Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to discuss this resolution, although I have not yet determined how I shall vote on it. The resolution has ``resolved'' clauses that speak for themselves and are reasonable. In the ``resolved'' clauses we do see a recognition of expression of sentiment about both the Palestinian as well as the Israeli innocent people who have been killed. Also, it recognizes the Roadmap and talks about some of the goals that we all agree on. I do have some reservations as to the ``whereas'' clauses which seem to be one-sided. The clause most disconcerting to me happens to be the one that people seem to be the most frantic in trying to get across today, and that is the claim that in some way, by saying that this is a cycle of violence that is going on, as it says in the ``whereas'' clause, that this implies a moral equivalency. It does not. The cycle of violence could well have been started, and I do believe there is a cycle of violence going on; it could be that both sides have made mistakes. That does not mean they are both morally equivalent. Who is judging the morality of it? We are judging the reality of it. The fact is, Israel may have made some mistakes. Certainly the Palestinians have made horrible immoral decisions in terms of suicide bombings and other types of acts of terrorism. But Israel may have made some mistakes. Was Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, in retrospect, was that not a mistake? How about the Israeli settlement policy for these last few years? I think in retrospect these things have not furthered the cause of peace; these things have created a cycle of violence, if you will. It is our job to try to come to grips with what is going on there and end this conflict, and quit trying to say that all of the blame is on one side. Both sides have made mistakes. Let us try to be an honest broker. Now, I will probably be voting for the resolution, because the ``resolved'' clauses are things that I agree with. But I would hope that we would be honest with ourselves and try to discuss this in a way that will further the cause of peace and not just simply be one-sided.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to yield.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, we have seen this misuse of this quote so often in this body, and I would just like to make sure that the public is aware when they hear it misused again that Mr. Gingrich has time and time again demonstrated that that quote was being misused by people who were trying to misrepresent what he said.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I am reclaiming my time. I would ask that the Sergeant at Arms remove the gentleman from the floor if he insists on taking my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I would ask that the gentleman be removed from the floor.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I would ask the Sergeant at Arms to remove him from the floor if he continues to interrupt.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. No, I would not. Mr. Speaker, I think I control the body. I have the floor.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Let me just note that this quote, as I have stated, has been refuted over and over again and demonstrated by Mr. Gingrich in many public forums that it was being used in a very irresponsible and dishonest manner. I would just note now that I would like to discuss a different approach to medical independence and privacy and health insurance and the whole issue that we have been discussing tonight and will be discussing further in the next few days. I have a piece of legislation that I would like people to consider and that I would like them to look at; it is H.R. 2544. It is a piece of legislation that I believe offers a whole new approach to medical care and health care in America. Unfortunately, all too often, the discussion of medical reform legislation has been focusing on the allocation of more funds. Sometimes those funds would help in our society those who are lacking resources to purchase their own adequate health care and medical care; but at other times when we are talking about spending more funds, what we are not talking about is helping those who really need it and cannot provide for themselves, but what we are talking about is subsidizing everybody, whether or not they need it. Rarely does Congress, when they are focusing on just spending more money, whether or not someone needs that help, rarely do we focus on how can we do things more wisely and more efficiently, and how can we bring down the costs of getting health care that would make more people able to take care of themselves. Rarely does government focus on how to create an environment which would spur the supply of medical services, and rarely do we focus on encouraging cost-cutting innovation or to provide incentives for those who create and innovate and bring up new, cost-effective methods of dealing with illness in our society. In essence, what government does, and what this body often does, is focus on medical care demand rather than on medical care supply. This focus all but guarantees the price of drugs and hospital care and medical treatment will continue to soar and outpace the ability of many Americans to afford the price of being healthy and; certainly, as it brings the price of health care up, it then creates even more Americans, a pool of even more Americans who cannot take care of their own health care costs. So it is a cycle that leaves even more Americans dependent on the government, and then the government creates a situation where even more Americans cannot take care of themselves. The Federal Government took over responsibility for the health care of America's seniors back in 1965. When Medicare was first enacted into law back in 1965, very few people remember what it was like back then. But before then, our economically disadvantaged were taken care of by tax dollars. Yes, they were. But most Americans who became seniors were expected to take care of themselves. And we need to ask ourselves, what has happened to the price of health care since the government assumed responsibility of taking care of all Americans over a certain age? What has happened to our health care since the emergence of Medicare? Today, I dare say the price of health care is so high that it is inconceivable that most of our seniors can take care of themselves. Before Medicare, people were expected, if they could, to take care of themselves. Medicare came in and decided to take care of everybody. Now, almost nobody is able to take care of themselves. Of course, the massive escalation of health care prices have hit the rest of the population as well as our seniors. Now, the same can be expected, I might add, of the price of prescription drugs if, indeed, we end up having the government take over, providing prescription drugs for all seniors, whether or not those seniors can afford to take care of themselves. What will happen is the price of drugs will soar, not only for seniors who will be paid for by the government, but by everyone else as well, again, making it even more difficult for people, for American citizens, to take care of their own health needs. Last week, I introduced a bill entitled the Medical Independence, Privacy, and Innovation Act of 2003. This legislation combines a creative mix of market-oriented reforms that will encourage independence and, hence, wise personal medical care choices. If enacted, this legislation will further expand the protection of our medical care privacy. It makes long overdue changes in the Federal Drug Administration procedures that will encourage innovation and invention of new pharmaceuticals and, thus, will have a major effect on bringing down the cost of health care. This legislation, if enacted, will expand the variety, quantity, and availability of medical innovation. It is innovation, new technology, and our creative genius that will enable Americans to overcome the monumental challenge of providing health care to the baby boomer generation as this generation slips into its senior years. Today, the entire system of health care delivery needs to be reshaped if we are to prevent a collapse as the baby boomer generation begins to retire and to go on Medicare. In my legislation, I propose a program of reforms based on sound economic principles that are vital to improving medical care in America. It assures that people make choices for themselves rather than accept bureaucratic or political mandates. Today, nonseniors, as with seniors, in fact, find that health care decisions are being taken out of their hands. So even our nonseniors now, much less our seniors, are finding that they do not control their own destiny. They do not make those health care decisions that are so important to their lives. What we have done to the nonseniors in America, while co-opting the decision of every senior in America by just suggesting no one will be taking care of themselves, even those who could, we have now taken over full responsibility and taken the decision out of their hands; but we are doing that, in a way, to the people before they become seniors. What we have done is structured a system where the employer has become the primary source of a health care service through employer- based health insurance plans. That is a fact of life, and we just had to accept it. Well, unfortunately, it means so many resources and so much power has been co-opted that consumer sovereignty and responsibility has been all but negated. Most people really do not have a choice. It is what the boss offers. If the boss offers it, it is take it or leave it. There is an old economic truth, by the way, and that is, if the cost of a private or public good approach is zero, that means if you are being offered something and there is no cost to you taking advantage of it, there will be overuse and a waste of that good. Today's system leaves us with almost no personal choices, but it leaves us with a system that does not rely at all on personal responsibility. We have no choices, and there is no personal responsibility as part of the system. It leaves people, American citizens, with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness and resigned to whatever is going to happen to them that is totally inconsistent with our heritage as a free people. We spend more and more money on health care. We spend, in fact, more money on health care supposedly than any other country of the world. So as you are listening to people debate the issue of Medicare and debate the issue of prescription drugs and debate the issues of health care in America, remember we already spend more money by far than any other country of the world. Perhaps part of this is due to the fact that individual responsibility has all been extracted from the system because what it is is we spend more money but we do not have the best health care system in the world and our people are not getting what they pay for or what is being paid for in the United States of America. We have, as I say, all but extracted from our system the idea of individual responsibility and personal authority over one's destiny, not to mention, of course, the profiteering and exploitation of the system by lawyers. Now, it is time to make a new approach and our system and my bill does not reflect on the exploitation of our system by lawyers. That is another bill. That is a whole different area. But those are obviously one group of people who siphon money out of the system that should be going to people's health care. It is time to take a new approach and, again, over and above the medical malpractice situation. It is time to take a new approach and what we need, for example, in my legislation, I am proposing that we establish medical checking accounts that incorporate both deductions and credits into our system so that our people will be free to control their own destinies. Many American families would benefit through the ideas that I am proposing in my legislation. They would benefit by being able to purchase high deductible catastrophic health insurance plans and pay for the year to year or day to day doctor, dentist and pharmaceutical costs out of a medical checking account. I have sat in my office with self-employed constituents who would love to be able to design their own package of medical care coverage. This approach would protect their family against the huge costs of serious medical illness, of accidents or some type of illness or disease, but it would allow them to pay out of their pocket for normal month to month costs. Now, imagine how the intelligently a consumer spending his money would help to limit overspending and over-utilization of insurance coverage. Imagine in a society where individual families could shop around for medical insurance plans that suit their needs and not have to squeeze their life-styles into their employer options. My bill would, for example, in the end and it would end the unfair discrimination against individuals who seek independent alternatives to their employer health insurance plans that are mandated in many big businesses or many normal businesses as well, I might add. It would naturally integrate market discipline through personal choice and responsibility into Medicare spending. My plan creates a medical checking account plan where the account base of $4,000 per family or $2,000 for an individual is built with tax deductible dollars and the estimated yearly variable costs are built in with a $1,000 tax credit replenished on a yearly basis. Now, we are beginning to find out that once we have been relegated, as we are in our current system, to cogs in a machine, either big government or big business machine, that the rights of privacy are no longer paramount or even considered. My legislation would reestablish the principle that a person owns his own medical history and must consent before it is passed on to others. The emergence of big government and big insurance as the dominant force in health care has eroded the ideas of medical privacy, if not totally just extinguished it. It is time to swing the pendulum back. My bill restores the issue of prior consent and protects the private relationship information relationship between patient and doctor. It eliminates loopholes in the current law that will result in unsolicited merchandising, disclosures of private medical information and the diminishing privacy for millions of Americans. Americans have visited their local pharmacy and many millions of have visited the pharmacy in the past several months and have been asked to sign a new HIPAA notice. Do these Americans realize that what they are signing is a set of rules that undermines their right to disclose or not to disclose their private and personal medical history? This country was at one time based on the principle that you owned your medical history and that your property is your property and without your concept that that information should not be placed in the hands of another, whether that person is in big government or private corporations. We need to go back to that principle. When big government starts taking the power, of course, to protect us from ourselves, and that is what they always say, they are trying to protect us from ourselves, not just protect the people who cannot help themselves but protect everybody. They are protecting us from ourselves, you better watch out. The government can and is protecting us to death. Not from death. They are protecting us to death. Today, for example, FDA approval standards require new pharmaceuticals not just be safe, new pharmaceuticals coming on the market, the requirement is not that they be safe, they have to be nearly 100 percent effective for everyone. It is a 96 percent efficacy rate that is demanded by the Federal Government. That makes it dramatically longer more difficult and more costly for a new drug to get on the mark. By doing this we are condemning hundreds of thousands of people to needless suffering with these overly high standards, we create hurdles to development of new drugs urgently needed and we end up preventing the use of drugs that are already available to help people, but it might only help 75 percent of the people. But if it only helps 75 percent, that cannot go on the market because the rule is it has to be 96 percent effective. No, this is not fair and it is not right. And it is no coincidence that families of victims of leukemia, cancer, AIDS and other diseases plead to no avail for the abilities to use drugs that were legally available throughout the world. I have sat if my office with constituents who have children with leukemia or siblings with AIDS or patients with cancer who beg for us to do something to allow them to have those pharmaceutical products that are available to people in other countries. Tragically at the same time, as new drugs are provided, or excuse me, are approved for both safety and efficacy, those drugs who do manage to jump all the hurdles and become effective for almost everybody, it ends up where the price is sky high and very few people can afford them. Then there is the case, of course, where inventors often place on their shelves and innovators and researchers and developers and scientists, they put on their shelves unused and undeveloped many innovative potential technologies and products because they can not afford the exorbitant costs of passing all of these FDA efficacy tests and are making it absolutely prove that 96 percent of the people will be totally cured by this drug. Well, that makes no sense if 85 percent of the people are going to be cured by a drug, and I have sat in my office with inventors who have told me horror stories of these new inventions that they have but they will not bring them out because they cannot jump over these FDA hurdles. Well, why does the FDA regulation concerning, for example, drug cocktailing today block the availability of new innovation? Why are we so afraid of new innovation? That new invasion can be set on the standard of it does no harm. I am proposing that we have the standard of it does no harm rather than a 96 percent or 100 percent efficacy rate. That is, it seems to me that that is what we should leave in the hands of the American people, the right to choose drugs that will do them no harm and they should have a right to take them if they feel, especially with the doctor's prescription that they can take that drug and treat themselves even if only 85 percent are cured rather than 96 percent. Today, websites, consumer interest groups, investigative reporting will make the people of our country, with the help of their doctors who can help them with prescriptions and give them advice, they help the American people fully able to make these choices that were not possibly available to them or maybe the American people could not do it in the past. Another oddity in the current system that drives up the price of drugs, not just this 96 percent efficacy standard that is insisted upon, one thing that drives up the price for drugs for Americans is the way we deal with the ownership rights of inventors, of those very same inventors and innovators that develop new drugs and find new ways of treating people more efficiently and for less costs in the long run. What we do, if an individual or a corporation invests tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in developing a new health alternative, all too often it takes years for them to get through this FAA approval process and the other governmental restrictions, and by the time a new drug or health care technology can be sold to the American people, almost all of the ownership time that the innovator and the patent owner has has been used up. So you only have about 20 years or 17 years with a patent, and if it takes them 15 years to get through the process, the company has to immediately charge a huge amount of money for that drug in order to cover its cost of development, to get it back, and then, of course, the drug has been held up for all of these other years. So it has not been available to the public; and then, of course, when it gets on the market we end up putting the company in a situation where it has to charge even more money to recoup its investment. My bill speeds up the process. It basically establishes that the patent clock does not start ticking against that company until the drug can be put on the market, until it is actually sold. Thus, new drugs, rather than waiting for 20 years or waiting for 15 years, can be put on the market sooner because people want to get this thing on the market because they have lowered those FDA restrictions and the company will make money over that time period. My bill also makes sure that once that patent term runs out, unlike today, there are many legal maneuvers these companies can play in order to keep the generic drug manufacturers from coming in and producing their drug. We eliminate those maneuvers. So what we have done is put a drug available on the market and in the hands of the American consumer earlier and cheaper, and then we make sure that the drug companies can make a profit, and we end up making sure that the generic manufacturers can jump in earlier without being deterred by legal maneuvers. In the end, my bill gives the people more access, more time with the drug. It can cure more people. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, will be available to be treated with a new, innovative approach, drug, or a new health technology if my legislation sets these new standards and we move forward with a system based on those standards, rather than protecting the people of the United States to death, which is precisely what we have been doing. When we hear the FDA say we are approving the drug today and it is going to save the lives of 10,000 people a year who are dying from this disease, and then you find out it is taking 10 years for the drug to get on the market, that FDA official has just admitted that they have been in the process of participating in the unnecessary death of 100,000 people. That is ridiculous. As we expand the ability of our drug innovators to create and make available new drugs that will, under my legislation, be protected, they will be able to make a profit at what they are doing; and the public will actually have more choice in their hands, and what we need to know, by the way, on the other hand, if the taxpayers end up financing, and there are some drug companies, we have to admit, they get money from the government to try to develop new drugs, they are subsidized by the taxpayers in developing new drugs. My bill will say if a company does that, if a private company does that, they will be subject to price controls, meaning if Uncle Sam pays the price of research and development, Uncle Sam will tell you what is a reasonable price to have on that drug; and the consumers will be protected right off the bat, even though there will be a reasonable profit margin made as well, but my bill insists that the government then put a reasonable price on that drug if the taxpayers did pay for that research. If a company pays for its own research and development, which we want to encourage more companies to do, they will not be limited by this type of price control. By encouraging private investment, and whether it is in the development and research of drugs or in other types of health care technology, we will thus be increasing the supply of health care of those things in our society which treat people's illnesses. By increasing that supply, it should help bring down the cost and thus the price of health care to our people. More new drugs and more new technology that can help bring health to our people being introduced on the market, that means a healthier life and a more affordable healthy life for our people. The medical reform bill I have introduced is a creative package of reforms. I urge all of the Members and fellow colleagues to study these proposals and to support this legislation. As health care costs are obviously going up and even ordinary Americans are struggling to pay the bill and many Americans, of course, cannot pay it all, it is imperative that we begin to seriously think about new approaches to health care. If the only thing that comes to us while we are looking at the Medicare system and the problem of health care in America is just the only thing we come up with is spending more and more money, we are going to increase the demand for drugs in our society. For example, if all we are doing is taking now a financial situation where the people who can pay for their own health care and their own prescriptions do so and we end up having the government take over all of that, we are going to end up not only dramatically increasing the price of drugs for the government but those people outside the government, younger people, the price of their drugs will dramatically go up. No, we cannot just simply handle this Medicare system, of course, by dramatically increasing the price of drugs, which will happen, will make sure the Medicare goes bankrupt much earlier than is scheduled. Right now, in the outyears, we can try to do something to keep Medicare solvent. If we are just going to take responsibility for everyone, even the people who can take care of themselves in terms of a drug benefit, it is going to bankrupt the system; and we will all be worse off, and the price of drugs will soar for ordinary families who are not seniors. We ignore half the problem if we only try to spend money. We need to free up the supply end of the medical care system, the supply of people who will be producing more health care for America. Yet we also have to be, of course, concerned about the escalating costs; but we cannot be stampeded into easy answers, quick fixes, because those just spending more money without creating any innovation in the system or any reforms in the system, it will make all of our problems worse. Backing up the Federal dump truck and just pouring in a mammoth load of tax money is not a quick fix. It will not work; and with new expenditures, it is going to bankrupt the system and cause the price of drugs to go sky high for all the American people, not just the seniors. No, the tooth fairy is not going to leave the money that is going to be spent on health care and improving our health care system under our pillow. Each and every one of us will pay. So it is irresponsible not to try to make the system more competitive, less bureaucratic, more innovative as we are talk about expanding Medicare and trying to take care of those people who need prescription drugs but cannot afford it. Our focus should be on those who cannot afford it rather than coopting this whole field and trying to take care of everybody. A government that tries to do everything for everybody is not going to be able to do anything for anybody in the long run as this economic insanity takes hold and has its effect on our society. We are going to make our problems for insurance worse if we do not try to make our system more effective and cost effective. One last note about health care in America. In recent years, Americans have witnessed an explosion of alternative health care health-related nutrition, acupuncture, chiropractic, vitamins, exercise, mental health programs that are based on self-help and individual responsibility. These are exciting, new alternatives; and most of them are not even covered by insurance, much less being paid for by the tax dollars. The American people need to have these available to them, these and other vehicles for a good healthy life; and we must use mass communications and the Internet to make sure our people know what their alternatives are, but instead, now what are we focusing on here in the Federal Government, instead we are just trying to focus on spending more money. New opportunities are needed. We do not need to just regulate these new approaches and these new things that people can do for health care. We do not need to regulate it, control it or ration it. We need, like my legislation will do, is to open up new opportunities. My legislation is based on the principles of freedom and the incentives of the market. This at least will have to be part of the solution, if not the entire solution, we seek to the challenges we face today.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, before my colleagues leave, let me just note that that quote from Newt Gingrich that was bandied around earlier, we have seen that quote used many times, and those of us who have been who have seen the full quote know that that quote was taken out of context and often Mr. Gingrich pointed that out as an example of the abuse of the public trust by presenting something that was totally misrepresented.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I hope the public is paying attention to this debate. If we had major cities throughout this country, they are refusing to cooperate with the INS and other people who are trying to protect us from illegal aliens that may be coming in to do terrorist acts, they should not be getting funds from this government. We are trying to ask them to comply to protect our citizens when we are given that type of a description. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) to give him a chance to answer some of these absurd charges.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Reclaiming my time, the purpose of this amendment is clear. We are trying to have cooperation throughout the country in a matter that is vital to our national security and the safety of our people. If there are people in those governments, in those cities that are refusing to cooperate with us, refusing to permit those who are responsible for protecting our borders to get assistance, they should not be getting funds. This is how we will encourage them to get involved and to help protect America.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, shortly after I was elected to Congress 15 years ago, I went to the jungles of Burma and met with a group of young people who were then struggling for freedom and democracy in their country. They showed me a picture of Thomas Jefferson and said, We do not like Karl Marx. We want to have a government like you have in the United States, where people are free. I will never forget that. They were up against one of the most brutal dictatorships in history, the SLORC regime, the military dictatorship that runs the country of Burma, although they would like to call it Myanmar. The bottom line is the SLORC dictatorship is still in power after all of these years, and they have just put under arrest Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the true heroes of freedom on this planet, a Nobel Prize winner. Aung San Suu Kyi, we do not know where she is. She is under arrest. They murdered and brutalized many of the democratic activists there. Today, this Congress needs to be aware of what is going on in Burma, and we must warn the dictators in Burma they will not get away with the dirty deed if they have touched one hair on the head of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 191, 108th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the Dreier amendment. I, too, signed that letter in 1993, and I have regretted it ever since. Unlike the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier), who has not seemed to have learned his lessons on this, the bottom line is this is exactly the same issue. I signed that letter in 1993 because I was promised that there would be no transfer of technology for military use that could be in any way threatening to the United States. And you know what happened? Yes, because the satellite industry wanted to sell satellites to Communist China and the end result was our missile technology was transferred to Communist China and as the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) said, we now have MIRVs based on our technology, that technology, aimed at the United States. This is a travesty. The same will happen if we do not put these types of restrictions on supercomputers. The bottom line is there is an obsession with open trade to Communist China driving policy here. We need to put heavy restrictions on those countries that could be potential enemies, like Communist China, while opening up free trade with nonbelligerent countries that do not pose a threat to us. Vote ``no'' on the Dreier amendment. Keep us safe.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on International Relations be discharged from further consideration of the Senate bill (S. 243) concerning participation of Taiwan in the World Health Organization, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, for approximately 5 years I warned this body about the threat that the Taliban regime posed to the United States and the free world and the threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network, which was then operating out of Afghanistan. For years I was a voice in the wilderness; and later it was found, of course, that those warnings should have been heeded. Tonight, I rise to alert my colleagues that our State Department may well be in the process of snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory in Afghanistan. First and foremost, let us note that we, the American people, have not done right by the people of Afghanistan. These poor people, in their war-torn land, they again have helped us out, but again we have not stepped forward with the type of commitment to rebuild their country and to help them rebuild what would have been warranted by the sacrifices they have made. Their bravery and their sacrifice helped defeat, not just helped defeat, it dramatically and specifically defeated the Soviet Army that was occupying their country, and that defeat of the Soviet Army was a major factor in the end of the Cold War. After the Cold War and after the Soviet Army left, we walked a way to leave them amidst land mines and rubble. However, after we were attacked 10 years later by the Taliban and the al Qaeda, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, which are the northern tribes, you might say, of Afghanistan, rallied to our side and were instrumental in eliminating the Taliban regime and defeating al Qaeda. Without their support, we would have lost many hundreds, if not thousands, of troops in Afghanistan. These brave people, however, after they helped us defeat the Soviet Union, then they helped us defeat the Taliban, these brave people are still sleeping in the rubble. We have not built, as Newt Gingrich noted recently, one new mile of road in Afghanistan. Three weeks ago, I was in Afghanistan and drove across the country on the same roads, the hole-pocked roads and horrible conditions that have existed there for years. Not one mile of new road, not one new energy project has been built, although most all Afghans live in the darkness of a nonelectric world. We need to offer them a way out of their despair. We need to let them know that America's word counts and that they can count on us because they have helped us. We need to repay our debt to the people of Afghanistan. We need to offer them a way to lay down their rifles and pick up shovels and start rebuilding their country. Instead, we have not done what is right by the people of Afghanistan, and our State Department seems to be not competent to get that job done, because for a year and a half the job has not been proceeding as it should. Instead, our State Department is, what? Our State Department is pushing that our allies in the war against the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, should, without reservation, disarm and dismantle their military forces; this at a time when those people who sided with the Taliban could well take over the central government and as the Taliban are still skirmishing throughout the country periodically. Yet our State Department wants our allies to disarm. By the way, our allies, and I visited them 1 month ago, want one thing and one thing only: the Northern Alliance, those who fought with us against the Taliban, are asking only that they have the right to elect their local leaders, their local mayors and provision leaders. That is what they are asking for. Is that not understandable? Is this not what America is all about? It is funny that our State Department, however, is pushing a system that is totally contrary to the American experience. They, instead, are insisting that Afghanistan have, get this, a French-like centralized system of government, in which the provision leaders and the local leaders would be appointed. The local police chief is appointed by the centralized government in Kabul, the capital city. The school masters are appointed by the centralized government in Kabul. This is not freedom. This is not what America is all about. Yet our State Department pushes in exactly the wrong direction. We need to oversee what the State Department is doing in Afghanistan before it collapses and before the heroin production in that country destroys any hope for those people to have a decent life in the future.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let me note that one of the prior speakers from the other side of the aisle was talking about the tax cut going to the richest part of America, which they defined as any family earning over $75,000 a year. Now, I would hope that every working family out there, where a man and woman working as hard as they do in order to make ends meet, realizes that if their total family income is over $75,000, the people on this side of the aisle have been labeling them as the rich, as the wealthy, as the people who need to be exploited in order to help all the other people. This is quite disturbing. It is certainly disturbing to me. I do not come from a wealthy family and the people I know work really hard in order to have a family income of $75,000 a year. Let me note that in our package, we are hearing a complaint that we are helping families that earn $75,000 a year, we are hearing complaints we have included a child tax credit, we are hearing a complaint we have ended the marriage penalty tax, that we have tried to give the seniors a little relief on their earnings limitations, things that were dramatically reversed in the opposite direction during the Clinton years when the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress and the presidency. They just went to work on all of the ordinary Americans. Of course, ordinary Americans are anyone who earns under $75,000. But if you earned $75,000 a year, you are the enemy and you are the target, according to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. But that is not the subject I wish to talk about today. Just very quickly, let me note I have spent a great deal of time in Afghanistan over the years. People in this body understand that I have taken special care with the issue of Afghanistan. I warned this body for years during the Clinton administration that we had to do something about the Taliban or it would come back to hurt us, and it did, in a big way on September 11, when 3,000 of our own people were slaughtered by an attack that had been based in Afghanistan. I rise today to warn my colleagues that the situation in Afghanistan is not going in the right way. Although much progress has been made, there are some things we need to worry about. Let us remember that the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, some of the same people, these mujahedin fighters who fought against the Soviet Union, and I was there in Afghanistan at the time with them, those very same people were recruited by this administration, by the United States, to help us defeat the Taliban and drive al Qaeda, which was a terrorist gang headed by bin Laden, out of Afghanistan. Their bravery, along with that of our Special Forces teams, had a magnificent victory in Afghanistan. We drove them out; but since that time, we have not done what is right by the Afghan people again. When they helped us drive out the Soviet Union troops and end the Cold War, we let them sleep in the rubble. There has not been the progress in helping them rebuild their country in Afghanistan that they need to experience. America needs to pay attention to this. There are prices to pay when we do not do what is right. The heroin crop in Afghanistan has quadrupled over the last year and a half. That is because the people are desperate. They have no other source of income. We have to go in there and help those people rebuild their country, and we are not doing so. What is worse than that is our embassy, under the control of the United States State Department, is pushing to undermine the Northern Alliance that drove out the Taliban and defeated al Qaeda, they are undermining these brave militia men and instead, shifting power over to another group in Afghanistan, many of whom were allied with the Taliban. Now, if you think that is screwed up, it is hard to fathom when you take a look at it. What the people in the northern part of Afghanistan are looking for is the right to elect their own provincial leaders, their governors, and their own mayors and city councilmen; they are asking for that right before they would disarm. Our embassy is pushing a centralized system on the people of Afghanistan modeled after the French, of all people, where the government, the central government would appoint the heads of the local police and the schools and whatever. Well, no wonder the Northern Alliance who fought the Taliban are not willing to give up their arms until they know they have a right to cast ballots to determine their own destiny. Our State Department, for some reason, does not have faith in the American system of government to the point that we are willing to share that with the people of Afghanistan. We need to keep track of what is going on over there. The people in Congress, the administration needs to keep closer track of what is happening and make sure that democracy works and the people of Afghanistan can share in the prosperity of this era.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, tonight, I thought that I would discuss some of the lessons learned since 9/11 and discuss some of the current events that we are seeing happen on a daily basis and put them into some historical perspective. First of all, 9/11. Let us note that 9/11 was not an unavoidable natural occurrence. 9/11, an attack upon the United States by an organized group of terrorists, happened because past American policies toward Afghanistan were wrong and because during the Clinton administration our general policy of weakness led our enemies to the conclusion that they could attack the United States of America and murder our people by the thousands and that there would not be the type of repercussions that they have had to endure since they did attack our country on 9/11. I have spoken extensively about the past policies about Afghanistan which led to the establishment of a Taliban, an extremist Islamic state in Afghanistan, which then was used as a base of operations for a terrorist organization that was committed to attacking the United States of America and killing as many of us as possible. I have also spoken in the past about 9/11 representing not only a mistake in policies but also a major, major screw-up on the part of America's intelligence organizations. 9/11, while the policies that we had as a country helped lead us to that situation, we should have at least been protected by our CIA, the FBI, and the national security administration. But what happened? We were blind-sided. We were blind-sided not just in an attack that cost the lives of thousands of Americans, but we were attacked by an organization, the al Qaeda, which had already been declared the number one enemy of the United States and the number one target of our intelligence community. The number one target of America's intelligence community, a community made up of organizations: the CIA, the FBI, the NASA, DIA and many others. These people receive tens of billions of dollars a year in order to protect us; yet the number one target of American intelligence carried off an extremely complicated plot against the United States that spent tens of millions of dollars putting a minimum of 100, if not hundreds, of people in the field who must have known about this; yet they were able to carry it off and to bring down the Trade Towers in New York and killing 3,000 of our fellow Americans. Let me add, had this happened a half an hour later or an hour later, it would have been tens of thousands of Americans and not 3,000 Americans. Let me just note that we have learned a lesson from 9/11. The CIA since 9/11, I am happy to report, has gone to great lengths to make up for their shortcomings prior to 9/11. The same with the FBI. The same with NASA. Apparently they learned the lesson. I remember when I worked in the Reagan administration back in the 1980s; and in 1983, almost just about 20 years, a little more than 20 years ago, right as we speak, Ronald Reagan put America's military forces on alert and sent them to the island country of Grenada in the Caribbean, which was going through a turmoil when a radical group of Communists took over that country. I remember that inside, that was a victory supposedly for the Cold War, and we did return democracy to Grenada; but the liberation of Grenada itself was a catastrophe. All of our military forces found that they could not communicate with one another. Most of the casualties we suffered, and we suffered almost as many casualties in Grenada as we suffered in taking on Iraq and Afghanistan and Grenada was just a tiny little country, but most of the casualties in the liberation of Grenada were friendly fire casualties. Most of those who died in our military, it was because our own military people were not cooperating. They learned that lesson, I might add. The leaders of our military took it to heart what they had seen and how embarrassed they were that they were not being serious about their job, and they reconfigured our national military; and today we have such a superb military, headed by, I might add, a man of vision and a decisive leader, Mr. Rumsfeld; and Secretary Rumsfeld and the leadership of our military have just given us one of the most profound military victories, one of the most astounding military victories in the history not only of the United States but of the world. We took on, with very few casualties on our part, fewer than 200 casualties, we liberated Afghanistan, and we liberated the people of Iraq and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan was, of course, thousands of warriors against us and a terrorist army of thousands. Then in Iraq, we had one of the 10 biggest armies in the world, one of the biggest armies in that region who were certainly a major force; yet we took them on in just a matter of weeks. That is because we did what was necessary to reform our system back in the 1980s and to equip our people with the technology they needed. The CIA, the FBI, the NSA are now going through that same kind of reform and soul-searching that took place in the 80s after Grenada. Already there have been some major successes. Many of them have not been announced to the public, but our CIA, for example, I know thwarted an assassination attempt on King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan, and there were no praises sung for this; but yet people in the know realized that since 9/11 and over these last few months and last years we have seen a new attitude emerge. Perhaps it is due to the leadership our President, President Bush, is giving; and I would certainly say that our President has risen to the occasion and since 9/11 has shown himself to be a world-class leader and historic leader of our country. This President has learned we should, when possible, have our local allies do the fighting for us. Let them fight for their freedom, and let us be there to help them. This is what President Bush, the strategy he laid forward in Afghanistan; and it is very similar to the strategy that Ronald Reagan laid down and was called the Reagan doctrine and how he ended the Cold War. Reagan's doctrine was let us not just do it just with the American military might, but let us depend on helping local people win their own freedom; and that is what we did in Afghanistan, and President Bush also made sure that the people of Iraq knew that our purpose was there to help them liberate themselves, not to occupy their country. Of course, we learned, and it was confirmed, that America's investment in weapons technology was well worth it, and we did go through a time in the 1990s in our predecessor's administration when there were dramatic decreases in the defense budget; and yes, certain decreases in the defense budget were warranted after the Cold War, but we managed to keep those technology weapons alive; and those developments of the laser systems that are offshoots of missile defense and other types of programs, we managed to keep them in the budget and not just is the defense budget being used as a social welfare distributing system for different systems for different groups that were preferred that our people wanted to make political fronts with. Instead, we kept it a fighting unit; and that was one of the accomplishments of this Congress, as well as working with the Clinton administration. What did that lead us to? It led us to fewer than 200 American deaths in liberating Afghanistan and Iraq. What an enormous achievement that was. Let us now make sure that we pay attention to what was learned; also what have we learned from what we have gone through, what we should have learned that we should not pay attention to the liberal whiners who always have seemed to be around. There is a myth that during the Reagan years the Cold War was ended because of some kind of bipartisan cooperation. I will tell my colleagues from the inside of the White House, we did not see much bipartisan cooperation. Yes, there were about one-fourth of the Democrats who were willing to stand by the administration when the fighting was hardest with the Communists; but by and large, every time Ronald Reagan tried to make a stand against the Communists during his 8 years as President, there was an active group of people on the other side of the aisle who were doing their best to fight those who were fighting Communism. They were anti-, anti-Communists; and it is a miracle that the President was able to succeed in the way he did with the type of people who were undermining his efforts. The Communists invested in a whole bunch of intermediate range missiles they put into Europe and immediately said let us have a freeze and left them in a position of superiority, and then we have the nuclear freeze movement which was supported by, unfortunately, many people on the other side of the aisle; and Ronald Reagan stepped forward and said, no way, we are not going to freeze them into a superior position, and then offered, as Ronald Reagan always does and always did, a positive alternative, let us bring the number of missiles down to zero, let us agree to eliminate the class of intermediate range of missiles in Europe which, by the way, he was called names. He was made fun of. They called him an amiable dunce. They were suggesting he does not know what he is talking about, the Russians will never agree to that; and of course, within 5 years there was an agreement signed with the Russians to do precisely that. These whiners have been with us every time America takes a stand, and it is not just against Communism. We are talking about, these are people predicting doom whenever we try to act. It seems there are people that are part of our political system, part of our political spectrum here that have a compulsive lack of faith in America itself, and they were suggesting all kinds of horrible scenarios of what was going to happen if we took a stand and acted against Saddam Hussein; and they were the ones claiming within a very short period of time after Afghanistan started, oh, are we bogging down in Afghanistan. After 1 week of fighting, well, remember, let us not forget these predictions and let us learn from them. It was predicted that there would be a major tank battle, Saddam's Republican Guard was going to engage us in a major tank battle outside of Baghdad. Whatever happened to that? I will tell my colleagues what happened to it. We had the technology to destroy most of those tanks before they started moving up to any position where they could threaten our troops. What tank battles there were were limited. Our people were very brave; but by and large, that major tank battle, historic tank battle that would be on the scale of El Alamein and all the rest never happened. What about the gas attacks and the nuclear attacks that were going to vaporize our soldiers, this fear which immobilized so many people. We have to stop our President from putting our troops in or they were going to be gassed and vaporized by nuclear weapons. That, of course, never happened. Some ask what happened to the weapons of mass destruction the President was talking about? Let me just note I have been a strong supporter of the President from the very beginning. I have called for eliminating Saddam Hussein for many years. When I was first elected is when we went to the war in the Gulf and I told Dick Cheney and Colin Powell then not to start this fight unless we are going to finish it. And yes, I have been critical of President Clinton, and now let us be critical of President Bush's father. He did not finish the job. He left us vulnerable, and left a homicidal maniac in charge of the country of Iraq. Well, that was not the responsible course of action, just like many things that Clinton did were not responsible, but we had to make up for it. I have never suggested that Saddam Hussein had to have weapons of mass destruction for us to justify joining with the people of Iraq or helping liberate the people of Iraq from this dictator or monster because he had a blood grudge against us. It was prudent for us to eliminate that dictator before he was able to amass these mountains of money that were predicted because of the oil revenues that Iraq could expect in the future years, these tens of billions of dollars. He would have bought himself a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon. He would not have to build it; he would have bought chemical and biological weapons. He would have overthrown the Saudis with the tens of billions of dollars of oil money that he was about to reap. No, it made no sense to leave that man there. We can be proud our President made the stand, even while everyone was throwing up their hands and nitpicking and naysaying and predicting horrible things. How many times did we hear: Why did we rush to this? The President took month after month after month trying to work it out peacefully, and then he was castigated as if he was rushing into war. We should remember that because those who were predicting weeks of house-to-house combat, building by building would have to be taken, and urban fighting. That never materialized. It never materialized. We kept saying the people of Iraq do not want to live in a dictatorship. And yes, President Saddam Hussein did have his gang of thugs that were somewhat of a threat, but the people of Iraq have by and large been on our side. What about the massive demonstrations that were going to be precipitated by America's adventurism overseas? And of course as the war ran its course, opposition actually declined. The number of people going into these demonstrations and saying and having all of these very negative thoughts about our country and troop deployment, they decreased over the days of this military operation. And of course now that it has ended in a very successful way, no one is out demonstrating. Remember if we did this, there were predictions that there would be chaos and destabilization throughout the Arab world and the region and there in the Persian Gulf. Oh, the instability this would create. There would be wars springing up everywhere and regimes falling and it would create a much less safe world. That did not happen, did it? But we heard all of these predictions. Let us not forget them. Let us not forget who was making those predictions and the speeches we heard right here on this floor by people making these very same predictions and doing their best to make sure that the American people had no confidence in their President's leadership during this vital moment in our history. So what about the chaos and destabilization? It did not happen. What about the urban fighting that was supposed to go on for weeks? It did not happen. What about the vaporization of our troops with gas and nuclear weapons? That did not happen. What about the Shiites rising up? There have been a few Shiite demonstrations, and most have been religious marches because under Saddam Hussein they were restricted from demonstrating their faith for 20 years. Finally, there are hundreds of thousands of them marching for their religious faith; but the left wing of this country, the news media, ends up characterizing that as being anti-American. No, the power play by some Shiites who are politically motivated in that direction numbered a couple thousand people, and we have made it clear to the people of Iraq that they are going to elect their own leaders and we are going to set up a system, we are going to work with them for a couple of years, and set up the institutions necessary for them to elect their own leaders. Mr. Speaker, I have no doubt some Shiites are going to be elected, but they are not going to be elected in the name of establishing a theocracy like Iran. They just got rid of their dictatorship. Clearly the people of Iraq would like to live in freedom; and yes, there are some powermongers there, but we are not going to let them get away with it, and the people of Iraq are not going to let them pressure their way into power. Remember the predictions about the Turks. They were going to invade the Kurdish areas in the northern part of Iraq. These Turks were going to come in and grab the oil and there would be bloodshed and chaos. Funny thing, that prediction did not come true either. Just remember who made these predictions. All I am suggesting is let us learn, America, from what we have just gone through so when people get up in the future and undercut a President who is trying to make a tough stand to secure the blessings of peace and liberty for future Americans we will be able to stick behind him and we will know that the naysayers will always be with us, and the naysayers will always try to undercut a President that is acting on the behalf of the United States of America perhaps because psychologically they just down deep have such little faith in our own system because they only see the flaws in America. I see the flaws. There is no doubt that America has a multitude of flaws. Look, we had slavery in this country. We had slavery long after Great Britain eliminated slavery. We have had racism in this country over the years. Let me point out that race relations to almost all of the other countries in the world in those days, they were just as bad as we were; but that does not excuse us, a country that Thomas Jefferson wrote down such wonderful founding principles as ``Rights are given by God to every person.'' These are children of God, and we have not done right by many people here. American Indians were not treated well, we know that. We know over the years we have had our share of corruption, but we know we, as Americans, have other things that we can be so proud of, that the average person has had so much more freedom here than in other countries. Even though there has been racial discrimination, we are going to try to work to end that. We have made a lot of progress in this. Our Army during the Gulf War, if we look at who made up that Army, it was a little bit of America. Every American was there and represented, the leadership of the Army and the leadership of our country with Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld standing side by side along with our President, George Bush. We have throughout the administration and in Congress seen these great examples of progress, and throughout the countryside and cities throughout our country, there is not the racial hatred and animosity that there was. I personally sense since 9/11 a wonderful rebirth, if not a rebirth, maybe it is a birth for the first time, of a feeling of goodwill among all Americans. We have gone through these times before, but I think 9/11 has unified us as never before, and we are building upon that. This President is building upon that goodwill to try to help us improve this country. One day in the Los Angeles Times, when we talk about what the President has put up with and the pessimism, and this is the day before yesterday, they had a front-page story talking about the quagmire that we are in in Iraq. Talk about naysayers. But what happened just today, look at the Los Angeles Times. The very next day they have a story detailing the emergence of new leadership in Iraq. Something is wrong here. We cannot have a story one day where we are in the middle of a quagmire and the next day have a new democratic leadership emerging in a country that has been under a dictatorship for so long. The problem is we had critics and naysayers who have been speaking out in loud voices and repeatedly they have been wrong, they have been wrong, and they have been wrong. What we need to do tonight and what we must do in the weeks and months and years ahead is not forget what they have been saying and how wrong they have been so we will not listen to them and take their advice and base it on pessimism, on just undue pessimism in the future. America in the future, as we have had now, and thank God we have had a President that is not afraid to act, we cannot be afraid to act if we are to be a prosperous people and if we are to live at peace and if our freedom is to be protected. We should have no apologies about acting in our own country's interest. Let me repeat that because many of the people who are attacking our President are doing it based on some global strategy or some notion of what is going to happen in the world. We should have no compulsion about holding back when it is our country's interest, and I mean long- term interest. In the long-term interest of our country supporting the cause of freedom, supporting the cause of peace and freedom in this world, of liberty and justice for all as we say, this is in America's interest. Ronald Reagan demonstrated that acting on the behalf of freedom, acting on behalf of liberty and justice, helping to support the various people struggling against the Soviet Union and supporting those people that believed in democracy, that helped end the Cold War; and now President Bush has clearly demonstrated that America's most powerful and successful strategy is not based on coalition building and some international acceptance or global strategy. Instead, our most powerful and successful strategy is one that is based on promoting human freedom. Look at what happened in the last few months. Our foreign policy establishment seems obsessed with pleasing the international foreign policy establishment. Our own State Department, these are the people who are supposed to be doing our bidding, their liberal allies in the press and the leadership of the Democratic Party, had George W. Bush jumping through hoops. And as President of the United States, they had him going from here to there groveling before the United Nations and begging our NATO allies to join with us or to at least give us your approval. Why should we need the approval of the United Nations or of our NATO allies to go forward and to do what is in our national security interest as long as that is consistent with promoting the cause of human freedom? By the way, again, if we are not furthering the cause of freedom and democracy, we probably should have second thoughts about what we are doing. But our enemies are the enemies of freedom. The Taliban in Afghanistan, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, these people are enemies of the United States because we represent what is best in Western civilization. We do not and should not need the approval of the United Nations to defend ourselves and to support other people who are struggling for freedom and democracy in far-off lands. Unfortunately, this has almost become a cliche about the United Nations. People think of the United Nations as our best hope. The United Nations is not our best hope. The United Nations is our worst nightmare. I hope the American people after looking at what has happened these last few months will understand that too is a lesson that we need to have learned. The United Nations is still with countries that are vicious, ugly dictatorships at the same level of Saddam Hussein. The world's worst human rights abuser, Communist China, has a veto power over anything the United Nations will do. We see the United Nations putting countries up that are dictatorships and human rights abusers. Fidel Castro ends up on the Human Rights Commission; and we end up being removed. Syria, you name it, these countries that do not have democratic governments, do not permit political opposition, end up in pivotal, decision-making positions. Let us note that if we depend on the United Nations, we are going to pay a price anytime we have to do anything; and in this case it took so long, it almost undermined our entire effort in Iraq because it was just taking so much time, it would have put us in the middle of the summer and it would have compromised the entire military operation. But our President, trying to prove that he is going to do everything he can to bend over backwards in order to convince our allies and convince the United Nations that we respected their institutional prerogatives. But what does it mean when you get the U.N. behind what you are doing? What it means is you have had to buy off the Communist Chinese. I do not know if we made any agreement, if our government ended up making an agreement with Communist China. I do not know. But I will tell you in the future, look very closely when people have a United Nations-based strategy. Perhaps in order for us to do something in our national security, they may demand that we never mention Tibet again. So we just write off the people of Tibet. Or how about other religious believers in China? Is that worth the price of getting their little approval in a vote in the United Nations? I say that is baloney. I say that is not worth it at all. There is no trade-off there. To get them to vote in the United Nations, that is worthy of us giving up millions of people in China who believe in God and so we will never mention it because we do not want to break our word to them that we are going to let them run their internal affairs now? And then there are people in our State Department and throughout academe and the press who are trying to build this global strategy for America, yes, based on the United Nations which, as I say, very precarious, but then they want to, of course, set up an economic organization, the world trading organization, that will control trade and economic decisions so that we will have economic harmony, another great dream just like the United Nations. But if you look real close, it is a disaster. It is a disaster waiting to happen. We will have panels set up that will be making decisions for what? It will be making decisions on whether or not our economic policies are consistent with the international agreements. Who will be on the policy boards and the commissions? And who will be running these structures and making these determinations? People from third-world countries, like Burma. How about Nigeria? How about Bolivia or Colombia? Do we really want countries like this to be making determinations if we are in compliance with international economic regulations and agreements? The people who will be serving on these boards from those countries will be bought off in a heartbeat by the Communist Chinese. We will not buy them off because we are moral. We want to go by the system. But they will not think twice; our enemies and the thugs of the world will not think twice about this. You do not want to go through the U.N., and you do not want to set up a world organization run by countries that are not democratic in order to depend on a prosperity and a peace for the people of the United States of America. We also do not want to rely on NATO and our NATO allies anymore. NATO served its purpose, and its purpose was to deter the Soviets from invading western Europe and that is done. That is totally done. The Soviet Union is gone. Now we have a democratic Russia, a Russia who is struggling to be democratic. We do not need NATO to protect the peace. NATO is a bureaucracy, and now we find that our NATO allies whom we believe that we can depend upon are not dependable allies. We find out that NATO is worthless, that France, Germany and Belgium and even our neighbor Canada are fair-weather friends, fair-weather friends who we cannot depend upon to help us when our liberty is being threatened and when we feel compelled to act. We have just spent in the last decade billions of dollars to help these NATO allies out in the Balkans, which is part of Europe, part of their responsibility. Yet we spent billions of dollars, put our military people at risk, and they in return gave us the back of their hand. By the way, we still have thousands of troops in Kosovo, thousands of troops in Kosovo. Yet our German, our French, our Belgian and other allies cannot get themselves to help us at a time like this. We did have, and I will say something inspiring, a new concept. As the President moved forward, he said we will have an alliance of the willing. That was extraordinarily inspiring. Great Britain, of course, stood with us. Yes, I think Tony Blair should be given an honorary citizenship in the United States of America. He and the rest of the British people are our great friends. But the people of Spain stood with us. Poland. We found our friends in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic and, yes, we found that our Aussie friends, the Australians, stood by us and proved themselves to be there when it counted. Let me note, when the Australians come to us, I may be a bit suspicious about the World Trade Organization and setting up a grand alliance with everybody in the world, democratic or not, and having those rules apply and be applied by an international organization controlled by all these countries. I have no problem with the free trade agreement with Australia. They have proven themselves to be our friends and they are democratic. What about one other country that I have not mentioned here a bit, a lesson that we may have learned in these last few months? What about Russia? They were not with us, were they? I have paid close attention to Russia; and I have separated it out from the rest in terms of an analysis of their potential and how we should relate to them. The Russians, I believe, first and foremost wanted to be on our side in the crisis from which we have just emerged. They requested, however, that if they would be on our side in any attack on Iraq, that the $8 billion that Iraq owes to Russia should not be canceled. They have a very weak economy right now. They are struggling in Russia. It was a very reasonable request for them to make, that if they were going to stand side by side with us, that we not let their economy take the $8 billion hit of a cancellation of the debt the Iraqis owed the Russians. They also said, let us be part of rebuilding Iraq. Those were two reasonable requests. We did not follow through. We could have had Russia and the United States standing together. It would have been an awesome picture to the world. It would have presented a picture of strength that would have been very difficult for anyone ever to ignore. It would have shown a new alliance for democracy in the world. It was just a very sad thing; and I believe that if the administration has made mistakes, and all of us do, it was a mistake in passing up this opportunity and not following through on it and putting the energy into making it work with Russia as we could have. Just as I say, the vision of Russia and the United States standing there would have so overshadowed the French and the Germans and the other whiners in Belgium and elsewhere, that everyone would have known it is a totally new world. But with Russia, sort of playing games with them and being sort of part of their team, it did give a greater image of strength to those opposing us than need be. Let me just note this. That does not mean we had to just go along. We could be creative. We could just go along and say, The Iraqis can't cancel their debt to Russia. I understand some of our diplomats were saying that, saying if they end up having to pay the debt to Russia, that is, if they end up paying the debt, it will be a burden around the new democratic Iraqi government's neck. We cannot burden the Iraqi people with having to pay back Russia so that is why we did not take them up on that offer. That is what I have heard. That is just a one- dimensional look at this issue. If we honestly felt that we wanted to have a democratic Iraq that was capable of acting without having to have that type of burden around their neck, we should have then told Russia, we will support your cancellation of Soviet-era debts to the German and French banks. That has been a burden around their neck all this time. We could have fulfilled their desire in a different way using a creative approach by letting the Russians cancel the debt to the German and French banks. That would have sent a very good message and at the same time protected the new democratic government in Iraq from having too much debt and a millstone around its neck. But we did not do it. As I say, it is something that is past now; but we are going to have to work to make up for that what, I believe, is a mistake. There are ways that we can work with Russia. We need to help the reformers in Russia. I know that just a couple of weeks ago there was a liberal reformer who was assassinated in Russia, showing us that we have got to stand by the good people in Russia who are struggling and even putting their lives at risk to try to build a more democratic and more decent place in what was the Soviet Union. So let us give the Russians a way to work in partnership with us and not to be considered an outsider. We did not do that during this Gulf War, this Gulf War II; we did not go out of our way to do that as we should have. The Columbia shuttle disaster, however, let me note, I am not only on the Committee on International Relations but I am also the chairman of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee of Science, so I oversee NASA. Let me say, the Columbia shuttle disaster, yes, it was a horrible thing and sometimes, as the Chinese say, opportunity and challenges are part of the same word. We have great opportunities in how we are going to deal with the shuttle disaster Columbia. It permits us a chance to work even closer with Russia in the satellite area and in the area of the international Space Station and space transportation. They have rocket engines in Russia that are superior to the rocket engines of the United States. We need not spend money to develop rocket engines in the United States when we can buy that type of capability from the Russians themselves. Let us let them get into the game of selling their services to the world; and when they do have something to sell, let us not cut them out by protecting our own industries. Our industries have to compete with them. Instead of spending money replicating what the Russians can do, let us spend our research dollars developing newer technologies and leapfrog technologies that will put us ahead of the game. I know that there are some restrictions on Russia, especially in cooperating with Russia in this arena, in the space arena, because Russia is building a nuclear power plant for the Iranians. I agree, they should not be doing that. The Iranians have oil and natural gas. They do not need a nuclear power plant. There is only one reason that they would want that and that would be to build a nuclear weapon and we will not permit that to happen. But we cannot just lay it on Russia, It is in our interest not to have the nuclear power plant built, and walk away, just like we were saying to them, you are going to have to join us and have the risk of losing that $8 billion in Iraq, you are going to have to absorb the cost. This is a country that is just struggling to have a decent economy to help their people raise their standard of living which has been going down for years. Now they have a chance to raise it. We should not be trying to undercut them, but let us use some creativity here. If they cannot build a nuclear power plant for Iran because Iran is controlled by hostile powers, let us help the Russians build a nuclear power plant for Turkey. Or how about Australia? Or how about the Philippines? These are countries that need electricity. We could probably arrange and guarantee a loan from the World Bank, and it would not even cost us any money. We would just have to help guarantee it and arrange the business deal, and then the Russians could build that; and they would be building something that would not be a threat to us like it is in Iran, and then we could move forward with a number of space-related projects in which both countries would benefit. But it takes creativity and a commitment to freedom in American foreign policy. And the struggle for freedom, the direction of Russia, is one of the pivotal fights in our time. If Russia goes in the way of democracy in the West and builds up these economic relations with the people in the Western democracies, especially in the United States, our world will prosper and will live in peace. If it goes the opposite direction, if it begins to more align itself with China, which has an anti-view of Western Civilization and is a belligerent country to democracy or if it starts to align itself with the thugs of the world, then there will be a lot of trouble in the world ahead and the Russian people and the American people will suffer because of it. So let us have a freedom-based policy and work with those people in Russia and elsewhere looking to promote a freer society. Unfortunately, that is not the basis of what our State Department uses to decide upon American foreign policy. After looking at the American State Department up close now for about 15 years, actually probably more like 20 years now because it has been 7 years in the Reagan White House, I would say that if there is one word that is the goal of the State Department, it is not globalism, it is stability. They believe in a foreign policy which they call a pragmatic foreign policy, which is based on a formula for stability. Ironically, and this is what is so ironic, pragmatism as a strategy does not work. It is idealism and the ideals of freedom and democracy that work, that help to build a more stable world. We receive stability when we put freedom and liberty and justice into the equation while we are trying to figure out what we should be doing in various parts of the world; and it is only when we have liberty and justice as part of that decision-making concept that we will find that peace is possible. For example, in Kosovo here we are still. Years and years and years we have been in Kosovo. I remember when I was down on the floor predicting that it was going to be a decade before we got out of Kosovo, and we were assured by all those people who voted for this at President Clinton's request, it will be 1 year, a 1-year deployment. Sure. We should not forget that either. We should remember all the lessons we have learned over these last few years. We are still in Kosovo, and do the Members know why we are in Kosovo? We have got thousands of troops in Kosovo because our State Department has basically convinced themselves that we cannot recognize Kosovo's right to have their own country. In Kosovo 90 percent of them are Muslims; they are Albanian extraction. They want to have their own country just like the Croatians want their own country, just like the Slovenians want their own country, and they have got their own little country; and there is no reason why they cannot, except that would make the Serbs really mad. So in order for the Serbs not to get angry, to make sure that there is not a crisis, to ensure stability of the moment, we have kept our forces in Kosovo all of this time. We should have worked a long time ago in order to build a consensus and reach compromises within the Kosovo society for there to be free elections and there to be a referendum; and the people of Kosovo should decide with a vote, with their own vote, whether or not Kosovo should be independent. I have no doubt that they would vote for their independence, and then we should support them in building their own defense forces to protect their borders and just let the Serbs know that, I am sorry, they cannot attack the Kosovars. They cannot attack the Macedonians; and whatever they declare their national sovereignty, they cannot attack the Slovenians, the Bosnians. I am sorry, but Serbia has got to be enough for them. By the way, each one of those countries has a map of a greater Serbia or a greater Albania or a greater Croatia, claiming that their borders used to be way down here and thus they should control it even though the vast majority of the people in those areas are no longer Croatian or Serbian or whatever, no. Where the majority of people want to be part of a government, we let them vote on it; and if they want their independence, they have a right to declare their independence. God gave them the right to control their own destiny through the ballot box. That is what the United States of America is supposed to be all about. We developed a system which works. It is practical, but the basis of the system is an understanding that people have a right to control their own destiny through the ballot box, and they have a right to live in peace and freedom and dignity. In Afghanistan we are making the same kind of mistake as we are making in Kosovo. And our State Department has again proven itself totally incapable of appreciating America's experience and America's ideals of how we solve things. In Kosovo they will not let these people have their own country even though the vast majority of them want their own country because it might make the Serbs mad. In Afghanistan there are many, many different ethnic groups. And in Afghanistan the major ethnic groups, they call them the Northern Alliance right after we were attacked, and this Northern Alliance is an alliance of ethnic groups, which compose about 50 percent of the population; they were the ones who fought the Taliban, those people, and they have militias. And their militias and their generals, which they call them warlords, which is very pejorative, they fought the Taliban and kicked the Taliban out while a huge chunk of the population of Afghanistan did not fight the Taliban. They sort of sat it out. They are called Pashtans, and the Pashtans of course share Pakistan and Afghanistan. And guess what? Now our State Department, so we do not make the Pakistanis mad, we have to have the Pashtans in power in Afghanistan. That is not what this is all about. We believe in democracy. We believe in people controlling their own destiny through the ballot box. Our State Department is pushing the French model in Afghanistan. The French model is when there is a strong central government and it appoints the police chiefs, the head of the local schools, the people who provide local services; and they do not have local government really. They have a strong central government. What do the Members think about these five ethnic groups that fought alongside the United States against the Taliban and we are telling them they have to disarm and basically let the strong central government, which is now dominated by another ethnic group who did not fight the Taliban, control them? I recently went to Afghanistan and helped work out a compromise, and the compromise is very easy. The warlords supposedly, their ethnic groups or their militias, will disband their armies. They will demobilize. They will disarm. But they have to be guaranteed the right to elect their own mayors and city councils, to elect their own provincial governors, just like here in the United States. Why is it the State Department cannot understand what made America successful? This is what made America successful. We do not centralize power in order to bring about a more peaceful society. We diffuse power and we let everybody share in it, and we have people electing the people who will most affect them. I will tell the Members I do not understand why the State Department does not understand, but they are pushing the wrong way in Afghanistan. It will not work there, and it is going to cause more trouble and it is not working. It is keeping us tied up in Kosovo. We need to make some decisions here, and we should not be leaving it up to the professionals of the State Department. The professionals at the State Department, when they are negotiating, they are not negotiating, as I have just pointed out, from the idea of what is best for America or even what is most consistent with the American way of government. Instead, they have an ideal of their own in mind. It is a worldwide pragmatic organized world based with United Nations, with the WTO, with all of these world health organizations, world trade organizations, and this is the dream of the people who are representing us. So when we go into negotiations and we try to have our government directed one way or the other, we end up not having America's interest and America's ideals in place. They are not part of the bargaining table. The people on the other side of the bargaining table, they know that they are bargaining for what is good for their country. Our people are bargaining for what is good for the world, what is good for the global vision of the world. A few years ago the Euro was in trouble. The Euro was in trouble. The dollar of the European Economic Alliance was in trouble. Why is it in our interest to help them build an economic coalition that is aimed at undercutting us? Why should we build our competitors up in Europe? Why should we help them build a currency that permits them to undercut the United States of America? Why did we do this? And this was about 4 years ago, the Euro was collapsing, and we took money from our own account here in the United States that should be aimed at stabilizing the American dollar, and we took it over there and we stabilized the Euro. We should not want our competitors to do well. Our job is to watch out for the people of the United States of America. Instead of these large grandiose worldwide treaties based on economics, we should be going individually to countries like Australia, for example, and having agreements, Japan and elsewhere, having bilateral agreements that we will insist on being enforced with other democratic countries rather than putting ourselves at the mercy, at the mercy, of organizations that will be controlled by people from countries that do not share our ideals. Yet our own State Department has this type of world as their goal. Let me just note that during the time when our President was trying to do the bidding of the State Department and trying to jump through the hoops, trying to have a strategy based on what they wanted him to do, things seemed to bog down. It looked like we were weak and that our President lost his purpose and was not going to be following through. He kept saying that he was, but it became tiresome. It was frightening for a moment to think that he might back down. Instead, that all changed when the President gave a speech before the American Enterprise Institute, and that is when he outlined the moral basis, not just the pragmatic basis. They were going to have regime change. Remember? They were going to have regime change. That was their goal. When he spoke at the American Enterprise Institute, and I believe that was the end of February, he outlined for the people of the world and for the people of Iraq that our goal was freedom and justice for the people of Iraq and that we will only stay there long enough to help them build a democratic system. After that our effort was energized. After that there was no stopping the United States of America because we were the freedom fighters, and those who opposed Saddam Hussein and wanted democracy were our allies, and the President allied himself with those people all over the world who believed in freedom and justice and democracy, and most importantly he allied himself with the people in Iraq who believed in those things. Yes, it is when we stay true to our ideals, it is when we have a morally based, a freedom-based foreign policy that America becomes unstoppable because our goal is not to dominate the world but to create, yes, a better world that is based on freedom, not based on more bureaucratic organizations, but on freedom and on people treating each other decently, on liberty and justice for all, as we have said many times. We would hope that as we face these challenges in the future, that the people of the United States remember what we just went through and learn the lessons. Our military learned the lessons of the seventies and eighties. Our CIA and our intelligence agencies have learned the lessons of 9/11. But the American people need to learn the lessons of what we have just been through. There will always be naysayers. There will be pessimists, people who do not believe in our system. There will be people who believe in a global approach, but not believe in America as a leader. But we must lead the way. The President of the United States is doing a terrific job for us, but we as the American people must stand behind any President that is willing to act in the cause of freedom. We must lead the world, because, if we do not, there will be no courage on the part of the people who believe in freedom and justice anywhere in the world, unless they know that the United States is with them, and we are with everyone throughout the world who would side with liberty and justice and against tyranny.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would just like to take this opportunity to point out to my fellow colleagues and those who are listening in on C-SPAN, as well as those reading the Congressional Record, the tremendous courage it takes for the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) to be leading this effort. This is a thankless effort. The gentleman just suggested that when you add up these various different approaches of things that are going on that it is minimizing the importance of citizenship, and that perhaps this is being done by design. Well, it is clear there is a coalition of a very powerful people in this country who do not really believe in the type of United States of America and the laws of the population we grew up with, but instead have more of a ``global concept'' and are willing to basically experiment with the rights, if not discard the rights, of American citizens in order to create this new dream. These are powerful people. These are people who have attacked the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo). They are people that have great deals of financial resources and political power. I personally am just rising tonight, when I saw the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) here again trying to be like Paul Revere and spreading the word and talking about the danger ahead of us, I wanted to come down here and let everyone know what a risk the gentleman is taking, that he is doing this at great personal expense. The gentleman could be a ``go-along, get-along'' guy. Those of us who try to make waves here, I try to be very amicable and I know the gentleman from Colorado does as well. He has a wonderful laugh and smile. We try to be fun-loving, good people, with good hearts and of good will; but at the same time, we are having to tackle issues that mean life and death to the people of the United States. It means whether our people are going to have their children go to school or not, whether the standard of living of our people is going to decline. Why do we have a situation where dramatically during the 1990s, there was such a huge increase in the GNP in our country, and, yes, the top 20 percent of our country did benefit, but the working people of this country, by and large, were kept behind? If you really trace it back, and the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) has done this many times before, we have looked at the charts, illegal immigration, this overwhelming flood of illegal immigration in the 1990s dragged down the standard of living, dragged down any pressure for an increase in wages for the working people. I know that I do not come from a wealthy family, and I am sure the gentleman from Colorado does not either. We identify with working people. There is no doubt that in the Federal Government there are many people who come from the elite of our society. But our job is to watch out for the working people and the regular human beings who go off to fight the wars, and go to work every day, and our good citizens by way of every race, of every ethnic group, of every religion. America, what we are so proud of, it is the fact we are a combination of the whole world; but we are working together, and because we have this love of liberty and justice and these ideals that keep us together. That is why it is so ever-important to recognize that we are a unit, that Americans are a family; and if we have policies that are bringing in strangers, even though they may be very good strangers and very positive people, from the outside, but it is happening in such a magnitude as to prevent our people from sharing in this great prosperity that we had in the 1990s, keeping wages down, that it is wrong. It is a wrong thing. Ordinary people are having their standard of living brought down by helping strangers. Our first and foremost job is to watch out for America and Americans and do what is right. Sometimes it takes a very courageous person to do that, and the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) has demonstrated that time and again. For those of you who do not know, the gentleman has made every hit list of every radical group, and other political groups, unfortunately. People that should know better have targeted the gentleman. I am very proud of him tonight, and I hope all of you who are looking at the Congressional Record and are seeing this on C-SPAN and the rest of the colleagues here will give Mr. Tancredo his due. I have my own Special Order later on tonight after the gentleman is done, but I thought I would make sure everyone understands what a great job the gentleman is doing for our country and for each of them.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to identify myself with the gentleman's remarks and I am very happy I was able to yield those 5 minutes because I could not agree more with the gentleman. Tonight I would like to discuss a matter very similar to what we were just hearing. I would like to talk about American foreign policy. First and foremost, when we talk about America and talk about some of our basic policies, let us note that America is not like every other country. America is a unique country in the world, and I have always believed that God has a special place for the United States of America. Why is this? Because America, unlike other countries, represents every ethnic group, every religion, every race and every kind of human being that you can imagine. We represent the world here. We have people from all over the world who have come here to live in freedom and enjoy opportunity, to better the lives of their family, and they have come here from every place in the world to try to live in harmony with one another, but also to enjoy our freedom and opportunity. We have this place here between two oceans, this incredible land that was given to us that has vast natural resources. Our Founding Fathers understood this. They thought that there was divine province in the establishment of America and that gives us a very special responsibility to the world. And also a responsibility to those Founding Fathers was not to waste this gift that they have given us. Our Founding Fathers were extraordinary people. And they had a profound understanding of human nature and of special organization. The Declaration of Independence, to this day, is the most revolutionary of all national charters. It talks about God-given rights, about the consent of the governed, as these two things being the basis of freedom, of liberty. Later, our Constitution would detail a system of checks and balances and of limited and layered government that would protect the freedom of the people while ensuring our society stability and our society the type of government it would need to progress. We were, back as long as our history started, back in 1776, through our history and on and all the way till today, the hope of the world. We were the hope to those people of the world who longed for liberty and justice, the people who hoped in the world that there was a better way, and we were there to show them a better way, and they could identify with us because we were the world. We are the people who represent every race and every religion. And we do not define ourselves by just a geographic area but instead by beliefs in liberty and justice for all. Beliefs that are at the heart of our system, instead of a religion or a race or even a locale. This is not to say that the United States of America has been a perfect country. And I disagree with many of my conservative friends who try to idealize the past of our country and try to say that we were a bunch of puritan moralists or something like that and very religious. I am a religious person myself, but it is very easy to see that many Americans were very rambunctious people over the years ago. There were hell raisers. There were frontiersmen, and there were saloons and brothels in our history and gangsters. That does not mean those things should overshadow the fact that there were also churches and educators and philanthropists and people that helped each other and cared about each other. Let us not say it was perfect here. Let us also remember that the taint of slavery was around from the very beginning, and how we treated our black population and the minority populations in the past should be an area of concern for us. We should not ignore it. We should try to make sure that we commit ourselves for making up for that in building a better America for everybody in the future. But there was racism in the past and there is some racism that exists even today that we should be working on because we want America to live up to its promise. We have seen in the past scandals and manipulation of government that match some of the very best in various parts of the world. But the fact is we also know that at the basis of America is a system of government that gives us the opportunity to correct the mistakes and to make things better and a system of ideals that call out for all Americans to respect each other and to work together to build a better country and to build a better world. Constant vigilance on the part of our citizens and the part of every American is required to make sure that our country continues to be free and that we continue to solve problems as they emerge, and that is something that sometimes is a little hard to do. I mean, when you talk about constant vigilance, sometimes it becomes nothing more than a slogan or some sort of a phase that may or may not have any meaning. But what we have to do, I mean by constant vigilance is we have to make sure our people focus on these ideals of our country and focus on our government enough to make sure we are doing what is right. And it is so easy for our citizens in a free country just to focus their own lives because they are free to do so, and they are free to try to improve the lives of their children. Thus, they are out with their children at ball games and they are helping their communities and, thus, sometimes these good and decent people who make up America just rely on our government, and especially on our government and the people who work for our government to do what is right, to do what is right domestically, but also to do what is right in those areas that our people really cannot focus on and know all the details on American foreign policy. I would say that America has, at times, let the American people down, but the American people have not let us down. American people have remained the most charitable people in the world, bar none, and I know that. I am, by the way, just not talking about our government and the government's services. I do not consider that a reflection of benevolence. I consider that to be a bureaucratic solution. And quite often some government programs are just established so we do not have to think about a problem, and it is a way of soothing many people. The liberals soothe their consciences by setting up a program that may not work but at least they can say they are trying to work on a program rather than trying to do something in and of themselves. But our people are willing to commit themselves. And they have committed themselves and provide more charity and more help to each other and more help to people in need around the world than any other people. Of course, liberals do not like to admit this because they claim we do not give enough; and, of course, most of the time they are just basing it on the level of foreign aid or the level of donations we make to the United Nations. But that is not the way to judge the benevolence of the people. No, that is not the way to judge at all. How much are we giving as individuals to help people in need? Many of our groups, many ethnic groups, as I say, from various countries that return to their homeland where they came from or from where their ancestors came from and give all sorts of assistance, thousands and thousands of dollars and any help, not only just in times of crisis but in other times. This is part of the benevolence of our country that these people return to their homeland and give vast sums of money to help the people who were left behind. Also, we have given in emergency situations. There are people that can always come to the United States and we are always there to help. But also in a crisis, but also what we have not been given credit for is our people are willing to go out and put their lives on the line to preserve the peace of the world. That we never get credit for. In fact, even in the United Nations, when we sent peacekeepers out, our peacekeepers and the amount of money that they cost, we pick up their paycheck and we are not even accredited for that in the United Nations as a contribution to the United Nations. And then my liberal colleagues who criticize us for not giving what we should to the U.N. If you count in all the money for the peacekeeping operations and all what we have done to keep peace in the world, we probably give more money than the rest of them combined. But we need to make sure that when the United States takes a stand in the world, that we are doing it in a way that is consistent with the ideals of our Founding Fathers. I am here tonight to discuss a morally-based American foreign policy. It is more than simply giving money in foreign aid or even benevolently giving money voluntarily as citizens to help people in other countries, and even more than participating in U.N. peacekeeping operations. It is what we stand for and what our government pushes for overseas and what we fight for at times. In the last 100 years, we have saved the democratic world. We have saved western civilization in World War I in World War II. In the Cold War it was the American people that stepped forward to save civilization at a time of great peril. The threats that led to World War II and the threat during that Second World War and during the Cold War, of course, were much easier to understand than many of the challenges that we face today. Today many of those challenges are less definable and they are less understandable. So today our role is much more complicated. But we must be willing to act just as our Americans moved in the last generation and the generations before were willing to act. In order to be a force in this world for the ideals that were laid forth back in 1776 by our country's founders and to make this world a more peaceful place and a place, because if this world is not peaceful, America will pay a price. Because technology has shrunk this planet so that each of us are affected when a terrorist or a dictator has his way in different parts of this planet. So we must be willing to pay the price, and that price is involvement and that price is engagement and that price is, yes, there is an economic price in having the technology and the weapons and the military that is capable of defending the United States and having the foreign policy establishment educated and committed to the ideals of the United States engaged in pushing the world in the right direction. September 11, I believe, was a result of bad policy. What we faced, the disaster there, and it was not a disaster that was a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster. And it was something that could have been averted had we had different policies. Yet, we had policies that led to 9-11. And in 9-11 we lost more people, there were more casualties in New York on September 11 than there were casualties by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the main target there, of course, were our soldiers and sailors, members of our military. So this heinous attack on 9-11 was much more brutal and much more aimed at our society and much more of an egregious assault on us than was the attack on Pearl Harbor. I would submit that, as I say, 9-11 need not have happened. It started with our policy in Afghanistan. And just a short brief on that. People understand I have had a long history in Afghanistan, from the time I worked in the Reagan White House. I was in the Reagan White House for 7 years. During that time, as part of Ronald Reagan's strategy to defeat the Soviet Empire and bring it down and prevent it from being a threat to the United States and the free people of the world, we supported people in Afghanistan and elsewhere who were fighting Soviet expansionism. We helped the Afghans fight against the Soviet Army that occupied their country. We provided them with weapons and equipment, and they fought bravely and courageously. It was their blood and their courage that helped end the Cold War because they drove the Soviets out of their country and broke the will of the communist bosses in Moscow. That is one of the major battles that helped us bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War so that we were able then to enjoy a decade of relative peace and prosperity. Yet the Afghans were left alone to fight each other in the rubble, with no assistance or help from the United States. We abandoned our Afghan friends after the Soviets left. We abandoned them because we made an agreement. I have not seen the agreement, but I am sure it was made. All the evidence is there. We made an agreement with the Pakistanis and the Saudis that they would be the ones to oversee Afghanistan. That in and of itself was not the right thing to do. It is the people of Afghanistan that we owed a debt to. It is the people of Afghanistan who fought bravely against the Soviets. Any agreement that was made about what would be happening in Afghanistan should have been focused on the consent of the governed, meaning the people of Afghanistan, and not a political power play among Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. So what ended up happening was that we simply left. We went and enjoyed our freedom and our prosperity at the expense of these people. What happened? Well, what emerged in Afghanistan was truly evil. It was a regime based on an extreme faction of Islam, based on the Wahhabi part of Islam, which is a very small faction of the Islamic religious faith. It was superimposed on them by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Having been in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets, and I was there working with the Afghans, fighting with the Afghans against Soviet troops back in 1988, I can tell you that those people are devout in their faith, but they are not fanatics like those that we picture when we think of the fanaticism of the Taliban. They were devout Muslims. They really hold God in their heart. They call God Allah, but it is the same that we say when we say God. They were not people who were insisting that everyone else pray the same way they did. But the Taliban, as I say, is a derivative of the Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia who were superimposed on Afghanistan; and they had no help from us. The people of Afghanistan had no help from us, and the Taliban took over Afghanistan and turned it into a horror story for the people of Afghanistan and a horrible threat for the people of the Western world. But the Taliban, did, as I say, did not just emerge in power. It was there because the United States policy permitted it to be or even acquiesced to it or even supported the creation of the Taliban in agreement with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. I worked for years, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and after the Soviets left Afghanistan, to try to offer Afghanistan some help. I went to every country around Afghanistan to get support for a return to Afghanistan of the old king, Zahir Shah, who had been overthrown by the Soviet puppets back in 1973. Zahir Shah had been king of that country for 40 years, and they had peace and they had prosperity. He was a very moderate force in that society. His wife actually took the burqa off and threw it into the street one day. So he was trying to bring more democratic government. He was trying to bring more liberalization of their society. But the communists manipulated the forces in that society, overthrew Zahir Shah with those forces, and then murdered the people who overthrew Zahir Shah and came to power themselves. And that is when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Zahir Shah is a fine man. The people of Afghanistan loved him. We could have brought him back. Had we supported him, had the United States supported bringing him back, he would have ushered in democracy into that country. That is what he was pledged to do. Yet our government wrote him off. And when I personally went to the countries around Afghanistan to try to get support for him rather than the Taliban, I was followed by a representative of the State Department at each of my meetings. At each of the meetings that I had with different political leaders in these countries, a representative of our embassy, meaning the United States State Department, was there saying Dana Rohrabacher is speaking for himself. He is not speaking for the United States of America. In other words, do not listen to Dana Rohrabacher. For anybody who wants to know who is to blame for 9-11, you can thank those State Department elitists who decided that the Taliban was better than King Zahir Shah and undercut every effort to bring a moderate government to Afghanistan. They are the ones, whether they were in Pakistan or whether they were in Turkmenistan or whether they were in various countries of the world where meetings were taking place, who undercut those efforts of the Taliban's enemies, or let us say those people who would just offer an alternative to the Taliban. Every time the State Department interceded. At one point, once the Taliban were in power, they became very vulnerable, because they had overstepped their bounds and their military had been defeated in the north and a swift reaction on the part of the anti-Taliban forces could have made the difference, could have eliminated them from power. President Clinton sent Bill Richardson, then our United Nations ambassador, and Under Secretary of State Inderforth to northern Afghanistan and convinced the anti-Taliban forces not to go into action but to seek a cease-fire, and to seek a cease-fire with an embargo of weapons, which would mean that they could talk out their differences. Well, of course, with an emissary from the President and people at that high level to go up to talk to these so-called warlords in the northern part of Afghanistan, naturally they acquiesced. And, of course, immediately the resupply of weapons began to the Taliban and the cease-fire was immediately violated as soon as the Taliban were replenished with their weapons supply by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We could have eliminated the Taliban then, or we could have prevented the Taliban from coming to power had we supported an alternative, like Zahir Shah. I was always so frustrated about this, because I knew that the United States Government had a policy of supporting or at least acquiescing to this monstrous regime. For years, I was asking for our Secretary of State Albright to provide the papers to me as a senior member of the Committee on International Relations to see about America's support for the Taliban. And, no, I could not get hold of them. I will have to say that some people on the other side of the aisle were very condescending towards me when I suggested we needed to see that because there might be support for the Taliban. Well, what happened recently? About 2 months ago the foreign minister of Pakistan came to visit in California and got up and publicly acknowledged that it was not just Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that created the Taliban, but it was the United States, your representatives were in the room, and so quit blaming Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Well, thank you, President Clinton. If there was a representative of the United States Government in the room, it was a representative of President Bill Clinton. It was a representative of our State Department. Want to ask who is responsible for 9-11? There you go. We now are dealing with national security threats that were passed on to us during the Clinton administration. The world lost respect for us, and they certainly did not fear us at all after 8 years of Bill Clinton. Human rights under that administration was turned into America's lowest priority. It became a joke in the sense that we would have the President of the United States going to China, talking about human rights, and then having business as usual, even though those same human rights violations were going on. Dealing with gangsters and dictators and the likes of the Taliban became the order of the day for 8 years under President Clinton. The number three man in bin Laden's terrorist operation, this operation that conducted the 9-11 attack on the United States, has told investigators that it was America's weak response to the embassy bombings, our embassies that were bombed in Africa, killing hundreds of people and many Americans, it was our tepid response to that, where we shot a few cruise missiles out into the desert, because we did not respond any more than that, it convinced these terrorists to move forward with their plan to attack the World Trade Center and kill thousands of Americans. That is the number three man in bin Laden's operation who has confirmed that that is what was on their mind. Well, thank God we now have a President who acts forcefully and thus will prevent gangsters and terrorists and people like the Taliban from thinking they can attack Americans and kill us by the thousands and get away with it. No, our President is sending another message. It is a message of strength; it is of resolve, moral courage, and principle. I am sure our President must know what Teddy Roosevelt said. One of Teddy Roosevelt's most favorite quotes of mine was, ``The greatest sin of all is to hit someone softly.'' You do not launch a couple of cruise missiles and hit the bare desert. After the attack on our embassies, they bombed a pharmaceutical factory that had nothing to do with the attack on our embassies. No, you do not do it that way. If someone attacks you and kills thousands of your people, you have got to act boldly, you have to act with courage, and you have to make them pay a price, or Americans will pay even higher prices in the years ahead. Again, thank God we now have a President that understands that principle. In the months after 9-11, the President rose to the occasion. But let me add that in the months after just being elected President, in his first few months, I had three separate discussions in the White House about a policy that might eliminate the Taliban. So I was involved in discussions with the White House, this White House, the Bush White House, prior to 9-11, trying to make sure that we would move forward. I was having a very receptive audience on how we could rid the world of the Taliban regime. The President was, as I say, and his staff, were very, very receptive. And then 9-11 happened. In fact, let me note that on 9-11 I called the National Security Adviser to the President. I actually called on 9-10, the day before the attack. Because of my contacts in Afghanistan and my analysis of what was going on, I realized our country was about to be attacked. I did not know exactly what form it would take, but I called the White House to warn the National Security Adviser. I called and I said this is an emergency, it is a national security emergency, I need to talk to Condoleezza Rice and the White House operative got back to me and said, Congressman, she is so busy today, but she will see you. He said she will see you tomorrow at 2 p.m. so on 9-11 I had an appointment at 2 p.m. in the afternoon to see Condoleezza Rice to warn her that our country was about to be attacked. But let me just say that after the attack on 9-11, our President rose to the occasion. He has been an incredibly impressive human being in the days since 9-11. He has pledged to the American people that he will hunt down every one of those people involved, those terrorists, those murderers who killed our people on 9-11, and that we will do everything necessary to protect America's national security, and that is just what he has been doing over this last year and a half. He has been handicapped, however, by the same State Department that traveled around after me all those years and stonewalled my efforts to get rid of the Taliban and to prevent them from getting into power, the same entrenched elite State Department is at play, and our President has had to deal with them all of this time in achieving his goals. They undermine elected officials whom they cannot control. And even with a world-class leader like Colin Powell at the helm, this entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy still seems to be in power and still has inordinate control over American foreign policy. Afghanistan is an example. Even from the outside, the policy that we had towards Afghanistan seemed disjointed. It looked a little bit disjointed in the days after 9-11. It took our President and Secretary Rumsfeld to push aside a State Department that was committed, and get this, our State Department after 9-11 was still committed to keeping the Taliban in power, even after 9-11. It took all of the effort, as I said, our President and Rumsfeld to push that policy aside and trash- can it. Let me note also, we were operating in Afghanistan after 9-11 almost blind. Members will hear that the CIA was involved in Afghanistan before the Green Berets, but let me tell Members and I cannot give the exact number but almost none, there was very limited CIA presence in Afghanistan. The State Department and the CIA did not know who the players were because they had pooh-poohed all of the anti-Taliban forces for so long they did not know who they were. The plan at that point that the State Department was pushing was to leave the Taliban in power and to send a huge military force, an American force in through the south using Pakistan as a base of operations, and take control of perhaps Kabul or a city in southern Afghanistan and then to negotiate with the Taliban who controls the entire countryside for the return of bin Laden. That would have been a disaster, and it was based on leaving the Taliban in power, people who hated us, people who turned their country into a staging area for a terrorist operation intentionally. They knew what was going on. They hated America and hated the west, and we were going to leave them in power? Well, let us put it this way. The best that our State Department could do and the CIA could do is probably that plan because they did not know anybody in the anti-Taliban forces. There was a team of people who went shortly after 9-11 to the Department of Defense, to the State Department, to the CIA, and made sure that our government at the highest levels knew the names and locations of those people who were fighting the Taliban who could provide thousands of fighters. We provided the names, the locations, the number of fighters available, and even the satellite telephone numbers of the so-called warlords who were in charge of tens of thousands of troops who would do our bidding on the battlefield against the Taliban. That small team that went there to advise our government were made up of people like Charlie Santos, Paul Behrends, Al Santoli, Dusty Rhoades and myself. Meeting after meeting took place, and all this information was transmitted. At the DOD, people went to work immediately to try to put in place a plan that could dislodge the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda. The group in the DOD that took the ball and ran with it include Paul Wolfowitz, Peter Rodman, Bill Lutti and several others who acted immediately on this opportunity to work with the people of Afghanistan to help them throw out their tyrants. We helped them liberate themselves from the tyranny of the Taliban. Thus, we accomplished our own foreign policy objectives by working with people and promoting our own ideals of freedom and democracy. What was put into place was Task Force Dagger, one of the most successful military operations in U.S. history. It was turned from a plan into an historical accomplishment by the courage, skill and hard work of unsung heroes, yes, some of them in the CIA, and yes, many of them in the special forces. Special forces heroes like Captain Nutsch became legendary in Afghanistan but unknown to the people of the United States. Thanks to people like Special Forces Captain Nutsch, we won an incredible victory in Afghanistan, losing only about 35 people to hostile fire. We should be proud of our defenders and grateful to the Afghans who fought with them and destroyed the Taliban and bin Laden's forces in Afghanistan. For a second time, these people in Afghanistan did our bidding, rose up and fought America's enemy and defeated that enemy. I recently visited the grave of a CIA officer who was there on the scene and helped fight this battle and helped organize this magnificent victory. I went to the grave of Mike Spann who was buried in Mazar-e- Sharif. I was there about 10 days ago. The local people are so grateful to Mike Spann they had a ceremony to honor him. They built a monument to him. It is a very inspiring monument because they realize that the Taliban oppressors would have never been defeated had the special forces teams not been there to help them with the logistic supplies and the forces that they needed to defeat the Taliban. But let us not forget that as the battle in Afghanistan progressed, voices were heard here that were less than supportive of what we were doing. This was even after 9-11. The pessimists and naysayers were at work and they started talking, even after a week or two, talking about a quagmire that we were in, and they started a propaganda campaign against, and they are the ones who came up with the word ``warlords,'' they started labeling our people and trying to find out what was wrong with those forces who were fighting with us rather than being grateful that we had people who were working with us to destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda who had murdered thousands of our people. Forces under commanders like General Dostum, Halli, Ata, Faheen, and Ishmail Khan led ground forces there in Afghanistan that drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and defeated the al Qaeda forces. I will let Members know the al Qaeda were the Taliban's old home people who were engaged in this sort of cult, which represented about 10 percent of the people. They were Afghans, but al Qaeda was made up of foreigners, many from Pakistan but many Arabs as well, who had come into Afghanistan to use Afghanistan as a base of operations against the west. But also, anyone in Afghanistan that raised their head in opposition to the Taliban were brutally murdered by bin Laden and his thugs. They were grateful when we came to help free them from these radical fanatics who were coming in from outside their country and murdering them to keep the Taliban in power. Yes, we can be grateful to those people in Afghanistan. We can also be grateful to our special forces and CIA, and we can be grateful to those people in the United States. Again, these things do not just happen. They happen because we have planned for them. What happened is we had the high-tech weapons system that we needed to do the job. Yes, Bill Clinton during his years did permit some of these weapons systems to be built. He dramatically cut the defense budget, but that is okay. These weapons systems were permitted within the budget left. But with those high-tech weapons systems, we were able, with the courage and cooperation and alliance with those people in Afghanistan, to get this job done. But what has happened in Afghanistan is not over. We need to do what is right diplomatically and make the right political decisions if we are to make sure that this does not happen all over again, that Afghanistan does not get drawn back into a morass of evil. What we must do first of all is help them rebuild their country. Our President has laid out a plan that has been very committed even through the Iraqi operation to making sure the people of Afghanistan have the help they need. We have not given them enough as of yet, and there have been bureaucratic roadblocks to the rebuilding of Afghanistan. Although there has been about $1 billion spent and there are signs that things will be getting better, the pace has been inexcusably slow. We need to speed that pace up, and we need to make sure that they can rebuild their country and their aqueducts, rebuild their roads and hospitals and schools. Mr. Speaker, ten days ago I was in Afghanistan. I drove about half the distance of that country on back roads, and I will tell Members it was a sight to see. There were burned out Russian tanks everywhere and rubble strewn. I saw a gang of kids, probably about 100 of them, and I stopped the car and went over to see them. I had an interpreter with me. It was kids who had arranged the rubble of a building that had been destroyed so they could sit down, and they were teaching each other to read and write. They were teaching each other to read and write sitting in the rubble. We need to work with those young people so they can learn to read and write, do their numbers, and so that they can be part of the community of nations, part of this great new world that we are building rather than be manipulated in ignorance by some extremist religious sect. We also need to really make solid and right decisions about what is going on politically. Let me note that those people who helped us defeat the Taliban were basically from the northern part of the country where there are five different ethnic groups. These are not warlords and warlord armies, these are ethnic group militias that knew they had to arm themselves to be safe, just like our forefathers armed themselves and had their militias. That represents about half of the country in the north. That represents 50 percent of the Afghan population. The other 50 percent of the Afghan population are Pashtuns. Their territory is along the Pakistani border. Because they represent 50 percent of it, they represent a much bigger portion. Thus, in a central government we can expect that the Pashtuns will have much more influence than those 5 ethnic groups in the north. But it was the ethnic groups in the north that were America's friends. They were the ones who put their lives on the line for us, and to a certain degree the Pashtuns did not fight very much at all; and, in fact, many of them were relatively sympathetic in one way or the other or at least acquiesced to the Taliban because they were cousins or whatever. This is what is happening today. Unfortunately, I am sad to report after my trip to Afghanistan, our government is again siding with those people who are not our friends, and they are trying to undercut our friends. The people who fought for us and helped liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban, those forces in the north, are being undermined, and they are doing everything they can to try to disarm those people even as skirmishes with the Taliban still occur in the southern part of the country. And of course our government, the United States Government, the State Department, if I can put that in a more correct term, is pushing to have a system in Afghanistan totally out of sync with the American experience. In fact, they are using the French model in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan what they are doing is asking for a strong central government that will appoint local leaders. That is not what we do in the United States. We have layered government. We have federalism. We have State and local people elected; thus, if someone takes over Washington, whether it is Bill Clinton or whoever, the whole country does not go crazy. They just say okay, we have different people in different parts of the country. We have checks and balances and separations of power. They want none of that in Afghanistan. They want a strong government that will be dominated by Pashtuns who were sympathetic to Taliban or dominated by an ethnic group that was sympathetic and at the expense of the people who fought for us. The answer is very simple. Let us look to the American experience. Let us stand for American principles. Let us not model it after France. Let us have a government that we can support in Afghanistan that gives those people freedom like we have in the United States to control their own destiny through the ballot box. And how should we do that? It is very simple. In Afghanistan let the people there enjoy the right to control their destiny through the ballot box through a federal system, and, that is, they should have the right to elect their local mayors like we do and like in Canada, like what is happening in Iraq. We are insisting they have a system in Iraq where the Kurds and the Shiites and the Sunnies all get to elect their local mayors and provincial governors, but the State Department in Afghanistan is insisting that we go the opposite direction. Why? Because a deal has been cut somewhere. That is what everybody believes. I have no evidence right in front of me that there is a deal any more than I had evidence for a long time that there was a deal with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia about the Taliban to begin with; but in the end if we follow what the State Department is trying to push on the people of Afghanistan, we will have a strong central government and the people in the north who are our greatest friends will be denied the right to elect their own local and provincial leaders. This is wrong. It is wrong, and it will not work. Our Government works because our Founding Fathers had an understanding of human nature. If people control their own police force or their own schools locally, they will be less threatened by a central government that is someone who controls it who is a bit different than they are, perhaps of a different ethnic group because that person only has control over the national army, which it should, and road systems and communication systems and health care and such that are of national importance, but the people locally can control their own destiny through the ballot box, through electing their own mayors and governors and control their police force. If a policeman is beating someone up, we call the mayor whom we have elected, and the mayor is not an appointee of Kabul. He is our friend because he has been elected there, and he will make sure that we are being treated right by our government. Or if our kids are not learning in school, I should not have to convince our State Department, Americans, that it is right for people to elect their own leaders, but yet that is what they are trying to foist on the people of Afghanistan, and of course there is a reaction from the north. The so-called warlords, are they going to disarm for that? When I was there, I went and talked to three of the so-called warlords. They are really people who are military leaders of militias of the various ethnic groups, and I got a terrific and a tremendous positive response to the idea of this, and this is what I have offered as a compromise, and of course our State Department, just like when I tried to offer the king as an alternative to the Taliban, I imagine they were trying to undercut this alternative all the way; and that is the military leaders in the north have agreed to disband their armies, to totally demobilize and to disarm if the constitution in Afghanistan, which our government is involved with pushing, guarantees the right of local people to vote and control their own destiny through the ballot box, meaning they can vote for their provincial governors and for their local city councils and mayors. Is that too much? These so-called warlords who we are going to hear being vilified over and over again, these warlords are willing to disarm, to trade in their bullets in exchange for ballots. Is that not a wonderful accomplishment? And of course I am pushing that as a compromise, and I would hope that our government, just as I know we had to shame the State Department into giving up its notion that the Taliban would stay in power, I hope that the State Department is made to understand that we are going to have a democratic system in Afghanistan that permits all the people guaranteed rights through the same sort of guarantees we have in the United States. We want to use the American model, not the French model, in Afghanistan. That is what will work. That is what we need to do, and I would hope that we do not have a corrupt deal with Pakistan again to try to force one group into a controlled situation of all of Afghanistan. That is the type of immoral decision-making and political power, wheeling and dealing that does not work. What works, fascinatingly enough, and makes it a more peaceful world and works for the security of our country is not wheeling and dealing pragmatism, which the State Department talks about, but instead principled, principled and moral decision-making. How about that? Pragmatism does not work. It does not make a better world. Principled and moral decision-making does. So, by the way, just let me just suggest that I think that we too can make it work not only in Afghanistan, but that same idea works with Iraq. Our President showed his incredible leadership and his strength and resolve in liberating Iraq. And as I say, we can help bring those people to a more democratic society and a society where they can elect their provincial leaders. That is our policy in Iraq to let provincial leaders be elected, their governors and their mayors, but not in Afghanistan. Whether or not Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is not relevant, and I know I keep getting asked this and my liberal friends keep pushing on this, when are we going to find the weapons of mass destruction? I do not care if we never find weapons of mass destruction. The fact is Saddam Hussein had a blood grudge against the people of the United States for what we did in eliminating him from power when he invaded Kuwait. We humiliated him in front of the world. He would have done everything possible to hurt and kill the people of the United States, the more power he got in his hands. And Iraq has vast new oil resources that are becoming available to it. Within a 5- year period had we not acted, Saddam Hussein would be the most economically powerful person not only in that region but in the world. And is there any doubt he would have used that power to overthrow the weak and the fat Saudi regime and thus he would have become even more powerful, perhaps the most powerful man on the Earth, and we were going to let that happen? A man who hated us and had a blood grudge against us? Maybe he did, maybe he did not have a nuclear weapons program; but with the tens of billions of dollars available to him, 5 years down the road he would have bought as many nuclear weapons from China or Korea as he wanted to buy. That was definitely a threat. And unlike President Clinton, our great President, George Bush, decided not just to pass it on to a future generation. Now that the people of America were focused and willing to do what was necessary for our security, President Bush prudently decided that taking Saddam Hussein out and working with the people of Iraq to build a democratic Iraq was the most important thing we could do for our national security, and I am sure that President Bush is going to leave to the next generation of Americans a world that is safer and more secure and with more opportunity than what his predecessor left the world with, which was he left us with every problem that he did not solve. I mean, President Clinton left us with the Taliban and al Qaeda; and, by the way, he also left us with a Korea that we now find has what? A nuclear weapon. By the way, the Clinton proposal that stopped the crisis over the nuclear weapons program in Korea was that President Clinton agreed to give lots and lots and lots of money to North Korea, one of the weirdest dictatorships in the world; and over the last 7 years, I guess it has been, over my objection and the gentleman from California's (Mr. Cox) and others, North Korea has been the largest recipient of American foreign aid of any country in Asia; and now they tell us, guess what, we fed their people, and they use their own money to develop a nuclear bomb. Surprise, surprise. If I have any complaint of our President during this crisis in our lead-up to Iraq was that he did not immediately talk about the moral basis for his decision-making. He was playing lots of games, and I am sure the State Department made him play those political power games at the United Nations and with NATO, but it took him a long time to do that, and he jumped through a lot of hoops trying to prove he was sincere; but I think that was a waste of our time, and, instead, it took him a while to get there, but when he gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he laid the moral case out, and from that moment on we were out to liberate the people of Iraq, to work with them, to stand by them in building a more peaceful and a democratic society and to free them from this monster, Saddam Hussein, who not only had a blood grudge against the people of the United States but was the oppressor and the murderer of their people. So thus the moral case that the President made at AEI, I think it was a historic speech. I would recommend it to all of my colleagues, and I would suggest that was when our effort in Iraq took off. That was when the momentum was created that was unstoppable. And sometimes I am asked why did the Iraqis not just jump up and start supporting us as we predicted? What had happened was 10 years before under President Bush, Sr., we had let the Iraqis down and they were not certain when our forces came in that we would stay there and actually help them liberate themselves from their tyrannical regime. But I think there is every evidence now that that country is going in the right direction and that country will be a light for democracy, and we will use this victory to spread democratic government and peace throughout this troubled region, a region that was handed to us by George Bush's predecessor in flames. The Shiite demonstrations that we see are much smaller than the people can see on TV. The Shiite people of Iraq are Arab-speaking people. The Shiites of Iran are Persian. They are not the same group of people. And also the people of Iraq just freed themselves, the Shiites, of a monstrous dictatorship. They are not going to replace it with another dictatorship of clerics or anybody else. Our job in Iraq, as the President has stated, is to help those people build democracy, and we will not let anyone pressure their way into that government. I know the President has the respect of the people of the world now; and when he makes that statement, they listen to him unlike they would any other President. So I have every confidence that we will not permit anti-democratic forces to pressure their way into power, and that we will work with the good people of Iraq in building the infrastructure of a system that will permit them to democratically elect their leaders. And, when they do, we will leave, if that is what they want us to do. We will be happy to leave. The President has made that clear. The people of the United States have made that clear. Because in building democracy in Iraq and helping the other people of that region to have democratic government, it helps in our own security. We are, with our commitment to freedom and democracy, building a better and more peaceful world. This is a world consistent with the dream of our Founding Fathers. This is a world that, again, is based on decision making, morally, in principle, based on decision making. That is the way to make a better world, not pragmatism that is making sort of power compromises and deals with people and regimes and gangsters. It is when we stand up for our principles and we try to build democratic societies, that is when things get better. That is what works in this world. So I am very grateful tonight to have had this opportunity to go into these details. We have challenges ahead of us, because there will always be people in the State Department and elsewhere who are thinking they are being pragmatic, but really are not living up to our principles. There always will be people who undercut our efforts and just do not believe that America can be a force for freedom overseas. That happened to President Reagan too, when he tried to fight the Soviets. But we can, with courage, with a commitment from our people, we can build a world that is more prosperous, we can build a world at peace, and we can build a world that is more free. And our greatest allies are the people of Iraq, the people of Afghanistan and the people everywhere in those Third World countries and other developing countries that long for democratic process and for a better life for them and their children.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I will try to make this quick. I rise in strong support of this amendment. There is a limit to American magnanimity. There is a limit to how much we will just turn our heads and say we will forgive you. And yes, we will forgive those people who are our friends who betrayed us when we were putting the lives of our young people on the line. We will forgive them, but we will not forget; and that is what this amendment is all about, not forgetting those who would not stand with us, and remembering those who did stand with us when the lives of our people were at stake. I have no problem with that.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise with hesitation to oppose the amendment of my very dear friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), who, let me note, has always been one of my heroes in this body because he not only is an articulate champion of the things that he believes, but he is a man who has walked the walk as well as talked the talk. He is a legitimate American hero and, thus, I am hesitantly coming to oppose his amendment. Let me suggest that the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) is right when he says that no Nation, including Turkey, should be able to slap the United States in the face and walk away without paying a price. They are paying a price. The fact is that earlier on we were willing to give them a huge aid package to join us in this war. It was a $16 to $30 billion package, and they are not going to get that now. This is a very much reduced package of about a $1 billion expenditure. So let us say that they have paid the price for not being true when the time was right. But let us add that Turkey must also get the credit it deserves for being one of our most stalwart friends and allies over the years. The Turkish people have stood by the United States more strongly and more courageously than almost any other people on this planet for over five decades. They deserve to get a little leeway for that. We deserve for them to be given a little credit. We should give the Turks a little credit for the fact that when the Korean War was on, and our people were being brutally murdered and we were unprepared for that conflict, the Turks were the first ones to send help to our end and stand by us in that conflict. In Vietnam, while they did not have troops there, they did support us in that effort while the rest of the world heaped abuse upon us. During the Gulf War, a decade ago, even though it was dramatically against their economic interest to do so, the Turks stood with us, and their assistance saved the lives of many and made that operation the success it was. We could not have done it without them. Thus, we owe the Turks. Now, yes, they did not do what was right by us at this moment. It was a time of confusion in their history. They are paying for that mistake. But let us give them the credit that is due them for so many years of friendship, so many years of alliance, so many years when we could count on them. And let us look to the future. If we are going to have democracy develop in the Muslim world, Turkey will be an absolutely pivotal player. We will rely on them again to make this a safer and a better world. We will not succeed in the President's goal of bringing democracy to the Muslim world without the Turks there. They are giving us a good example. They are giving their fellow Muslims a good example. Let us stand by them. Yes, let us say we were disappointed, but let us not treat them in a way inconsistent with the way that they have treated us over these many decades, which is as a friend and ally.