Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized on the floor of the United States Congress, and have this opportunity to address you on the issues that I think are important to this great country, this great country that all of us on the floor of this Chamber, all 435 of us, love so much and so desperately try to do our best to represent. Just a reflection upon the conclusion of the remarks made by the folks ahead of me in the previous hour and seeking to go to the new C words of cooperation and coming together. It is quite incongruous for me to try to understand how that would be when 1 or 2 hours a night there can be a relentless drumbeat challenging the motives, the integrity, the character and the intelligence, the planning and the convictions of the entire team over here on the Republican side of the aisle. In fact, I said Republican here, and that is the first time that word has been said on this floor in over an hour that did not sound like a word that was based on some type of profane term. This has gone on day after day, hour after hour, week after week, again relentlessly trying to undermine the hard work being done by the people here in the trenches, doing the work out on the floor, in committee, and behind the scenes. There is an awful lot that goes on behind every one of those office doors in Congress. Many, many things are happening behind those doors; the staff that multiplies the efforts of the Member, the grapevine that is out here feeding this information; the network; the information- gathering process, the analysis of that; the input that comes from our constituents, and the trips back home of many of us every weekend to get our feet on the ground and look our constituents in the eye and listen to them to hear what they have to say. I am one of those people that I am pledged to listen. I am pledged to hear what they have for input. But I am also pledged to owe my constituents my best judgment. My best judgment includes, if I happen to disagree with them, but I will absolutely lay out the case as to why and hear their rebuttal. So far we have had a pretty good working relationship over the years that I have had the privilege to serve here, Mr. Speaker. Yet this undermining of our national effort that goes on continually is not conducive to coming together. It is not conducive to cooperation. It is not conducive to comity. It is not conducive to any type of cooperation that I can think of. It draws a bright line and drives a wedge between the two parties. We should try to find things we can agree on. I heard the gentlewoman from Florida say there were only a handful of things when she was in the State legislature in Florida that she disagreed with, and that the two parties disagreed with, and the rest of that they came together and found common ground. Well, I am wondering if that was the case. I have served in the State legislature myself, Mr. Speaker, and I did not find that every one on the other side of the aisle sat their alarm in the morning, got up and read the newspaper to figure out what they could do to attack the other side. I did not see the State legislators focus their energies from the first sunup in the morning to try to identify what they could do to undermine the other side. They actually came to work to try to find how they could come together. They tried to find common ground and how to move their State forward. That is the way it was in Iowa, and I suspect that is how it was in Florida, at least I have not heard otherwise. That is not the way it has become in this United States Congress. In fact, in the time I have been here, this is as partisan as I have ever seen it. There is as much partisan disagreement as I have ever seen. An example might be our trade agreements, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement would be one. There was a time when we negotiated trade agreements and they were bipartisan agreements. There was a good sized group of Members from the Democratic side of the aisle that would support a free trade agreement. They believed in free enterprise. They believed in world trade. They knew if we traded with other countries, that whenever you make a deal with anyone, whenever it comes to free enterprise, if you trade a dollar with one entity or two or more entities, everybody involved in that circle all has to have profit. It is good for all of us, and that is why we agree to those trade agreements. But it has become a sharp, bright-line partisan issue. Many, many more things have become partisan here in the last couple of years that, to my recollection, were not. And so to argue for cooperation is one thing, but the actions and the words over the months of this relentless effort here down on the floor have done the exact opposite. They have driven a wedge between us, Mr. Speaker. So that means we have to try to move this Nation forward sometimes without the help of the people on the other side of the aisle, and then it turns into a partisan debate. It also forces us to do the best we can with the votes we have to move this Nation forward. So a free trade agreement is one thing. This Nation has a large economy and we can recover from a few mistakes and the few difficulties that come with partisan opposition to some of those things that were, before this, bipartisan. But when it comes to a time of war, when it comes to a time that our United States military is deployed overseas and their lives are on the line 24/7, and have been ever since March of 2003; at a time when the destiny of the world hangs in the balance; at a time when the presence of the United States in the Middle East itself has brought Lebanon towards freedom, and caused Qaddafi in Libya to turn over all his hold cards, to play his cards face up on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, which had developed far ahead of where we thought it was, but Qaddafi contacted us and said I want to drop this. I do not want to play this game any more. Our presence in the Middle East meant too much. The threat was so great, he figured we would find out about his weapons and go eliminate his weapons, so he decided he would simply cease to develop them and eliminate the foundations he had built for those weapons of mass destruction. That came because the United States has a positive image in the world, in spite of the message that comes from this other side of the aisle. I have stood here on this floor, Mr. Speaker, for the third time, this is the third hour I have initiated to come down here and talk about the President's agenda, the Commander in Chief's agenda, the mission of our troops and the destiny of the entire world that is part of this plan that has been laid out by President Bush. I laid this out last night, Mr. Speaker, and I spent some time doing it in not necessarily a concise fashion, but a thorough fashion. And anybody that was listening should have understood. I walked off this floor, perhaps after 10 o'clock last night, and another hour of this relentless criticism flowed down here again, and they picked up the same old drumsticks and began beating the same old drum with the same old song: WMD, WMD, WMD. Weapons of mass destruction. Everything that goes on is illegitimate because, according to them, it has been proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, you would think that anybody that arrived in this Congress and went through the crucible and testing process and was elected to owe their best judgment to their constituents, as I do, would know one of the most simple principles of rational logic, and you do not have to be a Rhodes Scholar or a Harvard lawyer to know this, but many are and still do not know this; that you cannot prove a negative. Yet they continually say it has been proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction. I would say tell that to the people up there in the region of Kirkuk and the area that is Kurdistan. Tell that to the swamp Arabs in the south; those that have lost perhaps 75 percent or more of their population because of the attacks of Saddam Hussein. Try and carry on this argument as the trial of Saddam Hussein goes on and this 140 or so people that he allegedly murdered in the one small city because of the assassination attempt on him. When that becomes the larger, there will be 180,000 or more deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein and the people who took orders from Saddam Hussein. In fact, as I was in Baghdad in the month of August, I met with the judges that are trying Saddam Hussein today, and we talked about the upcoming trial. They could not be specific about it, in order to protect the integrity of the system, but I did understand and learn in that room that the charges of killing 180,000 people that are charged against the person whom we know, or are familiar with his moniker as Chemical Ali, that he protested and said, that is not true, I did not kill more than 100,000 people. It was not 180,000 people. So how do you kill 180,000, or even 100,000 people, which is apparently the confession of Chemical Ali, how do you do that without weapons of mass destruction? How do you convince someone who lost their family in a gas attack in Halabja that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction? I met a young lady that was raised up there near Kirkuk, in an area I will call Kurkistan, about an hour from Kirkuk. She has a friend who survived that gas attack in Halabja. He was able to get on a tractor and maybe went upwind and got away from it somehow and survived. A random act, I am sure, that kept him alive, and he probably wonders why he survived and not his family. His family was all wiped out in this. I would submit that you could take that individual or any other survivors that are there, and if they could come down on this floor and listen to this, I think they would plug their ears. They would plug their ears because they would not know how to react to this relentless drumbeat of ``there were no weapons of mass destruction.'' Well, what caused all those deaths? Why is Saddam Hussein on trial? Why are there 180,000 people that have died and that are part of these court records and which will be part of this prosecution as it unfolds? Why does Chemical Ali say ``I did not kill any more than 100,000. I was not so bad.'' That is his defense? There are more deaths than that. There are hundreds of thousands of deaths, and some of the Members of Congress have been to the mass graves. I have not seen those mass graves. I have been to Iraq a number of times, but I have not seen the graves. But I have seen the pictures, seen the film, and I have read the reports and I have talked to the people that have been there. I cannot be convinced that anyone can kill that many people without weapons of mass destruction. Hitler could not. Neither could Saddam Hussein. So this drumbeat of no WMD, no WMD. Well, the King law of physics is everything has to be somewhere. And since we do not know where it is, it has to still be somewhere. If you find something you lost, it is always in the last place you looked. So perhaps we just have not looked in the last place yet. Perhaps it is buried in Iraq. Perhaps it has gone to Syria. We know before the Desert Storm operations in 1991, Saddam Hussein took his fighter jets and flew those to Iran. I remember the flight pattern that showed those jets going up and landing. I have never gotten a report that they ever came back. It may be that the ayatollahs in Iran kept them and maybe thought this is a nice way for us to get even for the war we had in the 1980s. He has a modus operandi of spiriting things out of the country when conflict is imminent. So if he would fly the MiGs out of Iraq into Iran, why would people not presume that he would haul weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq into perhaps Syria, or why would they think that he would not bury those weapons of mass destruction when, in fact, we discovered a fully operational MiG-29 buried in the desert, not because of any intelligence report, not because of some detector, not because David Kay was over there scouring that countryside for weapons. No, we found that fully operational MiG-29 because the wind blew the sand off the tail fin. They buried it in the desert. So he has an MO of bearing weapons and spiriting them out of the country when times get tough. Why would we presume that he did not do one or the other or both? We know everything has to be someplace. You cannot prove a negative. No one can honestly say with a rational mind that there were no weapons of mass destruction, because we know he used them at least 11 times. There are survivors from those attacks. The only way a rational person could contend there were not weapons of mass destruction would be to believe that Saddam Hussein used his last canister of gas on the Kurds and simply depleted his inventory and he decided not to rebuild it, but he decided to keep a system in place so he could reestablish that inventory any time he chose. He kept the system in place for both chemical and biological weapons. We know that. That is all in the David Kay record and the Duelfer Report. It is the same report that came to this Congress that is being quoted by the other people that says it proved that they had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no proof that there were no weapons of mass destruction. What there was not was a great big warehouse full of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, we found some canisters of nerve gas and we found munitions designed for gas, small quantities, not great warehouses. Out of the million tons of munitions that we found in Iraq, some of them were weapons of mass destruction components. Not in large volume. If there had been, we would have stacked them all up in the middle of a warehouse and brought in the inspectors, and maybe there would be a different story on this part. But I would contend if that were the case, if there had been warehouses of weapons of mass destruction there, then these people who are continually pulling down our national spirit every night with this massive, relentless pounding of pessimism, and they need to get away from the ``p'' words over there and get to the optimistic words, they would have moved the bar. They would have raised the bar and said maybe there were weapons of mass destruction, but. And I do not know their argument. I cannot think like they do; and I am grateful I cannot. But they would have raised the bar. Mr. Speaker, I submit this: if we ever get them now to set the standard on how to define a victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, if we could compel them to set a standard, then you would see that it would be such a high bar that they would know it could never be achieved. They would always find a way to define themselves away from that high bar because they will never admit that the President of the United States made a decision that could result in something that would be a fantastic result, a noble thing for this country to do, and an ultimate result that freed 50 million people and has every prospect of freeing hundreds of millions more throughout the Arab world, which is the only formula for ever getting to a victory on this war on terror. No, they say we are in this war on terror and they will keep attacking us until we get out of the Middle East. We were not in the Middle East when we were attacked on September 11. A couple other principles, Mr. Speaker. Since there was not a warehouse full of weapons of mass destruction that we have yet identified, and they make the allegation that they did not exist and do not seem to be quite up to that 8th grade level of ``you cannot prove a negative,'' since that seems to be the standard, what is wrong with liberating 50 million people, 25 million in Afghanistan and 25 million in Iraq? That is a noble thing. Is that not something that the United States has done throughout history? Do they not know that the Civil War was fought to save the Union? Do they not know that Abraham Lincoln's effort was to keep this Union intact? Do we not call it the war to free the slaves? Did we not liberate every black American, and it took a while to get it right, and we are still working on getting some of those pieces right. Do we call it the war to free the Union? No we call it the war to free the slaves. That was the result of the war. It was a noble thing. I will pick up some of these other issues, Mr. Speaker, and I would like to go back to that; but I see my colleagues here on the floor, and I wonder if maybe the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is prepared to speak.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments. He did bring up another war that I did not include in this when he mentioned the Cold War. The Cold War went on for perhaps 45 years, beginning shortly after World War II and ending, I am going to say, November 9, 1989, when the wall went down in Berlin. And it took about 2, 2\1/2\ years for freedom to echo all the way across Eastern Europe. But the liberation that took place at the culmination at the Cold War, and it was a glorious victory. We say a bloodless victory, and I have stood on this floor and called it a bloodless victory. But it was not without price. The mutually assured destruction, the millions of men and women that needed to be mobilized, the capital that had to be poured into the research and development to be ahead of the Soviet Union it came to the arms race, and not just the price in treasure but the price in blood as well. There is a price in blood as a price to be ready, Mr. Speaker, and we do not often talk about it. I asked the Pentagon to put some numbers together for me so I had a sense of that. I wanted to know how many of our soldiers in uniform die in the line of duty not at the cause of combat but perhaps at the cause of an accident, a training accident, for example, an on-duty accident, an in uniform on-duty accident. And I had them look back through a whole number of years, and I put that together and I boiled it down into a figure that I could at least commit to memory so that I could put it into proportion and talk about it in a way that made sense. The number that they gave me worked out to be an average of 505 American lives lost every year during peaceable activities in uniform, deaths as a price to be ready to go into combat. Five hundred and five Americans a year. Now, that is the average that takes place during the 1990s up until the year 2001. The average prior to that, during the Cold War, I do not know that number, and their records were not very available. But I would suspect it would be greater, not less because we have more safety, not less, and we had more people in uniform, not less. But I took that number and just said 500 a year, and as the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) was talking, I multiplied it across the 45 years of the Cold War. And the number I came up with was 22,500 American lives. That gives us a sense of the magnitude of the price of winning the Cold War, not to add the treasure. That is the blood. That is the sacrifice. There is a price to be ready. There is another whole price out here that is paid for our freedom that is never acknowledged by the pessimists on the other side of the aisle, and that is that price to be ready. And it is measured in this victory in the Cold War, 22,500 lives perhaps. A quick scratch here on the paper is all that supports that statement and some good information to support it. But with that number of lives, hundreds of millions of people were liberated in the aftermath of the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain descended down across Europe and those people lived for 45 years behind the Iron Curtain in a kind of a world where we were in full technicolor and they were living in black and white, it gives us a sense of how bad it was where they did not have free enterprise, did not have opportunity, did not have freedom. And today they do. And, by the way, the most recent people who have achieved freedom are the ones that cherish it the most. They are the ones that are the most eager to be part of our coalition forces in Iraq to defend the freedom of the Iraqi people. So this price for freedom has been great, but the value has been astonishing. The pessimism on the other side of the aisle has been stupendous. And I have brought some posters along to talk about what happens when we send a pessimistic message from this Congress; from the leaders of this country; from the people who are viewed, at least on the other side of the ocean, as the quasi-leaders of the United States of America. And I will start with Muqtada al-Sadr. This individual here, Mr. Speaker, decided to put his own militia together, Sadr City, Baghdad, in a region south of Baghdad. And his militia attacked coalition troops, American troops. His militia did not fair very well, and it took some really severe, and he has decided a few times that he kind of likes getting involved in politics as opposed to being a general of a militia because it is far less hazardous to be in politics there in Iraq. But I was sitting in Kuwait City on one of my trips over there at night, waiting to go into Iraq early the next morning. I turned the television on to al-Jazeera TV. I always, when I am in a foreign country, want to know what is going on; so I turn on the local channel. Al-Jazeera is the local channel for the Arab world. And there in Arabic out of his mouth came, with English subtitles, what I will never forget. And this is the date that I was sitting in that hotel room, June 11, 2004, al-Jazeera: ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.'' Where does Muqtada al-Sadr get an idea like that? What encourages him to continue the insurgency and the attacks on Americans and the recruitment of his people and his militia? What encourages him to raise the money and build the bombs and do the things that they have done? And this is not the worst enemy we have over there, by the way. He is not the biggest demon that we have. But it was just the circumstance that I heard this from the television screen while I was in Kuwait. Where does he get his motivation? Why does he think this is true? Well, there is the legacy of Vietnam. And these people over here every night that are dragging down our administration and undermining our military are the political descendants of the ones that dragged down our devotion to our military and our support for them during the Vietnam era. In the aftermath of Vietnam when Congress voted to shut off all funding for all military efforts in all of South Vietnam and ground every airplane that was flying air cover over the South Vietnamese, and a few months later, we saw the North Vietnamese army sweep through there, and we were lifting people off the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Why? Not because the South Vietnamese would not fight any longer but because the will and the commitment to support them disappeared over here, and the rug was jerked out from underneath not just our military but underneath the military of South Vietnam. And in the aftermath, they say they saved lives. We know 3 million people died in that part of the world in the aftermath of not keeping our commitment with the South Vietnamese military. That message resounds today and echoes throughout the Middle East, echoes throughout al Qaeda. ``The Americans will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu.'' Is that hard to figure out, then? They watch American TV too. I imagine they turn on C-SPAN and watch this every night and cheer and pop their popcorn and they have a good time seeing that their argument is being supported on the floor of this Congress every night for 1 or 2 hours. They build more bombs, not less, Mr. Speaker. That puts American soldiers' lives at risk. Bombs cost American soldiers lives. That is on the conscience of the people that are leading this country in that wrong direction. Now, on the chance that one might think that this is a coincidence that Muqtada al-Sadr just picked up this Vietnam idea on his own, maybe he read a comic book somewhere or watched C-SPAN or watched the Congress here and our Special Orders. Here is a statement made by Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second in command. He is al Qaeda. He is a more dangerous enemy than Muqtada al-Sadr. In February of 2004, in a letter to al Qaeda, he wrote: ``The collapse of American power in Vietnam,'' they ran and left. It sent a message, did it not, to Zawahiri? We know it sent a message to Osama bin Laden. It sent a message to Muqtada al-Sadr. It sent a message also to other leaders of al Qaeda. It gave them hope. It gave them spirit. It caused them to have more energy, more courage, more will, more resourcefulness to attack coalition troops and to attack Americans. Is that a hard thing to figure out? If that is a hard thing to figure out, Mr. Speaker, then I need to make this point very, very clear. In all of those wars that Mr. Franks and I talked about throughout this course of history, in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the Second World War, and the Cold War and other wars in between, what are the conditions by which a war is over? Not because somebody over here passes a resolution and says we are going to pick a date on when we are going to be deployed out, the cut-and-run date. We cannot set a date for the end of a war if the war is not finished. Wars are over when the losing party realizes and understands that they have lost. That is how a war gets over. You have got to convince the enemy that they cannot win, and you do that through violence. Yes, all history knows that. But when it is a relentless pounding from the other side of the aisle and the quasi-leaders of the United States of America and they stand up here and say the war cannot be won, people like Zawahiri, Muqtada al-Sadr, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, do they not hear that message? Is it not something that encourages them? Do they not think that the will of the American people is being broken because they hear that relentless message every single day coming out of this Congress, coming out through the media? In fact, I would suspect that Saddam Hussein probably has a higher opinion of the United States of America than some of our mainstream media do, listening to some of them out there. The pessimistic message that gets pounded out of here, that gets run through the mainstream media, that is supported by some people from the other body, that is supported by other leaders, quasi-leaders in this country, gets through to people like Zawahari, Zarqawi, Muqtada Al- Sadr, Osama bin Laden. If you doubt that, Mr. Speaker, if any one doubts that, I have another poster for you. There he is. The face and the voice of the Democratic Party, the leader of the left. One of the inspirational voices that mobilizes the other party for pessimism, negativism, and attacks. This individual whom we know pretty well, Howard Dean, DNC chairman, spent a lot of time in my home State of Iowa, about a year and a half in there. He was there most of the time going through the counties and the cities. I will grant him, he worked very hard running for President. And this is the picture that I think has been made famous by that mainstream news media that finally did turn on one of their own. I do not think he quite deserved the hit that he took over that. But that frustration from the scream, his failure to win the caucuses in Iowa and his failure to win the nomination on through that process did not really come from the scream. The scream was a result of, but the people who met him in the coffee shops and the living rooms understood the real man here, the man here that says, ``The idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong.'' Do you not think these other people I put up here see this man as a leader of the United States of America, the voice of the Democratic Party, the almost-majority in the House of Representatives? Of course they do. And they hear this message: the idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong. Now, if you had seen your troops decimated like al Qaeda has, if you had watched 3,000 of them disappear from your ability to utilize them in combat, in battle, 3,000 every month, those that are either killed or captured, and you do not see that in the mainstream news media, that is a number that does not come out here anywhere that I can find. But I can tell you that that is the number that has been the average over the last several months, 3,000 of the enemy off the streets, killed and captured. So that has got to be dispiriting to them. We are losing casualties. It hurts us. It breaks the confidence of the people on the other side of the aisle. What would our confidence be if it were 3,000 of ours lost every month instead of the numbers that we are facing today? So what happens? This man stands up and says the idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong. Well, if you are all beaten down after your 3,000th casualty for the month, and if you are looking for some optimism, here is the place to go. There are plenty of voices over here that bring this optimism for the other side. They keep mentioning the Vietnam War. That is the only war that the liberals ever won; they just won it for the wrong side, Mr. Speaker, and are trying to win another one. They have got so much invested in failure in Iraq, they could not abide by that. So I would ask this other side of the aisle, define victory. I will define it. We have had this sequence of it that took place. We listened to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) talk about being in Iraq during the elections, the first free elections in January, with the purple fingers in air, 8\1/2\ million Iraqis voted. We went through sequence of liberations, martial law, a Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer and handed over to a civilian government until such time as they could set up the elections, which they did in January, and they elected then a provisional parliament, an interim temporary parliament whose job it was to write the Constitution. On October 15 then they ratified their Constitution. And 10 days later we had leaders of this country that were speaking against the effort and undermining their freedom. And now here we are just a few days from a real election in Iraq that finally culminates this whole process and gives them a legitimate sovereignty in Iraq, one that will select a prime minister, gives them the ability now to take this massive amount of oil wealth that they have, market some oil contracts for development so that they can start to get this cash-flow coming back into Iraq, lift that country up. They are just dilapidated and depreciated from 35 years of neglect. We have given them a little shot in the arm, $18.5 billion. The number was wrong over here, by the way, last night. It was not 87 billion that went in there to rebuild Iraq. It was 18.5. The balance was for the military. But 18.5 billion of that, 12\1/2\ the Army invested, and the balance of that was scattered through some other entities. That was like the down payment on your house that gets them started. They will be certified December 15. There is hope. There is freedom. We must stick it out.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that narrative. I wanted to be there that day. I was not able to set the trip up to make it work; but I recognize, as you clearly did and Mr. Shays clearly did, that was the best place in the world to be on that day.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman's contribution to this debate. And you have really, you set the tone, I think, that I am going to need to have to carry out the balance of this time that we have here. I think too about parts of history and how far back we go and how our military set such a tradition for so many years. And as I stepped away from this microphone the last time, I had taken us to this point, I think I made the point that it cannot be stated that there were no weapons of mass destruction and be rational about it, because you cannot prove a negative. And we know that they existed. So setting that argument aside, I will just say when it comes out, it is bogus, they will pound on it until they get embarrassed and embarrass themselves. So we will hear it more. We will hear it every night down here. But one of the things that I can move along to, maybe expand this discussion a little bit is to go back then to that point that I was making earlier, that point about why we went to war in the civil war and what the objective of that war was. Now, the objective was to save the union. And anything that you read about Lincoln in his earlier debates and his efforts and his decisions that he made along that process, it was a super human effort all targeted to save the union. And part of freeing the slaves, yes, it was something that was in his heart. He conceded that Dred Scott was actually a constitutional decision, but we needed to amend the constitution to eliminate slavery. Lincoln had so much respect for the constitution that he made that point. But he had so much respect for the binding nature of our Constitution that it was an irrevocable agreement between the States, that he was willing to stay at war and the cost in that civil war was over 600,000 American lives, over 600,000 American lives at a time when our population was perhaps a third of what it is today or less. So that was the greatest loss of humanity ever in a conflict in this country, and yet, he stuck to the central purpose, save the union, save the union, save the union. In 1863, the subject came up on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. A great and powerful leader and one of the most profound stories of leadership that I have ever read throughout history comes back to the question, as he sat down with his cabinet, and there was the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves, and he asked his cabinet, gentlemen, what say you? And they started on his left and it went around the table at the cabinet table and the first member of his cabinet said Mr. President, I advise you do not sign it, and here are the reasons why. And the second and the third and the fourth and so on until it got around to the last member of the cabinet. And each member of the cabinet said, Mr. President, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Some of the reasons were we are at this to save the union. Some other, well do not confuse the issue. Some of them were political reasons of the time that I do not have a feel for today. But as President Lincoln, in his singular motivation to save that union, listened to their recommendation, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, well, gentlemen, the ayes have it. And he stepped forward with great courage and leadership and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He did not really free anybody south of the Mason Dixon line because we did not have jurisdiction down there at the time. We were at war with the South. It didn't really free anybody north of the Mason Dixon line because the people north of the line were free. But what it did is it set up an image and a goal and a dream and it mobilized some people that had been mobilizes for a long time to abolish slavery, and it became historically, looking back on that, now we are taught we fought the civil war to free the slaves. So how can it be that here we are today, when a civil war began to save the union, it ended to save the union, but history interpreted it to mean that it was about the freedom of slavery, which I absolutely think it was worth the price. How can we sit here today and say we did not find mass quantities, great warehouses full of weapons of mass destruction, therefore all the rest of this is illegitimate. When did the United States decide that we did not free people? When did we decide that liberation of humanity was not a worthy cause? When did we decide that going to war, if it had multiple reasons, if one of those reasons did not meet your standard over here on the other side of the aisle, then all the rest of it is illegitimate. There were plenty of reasons and whole constellations of reasons to go into Iraq and, in fact, there really was not a choice. If you sit down and analyze the circumstances at the time, there really was not a choice. Saddam Hussein did not give President Bush a choice. And I think, well, I do not know what Saddam was actually thinking. But if we went to the war to save the union in the Civil War and it became to free the slaves, and by the way, in about 1898, when the USS Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor, it is still at the bottom of that harbor, by the way, and the mast and the anchor are out here at Arlington Cemetery. But the Maine is at the bottom of the harbor. And we went to war against the Spaniards because, and history can reanalyze this, we believed that we were attacked by the Spaniards and the ship was scuttled in a hostile act and that triggered the Spanish American War. Sure, there was tensions that brought that about and you can argue about the details. Some will say that the USS Maine really was not sunk by a hostile attack. Some will say it was an explosion in the magazine that sunk it to the bottom of Havana harbor. Some will say it was a pretext for war. We went to war just the same and defeated the Spanish in the Spanish American War that began in 1898. And I will tell you that one of the things we did as a result of that war, we went to the Philippines. Now, was that consistent with the reason for the war in the first place? Was there something about sinking the Maine down there in Havana Harbor that would cause us to send the Marines to the Philippines? Well, you can argue that either way too, but I can tell you that I listened to a speech by President Arroyo of the Philippines a couple of 3 years ago here in Washington, D.C. at a hotel. She said thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for bringing us freedom. Thank you for teaching us your free enterprise, your way of life, your rule of law. Thank you for sending the missionaries over here that made us a Christian Nation. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers to the Philippines so that we would learn your way of life and the American values and we could learn English. And English is the national language of business and commerce. And today, 1.6 million Filipinos go throughout the world. They can get a job about wherever they want to because they have the language skills that are universal. They send their money back to the Philippines. A result of a detonation of an explosion in the hull of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 where it sits at the bottom of that harbor yet today. The result are free people in the Philippines. When did the United States give up on liberating a people? When did we give up on our culture and our way of life and projecting that way of life throughout the world? When did we give up on our legacy of western civilization? Whose idea is that, to cut and run because what? The reasons that you think maybe were what justified it do not quite uphold the way you would analyze that today. What kind of idea is that? What were the circumstances when we were attacked by Pearl Harbor? And by the way, September 11, 2001, I remember where I was, I was on the road on my way up to a county fair. My wife called me on the phone and said turn on the radio, there has been a plane that crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I turned on the radio and a few minutes later a second plane crashed into the Twin Towers. And the individual that was riding with me was a World War II veteran and the first words out of his mouth were Pearl Harbor. I will never forget that tone in his voice. The second plane into the Twin Towers made it clear it was not an aerial accident. It was a planned, stealth attack against civilians in the United States of America, the worst attack ever on our soil, and it was not against a military installation. It was against civilians. Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor happened December 7, 1941. It was the anniversary just a couple of days ago, Mr. Speaker. We went to war. We declared unconditional war against our enemies, and a few days later, Hitler declared war on us from Europe. Now we were involved in a two-front war. What was the objective of our declaring war on the Japanese in the first place? Unconditional war, that it would be total and unconditional surrender of the Japanese. Then we found ourselves in Europe, fighting a two-front war, which the Germans had found was not very successful, but for the United States it has been. We put troops on the east, we put troops in the west and in the South Pacific. And we were successful on both fronts of that war. Was there a clamor in this country at the time to say we were attacked at Pearl Harbor; what are we doing fighting Germans? What was the idea of that? And, by the way, all the people that were liberated around this globe as a result of the Second World War are all beneficiaries. Look at the Japanese today, their culture, their economy, their prosperity. The size of their economy compared with the rest of the countries' in the world is fantastic considering the population and the limitations that they have geographically living on that island. They are well off today as a country, and a big part of that has been the result of the reconstruction afterwards and the liberation that came to them. They were living under an imperialistic Japan. So this idea that the American people do not liberate anyone, that freedom is not a goal of a war is just simply false throughout history. And there are other examples throughout history, and I am wondering if the gentleman from Arizona might have one to add to that. I noticed the look in his eye. I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address this Chamber and appreciate the opportunity for some dialogue with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle and particularly Uncle Bill from Massachusetts whom I did yield to the last time when he asked me, and so we have a little engagement going. I think it is constructive dialogue that we have. I know we disagree often. We are looking for the best thing for this country all together, Mr. Speaker, and disagree with the method of how we get there, and sometimes we disagree with our definition and analysis of how we approach these things. So to begin my hour, Mr. Speaker, I would like to address some of the concerns that were raised in this previous hour, many of which I did not hear in great detail, some of which the philosophy I heard ad infinitum here one or 2 hours a night after our session every week for the last months. One of the issues that came up, Mr. Speaker, was the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and yes, I have been to Iraq. I have been there three times. The last time there was I came back the latter part of August, and I make it a point to go to the places where some of the other Members of Congress have not gone. I make it a point to find soldiers there, generally I ask for Iowans, anybody here from Iowa. We sit down and talk, and I meet with people all the way up the line to the top brass and also to the U.S. ambassador, representatives of the Iraqi government. I have tracked this through the history of the liberation of Iraq and on through to this point that we are today. It saddens me a great deal, Mr. Speaker, to hear some of the leaders of the party on the other side and a very small number of people on my side of the aisle who have lost their faith, lost their faith in their own judgment, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we had this debate here in this Congress in the fall of 2002, and this Congress voted by a solid majority to endorse the President's authority to use force to enforce the resolution of the United Nations in Iraq. Those resolutions had to be enforced, Mr. Speaker, and without that, there would have been no teeth whatsoever to the United Nations. Our President did that. We knew that was going to be the case. We knew when the debate took place in this Chamber that there was going to be a majority decision. I would like to think when we meet here to have these debates, Mr. Speaker, that we stick with the decision of the majority. That is the will of this body. When the will of this body is reflected and the will of the Senate is reflected and that resolution makes its way to the White House, where statutory legislation the President signs it, if it is a resolution the President takes account of the judgment of the House of Representatives and the judgment of the Senate. The judgment of the House and the judgment of the Senate was to endorse the President, the commander-in-chief, and grant him the endorsement of Congress to use authority to enforce the United Nations resolutions, particularly 1441. The President did that. There is a long argument as to why he did not have an alternative, and our troops went into Afghanistan. Our troops went into Iraq and liberated 50 million people, and they are grateful today, extraordinarily grateful today, to have that opportunity to be free. If anyone doubts that, look back in your mind's eye to last January when the Iraqis went to the polls to elect their interim parliament. Eight to 8.5 million of the Iraqis went to the polls to vote, and they voted and they dipped their finger in the purple ink. They proudly and they, in fact, defiantly marched out of there with their purple fingers in the air. When they were threatened with their very lives for going to the polls to vote in that January, there were 108 attacks on the polling booths in Iraq by some suicide bombers, all terrorists, trying to intimidate the entire country from voicing their voice of freedom, their voice of directing their national destiny through their elected leaders. Yet, they went to the polls and defied all of those threats and, in fact, upset the predictions from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. So the people that did not have faith that there could be legitimate elections in Iraq saw them happen, and those people that were so invested in failure, that they could not abide admitting that there was a success, began to explain it away. Well, we had kind of an election, kind of a legitimacy came out of the mouth of John Kerry. So how much more legitimate can you get when people defy a threat of death to go for their first time and vote for the first time in their lives, and legitimately, their argument can be made the first time in all history on that piece of real estate. They had that courage to take advantage of that opportunity, and they voted in greater numbers in percentage-wise than Americans did in the presidential election. Yet, we had people over here that said, well, it is a kind of legitimacy; it really is not a real election; we really do not know how many people that did not participate that would have if somehow or another they believed in the process, had more courage or been less threats on their lives. Yet, they voted in greater numbers than Americans did, and they call it kind of a legitimacy. That was January. October 15, by then this new parliament has written a new Constitution, another milestone, a milestone that set on the calendar a sequence of events that need to take place in order to take Iraqis who lived under tyranny, of murderous torture and tyranny, once that is taken, the resources of the country, and focused it on building palaces for themselves and glorifying their own leadership of Saddam Hussein, at the very expense of the people, a country that spent less than 50 cents per person per year on health care, did not let the girls go to school, that did not allow freedom of speech or press or religion, a country where you could not own a satellite dish or there were not free newspapers or there was not a television station that did not project the very opinion of Saddam Hussein himself, that, today, on a very short period of time of liberation, which really took place in the latter part of March of 2003, now nearly every home, everybody in Iraq has access to satellite TV, which is access to the world. I flew over up in Kurdistan up at Kirkuk, and I looked at the difference. I was over Mosul in October of 2003 and looked down. Two out of three homes had a satellite dish. I flew over the suburbs of Kirkuk up in Kurdistan, and I saw homes there. At each one of the neighboring homes were typical, about two stories, flat roof, many of them had three satellite dishes on one roof. All of those dishes would have been illegal just 3 years ago, Mr. Speaker, along with the mobile phones that are there, the cell phones that now are replete all across Iraq. There is something like, and I get conflicting numbers, somewhere between 100 and 170 new newspapers, some of them printing the real truth where none of them printed the real truth when it was under Saddam's regime. New radio stations that have grown to significant numbers out there, and television stations, the media has gotten out to the people, and some of it is the truth. It is not all the truth. We all know it is not all the truth in this country. One thing we have is the check and balance on our mainstream media, who has a certain desire to destroy our effort over there is the bloggers and the Internet. They do tend to get the truth out, and they are a check and balance. In a free country, you will get that check and balance, but people on that side of the aisle do not have that faith in this new freedom that 25 million people began to realize and appreciate in Iraq, that began the latter part of March of 2003, that freedom the Afghanis have known for a little while before that. Afghanis that had not gone to the polls ever in that place on the globe now have, and they have freedom, and certainly there are uncertainties. Yes, they have enemies. A Nation that has really not known anything but war is not going to be at peace just overnight, and Iraq's had it share of strife. There will be more ahead of us. We have lost 200 Americans in Afghanistan, and we have lost more than 2,000 Americans in Iraq, and their sacrifice is great value. It has great meaning and it is profound, and their conviction and their demonstration of courage and their leadership and their sacrifice will echo throughout the ages, Mr. Speaker. It is going to echo a long ways into the future in a way that never would have happened if we had receded from this challenge; if we had listened to the people on the other side of the aisle that wrung their hands and thought we should not have gone to Afghanistan but could not figure out how to say we should not, and so only one Member voted against going into Afghanistan, and that is all. But we sit there, having lost more than 200 Americans in Afghanistan, and do not hear a peep out of this side. What is the distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq? The difference is between 1,800 American lives. All sacred in my mind. All precious American patriots in my mind. All deserving their legacy for which they paid the ultimate price. All of them deserve our very best, Mr. Speaker. All of them deserve for us to keep the faith, to keep the honor, to keep the pledge, and to keep the commitments that were made in this Chamber in the fall of 2002 when a significant majority voted to endorse giving the President the authority to use force if necessary, and when this Chamber established a policy of regime change in Iraq. Now we are hearing it from the other side, over and over and over again relentlessly. And what is it about? I will submit this: it is about politics. It is about such a hunger and such a lust for power it would tear down the very destiny of the United States and put our American troops at risk because they want to be in the majority. They want the Presidency and they want the majority in the Senate and they want to change the face of America and send us down another direction that is against the will of the American people. But why? Why would someone put our troops at risk for political lust? I do not understand that, Mr. Speaker. I look back in history and I wonder when, when has there ever been a precedent where the well-being of America, when disagreements that we have had in this country did not stop at our shores; when we did not have political campaigns that focused on our economy, on our domestic life and the future of America, but joined together to support our military operations overseas when at time of war. How many of the people over here are saying wrong war, wrong place, wrong time? Howard Dean says a war that cannot be won. John Kerry said wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. Teddy Kennedy said it is a scheme cooked up in Texas. Do they not think that our enemies listen to them? Do they think that our enemies know what we know about them, that they really are not the spokesmen for the foreign policy of the United States of America? They are the naysayers, the critics, and the gadflies. The majority of the American people understand this. We voted in this Chamber when, and I will say the Murtha amendment or the Murtha resolution came up on the floor of this Congress, and that resolution said we should pull out of Iraq immediately. That was the recommendation that was made across the aisle, or at least by the news media. It was not verbatim to the resolution drafted by the individual. We debated that in this Chamber for 3 hours; and when the 3 hours were over and we debated the rule and we debated the resolution, at the end of that 3 hours, Mr. Speaker, the vote went up and three Members of the United States House of Representatives voted to immediately pull out of Iraq. Everyone else, Mr. Speaker, voted to stay the course, voted to support our troops, voted to defend their mission and ratified the authority and the direction that has been given to our military by their Commander in Chief, our President of the United States, George W. Bush. Those are the facts. Yet night after night after blessed night the team comes down here and relentlessly assaults the integrity of the administration, rearranges the facts of history, and seeks to dupe the American people, believing that somehow or another if they can erode the confidence of the American people, they will not have any alternative but to accept these people as their leaders. It is a frustrating thing to watch. But it would be even more extraordinarily frustrating if I did not have so much confidence in the American people and in their judgment. History has shown that in times of difficulty and in times of strife the American people have risen up together and that their judgment is sound. They believe in the principles, the Constitution and individual rights, and in freedom; and they know that freedom is not free. They know intuitively that if we are going to support our troops we must support their mission. We cannot separate the two. We cannot say to a soldier or a marine who puts on that helmet and puts on that uniform and salutes that flag and then goes out and puts their life on the line, that we are for you, but we are against your mission. We can never ask someone to put their life on the line if we do not support their mission. And we have asked them to do that. And duty and honor and country says that they do that, and they do that proudly. But when we look them in the eye, we know it is a dedication. They take their share of the risk. And when the grim reaper visits some of those homes, it is a sad time. And I draw my strength from those families and their belief in this country and in our freedoms and in our patriotism. It is stronger than the belief that we find in the average American household because they understand. One of the reasons they understand, I think, is because they have also imparted those values to their sons and daughters who have gone forth to protect our freedom. When that call has come for them, they have stepped up, and we owe them. We owe them 100 percent full support. We owe them all we can that is due them if we are to respect their memory. We have to give our level best as they fight to preserve these freedoms. Yes, we fight that out on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker; and we fight it out in the debates that take place in the coffee shops, in the workplace, in our churches and schools, and in our homes across this country. But I want the young people to understand that there are certain fundamental truths that we have to stick with; and one of them is that if we are going to support the troops, we must support their mission. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. We cannot undermine their mission and say that we support them. And when we argue that somehow or another there could have been a better plan, and we Monday morning quarterback and look back over 3 years and say, gee, knowing what I know now, this is what the President should have done then. It does not help the cause. When my colleague from Massachusetts seeks to discuss these issues in open hearings, I will not deny his right to ask for that. In fact, I will not deny a congressional right to have those kinds of open hearings. But I will say that it is not constructive for us to have these discussions out in the open. It is constructive for us to have these discussions behind closed doors, to reach a consensus and determine if we need to look further into any of these issues. Mr. Speaker, we have seen $200 billion get poured into a country for military support and reconstruction efforts, and by the way, the reconstruction efforts were the smallest part of all of that. As I mentioned to Mr. Delahunt, I have been there to review the construction that took place in Iraq, $12.5 billion done by the Army and the balance of that, $18.5 billion, that was done by other entities there, including the Seabees and others, subcontractors that were put together. I looked at the roads and the sewers. I looked at some of the bridges and the streets and the water lines. I have looked at the generating plants. I went up to Kirkuk to see the mother of all generating plants, 725 tons of generator and turbine, two pieces bolted together which came across 1,057 kilometers of open desert and came on a caravan with other components of that mother of all generators which was over a mile long. That generator, Mr. Speaker, had to arrive at that location out in the countryside near Kirkuk, Iraq, without a bullet wound in it. Because a bullet wound into the windings on that generator would have incapacitated it. But it arrived there safe and sound. They took a big crane and set it into place, the generator. They took the same big crane and set the turbine in place and then bolted them together. Several hundred Iraqi workers began to scurry around and put the pieces together of this mother of all generating plants. Now, we are told that this is far too dangerous a place for people to invest capital, for them to develop anything or put any commitment into energy. But in that area, for all those months that they constructed that huge generating plant, and after coming across 1,057 kilometers of desert, and after they had to rebuild and reconstruct eight bridges to get the strength there to cross those bridges with that caravan, throughout all of that, there was one little attack by insurgents, and that was fairly feeble, which resulted in one wounded person from a little bit of shrapnel. There was not a wall built around this generating plant. There is not a trench. There are not terraces pushed up with soldiers behind them all. There are not tanks dug in. They do not have Blackhawks hovering over this generating plant 24 hours a day. It is not sitting there rimmed with armed guards. Sure, it has a little security, but it is not ringed with armed guards. It is out in the countryside near Kirkuk, up in an area where the Kurds live. And throughout all of that, there sits that generating plant, the mother of all generators, pumping electricity into Kirkuk, pumping it into the surrounding communities. That can be a model of the energy that is unleashed into that part of the country. And I might add that if this were a highly dangerous area, an area that you could not control the security in it, then would there be a 12-inch natural gas pipeline that runs on the surface of the ground down to that generating plant that runs the turbine that turns the generator? Would that not be a highly sabotagable natural gas line? And would they not take that up every night, if they could? The reason for all that is that those folks up there are not interested in that. And 14 of the 18 provinces in Iraq are not interested in that kind of violence. They have a sense of security. They are building for the future. The children play in the streets. The families plan for their future. They go off on vacation. They go up to the lake and go swimming, like you and I do. Many places in Iraq have a normal, normal life. People on this side of the aisle would not want you to know that. Many do not want Americans to know that during Saddam's regime he was killing his own people at an average rate, Mr. Speaker, of 182 a day. Now, this was a tough day in Iraq, Mr. Speaker, but I cannot remember the last day in Iraq that there were 182 people that died at the hands of violence. Every day that goes by there are another 182 Iraqis that are alive that would not be otherwise if Saddam were in power. He is on trial today, and in a few hours they will gavel in in a courtroom in Baghdad, and he will be back under trial again. They are putting together a record, Mr. Speaker, a record of the atrocities that were committed under the regime of Saddam Hussein. I have met some of the people that were victims of those crimes. The other night I sat down in a coffee shop for 3 hours and talked with a young lady from Kurdistan. She had grown up there in that region, within an hour of Kirkuk. She has a friend, a friend that survived Saddam's gassing of Halabja where 5,000 Kurds were killed: men, women, and children, the most innocents of civilians. We have all seen the pictures of civilians lying there dead, gassed to death, a mother holding her child and families lying there dead. One of this young lady's friends is an individual that escaped from that gas, that gassing death at Halabja and lived to tell the story. As she told me the story of that friend, I asked her if she believed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Ladies and gentlemen from the other side of the aisle, I challenge you to try to convince that young lady of that. No weapons of mass destruction, when 5,000 of your neighbors are dead, when one of your friends has escaped the gas? How would you convince someone who had lived through that that it did not exist, because we did not find huge warehouses of gas, huge warehouses of chemical weapons, huge warehouses of biological weapons? Because we did not find a nuclear bomb affixed to the tip of a missile that had the capability of going to Tel Aviv? Would that have been enough? Or Washington, D.C.? Would that have been enough not to have detonated? I submit, Mr. Speaker, that the people on this side of the aisle have so much political capital invested in failure that they cannot abide victory. In fact, I challenge the people that will come out here on this floor in another 40-or-so minutes to define victory for me. Define victory for the American people. Let us hear what is the upside of this. I hear a relentless drumbeat of pessimism night after night after night. The pessimism is so deep and so dark, I could not wake up in the morning and face myself if I thought the world were really like that. What is victory, Under 30 Group? How would you define victory? And I will submit that they will never, Mr. Speaker, define victory because the investment in defeat is so great and the fear of victory is so great that they know as soon as they define victory, they will not be able to raise the bar again and again. They will not be able to redefine victory again and again and again. They will not be able to challenge the wisdom of this administration and continually give us a pessimistic viewpoint that causes so many people in this country to lose faith on where this Nation is going. I will define victory. Victory was defined by this administration, in fact, more than 2 years ago. It was defined shortly after the Iraqis were liberated in March and early April of 2003. Our President laid these principles out clearly. It was already defined in advance, and now I can back up and I can tell you the sequence of events. You liberate the Iraqi people, do so militarily. Our troops did that in a miraculous way. Even though detractors said you do not have enough troops to do that, Colin Powell had over half a million, you are going to do it with less than half, how can you hope to do so when you are going up against one of the largest armored militaries in the world? How can you go across the desert with your own armor in a fashion that has never been done before? How can you attack a city and liberate that city that is larger than any city that has ever been invaded and occupied by a foreign power in all of the history of the world. It will be another Stalingrad, they said. But before we got to the Baghdad, about 3 days in we got hit with a 4-day sandstorm and then there we were all bogged down in this quagmire. It was said the Iraqis are the only people that can see in the sand, and here our troops were hiding. The argument is will be slaughtered by the Iraqis because they are desert fighters, and our troops do not know about that environment. Mr. Speaker, it turned out to be entirely different. The world found out that our airplanes could see through that sand and they could identify the Iraqi armored columns. The Iraqis had their heads in the sand and they were waiting that storm out. And a lot of them did not live to see the end of that storm because we had the ability to see through the sand and we hit their armored columns, and we knocked much of that out during those days. And when the sand stopped blowing, our armored columns started up again and they headed up to Baghdad. Mr. Speaker, it was the longest and fastest advance across the desert in history. They arrived in Baghdad almost in a sequential column between our Army and our Marine Corps from two different directions. On a Thursday they went in and drove around through Baghdad with a tank and a couple of armored personnel carriers and looked up at the hotels and buildings. Essentially they met no resistance to speak of. They came out of Baghdad and said we really have liberated the city, and they had. It is the largest city in the history of the world to be invaded and occupied and liberated by a foreign power. It is an astonishing accomplishment. Was there an effort then to go forward from that martial law period of time and establish a civilian government in Iraq, you bet. In Mosul, the liberation took place in March, and in May, they elected a governor and a vice governor from Mosul. They sat down and again to craft how to govern that region. I met with those people in October 2003. They were doing business as usual. It was already usual in Mosul. So we went from liberation to martial law to the civilian government. We went to the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer. Under that we had regional elections in some regions. We put the people that lived there in power. That was another great milestone. Under the CPA, we had local governments that were functioning well. We needed to get the head of this government put back on again, and that was Paul Bremer's job to do that. He knew that we needed to hand over that authority to a Civilian Provisional Authority in Iraq. That happened in June. The date was set, but unlike most of the milestones for any other effort in history, the Iraqis and the American military did not just meet that deadline. Generally they get delayed, delayed, delayed, but they beat the deadline by 48 hours and took over control of Iraq with an interim civilian government from Paul Bremer and the CPA. Another milestone reached, Mr. Speaker. And that milestone went on. As the interim Iraqi government began to put the pieces in place so they could begin to get some connections between Baghdad and the rest of the country, and it was their job to prepare for an election. That election took place in January. That elected the interim government, and their number one job was to craft a constitution. Between January of this year and October 15 of this year, they crafted a constitution. It was a tough task. A lot faster than we crafted our Constitution here in the United States of America. This Constitution that I carry by my heart every day I have a jacket on for a pocket for it, it was a struggle to get our Constitution established. We had a Constitutional Convention. We had an effort for ratification. Essentially it happened in 1789. We had a Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, so 13 years and several months later, we had a constitution ratified by the people. We have not been in Iraq anywhere near 13 years, and I do not expect the effort is going to take anywhere near that long. It was a struggle to establish this constitutional republic that we have in the United States of America, and it is a struggle to establish a free government in a region of the world that has not had one before. But the Iraqi people stepped up and reached each milestone and crafted a constitution. Now 108 polling places were attacked by terrorists in January in the election that elected the interim government, the interim parliament that crafted the constitution. By October 15, 2005, the election that ratified the constitution that was drafted by that interim parliament, there were 19 attacks on polling places as opposed to the 108 that took place in January. That is a measure of progress, Mr. Speaker. We look throughout Iraq and we measure progress after progress. But now we are sitting here with a ratified constitution and our interim parliament and an election coming up December 15. Of all of the milestones that have been laid out in this sequence that I have talked about, liberation, local elections, establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, an election to elect the interim parliament whose job it was to run the country, a constitution, you add all those things all up, and this election on December 15 is more important than the others by far because this election puts in place a parliament in Iraq that truly represents the people. It will be the voice of the people and it is a certified voice of the people. It will be, among the Arab world, the most legitimate voice of any Arab people in the world. I would submit there is only one place where an Arab can go for a fair trial outside of Iraq, and that might be Israel. We are watching a fair trial take place in Iraq today, and that will be the second place in the Arab world where a person can go to get a fair trial. When this election takes place on December 15, 2005, several days from now, it will put in place a parliament that is elected by the people of the sovereign nation of Iraq. They will select a prime minister, and they will then be more legitimate than any other Arab nation that sits at the United Nations. And the sovereignty that comes from that and the consent of the people that empowers their representatives in almost the same fashion as we consent as people to empower representatives here, will give this government the authority to move quickly and decisively down the paths of progress. I am hearing naysayers. I am hearing detractors. Why? Why when we are roughly a week from time we are going to have a certifiable, sovereign nation of Iraq that has the ability to sit down and negotiate oil development contracts with some of the most effective oil companies in the world, to come into this country that is rich with resources, so rich with resources that oil seeps to the top of the ground, and I have seen it, Mr. Speaker. So rich with resources that more oil wells need to be punched in and more pipelines need to be laid and refineries built, and the export of the wealth of Iraq will pour the capital back into that country, and we will see that economy start to grow and multiply and flourish. Why do we hear these negative comments and detractors? Do they not know that our soldiers over there want and need their support? That the people that watch al-Jazeera TV see these voices as quasi American leaders. They see these as people that are directing the policy of the United States of America. They do not understand that the Commander-in- Chief is not listening to this every night. Thankfully he is not listening to this every night, and I hope he is not. The Commander-in-Chief has to lead us down a path without regard to public opinion. He will take into account our judgment, but the destiny of this country is more important. If the mainstream media and the relentless drumbeat on the floor of the House takes the confidence of the American people down so low that they have lost their will, it is the job of the President of the United States to step up and take the debate to the American people and do the fireside chats in this modern technological world, lift our spirits up and give us the facts. I am here to help him do that. He has given us some of these fireside chats and speeches. He understands, as I understand, that our freedom, our freedom depends upon our soldiers, yes, but it also depends upon our will. There is something that is a universal truth throughout all of history and that is a war is never over until the loser realizes they have lost. That is a fact, Mr. Speaker. War is never over until the loser realizes they have lost. If you are down in the dumps and you are losing your soldiers and troops and you are losing your ability to combat a battle, losing your munitions, losing the funding network, you are really down and out, there would be some people in this country that think that I am talking about the American or coalition forces, and I am talking about Zarqawi's people. They are down and out. They can barely put together enough munitions to conduct any kind of opposition. They do not have a lot of logistical support. They are hiding in caves and cowering in mud huts in places throughout Iraq, and they are going out one or two every day dying for their cause, dying for a lost cause. Mr. Speaker, I will submit that the people on the other side, the al Qaeda people, the Zarqawi people, they have it pretty tough where they are right now. A lot of them are dead. Perhaps 75 percent of their leadership is dead. We decapitated the number 3 man in Afghanistan within the last week. They have been writing letters back and forth from Zarqawi to Bin Laden. We know they are short of resources. One of them asked, could you kindly send me $100,000. Zarqawi wrote a letter a while back that said in this country we do not have any place to hide. This is not Vietnam. They do not have any mountains. They do not have any forests to hide in. The only place they can hide is in the homes of the Iraqis, and Iraqi homes that are willing to hide al Qaeda terrorists, he said, are as rare as red sulfur. Red sulfur does not mean a lot to us here. I submit it is quite rare. Red sulfur fits in the category of maybe as rare as hen's teeth or chicken lips or frog hair. It is a rare commodity. He draws the distinctions between Vietnam and Iraq: No mountains to hide in, no forests to hide in, and the homes they have to cower in where Iraqis are willing to house them are as rare as red sulfur, rare as chicken's teeth, rare as chicken lips, rare as frog's hair. So they feel that taste of defeat. When they are about ready to give up, we can take the tone of that letter some months ago, and have to think they are very close to the end. Then we hear the voice from the other side that says we cannot win. Howard Dean, This war cannot be won. The esteemed gentleman, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, This war cannot be won. In the same debate he said, Our military has accomplished their mission, bring them home. Was not their mission to win? And how do you define your exit strategy? Victory, Mr. Speaker. That is how we define the exit strategy, victory. There is no other exit strategy. In fact, I would submit why would you want to leave. I certainly want the Iraqis to take over the defense of their own country, and that is our administration's policy, and it is one that I support. There are over 210,000 Iraqis in uniform that are trained, and you will hear again from this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that there is only one battalion that is combat ready. One battalion. Maybe there was a time there was only one battalion, that there was not one American in that was truly combat ready that had the logistical support that they could go out and engage in combat without cooperation, coordination with American troops and American know-how and American logistics and American ingenuity and ability. Maybe one. Mr. Speaker, I would submit to you that 30 to 40 percent of the Iraqis that are in uniform, trained, equipped, ready for combat, having the courage to defend their country, 30 to 40 percent are engaged and ready to engage; and some of them have some American advisers there, and these people on this side of the aisle argue that disqualifies them from defending their country. I wonder what the mothers and the fathers and the wives think when they have an Iraqi soldier that is killed in the line of duty and they are told by the floor of the United States Congress that they were not really qualified for combat, they really were not ready to defend their country. Mr. Speaker, these people are ready. They have the courage. And many of them are ready for combat. Many have been in combat. Most of them go in combat with American soldiers, and it is a good thing for us to have. I would not want to say there are 210,000 Iraqi troops with uniforms and equipment and training and they are all ready to go into combat right now and all we have to do is just turn them all loose, Mr. Speaker, and they can all go into combat and at the same time, same day, same night American troops come back to their home bases, to their wives, their husbands, their sons and daughters and their parents. I wish they could, Mr. Speaker, but that would not be prudent. It would not be wise and it would not be good policy. It would not be good policy not to have an American involvement there to go through a transition, a transitional period, Mr. Speaker, that provides for a gradual transfer of power so that the Iraqis that are willing and eager to defend their country are handed over those reins of responsibility in a fashion that ensures success. So maybe sometime ago there was only one battalion that did not have any American involvement. About that same time that you heard the remarks about one battalion, one Iraqi battalion that did not have any American involvement, at that time we really did not have any American bases either that were under the control of the Iraqis. But since that time, we have 20 bases that have been handed over to the Iraqis to manage, 20 military bases. Have you heard that from the other side of the aisle? Have you heard that the Iraqis have taken over the control of 20 bases? Because we have confidence that they can provide the security and the logistics out of those places and dispatch their troops, take care of the communications, food and housing and training, all the munitions and equipment, the logistics that take place there and provide the security in the region. Twenty bases the Iraqis have today that they did not have when the allegation was made that there was only one battalion that was combat ready. So you get a real twisted view here, because we have people that get out of bed every morning and they scour the television, they scour the newspapers, and they scour the Internet trying to find the most negative that they can so they can bring this down, hustle down here and trot out onto the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, and begin to inform the American people of the most pessimistic view point, not always substantiated, by the way, but the most pessimistic view point possible because they want to dispirit the American troops. Well, that is some of the effect, only our people are so courageous and they do not listen to you all that much. But they are sure, in a word, encouraging our enemies. Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, Zawahiri, Muqtada Al-Sadr, all of those people. They believe that the Americans are going to lose their will; and if we lose our will, so will the rest of the coalition forces. Last night I put a poster up here on the floor that showed a picture of Muqtada Al-Sadr, big old blow up of his bearded face, and the quote beneath his face that I heard come out of al-Jazeera TV in Kuwait City. The quote was, he said it in Arabic, I watched the English subtitles, if we keep attacking Americans they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. Now, if you are an enemy, and you are dispirited like Zarqawi was dispirited when he wrote the red sulfur letter, and you hear that quote out of one of their leaders, by the way that same quote has come out of, in similar language has come out of the mouths of all four of those leaders that I have talked about, Muqtada Al-Sadr, the non-al Qaeda, the Shiite leader who is actually I will call him a revolutionary in some fashion. But Zarqawi, Zawahiri, bin Laden, Muqtada Al-Sadr, all of them have made statements that you will find out there on the Internet that says the Americans have left in the past. They have pulled out of places like Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu. They will pull out of Iraq. Just persevere, blow yourself up one more time, get your 72 virgins, turn yourself into smithereens, take a few people with you if you can and you will be adding to this cause somehow and some of the rest of us will figure out how we can come in here and create this civil war that will split this nation into three different section. What is the future for Iraq if we let that happen? Think about it for a minute. What is the alternative? What is this idea that was presented by the chairman of the Democrat National Committee that we ought to evict ourselves from Iraq and pull ourselves out of there and go someplace where we are wanted. Did you ever know there was a need for an army or you were really wanted? Anybody ever invite you all in there and say, gee, we like you folks. Why do you not come in here and stay because we like the way you spend your money downtown. Actually, there is a place in Germany like that. They are glad to have us. But that is not a reason to send an army there. An army goes a place generally where you are not wanted to free the people that are under the tyranny of those who do not want you there. But Mr. Dean has advocated that we pull our troops out of Iraq and go to another Middle Eastern country where we are more wanted, and then we can fight Zarqawi from there. Boy, you know, Zarqawi, I wonder if he is writing those press releases for Mr. Dean. That is what I would want if I were Zarqawi. I would be trying to convince Americans, get your troops out of here. Why do you not go someplace where you are wanted, and then Zarqawi would be free to turn Fallujah into an armed camp, to turn Ramadi into an armed camp, to turn Tikrit into an armed camp, to turn all of the Sunni Triangle into an armed camp and pull in money from around the rest of the Arab world and bring in and arm all the troops and recruit more al Qaeda and turn it into a training camp, and, yes, develop more weapons of mass destruction, both gas, biological to get the money. We are watching what is happening over in Iran. Nuclear. Add that all together, take the advice of the chairman of the Democrat National Committee and pull our troops out of Iraq, go to an Arab country where we are more wanted so we can fight Zarqawi from there, Mr. Speaker? That does sound like something that has been put out by Zarqawi himself. And it would be the very worst scenario that we can imagine. We are there now. Zarqawi is at least under our thumb. We have him surrounded. We do not know exactly where he is, but we have him surrounded. So we have to stay there; we have to finish this job. And every time we squeeze them down a little more, a little more, it gets harder and harder, and Zarqawi gets ready to write a letter and to sound a little more desperate each time when he puts out a plea for help that goes to Osama bin Laden, who essentially has not had much of a voice in what is going on in this effort for a good long time, Mr. Speaker. Pull out of Iraq. Go to a place where we are more wanted in the Middle East to fight Zarqawi from there. Think what happens if we ever pull out of Iraq. If we pull out of there, and it is not clear to history that we have a victory, if we pull out on our own free will, if we redefine victory ourselves, history will define it anyway. History will define victory as the effort that prevailed. And we have said here is what we want: we want the Iraqi people to be in charge of their own country; we want them to have free elections; we want them to elect a parliament, which they will do December 15. We want them then from that parliament to elect a prime minister, set up a civilian government, a government that represents the people of the state of Iraq, a sovereign state, a sovereign nation. They will go sit at the United Nations, and they will have more credibility there than any other Arab nation, Mr. Speaker. That is our definition of victory, and it is going to take a while for the violence to disappear in Iraq. And the reason for that is, Mr. Speaker, that as I said earlier, a war is never over until the loser understands that they have lost. If we stand on the floor of the House of Representatives and tell our enemies that here is how you win, if we tell them we cannot win, but they have, some of them are going to believe us. I do not believe it. Some of the American people believe it. I do not believe it. I believe that Iraq is going to be a certified sovereign free nation on the date of December 15, and maybe it will take a little while to count the votes, and maybe it will take a little while to elect a prime minister, and maybe it will take a little while to gavel in that first parliament, and it will take a little while for them to get all the kinks out of their new government. And it will take a little while to get the enemy, the insurgents, purged out of that society. But as they see this inevitable march, this inevitable march towards freedom, the enemy will begin to understand that they have lost. When they understand that they have lost, then we will have victory because the rest of the principles are there. We have followed the sequence of liberation, Coalition Provisional Authority, interim Iraqi civilian government control, an elected interim parliament, draft the Constitution, put it on the ballot October 15, get a great turn out, ratify that Constitution, and now set an election for December 15. We are now a free people. Free people go to the polls again, and I predict they will go to the polls again in greater numbers than the percentage of the American people do, because people that have never had freedom cherish it even more. That will be the definition for victory, Mr. Speaker, when we see a free people that are controlling their own destiny and going to the polls and directing their own leaders. They have got their Constitution. It is ratified. They have a tremendous amount of natural resources, and some day very soon after December 15 they can sign a contract with one or a dozen companies that have the technology and the skills and the capital to develop that massive amount of oil that they have. It is theirs. It has been our principle that it has been their oil from the very beginning. Our Commander in Chief said that to the world. And, in fact, if you go read the Iraqi Constitution there are two references in there as to the possession of their oil, and it is their oil. And it is there for the Iraqi people, and the Constitution defines that it will be distributed proportionally in a fair fashion and equally across the country so that there is equal development of Iraq from that wealth. And soon, within 6 months I will predict we will start to see the oil export from Iraq. Right now, the only thing that is really exporting from Iraq with any kind of profits are dates, and it is about half the date crop that it used to be. That can be improved too. But when the oil starts to flow out, it is their oil, the profit is theirs, the capital comes in. And when you have capital that comes in, you know what you have. You have capitalism. And capitalism really is the solution to this. We have the military who are doing their job. And behind the military solution is the political solution which is taking place on December 15 in this election. And when that free parliament is established and they elect a prime minister, the next step is hand over some of this development to some people that will risk some of their capital to develop those oil fields so that capitalism can sweep into that country, sweep into that country and so the linkage of military solution, the political solution and the free enterprise capital solution all come to pass, all in their sequence, Mr. Speaker. When that happens, then we do have a definition for victory in Iraq. And we cannot expect miracles, and it is hard and it is bloody and it is costly. But they can become, and in fact I believe they are, the Lode Star for the Arab people. This inspiration that gets established, when people are cynics in the world think that because of what ethnicity you are, what tribe you belong to, what country you come from, what religion you might be, you cannot handle freedom, well, I agree with the President. Freedom beats and yearns in the heart of every person and all people yearn to be free. Now we have not gone to war and fought and handed them their freedom. They fought alongside us and some of that freedom they have earned, and they needed to earn it because it is precious and it has more value if it is them earning that freedom instead of us. But I believe this has been a very noble thing that we have done, Mr. Speaker; and I look around the world and I think throughout history, when has this country ever gone to war against another free people? I will say never. Never once in the history of the world has the United States ever gone to war, a clash of arms, against another free people, because we resolve our differences in open debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate and across this country. And one of those things also that beats in the heart of all of us is we have a certain capacity for change in all of us. That change is within us. It is natural, and it is human, and it is described pretty much in the book ``The Case for Democracy'' by Natan Sharansky. He spent a fair part of his life in the gulag up in the Soviet Union, and he watched how there they struggled for their very lives and very survival. And the effort that came from them just to stay alive every day consumed almost everything that they did, and he thought that was the world that a lot of people lived in too, but that was a narrow thing that he was in at the time. When he was liberated from the gulag, he went to Israel, and he became a free person in a free society that had a democracy and open dialogue, and he went to the Knesset, and he watched that debate that was taking place there, and he saw that same energy go into the debate in the Knesset, sometimes arguing and debating and struggling over things that he saw as minutia because he had spent a lot of his years on survival, and the same effort on survival was being burned up and consumed on minutia in a free country. And he concluded, and I think rightfully, that we all have within us this energy for change, this desire for change, and we will use that energy for a constructive change whether we do so in open debate and dialogue like we do in this country, like they do in Israel, or whether we use that same energy and desire, when we do not have this freedom of speech, to take it out on our neighbor, take it out on our enemy, and do so in a violent fashion and often in the form of terrorism. That is the habitat that breeds terror, the habitat that is anathema to freedom. So some years ago, shortly after September 11, we had a guest lecturer there at Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, Iowa. Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan. She gave a wonderful lecture, and it was fascinating. And afterwards we sat down and had a little one-on-one conversation, and I asked her a couple of questions, and one of them was what percentage of the Muslim world are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda. How great in numbers are our enemy? She did not hesitate. In fact, her answer was so spontaneous that I concluded that she had answered that question before, and she said, Not very many, perhaps 10 percent. Well, not very many, perhaps 10 percent of 1.2 or 1.3 billion people is a whole lot of enemies, in my opinion. That is 120 to 130 million scattered throughout the world. We cannot attack all of them, and we cannot turn our military effort on all of them. We have to find another solution. So I asked her then how do we get to this point where we can ever define victory? What is victory going to be? How will we ever craft a victory given this global enemy we have that is committed to our death, people who believe that their path to salvation is in killing us? She said, You have to give them freedom. You have to give them democracy. You have to give them an opportunity for their future, and they will turn their minds, their hands, their hearts from hatred and killing towards their families, their neighborhoods, their communities, their mosques. That is the difference, and that is the climate that we need to create. That is that climate that is there in Afghanistan, and that is that climate that we are in the process of creating in Iraq. That is how Afghanistan and Iraq can link together and be the inspiration that shows the world that freedom can echo across the Arab world the same way it did across Eastern Europe when the Wall went down on November 9, 1989. And that is some insight.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, there were a number of motives, and I will concede there were other motives; but in the 60 seconds that I have left, I am not going to be able to address all of that. I will just say that, yes, liberation was part of that; and, in fact, I believe it is the broader vision, this vision that has been brought to this global effort by our President. I think he is a leading thinker on this in the world. Not a receptive adviser, but I think he is a leading thinker. And that is why I raise this issue. It is bigger and broader than weapons of mass destruction. It is bigger than many of the things that are discussed here on the floor of this House, and I bring this message here so that we can see the benefits of the sacrifice and the reason to carry on and the price if we fail to do so.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I will.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I thank my friend and the gentleman from Massachusetts and colleague on the Judiciary Committee. I have been to Iraq for the express purposes of oversight of those construction projects, about $12.5 billion administered by the Army and the balance of that $18.5 billion by other entities, the sea bees. Yes, I actually faced a number of questions from the people in Iraq. I did not get to the bottom of that. I do not know that they are in a position to actually have oversight on this in that fashion, but your point that you have made is one that is somewhat new and fresh to me. I have done due diligence, I think, to an extent to see where that money's been spent there. I would very much like to sit down with you and have this conversation so that we could bore into this.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to team up with Mr. Bradley and help direct our Presidential candidates on to South Carolina, too, in about another 3 years. I appreciate you turning this tone over to the tone of the progress that has been made in Iraq. We do not hear about that very often, and Mr. Bradley brings to mind some issues I would like to add to that tally. Two elections already this year in Iraq, one in January that elected the interim Iraqi Government and the one in October which was for the referendum that ratified the Constitution. We have heard the Iraqis cannot hold elections. There will not be enough safety, they will not be legitimate. And all of those criticisms got rolled out. In fact, I would take us back to the first election after the liberation of Iraq that I know of, and Mr. Bradley mentioned General Petrais who commanded the 101st Airborne that went in there in March 2003, and he liberated the region of Mosul and approximately three of the provinces up in that area. That was March. I was in the region of Mosul in the fall, and I met with the governor of Mosul and the vice governor of Mosul, and one or two other officials of that region. How can you have a governor and vice governor of Mosul? They were not appointed by General Petrais. It was interesting, the governor sat at the head of the table next to the vice governor, and General Petrais sat at the side of table, and he was giving deference to the elected leaders. The governor and the vice governor, and I do not know how many other officers were elected in May of 2003, but there were free and fair and open elections in Mosul. The governor was a Sunni and the vice governor was a Kurd. You could tell by the way that they worked and cooperated and laughed and did those things that they worked together comfortably. At the time in Mosul, it seemed like it was very much back to normal. I point out that the first successful election was in May 2003, and since that time there have been a number of elections in Iraq. The milestones established early in this process, at that point it was liberation first and it was martial law to stabilize the security in the country, get a handle on the looting but put the military law in place, and then shortly after that we established the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority. That was headed by Paul Bremer, who ran that region then, as Coalition Provisional Authority had, for quite a long time. But there was another milestone that was set on the calendar and that was the following June. Not recalling the specific date, but before that date by 2 days we handed over the control of Iraq to a civilian government before the targeted deadline to do so. We established the dates for elections and set the milestones to elect an interim parliament, and the voice of the people would then write and draft the Constitution, present the Constitution to the people of Iraq, and then the people of Iraq would have the opportunity to vote and ratify the Constitution. Each one of those milestones was met or exceeded by the Iraqi people at the direction and cooperation of the coalition forces. Now, you may think that is not such a difficult task, you simply open up the polling booths and hold an election. In order to have a legitimate election, you need to have voter registration. You want people to have an opportunity to vote and only vote once. It has to be safe to travel to the polls, and you have to maintain the confidentiality of their vote and the integrity of the tally of the ballots and the reporting process. An election has no value in a free country if the people who are being represented by those elected in the election, if the people do not have confidence in the process. But they had confidence in Mosul in May 2003. They had confidence in the process in January of this year when they elected their interim government. It was not as safe in January as it was later, but there were 108 different places attacked by the terrorists when they elected their interim parliament, but still the turnout for that election was greater than the turnout for the Presidential election for the President of the United States. We saw millions of Iraqis proudly waving their purple fingers in the air, proud that they voted. In fact, the fear factor was supposed to set in and cause people to stay home and not vote, but instead they voted. They voted with a proud and a free and a patriotic and, in fact, a defiant attitude, waving their purple fingers in the air and saying they directed their national destiny when they waved their fingers. But 108 of those polling booths were attacked by terrorists on that day. That did not deter the Iraqis. They went on without interruption. No one has challenged the legitimacy of the election. It was a legitimate election. That was January. On October 15 when the Constitution that was drafted by that interim parliament, and it was hard fought and there were many tough decisions to be made, and to reconcile the differences between the regions in the country, the resources in the country and the differences between the religious factions that were there and the tribal factions that were there was a very difficult thing. How do you divide up the resources of a country so all of the people benefit from those resources when you have that proprietary notion that because the oil is underneath the soil in one region, it should not be shared with people of another region that does not have oil underneath their soil? They came to an agreement on that, and the known and developed reserves are distributed equally around the country with exceptions to put extra resources in those regions where they have been at a greater disadvantage, and it is going to take greater resources to get them up to speed. But, essentially, the language in the Constitution calls for taking existing resources and providing kind of a parity so the Iraqis can benefit almost equally. But that Constitution that was so hard fought, the one that down to the last minute they were changing some language in it so they had the best chance of getting it ratified in the referendum, on October 15 of this year they ratified their Constitution. Now, one might say, so Iraq has gone through these milestones and the milestones of liberation in March and April of 2003, and the milestone of martial law converting into the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer, and then handing it over to the Civilian Provisional Authority, and then having the elections that elected the Iraqi interim parliament and then having the referendum that ratified the Constitution on October 15, one might say what is all of that about. Well, all of them together were required sequentially to get to the point where they are today: poised to have an election of a new parliament in Iraq, a new parliament that will be established upon the Constitution that the people have ratified in their referendum last October 15. The new parliament that will be seated shortly after those elections of December 15 will be a parliament that truly represents a sovereign nation of Iraq. When they seat themselves at the United Nations and the representative that is appointed to represent Iraq in the United Nations, they will be the most legitimate government represented in the United Nations of the Arab world that is there because they will be the ones that are elected by a free people. The voice of the representative from Iraq will actually be the voice of the people of Iraq. That is a misconception that many of the people in the United States of America have about the United Nations themselves, the idea that the United Nations is a voice of the world, that it is a free and democratic global forum where we can resolve all of our differences, when in fact many of the countries represented are not free countries. They do not allow their people to have freedom of speech, press, and religion. They do not allow their people to step forward and voice their opinions. In fact, some of those countries will cut their tongues off for doing that, but they have a voice for their dictator sitting at the table of the United Nations. This will be an Arab country, Iraq, which has a free and duly elected government that sends a representative to the United Nations that will be more representative of the people of that country than any other Arab country represented in the U.N. And so this is a huge milestone coming up December 15. But for a lot of other reasons too. Now the Iraqi people can start to direct their national destiny. This really is the milestone that allows that to happen. And I have traveled over to Iraq three times. The last trip in was in August, and I asked to go down into Basra where I believe we were the first congressional delegation to visit the coalition forces down in that region. General Dutton commands the forces there. He is a British general. And I stood in one place with soldiers in the coalition forces that represented Romania and The Netherlands and Denmark and Australia and Great Britain and Poland. I am sure I am missing one or two others. Put them in a group and took their picture because they really did represent the coalition forces. And down in that region, there the largest oil reserves are down in that region around Basra and we reviewed that and then went up to Kirkuk, as the gentleman from New Hampshire had mentioned, that he had been up there earlier during this conflict. And there, I saw places where oil seeped to the top of the ground. There was so much oil that I could drill a well and hit oil on it because I would hit the oil before I started to drill. But there needs to be a lot of oil that is developed in Iraq in the south around Basra and in the north up around Kirkuk and those distribution lines and refineries and the export systems have got to be set up so that they can get some cash flowing back into that country. This milestone of a truly sovereign Nation with a duly elected parliament that will select, that will elect themselves a prime minister so that they can move and act and build on the future of the country is an essential milestone. And it has taken blood and treasure to get to this point, and it will take blood and treasure for a while beyond this point. And it has been a price that has been painful to pay, but it is also a price that has freed 25 million people and it has the opportunity for Iraq to become the lone star nation that inspires the entire Arab world, inspires them to freedom and that freedom that becomes contagious like it did in eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, November 9. Freedom echoed across eastern Europe and almost bloodlessly and in almost the blink of a historical eye, Mr. Speaker. And I do not expect that kind a change to take place in the Middle East that fast, but we are seeing those yearnings for freedom and yearnings for democracy. We have seen Libya give up their weapons of mass destruction and openly show that they are were further along on their process of developing nuclear than one had ever imagined. Our intelligence did not get that one right either. And intelligence, by the way, is never perfect, and I do not mean to be critical of our intelligence. It is the inspiration that Iraq was becoming a free nation, that American and coalition presence in that region comprised a threat that might have deposed Qadaffi, I think was his motive to turn his nuclear cards over face up and drop and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction. We have seen Lebanon for the first time since 1979 throw off the yoke of Syrian occupation and move towards freedom. And we have watched some things change in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt. So it is happening, Mr. Speaker. There is progress that it is being made and the inspiration that is there, the inspiration of a free Iraq is an important inspiration. But 108 of those polling booths were attacked in January of 2005. And the following October, the security situation in Iraq had improved so much that that number became 19 polling booths attacked as opposed to 108 just the previous January, 10 months before. So that is an indicator, I think, Mr. Speaker, of the progress that has been made in Iraq. There are a number of other indicators and some of them are, we need the cooperation for intelligence of the Iraqi people. And so what are we getting for tips? Where are they coming from? We are finding about 50 percent of the improvised explosive devices, about 50 percent. Almost all of those IEDs are being found because of tips from the Iraqi people. The tips that we were getting in March, 483 in the month of March of 2005. In April, 1,591, it has grown five times better, a little greater than that, just from March to April. That is the sign that they have more confidence, that they can take the risk, that their country needs them to weigh in and put their neck on the line to give tips that will protect the lives of American and coalition forces. So March, 483, April of 2005, 1,591, May of 2005 up to 1,740 tips in that month, in June 2,519, in July 3,303 tips, and in August, 3,341. This trend is a fantastic trend line that shows that the Iraqi people see the future and they are committing themselves to helping save and protect the lives of the American soldiers. This goes on. There is more and more good news. And Mr. Bradley talked about 210,000 Iraqis in uniform that are trained or in training to defend their own country. And that is what needs to happen. Of that 210,000, there are quite a lot of battalions that are really combat ready. We keep hearing that there is only one battalion that has no American advisors in it and that can operate in a combat situation, Mr. Speaker, without having U.S. support. Well, I do not know that we want to be in that situation where we do not have any U.S. involvement in combat battalions in Iraq. There is too much at stake there. And we have handed over 20 bases that were coalition American controlled that now it is all Iraqis that control those 20 bases. And at least a third of the battalions that are there are ready for combat. And a lot of them are engaged in combat. And they are going in with American forces. And so the question of whether they are totally 100 percent independent, it is just a moot point. And the question of what is our exit strategy, when are we going to leave, you know, when the previous President sent our troops into Kosovo, he told America they would be out in a year. I never hear that from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, as to this is the longest year. I think this year is over 3,000 days long, and we are still waiting to get the troops out of Kosovo. Well, no one raises that issue because the situation is stabilized there. And American casualties are not zero, but they are very, very low. And I support our efforts there to provide peace in that region. But look around the world, Mr. Speaker. We have troops in nearly every place that they have been engaged over the last 60 to more years, and those troops remain in Germany. They remain in Korea. We have other troops in other locations around the world because we need them there strategically. And so, you know, when are we going to get out of Iraq? Why would we want to leave? Why would it be our goal to go there and pull the troops out, especially if it risked the goal of the mission entirely? And I heard Mr. Bradley address the importance of supporting our troops and their mission. And I want to emphasize that, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot send a soldier off to war, ask him to defend your freedom, put his life on the line for you, and then say, I support you, soldier, I am with you, but I do not like your mission. You cannot ask somebody to put their life on the line and tell them you support them but you oppose their mission. And that is what I am hearing over here. That is what I am hearing from the liberal news media. That is what this fellow right here, Muqtada al-Sadr hears. It is what Osama bin Laden hears, it is what Zawahiri hears, and it is what Zarkawi hears. They hear I am with you, troops. I think you ought to be home but I do not support your mission, and if something happens to you, then you know, you were a casualty of a failed and flawed mission. Not true. This is, I believe, one of the most noble things that the United States of America has ever done. Many, many times we have sent our soldiers off into foreign lands and here in this city, Mr. Speaker, if one would go down to the Korean Memorial and there in the sidewalk, etched in that stone in the sidewalk is a message at the Korean War Memorial that says, our country honors the men and women who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met. A very profound statement etched in the sidewalk there at the Korean Memorial. It definitely reflects the sacrifice of the Korean war. It reflects, I believe, Mr. Speaker, the character of the American people, the American soldier and marine. The history of this country has always been to reach out and promote our freedom. I think about a speech that I heard here in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago about this time of year. It was given by President Arroyo of the Philippines, and as she delivered that speech, it was in a hotel downtown and I was not before a Congressional delegation. I may have been the only Member of Congress that was there. But I point this out because she was not speaking to Congress. She was speaking to a gathering of people that showed up for a dinner in a downtown hotel in Washington, D.C. and we went out of respect and her message was that she said, thank you America, thank you America for sending the Marines to the Philippines to liberate us and free us in 1898. Thank you for sending over your interests that taught us your way of life, free enterprise and the freedoms that you have and the constitutional structure that you have. Thank you for sending the missionaries to the Philippines where we learned Christianity, and thank you for sending 10,000 teachers to the Philippines. She had a Filipino name for those teachers, and one day I will learn that name. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers who taught us the English language, who taught us the American culture, who educated us, and today we have over 1.6 million Filipinos that travel elsewhere in the world that can get a job anywhere because the universal language of business is English and they make good money, and they send that money back to the Philippines in significant dollars. She is grateful. She made that message to the United States of America 103 years at least, probably 105 years, since the time that the Marine Corps landed on the shores of the Philippines in 1898. That is a profound message, and I believe the gratitude that I heard from President Arroyo will come from the mouths of the Prime Minister of Iraq 100 years from now. It will come here to the United States, and Iraq will have established this image, this vision, of a free Arab country; and I believe that the rest of the Arab countries will see the prosperity that comes and they will adopt that same kind of freedom hopefully through a peaceful change rather than a violent change. But I expect the people of Iraq will express their gratitude to our descendants 100 years from now. So a loss of 2,000 American lives in Iraq, painful, every one, a personal loss to every family, a real profound sacrifice on the part of every soldier and Marine. We have lost over 200 of them also in Afghanistan. I have heard nothing from the other side of the aisle about why it is right to be in Afghanistan and wrong to be in Iraq. It is just on their part wrong to be in Iraq, and it seems to be that the number of casualties is the measuring stick. So I would submit that it is time now for the people on the left side of the aisle to give us a number of how many casualties they are willing to sustain in Afghanistan before they say we ought to get out of there too. This is not a cause that is measured simply in direct relationship with casualties. It is far more important. It is far more timeless. It is far more profound. It is something that the echoes of this will flow throughout history. Beyond 100 years from now, the world will be a different place because of the nobility of the American soldiers and Marine Corps. And the voices of Muqtada Al-Sadr and Zarqawi and Zawahiri and bin Laden, those voices that are saying things like, if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq-Afghanistan, name your country, the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. Those voices must be silenced. They must be silenced in this place at this time. I picked up a quote from the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Howard Dean, and I listened to him campaign in Iowa for 1\1/2\ years as he sought the Presidency and I heard some of these things then too. But in typical fashion he said, ``The idea that we are going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.'' He said that to more than 150,000 Americans who are there in Iraq and the numbers of coalition forces that are there. And they hear that and he compares it to Vietnam. Even Zarqawi describes the difference between Vietnam and Iraq. He said there are no mountains to hide in in Iraq. There are no forests to hide in in Iraq. This is in a letter that he wrote, I think, a year ago last April. And he lamented that they cannot stay in Iraq very long because they do not have places to hide. And he said that the only place that they can hide and operate out of would be houses, the homes of the Iraqi people that would be willing to take them in and let them run their operations out of there, and that the Iraqis that would be willing to let them do that are ``rarer than red sulfur.'' Now, I have been to a lot of places in that country, and I looked all over for red sulfur and I did not see any, and I asked some of those pilots that flew helicopters if they have seen any red sulfur, and they said no. No one I know has been able to identify that; so I am going to tell you that is pretty rare. I do not think there are very many Iraqis that are willing to let Zarqawi operate. In fact, there are a lot less of Zarqawi's allies. We do not hear these numbers, Mr. Speaker. We see the American casualties, the coalition casualties, and we see the Iraqi civilian casualties; but the numbers come down to how many of the enemy are being taken off the streets out of the operation, how many per day, per week, per month? And per month I can tell the Members, Mr. Speaker, that number, and the number was last brought to me in August of this year, I will say very close to 3,000 of our enemy are taken off the streets both in those killed and those captured, 3,000. The Iraqi people are losing about 600 a month. We are losing about 73 a month on average. A painful loss for all of us, but the enemy is losing more by far than we are, Mr. Speaker. And it is wrong on the part of Howard Dean. We are a long ways away from losing this war. Where he says that we are going to lose it is just plain wrong, that is just undermining the President, that is undermining our foreign policy, and it is undermining our military. And he identified it with Vietnam. I laid out the difference. He suggests that we redeploy our troops to Afghanistan because that is where we are welcome. Now, when in history has it been important to deploy troops to a place where the troops are welcome? It is nice to have them there for security reasons, but a strategic redeployment of troops because that is a place where they are welcome? And he suggests we ought to pull our troops all out of Iraq and take them to a friendly Middle Eastern country where they can have a strategic redeployment and they can be someplace where there is support for our troops there, Mr. Speaker. Another point that was made on this floor by the gentleman that was the purpose of our debate, he, Mr. Dean, both say that 80 percent of Iraqis want us to leave. Mr. Speaker, it is not 80 percent of the Iraqis that want us to leave. I do not know where that number comes from. I asked that question over and over again. We have had surveys over there that come a little bit different, but it depends on how they ask the question. Now, if we would ask the Iraqis someday sometime when they get full control of their country and they have safety and security and their freedom is established and the economy is flowing and they are not worried about enemies from without and enemies from within, they would like to have the last American soldier pull out of Iraq, maybe 80 percent would say yes, I think that would be a good idea. I think the responsible people in Iraq do not look forward to the day that American troops pull out anytime soon because they know that their future and their freedom is contingent upon American and coalition troops being there to guarantee it for now, as the 2,010 Iraqi numbers grow and increase and their training increases and their commitment increases, and, in fact, their courage has been increasing substantially too, and they do have the courage to fight for their country. I am hearing that from our generals over there now too. But I asked the question of the Iraqi people, if there is a referendum today, the same referendum that was on the floor of this House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, that only found three Members of this 435-Member body that would vote to move our troops out immediately, if that referendum were laid out before the Iraqi people, the Iraqis that I talked to say that 90 to 95 percent would say stay, please stay, we are so grateful for our freedom. When we come home, we expect our family to be there instead of wondering if Saddam has taken and spirited them away. I met with a Kurdish young lady who is here now on a scholarship, that has been here several months. She said up in that region around Kirkuk, every household that has boys has a crawl space for the boys to hide in when Saddam's henchmen came to conscript them into the military. She grew up with brothers and could not admit to the neighborhood that she had brothers because they would be conscripted into the military. The list goes on and on. The testimony that is taking place now in the trial of Saddam and his fellow henchmen that are there are bringing out atrocity after atrocity, Mr. Speaker. We will hear more about these atrocities as this trial unfolds. And when this trial is over and a new one begins and the history of Saddam's regime is written into the court records of those courageous jurists that put their lives on the line to provide a fair trial for a person whom I believe is a murdering tyrant, they need to be honored. They need to be respected. They need to put that in the history, and the American people need to watch it, Mr. Speaker. We need to all understand this, and we need to understand that when we speak up and we speak out and when we undermine our American troops, meanwhile posturing that we support them but not their mission, what happens is people like Muqtada Al-Sadr say on Aljazeera TV, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.'' Never again, Mr. Speaker. This is where that stops. This is where the bright line in history gets drawn. This is where the legacy of the freedom that emanates from America is established in the Middle East and where the lone star of Iraq inspires the rest of the Arab world and eliminates the habitat that breeds terror. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the Members in the Chamber this evening.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address my colleagues and the people in this country. There are some important issues before us, as there always are in this Congress, and sometimes I have a little difficulty sorting between which of those issues it is that I would like to speak to my colleagues about, Mr. Speaker. Tonight, I would like to address the subject matter of the future of this country, the future of the Middle East, the future of this global conflict, this assault on Western civilization that comes from radical, militant, Islamic extremists, the will of the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, to stand up and defend the cause that our Forefathers have fought so hard for and to preserve not just our freedoms which are essential and worth the struggle and worth the sacrifice, but our very safety and lives are at risk, Mr. Speaker. We need to understand this war that we are in. We need to understand our enemy, and as I listened to the debate here on the floor a couple of weeks ago on a Friday when we debated the resolution to immediately pull out of Iraq, it occurred to me that there were a lot of people actually on the floor of this chamber, Mr. Speaker, that I thought did not have a long-term view for the future of the United States of America or the free world for that matter. I want to raise a point, and I want to then continue to illustrate that point. I have brought in a picture and a poster to help with that point. This is not the number one villain in all of Iraq or all of this war against radical, militant extremists, but this is Muqtada Al-Sadr, who is actually a Shiite leader, an individual we have heard quite a lot about. He got into the military business and brought his militia to bear against U.S. and coalition military forces and Iraqi military forces and with mixed results I think we can say at best. I made a number of trips over to Iraq, and what we do is we go into Kuwait and then usually leave very early in the morning to go into Iraq in the morning. In the evening, I was sitting there, and I had turned on my television set in the hotel in Kuwait and turned it to Al Jazeera TV because watching Al Jazeera TV tells me a lot about what people are seeing in the Middle East and across the Arab world. As I watched that television, it was Arabic audio, but it had English I call them subtitles. On that date, which was June 11, 2004, this particular CODEL, I watched the television and saw Muqtada Al-Sadr come on there, and I heard him say in Arabic, with the English subtitles underneath, just what you see here, Mr. Speaker. He said, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq, the same way that they left Vietnam, the same way that they left Lebanon, the same way that they left Mogadishu.'' Now, what does that mean? It means that the word has been spread throughout al Qaeda world that Americans do not come and stay till it is over, that they will pull out, and that we are not committed to this cause. He would like to convince his followers and those he would recruit to be his followers that Americans are prepared at any moment to pull out of Iraq. That is far from the case, Mr. Speaker, and this is the cause where we must stay, and we must carry this message across this world to our coalition partners, to our soldiers that are over there, those soldiers that have just not too long ago celebrated a Thanksgiving in foreign soil again, and again to our allies but especially to our enemies. This language, this statement, that Americans do not stick to it, is a thread that goes through many of the writings and the statements of al Qaeda leaders. I believe I can find that in a Google search in words phrased a little bit differently but the same meaning, out of Osama bin Laden, out of Zawahiri, out of Zarqawi, and that coupled with Muqtada Al-Sadr. That message has been sent. It keeps getting sent. It is echoed out off Al Jazeera. That means whoever is watching Al Jazeera hears this message. Many of them believe this message that America is not going to stay until the job is done. We had a debate on this floor, Mr. Speaker, and that vote took place in the fall of 2002. It authorized the President to use force to enforce the United Nations resolutions, all for a good cause. That is how a free Nation should do this. We should have a free debate, and it ought to be an open debate. The people in this country should engage in this debate and carry their message to their Members of Congress and let that echo in these chambers, Mr. Speaker, and it did in that debate. The resolution after the vote went up, and it was a solid majority to give the President the authority to enforce those U.N. resolutions and to use force, if necessary, to bring Saddam Hussein in line. In fact, it is the policy and was the policy of this Congress to establish a regime change in Iraq. We had our debate. When debate is over and there is a majority vote that prevails, then the people in this chamber need to abide by that decision. If we pass a law in here, we do not go out and say, okay, I am going to ignore that law and undermine that law. We live by that decision. It is a majority decision. There is nothing more important than when you have men and women in uniform, put their lives on the line, and you do so by a majority vote and you endorse it, you do not want to see people undermining that effort. Undermining that effort indexes directly with this statement by Muqtada Al-Sadr. Mr. Speaker, I will pick that up in a moment and carry some more details of this, but I want to take the privilege of yielding to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. King), my friend, the first of the Caucus States, the first in the Nation primaries.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding me this time. I appreciate the opportunity to address this House and the opportunity for us all to sit and listen to this debate. I hear a couple of different numbers, 25,000 wounded but 15,000 wounded coming from the same side of the aisle. I am wondering if that is indicative of some of the other statistics that we have heard. But I ask this question: Why have I not heard any objections to our operations in Afghanistan? Twenty-five million people liberated and freed and standing on free soil, voting for their own freedom and their own national destiny, a cost of 200 American lives. Nobody set a value on that. How many is too many in Afghanistan? Twenty-five million Iraqis free, voting on free soil for the first time in their real lives, and what does this mean to America? It means that we have erased some of the habitat that breeds terror. Do we not understand this greater mission here is to eradicate that habitat so Arab people can breathe free and that free people do not go to war against free people? Could we look at this broader mission of 50 million people freed? 2,200 American lives, tens of thousands of other lives. We have not been attacked in this country since that date for a lot of good reasons. You cannot separate the mission from the troops. You cannot sit here and say, I support the troops. Mr. President, we ought to bring the troops home. I do not support their mission. You cannot ask somebody to put their life on the line for your freedom and not support their mission, but tell them that you support the troops. Further more, I sat in Kuwait City and watched on television as Moqtada al-Sadr said, ``They will go home the same way they did from Vietnam, Lebanon, and Mogadishu.'' We must stay the course.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, you also pointed out something that I think is important when you talked about how we need testing and how we need that as a deterrent. Traditionally, what we have done with all of our drug enforcement that goes clear back to the heroin days is that we see it from two different ways. One of them is interdiction, and interdiction, you go out on the highway, pull a car over, check to see what they are hauling around, search somebody. When you arrest them, yeah, if they have drugs on them, you take them away from them. You prosecute them. We try to lock some people up in jail. That is the interdiction part of this. The other side of that is the rehabilitation part, the drug treatment part. Those two things are on opposite wings of the entire problem. I want to say to the interdiction portion of this, yes, it is important; yes, we need to be aggressive. That is really part of what we are doing. We are trying to take the components of meth out of the hands of the people that make it for one thing and remove some of those components from even overseas on the way that it is funneled through this distribution system that we have, make it harder to access. That is interdiction. What interdiction does, by definition, when you remove a product, the more successful you are with the interdiction, the higher prices are going to go because this law of supply and demand manifests itself. Another thing that happens is, and I am not particularly concerned about this, is the quality of the drugs will go down because they will be able to sell a lower quality than they can when there is an ample supply for a cheaper price. So the price of the drug goes up with interdiction because of this law of supply and demand. The quality will go down. In the end, if you only do the interdiction side of this thing, you can reduce that down. If it is hard enough to get, there will be fewer people that are addicted. There will be fewer people that will hand some over to their friend and get them started. It will become a more precious commodity. It will be held together in a smaller group of drug addicts. That is one of the functions that will come from interdiction. I believe we need to do it, but it is not a solution to it all because on the other side of this is the rehab, the treatment, and meth is one of the hardest things to be successful with the rehab. I want to at some point ask the gentleman from Indiana what the percentage of success is on rehabilitation and treatment. Do you have some numbers on that?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity always to come to this floor of Congress and have an opportunity to address the Chair and also the people in this Chamber here on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and all across America. A lot of important issues come in front of us here in this Congress, and one of the hardest things that we have to deal with is the priorities always change day to day. We keep this big stack of issues, and we continually pull one issue off that has drifted down below the stack aways and put it back up on top, pulling those issues out, putting them on top, trying to get them moved so that we can get them off the table, send them to the Senate, and take up the next most important issue. It is a constant process here of hundreds, in fact thousands, of issues being reprioritized. But what we do also is keep sitting at the top those most important issues, those that are critical, those that are urgent. Sometimes we have that difficulty of taking up the issues that are urgent at the expense of those that are important, Mr. Speaker. But we have an issue before this Congress that I believe will come to this floor for a vote sometime this week or at the latest we could come back and take it up early in the first week in December, and that is the issue of methamphetamines. I represent a district in roughly the western third of Iowa, and we have found ourselves in a situation where we have perhaps as much experience, and I will say sad and bad experience, with methamphetamines as any place in the country. Some of the reasons for that are that the precursors for methamphetamine, and that means the components that are required in order to produce it in a meth lab, are and have been readily available in Iowa, and particularly in the Corn Belt. One of those components is hydrous ammonia, and because it is available essentially everywhere in the Corn Belt, it has been relatively easy for a meth cook to go in and to steal a tank of hydrous ammonia, take that back to their meth lab and use that to produce methamphetamines. We did not think we really needed to have a security policy and post guards around the hydrous ammonia tanks because, after all, when you crack one of those nozzles, you get a lesson that you will never forget. Yet, these meth cooks are so intent on producing methamphetamines that that kind of a danger has not been a deterrent to them, and they have some experience with hydrous ammonia also, being from the region, and so they are more comfortable using it and handling it. But, Mr. Speaker, there is a precursor to methamphetamines that is significantly different in that regard and still has been, up until now, readily available on the shelves of most of the stores in America, and that is a component that we are comfortable with that we know called ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and then there is a PPA, another precursor that is used in some of this. But I brought some of this along tonight so that I can speak about it, Mr. Speaker. So when we have a cold and we have congestion, we will go down to the store and we will purchase pseudoephedrines of some kind. Here is one example here, and I have another example here. Most people are familiar with that. The active ingredient is pseudoephedrine, and that pseudoephedrine is what the meth cooks are after. Now, I would point out that about 10 years ago, we recognized this and began to address it legislatively. One of the things we did in Iowa was realize that the people who were making methamphetamine then, and it was fairly early in our experience with methamphetamines, they would go to the drugstore or the grocery store and buy themselves a big pill bottle; and that big pill bottle might have pills in there, mostly it was pills that were 30 milligrams each. They would buy several bottles of those dry pills, those starch-based pills, bring the bottles back to the labs, take the caps off of the big bottles, dump them all into their overall vat, and produce their methamphetamines out of those. No restrictions, easily available, go buy it off the shelf. Nobody asked any questions. After all, it was entirely legal; and up until the time they figured out how to use this, there was no negative to people having pseudoephedrine or ephedrine products in their own medicine cabinet, so there was no restriction. Once we figured out that that is what they were doing, they were using the pseudoephedrine product in order to produce methamphetamine, in Iowa we decided we are going to fix this. We know how to outsmart these people. Since they buy these big bottles and there are 100 or more in a bottle, sometimes 500 in a bottle, we will just limit the size of the container, the numbers of pills that can be sold in a container. So in Iowa we said, you cannot have 100 or more of these pills that contain pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, or the PPAs. Well, we thought that would solve the problem. I did not get that involved in the language; I supported it; others worked on it. It seemed to me like it was a step in the right direction. Perhaps it was. It was a step in the right direction for just a little while. Congress understood that there was a problem too, and they concluded here in about 1995 that, you know, it is just too easy to go into the store and buy a bottle of pills that have pseudoephedrine in them and, like we thought in Iowa, take them back to the meth lab, take the cap off, dump it in their batch and cook an ounce of meth. So Congress did not address it the way we did in the Iowa legislature. Iowa said less than 100 per container, and Congress said, well, no, no meth cook is going to go to all that work if we just require that these pills go in blister packs. So if you have noticed, for the last 10 years when you go to buy your pseudoephedrine, you will find that it is in blister packs. So you have to take it out and tear one open. I have one in my pocket because of the condition I have been in, Mr. Speaker. There is a pair, that is 30 milligrams per pill, 60 milligrams in there, and you have to tear a little corner off, tear the tin foil off the bottom, push those out of there. It is kind of hard, but you can get them out if you are sick and take your pseudoephedrine in that kind of way, because Congress said, we will put these in these blister packs so that it is too hard for the meth cooks to open up hundreds of these, and then they will not be making methamphetamines in America any longer. So that was Congress, in blister packs. Iowa was less than 100 per container. So you put those two things together and that means you get these kinds of packages here. This is one that I picked up at the pharmacy in Iowa a little over a week ago. This is 96 pills. These are dry pills, they are in a blister pack, and they are 30 milligrams each, and that is 96 pills in there because Iowa law said you cannot have 100 or more. Well, that did not take them very long to figure out that they could comply with Iowa law, set these on the shelf, the retailers and the pharmacists had no problem, they complied with Iowa law, they did not complain very much, if at all. And the meth cooks looked at that and said, well, there we go, 96 pills per container. I will grab a stack of those containers, take them back to my lab and make myself a little tool where I can lay these blister packs down, drill some holes in a board, use another one for a press, pop all these pills through and they rattle down into the vat below, and they can quickly remove from the blister packs thousands of these pills and turn them into an ounce of methamphetamines. So between Iowa's method of less than 100 per pack, now we have 96; between Congress's method of they will all be in blister packs, which these are, Mr. Speaker, and all of them that we can purchase today are, it did not slow the meth cooks down very much, if at all. It made it a little bit inconvenient, but it did not really raise the cost of their transaction. So here we are, we are back on the floor of this Congress today, tomorrow, perhaps the next day; and part of that time we will spend debating how we are going to control methamphetamines in this country. I will tell you that this is a bipartisan effort. We have the Meth Caucus that is really headed up by the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder). He is one of the four formal leaders there and I would say the most active and the most effective of them. They all deserve credit. We put together legislation that I was part of back in the early part of this session called the Meth Lab Eradication Act, but the Combat Meth bill is part of this. It is a foundation for a bill that has been brought by Chairman Sensenbrenner of the Judiciary Committee. They have added to it, made some changes, and taken input from some other areas. So here we are functioning in the fashion that was envisioned by our Founders when they established this Congress and our Constitution, and we are listening from all over the country. But we come to this: we have toughened penalties, we have done a number of things that are all logical and rational, and I support all of those changes that are in there in the overall meth legislation. Yet, when we come to the piece that is designed to remove the meth precursors from the shelves so that the meth cooks cannot get at it, we have not done enough. So the proposal that is before this Congress that seeks to remove these kinds of products from the hands of the people that are out there producing methamphetamines, sometimes cooking it, sometimes using other methods, it all takes pseudoephedrine of some kind or a precursor, ephedrine, pseudoephedrine or PPA. The legislation that is here, I am going to argue, does not do enough. First I want to describe, what does Iowa do? Iowa has this long history of methamphetamines; Iowa has struggled with this for a long time. Iowa is in the corn belt and has anhydrous ammonia readily available almost everywhere. Iowa, like every place in the country, has had Sudafed and those precursors readily available, almost everywhere, convenience stores, grocery stores and pharmacies. They have struggled with this, gotten it wrong in the past; the package in 1996 did not do much good, just like Congress has struggled with this; a blister pack does not do much good. So what we have done for more than a year, we have done the research, examined this, we have interviewed retailers, convenience store owners, pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies, meth lab cooks, meth addicts, the law enforcement people, the drug czar in Iowa, put our heads together, churned this legislation through. A retired highway patrolman, who has been 10 years or more in the Iowa House of Representatives, Trooper Clel Baudler did a lot of work to put together the language in Iowa so that we could provide the medication for the legitimate use, that it absolutely has a legitimate use, so that a mother could have a sick child, run to the convenience store, the grocery store, pick up enough medication to just supply the need. We had enough medication on the shelf that we are supplying an inventory for a meth cook. With all this work that was done by a team in Iowa, they passed this legislation through. After a long period of work, it was passed March 22 of this year. The Governor signed it into law. Again, this is bipartisan legislation. Since that period of time, I want to point out the success in addressing the meth labs in Iowa. I would say here, the taller, the brighter color, is the numbers of meth labs per month that were busted by our drug enforcement teams and our law enforcement officers all across Iowa. 2004, we are up there: 142 for January; 122 for February; 299 meth labs busted in Iowa in March of 2004; then it went down to 213 in April; and in May, the number dropped down to 16. You can see there is a little seasonal cycle to this, where in the summertime, the meth lab numbers, at least those that are busted, go down, even in 2004, 92 in July; 79, August; 68 in September. By the time October came around, of 2004, the number of meth labs busted jumped back up to 114. November of 2004, 130; December, 110. So you can kind of see the pattern that there is a little seasonal cycle here. Yet we have hundreds and hundreds of meth labs that we had to go in and take down and clean up and pay the clean-up costs, the environmental costs, the risks and the risks to children that we have there. So this history goes back a number of years prior to 2004, and they looked at this history and determined that we want to do something about this. We want to end, we want to eradicate meth labs in Iowa; we want to eradicate meth labs in the United States of America. So the legislation came forward, having had input from most everyone involved. Mr. Speaker, the legislation was put together in Iowa, having taken input from all these other areas and weighed everything. They sat down, talked to the retailers, the pharmacists, the pharmaceutical companies, the consumers and came up with this proposal. The proposal was this: Let us reduce the amount of precursors, the Sudafed, we will call it, the pseudoephedrine, that can be available on the shelf easily at the grocery store, convenience store, at a normal outlet. Let us set an amount there that is going to raise the transaction costs for the meth cook so that he cannot stop in at enough places and buy enough precursor to come home and produce himself, I will say, an ounce of meth. We have to make it so it is no longer practical to do that. What we did was we passed a law in Iowa that says, you can buy a daily limit of 360 milligrams of pseudoephedrine, 360 milligrams. Here is an example of it. They just began packaging it in 360-milligram packages. That is 12 gel caps, another distinction. When you use the gel, it takes almost twice as much gel to produce the same amount of meth as it does the powder or the starch-based pills. So the inconvenience of a gel, I don't know if you can really measure that. You take a gel cap or you take a pill. It is kind of inconsequential as to what you prefer. I can tell you the meth-based cooks prefer the starch-based pills far more than they do the liquid gel caps we have here. So we say, anywhere in retail, you can buy in a day anywhere from 360 milligrams of gel only. So, for example, if a meth cook wanted to go out and produce an ounce of methamphetamine, you can go to 380 retail stops and those 380 retail stops, buy a package of this everywhere. When you get done, you can come back with 380 packages of this, that times 12 would be the number of pills that he would have to have in order to cook, produce an ounce of meth, 380 stops. Well, that made it a little difficult for the meth cooks to be able to run around and make 380 stops and produce enough meth that paid for them to be able to do that. The results are clear. They are here in my chart. Mr. Speaker, this is in blue; this is 2005 compared to the green from 2004. This is under the old law that said under 100 pills, and no other real restrictions on that: January, 81 meth labs busted; February, 27, actually, more than 2004; in March, down to 185, less than 2004, but still a high, high number of meth labs; April, 146, still a high number. You can see enforcement is making a difference. But we get to this point where the bill was enacted on, actually, the first day of June, past year, March 22, the message went out that said these precursors are going to come off the shelf in large quantities, meanwhile, while we let mom go in and get 360 milligrams in a package. When that happened, the inventory began to be reduced on the shelves in Iowa. By the time we got to the day of the bill's enactment when it had to be off the shelf, except in compliance with these smaller packages, then we saw the meth labs go up from 116, from the year before, down to 42, Mr. Speaker, a significant difference the first day that bill was enacted into law. The following month, it went down from 42 to 29; July, 25 meth labs; August, only 12; September, only 12; October, only 10. That is the end of my statistics, but my statistics work out to be this: An 80 percent reduction in the number of meth labs in Iowa. An 80 percent reduction. That means 1,011 fewer meth labs in this 5-month period of time that we have experienced now under the new Iowa law. You think, boy, what would not be worth it to achieve those kinds of results? How much meth came out of the hands of the addicts? What difference did that make in the lives and the lifestyles of the people that are the addicts and the people that have to live around them? We can compare this number, 1,011 fewer meth labs, 80 percent reduction in meth labs, down to around 10 a month or before we were doing 114 that same month. Who knows what it is going to be like for November, December. By the time we come around here to January, February or March, I think we see this number way down here or maybe perhaps even in the peak month, it was 229 labs that were busted in 2004, 185 in 2005. I think we see a number down here to around 10 or fewer. But we still have a problem. Mr. Speaker, we have a problem, because these meth precursors, this pseudoephedrine that is available, is available on the shelves of some of our surrounding States. That allows the meth cooks to drive across the river, across the border, go to the store, buy a big sack of it and bring it back home and then sit there and cook up meth for a while. I think that these remaining labs that we have here, these 25, 12, 10 and 10 per month that we are busting now, and those that we are not uncovering because we do not have 100 percent enforcement in Iowa. I wish we did, but we do not. I think they are being supplied by the surrounding States that do not have a law that produces this kind of result. Mr. Speaker, this has been recognized. Illinois has adopted a law that is very, very close to that of Iowa. Oregon has a law that simply requires a prescription in order to purchase anything that has pseudoephedrine in it. Oklahoma has a pretty good law. There are some States out there that made some changes in this language. But what I want to do is have a law that gets this job done. I do not want to come back to Congress 1 year, 2 years, or heaven forbid, 10 years from now and put the fix in place of the things like we did in 1995 when we said, surely a meth cook will not go to all this work to pop a pseudoephedrine out of a blister pack, or if you put it in a package under 100, that is too much trouble to screw the cap off a bottle of 96 or 99. These people are resourceful. We have to raise their transaction costs. Mr. Speaker, my point is this, if you go to a retail stop and you are a meth cook, and you want to do an ounce of meth, you do 380 stops to get these, times 380 gets you enough to open up all of these caplets and turn it into an ounce of meth. But under the proposal that is before us today, and this Congress, it allows for 3.6 grams a day rather than 360 milligrams, Mr. Speaker. I would point out the difference. The difference is 10 to 1. I have it just stacked up here, this is, if it does not explode in my hands, this represents 3.6 grams of methamphetamines, a typical purchase-size package that you would have. Under the Federal law that may pass here tomorrow or the next day, one could go to a store and purchase this anywhere in a retail outlet, grocery store, a convenience, Wal-Mart, wherever it might be, and walk away with this much in one's hands. That is a daily purchase rate. Now, that is not enough to really bother to fire up the old meth cooker, but it is enough to get one-nineteenth of an ounce, and it would allow an individual then to make 18 other stops around the retail establishments. Yes, they have to sign the book. I am glad they do. They have to show their identification. I am glad they do. These people are breaking the law regularly. They are not going to be concerned about lying when they sign their name or the fact that we are not able to index other retail establishments so that those 19 are not going to be checking the other 18 records. Neither is law enforcement going to be able to have the resources to do that. We will just go back on that. If we catch somebody with a truckload of this, then we will say, where did you buy it? We will find out they violated our new law. What we want to do is we want to raise the transaction costs. This meth cook can go 19 stops, get this much legally at every stop, come back home, make an ounce of methamphetamine out of that. By the way, he can buy the starch-based powder as opposed to the requirement for the gel that I have spoken about. Nineteen stops, an ounce of meth. He can probably do that in a couple of hours, come back home and cook a batch of meth. An ounce of meth is enough to last an average addict 90 days. The other 89 days he can continue to go out and do the same thing and continue to sell the meth. That is the result we are going to have. Or you can have three people join together. They will go around, have six stops, come back with 18 times this amount, make 1 ounce of meth and then that is good enough for each of those three addicts for a month. There will be an ounce of that meth. Yes, it will be a month. It is about a 90-day supply for one, 30-day supply for each of the other three. Then he will have 29 days to go out there and do this for a profit. Mr. Speaker, I do not want this Congress to be short. I do not want a solution that seems to be a solution that retailers and pharmaceutical companies agree to, but not one that is going to inconvenience and raise the transaction costs adequately for the meth cooks. I want to get this done. I want to get it done right. I want to honor the work done by the meth caucus here, all the serious work of people who put up vote after vote after vote. I will recognize it through the appropriations process. When there was amendment after amendment that came to this floor that struck a blow against methamphetamines, I saw people on both sides of this aisle stand up and put up that vote regularly and consistently. There is a real conviction in this Congress to get this right. Sometimes we have a little trouble being able to get down into the depths of the details in order to get it right. One of the individuals who has provided that kind of background, that kind of knowledge, who has been one of the leaders here when we introduce one of our friends and colleagues, but this time I am going to say that I am introducing the leader of this meth effort in the United States Congress, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) who is the chairman of the meth caucus.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Indiana. This has been no small task on your part, and I appreciate the chronology and the narratives of the efforts at the hearings across this condition and the history you have brought to the floor of this Congress. I know I have got a fair sense of how much work was done here, but you chronicled it in a way that is broader than I appreciated, and I am glad I have a better perspective of it now. You pointed out some things that I think need to be explored a little bit further, and the language in there that lowers the threshold for drug kingpins is a plus, and the tracking of the few sources in the world that actually produce pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and PPAs is another important part of this legislation. It is things that have been brought together very thoughtfully, and of course, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Blunt) has been a leader on this, and we rolled up our sleeves and put this language together quite a while back. I want to point out something else, too, which is the concern, what happens with children when they are brought up in an environment where the ma and pa meth labs are and where the fumes are there replete throughout a connection of homes that these poor children are in this toxic environment? One of the things that we recognize is a statistic that I did not offer here is that, in that 5-month period of time that we have had our law in place that removes the precursors and makes it a lot harder to find those in Ohio, the number of abused children now has gone down in that 5-month period of time. The cumulative fewer number of children is 455 for the State of Iowa, and if that is one child, it begins to be worth the effort; 455 is an astonishing number and a huge success. It saved $2.4 million in meth labs cleanup. As the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) mentioned, it is 4 to 6 hours to clean up a meth lab. That is not just a one-person team. It is a multiple-person team. These people are trained. They have to have equipment. They have to have the suits to protect them from the toxic material. When it is all done, then they have to throw that all away and go get new stuff. So between the manpower and the equipment cost and the time that is there and the logistics, and when you charge that back out, a cost to clean up the lab runs somewhere around $4,000 or more. You can kind of figure about $1,000 an hour, but there is a lot of capital involved in just having the equipment to clean up a meth lab. What we are after here, and I am sure that, Mr. Speaker, you have to be thinking and a lot of the listeners have to be thinking, well, if you are only going to be addressing 15 percent of the meth problem in Iowa and maybe none of the meth problem in New York or in Boston, what purpose is this to try to eliminate as much as we can of the ma and pa meth labs? The purpose is logical, and it is rational because there will be many fewer children that will be abused in that kind of an environment, for one thing. There will be a lot of money that is saved and a lot of law enforcement time that is saved and a lot of resources that are saved if we do not have these ma and pa meth labs out there. They are scattered. They are divided. They are diversified. They are hard to find. We cannot get them all. So, if we could get them all cleaned up, what remains in the area I represent is 85 percent of the meth now comes across the border from Mexico. We can turn our resources to that. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I am very happy to hear Mr. Souder present that here on this floor tonight, and I am an enthusiastic supporter of that philosophy, and I will tell him that I have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours in that very subject matter, and it lights me up to hear it come from him. I am anxious to engage in this battle next year, and I believe that I will be able to bring some background to this that will be part of this team that can bring a solution. And I have argued that if they test in the workplace, and I would be happy to drug test Members of Congress, but if they drug test in the workplace, that is a huge zone of influence in America, and we could clean up the workplace almost 100 percent. We would have a little trouble with the sole proprietors out there. It is going to be hard to get them to participate if they happen to be an addict. Most of them are responsible business people. But if we can clean up the workplace, then the other zones of our country that we would address would be the educational system, for example, and that is a little harder nut to crack. There will be significant resistance in a place like that. But that is a place where a lot of the drug addiction gets started. Then the other place is on welfare, those people that are on public benefits. By the way, I would only do the random testing in any of those places. I would not make it 100 percent testing of anyone. And the way we set up our law, we allow that random to be on a sliding scale. The employer can decide what that percentage is. And if that employer decides that he wants to test 100 percent of his employees once a quarter, he can do that. If he wants to slide that random number selector down, and it must be random, it cannot be personal, down to one-tenth of 1 percent, then fine. Nobody needs to know what that equation is. But the deterrent is always there. So, Mr. Speaker, I think that we have given a good dialogue to methamphetamines here tonight on the floor of Congress and raised the issue. I hope that we bring this bill to the floor tomorrow. I know that we will do good things for methamphetamines and drug addiction in America. One of my concerns is we are going to end up with 19 stops to get enough precursor to make an ounce of meth versus the 380 if we have the model that I brought before here. As long as I continue to believe in that, I will continue to bring it to the floor of this Congress. But mainly we have got a broad thrust. We have got a good start, and by next year I hope we do take up drug testing. But this is good work done by the meth caucus led by Mr. Souder of Indiana. The hearings that he has had all over this country, the work that he has done deserve a great deal of applause from the parents of America.

Mr. KING of Iowa. As I recall, the gentleman from Nebraska's (Mr. Osborne) charts are incremental pictures of a lady, by the way she was an Iowan, and I believe the last picture was in the morgue. So that is the end result of an addict that takes this to the `nth degree, and the odds of being successful on rehab, somewhere between the first time if there is conviction, maybe never if they really do not want to get cured, but six or eight times, one in six or eight might be one of those numbers then. So it sets the framework then I think for the center of this I would like to see us all focus more on. Yes, push interdiction as much as we can, and let us get treatment for the people that we can help but in between all that is the deterrent portion of it. In between that is the testing portion that you brought up and something that I worked with. Nine years ago, when I was elected to the Iowa Senate, one of my intense planks in my platform was I will work to rewrite Iowa's drug testing law. As a contractor and employer I have dealt with meth addicts on a construction crew. In fact, I was required to sign contracts where I would pledge a drug-free workplace in order to be able to apply for a Federal contract, and yet, there was no way I could guarantee a drug- free workplace because we did not have a law that allowed me to test my employees. Well, today we do. On St. Patrick's Day of 1998, our Governor signed that bill into law, spent 2 years working on it, authored it, floor managed it, and pushed it through the legislation. No one's tried to amend it since then that I know of, but it allows for and sets up the legal parameters for an employer to voluntarily drug test their employees, provided that they treat each employee fairly and equally. If they offer treatment, they must offer it to every employee. They have to have a drug assistance personnel there that understands these issues, gone through and taken the educational and training. So now we have employers that are voluntarily testing their employees, and this drug testing, if I were charged with this responsibility to eradicate all illegal drug use and abuse in America, first, I would have to have the will of the people behind me that would support the will of the people in Congress because believe me these voices in here reflect the will of the people in America. I would say the solution to this is drug testing. Testing in the workplace, people make a decision then that they like their job better than they like their drugs. When that happens, their children go to the ball game, go fishing, spend time with dad, instead of not having a new pair of shoes because the money went for meth or mom for that matter. We have got to be equal opportunity here even on the other side of this equation. But the positive decision that gets made because drug testing hangs over their head as an employee is deterrent enough to keep people from even trying it, many, many times. That is just in the workplace. We have also the educational. We have the welfare system. Each one of those zones out there, if we brought our drug testing to those zones, we would be able to eradicate drug abuse in America, and I think that is the most effective way to go.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and the opportunity to address the House tonight and until tomorrow begins I understand. First, I would speak to this issue that we have heard as the conclusion of my friends and colleagues from the other side of the aisle, however optimistic they may not be in their presentation to the American people on a regular basis. As I go through some of the things that are in front of me and I listened to the allegations that have been made that somehow the President has manipulated the intelligence and led this Nation into war because there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I will point out that I flat out reject that statement. It is not possible to prove a negative in the first place, and a rational person would understand that from the beginning. Additionally, we know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We know that he used them 1 time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would point out that I will not concede the accuracy of that, and I do not because I do not have that evidence and I have not seen that. I acknowledge the gentleman's statement for the honorable individual he is, and I would point out that we can concur then that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, President Clinton made that statement in 1998 very clearly and unequivocally, and my point is that either Saddam Hussein used his last canister of mustard gas on the Kurds and simply ran out of inventory or else those weapons of mass destruction still have to be someplace, and he constructed then an elaborate ruse to dupe the world and dupe seven or eight or nine different countries on the intelligence. I point out President Clinton's statement: Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. This is December 1998. With Saddam there is one big difference; he has used them. The international community has little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, says President Clinton, that left unchecked Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons. Again, 1998, Mr. Speaker, and allegations here on this floor and around this country are that somehow President Bush has manipulated intelligence and apparently misrepresented this to the American people, and the implication is also that he has duped these people that have made these statements, including former President Bill Clinton and a number of other high-profile people within his administration. The allegation would then have to hold true that somehow the governor of Texas, now President Bush, found a way to dupe the national leaders to somehow manipulate and maneuver hundreds of billions of dollars worth of national intelligence to produce these kinds of results. It is simply a ludicrous position to take. It will not hold water, it is not logical, it is not rational, and the more the American people hear about this, the more they begin to think about it, the more they begin to understand it, the less they are going to believe these allegations. I would also point out that the individual who has had his 15 minutes of fame and then some, the erstwhile ambassador who was sent by the CIA to go to Niger to investigate the question as to whether Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, that individual, of course, we know as the husband of now publicly discussed Valerie Plame, at her recommendation. As we understand, he was sent by the CIA. He had not been in Niger in 20 years. He was not a weapons expert like his wife may have been. But he went there, and he came back and gave one story to the New Republic Magazine. He gave another story under oath to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which thoroughly eviscerated his viability and his credibility. So the statements that were made for publication for the fame did not hold up under oath, did not hold up under scrutiny. One thing we are confident of is that erstwhile ambassador who went on a mission to supposedly represent the United States, Joseph C. Wilson, the individual who went over there for the CIA, if one is on a mission in a foreign country for the CIA, one would think that they would have some level of integrity they would have to hold up, have some level of confidentiality that they would have to hold up. One would think that if they went on a mission, a secret clandestine mission, first, that they would be qualified; second, that they would maintain that level of secrecy and confidentiality, that they would come back and report back to their superiors and it would be an accurate report and it would be precise and it would be credible and it would hold up under oath. That report, alleged to have been delivered in print by one Joseph C. Wilson, erstwhile ambassador, was not delivered in print. It was delivered verbally, and the verbal report that we have the notes of and the knowledge of, Mr. Speaker, is a verbal report that indicates that the Iraqis were seeking weapons of mass destruction, yellowcake uranium in Niger. It indicates the very thing that he alleges today was not true. Yet this seems to be some kind of allegations by the other side, if they like what they hear, are enough for them to say this is confirmed and absolute proof; and rational, thinking Americans know better. Critical thinking Americans know better. In fact, this President would not use any language in a State of the Union address or any other kind of speech unless he knew that it had been thoroughly vetted, it was reliable. And it was, by the way, vetted and reliable and delivered into that speech on January 28, 2003, in these Chambers from just in front of where the Speaker is right now when the President gave his State of the Union Address. Those now infamous 16 words that are alleged to have been untruthful to the American people start out with ``we have learned from the British'' that the Iraqis have been seeking uranium from Africa. Now, ``we have learned from the British'' is true. That is a fact, and no one has challenged that fact. ``We have learned from the British that the Iraqis are seeking,'' that qualification precludes any of the rest of that statement as long as the rest of that statement is consistent with what we have learned from the British; and to turn that into something that is now called a lie is disingenuous and dishonest to the American people. I reminded the body here last week, last Wednesday night, that there were commercials that were run across this country on television in the 1996 Presidential campaign. There were issues there about integrity and honesty in that Presidential campaign. Charlton Heston went on television, and he said, looking into the camera, ``Mr. President, when you say something that is wrong and you do not know that it is wrong, that is a mistake. But, Mr. President, when you say something that is right and you know it is wrong, that is a lie.'' That is the distinction between a mistake and a lie. That distinction has not been recognized by the other side of the aisle, and it is willfully being ignored. I will not concede that a mistake was made. I think the words in that State of the Union Address are precisely accurate. I think the British would concede that point today. I think any rational, critical thinking person would concede that point today, Mr. Speaker. But this has been twisted and warped to the point where it is jeopardizing our national security, and that is why I am on the floor here tonight. I have been over in the Middle East a number of times. The last time I came back was August 20 of this past summer. I have been there with our men and women in uniform when they are strapped on with helmets and bullet-proof vests. I have been in and ridden in and inspected some of those armored vehicles that have been hit by enemy fire, hit by IEDs. I happen to have inspected an armored Humvee that was hit by a rocket and an RPG almost simultaneously. It rolled off the road upside down, and the four American soldiers that were in that armored Humvee walked away and were on patrol the next day thanks to the armor that is there. I have been to Fallujah, I believe a year ago last May, where the Marines were bolting on armor then and preparing for battle that was ahead. So we have accelerated the production of our armor for all of our vehicles there. Some of them are not armored. They stay on the base where they are safe. But almost all of our vehicles that go out anywhere where they are in danger are fully armored, top, bottom, and sideways, with bullet-proof windows in them. We have done a fantastic job to ramp up the construction and development of armor and done a pretty good job. We were not ready for this. The Humvees were not designed to go into combat. They were not designed to drive over IEDs. They were not designed to take direct hits from RPGs or rocket fire. In fact, they were not designed to take hits from AK-47s. They were not a combat vehicle in the beginning of those operations. So we had to adapt to the circumstances that were there. We began sending steel over there, and it was cut and fitted and it was bolted on or welded on, and our military went right to work as quickly as they could to get as much armor up as fast as they could. We started our factories up here. We took an existing production line and multiplied its production capability by at least 10 times to get our armored Humvees out in place and to put the armor on our trucks and to get ready. Now we do send out convoys that are fully armored on a regular basis, and it has been a long time since we have exposed significant numbers of vehicles or American soldiers out there in vehicles that were not armored, Mr. Speaker. So this argument that it is something other than that I think is specious, and I do not think it is based on fact. The statement that the President made about the irresponsible statements when people undermine our military efforts, I will go further than that, and I will relate an incident for me a year ago last June, about June 17. I was in a hotel in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq the next day early. I turned on the television to Al-Jazeera TV. As I watched that television, it was Arabic audio and it was English subtitles, and on that television came Moqtada al-Sadr, a big black beard, and as he spoke in Arabic, the English subtitles came on underneath on the screen, and the subtitles said, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.'' Listen to that echo in the ears of Moqtada al-Sadr, and we know that his voice was echoing in the ears of our enemy, the people we call the insurgents on our nice days, the people who are sitting somewhere in a mud hut or a stone building and they have some 155mm rounds. They have got explosives. They have got detonating devices. They have got shrapnel built into this, and they are making improvised explosive devices. They are watching their new satellite dish TV. Some of the communities there in Iraq have more than one satellite dish per household. They were illegal when we first came into Iraq, but every Iraqi today has access to satellite TV. Every Iraqi today can watch Al-Jazeera TV. And on Al-Jazeera TV, they would see these kinds of scenes of Moqtada al-Sadr saying, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.'' And the enemy who are making improvised explosive devices see that on television. It encourages them. It causes them to build more bombs, not less. It causes them to plant more bombs, not less. It causes them to detonate more bombs, not less. It causes them to have more courage, more hope, a stronger spirit to fight our American soldiers because of the words that came out of Moqtada al-Sadr. Now, imagine how encouraging that is to our enemy over in Iraq, and many of them are not Iraqis. In fact, most of the enemy, I understand, are not Iraqis but imported fighters from other countries. Imagine how encouraging it is when they see on their Al-Jazeera TV, when they hear the voice and see the face of a quasi-leader of the United States of America, someone from the floor of Congress, someone from the floor of the United States Senate, someone who is doing a press conference out on the steps of the Capitol, someone who is doing talking head television, someone who says, wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, get them out of there, Mr. President, we need to get out of Iraq. Imagine how much encouragement that gives to the enemy. And what is the enemy going to do? They are going to recruit more. They are going to build more bombs. They are going to attack more Americans. I reject the idea that one can say they fervently pray that the troops come home and they support the troops. I reject the idea that they can support the troops and reject their mission. Mr. Speaker, if you are for the troops, you are for their mission. And if you are against the troops, you are against their mission. But these things are inextricably linked. They cannot be separated. We cannot ask an American soldier to go in this country or overseas, risk their life, perhaps give their life on a mission that we do not believe in. We would not send them on a mission we do not believe in. We would not ask them to do that. It would be the most dishonest, disingenuous thing we could do as the United States Government in Congress and the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief to order men and women into a theater of battle and not support their mission. When I talk with the families that have lost a loved one in this war on terror, it is a sad time, and that price they have paid cannot be felt unless we ourselves have had that loss, but we can empathize with them. We can pray for them. We can sympathize with them. We can try to understand. But invariably those that I talk to, those that I meet with, will tell me they want their son or their daughter's life to have meaning. They want that sacrifice to have meaning. And they will say do not give up on this mission. My son believed in what he did. He volunteered for this mission. Let us have meaning. Let us have freedom for the Iraqi people. Let us have freedom for the Afghani people. By the way, while I bring that up, what is the distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq? Why do I not hear from the other side of the aisle ``get your troops out of Afghanistan''? The statement is never made. We forget about the naysayers that were here before we went into Afghanistan and before we liberated the Afghanis. There were plenty of naysayers. They said we cannot go into that part of the world. No one has ever been able to be go into that part of Afghanistan or even Afghanistan at all and be able to liberate, invade, occupy because the terrain is so difficult, that Mujahideen are such tough fighters. So 2 months after September 11, the American military were in there, coalition forces were in there, and we still heard the naysayers. But as the operation got wrapped up, as there was more security and more safety and votes coming along in Afghanistan where people had never voted before on that particular piece of real estate, they did so and they have done so twice. They have done that because of the American soldiers giving them that liberty. But the critics essentially shut up about Afghanistan but not about Iraq. Is the difference the number of lives, Mr. Speaker? Is the difference that 200 Americans have lost their lives in Afghanistan and 2,000 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq? If that is the difference, then I would challenge the left, the pacifist left, the people who have difficulty figuring out how they are going to support the troops and oppose the mission, and if they were rational, they would admit that that dichotomy could not be accepted or tolerated. They cannot seem to draw the line on what the difference is between Afghanistan and Iraq, 200 lives versus 2,000 lives. If the number of lives were the difference, then they should tell us from their position how many are enough. How many lives would they spend to free 25 million Afghanis? How many lives would it cost to free 25 million Iraqis? And, yes, the price has been high, and it has hurt. And it will hurt far more if this job, this task, is not completed, if this freedom that has been so hard fought and won is allowed to go back to a state of tyranny where a dictator would take over in Iraq and where we would see a center for Islamic terrorism for al Qaeda. It would clearly be there if we pulled out of there today. I would wager if you put this up for a ballot to the Iraqi people and asked, do you want the United States and the coalition forces to pull out as fast as they can, that ballot referendum, I believe 95 percent would say, no, we would like to have the Americans leave not real soon, just soon enough to get control of our country. That is moving along at an acceptable rate. I will not say I am happy about the speed. It is a tough job. The infrastructure in Iraq has been depreciated and dilapidated over 35 to 40 years of neglect. So there is old equipment that does not function very well. Parts and materials to keep it in shape, many have to be manufactured. The oil fields need new wells and distribution systems. They need to get their refineries up to shape. They need a distribution system that will get that oil out of the country so they can get some cash coming back in. But Saddam Hussein, when he was in power, was killing an average of 182 of his own people every day. Every day on average. Hundreds of thousands of them have been found in mass graves. The 800,000 Swamp Arabs that were there before Saddam Hussein decided they were an enemy of the state were decimated down to 220,000. Some escaped. In the end, about a fourth of the population of Swamp Arabs in the area of the wetlands, Saddam Hussein dried them up in order to take away their livelihood and way of life. That area is twice the size of the Everglades, and that way of life was destroyed by Saddam. We have reconstructed about the size of the Everglades, and the Swamp Arabs are starting to repopulate. But that is one-thirtieth of Iraqi population doing what they can. The argument that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and now we hear from the gentleman from Massachusetts that he did, what did he do with them? Where did they go? Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Saddam Hussein said, I have those weapons of mass destruction. He defied 17 U.N. resolutions stretching back to 1990. We know from September 11 that we cannot wait until a threat is fully developed. The question still remains, we do not know, we do not know how large the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were. We just know he had stockpiles. He used them. We do not know what happened to them. But the King rule of physics is everything has to be someplace. So where are they? There is no evidence he destroyed the weapons of mass destruction. But due to Saddam Hussein's obstruction, the materials once declared by the Saddam regime were never accounted for, even though he declared them. I also want to point out that in October 2002, a bipartisan majority of Congress authorized President Bush to use force if necessary to deal with the continuing threat posed by Saddam Hussein. We also had a national policy that Congress endorsed of regime change in Iraq. All of these things were consistent with the will of the people of America, as debated and voted on in Congress. H.J. Res. 114 stated that by continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, and actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations, those were the activities going on by Saddam Hussein. And the intelligence of countries that concurred with ours. The 15 members of our intelligence community in this country, and additionally some of the other countries who concurred with our intelligence were Great Britain and France. France opposed our operations there, concurred with our intelligence. Germany opposed our operations and concurred with our intelligence. Russia same story: concurred with our intelligence, opposed our operations there. What do those three countries have in common? The answer is those three countries were three of the most vocal opponents to the liberalization of Iraq. I said at the time that the decibels of their objections to the liberation of Iraq can be directly indexed to their interest in the oil development contracts that they had access to that they designed with Saddam Hussein prior to the beginning of our operations of the liberation of Iraq. They had a vested interest in the oil in Iraq. They had contracts signed with Saddam Hussein, which of course were nullified by the liberation of Iraq. Come to find out after the fact, it was not just legitimate oil contracts that had them all in a dither; it was also the Oil-For-Food fraud campaign that was replete through those three countries, a number of others besides, and through the United Nations itself. Also, the U.N. Security Council echoed the congressional assessment of the threat posed by Iraq. Even the U.N. Security Council agreed with our intelligence: there was a fair amount of fraud going through the Oil-For-Food program. I have to point out George Galloway, as a Brit, was apparently profiting significantly from Oil-For-Food, and his wife had a number of six-figure checks deposited in her checking account; and the facts are coming home to roost in the case of Mr. Galloway. So the objections to the liberation of Iraq, many of the countries that objected had a conflict of interest. That vested interest reminds me of Barbara Conable's famous statement of hell hath no fury as a vested interest masquerading as a moral authority. That is what we heard prior to the liberation of Iraq. We know Saddam Hussein had sufficient time to shuffle his weapons of mass destruction. They could have buried or spirited them out of the country. By the way, Iraq is a country where everybody digs holes. It looks like one big prairie dog village. That countryside has a lot of open holes and a lot of things buried. We found a fully operational MiG-29 buried in the desert in Iraq. That is a whole lot bigger than you would need for a stockpile of the weapons of mass destruction. Did we find it because of intelligence or we had a metal detector or because somebody had good instincts, or because we had some scientific way to fly over the top and notice the difference in the terrain? Or did somebody tip us off to find that fully operational MiG-29 buried in Iraq? Mr. Speaker, no, we found it because the wind blew the sand off the tail fin. If there had been weapons of mass destruction inside that plane, if it just filled the cockpit, that would have been plenty enough to convince even the skeptics on the other side of the aisle that the weapons of mass destruction are not really the question that is before this country or the world, but a red herring that is designed to throw the American people into a frustration with the decision- making process and the effort to convince Americans that things are going badly there. Whenever we lose an American, that is something going very, very badly. Whenever we have Americans exposed to enemy, we will have casualties, Mr. Speaker. But when we look objectively at what has been accomplished in Iraq, when we objectively look to see that there were milestones set on the calendar, the effort over there has met or exceeded every single milestone. Certainly the liberation of Iraq came around a lot faster than anybody thought it would. I point out to the American people that the city of Baghdad, about 5 million people, is the largest city in the world, ever in the history of the world, to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power. It happened in the blink of a historical eye with an extraordinarily small number of casualties for a city that size. No one quite believed on that Thursday, an American armored column had gone into Baghdad, driven in and came back out, and the enemy had given up the ghost and essentially disappeared. But that is what happened. They met that deadline. They set a new milestone for armored columns going across the desert and for the liberation of 5 million people. They were way ahead of the agenda, the targeted timetable. And then we set up the CPA, the provisional authority under Paul Bremer. The idea was to establish a functional government in Iraq and be able to pass that over to the Iraqis so they could govern themselves. This began in March of 2003. March 22 was the date Baghdad was liberated. I happen to know, since I was in Mosul sometime after that, that General Patrais and the 101st Airborne that liberated Mosul, they held open and free elections in May of 2003. They elected a governor and vice governor and put together a government of the people by the people and for the people, a Kurd, and I am not sure actually of the religious definition of the other individual, but I watched them interact with each other and I watched them do business. They brought a businessman that could speak English. They were optimistic about the city of Mosul. In fact, when the 101st Airborne left Mosul and deployed after their year tour of duty, the Iraqis took a boulevard, a broad boulevard in Mosul. And I only saw one street sign in all of Baghdad my first trip. Most everything had been looted and stripped for the metal. The one street sign in Baghdad was a street named Jihad. So they left that up and tore down the other street signs. Go over to the city of Mosul and I did not notice any street signs there, but I have a picture of a street sign in Mosul, that sign is 101st Airborne Air Assault Division. They named that street after the 101st Airborne. And this was not something put up by the 101st Airborne unless they had the same difficulty with spelling that the Iraqis had. They misspelled ``division'' and they misspelled ``assault.'' That makes it genuine in that effort. I am quite proud of the way the Iraqis responded to the Americans. I am proud of the way they respond to them in most of the areas of Iraq. Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to fly over Fallujah, where we have had as much conflict as anywhere, and see people come out into the streets and wave and smile. They come out and wave because they are grateful to Americans for giving them a chance at freedom. But this message that the American people are getting that the credibility of the administration is not there disappoints me a great deal. It undermines our American troops. It does give aid and comfort to the enemy. It encourages the enemy to attack more Americans. It is costing American lives. When people come to this floor of Congress, when they step out into a press conference, when they speak on the floor of the Senate, they are viewed as quasi-leaders of the United States of America. This encourages our enemies. When I see a soldier anywhere in America, particularly in my district, serve their second tour of duty, and they lost their life defending freedom in their second tour of duty, it is infuriating to me because I believe if we stuck together as a Nation, if we stuck by the deal and the agreement that this Congress has when we have our vote on the floor of this Congress, when the vote goes up and men and women go to war, you stand with them, you stand beside them, you support them with everything you have. That means, yes, bulletproof vests; yes, armored Humvees; and, yes, support and equipment and training and tactics and technology and great leadership. But it means support the mission, Mr. Speaker. You cannot ask a soldier to go to war and tell him that you do not support their mission. And so the pessimism that abounds that seeks to undermine the presidency here and seeks to establish a majority in the House and the Senate in the upcoming election is all about negativism. It is all about dragging down our foreign policy. It is all about trying to prove to the American people that the administration has not been successful. But each milestone that is reached in Iraq, handing over the CPA of Paul Bremer's over to the temporary civilian government, that happened 2 days early. And then they had elections, and the elections were there to put people in temporarily into their temporary parliament and the temporary parliament got together and they agreed on a constitution and the constitution was rolled out on time. And they had an election to ratify the constitution, Mr. Speaker, all in an extraordinary amount of time. The United States of America declared its independence July 4, 1776; and yet we did not get our Constitution ratified until 1789, 13 years later. Now it took a while to earn our freedom, I grant, and the war was long, and it was bloody, and it was costly, and it was brutal. We have our freedom, and we have our Constitution. In fact, the Iraqis have their constitution far sooner than the American Constitution has been established, and it is ratified by a full vote of the Iraqi people. Now, about 1 month from today, the Iraqis will go to the polls, and they will select a new parliament, and this will be a sovereign nation when that new parliament is seated. It will have all the legitimacy of any nation that sits at the United Nations today. Iraq will be fully, fully legitimized. The vote of the people will seat the members of parliament. They will select a prime minister and their leaders and that legitimacy that is there takes them to another level. But this is an astonishing thing. This is far, far more freedom, far, far closer to establishing a functioning rule of law than has ever been seen in that part of the world before. And the inspiration for the Arab people all around Iraq that see that a nation like Iraq can have freedom, when people breathe free, they give inspiration to others who see them breathe free and out of that yearning will bring them to the streets like it did in Lebanon. The Lebanese reached out for their measure of freedom, and that is part of the inspiration of Iraq, and it is part of the inspiration of Afghanistan. It is part of the inspiration that this President has laid out in an articulated way to the world, the inspiration that we have been attacked by enemies from without. We did nothing to provoke them. They attacked us and killed approximately 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. And we went to Afghanistan and liberated 25 million people, and we went to Iraq and liberated 25 million people. Fifty million people that had not been free before in any substantive way are free today. Those two countries can become and I believe will become the lodestar nations, the Arab nations that can be the inspiration for the rest of the Arab world. The habitat that breeds terror is a habitat that breeds poverty, ignorance, jealousy and hatred. That is the environment that is being exploited by the wahabis and the madrassas that are teaching this hatred in the young people. And the pressure that comes on those countries from the measure of that kind of hatred, they are being taught that, somehow or another, it is part of this age-old philosophy. I really do believe that if you would scramble up all of our cultures and all of our people and erase our institutional memory and toss us into a totally new environment in a random way, some of us would wake up in the morning and think, huh, my glass is half full, and I am going to go to work and see if I can fill it up the rest of the way. And others, they look at their glass and say mine is half empty and that fellow over there, he is seeking to fill his glass. If he were not doing that, mine would fill spontaneously. That is the class envy, jealousy, hatred that comes. It has always been this conflict between freedom and communism, freedom and fascism, freedom and national socialism, and freedom and militant Islamic extremism, all the same kind of class envy jealousy, the hatred that comes from the idea that if somehow other people were not industrious and did not earn a profit, somehow those resources of the world are finite and they will flow at random to other folks who do not quite try so hard or have the technology or have not developed the education. But this spirit of entrepreneurship and free enterprise will establish itself in a strong way in Afghanistan and in Iraq. In fact, I gave a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce. I did not know they had a Chamber of Commerce. We pulled into Baghdad at the al Rashid Hotel, and they asked me if I would give a speech to them. So I said yes I would. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon. Walked in there, and they were getting ready to introduce me, and I said introduce me to the interpreter first. That is going to be really helpful. And they said, no, we do not have an interpreter. You do not need an interpreter, Mr. Congressman, because they all speak English here at the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce. About 56 to 58 of them sitting at the dinner tables. So I gave them a little speech, and you could tell they understood English. They laughed at the right time, and they smiled at the right time, and they clapped at a time that I thought was appropriate anyway. I was quite encouraged at the level of interest in developing a culture of free enterprise in Iraq. When that speech was over, I needed to get on to the next meeting, but it was an instantaneous cluster, huddle like, actually. They had to eventually just pull me out of this huddle. We were passing back and forth business cards and writing notes and trying to find a way to connect with the inspiration of free enterprise that is embodied in almost every American that walks the streets of Baghdad or Iraq. They look to us to be leaders in a lot of ways, not just military but on free enterprise capitalism perspective, and as they continue to develop that their economy will grow. It takes a level of integrity and morality to have a functioning free enterprise system. It works on trust is why. As that trust gets built and established in the culture in Iraq, it is going to be a stronger and stronger economy. As the free enterprise economy flows out in Baghdad and the other cities in Iraq and connects itself with the new thing that will come, that will be available for the Iraqis after December 15, when they are a truly sovereign nation in control of all of their own assets, then they will be able to sit down and negotiate or have competitive bids for the development of the oil resources in Iraq. They must have that. They must have outside capital, foreign capital and foreign technology and foreign know-how, and a lot of it should be and hopefully is American technology capital know-how to pour into Iraq, to go out and punch in hundreds of new oil wells and new pipelines and distribution systems and refineries so that that oil can pour out of that country and the money can pour in. Another allegation that comes from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, is that somehow we did this all for oil. But oil is something that you can purchase on the open market around the world. We did not go in there to steal anybody's oil. We went in there to protect that oil for the Iraqis. It is absolutely clear that the oil resources of Iraq belong to the people of Iraq, and we protected that, preserved that, and we are keeping our pledge with the Iraqi people. They will develop the oil resources with foreign capital and, when that happens, then the cash will flow into the economy and it will multiply itself over and over again. And Iraq becomes the lodestar Arab nation that brings freedom to that part of the world. Like, as the European, the eastern European nations saw, an echo of freedom go across eastern Europe when the wall went down on November 9, 1989, I believe we will see an echo of freedom go through the Arab world, probably not as dramatically, probably not as quickly, probably not as bloodlessly. But I believe we will see a free Arab people some time within the next generation. At that point, the habitat that breeds terrorists will disappear. It will not be the culture that can create that kind of a thing. And I mean that two ways. But the culture of freedom does not produce a culture of terror. In fact, free people never go to war against other free people. This country has never gone to war against another democracy, another group of people that had an opportunity to go to the polls and select their leaders and their national destiny. That is another known fact that does not seem to get out on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. So I am optimistic about the solutions there. I applaud the President's vision and having the courage to step in and take the initiative to free 50 million people, 50 million Arab people, to give them an opportunity. And those people will be our allies, by the way, for a long, long time to come in a part of the world where it is pretty important to have those kind of allies. As I listened to some of the other laments that were here earlier this evening, the discussion about the Budget Reconciliation Act, the people who are critical of that, of the Deficit Reduction Act that we brought some $53 billion to come out of the proposed spending up until the year 2010, not enough, but a start. A half of 1 percent of our budget is all that amounts to, Mr. Speaker. I do not think it is very hard to step up and do a very small half of 1 percent trim, given the kind of spending that we have had. But the other side of the aisle does not offer $1 in fiscally responsible cuts, not one; and they do not offer one vote to support our fiscal responsibility, not one. Additionally, they demagogue the very things we have done that are responsible. The statement was made over here earlier tonight that we have cut $40 billion from the student loans and that somehow it is going to come out of the students, their loans and their aid. Not. Not $40 billion from the student loans. The students are not going to notice any difference unless there is more cash available, not less, because we have made administrative changes, changes that affect the interest rates and the fees that are being charged by the lenders. This is not going to affect the students. This is reform. That is efficiency in government and efficiency in business. But you know the demagoguery again. If I was as pessimistic as this and if I had this philosophy, this argument that everything is wrong and you cannot trust your leadership night after night after night, I think I would swim to Cuba and try to find a place where I would be happy. That would be my advice to the people that are here every night tearing down the optimism of America, undermining the truth that is America and making it difficult for us to move forward into this bold and brave future that we need to. And, by the way, they have no confidence in our economy. I would go down through the whole list of economic indicators. We have had the longest period of consistent growth over 3 percent for 10 consecutive quarters. That is the longest since for the last two decades to have that kind of growth. Unemployment is down to 5.0 percent, when 5.6 is considered to be a pretty good position to be in. It has been ratcheting down. This economy has been creating more and more jobs. Nearly every economic indicator is stronger and stronger and stronger. That in the face of the negatives, that in the face of Hurricane Katrina. This in 10 consecutive quarters of growth over 3 percent is after we got hit by September 11 and the attack on our financial markets. It is after some of the business circumstances that were brought up short by this Congress, and I am pleased that they were, hit the markets as well. After people lost confidence in the markets, September 11 came and destroyed the financial industry. We still came back and recovered with 10 consecutive quarters of growth over 3 percent, Mr. Speaker. So this is a strong and robust economy, and it is a credit to the Bush tax cuts, those tax cuts that we need to make permanent, the extra resources, the billions of dollars that we have in our Treasury today because we had the courage to cut taxes so our economy could grow and create jobs. That is the kind of vision that is sorely lacking on the other side. They are good at criticizing, but I am waiting for a positive agenda, Mr. Speaker. This idea that American soldiers should be, go off and fight without support for their mission has got to come back to the people who believe somehow they can support our soldiers but not support the mission, Mr. Speaker. So I just tell you that I am optimistic about the future of America. I know our economy is strong. I am optimistic about the future of our economy. I am watching a confirmation process begin over in the United States Senate for Judge Alito. I think he will be the individual that comes to the Supreme Court and begins a constitutional restoration process. I am looking forward to that. We must restore this Constitution. It has been eroded over the last 30 to 40 years with activist judges. The Kilo decision was the last straw for me and a lot of us. I agreed with the liberals on that. I will say that the gentleman from Massachusetts and I, whom we most generally disagree, he and I agreed and spoke essentially back to back here on the floor in opposing the Kilo decision. That is Mr. Frank from Massachusetts. When he and I agree on a constitutional issue I am going to say and oppose the Supreme Court, chances are the text of the Constitution ought to be respected. We will get back to that, Mr. Speaker, with this confirmation of Judge Alito. The corner needs to be turned. The American people need to be informed on how positive things are over in Iraq and that our economy is strong and we are going to move forward in a bold future with a bold agenda. We need to pass this reconciliation act so that we can offset the costs of Hurricane Katrina. I will do more. We need to drill for oil in ANWR. We need to drill for natural gas and oil on our Outer Continental Shelf and hand this future over to our children and grandchildren with oil supplies, good tax programs, a national security program, a whole package. So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence tonight and the privilege to speak to this House. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the managers on the part of the House have until 2:00 a.m., November 16, 2005 to file the conference report to accompany H.R. 3058, making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development, the Judiciary, District of Columbia, and independent agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2006, and for other purposes.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?