Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) for their wonderful bipartisan effort in putting this together and also my great colleague from the Committee on Armed Services, my partner, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), for his work and contribution. I will be very brief, but there are two messages in this resolution. I think it is appropriate that this resolution follows the funding of our Defense bills and our Intelligence bills because those are the bills that give our forces the tools to get the job done. I think we have done an excellent job in putting together bills that give the force protection, the surveillance capability, the extra troops that are going to be needed over the next several years, and the funding for those troops, and particularly that $25 billion bolt-on that we did on the Defense authorization bill and the Defense appropriations bill. So it is appropriate that this resolution, this message to the people of Iraq and the people of the United States, follow those funding bills because this is a very important message that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) and the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) and many others are sending. The message to the American people can be found in this resolution that the command of American forces will remain with American commanders. That is very important to moms and dads and people who care about our uniformed people, that that chain of command will remain firmly in place, that we will continue to pursue our mission against terrorists, and that operation will be overseen and supervised by U.S. leaders. That is a very important message. But to the Iraqi people there is also a message, and the message is that we are giving them a running start. We are handing over a country divested now of the leadership of Saddam Hussein. We are handing over to them a chance to maintain freedom in a very, very difficult part of the world. We are going to provide for them this military shield just as we have in other countries around the world as they stand up this free government. But I think it is important for the Iraqi people to understand that too, and I think they do understand it, that this enduring, the endurance of this government in a very difficult neighborhood is going to require some real grit on the part of the Iraqi people and that no country, not our country, not any country, is guaranteed perpetual freedom. We are giving them a running start. We have given them the sacrifice of many brave Americans and the continued sacrifice right through this day in terms of Americans KIA, killed in action, and wounded in action, as well as coalition partners, as well as many Iraqis. But they are going to have to take hold, and they are going to have to be able to lift that weight. I hope that under the good leadership that is now forming, that is taking over on the 30th of this month, they are going to be able to make that transition. This is only when the Americans were in Iraq, one thing that can be said from the dawn of time until the end of time, only when the American came to Iraq did they have a chance to have a free and fair government. We are giving them this chance.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, let me just say to the gentlewoman that I too have looked at requirements. And intel requirements in those two war-fighting theatres, Afghanistan and Iraq, are as difficult for the intel experts to project as it is for our defense experts, our people who are leading uniformed troops, and there is plenty of money to carry this bridge. This is a bridge fund, and I might say 60 out of 60 people, Republicans and Democrats, agreed this was a good number, and this had the $2.2 billion intel piece embedded in it when we passed it. So I can just tell the gentlewoman there is not going to be a gap.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to say to the gentlewoman the reason we bolted on $25 billion, not $50 billion, not $75 billion, with a piece of that being carried for her committee was because we have a war in two theatres which is ebbing and flowing. We cannot see into the future. We may need more money in January and February than projected $50 billion or even $75 billion. So I would just say to the gentlewoman, there is plenty of money for current operations. Nobody is being short-changed in this year.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. And let me just say that when we put the defense bill together, put together with bipartisan support, passed the committee unanimously, we bolted on $25 billion in supplemental for this next year. 2.2 billion of that, after consultation with the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Goss), we put into the intel side which went into his intel budget. That is only for a couple of months. It was understood that was just for a couple of months. And I would say to the gentlewoman who said we have underfunded counterterrorism to hold on to her horses because we have got a supplemental coming up for 2005, which will have a large intel piece to it and she will be tired of voting for intel increases. So there is no cut to the intel budget. This was always intended to be a bridge. And everybody, everybody, on both sides of the aisle, we passed this thing 60 to zero in the committee, an overwhelmingly vote in the full House. It was only be supposed to be for a couple of months at the end of this year so our intel people and the people that wear the uniform would have that bridge in the winter months of this year. So I want to applaud the gentleman for everything he has done. We did this with total synchronization, total coordination, and we have got a great budget for the folks who carry out the intel duties for this Nation.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, no. For the Endangered Species Act they have the money to enforce. They are using it for monitoring studies which are used to discover the existence of endangered species which in turn has been used in public lands throughout the West.

Mr. HUNTER. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I am arguing that they should be using other money other than this demo money. The demo money is supposed to be used for the benefit of the off-road community and put into recreational areas, campgrounds, et cetera.

Mr. HUNTER. Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, if one drives out beyond the population centers in California, they will come to the great California desert that lies between the coastal range and the Colorado River and vast areas of sand dunes, and that is a place where literally hundreds of thousands of Californians go to get away from the boss, to take the family for a weekend, to have a good time and to be able to off-road with their four-wheel-drive vehicles and their sand rails and dune buggies; and we have got places out there where families have gone for generations, where under one Palos Verde tree a family may have camped for 30 or 40 or 50 years, and it is a great getaway spot for Americans. This land is BLM land, and recently the BLM has tripled user fees for the folks that use this territory, for the families that go out there and recreate. And that amounts, Mr. Chairman, to about 30 bucks a weekend. They go out and before they can buy groceries or charcoal or anything to use for their camping, they are going to have to fork out over $30 to Uncle Sam ostensibly for improvements in this BLM recreational facility. In fact, the BLM advertises it in one of their national publications, ``The Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area''; and they talk about these windblown sands of an ancient lakecrest which is one of the premier off-road vehicle playgrounds in the United States. What this advertisement does not tell us is that the BLM has decided to use, having tripled the user fees for these off-roaders, a lot of folks having trouble coming up with that extra money to pay for a weekend, they have tripled the user fees, and they are using now almost a billion bucks of these user fees for monitoring studies which are used in an attempt by a number of groups to try to close down the dunes. When we passed this pilot program for user fees, we never envisioned that this money would be used for monitoring studies for endangered species that would be used to try to inhibit the use of this great public land that is so valued by many Americans. It is within driving distance of about 10 percent of America's population. So my amendment says very simply that we cannot use these user fees. We have to use them for what they were designed for and stated to be designed for, which is improving this recreational resource and not for doing biological studies which in the end are used by a number of groups in an attempt to close down the usage of this public area. So my amendment would restrict that type of usage, and right now it is proposed by BLM that they take $1 million out of this fund, which is only about $3.8 million, and pull it way from using it to improve the resource and instead use it for monitoring; and my amendment would limit that.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman very much for his comments.

Mr. HUNTER. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. HUNTER. Exactly.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I just thank the gentleman for his very astute analysis that there are no guarantees in this war against terrorism and this is a central part of the war against terrorism. It is interesting that we had America hit with these aircraft taken over by terrorists, shocking Americans beyond their wildest nightmares and in a way that no one could imagine just a few years ago. I think that is going to be for this country, even Iraq aside, that is going to be the pattern for the next many, many years. We live in a new age. The age is terrorists with high technology. And we had a Soviet Union which was big and strong and fielded literally in the Warsaw Pact hundreds of divisions. It had a lot of might. It had 309 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each of which had 10 warheads, each of which was about 30 times as powerful as the bomb that hit Hiroshima. And they had those bombs and those missiles aimed at American cities, and they had at times over the last 20, 30 years very aggressive foreign policies. But they were fairly predictable, the Soviet Union. We certainly should not lapse into nostalgia for the Soviet Union because they were very much an evil empire. From where the sun now stands we will have people excavating graves, many of them mass graves that were caused by the Soviet Union, but this is a new era. This is an era of terrorists with high technology, and it is an era that will see bad people doing everything they can to leverage technology and to hurt Americans and our allies in ways that go far beyond the scope of what was possible just a few years ago. And just a usage of those American aircraft that were taken over by the terrorists and the thousands of people who were killed and hurt by those actions are representative of what we can expect for the next 20 or 30 years. We all breathed a sigh of relief when the Soviet Union went down. We look forward to an era of peace. Unfortunately, we will only have an era of peace if we have strength, and one thing that we will have to have if that we dissembled in the days when liberals in this country thought that it was not Marquis of Queensbury rules for us to have good intelligence. We are going to have to have really good intelligence. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my very good friend, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), as he is leaving, because he is a gentleman who is very astute and has spent a lot of time looking in depth at these issues and knows a lot about security. He is not a member of our Committee on Armed Services, but we wish he was. And I want to thank the gentleman from Colorado. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to ask my friend, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks), who has done a great job on this Committee on Armed Services, we put together this bill. We hope to get the other body to get to work and get their bill done and get the thing finished and get it to the President's desk. But I wanted to ask him what his impressions are of where we stand in this war against terror. Because I know he looks at it every day and I just say to the gentleman, you have done a great job on the Committee on Armed Services.

Mr. HUNTER. That is one thing this President has done in moving so aggressively because lots of people cautioned him to hold back and wait and delay; and by moving aggressively, he kept the terrorists off balance. Many people have said, well, how come we have not had more strikes and have not had more actions against Americans. Very simply, when you have a meeting and a bomb-guided precision munition comes through the window and blows up your meeting, it is pretty tough to conspire to kill Americans, and the literally hundreds and hundreds of bad guys have discovered that the Americans were able to find them in places where they thought they were totally inviolate. That is because of the aggressive posture against terrorism that this President assumed. He did the right thing by doing that.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I say one other thing to my good colleague. I think I got the name wrong on Gunny Sergeant Jeffrey Bohr. I called him Jeffrey Shore. That shows how good my eyes are after being here for 20 years or so. I just ask the gentleman, since we have got Gunny Sergeant Bohr's citation up there and since the doggone media has literally, with the 127 articles coming out of one newspaper alone about the prison mess involving criminal acts by what so far have been focused, been identified as seven people who have been recommended to be bound over under article 32 of UCMJ for courts-martial, with all that mess occurring and being so focused on by the media, that brave people like those people who are out there fighting in the field for our freedom are not being recognized. This gentleman did not get on the front pages of any newspaper. It was more important to talk about a detainee not getting sugar in his tea; but if the gentleman could read that citation, I think as long as we put him up there, we better get it right. I would ask the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) to help me out on this one. If you could read that citation, I think that would be appreciated, hopefully, by the gentleman's family.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I think if he thinks I am one of the greatest Americans he may be in trouble. But I want to commend the gentleman for his great service on the Committee on Armed Services and all the work he has done on behalf of people in uniform everywhere. It is interesting. This is an interesting time in that we have had several weeks of remembering a great President, Ronald Reagan, and at the same time the criticism of our present President, George Bush, has mounted severely. I was looking over some anti-President quotes, anti-Republican President quotes, and I thought I was reading some things about President Bush, because, of course, you have these various groups that have been put together, knit together, to come forth in the nature of Henny Penny announce to us that the ski is falling in, particularly with respect to foreign policy, and that we have got to get this guy out of here; and we look at the credentials of the people who have said it, and a few of them have marginally worked in Republican administrations, but most of them came right out of the team on the other side. It was interesting, I was looking at some statements about a President, and I had a couple of statements I thought bore repeating, because they looked to me like they had been applied to President Bush by his critics. Here is a quote by a gentleman who is running for President. He said, ``The biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense. Americans feel more threatened by the prospect of war, not less so, and our national priorities have become more and more distorted as the share of our country's resources devoted to human needs diminishes.'' I thought that was John Kerry talking about George Bush, but it is not. It is John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan. In fact, it looks to me like they simply xeroxed this statement and put this out on the latest ``sky is falling in'' report about the present President. Here is another quote: ``The administration has no rational plan for our military.'' You heard that one before? There is no plan. ``Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the enemy and a presumed window of vulnerability, which we now know not to exist.'' I thought, well, doggone it, that is Senator Kerry and he is talking again about George Bush. No, that is Senator Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. Of course, the same Senator Kerry now thinks that Ronald Reagan was actually quite a guy, and he said over the last several weeks that he brought us together and was a great President. Now, here is another one. This one is a little bit personal. ``You roll out the President one time a day, one exposure to all you media, no big in-depth inquiries, put him in his brown jacket and his blue jeans, put him on a ranch, let him cock his head, give you a smile, it looks like America is okay.'' I thought, there is John Kerry talking about George Bush down on the ranch in Texas. No, it is John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan down on the ranch in California 20 years ago. ``The President certainly was never in combat. He may have believed he was,'' this is another quote, ``but he never was. The fact is he sent Americans off to die.'' I thought maybe that was John Kerry talking about George Bush. We have heard a lot about that issue over the last 3 or 4 months. No, that was John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan. Here is another quote: ``I am proud that I stood against the President, not with him, when his intelligence agencies were abusing the Constitution of the United States and when he was running an illegal war.'' Once gene, I thought this was John Kerry talking about President Bush. It is not. Twenty years ago, this was John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan. After his first major political battle in the Senate over the President's foreign policy, John Kerry said, ``I think it was a silly and rather immature approach.'' I thought, well, doggone it, that has to be John Kerry talking about George Bush's approach to Iraq. No, that is not. That is John Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan's approach to our Central American countries during the contra wars, 20 years ago. Incidentally, it is interesting, that ``silly and immature approach'' that Senator Kerry talked about 20 years ago ended up and resulted in Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador and Nicaragua all today being fragile democracies; and, interestingly, Salvadorans are standing side-by-side with Americans fighting for freedom in Iraq today. They are some of our best soldiers. In fact, their people have shown absolute bravery on the battlefield. And one time they were on the verge of being assimilated or taken over by a communist-backed insurgency, a Russian backed insurgency back in the 1980s. It is interesting, what John Kerry called ``a silly and immature approach'' resulted in fragile democracies coming around or springing up in all those countries, which, before the Reagan administration had been military dictatorships. Now, here is another one. Mr. Kerry spoke at great length about the President's abuse of the Constitution and totalitarian inclinations. This must be him talking about the PATRIOT Act. ``They are literally willing to put the Constitution at risk because they believe there is somehow a higher order of things,'' maybe that is about Abu Ghraib, ``and the ends do in fact justify the means. That is the most Marxist, totalitarian doctrine I have ever heard in my life.'' This is a quote from John Kerry. ``You have done the very thing that James Madison and others feared when they were struggling to put the Constitution together, which was to create an unaccountable system with runaway power running off against the will of the American people.'' Once again, I thought that must be Mr. Kerry talking about George Bush. No, that was Mr. Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan, whom he now reveres. Interestingly, just a year or so ago, he likened his own criticism of Ronald Reagan to George Bush. He said this, and this is about the President. He says, ``They have managed him the same way they managed Ronald Reagan. They send him out to the press for one event a day. They put him in a brown jacket and jeans and get him to move some hay and drive a truck, and all of a sudden he is the Marlboro Man.'' He goes on. ``We have seen governors come to Washington, and they don't have the experience in foreign policy and they get in trouble pretty quick. Look at Ronald Reagan, look at Jimmy Carter, and now, obviously, George Bush.'' So let me see. We had the former leaders of the free world talking about Ronald Reagan the other day, Brian Mulroney, Maggie Thatcher, talking about the hundreds of millions of people who were freed by the Reagan doctrine of peace through strength. Those days when Ronald Reagan strode out, took leadership of the free world, and when the Russians ringed Western Europe with SS-20 missiles in an attempt to intimidate our allies, the President started to move ground-launched Cruise missiles and Pershing missiles into place in Europe, and the Russians picked up the phone and said, can we talk? But, of course, before they picked up the phone and said can we talk, there were massive demonstrations in Europe, and liberals like Mr. Kerry talked about the idea that somehow we had lost our leadership of the free world. They called Ronald Reagan a cowboy. They said we need to talk more. We need to get concessions from the Soviet Union. And what happened? He met their strength with American strength, and in the end we had arms reductions, and in the end Ronald Reagan negotiated not just arms limitations, he negotiated the surrender and the disassembly of the Soviet empire. Very interesting that we have got now this same collection of people coming together and saying, well, they may have gotten it wrong with Ronald Reagan 20 years ago; but by golly, this time they think they have got it right with George Bush. And you can Xerox these quotes from Mr. Kerry that he used 20 years ago against President Reagan and put them in his speeches today against George Bush, President Bush; and there is not a bit of difference. Now let us go back to the facts. The facts are that when this country was attacked, this President did what we all needed him to do. He moved aggressively against terrorists; and in moving aggressively, we hunted these guys down in places where they never thought we could get to them. The Tenth Mountain Division soldiers killed them in rifle pits at 10,000 feet elevation in the mountains of Afghanistan, in those rugged areas on the Pakistani border. We went into Iraq and took out a dictator, who I guess, except for Adolph Hitler, was the only dictator in the history of the world who used poison gas to kill his own people. And those thousands of Kurdish mothers laying on those hillsides holding their little babies killed in mid-stride by that poison gas, according to today's liberals, was not enough of a justification for the United States to change the leadership of Iraq. What have we done in Iraq? Well, we have occupied Iraq, and it truly is an occupation and occupations are tough. They are tough on both the occupied country, and they are also tough on the occupying country. And if you do not think that is so, look at what happened after World War II when we were occupying Germany and other parts of Europe, and you had the presence of outsiders, Americans are great people, but outsiders wearing very thin on the German populace, just as we wore thin on dozens of countries simply because we were there, we were outsiders; they knew we were going to leave after a while. We had lots of writings, lots of editorials talking about how the people who had come in and had their tanks strewn with flowers when they liberated those areas now becoming somewhat of a guest who had been there, who had overstayed their invitation and should move out. Well, we all know that, and we all know that the stray artillery round that accidentally hit civilians, the truck that is going too fast that hurts livestock, the very presence of having outsiders in your country is always wearing thin. But what is the alternative? The alternative was Saddam Hussein and those thousands of Kurdish mothers laying on the hillside killed by poison gas in mid-stride. And I would just say to my friend, those pictures, and I keep them in my office and I look at them on a regular basis, those pictures are as compelling as anything that ever happened at Auschwitz. They are compelling, compelling pictures. So maybe that question the school kids ask, they ask their daddies, ``Daddy, if Hitler hadn't threatened the rest of us, would we have stopped him from killing the Jewish community?'' Well, that is a pretty profound question. That is a pretty tough question, because generally speaking, the desire or the will to go to war manifested in a declaration of war by an assembled Congress and the President is usually justified based on the threat that a particular adversary has toward you, toward your country. But I can tell you this, that at least partially the reason that we went into Iraq was because of those dead Kurdish mothers strewn out across that hillside killed in mid-stride by poison gas. It was those thousands of people who were taken in buses to the killing fields where the backhoes worked all night digging the trenches, where the firing squads that kept, according to the farmers, bankers' hours. They showed up at nine o'clock. Would wait patiently for the buses full of civilians, women, old men, children; and they would disembark from the buses and line up dutifully along their trenches, and then Saddam Hussein's gunners would walk down the line and in a very workmanlike way would put bullets in the backs of their skulls, and they would be bulldozed into the trenches and filled up. One day the farmer said that the ammo people, the executioners, ran out of ammo, and so they just bulldozed them in anyway. They found out that kills them just as dead. So what is that we replaced, and every American who has served in Iraq, and there are 300,000 of them, incidentally, who have served in Iraq, 16,000 bronze stars have been won. I would ask the gentleman to pull that over. We might ask that that be noticed. That is one of 127 silver stars that have been awarded in combat operations to Gunnery Sergeant Jeff Bohr, who happened to place his body between his wounded people and the adversary until he himself was killed. And, you know, as I was looking at the stuff about the Abu Ghraib prison and the prison mess, which has dominated the media, I started to look through some of these citations of bravery, and there are tons of them. There are tons of brave, brave people who have sacrificed everything, including giving that last full measure of devotion to this cause. And I want to say to them, what you have done, the purpose of what you have done is of value. And the real meanness of the left, of these operations, where they say, Well, we like the troops, we support the troops, we do not support what they are doing, is to devalue and take away meaning from the people that serve the cause of the American military. What they did does have value. Every single person whose boot has touched that sand of the Middle East who has served his country in an honorable way has value to this country, and Gunny Sergeant Jeff Bohr is just one of those people. If my colleagues look through, there are literally dozens and dozens of people, hundreds of people who have done heroic acts; some 16,000 Bronze Stars have been earned in that country. Yet, I saw all this publicity about Abu Ghraib, because there is a couple of newspapers driving that story. They want that story to stay alive, to the point where The Washington Post had an article the other day and on the front page I thought, boy, they are going to try to come out with something really bad. One of the bad things they cited was that the prisoners at Guantanamo asked for sugar in their tea. These were suspected al Qaeda, some of them, the people that ran those airplanes into our Twin Towers. These people asked for sugar in their tea, and they were told by the cruel American captors that it would be a long time before they got sugar in their tea. The Washington Post, by golly, obviously thinks that ought to be fixed real quick. The other thing they did not get was DVDs for their religious ceremonies. So on the one hand, we have people who drive planes into buildings and kill thousands of Americans; and on the other hand, we have people who commit those acts who are treated in general so well that one of their biggest complaints is that they do not get sugar in their tea and they have only The Washington Post to fight for their rights. Now, I looked at the number of articles that The Washington Post did, because I made the statement the other day where some people said, well, that puts you out on a limb. I said that the biggest event, military event in our history, the event upon which the freedom of our world hung in the balance, and that was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy when we were fighting the forces of Hitler, that day, that event, that operation received in The Washington Post, in those days when The Washington Post wrote a lot about our military operations, that received some 57 articles in The Washington Post. We counted them up. Now, if I have missed a couple, I want The Washington Post to set me straight and send in the other articles, and we will sure put them in our count. Fifty-seven articles The Washington Post printed about the invasion of Normandy. Now, on the other hand, The Washington Post likes the prison story like the one they just printed about the prisoners not getting enough sugar in their tea. They have printed twice as many articles about the prison mess, about Abu Ghraib, 127 articles, and they are still going, so it is not over yet. They have printed 127 articles about the prison mess, twice as many articles as they printed about the most important day, arguably, in the history of this country during the 20th century, and that was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, when thousands of ships and thousands of airplanes and hundreds of thousands of fighting Americans, including thousands who lost their lives, did everything they could to win back freedom for the world. So the invasion of Normandy, D-Day, had roughly half as much importance to The Washington Post as the Abu Ghraib prison mess. I think that is imbalanced. And I think it is time for us to refocus on winning this war and, maybe more importantly, now that we have come to the first phase of this hand-off, handing off this country to a new government, a government that is led by people who are responsive to their constituents, that means to the Iraqi people, with a military that will respond to a civilian leadership; and maybe it will not be a Jeffersonian democracy, and it will not have all of the complex attributes that a country that has been free for hundreds of years has. But, hopefully, it will be a country where the average guy has a modicum of freedom and protection, like freedom of speech, freedom to come and go, freedom to buy or sell, freedom to know that somebody is not going to knock on your door in the middle of the night and take you on a bus to the killing fields and dig a trench and execute you and push you into it. So, hopefully, we are going to turn this country over to a government and a military, a new military that we are standing up, which will be strong enough to back that government and be responsible to that civilian government. And the United States, which is much chastened by the rest of the world, just as Ronald Reagan was chastened by the rest of the world when he took on the Soviet Union for them, and when he freed literally hundreds of millions of people, all we are asking of the people of Iraq is this: be free. Be nice to each other. Be representative if you are in government. Be responsive to what your people want. Be good to each other. Have a rule of law. Have a court system that works. Have an education system that works. Have economic opportunities so a guy with a good idea and a machine shop can make some money. Very basic, simple things. Arguing against that, of course, are our so-called allies who really have not been our allies in many cases. The French, for example, are not our allies. The French have, on occasion, been very strong, stood strongly with the United States. Certainly they did when our people were shedding our blood at Normandy. The French liked us then. We have Mr. Lafayette gazing at us from his framed picture here on the House floor. We sure remember him. We remember those allies in those early days, and also in World War II and, of course, the French have contingents fighting terrorism in other areas. But the idea that the French would not agree with us to get rid of a man who left all of those Kurdish mothers killed with poison gas with their babies laying across that hillside, or gunning down people in wholesale quantities and pushing them with bulldozers into open graves, or taking people who he suspected of having done things against the State and having their arms removed from them, that prison, and having schoolchildren who wrote graffiti on the blackboard ``Saddam Hussein is a bad guy'' taken out, schoolchildren, and hanged from the neck until they are dead, certainly the French would agree with us that that is the kind of a government you want to change. And certainly the Russians should agree with us that that is the kind of government that you want to change. Now, maybe they will not agree with us; maybe they do not agree with us. I am just reminded that when we hit Mr. Qadhafi in the days when Ronald Reagan was then called a cowboy by the left, hit Mr. Qadhafi in those days when Qadhafi's agents have bombed Americans in Germany, a terrorist act, and we flew a responsive aircraft, we flew our bomber aircraft out of Heathrow in England, I remember Maggie Thatcher stood with us. And when she stood with us, even a majority of the British people were right on the bubble as to whether or not they should support us because they thought this might bring trouble on them, but Maggie Thatcher stood with us. But when we flew over France with our bombing runs, we had to go around France, because France, even then, did not like our actions, and this particular action against a terrorist who I think they felt they could deal with, Mr. Qadhafi, so they told our planes not to cross their soil. That was not under George Bush; that was under Ronald Reagan. Do my colleagues know what Ronald Reagan did? He flew those planes right through the Gulf of Sidra and he flew a couple of cruise missiles right down to meet Mr. Qadhafi and he changed his attitude. Maybe that change of attitude is going to result in new openings in Libya. Other actions that Mr. Qadhafi has taken lately would indicate maybe it is not. But the point is that that President stood strong against lots of criticism back here from the left and lots of criticism from allies like the French, but he did the right thing. This President is doing the right thing, and we are on the verge now of making this hand-off. We are going to have elections in December. It is going to be a rough, tough, difficult road. We drove that steel column up through Baghdad very quickly and did it in what I think was a historically effective manner. This occupation is a tough occupation. It is always tough when you have to provide a shield behind which a new government can knit itself together and that is what we are having to do. We have to provide that shield. That shield has vulnerability. When you are out there shielding people, you have vulnerability just when we have seen when they bombed U.S. headquarters; they have bombed hospitals; they have bombed lots of places where people are doing good things but we will continue to provide that shields until we make this hand-off. I will just say one thing to the gentleman that we have learned in these United States that freedom is not free. It is also not guaranteed and freedom is not going to be guaranteed for the Iraqi people either. We are going to give them their freedom and a running start. They will have to have some grit to maintain that freedom. They have lots of enemies in the neighborhood. I hope they make it because we put an enormous investment, an investment like the gunnery sergeant who is in that particular citation. In fact, if the gentleman will look at that, is that for the Navy Cross or the Silver Star?

Mr. HUNTER. There are lots of folks who have given a great deal, not just for our country, but for Iraq; and it is a very, very important thing that the Iraqi people take hold and have discipline and have tenacity and have toughness and grab hold of this idea of freedom and evolve that idea, that policy, that desire into a Nation that can endure, that will have a good relationship with the United States. I thank the gentleman for taking out this time and I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), who is just a great contributor to these discussions for letting me talk about Iraq.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for reading that citation and so we have laid out for Gunny Sergeant Bohr's family at least publication of his service to our country and to our flag that will never make the front page of The Washington Post because unless he denies sugar for the tea of detainees at Guantanamo, he will not merit that kind of attention; but we have literally, again, 16,000 Bronze Stars were earned, and all those are not earned for valor. All Silver Stars are earned for valor. We have got a picture, and I would ask the gentleman if he could hold that picture up. That is the picture of a GI giving some stuff to some kids. That is the story of the American GI. The Marines right now, they went up and got in battle at Fallujah, but you know what they brought to Fallujah? They brought soccer balls to Fallujah because they wanted to help people and to be good and American GIs are good to people. I am reminded in the days when the liberals were talking about how Vietnam hated us and just wanted us out and if we would just get out of there, by golly, the Viet Cong and the MVA could create a people's paradise. When the GIs left Vietnam, about half that country tried to swim after us; and for years after that, they would get out and push off in a leaky shrimp boat into the South China Sea, some of them to be capsized and drowned, a few of them to make refugee camps like the one in Hong Kong. I am kind of reminded of Senator Kerry, meeting in Paris with the North Vietnamese leaders must have felt strongly they were on the right side of this thing. I am reminded that when those people pushed off in those leaky shrimp boats and got to Hong Kong and later were forcibly repatriated to what was described as the People's Paradise of Communist Vietnam, if you look at the photographs of those refugees being taken back to so-called people's paradise, you will notice that many of them were shrieking and crying and holding on to the chain link of the detaining facility. They had to be sedated and forcibly removed from that squalid refugee camp because that squalid refugee camp in Hong Kong meant one thing to them that they would never see in Vietnam. It meant freedom, and that is the real story of the American presence in Vietnam. It is also the story of the American presence in Tokyo. After World War II, we had the capability of doing anything we wanted to the Japanese people, and the warlords of Japan told their people to expect us to be as bad to them as they had been to the rest of the world, when they raped and killed over 100,000 people in Manking, China; when they beheaded many of our American captives; killed a third of our POWs. Yet American GIs walked down the streets of Tokyo and handed out Hershey bars to the kids, and there were almost no incidents of mistreatment of civilians by Americans. Once again, if you take that drop in the bucket, that one group of people that did wrong at Abu Ghraib and match them against the 300,000 GIs who did right, it should not dominate 127 articles out of one paper alone. So I thank my friend for letting me ramble on here. I think we have had a good discussion. I would like to hear his closing thoughts.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4323) to amend title 10, United States Code, to provide rapid acquisition authority to the Secretary of Defense to respond to combat emergencies.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on the bill under consideration.