Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, my friend, Mr. Ehlers. I appreciate your input on that. I would say with regard to that, that I believe that there is a unique American character, a unique American culture; there is a vibrancy within this overarching American culture that causes us to sometimes challenge the rules, sometimes look into the science, sometimes wonder why cannot that be, why can't we accomplish that. There is a creativity that comes within this culture, this vibrancy that we have, and it is based and rooted in our freedom and in our property rights and in the reward that comes from that, when, say, a Bill Gates comes up in our lifetime and in a matter of a couple of decades turns himself into the richest man in the world. And what a thing he has done for the standard of living and the quality of life for everybody on this planet.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate the responsibility and the privilege to speak to you in this House and to represent my constituents here. I came over here to raise the issue on a number of bits of subject matter. And as I sat and listened, of course, the subject changed a little bit as I listened to the group here on the other side. And I think that it is important to edify Americans as to the difference between Republicans and Democrats. And I am just really grateful that when I was born and I was reared in a family, I began to build a certain attitude about life. And as that attitude unfolded, I was taught from the beginning to fend for yourself. You are going to have to get out there and make something out of yourself in this lifetime because nobody is going to do it for you. Your ship will never come in. Take control of your life. So at an early age, I realized that when I was born, my glass was half full and it was my job to get out of bed, go to work every day, and go ahead and fill that glass up. I was not raised with an attitude and neither did I gather an attitude that my glass was half empty. I was always grateful that I was born here in America. And when I would ask my parents, what is the best country in the world to come from? They would always answer, The United States of America is the best country in the world. Eat your cold mashed potatoes. There are people starving in China. That is kind of the composite of the upbringing that I had. But grateful for this Nation, and I would always ask why, what is the difference? And probe into these other countries. And, of course, the people starving in China part was what we talked about then. But country after country in the aftermath of World War II, we were the only surviving industrial nation, and this Nation that had preserved freedom for the world, for the entire globe, and had we not done that, we would not be standing here today speaking in English, for example, Mr. Speaker, but speaking in a free way with free ideas and having this free exchange. I stand at the same spot on which Tom DeLay gave his last speech here in this Congress. And he made a point that I think is an important one. And that is that, yes, there is partisanship and, yes, we have sharp disagreements. We have those disagreements because we have a Constitution that protects our right to do so. But he made a point that was, you show me a Nation that does not have partisanship and I will show you a tyranny. So when we disagree, we need to be grateful that we can disagree, and we should base that on fundamental philosophical differences and highlight those. But there is a difference in human nature. Part of human nature is like me that sees our glass half full. Part of human nature is like the people on the other side of the aisle that see their glass and the glass of their constituents as half empty. And that is all right if you look at it from that perspective. But then you have to take it to the next level. And the next level is those that see their glass half full set about going to work to fill it, and we pull each other up the ladder because we know that as we all go out and work and produce and market and save and invest that that helps everyone, that this economy grows. This is not a zero sum game. It is not a goose that has so many golden eggs in it where we can just simply slaughter the goose and harvest the eggs. It is an economy that needs to have inputs. It needs to have capital investment, both intellectual capital and real dollars in a real way. We need to have entrepreneurs. We need to keep generating new ideas. This organism of our economy, has a lot of components in it, and it needs to be working and churning. And when we go in there and we tap into this organism of our economy and we start to take from it and not put into it, then it slows down the growth of our economy and it grows slowly. But this was an economy that when Ronald Reagan was sworn in outside this building in 1980, the Dow Jones was below 1,000. I do not remember the exact number, but I know it was below 1,000. Today it is at 11,000. That is a good measure of what has happened with our economy, and that should be something that should tell, Mr. Speaker, the American people that when your glass is half full and you go to work to fill that glass up the rest of the way and you help your brethren up the ladder along the way that the sum total of the size of the pie, which is divided up amongst now 300 million Americans, gets greater and greater and greater, and that means when the pie is bigger, the size of the pieces can be bigger for each individual that is involved. This is not a matter of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. This is a matter which the argument that I am hearing really slows down this economy and that when you tax someone for the labor they do, you punish them for that labor. Ronald Reagan also said what you tax, you get less of. So we have a first lien on all productivity in America. The Federal Government has the first lien on all productivity in America. So we tax production. We tax earnings, savings and investment. We tax Social Security, we tax your pension, we tax your capital gains, your income tax, your corporate income tax, your partnership income tax. Also we tax your earnings on investments and your Alternative Minimum Tax. All those things are taxed. Well, when there is a tax applied to anything, it is a disincentive to produce. So the first lien on all productivity in America slows down the productivity in America, but it does gather dollars from those wages to run the Federal Government. Now, if you think your glass is half empty and it is not a growing economy, but simply something, a same size pie every year that gets divided up differently depending on who has the political power, not depending on who produces into this economy, eventually what you are doing is you are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, harvesting the eggs and thinking somehow there is going to be another goose come along. Mr. Speaker, it will not. There will not be another goose come along. This is the one we are going to have to nurture. This economy that is growing, the one producing the golden eggs that are popping out here, it is because people have invested capital and taken risks and put in sweat equity and had a vision and made a sacrifice with their time and their dollars, and sometimes from their families, to make their businesses run or to go to their jobs to help their companies operate, or sit in the basement or up in the attic working sometimes working on inventions that become creative inventions that increase and contribute to this dynamic economy that we have. So much was said about the national debt. My glass is half full and I am going to work to fill it up. Most Americans are doing that. That is why Republicans have control of the House, the Senate and the White House. Some folks believe their glass is half empty, and if they sit around with their tin cup, then let me tell you, that cup will never be full. You have to take charge of your life. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have compassion. In fact, everybody in America has access to high quality health care. We have the highest percentage of personal ownership of their homes ever in the history of the United States, and, I would submit, in the history of the world. That home ownership was at 68 percent the last time I checked. If you go into the poverty regions, you have a higher home ownership there than ever before. This administration has been great for people who are on the lower income side of this, and I have got a proposal I will talk about that will make it even better yet. But I want to give everybody hope, Mr. Speaker. I want to give them all hope that there is a reason to get out of bed to go to work and make your life better. In fact, to solve the pathologies in the United States, it is a pretty simple equation, and that is simply this: For people who are going to have children, to get married and stay married, get a job and keep a job. Statistically that solves almost all of society's pathologies. It is not a complicated equation. We need to encourage people to go to work. Most do. Out of 300 million people in America, there are 7.5 million on the unemployment rolls. Those numbers have been actually inching down as new jobs have been created. There is about another 4.3 million that are on welfare, and another 5.3 million that have exhausted their unemployment benefits that are still looking for a job but are not technically listed on the unemployment list. That as a percentage of America isn't particularly large, but altogether, between the ages of 16 and on up through retirement, there are 77.5 million non-working Americans in this society. We have a large labor force there that we can go to when we need that labor force. But we have made good progress with the unemployment lists also there. We haven't reached the lowest unemployment. I would point out that when people say we are at full employment at 5 percent unemployment, or 4.7 percent unemployment, I don't accept that number. The lowest unemployment that I can find statistically throughout, at least the last 100 years or so that we have kept records, is 1.2 percent unemployment, and that was during World War II. So I qualify that statement. But that was when we had all hands on deck. If we really get in trouble, we can be all hands on deck again. We haven't needed to do that. So, we do have a large labor force that is here and we can draw from that. But as I listened to the Members on the other side of the aisle, the group that has consistently been down here using the word ``Republican'' as if it were a four letter word, I don't know how to spell it with only four letters, but I know how they say it when it sounds like a four letter word. They talk about the national debt, they talk about a balanced budget and they talk about the balanced budget under Bill Clinton. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, there was a balanced budget under Bill Clinton, but there were budgets that were sent to President Clinton that were vetoed because he sent them back and demanded more spending, over and over again. This government was shut down by a veto of Bill Clinton, not because he was insisting that we should balance the budget. He was insisting that he wanted more money. That was the issue here back during the Clinton years. I will admit that there was a partisan divide going on during that time, and I will say that the Republicans in this Congress presented those first balanced budgets that we had seen in decades, and they insisted that the budgets be balanced, and that is what happened. It wasn't because Bill Clinton was ponding on his podium asking for balanced budgets. He was demanding more spending. Now, a decade later, I hear Members of his party come here on the floor it take credit for the balanced budget during the Clinton years, when, yes, he signed them all right, he did not have a lot of choice, but this Congress, this Republican Congress, made him balance the budget. In fact, they balanced the budget and they required him to sign it. Then, in the aftermath or in the latter months of the Clinton administration, we had this thing going on called the dot.com bubble. I don't know if we realized it was a dot.com bubble until it burst. But when you think about it, it had to happen. In fact, my instincts were telling me that it was this; that we had technologically, because of great inventions by Americans and the stimulation that we have here and the structure that rewards productivity, invented the technology that allowed us to store and transfer information more effectively, more efficiently and cheaper than ever before. It was an amazing ride to see that dot.com bubble go up in our stock markets, because the people were investing in these dot.com companies on the anticipation that there would be a financial reward on the other end that would be in proportion to our ability to store and transfer that information more cheaply than ever before. Well, it didn't work out quite that way, Mr. Speaker, because information has value, but it isn't measured just by the amount of information. It is measured by its commercial value, and information as a commercial value has to allow you to produce a good or service and that deliver that good or service more efficiently than before, otherwise as a business you don't have an interest for paying for that information. In the case of the Internet would be a good example, it is also marketable that you can get people to pay for their Internet service so that they can have recreational information on the Internet service. So you can use that Internet for business purposes and you will pay for that, and people also pay for it for recreational purposes. That is the only two ways that information has a value in the marketplace. So we overspeculated on our ability to store and transfer information more cheaply and more efficiently than ever before, and that was the dot.com bubble. Well, the lawsuit on Microsoft I believe was the lance that pierced the dot.com bubble. It would have burst anyway, because it was a growing bubble that was speculation. But when that lawsuit came and the lance of the lawsuit against Microsoft pierced the dot.com bubble, then we saw the stock market begin to contract. In fact, a lot of us will say we were moving into a recession, and I will say we were, and that was at the end of the Clinton administration. On top of that, we inaugurated President Bush out here on the West Portico. When that happened, he was in the middle of this bursting of the dot.com bubble and the decline in our stock market and our economy. We hardly got a handle on what was happening there, and along came September 11, the terrible damage to our financial institutions in the heart of New York City at ground zero, the Twin Towers, and, of course, the attacks on the Pentagon and the crash of the plane in Pennsylvania. That was an attack on our financial centers that sent it into a further downward spiral. So we had two things working against this economy: The formerly balanced budget, running into the dot.com bubble that shut down the revenues here and dramatically reduced our revenues here in the Federal Government, and on the heels of that came the September 11 attack and the impact on our financials in the United States of America was dramatic. Then on the heels of that we had to create a Homeland Security Department, that spent billions of dollars to protect 300 million Americans, and has done so very effectively. We have not been attacked on our own soil since that time in any effective way. And additionally, we had to appropriate money because we went to war in the global war on terror. All of those things stacked against this economy, and, do you know, we are growing back out of this thing, because there was vision on the part of President Bush, there was vision on the part of his financial advisers and vision on the part of the leadership in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, that had the fortitude to come to this floor and propose tax cuts that stimulated this economy. If President Bush had not had the vision and the courage to do that, if this Congress hadn't had the vision and courage to step forward and propose and initiate these tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts, as we know them now, we would have seen a depression, not just a recession, but a depression in this economy, Mr. Speaker, and that would have been the price we would have paid if we would have stuck with, I will say the philosophy that we have heard over here on how we ought to be running a balanced budget. The people on the other side of the aisle, if they had been in the majority in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, would have proposed tax increases. They would have said, well, first of all, let's not take on these global terrorists. Let's figure out a way that we can curl up into a national fetal position, and perhaps we could have just put enough guards at every school and every bus stop and every theater and every church and maybe even every home and turned America into one great big, huge Israel, and somehow or another cowered away and apologized to the terrorists, and maybe they wouldn't have attacked us again. But they would have. They attacked us in the first place, didn't they? So under the leadership of the other side of the aisle, there would not have been a proactive tip-of-the-spear effort in Afghanistan, there would not have been a proactive tip-of-the-spear effort in Iraq. They would have turned the United States into one huge Israel, and that would be a defensive posture with enemies all around, wondering where they are going to come from next. That is not the way I want to live, Mr. Speaker. I refuse to live that way. I insist that we exercise our rights to live in freedom, and freedom requires risk, it requires sacrifice, and there is danger involved. But it is worth it. It is worth it from the time Patrick Henry articulated it so well, it is worth it from the time that it has been articulated so well by my colleagues on this floor on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and I am honored just to be a part of that. But we took on the war on terror. And it is interesting to me that before our troops went into Afghanistan, there was much objection to the foolhardy nature of mounting a military operation in a country that had never been invaded successfully and occupied before in all of history. And yet that took place successfully on the part of our United States military, working with our coalition forces, many of our coalition forces. They said it couldn't be done. They said it was another Vietnam. They said the passes in the mountains would be impassable, and no one could sustain a military operation through there because they would be ambushed over and over again, and that the people in Afghanistan couldn't handle freedom. They had never had that freedom before. They had never voted there before. This wasn't the kind of people that could handle freedom. Well, they were right about one thing, Mr. Speaker. They had never voted there before. But there were American soldiers and American Marines that were on the ground guarding the travel routes to the polling places, guarding the polling places, and I am very proud of the Iowa National Guardsmen that were there at that time on that soil that provided an opportunity for the Afghani people for the first time in the history of the world since Adam and Eve to go to the polls and choose their leaders and direct their national destiny of 25 million people, a huge accomplishment when that liberty bell rang across the globe. And the inspiration that comes from that carries over to the issue of Iraq, Mr. Speaker. Now, this issue with Iraq, it is the same size country; 25 million people in Afghanistan, 25 million people until Iraq. The complaint I hear on the other side of the aisle is that Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush didn't listen to the military advisers because the people on the other side of the aisle found a general that disagreed. I don't know if it was a Sunday afternoon or Monday morning quarterback, but they found a general that disagreed. Well, I understand there are about 9,000 generals in our military, and if you can find one that disagrees, in fact, I saw six that disagreed, and it takes a long time to gather those kind of people. I will bet that some of those people will show up in the campaigns for the Presidency working for candidates by the year 2008. I expect I will see some of those generals that claim that they counseled for the opposite, working with and for Presidential candidates, for Democrats on the other side of the aisle. I am not suggesting that they have a motive, I am just suggesting that they have a different philosophy about the future of America, even though they are generals and even though they are literally a handful out of the 9,000 generals that we have. But the advice that the President followed and the advice that Secretary Rumsfeld followed was the same people advising in Afghanistan for the most part as advised in Iraq. The same number of people, Mr. Speaker, 25 million people in Afghanistan, 25 million people in Iraq. We heard the same arguments: It's another Vietnam. It's a quagmire. You never can do that. No one could go into Iraq and invade and occupy that country. We didn't, really. We liberated them. We had an armored column go across Iraq to Baghdad in less time than ever in the history of the world. Baghdad, itself, was the largest city ever in the history of the world to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power. Absolutely a true statement. Berlin was the next largest that I could find, and that was far smaller than Baghdad. But they only occupied it for a split second as they erroneously put up the American flag and then realized, This is the wrong message to send to the Iraqi people. We're here to liberate you. And they ran the Iraqi flag back up the flagpole. You haven't seen an American flag fly around there since then because the Iraqi people are liberated. They give me smiles, and they give me thumbs up when I go to that country because they are still grateful. The gentleman from Pennsylvania that has been on the floor so many hours here in the last couple of weeks, he finds a different view. You can find whatever it is that you want to support your argument, Mr. Speaker. But in this case, I stand with our soldiers. I stand with our marines. I stand with the judgment that said, go to Iraq. And, in fact, there have been some announcements today that I could take up in a little bit. I am very happy at this time to yield so much time as he may consume to my friend Mr. Ehlers for any remarks he may choose to make.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I bring an amendment here to the floor that strikes section 9012 from the bill. The bill language under 9012 says: ``None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Government of the United States to enter into a basing rights agreement between the United States and Iraq.'' Mr. Chairman, I believe that we should not foreclose our options in Iraq, and H.R. 5631 prohibits the United States from entering into any military base agreement with Iraq. If we rule out all bases, we forego a critical part of diplomatic relations. My amendment would strike this section from the bill. Historically, basing rights agreements have been a necessary part of diplomatic relations with foreign governments. These agreements outline guidelines and conditions for operating American military bases worldwide. It is both common and responsible for the United States to enter into, and periodically renegotiate, basing rights agreements with countries hosting American troops. This has been done with every country hosting U.S. troops including Afghanistan. The newly elected democratic government of Iraq should be no exception, and it is likely and appropriate that basing agreements will soon be negotiated. In this way, my amendment respects Iraqi sovereignty. Prohibiting these negotiations will not make the problems go away. Rather, by refusing to enter into a sensible diplomatic dialogue, the United States would neglect its diplomatic duties. Opposing my amendment would tie the hands of those responsible for engaging in civilized diplomatic relations with Iraq, but supporting my amendment would allow for prudent decision-making and dialogue with the independent nation of Iraq. The use of the term ``permanent bases'' is a loaded term. The BRAC process clearly demonstrates there is no such thing as permanent U.S. military bases, even within the United States. Furthermore, military basing agreements can be negotiated for any length of time, including short term and temporary, and they can be renegotiated at any time. I am not proposing installation of permanent bases in Iraq with this amendment, Mr. Chairman. I am simply asking that the United States be allowed to pursue this historically necessary avenue of responsible foreign relations. Mr. Chairman, I thank you, and urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from North Carolina, and I appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and also this Chamber. If we take ourselves back to September 11, 2001, we had a lot of small problems then that we thought were big problems, and all of a sudden we had a great big problem. We were attacked by an enemy that most of us hadn't paid much attention to, if indeed we had ever heard of that enemy. We believed that that day wouldn't be over before on top of the attacks we knew about there would be other attacks on top of that. We believed in the following days there would be more and more attacks in this country because of an organized effort that would be continuing with suicide bomber attacks that would continue to cost the lives of Americans. We mobilized this. The President stepped up in New York at ground zero and took a leadership role. He said if you're not with us, you're against us. If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. And he carried that out. And as we began to get mobilized to go to Afghanistan, there were those on the other side of the political equation that said you can't go in there and successfully invade and occupy a nation like that; that has never happened in the history of the world. The terrain is too difficult, the fighters are too tenacious, and it is a fool's errand to go into Afghanistan and think you can succeed in there militarily. But in fact that is what happened. They said it would be another Vietnam, but it wasn't another Vietnam. The Afghani people voted on that soil for the first time in the history of the world, and American troops were there to see to it that they were able to do that. They have chosen their own leaders and directed their own national destiny, 25 million people. And the advisers that put that together, both civilian and military, were the same advisers that advised President Bush on Iraq. The similarities are almost identical: Difficult country, 25 million people, you can't go there and succeed. The same advisers. And because some people can find one or two generals that had a different idea, they seem to believe that the President hasn't used the best wisdom possible. In the shortest time in the history of the world, an armored column went across the desert and invaded and occupied the largest city ever in the history of the world to be invaded and occupied, and that is Baghdad, successfully, 25 million people. Even though we had some people who have spoken on this floor tonight that were inclined to surrender before the operation ever began. And now we have an operation going over there that has freed 25 million more people. And Afghanistan and Iraq are the lodestars for the Arab people in the Arab world. When the Berlin Wall came down on November 9 of 1989, many in this place did not predict that freedom would echo across Eastern Europe for hundreds of millions of people, but it did. And freedom can echo across the Arab world for tens and hundreds of millions of people the same way that it echoed across Europe. That is the Bush doctrine. That is the vision: To free people. Because free people never go to war against other free people. We don't, at least. And to the extent that the world is a freer place, it is a safer place, especially a safer place for Americans. So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and I stand with our military.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the privilege and the honor to address you and address the House of Representatives and the American people who are viewing these proceedings that take place in these Chambers continually as we deliberate and debate. I came here to take up another subject matter, but as I listened to the gentleman from Tennessee, he raised a number of points that I am compelled to respond to. I will just say I am glad I have a more optimistic viewpoint about the history of this country, about the current events, about the most recent current events and especially about the last 3\1/2\ years within Iraq. Further and longer ago than that, our operations within Afghanistan, about how this Nation has conducted its foreign policy, about how the Commander in Chief has made his decisions on foreign policy, and the direction for the future. I would just back up to this. I would say that the gentleman from Tennessee, when he states that we are the greatest Nation, I do agree with him. We are the greatest Nation. We are the unchallenged greatest Nation in the history of the world. Often folks on the other side of the aisle disagree with that statement, so I am very refreshed to hear someone on that side of the aisle say we are a great Nation. In fact, I look forward to us becoming an even greater Nation going into the future, and we can't do that if we are going to wallow in guilt and self-pity and pessimism. We have a positive track record. Did we think we could go to war and not face adversity? Some of the criticism is that Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld and others said we would be greeted as liberators, according to the gentleman. He contends we were not. I was one of the first Members of Congress to arrive in Iraq after Iraq was liberated, and I recall and I have videotape of traveling down through a Sunni section of Baghdad, where we would be the most hated, according to national news media and the minority party; people that you would think would be throwing grenades and shooting at you, and perhaps throwing stones and making all kinds of vile gestures at American conquerors. In fact, we were liberators. As we rode down through on that convoy on those narrow streets in Baghdad several months after the liberation of Iraq, I looked out the window at military-age Iraqi men, and they looked into the window of my vehicle at me. I couldn't discern what they were thinking. They didn't know who I was. They just knew it was not your normal transportation going through there. So I did like we do in Iowa. We meet them on the road. We are uncomfortable with silence and without acknowledging someone we see, so I began to wave to these military-age Iraqi men, men between the ages of 16 years up to 45, standing along the sides of the street in groups of two to three, groups up to 18, and they may be 10 to 15 feet away from my vehicle. The instant I did that, they waved back at me. They waved back and smiled with a gleeful smile and gave me thumbs up. Here is an American in Iraq, a Representative, and just by the fact of the identification of being an American was all they needed, not necessarily a Representative of Congress, there to be part of that city, to see that country that now was for the first time liberated in the history of the world. No, we were greeted as liberators. We were greeted as liberators in a country that had not been liberated in their history. Of course, there have been difficulties since that period of time. It is odd to me that the gentleman from Tennessee takes issue with the decisions and strategy that were made. In closing, he said he trusts our military experts, not our civilian experts. The experts who put together the strategy to liberate Iraq were essentially the same people that put together the military planning and operational strategy to liberate Afghanistan. And the criticism of the Iraq operation is essentially the same criticism that we heard of the Afghanistan operation. The difference is that in Afghanistan it was over so quickly and over so successfully, and people there went to the polls and voted and elected themselves new leaders and directed their national destiny and live in freedom for the first time on that spot of the globe for the first time ever in their history. That all took place in Afghanistan, even though the debate over here on this side of the aisle, the debate on the part of the liberal pundits, was it's another Vietnam. You will never succeed in Afghanistan. No Nation has ever been able to go in and invade and occupy Afghanistan and get out of there with their military intact. That is a hostile area that can never be occupied and conquered, and history has proven that. That is the statement with Afghanistan over and over and over again. Afghanistan, another Vietnam. But, you know, military success, political success and economic success has a tendency to muzzle the critics. And the critics have been flat muzzled on Afghanistan. And yet they draw the same criticism towards Iraq. Afghanistan, 25 million people, liberated. Hostile terrain, couldn't be invaded. We didn't invade them, we liberated them. We worked with the Northern Alliance and we worked with the people in Afghanistan and gave them an opportunity at freedom. Their struggles are going on yet today. In fact, there has been a reignition of some of the opposition there. But we are not hearing criticism. We are not hearing the other side of the aisle say we never should have gone there because we knew that al Qaeda was operating in Afghanistan. We knew we needed to go in and knock out the Taliban. We knew that was a base of operations for terrorists who were sending people to come to this country to kill us because they believe that their path to salvation is killing people not like them, and we are one of their preferred targets. So all of this criticism of Afghanistan, 25 million people, mountains and difficult terrain and difficult transportation routes, has been muted by the resounding success in Afghanistan. And the same people gave the same advice on a country with the same population and different terrain, easier terrain but a different location, and different people, different countries surrounding Iraq, and we ended up with being greeted as liberators. And in the aftermath of the greetings as liberators, there was an insurgency that rose up; an insurgency that was founded and supported by a lot of cash dollars, billions in cash dollars that were spirited out of Iraq, American dollars out of the banks of Iraq by Saddam Hussein, his regime, into other countries where that money was used again to pay for terrorists to come back into Iraq and blow themselves up. To detonate and build, and make and set and detonate improvised explosive devices. Seldom do we see them come out of the shadows and attack our military troops straight up front. But the insurgency, what I call a terrorist- organized operation, as it grew in Iraq, then so did the criticism grow. While this is going on, the lust for power for the White House, the people on the other side of the aisle are willing to put our military men and women at risk so they can achieve their political gain, which would be to win back the White House and seek to take over the majority in the House of Representatives and convince the American people that they know what's best. Well, Mr. Speaker, I'm not hearing a positive agenda. I am hearing this agenda that says pull out. Pull out to the horizon. Sit and wait until there is a problem and then move in. Somehow this same message that keeps coming from the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee would be one, conflicting with the same message that comes out of sometimes the same mouths that, well, we will pull out to the horizon in a country we should have more troops in, or maybe should have had more troops in, and never mind that we are up now to 267,000 Iraqis in uniform defending Iraqis that are trained, uniformed, equipped, and in these operations and initiating operations as we speak today in that country over there and performing very well. For the first time Iraq does have a sovereign government that represents a sovereign people and a Nation where they can begin now to build their future. They have a Prime Minister who has named a full Cabinet. And this Cabinet can now resolve many of the sectarian differences that are there within Iraq itself and move them forward since now they have a Secretary of Defense and a Secretary of the Interior, a strong Prime Minister with some vision that has taken a role to lead. It takes time to put these pieces in place, and we have to let the Iraqi people make these decisions and do that, and it is taking place. So this criticism, why is it brought up now? Why do I hear the question, why did the National Guard have to scrounge around for metal to weld or bolt onto their equipment to protect them from IEDs? This issue raised by the gentleman from Tennessee, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, appropriately and accurately, you go to war with the Army that you have. And it implies you go to war with the equipment that you have, and then when the unforeseen happens, and it was unforeseen that Humvees would be used as military vehicles in that kind of a combat environment. No war in the past had seen improvised explosive devices. No war in the past had seen suicide bombers that would run into a crowd of soldiers and blow themselves up or a crowd of women or children, school children. No war had seen terrorists or the likes of Zarqawi. But yet, even though no one had ever seen these circumstances before, somehow the people on the other side of the aisle believe the President, the Secretary of Defense and these civilian leaders that are labeled to be so wrong, should have been able to anticipate something that had never happened before, that there is no pattern for and no indication for, and they want to claim that they were right, but I don't think any one of them are on record predicting we ought to watch out for improvised explosive devices and I don't think any one of them were on the record saying we are going to have suicide bombers in Iraq. And I don't think any one of them are on record saying that these suicide bombers were going to come from any place other than Iraq, coming in from all over the Arab world, places like Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Pakistan. All those countries have supplied suicide bombers to come into Iraq that detonated themselves because they have been trained in those countries to give up their lives in the idea that somehow their path to salvation is in seeking to kill those who are not like them, and that means us. The civilian leadership that led us into Iraq is the same civilian leadership that led us into Afghanistan. The military leadership that led us into Afghanistan is the same military leadership that led us into Iraq. If we are going to be critical of the judgment, the decisions and the tactics that were used in Iraq, and the people that made the decisions, then let's hear it from the other side. Let's hear their criticism for the same people, for the same decisions, for similar tactics that were utilized in Afghanistan. And the reason we don't hear that is because of the distinction between the easy results as opposed to a distinction between a philosophical or a judgment disagreement. This is Monday morning quarterbacking, Mr. Speaker, and nothing else, and it is done for political opportunism and no other reason. And while we hear that, however much is said about supporting our military, that language, that talk, Mr. Speaker, undermines our military, weakens their ability to be effective, and they have got to try all the harder. They have got to bolster their spirit all the harder, and they do. And I go over there and I meet them and visit them, and their spirit is strong and their morale is strong. And they did pick up metal and bolt and weld it onto their machines because that is what Americans do. We make do with what we have and we go scrounge and find what we need and we get things in the pipeline as fast as we can to get things up- armored and we did. And today, and for a long time in Iraq there hasn't been any equipment leave the wire that is not fully armored. And it has been a long, long time since anybody left the wire without a bulletproof vest and the right kind of equipment to protect them from the flying bullets and shrapnel that takes place over there. And our medics and our medical corps, all of the people that are taking care of our wounded are doing a better job, far better job than ever in the history of the world and warfare. They have transferred, the last time I checked this number, and it is a little bit dated now, Mr. Speaker, but the last number that I had as I stood as we loaded a C-17 with wounded out of Landstuhl Hospital there in Germany to come over here to land at Andrews Air Force Base, and some of those wounded soldiers would go to Walter Reed, some would go to Bethesda. But as I stood there and lent a small hand in helping load some of those wounded as that plane was loaded, one of the officers there told me that they had transferred 36,000 sick and wounded, those that needed medical care out of that theater in Iraq from Iraq to Ramstein Air Force Base and from Ramstein over to Landstuhl hospital, from there back to the United States. And in those transfers, 36,000 transfers, and some of those people would have been transferred, I think, counted twice, however that worked out, they lost one, one soldier en route. And that one that they lost was due to cardiac arrest that was they believe unrelated to the injuries. It is an astonishing accomplishment. It is something that I can't imagine how one could even dream to have that kind of success. And they are, they are dedicated. The statement that our Republican leadership must feel insecure or wouldn't bring up this bill and not allow amendments, why would any leadership that was insecure bring up this bill, this resolution that supports and defends our efforts in Iraq? Why would they bring it up at all if they felt insecure, Mr. Speaker? I will tell you that we are very secure in this, very confident in this. The difference is we are not getting this message out to the people. This debate is so the American people can hear the truth about what is going on in this global war on terror, and in particular, the battlefield of Iraq. That is the mission that we are on here tomorrow, to uncover and speak truthfully and illuminate the good things that are happening, the progress that is being made. And I intend to engage in that debate and help with that cause and lend a hand, because every voice that stands on the side of our military is a voice that accelerates the end of the war and every voice that undermines or degrades or is detrimental towards the effort and erodes the credibility of our Commander in Chief, our Secretary of Defense, our General, our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace, all of our officers, any voice that weakens their credibility delays a successful end to this war. And delaying a successful end to this war doesn't just put our troops at risk, Mr. Speaker. It costs their lives. So I am proud of the work that is being done. I am proud of the character of the people that are serving there. I stand with them every step of the way. I have never met a more honorable people. And I believe in the history of America, in the history of the world, there has never been a better military go off to war than this current crop that we have. Our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, our Reserve personnel, and our National Guard personnel. And I don't say that to disparage the efforts of any previous war or any previous engagements or any previous peace time service. But I will just, I say it to build on the honorable record that was built in all of those previous conflicts. And I say this because we have, first of all, an all volunteer military. There is no one over there in that theater that was drafted to go to this war. They all volunteered. And, in fact, everyone that is over there now has re-upped in this same climate of this war. So it wasn't that they happened to be a National Guard soldier that thought they would just train 1 weekend a month and get their 6-week active duty in and pretty much take life easy and cash the check. Those people had a chance to drop out. But they are re-upping in greater numbers than we ever anticipated. That is not a demoralized military. That is a high morale military that is reupping on these tasks, because they believe in this mission, as I believe in their mission. And we have an all volunteer military, and they are getting the best training there is in the world, build upon the culture of efficiency and proud combat, and we add to that the equipment that they have, the modern technology that they have, which eclipses that of anybody anywhere in the world today, let alone in the previous half a decade or more. They have the best equipment, the best training, the best personnel, they are all volunteers. And our active duty personnel are supplemented by our reserve troops and our National Guard troops. And those people bring with them the skills of their professional lives to supplement the skills of the training of their military lives, and that is a great combination for a highly technical military that we have today, and that is how we could have the technical ability to put a laser on a safe house. Now there is an oxymoron. I bet you that is what Zarqawi is saying in the next life. It is really an oxymoron. There I thought I was in a safe house. Well, it wasn't such a safe house for those people. But to lay a cross-hairs of a laser beam on a, quote, safe house, Mr. Speaker, and seconds later have that safe house just simply detonated by a 500- pound bomb, and then to be sure, just drop a second 500-pound bomb in there. It puts me in mind of something that Rush Limbaugh said before Desert Storm back in 1991. He said, Mr. Saddam Hussein, I have got some good news and some bad news for you. Now, here's the bad news. Or actually, no, I tell you, here's the good news. He said we have a weapon, at the time he was talking about cruise missiles rather than J-DAMs. We have a weapon, and the bad news is, let's see. I am going to get this right. The good news is for us, we can take this weapon and we can fire it from wherever we choose into the country we choose, and we can fire it into the city within the country, and we can put it in the block within the city, and we can put it within the building within the block, and we can put it through the window of the building within the block within the city within the country that we choose and you know, the good news for you is we just shot off a half a dozen of those missiles and every one of them missed its target. The bad news is the most any of them missed by was an inch and a half, Mr. Saddam Hussein. And that was the way Desert Storm was. And we are more accurate today with the weapons that we have. And it saves lives. And it brings the close of this war closer, and it convinces the enemy that they can not win, and in fact, that they have lost and it is a matter of time, until they resolve to accept the reality. That is the object of war, after all, Mr. Speaker. And von Klauswitz wrote a book on war. And in that he said, the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. Destroy their will and their ability. You could be sitting there with ranks of tanks and all kinds of missiles and Air Force and Navy, and AK-47s, you can have all of this equipment. You can have an Army with 2 million people, all trained and ready. But if you don't have the will to conduct the war, all of the ability doesn't count because you can't unleash, you can't mobilize that effort. So Klauswitz saw, if you destroyed some of the ability, destroy some tanks, destroy some missiles, destroy some Air Force, take away the ability to provide fuel and food, that would destroy some of the ability, but also would deplete the will. If you could destroy the will to conduct the war, you have destroyed the ability to conduct the war. That was the philosophy of Klauswitz. And for years, since 1832, that has been the definition of war. Object of war, destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. Steve King's definition comes like this. A war is never over till the losing side realizes they have lost. You have to convince them that they have lost. That is all you have to do. And if you can simply send them a letter or go down here on the floor and give a speech, put it in the Congressional Record and they would read that and say oh, boy, I guess we can't win against these people. I am going to surrender. Maybe Ahmadinejad would just come to that conclusion, because you know we are not going to give up on that. We are not going to let that man have his nuclear ability. But if we could just simply send a letter and convince them that they will lose the war, then they wouldn't engage in the war, but seldom will they give up quite so easy. And so that means that we have to turn up the pressure, turn up the diplomatic pressure and then maybe do some economic sanctions and then maybe do a blockade and then if things get bad enough, maybe we have to run a little operation in there. But at some point, this deterrent effect that says you are going to have to take us seriously, we will not blink, we are resolved to impose this war, this position of peace on this country, at some point the losing side, in despair, sometimes, but without having hope of coming out of it with any other solution, throws up their hands or as we say in a chess game, tips over their king and says I have lost. I surrender. I am willing to accept the consequences. I gave it my best, but the price is too great. I no longer have the will to conduct war. That is what we are seeking to do in Iraq. That is what we are seeking to do globally in this global war on terror. And we are a good long ways down that path, and we would be much further down that path and perhaps the battlefield of Iraq would be concluded if the naysayers and the detractors from that side of the aisle hadn't first sent their emissaries over there to surrender before we ever went into Iraq. And we have relentlessly been trying to convince the enemy that we will lose and they will win since that period of time. We will hear some of this debate tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and I look forward to that and we will knock those arguments down in this chamber. And the American people will understand who supports the military, who doesn't, who supports the Commander in Chief, and who doesn't. And I would lay another principle out here that is not a negotiable principle, to say you are for the troops and against their mission. You cannot separate those two. If you are for the troops, you have to ask them will you put your life on the line for the freedom of the people in this country, this great country? And the gentleman from Tennessee and I agree on that. This great country, the United States of America. But you cannot ask someone to put their life on the line for your freedom and tell them ``but you are on the wrong mission.'' You have got to support the mission. You have got to support the troops. And if you separate those two, if you say I am against your mission, it is the wrong mission, you never should have gone, you should not be there, you ought to get out and come home, but if something happens to you, you lost your life and it has been a worthless cause, that is what they are saying over on this side of the aisle. One and the same. You support the mission; you support the troops. You cannot support the troops and not the mission. These things are bound together, and they are bound together because we asked them to risk their lives on a mission that we believe in and we have endorsed that mission. And so the other morning not that long ago, al-Zarqawi went to meet his maker because of some really good targeting, some good intelligence, some cooperation from some other entities over there, some good work with the coalition forces, good work with the special task force that had been shadowing him and following him for a long time and gathering in all the intelligence and the intelligence tips from 400 a month a year ago to 4,000 a month today. They picked up enough information to track al-Zarqawi and put those bombs right down in on that thing that he thought was a safe house, that we call a safe house, that was not so safe for al-Zarqawi. But you know, blowing up that house made this world a lot safer for the rest of us; so I will call it a safe house by that standard. And I am pleased and extraordinarily grateful that our military are there doing the job they do with the professionalism that they have, Mr. Speaker. And I am looking forward to this debate tomorrow. It will not go long enough and it will not make enough points to satisfy me. I think we need to do this over an extended period of time. And I will be here to join in that debate. But I digress. I came to this floor to speak about a different subject matter, Mr. Speaker. And as I listened to the gentleman from Tennessee, I believe that I needed to provide an alternate viewpoint from some of those opinions that came out here. And I do respect the gentleman from Tennessee, and he is one of the more intellectual people that we have in this House Chamber, and his intentions are good and I believe he is a strong patriot. I am just hoping to redirect some of his perspectives and perhaps that of some of the folks that live in that region down there in Tennessee. But I came here, Mr. Speaker, to talk about another issue, and it is an issue that stands out everywhere most of any of us go in the entire United States of America these days. It is an issue that for perhaps a year has been front and center in all of the discussions that take place in the Fifth District of Iowa that I represent, this western third of Iowa. And certainly wherever else I go around the country, it is a subject that comes up. I see things happen in my office. There might be a group that comes over and they have met and their organization has produced one or two or three or five or maybe six or ten points that they want to discuss with me and their positions of their organization. We all do this on a regular basis. And as I sit down with them, I can see them going through those points kind of quickly, and as they get through those points, they want to reserve some time. And whether it is an issue that seems to be relevant to their organization or whether it is not, they will get down to where there is maybe 15 minutes left in our 30-minute meeting and then they will say, Now some of us want to talk to you about immigration, Congressman, and we have these issues we want to discuss with you and we are concerned a little bit about that. So they begin bringing up the issue. And I engage in those conversations, of course, and sometimes I find a little bit different viewpoint, a little bit different way to solve these problems. But the core of this, middle American knows this and the southern border knows this and even some folks out there on the left coast understand this and some folks over on the right coast also understand this because the American people are great respecters of the rule of law, and we understand that if we did not have the rule of law here in the United States of America, we would not be this great Nation that Mr. Cooper and I agree that we are. And now I am going on my own judgment here and not representing the gentleman from Tennessee except that we agree it is a great Nation. This Nation was founded upon the philosophy of the Declaration that sits in the back of this book and the Constitution that was written upon the philosophy of the Declaration. And these freedoms that we have and these responsibilities that we have are founded upon these three branches of government, not three coequal branches of government, not separate but equal branches of government, codependent branches of government, not equal. The founders established this country with a constitutional principle, Mr. Speaker, that gives the buck stops here to the legislature because we are the voice of the people. And so each branch has its own power base. And the executive branch is to carry out and enforce the laws. The legislative branch is to introduce and pass the laws, and here we start all the appropriations and the tax bills and they go over to the Senate where they get processed over there and bounced back here, and then often to the President. But it is our job to initiate the funding, initiate the tax bills, and to establish an immigration policy by a constitutional directive here in this Constitution, Mr. Speaker. And so the American people respect this rule of law that is built upon this foundation of the rule of law called the Constitution. And when they read that Constitution, they know that the rule of law covers immigration. And they know that we are obligated to establish immigration laws should the will of the people be such. And we have passed that legislation many times throughout the history of this great Nation. But even though we have, I believe, adequate laws to enforce our immigration laws, the American people understand that they have not been enforced. They have not been enforced with anywhere near the vigor required to slow down and stop the flood of humanity that is pouring across our southern border. As I speak here tonight, I just do a little bit of round number math, and we are in that area of 11,000 illegals a day pouring across our southern border; perhaps 12,000. So that comes down into the area of while I speak here, there will be perhaps 500 people who have illegally crossed the border, just our southern border from Mexico into the United States, while I stand here for this 60-minute period of time, perhaps 500 people. And it does come up, if I remember right, to about one person every 8 seconds coming into the United States. I have gone down to the border a number of times to get a better feel for what is going on down there. I have been there on what they call the red carpet tour with the Border Patrol. I met with the ICE people. I have flown in the helicopters over that border at night with the giant lamp that they have on some of those choppers, and I have done it also with infrared, infrared optical equipment. I have been to the stations. I have talked to the Border Patrol officers. I have gone back down on my own and slipped in on a surprise trip and arrived at the ports of entry and gone in and talked to our Border Patrol people to get a feel of what it is really like on the ground. And I have gone down to one of the most dangerous and active crossings on that entire border and sat there at night in the dark for hours, in utter silence, and listened as the cars came up across the desert from Mexico, stopped by a big mesquite tree. They opened the doors, let their people out. You can hear their backpacks hit the ground, pick them back up again. You could hear them infiltrate back through the brush to climb through the fence and come into the United States of America on a night where there was just about a three-quarter moon, not enough to actually be able to tell you exactly what I saw, but I know exactly what I heard. As I would hear those vehicles come down there, there is only one they would come there, and they came on a regular basis about every 20 minutes, shuttling people down, dropping them off, shuttle people down and dropping them off, and there they would come back across the border into the United States. Some of these people just want to come into the United States, they say, for a better life. And as I listened to that, I imagine that is true with some of them. And it is a fact that there are a fair number that are here that are working, that are raising their families, and are good citizens so far as we can see. And they are our neighbors, and they have actually built a pretty good appreciation and affinity within these communities. They have made themselves useful, and when that happens, they make themselves good neighbors. But the fact remains that those who came into the United States illegally are criminals. I see the signs in the streets that say ``I am not a criminal.'' Yes. If you violated the Criminal Code of the United States of America, you are a criminal. And if you came into the United States illegally, you are a criminal. And the penalty for illegal entry into the United States is 6 months in a Federal penitentiary and then forceable deportation. That is what is written into the law. I cannot think of a time when that law has been utilized and the penalty has been imposed. And the time that I have served on the Immigration Subcommittee here in the House Judiciary Committee, not one that I know of. It may be the case that it actually has been utilized, but I cannot think of a single time. So people come in and violate our immigration laws. If they get caught, sometimes they get a bus ride down to the border. Sometimes they promise to appear. Sometimes they promise not to come back into the United States, and we know that people who break our Criminal Code probably are not going to keep their promise if it does not suit them to do so. So we have this border that is 2,000 miles long, 2,000 miles long, with 11,000 people a day pouring across that border, 500 an hour, one every 8 seconds. And where they will go is they will follow the path of least resistance. It is like electricity, just a natural equation. If you go to San Diego and build a wall there, which we have done and it is not quite finished but we are working on it, if you build that, they will go around the end. If you put some more pressure on there and put Border Patrol there, they go into Arizona and cross the border in the middle of the desert. And they will walk 20 to 25 miles from Mexico to get to the border sometimes. Sometimes they are dropped off very near the border. Sometimes they walk quite a ways. Sometimes they will walk 20, 25 miles up into the United States to get to a highway where there is a predetermined pickup place and they will jump in the back of a truck or in a van or in a vehicle, and as soon as they are on that highway and gone, that is the case. They are gone. And with the illegal drugs that come into the United States, the difficulty that comes with shutting that off, a lot of pressure says to push those drugs into the United States. So if we are successful in shutting those drugs down at our points of entry, and I am not convinced that we are, but if the odds are a little better to drive a truck across the desert and drive across the border into the United States, they do a lot of that. Stray trucks, sometimes a semi right down the highway even, with a whole load of marijuana in it. In fact, I was down there not too long ago, within about the last month, and as I was near the border, they picked up a white pickup and it was driven by an individual that was covered with tattoos from his waist to his neck, and he had a ``13'' tattooed on the inside of his forearm right here, and that ``13'' indicates MS-13, Mr. Speaker. And that is the most vile and violent gang this hemisphere has ever seen. And below in a false bed of that pickup truck, when we took the jaws of life and opened it up, there was about a 7-inch thick false floor in there with a false chamber. And in that chamber it was packed full of bags of marijuana, each one weighing a little over ten pounds. So approximately 180 pounds or more of marijuana under the bed of that pickup. And this MS-13 individual, he had gotten into the United States. We were 20 miles inside the United States, but he looked suspicious, drove erratically. And they converged on him, brought the helicopter, chased him around with a Black Hawk, brought the ground people in, and finally corner him and collared him. Now, why would someone who had 180 pounds of marijuana drive erratically and tip off the officers to go chase him down? Mr. Speaker, I would submit that 180 pounds of marijuana was a decoy, that it was a decoy that was designed to pull the helicopter in, to bring all of the Border Patrol officers in and the enforcement officers in so that when they converged upon that vehicle with that 180 pounds of marijuana, the vehicle with 2,000 pounds of marijuana could shoot on through the gap. It happens all the time. The officers tell me that on a regular basis. Sometimes they are able to catch the decoy and the other load. That is how they know. Sometimes that load goes through and they are unable to catch them. So those are the circumstances down there. And this border that sometimes is not marked at all, and in much of New Mexico it has a concrete pylon from ridge to ridge, as you can see through an old style transit, put the crosshairs on there. That is how the border is marked. A vehicle can drive across that border anywhere. How do you control a border like that when you have $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming across that border? That's billion with a B. $65 billion, a powerful force. I want to someday look that up and see just how that ranks in the gross domestic product of nations. Just the illegal drugs coming out of Mexico into the United States. Ninety percent of the illegal drugs in America come through the Mexican border. That is $65 billion worth. If you couple that with the $20 billion worth of wages that are earned here, much of it by illegals and wired back down to Mexico, those two things add up to $85 billion. How much is $85 billion, Mr. Speaker? I don't know. It is beyond my comprehension. But I can tell you, by comparison, the oil revenue from Mexico is $28 billion. Yet they have $65 billion worth of illegal drugs, another $20 billion worth of wages that come out of the gross domestic product of the United States. That is a powerful force. And so if we shut down some of these illegal drugs that are coming across our ports of entry, shut down some of the illegal people traffic across our ports of entry, then they simply go around, they go out in the desert, they cut through somewhere, and then we do this other thing, this other wise tactic, I will say, and put that in quotes, we build a vehicle barrier along on the border. That consists of some 5- inch square tubing, drill a hole, set it in it, pour concrete in it and take this square steel tubing and set it up and then weld another piece of 5-inch square tubing, oh, about headlight high on a vehicle that runs along there. That is a vehicle barrier. It is not a fence. It keeps out cars and trucks. It is designed to let antelope and snakes and any other animals go back and forth because surely we couldn't upset Mother Nature by defending ourselves from all the illegal drug traffic that is going on. It is designed to let wildlife go through. Of course, if you can't drive a semi through there or a straight truck or a pickup any longer, then you just simply get your human mules there because they can climb through there as easily as an antelope can climb through that vehicle barrier. So they climb through with their 50-pound pack of marijuana and a human pack train of seven or eight or 10 or 20 or 25 or even, I heard one report, as high as 100 young men each with 50 pounds of marijuana on their back, trekking across the desert, crossing the vehicle barrier by throwing their pack through, go through, put their pack back on and walk across the desert, 25 miles to a highway, where there is a predetermined pickup location, throw their marijuana in the back of a truck, their bags of marijuana, some get in the truck and go on, now they are in the United States to stay if they choose. Some turn around and walk back to Mexico to get another load. This is going on night after night after night, bringing these illegal drugs into the United States of America. $65 billion worth, 11,000 people a day, 77,000 people a week, 4 million people a year. And we are spending $8 billion a year to protect our southern border. That is $4 million a mile. $4 million a mile, and we can't stop $65 billion worth of illegal drugs? And why not? And so as I go down there and sit on that border and listen and I talk to the Border Patrol officers and ICE and the other officers down there, I am always asking them that question, how do we get to this point where we're successful? First of all, how do you define success? And how do we set things up so that we can shut off illegal human traffic and shut off the illegal drug traffic? In fact, I believe the illegal drug traffic is more dangerous than the illegal human traffic but they come together in a package, illegals carrying illegal drugs. They come in a package. And it is sometimes terrorists coming into the United States, people that are from nations of interest. Isn't that a nice politically correct phrase for a terrorist nation, a nation of interest? And we have caught people down on the southern border who come from terrorist nations, nations of interest, whose identification was in the high risk database for the Department of Homeland Security. When that happens, that is the last we hear of that. I don't know how many there are. I know it happens. I know it has happened fairly recently. I know that if we caught some, more got away. Those that came here to do us ill are going to pay more money to get brought into the United States through the illegal traffic route across our southern border because they have the resources to do that. When they have the resources to do it, and instead of paying a thousand or $1,500, now I hear that the coyote prices have maybe gone up as high as $2,000. Instead of paying a couple of thousand bucks to come in, it is a $30,000 ticket on some of them, which means it is essentially a guarantee that you are going to be here. Once they are here, these are not the people that are carrying in 50 pounds of marijuana. They are the people that are in here to be part of an enclave, to be part of a cell that one day will rise up against us here in this country the way they rose up in France and in Spain and in Great Britain and also just most recently in Canada. It will eventually happen here as we are infiltrated by people who believe again that their path to salvation is in killing us. And so, Mr. Speaker, the solution to this is not a simple one. It is not a single component solution. But I have an addition to this component that is a very constructive one and an essential component to the solution. That, Mr. Speaker, is the necessity for us to not just build a vehicle barrier, not just build a simple fence, but to build a wall, to build a wall that can actually be utterly effective in keeping illegals out of the United States of America. If we can do that, we can shut down 90 percent of the illegal drugs that come into this country at the same time. We can force all of the traffic to go through our ports of entry. And if it is all coming through the ports of entry, then we can turn many more of our resources on our ports of entry, where now we have thousands of Border Patrol agents that are out there trying to chase people down in the desert that are scattered all over the place, they can patrol this wall that I propose we build, but they can focus a lot more resources on the ports of entry. I simply put it this way. This cardboard box I have represents the desert floor. The desert floor in a lot of these areas where it will be suitable working conditions. Sometimes we are going to run into rocks, sometimes into mountains. When you hit the rock, you don't have to dig any deeper. They're not going under there. So we will just pour the concrete on the rock and put some pins in there to tie it together and we will be fine. This represents the desert floor and a trench that I would dig through there to build this concrete wall. This looks at it from the end, a cross-sectional view, I would say. Sock a trencher in and trench this. At the same time we do it, we would pour a footing in here with a slot in it. And I would demonstrate, Mr. Speaker. This would be the footing that I would put in there. This would be a slip form footing, which means that the style that you see here with a slot in it that would receive precast concrete panels, the bottom of this would be 5 feet deep. So it would be a trencher that you would sock in here. You would have some augers here on the side. You would pull that together. As you pull this down, you pump concrete in right behind it. I would put it this way. I would sock in here, dig this trench, and as this trench moved on, I would be pouring concrete in that trench. Maybe the way to go would be from about this end. Let's just say that we are pouring concrete here and trenching this way. As the trencher comes along, the concrete pours right behind the trencher, and you move along at the pace that you can deliver the concrete to it and dig the trench. This concrete will set up, and you would leave this slot in the middle. The reason for this slot, then, in the middle is so that it can receive the precast panels. So now I have this concrete footing. Actually the earth would be right to the top of this concrete here on each side. It sets in the ground 5 feet. It has got the stability that is there. It has got the strength. It has got a place to receive these panels. Then, Mr. Speaker, I would have trucks pulling in within about 2 days of cure time. We would start setting in precast concrete panels. They would be a finished height to 12 feet and about 10 feet wide. They would weigh about, oh, 9,800 pounds or so, 6 inches thick. They would beef them up a little on the bottom, taper them a little on the top. You would just take a crane and drop these in. I would tell you that our little old construction company would not be bidding this, I don't know if you would call it a conflict of interest or not, we wouldn't be down there bidding in Arizona but it has the kind of work we could do, Mr. Speaker. I would add that we could put together about a mile of this a day, just dropping this in with a crane, swing them in place. Actually they would go together a little better than that. Take these off the bed of the truck, swing them in, drop them in just like that, they drop in the slot, the slot holds them up. It's firm. It's fixed. And it's that easy to put together a 12-foot tall concrete wall, 6 inches thick, precast panels, reinforced, of course, tied together with tongue and groove in this kind of a fashion. And when we are done with this, this is a wall that they are not going to climb through and they are not going to cut through. They may try to climb over and they may try to dig under. It has not going to be that easy to dig under because we are deep, remember, 5 feet deep. Maybe we should go a little bit deeper. I wouldn't disagree with that. So they don't go over the top, Mr. Speaker. I happen to have this handy dandy little piece of concertina wire that I would put right on top here and install this wire like this. We could have a little bit more concentrated concertina wire so we could put two rolls on here. On top of this concrete we could also put on any kind of optical equipment, vibration sensers, any other kind of surveillance equipment that we so choose. This wall would not go exactly on the border in my mind but it would be back north of the border perhaps 60 to 100 feet so that there is a patrol zone between. I would have a fence right on the border and that would be the fence that thou shalt not cross. In fact, I would hang a sign on the south side in Spanish that says, check this web page, you can go to the U.S. consul and apply to come to the United States legally and that is what you ought to do. I would put that every mile. I would have a nice sign there that would say, You're welcome to apply. We welcome all people to come apply and come to the United States legally, but don't cross this path because you're violating our laws. Fifty-eight percent of the people in Mexico believe they have a right to come to the United States. And so this wall would have a value to keep out illegals. It would slow dramatically down. I think it would take 90 percent of the human traffic down. I think it would take 90 percent of the drug traffic down. And it sends a message to the south side of the border that says, You don't have a right to come here. We're a sovereign nation and we take our applications at the U.S. consul. But this would be an effective structure that would free up the Border Patrol. They would still have to patrol. They would drive back and forth. They would cut sign here. They would check for tracks. If they caught anybody out here in no man's land, they would be picked up immediately. And if they got across this wall, it would be rare and we would see the tracks and we would be able to chase them down and I think we could catch nearly every one of them that did that. Maybe they would want to come with a ladder. Somebody said, well, if you show me a 90-foot wall, I'll show you a 90-foot ladder. It is hard to carry a ladder across one fence and get it to the next one, Mr. Speaker. If so, we have an opportunity to catch them in between. I don't think they are going to carry that many ladders across that many miles of desert. We will know what kind of tactics they are using, we can beef it up, but they are not going to breach this wall easily. They are not going to go underneath this thing in any short period of people. They are not going to go over it easily. They are going to look at it and try to find another way. Some of them will decide, now the transaction cost is too high. I believe I'm just going to stay here in Mexico and maybe go to work and help improve that country, because that country needs its productive people if they are going to have any economic future. You empty a nation out of its vitality and what do you expect is going to happen? I don't know why it is Vicente Fox is willing to see his best people come to the United States, because the solution to what is wrong in that country is within the people that are leaving, especially the people that are leaving. They aren't all good folks that are coming here. A lot of them are but they come here for about three reasons. One of them is to come here and go to work, one of them is they are running away from something and maybe they are running away from the law down there, maybe they are running away for some other reason and maybe they are coming up here to do us harm. That is about the only three reasons why people are coming here. I cannot fathom why Vicente Fox would promote the exodus of his own people. In fact, 10 percent of the population of Mexico is here in the United States. That is a number that I believe is probably on the low side. The population of Mexico before the exodus was 104 million. If 10 million of them are here, let's just say that number is inflated a little bit. Let me round this down to 90 million just for the sake of discussion. If there are 90 million people left in Mexico and we pass the Senate version of this immigration that they passed here some weeks ago, and that version according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, the lowest number he has is that it brings in 59 million people over the next 20 years. That is 59 million people, added to at least another 20 million people. So we are up to 79 million people coming into the United States. That is the lowest number. The highest numbers were pretty astonishing, up there around 200 million, but I think that range falls between 59 million and probably 92 million. Let us just say 92 million people in the next 20 years, and are 90 million people left in Mexico? Some will come from those other countries down there. But I will say this that everyone who wants to come under the Senate version, everyone who wants to come to the United States will come to the United States under that bill. It will not be an immigration policy that is designed for the interests of the United States. It will be the immigration policy that is designed for the wants of people who want to come here. We have never had a policy like that in the past, Mr. Speaker. It is not the intent of our founders when they gave us the charge in this Congress to write immigration law. We are charged by our constituents, by the people in the United States of America, to devise an immigration policy for the economic, social and cultural well-being of the United States of America and nothing else. We cannot be a safety valve for all of the poverty in the world. For every 1 million people that we could bring in across our southern border, there are another 10 or 12 million people in the same region down there that are born. But for every person, the average citizen of Mexico, their average standard of living, there are still 4.6 billion people on the planet with a lower standard of living than the average citizen of Mexico. So if it does our heart good to not say no to some of people who are our neighbors, what do we have to say to people that aren't our neighbors who live in much greater poverty. What do we say to the poverty in Bangladesh, and what do we say to the poverty in Africa? The Senate bill leaves a lot of that open as well. The difference is it is easier to travel here from Mexico than it is from Bangladesh or Africa. So we would get more Mexicans than we would Bangladeshis. But that bill is wide open, and the future of this country, the destiny of this country, hangs in the balance. As the American people do this debate, we need to come to an agreement. The message needs to get over to the Senate, and it needs to get to the White House, that we are going to stand on the rule of law, Mr. Speaker, and that we are going to have enforcement of our immigration laws in this country, and that we cannot have, we cannot have an immigration policy that is essentially a guest worker, temporary worker, amnesty plan, that is built upon the false promise of enforcement, when we have had 20 years to enforce our immigration laws and over the last 20 years, there has been less and less enforcement and more and more accusation of that. Of the illegals coming into America, the numbers that were presumably 1 million in 1986 became 3 million by the time the amnesty was done. Now these numbers, we are talking with a straight face, 10- to 12 million people, and saying it is not amnesty. But in reality, this 10- to 12 million is more like 20 million, 22 million, 27 million, somewhere in that category. The bill that has been passed in the Senate takes us up to 59 million or 70 million or 92 million. The cumulative total for all the immigration legally in the history of America, from the time we began to keep records until the last numbers we could total in, and those numbers would be 1820 to the year 2000, the cumulative total, Mr. Speaker, was 66.1 million people coming into the United States. That is the immigration total for all of our history. Maybe it is off a couple or 3 million because I can't add those before 1820 and I can't add those after the year 2000. Statistics aren't available. There are 66 million people. The Senate version eclipses the grand cumulative total for the history of America all in one fell swoop. They say it is not amnesty, and it really isn't any big deal. We can do this because we need somebody to trim our lawns and trim our nails and wait on us in our mansions and change our bedding and cook our steaks. How much of this work is not essential work? How much of this work is convenient because it is cheap? I can use a lot of servants, if they are cheap. So why can't I, you know, that is the attitude. We have this new ruling class in America. They made a lot of money hiring illegal labor, cheap labor. And they have got this attitude that they ought to be able to hire this cheap labor also to wait on them in their mansions and trim their lawns and wait on them and drive their cars. They want to be able to hire them cheap and make a lot of money, and they want to hire them cheap so when they spend their money they can be well taken care of. This is what is happening. The middle class is diminishing and shrinking. That strength of America has been a broad powerful middle class, not a shrinking middle class. We have never been an elitist country. We have never been an upper or lower class stratification. But the ruling class and the servant class are all that will be left if we let the open borders crowd rule in this immigration debate in America. Mr. Speaker, I stand first on enforcement first and enforcement only. If I am able to see a demonstration of that enforcement being effective, and it has to be demonstrated for a number of years before I am going to believe there is a commitment. Then in that case I am willing at some point to have a discussion about what to do with the people that might be left here. But in the meantime, I want to build this wall, and I want to put this wire on top, and I want to shut off illegal traffic at our border, and I want to shut off illegal drugs at our border. I want to end birthright citizenship, and I want to shut off the jobs magnet, and I want to hold the line on this until we can see that we have been effective. When that day comes, maybe there is time for another debate. But until that time we have this bleeding patient, and we have got to stop the bleeding. We can worry about what the therapy program is if this patient recovers. With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``yes'' vote on my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, this amendment just simply states that there is a construction project in Los Angeles that would not be available for funding out of this bill, and it is about $300,000. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn) especially for organizing this evening. Mr. Speaker, I am privileged to be here amongst my colleagues for whom I have such respect and gratitude for the work that they do on a daily basis to help lead this country in the right direction. As the gentlewoman from Tennessee mentioned, we are going to talk about the big picture in the global war on terror, and oftentimes we lose sight of the big picture. One of the reasons is because we are watching the news every night, and it seems as though they are setting up television cameras or movie cameras in Iraq wherever the IEDs might be planted, and they seem to be able to turn the cameras on seconds before they detonate an IED and seconds before there is some kind of an atrocity that takes place over there. That gives us a very narrow picture of what is going on in Iraq, Mr. Speaker. But the bigger picture over there is this, and that is that Iraq is a battlefield in the global war on terror, and we began this 20 years ago or so. It came home to roost when we all realized September 11, 2001, that this was not just a sometime enemy, not just an enemy that attacked the USS Cole or the U.S. embassies in Africa or did the bombing on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the list of those kind of terrorist attacks went on and on; but it came home to roost in a way that Americans all understood on September 11, 2001. The bigger picture of it is this that there is a culture out there that believes that their path to salvation is in killing people who are not like them, and I will contend that that organization that is out there, al Qaeda, also remnants of the Taliban, those that are left, are really a parasite; and it is radical Islam which is a parasite on the religion of Islam. Islam itself as mainstream may well be a peaceful religion, but the parasite that rides on them is not. The definition of parasite, I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, and the other listeners as well, it is a species that rides upon the host. The host is Islam. The parasite is radical Islam, and that parasite species rides on the host, feeds off the host and reproduces on the host, sometimes attacks the host and drops off and attacks other species and sometimes gets picked up back up again and rides on the host again and starts the cycle all over. That is the case with ticks and mites, the whole series of parasites that are there throughout all we know in the animal kingdom, and that is the case also with radical Islam and the overall religion of Islam. We are faced with that kind of an enemy, and that enemy has killed a lot of Christians. That enemy has killed a lot of Jews, but that enemy has also killed more Muslims than anything else. It gives us a broader picture, Mr. Speaker, of what this enemy is that we are up against. But the question we needed to ask ourselves, probably well before September 11, 2001, and certainly on that date and every date after that, is how do we conduct a war against a global enemy that is amorphous, an enemy that does not have uniforms or a territory, maybe has a leader or group of leaders, an enemy that simply has an ideology of hatred and terror that comes out and attacks people who are not like them in order to destabilize and somehow gain their presumably greater glory and somehow their salvation in the next life, which I think is down below rather than up above? Well, as I asked that question subsequent to September 11, 2001, I had the privilege to be listening to an address by Benazir Bhutto, who is the former Prime Minister of Pakistan. She served two different periods of time there, mostly back in the 1990s. She gave an address back in Storm Lake, Iowa, town of my birth, to Buena Vista University, a small private university there, and a very excellent one, that tracks outstanding speakers. After her profound address, she and I sat down one-on-one, knee-to- knee, so to speak, and this certainly was on my mind and it is on all of our minds even today. I asked her how do we get to this point of victory? How do we bring forth a war on these terrorists to the point where we can declare victory? What is our objective going to be and how shall we carry out this and conduct this war to reach this objective? And she sat for a little while and she said, You have got to give them a chance at freedom. You have got to give them a chance at democracy. Today, the people in these countries do not have hope. They do not have a way to vent their anger. They do not have a way to apply their energy for change in a constructive fashion with any kind of hope that they can make progress and make this world a better place for themselves, their family, their children, and the subsequent generations. So, consequently, if we can provide that opportunity, then the climate that breeds terror will turn into a climate that turns that energy towards constructive ends, constructive ends where they would be working to improve their families, their homes, their communities, their country, their churches, their mosques, their synagogues, whatever it might be. As I listened to that, I asked her a series of questions about it for clarification. I began to think as I drove home that evening this is a pretty good formula to put Benazir Bhutto back in power in Pakistan, but I am not convinced that it is a solution on how we could prosecute and win a war on terror. Yet, I sat down and began to read more and more about Islam, in particular the book, ``Radical Islam Visits America'' by Daniel Pipes, and I read that through twice with a red ink underliner and a highlighter to try to understand the culture, the religion, the psychology. I put that together with Natan Sharansky's book, ``In Defense of Democracy.'' When Natan writes that all human beings have a certain energy within them that they will use to try to effect a change, and that they will use that energy if that change is to keep them alive or if that change is to deal with the minutiae that may seem irrelevant to people who will struggle just to stay alive. Then, to understand, that we never go to war against another free people. Free people do not go to war against free people. So if we put that into the equation, there is an energy and a drive for change, by Natan Sharansky. We never go to war against another free people. So to the extent we can promote freedom and a form of democracy around the world is also a formula for more peace and more safety for all Americans and all free people. We add that then to Daniel Pipes' understanding and to the idea to promote freedom, and the President's doctrine which he gave out in his second inaugural address, which now we know as the Bush Doctrine, and that is, that all people yearn to breathe free, and it is the duty and it is the obligation of all freedom-loving people to promote freedom throughout the globe and throughout the ages. Put that formula all together, and that is the formula for how to move forward on this global war on terror and how to finally declare victory. So we began operations in Afghanistan a couple of months after September 11 very successfully, and 25 million people that had never before in that place on the globe gone to the polls to select their leaders and to direct their national destiny went to the polls and voted, and there were American troops in the field, especially our troops that I noticed in the field, guarding those paths to the polls, guarding those polling sites, and now you have 25 million people in Afghanistan. Some would say, and there were many detractors over on this side of the aisle, that said, oh, it is another Vietnam; you will never be able to get through the Khyber Pass, no one's ever been able to go into Afghanistan and come out of there having won a victory; that country has always fought off all of its invaders. Well, we did not invade them. We liberated them and the Afghani people now breathe free and have selected their leaders, and the same formula with the same advisers and the same advice was to go to Iraq and do the same thing for the same number of people, 25 million people, and the American soldiers did that and the marines did that and our airmen and our sailors did that and liberated 25 million people. They went to the polls three times, Mr. Speaker, in 2005 to select their leaders, to ratify a constitution and to put a legitimate government in place, and now they are a sovereign Arab nation in the Middle East. This sovereign Arab nation has had a difficult struggle, and the casualties have been by some measures high, not by measures of previous wars, by measures of the contemporary media. It is tragic to lose America's best in a struggle like this, but it is the highest calling. So, today, Iraqis breathe free, and we think that somehow, because there is casualties there in the streets of Iraq, it is an intolerable level in that civilization. I asked the question, how can they tolerate living in a society with this high level of violence, this high level of casualties? So I went back and took a look at the level of casualties that were there, and they need to be measured as a percentage of the overall population. We do that, we do that statistically by measuring how many people out of every 100,000 die a violent death. Well, that would be murder in most societies; and in Iraq, the civilians would be the measure, some are victims of IED bombings, some are victims of murder. We added up those numbers. There are several Web pages that provide that information. We took the most reasonable numbers that we could find. It comes to this number: 27.51 Iraqis per 100,000 die a violent death on an annual basis, 27.51. Now, what does that mean, and to me it really does not mean a lot until I compare it to places that I know where I have a feel for the rhythm of this place. Well, I by now have a feel for the rhythm of this place called Washington, D.C., and my wife lives here with me. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, she is in far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq. Forty-five out of every 100,000 Washington, D.C., residents die a violent death on an annual basis, 45. 27.51 in Iraq out of 100,000, 45 out of every 100,000 in Washington, D.C. If you go to New Orleans, pre-Katrina, before Katrina, 53 per 100,000, almost twice as many violent fatalities in the city of the New Orleans than there are in Iraq as an average civilian. Now, we took out the military, took out the police because they are involved in combat, but that gives you a measure, Mr. Speaker, of what is it like in Iraq. The United States military has provided, first of all, liberation for the Iraqis that were dying at an average rate of 182 a day at the hands of Saddam Hussein, collared him, put him on trial, took out Zarqawi and gave them a safer, free society than the society that they lived in. Statistically, if you want to chart that for the duration of this operation from the liberation of the Iraqis in March of 2003 until today, there are over a 100,000 Iraqis alive today because the United States and coalition forces went into Iraq and took on that calling to promote freedom throughout the globe. Now, Iraq stands as near the end of the military security solution of the operation in Iraq, at the beginning of the political solution in the operation of Iraq, where now they have a sovereign Arab government, and they are on the cusp of the solution for their economics. When they are able to start pumping oil out of that ground and sending it around the world and cashing the checks, we will see then this lode star of Iraqi being an inspiration for all the Arab world. A free Arab world, a prosperous Arab nation, and inspiration for all the Arab world. I have to believe that as the Berlin Wall went down on November 9, 1989, and freedom echoed across Eastern Europe, hundreds of millions of people breathe free today, I have to believe that same kind of contagious desire for freedom will take place in the Middle East among the Arab people. That is the big picture, Mr. Speaker. That is the vision of our President. That is the sacrifice of our military. That is the commitment of this Congress, and that is where we are headed. I believe and I pray that we will arrive there one day soon, and I expect to be around to celebrate that joyous day. I will stand here with our military every day until that is accomplished. Thank you to the gentlewoman from Tennessee. I appreciate this privilege to address this Chamber and the Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as always, I appreciate the honor and the privilege of addressing the Speaker and, in doing so, addressing this Chamber as well. I know that the voices that come to this floor to make these addresses echo across America, as our Founding Fathers envisioned. Before I pick up the issue I came to this floor to speak about, I would say a few words in support of the remarks made by my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), with regard to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sometimes we lose perspective of that time in America, back in the 1960s, when there was the institutionalization of segregation, particularly in the South. Those were glorious days when there were civil rights marches for civil rights reasons and the rights that everyone has in this country that are guaranteed by our Constitution. These are individual rights. They are rights without regard to what group you might think you are aligned with. They belong to men and they belong to women, and they are rights that preclude group rights. They are individual rights, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but more specifically freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom to keep and bear arms, and the right to property ownership, which has been eroded by the Kelo decision here in these last few months, I might add for your benefit particularly, Mr. Speaker, and for mine. In those days, when there was a peaceful civil rights movement in this country that stood on solid philosophical ground that all people that are citizens of this country, that live here, have equal rights. That is a different kind of a civil rights call than we have heard sometimes across this country today. There is the argument that there is a civil right to marry anyone that you choose, say, for example, a same-sex marriage civil right they claim. Or a civil right that people claim because they are illegally in this country and they say I have a global civil right to come to the United States of America and the Americans do not have a civil right to set immigration policies. Those are not civil rights, Mr. Speaker. There is not any civil right to come to America and demand the rights of citizenship; and there is no civil right to marriage, even for opposite sex couples that are madly in love, that traditionally have and will hopefully continue to be joined together in holy matrimony. That is not a civil right. In fact, we give a license for marriage. And a license is, by definition, a permit to do that which is otherwise illegal. So the State, meaning the government, the Federal Government, there are State governments and some of our local governments, take an interest in that sacred institution of marriage when a man and a woman are joined together in holy matrimony. Because we know that the value of this entire society and civilization is poured through into the next generation of our children through that relationship of holy matrimony between a man and a woman. We teach our children in that relationship everything that we know and everything that we believe about our values. We pass our religious values along through that marriage relationship. Children are our projects for our life. There is nothing more important that we can do in our lifetime than raise children. So we make them projects. And our first and most important thing is to be able to teach them our religious values and our moral values and our work ethic. And all the things that flow from our culture flow from a father and a mother and a family. Now, that is the ideal circumstance. And it doesn't mean that there aren't millions of children in America that aren't raised in that kind of an environment. It doesn't mean that they will not have opportunities. They will. And they will pick up their values sometimes from a single mother or a single father. But they need extra nurturing from their pastors and teachers in the neighborhood. We know that statistically most of society's pathologies can be solved by two people joined together in marriage raising children in that marriage and having them also keep a job. But the fact that there is a marriage license that is granted precludes the idea that there is a civil right to marriage, just like there is not a civil right to someone who lives in another country to come into the United States. Those are not civil rights. Civil rights are specified in title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and those are defined characteristics. There will be no discrimination against people based upon race, creed, religion, ethnicity, skin color, or national origin. And I am not sure that is exactly the quote, but it is exactly the theme, Mr. Speaker. I know that behind that some of the States have added also age or marital status. But those are all immutable rights or immutable characteristics, characteristics that can be independently identified and can't be willfully changed. Those are the reality. It is not something that I decide I am going to be a man or a woman or a person of a certain other country or color. You can't change that, Mr. Speaker. The immutable characteristics are those that are real, they are distinct, they can't be changed, and they can be independently identified. And what we say in title VII of the Civil Rights Act is it shall be unlawful to discriminate against people for that list of immutable characteristics that I have given. That is what gives the Civil Rights Act the dignity and respect and sets it apart for many of the claims for civil rights that come out today. There is always looking to be another successor to the civil rights movement, and there will never be another need for the civil rights that were demanded in the 1960s, and provided by peaceful demonstrations done in the right way for the right reasons with the right ideals, and those were glorious days for America to go through that change and emerge. I will say we are very sensitive to these issues of race and ethnicity, and we are very respectful of the issues of race and ethnicity, and the work that was done in the 1960s, the benefits flow to us today. The legacy is with us today. We look across our public life and see successes in people from all avenues, from people that have come from any origin. They have overcome many obstacles, and we applaud that as Americans. As Americans, we are for the underdog. We are for the one who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We are for the ones who had the least opportunity and made the most from the least opportunity. The reason that we are is because that embodies the American spirit, the American spirit which is embodied by the massive number of immigrants that have come to this country legally. Mr. Speaker, 66.1 million Americans have come to the United States legally, many of them through Ellis Island starting when we first began keeping records in 1820 until the year 2000 is the last time I can get the numbers added up and be firm on them. So 66.1 million self-selected individuals that brought their vitality to the United States because of the clarion call of freedom and liberty, and that liberty that was ensured and enhanced during the civil rights era. I applaud Mr. Davis for his remarks, and I am a great fan of the contribution of Martin Luther King, Jr. But, Mr. Speaker, I came to speak on an issue which has significant impact on the destiny of the United States of America. That is some of us found out very early yesterday morning, it came to my information about 3:30 yesterday morning here, that perhaps the worst, most horrible murderer on the face of the earth had been brought to justice by Coalition Forces and Iraqi intelligence as well as Task Force 145 of the United States military, and I will say, all of the Coalition Forces together, and that would be the end of the very tyrannical career of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We know they had followed him to a safe house where he was having a meeting with six of his other colleagues, some of them high level. Our surveillance had tracked him there. As they watched that safe house, they thought about different ways that they might be able to take action against Zarqawi, the person who was responsible for thousands of murders in Iraq. Zarqawi was the inspiration, was the person that led the recruitment of al Qaeda fighters to come into Iraq and take on Coalition Forces and try to foment an insurrection, tried to foment a civil war. One who argued and promoted and schemed and planned and strategized to attack Shiites within Iraq for the specific and stated purpose of fomenting civil war in Iraq. It was not just to fight Americans, which was bad enough, but it was to get Iraqis to fight Iraqis. And al Qaeda knew that if they lost a base of operations in Iraq, they didn't have another place to go to. When our military went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and won the significant victories there, that took out a base of operations for al Qaeda. They had operations that were beginning to take place down to Mogadishu, and when they moved some of those operations up to Afghanistan, they had a base of operations that would allow them to penetrate anywhere in the world and mount their terrorist operations against the United States embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, and bombings across the globe against other countries as well as the United States. But when they had a base of operations, then they could raise funds, control those funds, bring in military supplies and munitions. They could train and recruit and send people out around the world. We picked out a lot of Taliban fighters during the Afghan operation, and many of them were brought to Guantanamo Bay. As we began to interrogate them, we found out that they had been going into Afghanistan to train. They came from different places in the world. And there was a handful of Americans that went to Afghanistan to train with al Qaeda to come back and fight somewhere in the world against the United States of America. Certainly we know that is the case for other countries as well. Well, that base of operations in Afghanistan was wiped out in the fall of 2001. Justifiably so. And then the base of operations shifted over to Iraq. Now we know that there was an al Qaeda training camp in northern Iraq up in the Kurdistan region. We know that Saddam was working and strategizing with al Qaeda. Some would say Saddam was secular; and, therefore, he would not have collaborated with Osama bin Laden. We know better than that. The thing that is in history that we know the enemy of one's enemy is their friend. But Stalin and Hitler teamed together in World War II and converged in their battles over on Germany's eastern front until such time they met and clashed, and then Hitler turned around and attacked Stalin. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. So we joined up with Stalin at that point and began to engage in that war that turned it into a two-front war for Germany. The idea that someone like Hitler could not have collaborated with Emperor Hirohito in Japan because they didn't match the same ideology doesn't matter throughout history. That is an erroneous assumption. That does not matter. It is an erroneous assumption throughout history that people will not cooperate and collaboration because they do not match the same goals or ideology. It is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That is what was going on over between bin Laden and Saddam. We know that Zarqawi went to Iraq and established himself as the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. He said that he pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden. We have watched on television the horrible beheading of at least one American at the hand of al-Zarqawi. We know how bad this evil individual was. I believe it was a year ago last April that he produced a letter. And the letter stated what the circumstances were like in Iraq. It should have been given us great heart. All Members in this Chamber should have read the letter and understood what it was Zarqawi was writing about. Many people on the other side of the aisle denied the reality of what Zarqawi knew last April when he wrote this letter. If I remember right, it was about a 17-page letter. I remember some of the things that were in the letter, and it followed along these lines of now we are here in Iraq and we have to find a place where we can hide because if we are going to operate out of this country, it is a very dangerous place to do it because we have coalition forces and U.S. military that are breathing down our neck at every turn. He said there is a difference between some countries where they have been successful in their guerrilla warfare and Iraq. And these are the reasons why Iraq will never be a Vietnam. He said there are no mountains or forests to hide in, we must hide in the homes of the Iraqi people who are willing to take us into their homes, and Iraqis willing to do so are as rare as red sulfur. That was a quote from the letter. Iraqis who are willing to receive al Qaeda and harbor and protect them are as rare as red sulfur. Now I don't know how rare red sulfur is. I don't know if I have ever actually seen red sulfur. I have seen quite a lot of yellow sulfur. I am going to assume it might be an expression like as rare as frog's hair or as rare as hen's teeth. But as rare as red sulfur. So there weren't many places for al Qaeda to hide in Iraq even last April. They had to take over communities, and then we would go in and break up those cells. So they kept reforming again, kind of like flies do. We would scatter them and swat some and arrest some and kill some, and it was going along at a very brisk pace. In fact, as recently ago as last summer the Coalition Forces, and this includes the Iraqi military of which there are at least 245,000 that are in uniform defending Iraqis today with those numbers going up 70,000 to 90,000 within a year, but these Coalition Forces were taking out between killed and captured 3,000 a month. So as those numbers diminished within Iraq, so did Zarqawi's supporters. And the stronger the opposition to Zarqawi and the terrorist was, and the more confidence the Iraqi people got, the more tips that they handed over then to the Coalition Forces that we could act on. We know that Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein's two sons, and actually one of his grandsons that were taken out in Mosul a couple of years ago, that was as a result of a tip. Our 101st Airborne reacted and took them out. In the end the house that they were in, they demolished the house and hauled the rubble away and graded the lot empty. There will not be a martyr's shrine on that location, Mr. Speaker. It was intelligence that did that, and it was intelligence that took out Saddam Hussein some months later, to find him and track him and find him in his spider hole. This is another high level of intelligence to be able to close in on Zarqawi. We know they were close to him a number of times in the last few months. We have heard different people in the news state that eventually they would get Zarqawi. This should not be a surprise to us. Sometimes it is a surprise that a person can stay on the run and last as long as they did, but he stayed on the run until a little more than a day ago when our task force people put the laser on the safe house that he was in and then directed two 500-pound bombs into that house. We have seen the pictures of it. The house, made of cement blocks, is just a jumbled pile of broken up cement blocks. Of the people who were in there, Zarqawi was the only one that was alive by the time our forces arrived there. I understand he expired not too long after they closed in, but he had at least enough left to recognize that it was Americans that had closed in and put an end to his terrible reign as the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Now, I believe that Zarqawi got his just desserts. I believe he has been sent to his eternal reward, or his eternal punishment is a more precise way to speak of that. I am grateful to the Coalition Forces, to the Iraqis, and especially to the United States military for the job they are doing over there in that country and in all of the theaters that we have in operations now in this global war on terror. We know that things have heated up some in Afghanistan and the intensity that is there in Iraq, and the futility of the people on the other side who believe they can keep blowing up women and children and noncombatants. The other day they pulled a bus over and sorted out the Sunnis and gave them a pass and executed the Shiias and the Kurds on the bus. It is a horrible thing to create that kind of violence. This man, Zarqawi, there was no level, no depth he would not stoop to. We know he has done the beheadings. He initiated the beheadings. Even today there were heads that were found in banana boxes in Iraq. They were put there to drive fear into the hearts of the people who would oppose al Qaeda. We know also there are retribution killings, revenge killings on the other side. But the truth of it is there is progress being made in Iraq, and the progress that has been made in the last 3\1/2\ years while we have been in those operations has been slower than many of us would have liked. But compared to any other similar operation in history, it is going along pretty good. Mr. Speaker, we need to keep in mind that the Iraqis have established themselves as a sovereign nation. That is no small task in a nation of 25 million people torn by violence and strife and torn by an al Qaeda parasite that came into that society that was determined to tear them apart, that was attacking and fomenting the kind of violence that was designed to produce a civil war. With all of those forces inside, with Iran providing resources to try to incent a civil war within Iraq, Iran not wanting to see free people in Iraq, for obvious reasons, the clerics, the mullahs that run the country of Iran, they want to stay in power. And we know that there is a significant amount of unrest within Iran. The people in Iran have memories of a more modern, open society under the Shah, and they want to join the world community of nations and they want to move into the future. And they understand that if they are held back into the Dark Ages by a clerical group of leaders who are determined to hold them there and tell them what they can wear and what they can say and how they are going to live, to hold women back, to not allow elections, at least legitimate elections, that they will not be able to move Iran into the 21st century. And they want their opportunity. But the leaders in Iran want to hang on to the power. That is all the way it is, Mr. Speaker. The leaders want to hang onto the power, and so they are promoting the violence also in Iraq. Some of that violence has been supported out of Syria the same way and the infiltrators that come in that are the fighters for the insurgents come across the border from Iran into Iraq and from Syria into Iraq in the greatest numbers from those two countries. There is support in both of those countries for an insurgency that had we had the cooperation of Iran, had we had the cooperation of Syria, this operation in Iraq would have been over a long time ago. And, Mr. Speaker, I would point out for the edification of the folks that don't think about this very much that a war is never over until the losing side realizes that they have lost. It isn't a function of how many people are killed, or a function of how much land is occupied, or a function of how many battles are fought and won. They are all factors. But those are all factors that are designed to influence and convince the other side that they will eventually lose, in fact, may have lost the war. And so every operation that we have, military operation, any kind of a sanction that is there, any kind of a blockade, any kind of psyops, any psychological operations that are going on, media message that is going out there, the voice of the President, the Secretary of Defense, the voices on this floor of Congress, Mr. Speaker, should all be designed to promote the idea that America will not blink, that we will not back out, that we will stand up for freedom and stand up for liberty. And if that consistent message goes across the ocean into the Middle East, those people that are sitting in those huts making bombs and deciding that they are going to plant them and detonate them on American troops or coalition troops or Iraqi troops, or Iraqi women and children, at some point they will understand, we will not blink. We will not flag. We will not fail. We will carry out our efforts on this war on terror globally, and Iraq is a battle field in the global war on terror. This country cannot fail in our resolve. We will be resolved and we will finish this task. And the task will be over when the enemy realizes that they have lost. That is the very definition of winning a war, Mr. Speaker. In fact, Von Clausewitz wrote in his book on war that the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. Destroy the enemy's will and ability. And Von Clausewitz understood that if you could destroy the enemy's will, they would not have the ability to conduct war. And if you take away the enemy's ability to conduct war, part of that ability is having the will. Without the will, no amount of weapons, no amount of resources would even be used at all because there would be a lack of will to ever use them. So to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war boils down in the Steve King version to make the enemy realize that they have lost. Once they reach that realization, then they will give up their arms, they will give up their efforts and there will be peace and there be a peaceful reconciliation that resolves things hopefully for the better so that people can live free. That is the effort that is going on in Iraq. And we lose sight of the reason that we want to see the Iraqi people with peace and freedom and, in fact, I would say freedom first and peace second. And the reason for that is because, after all, we have an obligation to promote freedom throughout the world, but we also can't be denying this freedom to anyone. And we need peace in the Middle East. It is a critical part of the world. It puts a threat on everyone in the world when we don't have peace in the Middle East. One of those things would be to look to the freest people that are in the Middle East today, and that would be the citizens of Israel. And where they sit with enemies surrounding them all around, the threat to them, the pressure on them is a threat and the pressure that threatens to annihilate an entire people. They have a right to be there. That is their sovereign nation. And they are a lamp of liberty in the Middle East. The people that live around them don't have the freedom that Israel has. But soon, I believe they will. I believe they will because Iraq is emerging as a free Arab nation. And Afghanistan has emerged as a free Arab nation. Not without trouble, not without strife, not without violence, not without some more outbreaks of Taliban violence, not without some more battles with al Qaeda over in Afghanistan, certainly not without more battles with al Qaeda within Iraq. But if Afghanistan, a nation of 25 million people, and Iraq, a nation of 25 million people, can emerge a free people, Afghanistan has, Iraq is poised to do so. They become the lode star for all the Arab people in the world. And the people that have lived the least under freedom now have an opportunity to live under freedom. And I don't believe that the force of freedom can be held back, because the march of history is always, Mr. Speaker, a march towards freedom. And it has been a gradual progression throughout the ages, but in our age, in our lifetime, and this past half a century and peripherally in this next half a century, we will see more progress towards freedom than ever in the history of the world and, in fact, in all the rest of the history of the world put together, I believe we will look back on this time and say this was the time that freedom emerged on the globe. And it emerged in the aftermath of World War II and it burst out when the Berlin Wall came down, November 9, 1989, and we saw freedom echo across Eastern Europe, almost bloodlessly, in a historical miracle of people that now live and breathe free. Five hundred million people at least freed in that echo of freedom when the Berlin Wall went tumbling down and families were reunited. And as I watched that on the news, I noticed that the national news media missed it. They thought it was about reuniting families and breaking champagne bottles on the Berlin Wall. They didn't realize it was the crashing down of the Iron Curtain. They didn't realize that that era was over. And even for 2\1/2\ years after that, as nation after nation emerged free, as they stood in the square in Prague and people stood there and shook their keys by the tens of thousands and just rattled their keys, Mr. Speaker, in a chorus, in a din that said we will be free, and that country is free today. They had their Velvet Revolution and separated again and they seem to be happy between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic and their neighbors are free. And as I look at the coalition troops that are there in Iraq today, the ones that I have met as I have been over there in my several trips over to the Iraq region and into Iraq, I recognize that the participation in this effort is greater within the countries that lived under tyranny up until the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War on November 9, 1989. That participation of those countries is greater in percentage than the countries that have lived under freedom longer. Those that got their freedom back from the Third Reich at the end of World War II, some of those countries forgot what it was that they achieved 60 years ago. But those countries that just achieved their freedom less than 15 years before sent their troops to fight for freedom in Afghanistan and in Iraq because they have an institutional memory within the people in the government and within their leaders on what it is like to live under tyranny. But here in this country, we have a better memory than that. We have not ever lived under tyranny here in the United States of America. We have lived free from July 4, 1776, even though we had to fight a few wars to keep it, all the way up until today. Some of us would argue that our freedom gets diminished and we argue, here, Mr. Speaker, rather than going to the streets to clash in the streets, we have our debates here. We have an outlet for our desire to make change. And this is that outlet. And there are outlets in the State legislatures all across this land and in the county supervisors and the city halls. We take our disagreements to the public forum, and we have a civilized debate. And as the former majority leader and my friend and colleague, Tom DeLay, said on this floor, this very podium about this same time yesterday, you show me a nation that doesn't have partisanship and I will show you a tyranny. If there is not a forum for debate and for disagreement and dialogue, then that means a tyrant will be in control and be denying that forum. Well, a tyrant was in control in Iraq and he is now under trial, Saddam Hussein. And there were tyrants in control of the lawless regions in Afghanistan. And now they are free and there are people who have a future. And now, Iraq has a brighter future because the tyrant, the murderer, the baby slaughterer, the person who beheaded people on television has gone to meet his eternal justice. And I think I know where he will spend eternity, Mr. Speaker, and I can think of no better justice for someone like Zarqawi than that. Some of the things that he did would be to go take someone off the street and kill them because maybe they had a different viewpoint about what the future of Iraq should be. Kill them, disembowel them, fill their body up with explosives and projectiles such as screws and bolts and ball bearings and then put their body alongside the road and sit back and wait for the family to come and recover the body and then detonate the body and blow it up and kill the rest of the family. I cannot think of anything more horrible than an act like that. But I can tell you that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Mr. Speaker, spent a great deal of his time trying to think of more brutal things that he could do, more shocking things that he could do, more ways that he could try to crack the nerve of the Iraqi people so that somehow, in that conflict, in the confusion into a civil war that he would have like to have created, he could have found a way to take power and turn Iraq not into a sovereign nation, not even into a real tyranny, but to turn it into a terrorist camp so that he could bring funds in, train people and dispatch people around the world to attack civilizations unlike him. And that is what the hatred is of al Qaeda. That is the kind of enemy that we are up against, Mr. Speaker, and that is that this is a battle and Western Civilization is an element in this battle. And I will submit that al Qaeda, radical Islam is a parasite on the religion of Islam. And this parasite has attached themselves to Islam. And a parasite will attach themselves to the host; Islam is the host. And they will travel on the host. They will feed off the host; they will reproduce on and within the host. And they will attack the host and they will drop off the host and attack other species. That is what a parasite is. And I will submit that al Qaeda and radical Islam is that parasite that is now riding on the host of Islam. And we need to be asking Islam to rid themselves of this host, with our help, help guide us, but purge yourselves, rid themselves of this parasite. Purge themselves of the parasite radical Islam, al Qaeda, because sometimes parasites are fatal, and they will consume their host and the host will perish. Well, this parasite has caused numerous Muslims to perish because they have turned and attacked the host and, in fact, I believe that there is not really any question about it. When we look across the world and we count the bodies, the bodies of Muslims lie in significantly greater numbers than the bodies of Jews or Christians that are victims of al Qaeda, victims of radical Islam. They turn on their own. Zarqawi was one of those people. He drew a distinction between Shiias and Sunnis. And when he did that, he began attacking Shiias to try to get them infuriated. He blew up their mosque to try to get them to turn around and attack the Sunnis so that they could have a civil war. And we had leaders within this country and this Congress, Mr. Speaker, that would join together and declare that there was a civil war in Iraq, and their definition of a civil war would be when the unrest in Iraq got to the point where they had lost their level of tolerance to watch it on the news, I guess. And so some came to the floor and said that there was a civil war. Many said so in the news. There was a group of Senators from the other body that did so. A junior Senator from Iowa declared a civil war to be taking place in Iraq. And I contend that you need to define a civil war before you declare there is one, and I will define it this way: We will know when there is a civil war in Iraq, and I do not believe for a moment there will be one. I think the steps that were taken yesterday and the death of Zarqawi move things closer towards peace and freedom and further away from the threat of a civil war. But a civil war in Iraq will be defined when the Iraqi military that are in uniform protecting Iraqis, and remember we have Kurds and Shiias and Sunnis all wearing the same uniforms, Mr. Speaker, and they all take the same training and they all carry the same weapons, and they answer to officers that are officers, without regard to whether they are Shiias, Kurds, or Sunnis. But if that ecumenical military, if I can use a little license to describe them that way, chooses up sides and starts to shoot at each other, that is how we will know there is a civil war. But what we have are at least 250,000 Iraqis in uniform protecting Iraqis without regard to whether they are Shiias, Sunnis, or Kurds, wearing the same uniforms, mixed up in roughly proportionate numbers and defending Iraqis against al Qaeda, defending Iraqis against terrorists, defending Iraqis against criminals, and defending Iraqis against former Baathists that are in their last gasps. Now, there are also some that believe that somehow Saddam Hussein will come back to power. And because he is alive, because he is able to put up a fight in the courtroom, it gives inspiration to those people that have always been intimidated by Saddam and believe that somehow he has, I don't want to call it a supernatural power, but a power that transcends the limits of a mortal human being in a way that they can't be confident that he is out of power forever until he checks into the next life and joins Zarqawi. For that reason, I am hopeful that we can get the trials over in Iraq. I am hopeful that we can move forward and if Saddam is found guilty, and so in this country we say innocent until proven guilty and I will afford him on this floor, Mr. Speaker, at least that much latitude, he is innocent until proven guilty. But I have seen and the world has seen plenty of evidence to the contrary. Now, if that evidence is continually presented in court and the Iraqi court finds him guilty, I did meet with the judges over there last August and sat down with the panel of the judges and one of the questions that I asked the judge was, what is the penalty for Saddam? And he said, Well, first I cannot speak about a case that is before the court. That is appropriate. That is the rules we have in this country. And I should probably not have asked him such a direct question, but I did test out apparently his good judgment to not speak about a case that was before the court. So I asked him the longest convoluted question one could imagine, at least that I could imagine at the time, which is: If there were crimes that were committed or alleged to have been committed which would be of a similar vein, of the murders up in the region in Kurdistan and the killing of the swamp Arabs in the south, I went through the whole list of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that had died, if that had happened and if hypothetically we had someone who was found responsible for committing those kind of atrocities, if that person were brought before this court and they were faced with a penalty that would be similar to or charges that were similar to a charge that was being faced by Saddam Hussein then, what would the penalty be? That is how you have to ask the question without him addressing the case. And he said if someone is charged under Iraqi law the charge of crimes against humanity, then there is only one penalty available and it all is in one paragraph in Iraqi law and I have read it, and that one penalty is death. And so that would be I think a suitable punishment for someone who may well be responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqis. I have looked at some of the statistics, and under Saddam's reign there are varying numbers, but I am always asking these questions trying to quantify how bad was the violence under Saddam Hussein, and I can come up with some conclusions. The number that I see come up the most often, the annual deaths in Iraq or the total deaths during Saddam's regime, and then divide it by the year and by the day. And, Mr. Speaker, the most common number that came up was that Saddam was killing his own people at the rate of 182 per day; 182 of his own people per day murdered, many of them tortured, many of them raped in rape rooms. Can you imagine an administration that had professional rapists that are on salary to torture and terrorize and rape family members within the presence of other family members in order to extract certain confessions out of them or just simply punish them to watch their loved ones treated in that fashion? Put through shredders, plastic shredders and ground into little pieces, fed to lions. Those are the kinds of things that Saddam Hussein was doing as well as unleashing gas on the Kurds, for example. This was going on in that country for years and years. And maybe that number is not 182 a day. The lowest number I can find is about 135 a day. But if you add these numbers up and you subtract from it the numbers of Iraqi civilians that have lost their lives in this conflict since the aberrations began in March of 2003, if you add that up, there are at least 100,000 Iraqis alive today in Iraq that would not be if we had not intervened and pulled Saddam Hussein from power and given the Iraqi people their opportunity at freedom. 100,000 lives at least statistically have been saved in this operation that the news media characterizes as so utterly violent that we should sack up our bats and hit the road no matter what the consequences. I have heard that statement made even in the aftermath of Zarqawi. The gentleman from California (Mr. Stark) made the statement, or at least the news reported that, this is, that we should get out of Iraq. This is a sign that tells us to get out of Iraq. Well, those that want to get out of Iraq will use any excuse to try to make the argument. But I asked the question sometime back and I have made the statement on this floor, Mr. Speaker, and I will go down this path of making it again. And it is from memory and not some notes, so there could be a decimal point or two that I could be off, but I will be exactly right on the substance and on the theme. I asked the question, myself: How can the regular Iraqi civilian, people that are living there scattered all over Iraq in random places, some in Baghdad, some in Kirkuk, some in Mosul, some down in Basra, some in smaller towns, Tikrit and wherever, how can those people, those citizens that want to live a peaceful life and raise their families and have a future, how can they tolerate living in a country that has the level of violence that every day shows these bombings on television to the point where we are jaded here in America and hardly look at them anymore. We kind of do a little mental calculation of what kind of casualties there are over there in civilians. Here was a bombing with 10, here is a bomb that killed 20, here is the bus they pulled aside and, by Zarqawi's orders everyone has to assume, when they sorted out the Sunnis and let them go and killed the Kurds and the Shiias, how can one live in a country that has that level of violence? How violent is Iraq? And I will have to admit that some of the places that I have been in this country and the statistics that I see caused me to pay attention. And not too long ago, Mr. Speaker, I was down in Brazil in Sao Paulo, and some of the briefings as I came into that city from the airport and it is a large city in southern Brazil that they have 10,000 homicides in that city every year. 10,000. A division, a number greater than a division are annihilated in that one city in Brazil by murder. So I began to simply calculate, statistically what does that mean. And I didn't get good statistics on how large an area that was, so I didn't commit those numbers to where I could repeat them here, Mr. Speaker. But you divide the 10,000 into the population of Sao Paulo to find out how many homicides per 100,000. And internationally that is the way we measure the risk of violence and homicide. And so I don't have that number, but that is the one that inspired me to look. So we went back and we added up all the deaths, all the deaths that are in Iraq, all the deaths that we can calculate and tabulate. And there are a couple of Web sites that do that, and at least one of those Web sites is designed to be able to add as many numbers as possible to this. Now, here are the statistics then, Mr. Speaker, on how dangerous it is to be a regular civilian living in an average place in any of these countries that I have laid out here on this graph, and you can see by the chart. Here is the United States. Out of every 100,000 people, every year annually there are 4.28 Americans that are murdered, that die violently at the hands of someone who willfully wished them harm and acted upon it: 4.28 per 100,000. Mexico's rate is three times greater than ours, a little more than three times greater. Theirs is 13.02 per 100,000. We move up the line. Here is Iraq down here pretty low in this graph scale, 27.51 per 100,000 people. That is their level of violence. Now, it is possible that the tabulation has missed some murder in Iraq that maybe didn't get reported perhaps out in some of the obscure towns and cities because their bureaucracy is not very efficient at this point. But it is also likely and in fact very probable that they double- counted some of the other homicides; so I can't tell you if this number is maybe a little bit lower than it is in reality or it is a little higher than it is in reality, but I can tell you this, we don't expect this number to be down here. And if we would double this number, we would still not anticipate that is the case, and the reason is because of the United States news media, Mr. Speaker. And I so will take you up the line. Venezuela, 31.61 violent deaths per 100,000; Jamaica, 32.42 violent deaths per 100,000. I can remember these. Venezuela and Jamaica, I teamed those together. They both average out at 32 deaths per 100,000. That happened to be OJ Simpson's jersey number, so I will never forget that number. You can ask me in 20 years. Thirty-two violent deaths per 100,000 for Venezuela and Jamaica. And then you go to South Africa, and down in that country, a great welcome when I visited and met good people and they are struggling to move themselves into the 21st century as well, Mr. Speaker, but in reality you look around and you will see that there are fences built around the homes and walls built around the homes. And they will take glass, and when they finish their wall on top of their wall put mortar on top and set broken glass in the top of that mortar, so those people that want to climb across the wall have to get cut up on that glass. And then I talked to one of our U.S. council employees and asked him what it was like to live in a country that was walled in, that you were shut in in your own little fortress of your home. And he said, Well, it is not so bad for me because we have a good wall around our house and it has got good security on top of it, and we have got cameras and we have got warning devices, and we have got good solid doors and bars across the windows. And, if they get through those doors or through those bars and get into the interior of the house, we have good solid doors there, too, but we have a chamber that we can go into to protect ourselves that is almost impregnable. So we can always retreat into that if someone invades our home. It kind of sounds like a war. It sounds like an invading army coming into a country the same way one might consider to be an invading terrorist, criminal coming into a home. It is not a lot different when someone comes across our border, especially when they are armed. South Africa, 49.60 violent deaths per 100,000. Colombia, one of the highest murder rates in the world and it ranks significantly higher than the United States. So of 61.78 violent deaths per 100,000 in Colombia, well over twice as high as the violent deaths in Iraq. Now I start to ask the question: How can an individual, an average citizen in Colombia, tolerate the level of violence in Colombia? How long has it been since you have seen the mainstream news media run a story on that? And I would say you could do a Lexus-Nexus search, but never wouldn't surprise me, Mr. Speaker. So Colombia is not the highest murder rate in the world, but they are multiple times greater than the United States. Honduras is not on here, but their rate is nine times that of the United States. And Swaziland is out there at 88.61 violent deaths per 100,000. Now, that is a lawless society. But I just about guarantee, Mr. Speaker, that nobody hears a word about that lawless society in Swaziland, but it approaches that number of three times as dangerous to live in Swaziland, in fact it exceeds that of number as three times as dangerous to live in Swaziland as it is to live in Iraq today. And yet people think that civil society has broken down in Iraq and that there is not a way to operate in that country because it has been taken over by violence. Well, we had a little violence there for al Zarqawi and lots of people were dancing in the street and firing their weapons in the air like they did when Saddam Hussein was collared, and it is a significant moment in the history of this war on terror, and it is an indicator of what will happen to the next person that emerges to take the head of the operation of al Qaeda and the enemy operations within Iraq. We will always be targeting those people at the top, those people that are second tier, third tier, grabbing them wherever we can. And we have an individual here on the floor with us who has, as I know, been to a very intense and detailed and informative briefing on the operations that were able to take Zarqawi out. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to yield so much time as he may consume to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico. In the interim I was able to come up with this picture that I think is important to have posted here for us to remember this individual. Remember, Zarqawi was an inspiration to our enemy. And I do not believe that Zarqawi is going to end up being the inspiration in the form of a martyr as we often consider them to be. You know, when you think about what a martyr is, that would be one person who committed and dedicated their lives to a cause selflessly, in an inspirational way, and perhaps one who might have died in that cause. Can you think of two martyrs for the same cause, Mr. Speaker? And I think back, I cannot think of two martyrs for the same cause. But I would point that out. Maybe there are. But if I cannot think of two, I am convinced I cannot think of three, or four or five or six or ten martyrs for the same cause, or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000. Martyrs come along in groups of 1, not groups of 2, 5, 10, 20 or 1,000. I would submit this, Mr. Speaker, that the more of these alleged martyrs that there are, the less they are martyrs and the more they become statistics, and the less anyone is inspired by someone who is full of murder and hatred and brutality. They do not stand for anything except murder, hatred and brutality. I would be happy to yield to Mr. Pearce.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman. I point out also to key into that point, that Stonewall Jackson may have been the most inspiring general in the South, but you cannot inspire people from the grave. Well, you can do that, but you cannot recruit military to fight underneath you from the grave. This fellow, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is done recruiting for al-Qaeda. They are not going to come here to fight in his memory, because they are going to meet the same kind of end as Zarqawi. But I want to point out his statement here, Mr. Speaker, because I think it is important for Americans to burn into their mind his attitude towards Americans. He said, ``Americans are the most cowardly of God's creatures. They are an easy quarry, praise be to God. We ask God to enable us to kill and capture them.'' That was his letter to al-Qaeda, February 2004. Americans, the most cowardly of creatures? You know, in this entire conflict, the battle in the global war on terror, in the breadth of Afghanistan and Iraq and all points in between and the periphery of all of those, I have yet to hear of a single incident of an cowardly American soldier. I mean, it may have happened. But I have not heard of a single incident. I have only heard of bravery and courage and sacrifice. And each quarter, I never let it be longer than that, I go to visit our wounded Americans in places like Bethesda, Walter Reed and Landstuhl there in Germany. And when I go in to visit those wounded soldiers, they give me strength, they give me inspiration. They believe in this cause, and we must not let them down. And most of them feel guilty that they were wounded, because now they are not with their men. Most of them want to go back to their unit. In fact, we have had amputees that have gone back to their unit and engaged in combat again. That is the kind of inspiration, that is what Americans are about. Zarqawi could not be more wrong. I am happy to say today he could not be more dead. I yield to the gentleman from New Mexico.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico for joining me and raising his voice and standing up for United States of America. Mr. Speaker, I have this one quick chart that I am going to run through quickly. That is, the Iraq numbers again for civilians, 27.51 for 100,000. Where is the place most comparable to that in the United States today? Oakland, California. If you are safe in Oakland, that is about how safe they feel in Iraq today with the exception of the national news media's exceptions. God bless our troops. I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The amendment that I offer today is an amendment that supports the continuing philosophy of the Nethercutt amendment of 2004 that removes funds that go to the economic support fund in Mexico if they do not comply with an Article 98 order, which says that they would not send an American citizen to the International Criminal Court. Mexico is slated to cash in big on foreign aid contained in H.R. 5522. The House report would allocate $40 million in assistance to Mexico while the President's fiscal year 2007 budget request estimates that they will receive $62.9 million in various forms of aid through this bill. My amendment would prohibit sending economic support funds to Mexico, and that is about $9 million. And despite spending over $31 million in economic support funds since 2004, the Mexican government has not show any progress towards real reform. Mexico is rife with corruption. Their politicians can steal, bribe, and commit fraud and avoid jail time since crimes are not always treated seriously, especially these crimes of fraud, regardless of the amount of money stolen. A case in point would be $90 million that was diverted, and that is U.S. dollars, diverted from PEMEX, which is Mexico's nationally-owned oil company, to illegally finance the 2000 presidential campaign by the PRI. And yet even though they have been fined, they can pay their payments in installments, and there has been no jail time. This is indicative with what we are faced with down there. And with all of the money that has gone in under this fund, I cannot measure that there has been any kind of significant results. Now they are prohibited from advancing these funds, even though they have been appropriated, unless Mexico agrees under an Article 98 agreement that even though they have joined the International Criminal Court, they would not send a United States citizen to that court. Mexico refuses to do so; and, in fact, a statement in February from a spokesman for President Fox said that the United States is within its rights in suspending military aid, but this would not persuade Mexico to change its stance on, as he said, full adhesion to the ICC at whatever cost. Mr. Chairman, this is one of those costs. And if they are determined to send American citizens, maybe American military, maybe CIA, maybe FBI, maybe American soldiers or American Marines to the International Criminal Court as our southern border, they have missed the point, Mr. Chairman, in all of this, and I intend to make that point with this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield a minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. First I would state that the information that has been provided here by the gentleman from Texas is a chilling thing to see. And if this Chamber had the ability to look at these pictures and understand the topography and know what is going on in the north side of our border and that is with the full knowledge of the government of Mexico and understand also that the corruption is replete on the other side of the border and in an even more significant way. These people have an unlimited amount of funds. There are $60 billion worth of illegal drugs that come into the United States across our southern border every single year, eleven million illegal people every day coming across that border. And this fund, this is a $9 million fund that is supposed to be teaching freedom and democracy and proper forms of government. We don't have an ounce of evidence that demonstrates that they have moved anything in that direction. In fact, I suspect that it has gone the other way. The American people know this. People that live on the border know this. Members of Congress who represent these pictures that you have seen here ought to know this, and they ought to support my amendment. This amendment simply supports the Nethercutt amendment which has been renewed each year since it has been brought before this Congress. But there is no reason for us to appropriate $9 million when the Mexican Government has said that they are not going to comply or agree with an article 98 agreement, which again, is the agreement that would state that they would not send an American to the International Criminal Court. In fact, the representative of President Vicente Fox has said the exact opposite, that they are going to comply with their entire agreement with the International Criminal Court and they would not enter an article 98 agreement. Therefore, we must support this amendment.

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I point out that the language of the amendment merely requires the Federal official administering these funds to comply with Federal law. A new duty is not required in the face of the amendment, and because we are simply asking them to comply with current Federal law, I don't adjust that at all in this amendment. There is no policy change other than the requirement to comply with existing law that passed in 1996.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I think if the gentleman would, that we understand that funds are fungible, and when they go into an appropriations process to a local government, that there can be interdepartmental transfers within those local governments that would be very difficult to track and give a precise answer to. But if funds are going into a local government and local government has a sanctuary policy, one can presume that some of those dollars are being used to support the sanctuary policy. And that is what this amendment seeks to prevent.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I don't direct DHS to do anything under this amendment except to evaluate if the local governments are receiving funds under this appropriations and if they have a sanctuary policy that is on the books.