Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, in response to the gentleman from New York, I would point out that I have a letter here from the United Sioux Tribes of South Dakota that I will introduce into the Record. And in this letter it says: ``Horses have played, and continue to play, an important role in the Indian culture. That is particularly true for Tribes of the Great Northern Plains.'' And it says: ``Many tribal members raise and sell horses.'' This is currently, today. ``Some of these horses are used for food and exported. It is inconceivable to think the Congress might extinguish our property rights and lessen our income even more.'' And I would point out to the gentleman from New York that we have in this amendment language that says it would be determined by the Secretary as to which cultural exemptions. So it is not simply a blanket exemption. I did not list the Irish in that, and maybe I am remiss in that. But I do not intend to build a record here of all of the cultures that have traditionally eaten horse meat, but there are many of them that do. They do so today. They have recipes today. And this is something that infringes upon people's property rights and their cultural rights. And if we are going to say this to the Native American people that we are going to pull these assets out from underneath you and you can't do with a horse what you have done for hundreds of years, I think that is a message that we are not going to want to send across America. United Sioux Tribes of South Dakota, Pierre, SD, August 22, 2006. Hon. Stephanie Herseth, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Attention: Ryan Stroschein & Phil Assmus Dear Stephanie: We greatly appreciate your opposition to H.R. 503. This bill would, in short, prohibit the marketing of our horses to slaughter. Horses have played, and continue to play, an important role in the Indian culture. That is particularly true for Tribes of the Northern Great Plains, including the Great Sioux Nation. The United States has taken our land and if this bill passes you will be taking our property without compensation. Many tribal members raise and sell horses. Some of these horses are used for food and exported. It is inconceivable to think the Congress might extinguish our property rights and lessen our income even more. We urge you to ask your colleagues to follow your lead and oppose H.R. 503. Thank you. Sincerely, Clarence W. Skye, Executive Director. Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chair, I yield myself the balance of the time. Madam Chair, I would reiterate that this amendment is about the cultural exemption to horse slaughter and consumption for human purposes. And this is something that has gone on in this country for hundreds of years. Since the Spaniards brought the horses here, there have been horses consumed for human consumption. It has been part of the plan, part of the breeding, part of the raising, part of the feeding and part of the strategy. In fact, as I stand here today, this date here in September is almost very close to the date that, 200 years ago, Lewis and Clark returned, back down the Missouri River. It was in September of 1806. They bought horses from the Native Americans out west for the purposes of taking those horses as pack horses up into the mountains. They knew they would not need those horses when they got to the end of the line. And they bought those horses. Part of their strategy when they left St. Louis was, buy horses in that region and when you are finished working them, eat them. Louis and Clark ate horses. All of these ethnicities and countries that I have named all eat horses. I do not think there is an ethnicity that has been exempt from having horses in their diet, but particularly Native Americans who, the Great Plains Native Americans, the Sioux Nation, and I represent Sioux County, and I represent two reservations in my district that I have had for over 10 years now, or almost 10 years now; all of those cultures are rooted in this. We need to provide a cultural exemption, Madam Chairman. If we send this message off to Native Americans, in particular, that we would not even let the Secretary of Agriculture designate an exemption for Native Americans no matter how long their tradition is, that will be an insult to Native Americans, an insult to multiculturalism in America. I urge the adoption of this amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Madam Chairman, in this position that we are in today, to be objective in our perspective about how we deal with this issue, I don't know that there is a precedent in America that we have told an entire country no matter what your culture, no matter what your beliefs, no matter what your traditions, we do not want them here in this country. There are many other elements of other cultures that this civilization would be more healthy without, and yet there is not a single piece of legislation before this body that would define those components of another culture and rip them out and say, in our best judgment we think you ought to quit doing these things. We accept all beliefs in America. That is part of who we are. Freedom of speech, religion, press, all of our cultural composition comes with all immigrants into this country and with the Native Americans too. And this amendment says to the Native Americans specifically and other cultures inclusively, if certified by the Secretary, we are going to accept your beliefs. We are going to accept your traditions. It is part of who we are as America to blend all those cultures and those civilizations together and come out with this robust nature of our great American culture, and that is what this amendment is about. It is about protecting our traditional values. Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding and for leading this cause. I rise in opposition to H.R. 503. H.R. 503, the Horse Protection Act, would ban the processing of horses for human consumption. There is no evidence that suggests that products derived from horses pose any food safety or public health risk. Because processing facilities process meat intended for interstate shipment, they must be inspected by USDA for compliance with the Horse Slaughter Act, the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and other Federal animal health and food safety regulations. The people who want this bill passed claim that horses are not raised for meat. However, there are at least three breeds that are raised for meat: the Yili, the Altai and the Bashkir, among others, that are raised for dual purposes. Every year, 80,000 to 100,000 of these horses are abandoned in the U.S., and this number is expected to double in just a few years. But there are no provisions to address disposal or care of the unwanted 100,000 horses. When horses are euthanized on private lands, it is normally done with a heavy dose of barbiturates. Once that horse succumbs to the barbiturates, the carcass becomes an environmental concern. And if the horse is disposed of on private land, we have to be concerned about the issues that lead to contamination, human exposure to zoonotic disease and related problems. The individuals who support H.R. 503 and argue unwanted horses can be moved to adoption facilities or resold are selling us short on the resources. The total take capacity for all these facilities is 6,000 head; 6,000 head. These facilities are already at overcapacity. Where would the additional 100,000 horses go? I would add that is a cumulative total of perhaps a 10-year rolling total of 100,000 a year. It may be 1 million horses. But these horses are eating our cellulose and costing us ethanol.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Chairman Hunter, I would ask you, would you care to comment on the remarks on the position that Iraq is a diversion on this global war on terror and it didn't have anything to do with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for coming to the floor and speaking on behalf of our military men and women. And as I listened to his presentation, it was very welcomed from my perspective. I wonder if the chairman would yield for a question.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman. It is for a good cause, and as I recall, I believe that the percentage of our GDP during the Second World War was perhaps up to 26 percent for a period of time there. There was a real, real commitment, and as those numbers go down and you see the numbers in the military shrink, our commitment to our military has not been as strong as it might have been and needs to be stronger again. We do not have a real handle on how broad and how deep this is going to have to be, but we must be ready at every quarter, and especially, this homeland security side has been for these 5 years, it has outstripped the expectations and the aspirations I think. I did not hear anybody say back on September 11, 2001, we can go a half a decade without an attack in this country. Everyone believed that there would be another attack. Now, heaven forbid it happens at this point or beyond, but I am grateful for work that has been done that has kept us safe to this point. I would take us to another aspect of this issue, too. One of the things that this administration decided to do was we are not going to touch the oil in Iraq, and we set that aside for the Iraqi people. Now, that system over there is not shaping up the way it might be. There is a lot of oil in Iraq. It seeps to the top of the ground, and the wells they have drilled, there have not been new ones in years and years, and a lot of the infrastructure has not been rebuilt. That needs to all happen and get that oil online. One of the first things I would do, if I were the prime minister of Iraq, would be to hold a bidding conference and bring in the oil companies and get them to inject international capital into the development of the fields and the development of the infrastructure so they can get that cash flow running, and if the cash flow runs, capitalism will take over. I gave a speech in Baghdad a while back to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce in the Al Rasheed hotel. As I walked in there, they started to introduce me. I said, just a moment, I would like to know who my interpreter is before you introduce me. They said, no, you do not have an interpreter. I said, but I do not speak Arabic. They said, you do not need to; these businesspeople speak English. There were 57 members there of the Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, and you could tell by the way they laughed and smiled and applauded, it was all timed just right. They understood English. Afterwards we had a great gathering over on the side of the room, handing out business cards like frantic businessmen in a way. They wanted to exchange information and ideas. They are ready to do business in that country, and they are doing business in that country. The more dollars can come in and the faster that can get turned over, the closer they are to their own solution in Iraq. So I am optimistic that we get a solution out of there that bodes well when judged by history. Sometimes we lose confidence in who we are as a Nation. I would take us back to a little over 100 years ago, and actually in 1898, we sent the military over to the Philippines. I recall being in this city about 3 years ago in a hotel when the President of the Philippines, President Arroyo gave a speech. She was not speaking to Members of Congress. I was kind of a random dinner guest, but she said, speaking of this random crowd in a hotel here in Washington, she said, Thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for freeing us. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for sending the priests and the pastors there. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers that taught in our schools and you taught your language to us and we learned your language. We learned your culture, and today, there are 1.6 million Filipinos that go anywhere in the world to work and send their money back to the Philippines because they have the language skills and they have the cultural skills that came because of the liberation that came from the American military. How often do we read that in our history books, Mr. Speaker, that kind of an impact that, a century later, the expressions of gratitude that come from a national leader? That was an insurgency. That was an insurgency we fought in the Philippines and defeated at insurgency in the Philippines. That does not seem to be part of our national memory. We can often learn from history, and we need to understand the economics and the sociology and the military tactics and put this all together, but we must have faith in who we are as a people. We must have faith in what has made us great. We must hang on to those things that are going to enhance that greatness and move America to the next level of our destiny. Once in a while we have got to discard some of those things that are not assets to us. We have got to move into the future with technology. We have got to hang on to those core things that give us strength, and those things I believe are free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization and our biblical values, tied together as the three pillars that make America great. So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address this chamber and address you tonight. I especially appreciate the chairman coming down to stand up for American fighting men and women, and the job that you have done to lead us through these difficult years from September 11 and on into the future, and I will stand with you and our military men and women when one day hopefully it will be us, and if it will not, it will be our children and grandchildren that realize there has been a victory in this global war on terror and the face of the world will have changed and the world will be a freer place. A freer place is a safer place, and that is the goal and that is the call of the trumpet for us in this country.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would take this to another level of this vision too. Before I do that, I would point out that I sometimes have some opportunities to sit down and talk to people who were raised in Iraq. Some of them are refugees that have found their way here. There is just a certain bond and affinity between Iraqi and Americans today because they understand and they appreciate the sacrifice and the commitment that has given them now an opportunity. I recall a conversation with a young lady who was raised in the north up near Kirkuk. And she said that no one admitted that they had any boys in the family. The houses in that town all had hidden compartments in them. If they had a boy they had hidden compartments. So when Saddam's men came to town, those boys crawled into those hiding places within those homes to hide from the military recruiters. They would pick those young men up and haul them off to the military and they would never know where they went and they would never see them again. The girls could go out and play, but the boys could not. They had to be kept in hiding, like young little Anne Frank hiding in their home and growing up and trying to make a happy life out of this. But I would take this image, that we had Iowa Guard troops on the ground in Afghanistan helping to guard the routes to and those polling places that were there. The first time in the history of the world that those people had ever voted on that place in the planet. And we have seen the Iraqi people go to the polls, and three times pull off a successful election, when the naysayers on the other side of the aisle said it cannot be done, there is too much violence, and the Iraqi people really cannot handle this Democratic process. Think about what this means. The inspiration that Afghanistan is today, and the inspiration that Iraq is becoming. I see those two nations as the loadstar for the world of Islam. And if Islam can see that they can live in compatibility with freedom and prosper and turn their focus, as Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan told me shortly after September 11, she came to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, and gave an outstanding speech. And we sat down afterwards one on one and had a conversation. And I asked her a couple of questions, that I remember, at least. And one of them was, what percentage of the Muslims are really inclined to be supportive of or sympathetic to al-Qaeda? And her answer was, not very many, perhaps 10 percent. A very quick answer which told me that she had thought about it. Daniel Pipes used the number 15 percent in his book Radical Islam, I think, Visits America or something very close to that. 15 percent. So when you think about what that means, I said how can we get to this point? How do we define victory, and how do we achieve victory? And she said, you have got to give them freedom, you have got to give them a chance at democracy. And if you do that, they will turn their focus then from hatred and killing and jealousy, and the kind of things that motivate people to evil, their focus will be to good. It will be to build their families and build their communities and build their countries and make that stronger. Take those goals, and now they have an opportunity to reach for. But today, their energy is being used in hatred and being taught in madrassas to hate people that are not like them. So when you think about it in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan becoming the lodestar nations, they are the inspiration for the world of Islam. I want to say to the Arab world, but then we have got countries like Iran that are really not Arab they are Persian. But the inspiration for those countries to know that they can become free, and then index that to that historical miracle that I referenced a little earlier about how freedom echoed across eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall and the Iran Curtain came crashing down, that historical miracle can be replicated in the Middle East, probably not as fast, certainly not as easy, maybe it takes a lot longer, maybe it is not as pretty when it is done, but there is an opportunity there to find a way to finally win. Our alternatives become, promote freedom as the President has done, that is the Bush doctrine. And in that freedom, change the habitat that breeds terror. And if we go the other route, if we go the route to the poor me's, the lamentations, the everything is wrong and we would have been smarter, we just cannot tell you even in hindsight how, and we certainly are not going to give you any foresight as to how to be smarter, if we go that route, then our alternative, and there only being two, the first one is the road to freedom, to change the habitat that breeds terror. The other road is for the United States of America to curl up in a fetal position and guard every bus stop and every school and every hospital and every football stadium, and still be attacked and still see our families blown to bits by people that hate us. We cannot prevail in this war, this clash of these two civilizations by simply playing defense and thinking it is a law enforcement mission. It is a matter of defending ourselves militarily, putting our resources at the tip of the spear, but it is also a matter of changing that habitat, so that freedom can grow and prosper. When that day comes, and I believe that freedom burns in the heart of every person, and I believe it is in the future of everyone on this earth. When that day comes, we will be a lot closer to freedom than we are today. Free people never go to war against other free people. I particularly appreciate the chairman and ask him if he has any other remarks to make.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress. I am pleased to be back in Washington, D.C., where we can join together and work together to resolve the issues that are in front of us between now and the election and after the election. As I awaited this opportunity to address you, Mr. Speaker, and I listened to the remarks made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I have to say that it is a bit depressing to listen to that litany, but as I look back across these Presidents that have done such a fantastic job, I think in terms of who was in charge when we got into those wars that were ended when they were in charge, it is the same person. I don't take a great issue with the way the Second World War was conducted by FDR. In fact, I am quite proud of the way Harry Truman had enough vision and courage to do what he did to end the Second World War. But as I listened through the rest of that, who was in charge when the war in Vietnam began, and the first troops were sent over there by John F. Kennedy, who was in charge at the Bay of Pigs when air power was taken off to protect the lives of the Cuban freedom fighters who were caught out in the open and slaughtered in the Bay of Pigs, that was John F. Kennedy who decided not to provide the air cover that he had guaranteed them. They went in there thinking they had air cover, they didn't have air cover, and Castro has been in power ever since down there in Cuba. I would go further. Not only did Kennedy send the first troops into Vietnam, but Johnson accelerated the operations that were there. As I listened along throughout some of these Presidential candidates, and I am just simply giving the balance on the other side, Mr. Speaker. I didn't come here to make a case to denigrate any of our proud Presidents that we have, just to put some balance in this perspective that we have here and hopefully I can get that done and then move on to some other subjects that I came here to talk about. But the Johnson administration got to the point where Lyndon Johnson would not run for a second term of office. Those of us that were here remember that. He knew he couldn't win. The streets were full of demonstrators. Things had melted down in Vietnam to the point and melted down in this country to the point that he had lost confidence, and he came to the American people and said I will not be a candidate for a second term for President. So that some characterize as a failed Presidency, and I just point this out to bring some balance to the reality of it all. I also recall what happened in the aftermath of the issue that nobody is proud of, and that is the Watergate break-in. That put political power in the hands of the people on the other side of the aisle. And what was the first thing that they did with it? They passed legislation that said there won't be a dollar spent in Vietnam helping anybody defend anybody from the North Vietnamese. There won't be a dollar spent for a meal or a bullet or a tank or a gallon of fuel for air cover to protect the people that we pledged to protect. And in a matter of a few months, the North Vietnamese stormed through South Vietnam. And you wonder why they couldn't defend themselves. They didn't have munitions to work with. They didn't have air cover support which we had pledged them. And there were hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions that died in the aftermath because we made a commitment and didn't keep that commitment because of political fighting here in Congress. Not because of the lack of the will of the American soldier or the lack of the will of the South Vietnamese soldier, for that matter, at least during that era. And as we move forward throughout history and we bring ourselves up to the Clinton era, I just have a little note in my pocket from a speech that I gave a couple of nights ago. In fact, it was last night. Someone remarked in that meeting that I was at that they knew what the meaning of the word ``is'' is. Well, all I have to do is say that, Mr. Speaker, and I think it brings back to mind all kinds of images of things that went on through the 8 years of the Clinton administration. I didn't notice that there were some strong remarks there, but I do remember the remarks that were made with regard to Sandy Berger, the proud adviser to the Clinton administration, and how he had provided for a strong military. Mr. Speaker, there is something about the image of Sandy Berger with his socks full of secret documents at the National Archives that just belies any kind of image of Sandy Berger contributing to a strong military. In fact, on his watch, and on the watch of Bill Clinton, we saw our military be reduced from 2.4 million military down to about 1.4, perhaps even 1.3 million in our military. Now, that is not what you call contributing to a stronger military. That is reducing the military. That is what they called the peace dividend. If you remember when the Wall went down on November 9, 1989, most of the people in the mainstream media thought that had to do with a family reunion between East and West Berlin families. But what it was, when that wall went down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down at the same time and peace echoed across Europe almost bloodlessly in what I would consider to be nearly a historical miracle. But in that period of time after a couple of years and that soaked in and we got around to the 1992 elections, people in Congress then coupled with the President decided, and that would be President Clinton, decided we have this great peace dividend. Now the Soviet Union is no more. There is no evil empire out there. Of course, they wouldn't have called it an evil empire. That was Ronald Reagan that defined our enemy there. But the evil empire had fallen apart and been separated into its parts. And, of course, it wasn't equal to the sum of its parts. Each part was separate. They didn't pull together anymore. And the threat from a superpower from without diminished substantially. When that happened, the decision was made here, Mr. Speaker, in this Congress, to dramatically reduce our military and take the savings and spend them on growing government programs. That is what was going on during the reign of Sandy Berger. I don't know how he was the guide that propped up and beefed up our military. There are compliments that we can lay into every administration and criticism that we can lay into every administration, but it is pretty difficult to lay out a clear perspective that is subjective because all of us have a different viewpoint. We have that different viewpoint. It has driven us to come here to help serve the American people. But out of this Congress needs to come a consensus that can help direct the American people, Mr. Speaker. It doesn't serve us well to be tearing down our effort of our military when they are overseas, when their lives are on the line for our safety, for our freedom, to win this global battle and this war on terror and provide an opportunity for freedom for the Iraqi and the Afghani people. And who knows what might be next. Who knows what people might be next. Who knows who might be attacked next. But we are on the eve of the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, and I am standing tonight on the floor of Congress listening to a lamentation of sadness and despair because the resolve to finish this appears to not be there with some of my esteemed colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I regret that, and it saddens me. But I ask: if they say staying the course is not a plan, and I am looking for some direction that can resolve this thing more quickly myself, Mr. Speaker, but if they say staying the course is not a plan, I have to tell you, it is no plan to tear down the effort. You had better have a positive message. You better have a way to resolve this issue. Or it works against the American people and it works against the American soldier to stand on the floor of this Congress and say, This is not a plan. We're going to take a new direction. We will fight the war wiser than President Bush fights the war. But we're not going to tell you how. We're going to keep that classified. That would be one of the few things kept classified that had to do with military, but that is because there is nothing to uncover. There is not an idea. There is not a plan. They don't have a way to fight the war smarter than it is being fought now, or they would tell you. They would surely tell you between now and the elections in November. But that seems to be still a secret. So I say to them, gentlemen, what is your plan? Please tell the American people what is your plan. How would you resolve the issue in Iraq? How would you resolve the issue across the world where about 1.3 million Muslims have within them, maybe 10 percent that are sympathetic to, or actively supporting, al Qaeda? How would you resolve this issue? And if as some of the people on the other side of the aisle say, Mr. Speaker, and that would include the minority leader, that Iraq was a diversion, that it really didn't have anything to do with the global war on terror, that the terrorists weren't in Iraq, that they weren't operating in there. Saddam Hussein, they claim, was not harboring terrorists and he was not fomenting any kind of terror. He was essentially a benign dictator that just tortured and murdered, in mass fashion, with weapons of mass destruction, his own people. That is the argument, Mr. Speaker. I would submit this, then: If Iraq was a diversion and didn't have anything to do with the global war on terror, why did you vote for military operations to go in there? Don't tell me that you were duped by the intelligence of the United States, that you were given misinformation. That was the intelligence that all the world had, that all the world concurred with. This was the intelligence of America and the United Nations and Great Britain and Israel, and probably the intelligence that Saddam Hussein had as well. We made a decision based upon the very best information that was available, all of us together. And now you want to say, No, it was a diversion. It was a distraction. We should have been somewhere else. Where? Well, anywhere else. If Iraq could have been taken off the map, and I would challenge you on this, as a nation that didn't threaten us and didn't foment terror and didn't have weapons of mass destruction, all these things we know did happen, they are true, but you want to argue that they are not. If you could have taken Iraq off the map and wouldn't have had to worry about Iraq, what other countries out there, gentlemen, would you name that are nice and safe and we can cozy up to and we can take them out of the equation as a nation that might harbor terrorists, breed terrorists, foment terror, fund them or sympathize with them or have the kind of habitat that breeds them? Who can we take off our list? Could it be Syria? I don't think so. Iran? No, I don't believe so. Even Saudi Arabia? Well, there are a lot of Saudis that were here 5 years ago in the air, came in to blow up Americans. So I don't think so. Pakistan? There are thousands of madrassas teaching hatred there. Even though Musharaf has been doing a very good balancing job within Pakistan and he is making progress there, but we can't turn our back and conclude that the Pakistanis are all our friends. A lot of them are. They have done a good job of working with us. But there are elements from within. What about Great Britain, speaking of elements from within? Can we take them off the list? It would have been a foolish mistake to do so, Mr. Speaker, as we found out just a few weeks ago as a plan was foiled to blow up as many as 10 or more airliners across the Atlantic Ocean that would have flown out of Great Britain towards the United States. That plot was put together and led by, some of them, born citizens of the United Kingdom, second generation people, who were taught hatred in their home and in their schools that didn't assimilate into the society. So the argument that Iraq was a diversion just simply does not hold up, Mr. Speaker, because you could not have taken Iraq out of that equation any more than you could take Syria or Iran out of the equation today. It is a false and specious argument and the American people know it, Mr. Speaker. The more it gets repeated by the other side of the aisle, the broader the margins of victory are going to be for the Republicans in November, because at least we have a rational process of thinking. We are a reasonable people. Even though we disagree, we understand a logical and rational argument, and we understand when one is not logical and it is not rational. It is not rational to argue that we didn't have to worry about Iraq if you can't name a country that we don't have to worry about today. You didn't have the vision then, you don't have the vision now, and that is where it stands. Moving along now, Mr. Speaker, as I listened to the argument that we need to go to Brazil to figure out what to do about our energy crisis here in the United States of America, I went down to Brazil to take a look at that. I wish the gentlemen over there would sit down and have a conversation about this or maybe just simply, Mr. Speaker, tune into C- SPAN and I will fill them in on what one can find out in a place like that. You can go to Brazil believing that they have replaced 100 percent of their gasoline with ethanol that is produced from sugar cane. But you can't go to Brazil and come home believing that, because it is simply not true. And it is obvious from your first moments within the country. I can give you some real numbers that put this in perspective. Of all of the fuel that is burned on the roads in Brazil, only 15 percent of it is ethanol. Only 15 percent out of the 100 percent pie chart, 15 percent is ethanol, of all the fuel burned on the roads by all the vehicles in Brazil. When you take the trucks and the diesel fuel vehicles out of there so you are just dealing with the ethanol gas market, now the number goes up to 37 percent. Not 100 percent. Even when you take the diesel vehicles out of it. That is respectable, though, I have to say. But it is only a little bit more than a third of what most people think is the reality in Brazil. But 37 percent of the gas-burning vehicles that have the option of gas and ethanol, 37 percent of the fuel burned is ethanol. Then they burn a blend. You can either go in, pull in and buy a 100 percent blend of ethanol, or you can buy the blend. The blend is actually a 25 percent blend. While I was there, they reduced it down to 20 percent because they didn't have enough ethanol to fuel their own vehicles. So I don't think Brazil has got the answer for us all here. They want $8 billion to build the capital to invest in their ethanol production because they want to double this production that they have, but they don't have the sugar cane to make enough ethanol to even blend their fuel up to 25 percent. I would rather have that capital invested in this country where we can build an infrastructure here that is going to produce the ethanol that will replace the gasoline from the Middle East. So I would simply submit that there is $1 billion worth of private capital that is being invested in this construction year in my little congressional district to produce renewable fuels, between ethanol, biodiesel, and wind, $1 billion in that sliver, that western third of Iowa, and we are kicking up our ethanol production. And if you want to see how to do it, come out there where we are doing it in America. I see my esteemed colleague on the floor this evening, and I am quite interested to hear what my friend and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Duncan Hunter, might have to say, and I would be happy to yield to him.

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, there is no doubt that most of the provisions contained in H.R. 5970 are good for America. I am in complete agreement with those who argue that no American family should be forced to sell off their loved one's life work in order to pay the federal inheritance tax bill. I have always considered the Death Tax to be a scourge on America, and I will continue working to bring about the day when this destructive tax is permanently repealed. In addition, as one who believes that our federal income tax code should be replaced by a national sales tax, under most circumstances, I would eagerly support the many provisions of this bill that are aimed at reducing the burden of taxation on hard-working Americans. Unfortunately, however, these provisions were brought before us this evening in an attempt to compensate for, and distract attention from, a politically-motivated, economically nonsensical, and utterly unprincipled move to raise the federally-mandated minimum wage. When we artificially raise wages, we will force small businesses to either hire fewer workers; shrink their labor force; transition to more efficient means of production, like automation; or simply close their doors altogether. The effect that this wage hike will have on the American worker is simple: it will price low-wage workers--the very people it is intended to help--out of the labor market. Labor is a commodity like corn, beans, gold or oil, and its value should be established by supply and demand in the marketplace--not by congressional mandate. If it makes sense to legislate a minimum wage, it also makes sense to legislate a living wage. And, if it makes sense to legislate a living wage, it makes sense to simply legislate prosperity . Yet, if Congress passed a law that everyone had to make $1,000,000 a year, there would only be a handful of people with a job in this country. Eliminating the Death Tax on small business owners stands on its own merit. But, adding inheritance tax reforms to a minimum wage mandate that will cripple small businesses is a losing proposition. While I am supportive of the provisions in this bill that will undoubtedly bring much needed relief to the American taxpayer, I would be doing my constituents and the people of this nation a great disservice if I attempted to use these ``sweeteners'' to force the poison pill of a minimum wage hike down the throats of America's small business owners.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would absolutely agree. I think pretty soon fall football practice will start, and I can't imagine a football coach inviting the other coach in to watch your fall drills, or ``Here is my playbook. Here is how we run these plays and here is how I call them.'' You would never do it. You would never sit down to a poker game and play your hole cards face up. When you are at war, intelligence is a big part of it. And to be able to tip your hand to say, no, we are going to pull out of here on such and such a date, the enemy could go underground, hole up. They could use that period of time to store more weapons, more ammunitions, do more training, just stay out of combat; and then, when that moment comes, come back out of their holes in the ground and turn around and attack Americans and Coalition troops and Iraqis. This is such a solid concept that you are addressing here. It is such a solid concept that I am surprised that there is anyone on the other side of the aisle that promotes and supports such a thing. About a week ago, former President Clinton also stood with you on this issue and with me on this issue on how ridiculous it would be to establish a date certain to pull out of Iraq. You illustrated that first year, some months ago, the statement was made that we should pull troops back to the horizon. Now I envision that to be kind of back there where the sun sets on the hill or rises on the hill. Either way it would be a horizon. And it does turn out that the horizon was Okinawa. I don't think anybody in the world imagined that the horizon really meant Okinawa.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Gingrey for leading this special order hour tonight and for stepping up front to stand up for freedom and liberty for the American people, for the Iraqi people, and one day, I hope and pray it is for all people on this planet. If there was a theme that came out of prime ministers Al-Maliki's speech today, it was that theme, that theme of freedom and liberty, and that theme that ties us all together when he told that freedom is not an American value, but it is a value that God gives to all humanity. One of the statements that he made, I am not sure if you might have already made this statement, Mr. Gingrey, but I want to emphasize it. And this is one that gripped me when I heard it said this afternoon. Prime Minister Maliki: ``The fate of our country and yours is tied. Should democracy be allowed to fail in Iraq and terror permitted to triumph, then the War on Terror will never be won elsewhere''. Mr. Speaker, we must win this battle in this Global War on Terror, this battleground that is Iraq. There is no alternative but victory. In fact, we are moving down this path in a successful fashion. You just cannot simply every day take a measure of it. It is kind of like going on a diet in the morning and weighing yourself at noon and deciding you want to change your diet. We need to look at milestones. There have been milestones after milestones that have flowed out of Iraq. And there been three elections with 70 percent of the people going to the polls, more people going to the polls in some of the elections, than came to the polls in a U.S. national election. That ought to tell you where their commitment is. And the picture of the lady with the purple fingers and shining it in victory, that says what is going on there. It is a very, very proud thing that they stepped up to freedom. When I asked them, the Iraqis, are you first an Iraqi, or are you first a Kurd or a Sunni or a Shiia, invariably they will are ay, I am an Iraqi first. They want to have a unified nation, they want to have a free nation, they want to be a free people. Part of the rest of the speech was, as Al-Maliki said, ``this terrorist front is a threat to every free country in the world and their citizens. What is at stake is nothing less than our freedom and liberty. Confronting and dealing with this challenge is a responsibility of every liberal democracy that values its freedom. Iraqi is the battle that will determine the war. If in continued partnership we have the strength of mind and commitment to defeat the terrorists and their ideology in Iraq, they will never be able to recover''. Which brings me to mind a meeting that I had in Iraq my last time there with General Casey and General Abizaid, when General Casey made the statement, ``the enemy cannot win if the politicians stay in the fight''. That means the people here in Washington, D.C., the politician all across America. That means the politicians in western Europe and all across the world. That means the politicians in Iraq as well. They have all got to stay in this fight. When I look these solders in the eye that are over there in that 125 and 130 degree heat today, they will say to me, ``I am proud to serve my country. I am proud to stand here, and I am willing to put my life on the line for a year or more if necessary. But why do I have to fight the United States news media too''? Well, no soldier or marine should have to do that. In fact, that is our job. And we take that on and we put the facts out here on this floor. And we do so in press conferences. That is our way of fighting this war. The object of war, according to Klauswitz is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. The object of war, according to Steve King is, war is over when the losing side realizes that they have lost. And if voices come out of this Congress that seek to convince them otherwise, that works against the cause and does not support our troops. In the end, it costs American lives. And that has happened. And the cemeteries have brave Americans that would otherwise be living a normal life that have given their lives for freedom that would not have had to, if we stuck together as a people in this country. But a core of us are together, a majority of us, a vast majority of us are together and we will stick this out. You know, I would rather be on this side as I listen to the pessimism that comes sometimes from the other side of the aisle, then I would be on the other side of this battle in Iraq. I would a lot rather be on the side of freedom, on the side of the Iraqi military and the coalition troops than I would be on the side of al-Qaeda and the terrorists in Iraq. Just to state that, I believe it was a year ago, it must have been April of 2004 when Zarqawi wrote a letter, about a 17-page letter full of lamentations. And he said then this was not like Vietnam, that they did not have mountains or forests to hide in, the only place they could hide was in the homes of the Iraqi people that would be willing to take them in, and the Iraqis that were willing to hide al-Qaeda were, ``as rare as red sulfur''. I am just going to presume that red sulfur is quite rare, maybe like frogs or chickens teeth, but quite rare. I have never seen any red sulfur over there, and I have looked around quite a lot. I am sure he meant it was awfully hard to find a place to lay down and get some rest in a country like Iraq when the people do not want to take in al-Qaeda. That was a couple of years ago. Now, Zarqawi has gone on to meet his eternal reward, justly so. And I have visions of what that might be like for him. But rather than paint those on this floor and perhaps be gaveled down, Mr. Speaker, I point out what it looks today like for the survivors that are still on the side of al- Qaeda. How bad must it be over there to try to find optimism when you are losing as badly as they are. Other folks would like to convince us that we are losing. In fact, there is nothing that supports that. How bad are they losing? Well, one of the latest blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq, this is an excerpt from a May 8, 2006 Associated Press, could not get more credible than the Associated Press article, about documents captured during mid-April's raid south of Baghdad. The highlights of disorganization that already existed in Iraq, and the disorganization for al-Qaeda and the terrorists that continues to this day. It is this way. ``Every year is worse than the previous year''. That is a quote from captured documents of al-Qaeda and the terrorists. ``Every year is worse than the previous year.'' The strategy document complains that, ``the strength of the brothers in Baghdad, is based mostly on car bombs and groups of assassins lacking any organized military capabilities''. We will go on with the AP article. The writer complains that the Americans and the Iraqi government forces were able to absorb our painful blows, raise new recruits and take control of Baghdad as well as other areas one another. There is why every year is worse than the previous year, as far as the Mujahadin's control and influence over Baghdad, according to the document that was captured. That should give the American people a sense of what it is like on the other side, on the losing side. And if we sang from the same hymnal, sang the same chorus, carried forth the same message, which is we are in this thing for victory, Iraq is a battleground in a Global War on Terror, we will stick this thing out, not only to put this issue away and behind us and make sure that there is a platform and a climate for freedom for the Iraqi people, but as far and as long as we have to go so that we can secure the safety and the security for the American people and for all freedom-loving people all around the globe. Today we are watching about the 14th or probably the 15th day of the battleground in Israel, where they were attacked from both sides, from the south in Gaza and the north out of Lebanon. By Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. At the directive and order, I believe, of the mullahs in Iran and Ahmadinejad. Because they wanted to change the subject on the United Nations pressure on Iran for violating nuclear proliferation agreements, and UN Resolution 1559. So they started a war, and their number one enemy, the people that Ahmadinejad said should be wiped from the face of the earth. There is no question that that is their commitment, Mr. Speaker, to do that. Iran has been fomenting violence in Iraq for years. And we have tolerated it far more than we should. And I do not know that we can resolve the issue in Iraq as long as Iran is sending munitions, supplies and money and providing training for terrorists to go into Iraq. But it is happening. It has been going on for more than 2 years, perhaps more than 3 years. And there has been a big price paid for that. Syria also to a lesser extent. But I don't know anybody that believes that if you could have taken Syria and Iran out of this equation with Iraq, if the border essentially had been sealed and they stayed out of that involvement, I don't know anybody that believes the issue wouldn't have been resolved in Iraq, that there wouldn't be peaceful passivity there and a solid, stable government and this economy that is now growing to the point where they have doubled their GDP since the time of liberation would have been even greater than it is today. The soil supplies would be greater. The electrical production would be greater. But a lot of that progress with that was not yet made in Iraq, has been held back by the terrorists that are trained and funded and supported by Iran. And I remember what our President said: If you are terrorist, you are an enemy. If you support a terrorist, house a terrorist, fund a terrorist, train a terrorist, you are our enemy. It doesn't matter where you are or who you are. Iran fits in that category. Syria fits in that category. Now the pressure is up, and the world's spotlight, the world stage is Iraq and Israel. Now, imagine a free Iranian people, a free Iranian people that next month, just the fifth of next month, will be celebrating a constitution that was established, however briefly, 100 years ago that defends their freedom and their rights the same way that our rights and our freedom are defended by our Constitution. I will say close to that. They have something to celebrate. And as that centennial roles around on August 5, next month, I am hopeful that will be an inspiration for the Iranian people that one day soon they can rise up and they can grab ahold of control of Iran and again be a free people inspired by that constitution from a century ago, inspired by a free Iraq and a prosperous Iraqi people and inspired by the potential for a world across the Middle East where all people breathe free. If that happens, that has cured the type of habitat that breeds terror. Freedom doesn't breed terror. Free people never go to war against other free people. There is a bright future there in that part of the world. Freedom can echo across those Arab countries the same way it echoed across Eastern Europe when the wall went down in 1989. That is my prayer and that is my hope, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the gentleman from Georgia yielding to me, and I appreciate his presentation.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you, and in doing so, Mr. Speaker, the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come to the floor tonight to address the subject matter that has had the world sitting on the edge of its seat and somewhat transfixed for the last about 13 days, those days that the military actions began in Israel. I take us back and lay some of the groundwork on that and perhaps lay some of the framework of the history that has brought us to this point and as fellows travelers in the world. Israel was established as a Nation in 1948. The many thousands and thousands of refugees from the Second World War, those that survived the Holocaust, the Shoah, from the Nazi attack and the Nazi hatred, the Nazi anti-Semitism, the Nazi bigotry and the deep, seems to be abiding, anti-Semitism that I do not understand that some in the Western European culture, in fact, that anti-Semitism that seems to be growing from those roots yet today, not just the Muslims that have migrated into Western Europe, but also the native Western Europeans do not stand up and defend Israel in the fashion that I believe they should because we have a lot in common with Israel. They are a free country. They are a democratic country, and aside from Iraq, they are still the only place in that hemisphere, let me say the only place in the Middle East, where an Arab can go to get a fair trial is in Israel. Israel is a Nation established in 1948, approval by the United Nations, but a Nation that was carved out in a fight for freedom. It was a glorious fight, and it was one that was brought from the theme never again, never, never again will they allow an annihilation, a genocide to take their people. That is why we stand with them today, Mr. Speaker. We stand with the Israelis because they stand for freedom, and because they elect their leaders and they come together in the Knesset, and they have a prime minister and they choose their national destiny. But they have enemies that surround them, enemies all around them, and that was proven in 1967, the 6 Days War, and this has helped frame, for me, the history of Israel and their defiant, brave, courageous leadership that has kept them sovereign and kept them free. But that happened to be the year I graduated from high school, and that was the year, as things happened, that was burned into my memory. And not that long after that, in 1973, the second war, second great war that Israel had after their independence, where once again they prevailed over their enemies and they established their boundaries and justly earned territory. It was the effort of their enemies around them, the Arab nations that surrounded them, to drive the Israelis into the sea, to annihilate Israel, and to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth. In fact, they still deny the reality of the existence of a sovereign and free country called Israel. It doesn't show up on the maps in many of the Arab nations. They will not acknowledge that since 1948, that would be 58 years, they still don't acknowledge that Israel is a sovereign nation. In fact, if you look at the United Nations, resolution after resolution, Mr. Speaker, comes to the United Nations, and that Third World-class enemy debate society lines up invariably with resolutions against Israel. They aren't rooted in justice, Mr. Speaker. They are rooted in bigotry and hatred and anti-Semitism. There is something the Arabs cannot explain to me when I ask them the question, Why do your people hate Israel so much? It is rooted deeper in history than I have been able to unravel, but I know it exists today. I had a high school student in my office not that long ago from Oman, and I asked him if he believed Israel had a right to exist; and his answer was, no, I don't believe they do. I said, what would you do with the Israelis? And he said, rather flippantly, send them to Oregon. I said, well, if that doesn't work, to send them to Oregon, what would your next alternative be? He said, I don't care what happens. They have no reason to be there; they have no right to exist as a nation. It is one little piece of real estate on the entire Earth. Isn't there one place in all that continent, in all of the Middle East, in all of Africa where they can live in peace and safety without their enemies seeking to annihilate them? Such has not been the case, Mr. Speaker. Yet the Israelis have bent over backwards and have tried time after time after time, with peace accord after peace accord, to try to find a way to come to peace with their neighbors. I think sometimes they try so hard that they do some things that don't appear to be something that is predictable and predictably positive. For example, the efforts of land for peace, as we watched this unfold and we saw Israel give up a piece of real estate here and a small piece of real estate there, but also looked to see where they needed to defend themselves. And one of those places would be the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights sits up above the Jordan River Valley, up near Lebanon. I have been up there in the Golan Heights. They were occupied by Syria. The Syrians put gun emplacements up there. The Jordan River Valley is flat and fertile and beautiful, and the Syrians would sit up on those heights and they would take target practice against the Israeli farmers that were out in the field. It is something to sit in those gun emplacements now and look down over that valley and see what the Syrians were looking at as they were picking off Israeli farmers who were trying to feed the people in their country. It is something to meet a widow whose husband was killed there as he went out into the field to try to get the farmers off the field and get them to safety as the Syrians, just for no reason, seemed to open up fire occasionally and begin to shoot at Israelis that were farming in the fields. It is something to see what it is like for a nation that is surrounded by enemies, and sometimes strategically have a disadvantage because of elevation, because of certain tactical situations that they have, and to see a nation try so hard to come to peace with their neighbors. It is something to watch the Israelis pull out of the Gaza Strip and cede that piece of ground to the Palestinians. What is also something to watch is when there is a free election in Palestine, the area I guess that is referred to as Palestine, it is mostly the West Bank in Gaza, it is something to watch that and see Hamas come to power and take over and rule in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and in Gaza. You wonder what kind of people would elect terrorists to rule them. Well, the kind of people that have been teaching their young people for generations now to hate Israelis, hate Israelis, hate Israelis, for reasons I don't understand, and they don't need to understand, apparently. But they elect terrorists to run their government, and then, when they have land for peace and Gaza is handed over to the Palestinian Authority, under the control of Hamas, we have Prime Minister Olmert come to this very Chamber, Mr. Speaker, not that long ago, and in his speech talk to us about his idea to bring 50 to 100 Jewish settlements out of the West Bank and move them up close to the fence, appropriately, and sometimes for protection it needs to be a wall; or bring some of them inside the fence and into Jerusalem so that the Jewish settlers from these 50 to 100 settlements can be protected from being annihilated by their neighbors because of their neighbors' hatred, bigotry, and anti-Semitism. It is something to watch that, and see how hard a nation has tried to make peace with the people among them who are not like them. It is something to be there and see that 20 percent of the Israeli population is Arab; something to know that the Arabs in Israel go to the polls and they vote, just like the Jews do. They can serve in the Knesset, and they do, roughly in proportion to their population as a whole. They can serve in the supreme court. And in fact, Ariel Sharon, when he was active prime minister, appointed an Arab to the Israeli supreme court, full rights of property ownership, rights of citizenship, and rights to vote. And some will argue that, well, there is bigotry there. But still we are not watching Jews killing Palestinians because they are Palestinians. We are watching Israelis defending themselves from terrorists attacks. So they said, we will give you Gaza; give us peace. Land for you, peace for each of us, an idea that I can't find has a precedent of ever having worked in history, but, nonetheless, Mr. Speaker, that was the effort. So the Gaza Strip went over to Hamas and the Palestinians. And the effort in the West Bank hadn't quite taken shape down the vision of Prime Minister Olmert yet as to moving the Jewish settlements out of the West Bank. Taking the Jews out of Judea, Mr. Speaker, a place where Jews have lived since antiquity, in an effort for peace. Thousands of years of history traded off in an effort for land for peace. We know what the answer is. And for 18 years the Israeli Army had to occupy Lebanon in order to make sure that there weren't going to be attacks coming from there down on to Israel from the north. Yet, after all those years, in the year 2000 they finally deployed out of Lebanon, and in that interim, this 6-year period of time, even though we had United Nations Resolution 1559 that said that Hezbollah had to disarm and they had to step back out of their involvement in Lebanon, a very clear resolution by the United Nations and one that was never enforced, it is typical if you let the United Nations enforce something it is never enforced, so for 6 years Hezbollah, the terrorist organization, brought in armament into southern Lebanon. They dug bunkers and poured concrete and brought in rockets, and they brought in missiles, and they got more heavily armed and they got better trained. There are 5,000 Hezbollah troops, at least, in Lebanon, in uniform, paid every month, funded out of Iran, with military supplies out of Iran, smuggled through Syria, either over the air or through seaports, through Syria and down into Lebanon. Fully armed, fully protected, fully trained, fully funded. Every month paychecks coming from Iran into the hands of Hezbollah troops, uniformed and ready to take on the Israelis in southern Lebanon. For what purpose? And their agreement, Mr. Speaker, was that they would avoid a conflict with Israel because so much of Lebanon had been destroyed in the previous conflicts. And as the reconstruction of Lebanon began, they couldn't afford to have another war. They couldn't afford to have their buildings, their airports, their bridges, and their highways demolished in the bombardment that would come if there was another war. So the peace between the Lebanese and Hezbollah was kind of a peace tied together on this implicit promise, this tension that Hezbollah would not bring a war on Lebanon. And here we sat with a static position in the north, with Hezbollah with 12,000 or more rockets and perhaps 100 or more long-range missiles in their possession, with Iranians in their midst, trained and ready to go, sitting there in this static position looking across at Israel while Hamas organized in Gaza in the south and began to be prepared. We knew it was going to happen, that they were going to attack Israel. And so they began to send sporadic rockets out of Gaza, homemade rockets, some of them, over into Israel. Many of them landed in benign places; some of them did not. But as this went on, this static situation was here, Iran is fueling and funding the Hezbollah in the north and we believe also, to a lesser degree, Hamas in the south. Then as the world turned their pressure on Iran, as Iran moved forward towards developing nuclear capability, the capability to produce nuclear weaponry, nuclear bombs, and the means to deliver it, and that means missiles that they can put their warheads on, and if that missile can reach from Iran to Tel Aviv, that will be the first target. But they would not be satisfied just to have missiles that would reach to Tel Aviv, but they needed to have missiles that would reach to Europe and then perhaps one day across to the United States. If they can do that, if they have a nuclear capability, Mr. Speaker, then they can threaten the rest of the world. And the radical regime led by Ahmadinejad see themselves as martyr fighters for a nation. They think that the 12th Imam will arrive if they just kill enough people who are non-Muslims, nonbelievers, infidels. That means everyone else, to keep it short. But as the world pressure turned up on Iran to stop their efforts to develop nuclear capability, and that happened through the House of Representatives as well, Mr. Speaker, in the discussions that I had with representatives of the Western European nations regarding this and many of the rest of us in this Congress had those conversations as well, it became clear to me that I didn't see the will to enforce anything in the part of the Western European nations. But there are a couple of nations that do have the will, a couple of nations that will not tolerate, Mr. Speaker, a nuclear armed delivery capable Iran, and that would be Israel and the United States. Israel because they are the first bulls eye with the crosshairs on them all the time. The United States because we have a responsibility to the rest of the world, being the world's only super power, and we promote freedom and we protect freedom where it exists because we know that we never go to war against another free people. Free people find ways of resolving their differences among other free people. The stage was set, and as the pressure from the world and the United Nations and the need to finally demand that Iran give up their effort to build a nuclear weaponry and missiles to deliver it, as that developed, the pressure got high enough where it became clear that the rest of the world was going to find some ways to put some sanctions on Iran. And the path of this likely would have been to shut off some of their funding, limit or prohibit the travel of their leaders, find a way to set up sanctions first and perhaps a blockade next, the world's stopping doing business with Iran. And we know that there are countries that have conflicting interests there, countries that would not stand with us, and Russia and China likely could have been a couple, although it is surely in their interest to avoid nuclear capability in that part of the world. Russia is a lot closer to Iran than the United States is. So we have some cooperation there but not the level that we would like to see. But Iran could see the pressure coming. And just as things were coming to a head in the United Nations, just as the United Nations was prepared to act, coincidentally, some will say, but most of the world will see clearly through the ruse when the attacks from Hamas came out of Gaza and the attacks from Hezbollah came out of Lebanon, on to Israel from the south and from the north almost simultaneously. Rocket attacks from both places. Military incursions up, one through a tunnel up into Israel where they took on Israel IDF troops and captured soldiers, almost simultaneously. And when that happened, when the Israelis did what they had to do, the idea of counterattack, they had to go into Gaza, go in and engage, identify some of the enemy, and then pull back out and disengage. They have been doing that for some days now, Mr. Speaker. And they will have to demonstrate to Hamas down in Gaza that they will be back there with the full presence in Gaza unless the violence stops and unless the prisoners are returned. And they cannot be negotiating land for peace this time. In fact, it ought to be the other way around. It can be we will take this land back, it was ours, you didn't follow through on your part of this bargain. As I watch what is unfolding here, Mr. Speaker, the coordinated attacks on the part of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both were designed to take the pressure off of Iran. Both were designed to change the subject in the world, to take the pressure off so that Iran would not have to be dealing with the pressure of the United Nations, the pressure that was coming from United States, from Germany, from France, from Great Britain. That is the effort that we need to continue. We need to keep turning the pressure up on Iran. They cannot be allowed to believe that we do not have the will to follow forward with this and shut off their nuclear capability at some point. In fact, Mr. Speaker, that message needs to be sent more clearly now than ever before. Coordinated attacks, both funded, I believe, by Iran. In fact, the leader of Hamas, Mr. Kaled Meshal, I am going to check this name to make sure I get this right. Kaled Meshal, the overall leader of Hamas, who generally is in Damascus, did go to Tehran, by the information I have. The information I have, and it is not supported fully yet, but it indicates that he was handed $50 million in cash shortly before Hamas attacked Israel out of the Gaza Strip in the south. Now, if that happened with Hamas, an organization that is not naturally aligned with Iran because Hamas is Sunni and Iran Shia, but if that happened, it is part of this theory that we always know: ``The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'' So as they have a common enemy, being Israel, they can get together, and with the proper transfer of cash, Hamas could take this minor risk and do these excursions and then attack Israel from the south. Hezbollah had a lot higher risk, and I do not know what might have happened with regard to funding there, but I know this, that Iran has been funding them all along. So they surely had a lot stronger tie and Teheran is a spiritual center for Hezbollah, where they send troops in there to be trained. They bring their philosophy down to Lebanon. They have been a surrogate of Iran for a long time. But the price for Hezbollah was a lot higher because their implicit agreement, the kind of unspoken agreement, with Lebanon was: Do not bring war on us. We do not want to see the things we built destroyed. We do not want to lose our peace here. We have a fledgling democracy, even though 20 percent of that fledgling democracy are elected Hezbollah leaders within that organization. So Hezbollah took the risk and attacked Israel and started firing rockets, sometimes by the hundreds. And as this has unfolded, it has become clear that this is a gambit that has been coordinated, orchestrated, and operated by Iran. And Syria is complicit in this. And that is why they have been in the crosshairs of Israel as well. So the pressure is on right there in the center of the bulls eye, where much of the world's conflict has been. And land has never been traded for peace in a successful fashion. Now, we need to look at a way that we can resolve this issue once and for all. And I am not sure we can get there, Mr. Speaker. But I would submit this, that Israel is the center of the bulls eye. The pressure that comes on Israel is coming from the Arab nations, some to a greater and some to a lesser degree. But a lot of them have signed up in this. Many of them launched the attacks in 1967 and in 1973. They are still on the suspect list. They still have people in those countries at least, even if it is not an official policy of their nation, to send money, send support, send military troops, send terrorists in to put pressure on Israel. Israel is the center of this bulls eye. And the direct pressure has come now from Hamas out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon to do a dual attack on Israel and put them in a two-front war in the north and the south, funded by Iran, cooperated with and coordinated and logistically passing a lot of materials through Syria. Now, we also know that the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, some of them are supportive of this, although their regime there appears to be more inclined to want to support peace and maintain a level of stability. But that surrounding of Israel is something that one needs to look at like a bulls eye. Israel's being the dead center red part of the bulls eye, and as the surrounding countries around that bulls eye move out, I would submit this, Mr. Speaker: The problem of the violence and the attacks on Israel cannot be resolved by simply declaring that there be a ceasefire in Gaza, that there be a ceasefire in Lebanon. It cannot be solved by negotiating with Hamas or Hezbollah. That is because their mission statements don't coincide with anything that we believe in. They don't coincide with freedom. They don't allow Israel to exist. They won't acknowledge Israel's right to exist. They will continue to preach hatred, they will continue to act on hatred, they will continue to seek genocide against the Israeli people. They will continue to drive them into the sea, Mr. Speaker. That is their effort. People that are that fanatical without a rational goal in mind, you can put them in power and elect them to government, like they have been by the Palestinian people, the Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, and the 20 percent of the fledgling Lebanese democracy that has elected Hezbollah. If they were handed over the reins of power, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that it would be a boring life for someone who has been a military terrorist and all the glory and intensity that comes with that and say, okay, now it is your job to be the minister of education, or the minister of the interior, or the minister of transportation, or maybe the secretary of state. They are not cut out for that. That is not part of their mission. They don't envision themselves as one day being a legitimate leader with a legitimate government on the world stage sitting at the United Nations, or negotiating at the roundtable in Brussels, or visiting the White House in the United States, or speaking on the floor of this Congress here at the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. They don't envision that at all. They envision themselves being modern day warlords, taking terror to people who are not like them and seeking their path to salvation, which their path would be that if they can kill enough people that are not like them, then they go to their eternal reward. Mr. Speaker, I said about enough about the eternal reward of a religion that is so steeped in that kind of hatred, but I would submit this: This Nation, this United States of America, must stand with Israel. We must make it clear that they dare not blink, and we will not blink. We will stand with them with everything necessary to preserve and protect them from being annihilated by the hatred that surrounds them, and for a number of good reasons. They are the vanguard for freedom in the Middle East, Mr. Speaker. They stand for freedom. They treat everyone in their country on an equal standing with the right to vote, own property, serve in the Knesset, serve on the supreme court. Full standing for everyone. They are a vision for what the future of the Middle East can be, yet a lot of the rest of the world doesn't stand with them the way they need to. Another reason we need to stand with Israel is they stand up for themselves. We have supported them with foreign ops money and they have invested it in military equipment, supplies and training, and they are one of the best trained, most ready militaries in the world. But they know they don't have room for error, Mr. Speaker. A small error on the part of the Israelis and in 24 to 48 hours they could be driven into the sea. It tends to concentrate the mind at that moment in history, and they have always risen to the occasion, but they know they can't be complacent. And we can't be complacent, Mr. Speaker. We need to be following through on the Bush doctrine. We need to be promoting freedom throughout the Middle East, and taking a look at Afghanistan as a nation now with 25 million free people, people that have gone to the polls and voted on that place in the planet for the first time in the history of the world there in Afghanistan. Yes, they have their troubles over there, but they are pulling together and they are fighting off the kind of resistance that seems to want to form and then disappear again. But Afghanistan is on track, and I don't think anybody argues that we did the right thing going into Afghanistan, unless things go badly. Then I hear the argument, well, we should have done something differently. But it is never a Democrat that gets criticized for any decisions, I would point out, Mr. Speaker. Then in Iraq, 25 million people, a more difficult proposition. But we have been in Iraq now since March of 2003. It is a little over 3 years. In that period of time, there have been three nationwide, free elections. They have established a written constitution and ratified the constitution. They have established a government. They now have a prime minister. They had difficulty after the election to get to that point where they could agree on a cabinet and form a government, but they did that. When they formed the government, it has been now about 2 months since they have had a minister of defense and a minister of the interior. And now we have a prime minister that has a leadership capability, and he is stepping forward and he is enforcing security and safety with a military arm that he has control of in Iraq. That part is moving forward. But it has been a long, difficult row to hoe; a long, hard slog, to quote Secretary Rumsfeld. But a lot the reason for that, Mr. Speaker, has been the involvement on the part of Syria and to a far greater degree the involvement on the part of Iran injecting themselves into the operations in Iraq. Iran does not have an interest in the safety and security of Iraq. They have an interest in the instability in Iraq. So they have been sending people and money and munitions into Iraq in an effort to try to destabilize the whole nation, if they can. As the civilian violence has gone up the last 2 to 3 months in Iraq, it has gotten more and more dangerous in that country, and we often see casualty numbers that go 50 a day or even higher on the part of civilians bombed. I will submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that had we been able to shut Iran out of this conflict, had we been able to shut Syria out of this conflict, if it would have stayed just Iraq and the coalition forces that were there, this conflict would have been over perhaps a year-and- a-half ago. Maybe even longer ago. The casualties that American forces, coalition forces and Iraqi civilians have suffered, many of them have been casualties fomented by a hostile neighbor, Iran. I will remind you, Mr. Speaker, of the President's statement. The President's statement is if you are a terrorist, if you harbor terrorists, if you fund terrorists, if you support terrorists, you are a terrorist. That means you are our enemy and we are coming after you. But Iran has been harboring terrorists, has been funding terrorists, has been supporting terrorists. Although that is going on, and I am talking in those references about terrorists in Iraq, Mr. Speaker, but they have also been training, harboring, funding terrorists, Hezbollah, in south Lebanon and supplying them with rockets and supplying them with a lesser number of missiles, and in fact supplying them with troops of their own that have been in Lebanon helping to fire a Cruise- type missile that hit an Israeli ship early on in this operation about perhaps 11 days or so ago. That is a terrorist country. That is part of the axis of evil. That is a nation that threatens the world with a current or future capability to produce nuclear weapons and to have a means to deliver those nuclear weapons. Iran had advisers on location in North Korea when North Korea decided to celebrate our 4th of July by setting off a series of missiles that went over the Sea of Japan. They were fizzled missiles mostly, Mr. Speaker, but missiles nonetheless. With Iranian observers there in North Korea, presumably this was part of the purchasing agents for Iran that were there while they put on a little show of force in North Korea, perhaps for the idea they would be selling those missiles to the Iranians. And if North Korea has a nuclear capability, and most of us believe they do, how do we know they have not already sold a nuclear weapon to Iran? How do we know that those transactions have not taken place? In fact, Kadafi in Libya made the statement the other day, and I think it was just yesterday, that he was a lot further along on his nuclear capability than anyone knew that he was. This can't happen, Mr. Speaker. If a nuclear weapon had been sold to the Iranians, has been sold at this point, and if they have a missile that will deliver it, then this regime that is in Iran today is far more dangerous than we are treating it. I would submit to this body, Mr. Speaker, that we need to look at this thing from a broader perspective. Generally when violence breaks out in a war, we always want to scramble and do shuttle diplomacy and get our Secretary of State there and say, hold it, shut it down, shut off the firing, kind of like we are breaking up a bar fight. Well, this isn't like that under these circumstances, Mr. Speaker, because if the firing stops now, there are still many Hezbollah and many rockets in southern Lebanon with many places to hide them. And this is a people that will hide rockets inside a house that has women and children in it, pull one outside the house, set it up, fire it into Israel and run back inside again, or leave the premises, so when the counter-assault comes, there are civilian casualties that occur. If you hide rockets and missiles and troops in residential areas and you house them in people's houses, then you have to expect there isn't a way to avoid civilian collateral damage. It is bound to happen. But this is a hateful people with a mission in mind to annihilate Israel. If that happens, if that should happen, shame on us for not acting soon enough. And I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that if someone has to take out this nuclear capability of Iran, it would be better for us to do it than it would be for Israel. In fact, Mr. Speaker, the odds of avoiding it are pretty slim. With this rabid regime that is there in Iran, it almost comes down to this question, the question being are we willing to live with a nuclear Iran or are we willing to take the steps necessary to eliminate their nuclear capability? I am for diplomacy. I am for turning up the diplomacy. I am for turning up the sanctions. I am for shutting down commerce with Iran. I am for blockading them, if we can go that far. Every step from A to Z, I will follow all of them. Mr. Speaker, I say quickly, because if we do not, then what we will see is the day that it becomes too late. And the day that it could become too late could be the day that the mushroom cloud rises over Tel Aviv, or the day that they aim their missile at us and say, well, you did not know it, but now we have the capability to reach the east coast of the United States. That is almost an inevitability if we do not stop them at some point. They have a religious fanaticism that drives them. They do not act like a rational State. They cannot be deterred by mutually-assured destruction, because their own destruction, they believe sends them to their own salvation. But they are there to create violence, to attack people who are not like them, not just to attack western civilization, but all other civilization, Mr. Speaker. We need to look at this at how we are going to find peace in that part of the world. I submit it has got to come from without first, and merge down to the bulls-eye that is Israel. If we try to do it any other way, we are simply putting a band-aid on a bleeding wound. So Hezbollah has got to be annihilated out of Lebanon, and Hamas has got to be controlled in Gaza. But meanwhile, Iran has got to be taken out of this picture so they are not funding training and fomenting war in places like Iraq and in Israel. But they are doing so in both places right now and they are getting away with it, Mr. Speaker. We have to put a stop to that. We have to understand our enemy before we can do that. This Nation needs to have the will to do what we need to do. During this process of sanctions and perhaps a blockade and shutting off the economic capability of Iran to continue to conduct war, and to develop nuclear, while this is going on, I ask our President to prepare this country for the job that may be ahead of us, and it may well be something that can save millions of lives. But it would be disastrous to wake up in the morning some morning and find out that we waited too long, that a mushroom cloud went up over Tel Aviv, and perhaps there was a missile on its way to western Europe, or a missile on its way to the east cost of the United States, and perhaps millions of people could die in this process. This does not include smuggling those kind of weapons of mass destruction across the borders into the United States, which are still far too porous. There comes a time to act, Mr. Speaker. I am not submitting that time is right now. But I am submitting that we need to establish a time frame and be ready. We need to look at the countries out there in the world, and determine what are their motives, what can we count on them doing, what have they told us they are going to do, and they have told us they are here to annihilate us. They repeat that over and over again. There are people in Iran that remember the times that they lived in a modern world. They hunger for that modern world again. They are repressed by the regime that they have. They had leaders that came forward as candidates that wanted to run for office in the recent elections that they had. But the mullahs shut them down, peeled them out, put some of them in jail and prohibited the candidates of the people of Iran from running for office so that they could choose their own leaders. The people in Iran deserve freedom. We need to hear from the people of Iran. We need to hear what they have to say about how hungry they are for freedom. But they had a constitution that was the established in 1906. It was established August 5, 1906 in Iran. And the Constitution speaks, for the most part, the same way our constitution speaks, for freedom. Freedom for the Iranian people. The 100-year anniversary comes up on August 5, 2006. The century celebration for the constitution of Iran. Let that be an inspiration to the people in Iran.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the majority whip for yielding. I especially thank Mr. Akin for bringing this bill before this Congress. When we first met, he approached me with this bill, and I said, oh yes, Article III, section 2, I will sign on. Then we got to know each other after that. So it is a proud moment for me to stand here and stand with the gentleman from Missouri and God-fearing and God-loving people across this country. The question about the constitutionality of court-stripping Article III, section 2, I think Mr. Pence addressed it very well. Black-letter language in the Constitution was such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make, and those exceptions are legion. In fact, the landmark case is Ex parte McCardle 1869 where Congress had authorized Federal judges to issues writs of habeas corpus, and they purported to be acting under its authority under Article III, section 2 to make those exceptions. But in reviewing the statutes the Supreme Court's jurisdiction granted, they were not at liberty to inquire into the motives of the legislature. We can only examine its power under the Constitution. In fact, the majority decision on the Supreme Court said this: ``Without jurisdiction the court cannot proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the cause. And this is not less clear upon authority than upon principle.'' Ex parte McCardle, 1869. And I would point out that Justice Scalia in the Hamdan case so recently wrote in his opinion, albeit in dissent, he said that ``the Court . . . cannot cite a single case in the history of Anglo-American law . . . in which a jurisdiction-stripping . . . was denied immediate effect in pending cases.'' But ``by contrast, the cases granting such immediate effect are legion . . . they repeatedly rely on the plain language of the jurisdictional repeal as an `inflexible trump,' '' and we know in our current experience in Congress, we have done this several times, particularly the Daschle case with Blackhawk Timber.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time and for his leadership on this issue. This issue that is in front of us today is an example of congressional restraint, congressional restraint with regard to a court that is out of control. The Ninth Circuit Court has thrown it back at this Congress time and time again, and the activism that has taken place out there in the ninth circuit brings me to some things that would be more drastic solutions to this than this very careful, very narrow, very gently defined legislation that we have before us. It only deals with the words ``under God'' in the Pledge. We could do far more. In fact, I voted to split the ninth circuit in half. I would vote to abolish them if they continue this kind of behavior, throwing this into the face of the American people. We are not doing that. We are very carefully, very narrowly addressing something that the American people are asking for, very well within the jurisdiction of the United States Congress. And any Member who votes against this legislation may have their opinions, as Mr. Watt does, that they are either knowingly or inadvertently or perhaps even willfully conceding some power and authority this Congress has to control the courts. In the end, it is the Congress that controls the courts. It is not three separate but equal branches. In the end, the congressional structure is set up for the Congress to determine the final authority over the judicial branch of government through the pursestrings. For all of our judicial courts and all of our appellate courts, everything is a creature of Congress, except the Supreme Court, which is also a creature of Congress, but established by the directive and the mandate of the Constitution. Mr. Chairman, we have the authority to do this. It is a very narrowly and carefully defined piece of legislation. The Watt amendment is a gutting amendment. It kills the bill. It hands this authority over to the Supreme Court, which is our very number one concern. We simply want to, with legislation, reflect the values of the American people, reflect the values of the history and the legacy of our Founding Fathers, and our rights that come from God within this Pledge. I urge we oppose the Watt amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I pose the question to the gentleman from Massachusetts, and that is, Are you advocating that we send 150,000 troops to Afghanistan? I yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. I do appreciate the gentleman's sentiment on this. I know that you are right on the vote. I am confident that I can go back through the Congressional Record and pick out the rhetoric that supports my remarks. But I guess it is a balance that there was one vote against the resolution. I do recognize the gentleman's point. I look forward to bringing all of the resources necessary to protect America in the future anywhere we have to in the world. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts. Picking up on my next point, it is that the statement made here on the floor that we are not winning the war on terror, ``the rest of the world believes we are losing the war on terror.'' I do not believe that is true at all. In fact, who would want to trade places with the other side? How would you like to try to conduct or construct an optimistic scenario if you were, say, Zarqawi before he was sent to the next life by the United States Air Force? How would you put together a scenario by which you could possibly win? I would point out that listening to one of our experts, one who is actually under the command of our Commander in Chief, General Casey, who said the last time I was over there, he said the enemy cannot win if the politicians stay in the fight. That is what I am about, Madam Speaker, is seeing to it that the politicians stay in the fight. Our solders and marines deserve it. They deserve everything we have to support them. When they approach me in Iraq and say to me, I am proud to put my life on the line and commit a year out of my life to defend freedom and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom, but why do I have to fight the United States news media too, why do I have to fight the anti-war detractors, my answer to them has been, you should not have to do that. That is my job. And it is a job of all of us, to stand up together. But also the criticism that we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq. That is not a criticism that sets on very solid ground from my perspective. I support the President in that. You cannot give people a date that you are going to pull out. And so I would submit to the other side of the aisle that has found some experts to support the position that they are advocating, they should listen to an expert that I would think that they should support, and that would be the expert called former President Bill Clinton, who said, and agreed with President Bush, that we cannot give the enemy an exit date or they will just simply go underground. He said, you cannot give them a date. Bill Clinton, 2 days ago supporting President Bush and his position not to telegraph when we might be ready to deploy out of Iraq. And so the selective process is going on, pick the people that support your position and then declare them to be experts. And I generally stand with my position. But, let's see. The people who got it right were ignored; the people who got it wrong were rewarded. I think it is a bit early to declare such a thing. I think historians will make that decision. I think the advisers that got us into Afghanistan successfully and successfully have managed the liberation of Afghanistan got it right. I think the same advisers were there to put together the strategy for Iraq, and given the military operations that are there, the liberation of Iraq, they got it right. To maintain the safety and security in that country has been difficult, but the strategy, there is not a consistent viewpoint here, to get Americans out is what we hear from people like Mr. Murtha, because they are targets of the enemy. If we pull out to the horizon, which we found out, I thought the horizon might be over there where the sun sets or where the sunrise is or up on the hill, the other side of the hill, just some place out of sight would be the horizon. We found out a month ago their horizon is really Okinawa. He said let us redeploy our troops to Okinawa, then if things get bad, we can go back in there. So the Out of Iraq Caucus, I wonder how large a caucus that is, but their position doesn't have a futuristic view. What takes place in the Middle East? I would say this: We need to be looking at the Bush doctrine, we need to be looking at when the Berlin Wall went down, and that echo of freedom that I talked about earlier, we need to be looking at the way a map of the world looks today, and a free Afghanistan, 20, 25 million people and a free Iraq; 25 million people, an Iraq that is far safer than the news media would have us believe, that cameras are trained on the IEDs before they go off, but they are not trained on the happy Iraqi playing children. We have a new conflagration in the Middle East. We have the circumstances with Israel, an Israel that has been trading land for peace. When there is no rational reason to trade land for peace, there is no historical model of somebody trading off land and getting peace. We could go back to the prior, to World War II, you would think the focus on that, if that history would be pretty acute, the trade-off for the Sudetenland, to Hitler, to get peace, and finally, the carving up of Poland between the Germans and the Russians, and ultimately war. It always happens, you can never trade land for peace, and yet the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon, and I understand why. It was costly to be there, but the agreement was that Hezbollah would not be operating in southern Lebanon or in Lebanon at all. Finally, most of the Syrian troops got out of there, not the Syrian intelligence people, but the Syrian troops. Hezbollah accelerated and built up their forces there, and they smuggled in missiles from Syria, probably from Iran to Syria and into Lebanon. Israel sits there today in a two-front war, being shot at from Gaza and being shot at from Lebanon, missiles raining down from the north, raining up from the south. I would submit that if they had succeeded in moving the Israeli people, the Jewish people out of the West Bank, moved them up against the fence, or inside the fence, if they had succeeded in allowing an autonomous West Bank, they will be firing missiles from the West Bank as well, and the only area Israel would not be shot at from right now would be from the sea. The sea, of course, is the place where the neighbors of Israel would like to drive all Israelis, and they don't have very long. They cannot make very many mistakes. I am glad that they have stepped up to defend themselves, and I am glad that they began operations north and in the south. It is the right thing to do, and talk of negotiating for peace without the eradication of Hezbollah in Lebanon would be a mistake. They must go in, and they must take out Hezbollah, take them out, take out their entire ability to conduct military operations there, pacify southern Lebanon, before they can come back out of there again. It has got to happen. If it doesn't happen, there will not be peace. The missiles will continue to rain in. The Syrians, complicit in this, sitting up there, providing military weapons; and Iranians, we believe, were down in Lebanon helping advise and helping to fire off some of the rockets that were fired, especially the one that went to the Israeli ship. We have acts of war being conducted by Iran against Israel, and I believe acts of war being conducted against Israel by Syrians. The Israelis have to be looking to the south to Gaza, to the north to Lebanon, and over to Syria and on over to Iran. They have got to look at their sites at four different locations. We must stand with them every step of the way. We have got to do so with a vision, with a vision of how this end game might work. We need to be thinking that the nuclear capability, the growing nuclear capability of Iran in the very belligerent hands of Ahmadinejad is far too dangerous. We have to believe that if he had the capability to drop a nuclear warhead into Tel Aviv, this would be about the time. We have to understand that Hezbollah is conducting operations and firing missiles into Israel at the direction of Iran. Iran has been and is providing the supplies. Iran has recruited, founded, recruited and trained Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of Iran. They cannot shake the responsibility that when Hezbollah acts in an act of war against Israel, it is really an act by a surrogate of Iran. I came to the conclusion in September of 2004 that there was a 95 percent probability that we would have to go in and take out the nuclear capability of Iran. We cannot sit and let a rogue nation have that capability, a nation that deals with, trades with, and probably is able to swap nuclear secrets with North Korea. These two axes of evil are still out there, and they are still dangerous, and they are getting ever more bold. When we have people here in this Congress, that say we are losing this war on terror, that Iran is a winner, that Hamas is a winner, that Hezbollah is a winner, I don't know how they can be winners when they are being taken out 24 hours a day by the IDF. But that scenario gives them hope. Members of Congress think they are winning. Then their optimism will be stronger, or they will probably lack the defeatism that we think they are getting. So we must look at Israel, we must look at this end game with the idea that if we have to take action, then we may have to do it in a more urgent fashion than we might otherwise, because of the war that is breaking out in the Middle East, the war that is breaking out with Israel. On that subject matter, I trust our Commander in Chief to be putting an end game in mind. I stand with him in his vision on this safety and this security and on a strategy to get to the end of this global war on terror. I would ask the American people to envision this, envision how freedom echoed across Eastern Europe in 1989. Country after country after country became free, and today they go to the polls, and they choose their leaders. They direct their national destiny, and they join the European Union, and they join NATO, and they are good allies, and they join the coalition and our operations in Afghanistan and the coalition of our operations in Iraq. The people who are the newest to freedom are the first to fight for the freedom of others. I stood in a military base in Basra some time back, where a British general was commanding the region down in the southern part of Iraq. In that group, that group of soldiers, if you look at the flags on their shoulders, there were British soldiers, Australians, Romanians, Polish, Danish, Netherlands, I am forgetting one or two, but that was all, just happened to be those in a group. I lined them up and took a picture. That is the true coalition forces. They are there. Shortly after I came back from Iraq, the Australians doubled their troop involvement in Iraq. They doubled it, just simply doubled their troops. Do you think it made the news in the United States of America? Only one or two news outlets when we did a LexusNexus search, but, you know, al Jazeera picked it up. You know, al Jazeera scooped the major news media in the United States, because they were paying attention. So, Madam Speaker, we will stand with the Commander in Chief with the vision for freedom, and we will look forward to the day that the Arab world breathes free, and when that day comes, country by country, piece by piece, the people that get up in the mornings there then can turn their outlook from teaching hatred, from making bombs and trying to kill others to try to drag the rest of the world down, they can turn that focus to building their homes, building their families and their communities and their mosques or their churches, building their country into a model of prosperity instead of a model of destruction. I think in the amount of time that I have, I am going to shift subjects, and we will talk about the security on the other side of the United States. I would point out that we have also a security concern on our southern border; and down there, that 2,000-mile long border that runs from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, that border has, according to the Border Patrol testimony at the Immigration Subcommittee hearing, as many as 4 million people pouring across that southern border annually. That is about 11,000 people a day, 4 million people annually. In the past year, in 2005, they stopped and turned back 1,188,000 people, most of them run through, identified, put on a bus, taken to the border and sent back through the turnstile into Mexico. The year before, there was 1,159,000. The number has been growing. It has crept up from 900,000 on up to now nearly 1.2 million, 1.2 million people caught when we are catching a fourth to a third, by most of the testimony that comes here. But when I go down on the border and I meet with the Border Patrol officers down there, Madam Speaker, I ask them and I propose that number, are you stopping 25 percent. I found no one down there on a regular basis that told me that they stopped 25 percent of the illegal border crossings. Most of them, they gave me the number of 10 percent, and one, when I submitted the 25 percent number, actually went into hysterics and said, oh, it is not more than 3, perhaps 5, percent; 3 percent of illegal crossers and 5 percent of the illegal drugs that are coming across the border. Now, when we talk about numbers of those size, it is hard to put it into perspective. So I would put it this way: every time an illegal comes into the United States across the Mexican border, that is an average of one every 8 seconds. In the United States, every 8 seconds, there is a baby born in America, and it might be an anchor baby and a baby born to an illegal mother. That baby will have citizenship here in the United States. I am opposed to that policy, but every time a baby is born, an illegal walks across the border into the United States. As our population grows, half of it is an illegal population. A bull ride is 8 seconds long. For the length of a bull ride, a baby is born, and an illegal crosses a border. A cowboy rides a bull another 8 seconds, only they are not riding 24 hours a day, we are having babies and having illegals come across every day, 24 hours a day. How many people are 11,000 daily? To measure 11,000, I would put it this way. Santa Ana's army that entered into Texas that began the great war that ended up in a free Texas and ultimately Texas, a great State in this Union, Santa Ana's army was about 6,000 strong. When they stormed the Alamo, they were 2,500 to 3,000. He had split his forces; 2,500 to 3,000 storming the Alamo, and we think that was a massive armed force, and it was. But Santa Ana gathered all his army up together and he came across the border one time and wreaked havoc across Texas; twice that number marches across that border every single day. And what does America have to say about that? Ho-hum. Well, we can find a way. They have absorbed themselves into our society. Somebody needs somebody to do some cheap work, and so we really should not concern ourselves with this. I disagree with that, Madam Speaker. I think that a country that does not control its borders cannot very much longer declare itself to have borders, and a country without borders is not a country, a simply amorphous mass of a North American continent. We have to have borders and we defend them, and we have to defend those borders for all the reasons that we know, but there are other reasons that most of America does not know, and that is, as we hear the President say, we cannot stop people from coming across the border that just want to come here for a better life. Well, we cannot? Of course, I think we can. And yet, if he will concede that point, that point that we cannot stop them unless we legalize them so that they can come back and forth in some legal fashion, if that cannot be done, how in the world then does the President or anyone else propose that we can stop the force of $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming into America? Ninety percent of the illegal drugs in America cross our southern border and that is according to the DEA. That is $65 billion worth. That is marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin that comes in from China and gets funneled up this way. It is cocaine that comes from Colombia. Colombians used to have a pretty lucrative trade on cocaine until the Mexican methamphetamine brought their market down; and on top of that, when September 11 came, we tightened up the security of our airports, and it is a lot harder for them to smuggle cocaine into the United States. So now they have a transportation route that comes up around the inside of the gulf, along the rail line in Mexico, a lot of it controlled by MS-13, the most brutal gang this continent has ever seen. But you have Colombian cocaine, you have Mexican methamphetamine, you have Chinese heroin and Mexican marijuana coming into this country, totaled up value, $65 billion. Now, the force of a $7- or $8-an-hour job for someone that wants to come and pick lettuce, tomatoes or apples or whatever it might be, that is one thing. Somebody wanting to walk across the desert to pick apples, it is hard to fathom somebody that wants a better life that much, although we have to sympathize with that and solution-wise in fixing Mexico, not in draining off all of the discontent, and the poor people that are in Mexico and in the United States. But the problem is we can deal with that. What we have not done is taken steps against the $65 billion worth of illegal drugs; and as I go down there, Madam Speaker, and I sit along that border at night and listen to the infiltration of the illegals sneaking through the brush, being unloaded out of the vehicles, picking up their packs and marching off through the brush, when it gets light and I go and look at the tracks and see where they are marching off through the desert and they are carrying a 50-pound pack of marijuana, pack trains of people, 10 or a dozen or 50 or even as high as 100 people, each with 50 pounds of marijuana on their back, marching across the desert because they cannot drive a vehicle across there in some of those locations now because we put in vehicle barriers, well, the vehicle barriers are environmentally friendly. They have let the desert antelope crawl through. And a man with 50 pounds of marijuana can throw his pack through there, crawl through, put on his pack and walk across the desert. That is what is going on So we need to force all traffic through the ports of entry. That is my mission. That is why I believe we need to build physical barriers to do that, Madam Speaker. So I have designed one. I have spent my life in the construction business. We build things, design things, pour structural concrete, make it out of steel. You name it, we have done it. Mostly it is earthwork of all kinds. So I submit that on this desert floor, when I go down there, it lays pretty good for this job. I would, Madam Speaker, dig a trench like this in the desert floor, dig a trench down through that desert floor, and I will demonstrate another thing. As that trench is dug, we pull a slip form trencher right along behind it. It will be pouring concrete right in the trench. As you move the trench, the concrete would move along like that. You come along in a couple of days when this cures, leave a slot in the middle, and start setting precast panels right up in this slot that I have. These would be already made, already cured. They would be about 10 feet wide or 13\1/2\ feet long, and they are designed to be a 12- foot high constructed height. And we just pick them up with a crane, set them in like that. You can see how easy this is, Madam Speaker. Once you get the trench and the footing poured, it is a simple task to set the precast concrete panels right into the footing and into the slot. Now, that builds us a 12-foot high concrete wall. I do not submit that this wall be built right on the border because I think it is important for us to be able to do surveillance on both sides of this wall. I would submit that right on the border, we put up a 10-foot-high chain link fence, a chain link fence with about four barbs tipped out to the south. I would hang a sign about every quarter of a mile, in Spanish, that tells people go to this Web site or go to the U.S. consulate and here is where you apply to come into the United States legally. That would be my approach. And then, when they cut through the fence, when they dug under the fence, when they went around it, over it, or through it, whatever they did, that would tell us that is a location where we need to beef it up. And I would pull back 60 feet. I would put this footing in, and I would drop this concrete fence, and they will have demonstrated that we need it because they have violated the one that was the lighter fence that they didn't respect. And so, we have this concrete wall. It is about 6 inches thick. It ends up 12 feet high, 10-foot-wide panels, one after another. And our little construction company could toss together about a mile a day of this once we got going. Now, we won't be bidding any project like this, but we have the capability of doing it is my point. And certainly there would be a little bit of engineering design that would be touched up on it. But this is basically the design that I believe we would be ending up with. It costs about $1.3 million a mile. Now we are spending $8 billion on our southern border, $8 billion. That is $4 million a mile every year, and we are paying Border Patrol people to drive back and forth on HUMVEES, to park and look at it and be a deterrent just for being there, and we are paying all the administration that it takes to support the people and, of course, their weapons and all the technology. And I am for supporting this wall with additional technology. And it is okay with me if they want to fly drones around and let us know when people are approaching the wall. But I will tell you, they will find that this wall doesn't let them cross it. And people will say, well, if you build a 12-foot wall, I will show you a 12-foot ladder. And that might happen, Madam Speaker. So I have a little bit of a solution for that. And that solution consists of, this is actually a little piece of solder, but just a little nice little concertina wire to put on top of this wall as a deterrent. Easily installed. And you can see that it can provide that deterrent effect. Now, I also submit that we run a little current through this wire, and that provides also as a deterrent. Now it is up there where you would have to have a ladder to get your hands on it. But that will keep people from putting a ladder up against it. And then we will have our borders respected and protected. And if we fail to do this, Madam Speaker, we are going to continue to see 11,000 people a day, one every 8 seconds, $65 billion worth of illegal drugs pouring across this border. Whenever we built the fence in San Diego they went around the fence. And each time that you do that they will go around it because the money is too great, $65 billion. We have got to shut it off. And we will build this thing where they don't respect a more modest barrier, and continue to build until such time as all traffic goes through the ports of entry. And that means legal and illegal, through the ports of entry. And then we will beef up our people there. We beef up our technology there. And if we do that we can then finally say we have control of this border. And if we enforce there, if we end birthright citizenship, and if we enforce employer sanctions, those three things will solve this issue. And I would ask the President commit to enforcing our immigration laws, commit to controlling the border, spend the next years of your administration establishing that. And when that is done, while the next President is campaigning for the 2008 election to be sworn into office here in 2009, that campaign can be about whether or not we need guest workers in this country and how many we might need and of what skills they might come from. But we cannot build a guest worker plan on a false foundation, a foundation of the promise of enforcement. And the only way we can ever know that we have enforcement is to actually enforce, prove it can be done. If we prove it can be done, then we will have something solid to build this guest worker plan on. But without that, we are building a guest worker plan on hypotheticals. The hypothetical will be that we will enforce the law. That has not happened. It has diminished over the last 20 years. An employer under Bill Clinton was 19 times more likely to be sanctioned for hiring illegals than under our current President. And so I am asking, let's enforce the law. Let's demonstrate that we can do it. Let's put fixtures on the border, because this $1.3 million per mile is a one-time investment that will free up other people. As I asked in the testimony down in Laredo of the sector chief for the Border Patrol there, I said, if you have a wall like this, does it take more or less border patrol officers to protect that border? And his answer, even though it isn't the administration's position to support this, was it takes less border patrol officers to enforce this wall. So, Madam Speaker, that is my encouragement for the President. That is my encouragement for our Commander in Chief. That is my encouragement for the American people. Stand up and support our military in the Middle East and defend this country, and we will continue to be a great Nation.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. Madam Speaker, I did refer to him as some expert, because I did not pick out how you defined that. But I did attribute it to an expert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized here in the United States House of Representatives. And I came to the floor to talk about a number of things that I am convinced are of importance to Americans. And as I sat through this discussion over the last 45 minutes or so that I have tuned an ear to this, I cannot help but move into some of my disagreements with the remarks that were made by some of my esteemed colleagues on the other side of the aisle. And I want to state first that I appreciate the tone of their remarks tonight. Sometimes they are not so tolerant, they are not so patient, and the tone gets a little more intense than it was. It does not change my disagreement. I just appreciate the approach that they bring in our disagreement. And that is what we are supposed to do here. We are supposed to air our differences, Madam Speaker, and lay those things out, and the American people tune in on what we do, and they weigh in with each of us, and we draw our conclusions based upon our convictions plus the input that comes from all over this country. So I would first say that the statement was made consistently that we invaded Iraq totally on false premises. And, first, I would remind the body of resolution 1441, the last United Nations resolution that finally was the last straw. There were a number of other resolutions that Saddam Hussein violated. And we know that it was not our responsibility to prove that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. It was his responsibility to comply with the United Nations, to comply with the weapons inspectors. He did not do that. The war that took place in 1991, Desert Storm, that war was never over because it was not completed because Saddam did not comply with the conditions of the cease-fire. So the resolutions came before the United Nations. Resolution 1441 was the last-straw resolution, and that was supported by, of course, all members of the Security Council, and it passed the United Nations. Someone needed to enforce the resolution if the United Nations was to have any teeth in anything that they did. If there was to be peace in the Middle East, someone had to enforce that resolution. And if we were going to keep Saddam Hussein out of his neighbors' territory, like Kuwait that he went into that began this in the first place, someone had to enforce the resolution. So the second generation of Bushes stepped forward and built a magnificent coalition, a coalition of more than 30 countries, a coalition of the willing that went in and liberated Iraq beginning in March of 2003 and crossed that country with armored columns into Baghdad, the largest city ever in the history of the world to be liberated and occupied by a foreign power. That happened in a matter of weeks, Madam Speaker. It was a magnificent military accomplishment. And it was done with fewer troops than the first time, I agree. But as I listened too, I will not call it the dissent on this side because certainly we have not read the majority opinion. I hear from this general, he disagreed with the number of troops, and this general thought that we could not probably keep the Iraqis on our side, and this one thought there was going to be a civil war, and some of the people in the CIA disagreed, and a GAO analysis tells us that we really should not be there. Who are these people, Madam Speaker? Who are they to be directing our foreign policy? Are these elected individuals that are the voices of the people? Are they the Commander in Chief? Do they speak for the Commander in Chief, Madam Speaker? What business do they have weighing in? Is their voice in the wilderness of any more volume or any more credibility than the next person on the street, the next person that might be your neighbor? Do they have any more credibility than the elected Members of the United States House of Representatives or the United States Senate? My answer to that is no. Some of them were involved in foreign policy. Some of them were involved in military policy. I will grant that. I heard three generals that were named. I think I could probably come up with six to nine generals that disagree with the President's policy. But if it is nine generals, I will see your nine generals and I will raise you 9,000 generals who do not disagree with the President's policy and have not disagreed with the President's policy. And I would like to lay this out for the mission that it is. There is a Bush doctrine, and this Bush doctrine was finally recognized by the national news media when on the west portico of this Capitol building, President Bush gave his second inaugural address, and in that second inaugural address, he laid out his vision. Now, it was laid out prior to that. It was laid out at least in his State of the Union address January 28, 2003. It was laid out in his defense strategy for the United States of America, which came out in the previous September, 2002. And he made it clear that his vision was to promote freedom, to promote liberty, especially in these countries that fostered and bred terrorists. It was a clear policy established. ``The Nationality Security Strategy of the United States'' was the name of the document published in September of 2002. Very consistent with the President's speeches. Freedom beats in the heart of every person. All people yearn to breathe free. Free people do not go to war against other free people. And I have often, on the floor of the House of Representatives, Madam Speaker, talked about the similarities and the corollaries between the end of the Cold War and how we can get to the end of this global war on terror. And I point out that November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. It came down from the force of a people that wanted to be free. They yearned to get out of that trap that they were in. They yearned to reach across to their fellow man, their neighbors, their family members that were divided by that wall down through the middle of Berlin. But it was the yearning for freedom that made the difference. When they climbed up on top of that wall, they took hammers and chisels and chipped the stone out and the concrete out, and when they broke bottles of champagne on there and climbed up on top and danced and sang and celebrated, it was a glorious day. Much of the world missed the point. Much of the world, and I remember watching the network news media at the time, much of the world was talking about how families were being reunited, how important it was that we saw this joy of the reunification of families that had divided since after World War II. As I sat and watched that, it occurred to me that when the Berlin Wall came down, the Iron Curtain came crashing down with it. The Cold War, the beginning of the end of the Cold War was over. In fact, it was over on that day. It took a little while to clean up the mess, but what happened when that wall was breached by people that yearned for freedom was the echo of freedom. Once they got past that wall, once they got through the Brandenburg Gate, it echoed across Eastern Europe. It echoed across Eastern Europe with a crescendo. And it was almost a blood-free revolution. For practical purposes, it was virtually blood- free. As country after country yearned for freedom, Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia, country after country, the Soviet Union collapsed, Madam Speaker and they had a measure of freedom far greater than they had ever seen before, and they still have a measure of freedom greater than they had seen prior to the end of the Cold War. Hundreds of millions of people breathe free today because the Berlin Wall came down, because Ronald Reagan's vision, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' When that happened, when that vision was realized and freedom echoed across Eastern Europe and hundreds of millions of people became free, they stood in the square in Prague and rattled their keys together by the tens of thousands and came to power and later had their velvet revolution and separated those two countries without blood, and they live compatibly today as two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Those things happened in the blink of a historical eye, and it was a historical miracle. But that miracle that we look back on now from a period of 15 years or so, 17 years, that miracle that took place was the kind of miracle that can be emulated again. The second George Bush, Bush 43, came to power, and this Nation was attacked. And when this Nation was attacked, it was clear that we had an enemy that was determined to annihilate us. They attack our value system, they attack our culture, they attack Western Civilization itself. And they believe that their path to salvation is in killing people who are not like them. In fact, they kill more Muslims than they do Christians or Jews, it is just that Jews are their preferred tar gets, Christians are their second preferred targets, but they will kill whatever target is in front of them if they think they can sow some kind of discontent that might breakdown social order, and if the social order gets broke down, then they think they can somehow emerge into power. So this is how this thing unfolded from 1989 quickly until today. The Bush doctrine is the vision of freedom echoing across the Arab world the way it echoed across Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Now, I direct the attention of the Speaker and the public to the vision of what the world looks like today What has changed in the world since September 11, 2001? How much different is the map of the world today? If we would paint that map with freedom, you can go to Afghanistan. When we made a decision to go into Afghanistan, people on that side of the aisle said it will be another Vietnam, it will be another quagmire. No nation has ever been able to go into Afghanistan and invade, occupy, liberate, be able to operate in that foreign country in an effective fashion. Everybody has been defeated, everybody has been run out. The British have lost, the Russians have lost. You can go back through history and no one has succeeded in Afghanistan. Yet a month, actually less than a month after September 11, we had operations beginning in Afghanistan. And just a few months later, the Northern Alliance, coupled with coalition forces, routed the Taliban, surrounded and destroyed many al Qaeda and liberated Afghanistan. There is a proud National Guard unit from my district that was on the ground in Afghanistan that protected the voting locations, the voting booths and the routes to them, and some of the areas other troops from our coalition forces protected in the rest of the areas, and on that date and that location, the people in Afghanistan went to the polls for the first time in all of history and cast their ballots for a free government and they ratified a Constitution that now directs a free people, and Afghanistan is an up-and-running free country. This up-and-running free country has its problems, yes. And now that there has been an acceleration in the violence that has taken place in Afghanistan, the people who were afraid to criticize over these last 3 to 4 years or more are now starting to criticize again. The level of their criticism goes up in direct proportion to the number of casualties that go up in Afghanistan. And it is the same in Iraq. You could index it. If you could listen to the decibels from the other side of the aisle, the decibels of criticism of our Commander-in- Chief, undermining our efforts to free the rest of the world and free this burden of terror off the American people, if you could measure the decibels of objection from your side, you could index that directly to the number of casualties of American and coalition troops, because it is political opportunism that raises the objections. When the casualties go down, the objections go down, because the credibility diminishes. The casualties go up, the critics get up here, come to the floor and unload more and more. And when they do that, they are undermining our military who are on the line. But some of these other points that were made. Interesting things. Why does it matter if people like us in the first place? I would ask that question. There is much concern about the rest of the world doesn't like us. We need to do something so people can like us again. I recall going to the Greenbriar on a weekend that would have been the latter part of February in 2003. We had a bipartisan retreat where we got to know each other. We had breakout sessions and we brought in experts, especially from around the Middle East. There was an entire handful of experts that had lived in the Middle East and knew the culture and history and had a sense of how they could explain to us what was going on. We hadn't studied the Middle Eastern culture very much as a nation. We know a lot more about it today. But as these experts sat around and they started up the discussions and we had these sessions, and I didn't know the other colleagues very well, I had only sworn into this job a month earlier. So I spent a lot of time listening. It was important for me to learn what my colleagues didn't know and also to find out what they knew that they could impart to me. But I wanted to make sure that when I shared my viewpoint, that it was going into a place where there was a knowledge void so we could help fill that up. I hope they are doing the same thing with me. That is one of the ways things work. The author and journalist Tom Friedman gave an address to start that weekend out, and that set the tone for the whole weekend. The question was, well, they don't like us very well, and they are not going to like us any better when we get done with them. If we go into Iraq, and hadn't gone in at that point, if we go in, they are going to start to hate us even more. So we sat around and spent the weekend agonizing about how to make people like us. Well, how in the world can you decide to go make people like you when they just got finished bombing us, flying four airplanes into America, killing 3,000 Americans and believing that the 19 hijackers that were on those planes are now off in the next life with their 72 virgins each. That is their belief system. And we are worried about people like that liking us? I will submit that you can't worry about that. You can't negotiate with people like that. The only thing you can do is stall them off with fear or take them out with force. Those are our alternatives. A statement was made over here tonight, Madam Speaker, that we are in the middle of a civil war and we are being asked to protect the Sunnis from the Shiites. The middle of a civil war. There was a revolution that was introduced here that declared we are in a civil war. The junior Senator from Iowa introduced a resolution in the Senate that declared we are in the middle of a civil war in Iraq. The middle of a civil war. They have declared that now, oh, since, 3, 4, 5 months ago. I haven't noticed that there has been an acceleration in the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence in the 3 to 4 to 5 months since they began to talk us about being in a civil war. Wishing it were so does not make it true. I can define ``civil war'' so the American public can identify this easily. We go back and look at our own Civil War. That was when brother was fighting against brother. Yes, it was North against South, but sometimes they lined up on opposite sides of the line and they shot at each other, and sometimes brother shot at brother, and I imagine that occasionally brothers actually killed brothers. Friends that went to the military academy met on the line. I am thinking about General Armistead, and I believe it was General Reynolds on the line at the corner and the angle, at the battle of Gettysburg, facing each other, unit to unit. That was the Civil War. Half of the people in the military, or a number approaching that, took off their blue coats and put on grey coats, and they went to war against each other. They chose up sides and went to war against each other, Madam Speaker If there is going to be a civil war in Iraq, it will be when the Iraqis who are in uniform today, 257,000 strong, trained, in action, defending the security of that nation, all wearing the same uniform, some Kurds, some Shiias, some Sunnis all mixed up in their different units. Unlike the local police that more reflect the ethnicity and the religion of their locality, the military is mixed up with about an even mix and unit by unit of Kurds, Shiias and Sunnis. I ask them, when I go over there, what is most important, the fact that you are a Shiia, the fact that you are a Sunni, the fact that you are a Kurd, or the fact that you are an Iraqi? And they have always answered, Madam Speaker, it is the fact that I am an Iraqi. And these Iraqis, 257,000 strong, defending Iraqis from terrorists who are within their midst, in ever-reducing numbers and ever-reducing resources are standing together shoulder to shoulder, fighting together. They are not fighting each other. They are fighting together against the terrorists in their midst. This is not a civil war. A civil war would be when the Iraqis that are in uniform defending Iraqis, 257,000 strong, choose up sides and start to shoot at each other. That is not happening. It has not happened. And if it begins to happen, that does not mean that they are certainly in a civil war, but that would be an indicator to start watching pretty close, Madam Speaker. So also the argument from the gentleman from Massachusetts, we cannot secure Afghanistan with less than 150,000 more troops than we have, quoting some expert, well, I think the experts that the President has employed in both Afghanistan and Iraq have done pretty well. In fact, it was essentially the same people that planned Afghanistan, that planned Iraq. They had the right number of troops in Afghanistan. They said it could not be done, but it was done. And it is a magnificent success. The troops that they sent into Iraq were absolutely adequate for the job of liberating Iraq. Now, the circumstances that follow afterwards apparently are not bad enough for the people on the other side to say, well, I thought you should have had 500,000 troops there, but now I think you ought to have no troops there. And how can you say that we should have more but yet we should not have any? There is not a consensus on the other side of the aisle. I believe we need to follow our Commander in Chief. The other statement, we do not have an exit strategy in Iraq.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be happy to engage in a colloquy with the gentleman from Arizona.