through programs and mandates. When you start a new program, you send it to a school. That program comes with strings attached. But the gentleman has another view, a version of a tax credit bill that he would like to see enacted here in Washington that would, rather than empowering bureaucrats, would empower parents. So it says Washington is going to become more balanced, we are going to fund money directly for programs that we think are of high priority, but at the same time we are going to do something to strengthen that bond between a parent and the educational system in their community by going to the same win-win proposal as they have in Arizona, which was tax credits.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is exactly the point. What happens when we pass legislation out of Washington that empowers Washington, that gives them more authority, it means that people at the local level have to spend more time focusing on Washington bureaucrats. In Michigan, when we moved the funding from the local level to Lansing, it meant that the local administrators now would have to spend more time focused on Lansing rather than the interest in their community. That does not mean that what we have done in Michigan is bad, but it is a recognition that that should be counterbalanced. Because where do we want the power and the influence for our local schools? Do we want it in bureaucrats in Washington, in Lansing, or do we want it in my hometown of Holland, with parents? Do I want it around a kitchen table or around a PTA table? I want it in my local school districts, because in some cases now in my local community, the parents kind of walk away and say, Pete, what can we do? We cannot raise the money. We had an inner-city school that a lot of people in the community wanted to keep open, but there was nothing that our superintendent could do to go to the community and say, this is not the most efficient way to run our school system by keeping this school open, but I really think it is important to the sense of community and the city of Holland that we leave that school open. He could not go to the community and say, if you agree with me, great, then give me the money to do it. They never had the opportunity to say there is something more important here than just the bottom line on dollars and cents. There is a sense of community for that part of our town and the belief that using what somebody might describe as being an inefficient way of educating our kids by having that community school right there, that local neighborhood school right there, even if it is a little bit more inefficient, because it gets a better result. We have to focus and give our people at the local level and the parents and administrators at the local level the opportunity to design a system that works, not necessarily the one that is the most efficient. Because it does not do us any good if it is the most efficient, but we do not get the kind of results that we want.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. And it is intended to help public schools as well?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will once again yield, that is one of the ironies here. The gentleman is right. Many in Washington would say that the Congress functions as their school board, and yet we do spend somewhere upwards of $12,000 per student in the city of Washington, D.C. I know that for most of the school districts in west Michigan, the area that I represent, the number that they get per child is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,700 to maybe somewhere around $8,000, maybe a little over $8,000, but in that range, and they would be saying, wow, if I got $12,000, and even for the most or the best funded school district in west Michigan that is another $4,000 per student, that would be a 50 percent increase, what would I do with all that money? And then, of course, they look at the results here, and those are not very good results. I remember when we did the ``Education at the Crossroads'' hearings, we did a district in Alabama, and it was very interesting. They had one of the lowest per-student funding ratios in the State and they had the highest test scores. So we asked them what they attributed this kind of performance to, because they did not get a lot of money, yet their scores were phenomenally well. The answer was, well, we only get enough money to focus on the basics. We do not do a lot of the peripheral stuff. We cannot do it. We cannot afford it. So all we do is, day in and day out, we focus on the basics. That is not saying these other things are not worthwhile, but it means that they have to get the foundation and the basics done first. And I do not want to put a number out there, but if you gave that school district $12,000 per student, they would not know what to do with the money because they are doing it with a whole lot less and getting outstanding results.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The funding from Washington may not necessarily be all that bad if there was balance. But what we have done is we have funded bureaucracy, bureaucracy which has written more rules and more regulations for local school districts. We have talked about the impact that has had. It is smothering our local public schools with overhead and administrative costs and taking dollars out of the classroom. A tax credit would begin to bring a little bit of balance that says rather than putting more money into empowering bureaucrats, we are going to put some money into empowering parents and rebridging that gap between parents and local schools and their children. That is the important thing, to give at least some of this money the opportunity to be driven by the parents in their local community, rather than by a bureaucrat here in Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, I have spent a lot of time trying to find a common ground between the various forms of education in Michigan, whether it is home school, private schools, a charter school, or a public school, recognizing that each one of these plays a vital role in our total education system; and, also, very frankly, recognizing that when you are in the State of Michigan and you are talking about education reform, you are going to have to design it as a win-win that says there is something in here that is going to enhance the ability of public schools to compete, to educate our children, as well as enhance the educational opportunities for private and parochial schools. One system is not inherently better than the other and one system should not be inherently favored over the other. Again, this is why I am very much intrigued by the concept that the gentleman has successfully promoted, which is a tax credit, which is a win-win for all of those. I do not think, as it is written, Arizona allows or provides a benefit for home schoolers, does it?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What is the number?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, we did a program called Education at a Crossroads, where we went around to schools; and I do not know, 13, 14 different States, and we asked those kinds of questions, what kind of paper do you have at the administration level, and all those kinds of things. The local administrators would be the first ones to say we share the same vision that you have. We want parental empowerment; we want the parents to want to send their kids to our schools; we want to get the dollars into the classroom; we want that to be the focus. I still remember a press conference we did where we brought out the reams and reams and reams of paperwork that these school districts are required to send to Washington, and obviously if they have got to send all this stuff to Washington there has got to be somebody that fills it all out. The thing that we never did find was when you send all of that paperwork into Washington and we would have a huge stack from just a local school district, who in Washington is the person that reads all of that stuff? I think that we never found that person or that Department, and that is why the flexibility is so important. So even though in some of our schools the ratio of teacher to administrator is very different than what you may find in another setting, if it is a private or parochial setting, that is not necessarily where the administrators want to be. They would prefer to put as much money into the classroom because they have got the same focus that we have.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, what this tells us is a very important thing. This is not an issue of money. We are spending a tremendous amount on education, but we are spending a tremendous amount of it in the wrong place, and it is partly because parts of the No Child Left Behind, that never made it into law, was to give local school districts and States relief from the paperwork burden that sucks up valuable education dollars away from the kids and puts it into a bureaucracy either at the State capital or here in Washington. Like I said, and I think the gentleman agrees with me, the teachers, the principals, the administrators at the local level want to do what we are saying; they want to focus those dollars in the classroom. But they recognize that when they get as many mandates as they get from Washington, D.C., they have to have the piece of paper and the forms filled out; they have to dot the I's and cross the T's or they get in trouble.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield. I mean, that is one of the frustrating things that we have here, and I think that is an important statistics. We passed a bill here a couple of years ago that entitled dollars to the classroom because we did a survey of the Education Department. We found that the Education Department and the other Federal agencies had over 760 different specific education programs, not all of them obviously in the Department of Education, not all of them obviously targeted to K through 12 education; but we do not have that many different kinds of education systems that you said, well, it makes sense to have 760 different education programs. Then what we started doing is we started taking a look at how those dollars flow. We appropriate money into one of these programs, so we send it to a K through 12 school with a list of rules and regulations, or we send it to the State. The State then has to administer it and send it down to a local school district, and again, it gets to a local classroom, perhaps with some rules and restrictions on it. They then have to report back to the State, and the State has to report back to Washington and say we spent the money exactly the way that you told us to and within the restrictions of the program. Of course, we know that the folks at the local level cheat, so we then send in our auditors. We send in our auditor from Department of Ed down to the State, down to the local school district to audit, and the school district has to justify and keep the records that they spent the money exactly the way that they did. Then we end up with the scary numbers that you said, somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of every dollar actually going into educating a child. Somewhere between 30, 35, 40 percent of every education dollar we spend in Washington goes into bureaucracy by deciding where the money is actually going to go. Somebody's got to divide it up at the Federal level and the State level, and we have got to track and monitor and audit. What we tried to do a couple of years ago was kind of like what happens with the tax credit program. As we were saying, 90 cents gets into a classroom. What we tried to say here in Washington, would it not be great if every education dollar we spend at a K through 12 level, if we could get 95 cents of every dollar into the classroom educating a child and get rid of the rules and regulations, get rid of the bureaucracy. It is exactly one of the points that the President had in his No Child Left Behind bill of giving States and local school districts more flexibility, but that part of the bill was left on the cutting room floor. It got cut out of the bill, but I could not help but think of that when you were talking about the effective nature of voluntary tax dollars going into a scholarship fund, and then that scholarship offering it to a student and 90 cents of every dollar gets to that local school versus what we do here in Washington. It is a very efficient way of getting money into a school.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman used the word that we talk about quite often. School districts and principals and teachers at the local level are forced to comply. Compliance means you adhere to the rules, but it also means your focus has changed from where it needs to be, which is educating the child to complying with the rules. And the teachers and principals at the local levels want to focus on our kids. All these programs and all these rules and regulations move us away from where the gentleman and I started today when we started talking about parental choice. We talked about parental empowerment and recognizing that the tie between the parent and the child and the local school district is absolutely critical, and that when we put in funding schemes like we have in Michigan that say the money is no longer going to come from the local level and the people in the community, but it is going to come from these folks over here in Lansing, we weaken that. When we send in a bunch of programs and a bunch of mandates from Washington, it weakens the ability of the folks at the local level to take a look at the needs of Johnny and say, What do I need to do for Johnny? They have to say, Wait a minute, I have this form 1081 with this program and I have to fill this out, and that means I have to do this. I have to fill this report out after class today, or I have to fill it out at the end of the semester. Again, it weakens that link between the parent, the teacher, and the child and that local community and it forces these people to look to Washington, which is the last place they should be looking to as to who needs to be educated in their community.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding. To have the opportunity to have this dialogue about empowering parents, empowering parents to give them a bigger role in the education of their children, there are a number of methods now that States are employing to create a dramatic impact in improving their children's education. I think my colleague and I agree that the most important thing in a child's education is having a caring and involved adult in their life. And whether it is a parent, whether it is a guardian, whether it is a mentor, whatever, but if a child has a caring adult in their life, who takes an interest in their education, that is a powerful motivator to ensure that that child has the ability to learn and has the ability to move forward. And States are doing a tremendous amount of innovation and experimenting with how they provide parents with this option of selecting where their children go to school. Fifteen States today have various proposals for public school choice, inner- and intra-district choice programs, allowing students to transfer between public schools. And then there are other States that provide slightly different versions of public school choice. One of the things, again, another version of public school choice, is charter schools. Today over 40 States and the District of Columbia have charter school laws. Again, giving parents the initiative of saying this is the school that best fits my child's needs. And it does not necessarily mean that the other schools are not good schools, but recognizing that certain schools will have certain strengths, not every school is exactly the same, and provides a better opportunity to tailor the match for the child to the school that they attend. Six States have enacted voucher laws. My colleague has been very instrumental in another form, a modified form of school choice that opens up enhancing education for all of our kids, not only for those that might go to a private or parochial school, but also a public school, by putting more money into our school systems, public schools, and the private and parochial school systems with a tax credit program that my colleague not only introduced in the State of Arizona, but my colleague was the key move in, I think, a trend that is gaining a lot of interest. Because what it does is it not only empowers parents to select schools, but it also empowers parents to reward the schools or the community groups that they believe are doing a good job. In the State of Michigan we passed a new education financing system that I think in many ways was positive. But after 10 years we have learned that there have been some unintended consequences. Our school administrators in some respects are now more beggars to the State Capitol than being focused where they should be, which is on the parents and the kids in their community. And there is really no way for a school district that is doing a phenomenal job to go back to the people of that community and say we want to do some special things for our kids and to get that money. My hometown public schools have a declining enrollment. They cannot take costs down quick enough to reflect a declining enrollment, and so even though our public school system in Holland has always been a competitive advantage for the community, where companies would locate in Holland because they saw that we had a quality school system, it helped to attract, that school district can no longer go to the community and say if you want us to be a differentiater, that when a company is located saying are we going to locate in West Michigan, are we going to locate in Kentucky or somewhere else, one of the reasons that company is going to locate in west Michigan is they are saying they have got a great school district; they have put additional resources into that school, and I know that if I come to this community I will be able to attract the employees that I need because my employees are going to want to have a good school district for their kids. Maybe you would want to share a little bit about what the impact of tax credits have been in Arizona, not only in improving public schools but enhancing choice for all of the kids in Arizona.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, I think that is critical because I think this is what I really want to reinforce because I think it is also a model that I would hope that we would consider here in Washington; and more importantly, I am hoping that it is a model that we will consider in the State of Michigan for putting more money into our public schools. The tax credit that you designed in Arizona not only empowers scholarship organizations to give scholarships to low-income students to go to private and parochial schools, but it also provides a mechanism of funneling more money into our local public schools in Arizona. Is that correct?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman may want to just explain for folks exactly how the tax credits work. How is this tax credit different perhaps than a voucher system that is maybe being used in some other States? Then we can talk a little bit about the advantages of the tax credits versus vouchers and that kind of thing.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, maybe you can relate a little bit about the experience in Arizona. You talked a little bit about that there have been, what, 21,000 students in the State of Arizona who have been able to take advantage of a scholarship to attend a school of their choice; but there have also been significant amounts of money that have flowed back into the public schools where parents who are very satisfied with what is going on in their public school, the public school has identified a specific need. We did a hearing on this I think 4 or 5 years ago as this concept was starting to come out. I think that is what really intrigued me is it did not pit one sector of our education system against another, the privates against the parochials. This actually ended up being a win-win situation for education in general because it became a new way to voluntarily fund the public and private and parochial system, a voluntary way to move more money into educating our kids. I will yield back to have you explain some of the results that you have seen in Arizona.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. So over $220 million, voluntarily going into education?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. This is $100 million voluntarily, correct? This is not $100 million where the legislature in Arizona passed a new tax and said we are upping our sales tax by half a percent or changing the income tax? This is $100 million that people voluntarily in Arizona said we are going to pump this money back into our education system to help educate our kids and provide a higher level and a higher quality of education?

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of House Resolution 557, recognizing the liberation of the Iraqi people and the valiant services of American and coalition forces. In the years since the United States led a coalition of willing States to disarm Saddam Hussein, we have arrested a dictator that killed hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as 1 million people, during his reign. We have returned children to school and given the Iraqi people a new destiny. I have been to Iraq several times. It continues to be a dangerous place. Iraq is also a complicated place. There has been a considerable amount of debate and attention to what we knew before we went to war and how well our intelligence is measuring up with the realities on the ground in Iraq. I would like to take this time to clarify the record on a number of charges that have been levied against both the administration and our intelligence community. A number of Members who voted for the Iraq war resolution claim they did so because they were fooled by the President who overstated the threat from Iraq. In fact, some suggest that the administration knew Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and went to war regardless of the facts. These critics do not understand the difference between intelligence and policy formation. The President considered the intelligence in Iraq and calculated the risk of engaging in a conflict with Iraq and decided war was just. He took action, and we are all safer as a result. Some argue that the President portrayed Iraq as an ``imminent threat,'' that the administration misled the American public by overstating the threat posed by Iraq. This is what he said in January 2003, 2 months before the war: ``Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy and it is not an option.'' In fact, this President's statements on Iraq are not all that different from the previous President and his administration's remarks when they discussed the threat posed by Iraq: ``If we fail to respond today, Hussein and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity.'' And: ``What if he fails to comply and we fail to act? Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he will use the arsenal.'' These were President Clinton's words in August of 1998. Another quote: ``And, indeed, we have information that Iraq has assisted in the chemical weapons activity in Sudan. We had information linking bin Laden to the Sudanese regime and the Al Shifa plant.'' These words were written by former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Another quote: ``Sometimes the United States has to act alone or at least has to act first. Sometimes we cannot let other countries have a veto on our foreign policy.'' That was a quote from President Clinton during his election campaign. President Bush used the best intelligence available, as it had been suggested by the former administration, that Iraq was a threat, a growing threat. The removal of Saddam Hussein and his evil regime from power was a policy endorsed by both sides of the aisle for more than a decade. This menace became even more of a concern when examined through the lens of September 11. Saddam is gone. The world is better because of it. Mr. Speaker, we can argue the morality of war all day, but terrorists do not possess the same concern, as we saw again today. They act, and they act brutally. Iraq represents another front on the global war on terrorism. Iraq also represented a dangerous threat to the region and the world. This country witnessed the consequence of failing to act strongly against terrorism on September 11, 2001.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I have not had the opportunity to go to Basra, but the gentleman from Indiana talked about the Third World conditions. Again, I spent more time in the health care area in talking on a pretty regular basis with Mr. Haveman, talking about what is going on there and what existed before. This is actually what the first lady talked about when she was talking about the new hospital we want to build in Basra. Decades ago Iraq had one of the strongest systems. But here are some of the stories. Mothers tell stories of watching their children die because doctors do not have a small enough tube to give them oxygen. When parents bring their children to the hospital, they must also bring food, bedding and clothing, even their own blood supply. Under Saddam Hussein, one in eight children died before the age of 5. One in three was malnourished. Infant and child mortality rates doubled in 10 years while low birth weights increased from 4.5 percent to 30 percent. Today, infant mortality rates, and this is when the coalition came in, infant mortality rates in Iraq are similar to those in much less developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The prevalence of leukemia has also increased dramatically in the past decade and continues to grow at an alarming rate. Children in the United States with leukemia have a 90 percent survival rate. In Iraq, the rate is less than 10 percent. Saddam took care of himself, his family, and a core group of Baathists, but other than that, the country just totally slid. And those folks received very little health care, very few benefits from the government. Mr. Speaker, I will yield to my colleague.