Adam Smith

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield the gentlewoman an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Kinzinger).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlelady from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur). (Ms. KAPTUR asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Berman), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield the gentlelady an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. The bottom line with this resolution--and I think the gentleman made a lot of very fair points. I certainly think that the White House could have handled it better in terms of communicating with Congress. But what this resolution would do that he has presented would be to end our mission in Libya. So all of the debates and arguments that you heard from the previous discussion apply to this just as well. It has some limited options in terms of what the President could continue to do in support of NATO, but it very specifically disallows any effort at air support, any effort at suppressing opposition fire. It does allow for aerial refueling. It allows for rescue missions, but what the military has made clear is they will not do that without all of the other assets that are necessary to suppress enemy fire. We are not going to send up our aerial refueling apparatus or aerial refueling planes if we know we can't protect them from being shot down. So the effect of this resolution is to, again, end the mission in Libya, and people have different opinions about where they should come down on that. I don't believe that we should end the mission in Libya. I do believe that Congress' voice should be heard on this issue, and that is why I supported the resolution that would have authorized that. So I don't think that we should stop what we're doing in Libya, and getting back to the previous debate, there have been some comments that have been made that I want to be sure and correct. I think we have a much better idea of who the forces in Libya fighting against Muammar Qadhafi are than has been said, and we know this because they control roughly half the country right now. What our mission was able to do, it stopped Muammar Qadhafi from being able to crush the folks who are rising up against him and retake the territory that they have. So in Benghazi and in most of I think it's eastern Libya, it is controlled by these opposition forces, and by all accounts, they are running a very sensible government. It is not an Islamic state. It does not have al Qaeda influence. It has a bunch of people who are simply trying to exercise free expression that they have been denied for nearly 40 years by Muammar Qadhafi. We have a very good idea who these people are. They are precisely the type of people that the United States of America should be supporting. And as I mentioned before, in our great struggle against al Qaeda, one of the centerpieces of it is ideological. The ideology that bin Laden and many others advance is very anti-Western, and their biggest argument is that the West has consistently supported governments that have repressed the Muslim people, that we have not been good for them, and there are at least one or two instances when that argument actually has some facts to back it up. And now we are presented with the chance to support a legitimate group of people who want basically what we have--democracy. They want the ability to vote for their representatives. They want a voice in their government, and we are going to pull the rug out from under them. And keep in mind, this is a very limited mission. It is NATO-led, but we are offering critical support to make it possible, and if we vote for the Rooney resolution, we will pull all of that away and right at the moment--in fact, there was a newspaper story this morning about how Qadhafi is talking about leaving Tripoli because the pressure is getting too great on him. We have had continual members of the Libyan Government abandoning Qadhafi. He is ready to fall, and those voices of Libyan people who want the very freedoms that we all say we want for them are ready to rise, and we are going to reverse that by pulling out this minimal level of support that we are offering. That is the effect of the Rooney resolution, and therefore I oppose it. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. David Scott), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and also a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews). (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. I rise in support of this resolution. This is Congress exercising its authority as appropriate. And I agree with the people who say that Congress should do this, and I just wish we would understand that Congress has a certain responsibility in that regard. Yes, the President should have asked us, but it's been over 3 months and this House has chosen not to act until now. I think it's appropriate that we are. I think we should authorize this mission in Libya, and I strongly support that mission. Now, like most Americans, when this issue first came up, when the people in Libya started rising up against their oppressive dictator, I was very reluctant about the idea of U.S. military involvement, as I think we always should be. I think in the past we have been too over- anxious to use the U.S. military in places where it was not a good fit. We need to think carefully about this. And in every instance we need to strike a balance. On the one hand, what is the positive impact that our involvement could have and, on the other hand, what are the risks of that involvement? I think there was a unique set of circumstances in Libya that made this make sense. First of all, our involvement could have a very positive impact. We had international support. The U.N., NATO, the Arab League, everybody in the world wanted Qadhafi to be stopped from slaughtering the civilians who were rightfully standing up and asking for the basic rights that we take for granted in this country. In addition to that, our military budget is roughly equivalent to the entire rest of the world's combined. That gives us a unique set of capabilities. That unique set of capabilities was critical to stopping Qadhafi from crushing again the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Libyan people. If we had not acted, they would be crushed, many more civilians would be dead, and Qadhafi would be back in power. We cannot walk away from that responsibility and say that, well, yes, we don't like Qadhafi, we wish the people there would do well, but we simply don't want to support the action that is necessary to give them that opportunity. So in this case, I think the mission did make sense for that reason. The United States was in the position to make a difference and stand up for people who were asking for legitimate rights. But then the broader question is, well, what does that have to do with the United States? That may be true, but it's true in a lot of countries. The reason this is so important is because of the broader movement that is going on, the so-called Arab Spring, people in Muslim countries rising up and demanding representative rights. That has an incredible impact on us. The greatest threat that we face as a country right now is from al Qaeda and their ideology. That ideology arose in part because of a whole bunch of repressive governments across the Muslim world that weren't providing for their people, a number of repressive governments, by the way, which the United States has in the past supported. We had an opportunity to do the opposite, to stand up for Muslim people. Let me tell you, in the history of this country, I don't think we've ever gotten as much positive press on the Muslim TV stations and Muslim media as we got for standing up to Qadhafi. This has been enormously helpful to us in that broader ideological effort. We had national security interests here for standing up. Now as a House, I don't want us to stand up and say that we're going to back down from that commitment that we made. Make no mistake about it, if we defeat this resolution and pass the Rooney resolution, we will stop the mission in Libya and empower Muammar Qadhafi, something that I know nobody wants to do. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished minority whip, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, consistent with the policy in here, it says: ``Congress does not support deploying, establishing or maintaining the presence of units and members of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Libya.'' The resolution clearly prohibits ground forces. I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. The President has said from the outset that our role in this mission will be limited; limited but critical. We are not committing troops, we are not committing the full force of the U.S. military, but what we are contributing, as Mr. Moran said, is absolutely critical to the success of the mission. We are supporting our NATO allies in making sure that this mission is carried out in a very limited and very critical way. I just want to emphasize again that Muammar Qadhafi is not someone who is in the best national security interests of the United States of America. He has a long, long history of weapons of mass destruction, of supporting terrorist groups, of committing terrorist acts against United States citizens, and of in general being an unstable and destabilizing figure. When the people of Libya decided to rise up to throw him out, it was a very appropriate thing for them to do. Now we all wish that Mr. Qadhafi would have gone quietly and simply-- that certainly would have been the easier way to go--but he didn't. And to protect those people who have legitimate aspirations for a better government, we needed to intervene militarily to assist. Now I think in this instance the best thing about this is we were not alone. The Arab League, the United Nations, NATO, took the lead. There is a great deal of instability throughout the Middle East and that is unquestionably in the national security interests of the United States of America to do whatever we can to try and reduce that instability and make sure that we have friends, allies and also governments that legitimately represent the aspirations of their people. That is one of the greatest problems we've had. We have supported governments in the past in the Middle East who didn't have the support of their people. We need not just the support of governments, we need the support of the people in that region. This is a critical opportunity to gain that support. I believe that's clearly in the national security interest of the American people. So, I do not agree with the gentleman from Ohio's resolution in saying that the President has not articulated a case. He has. We in the House should vote whether we approve it or not, but I don't think it is correct to say that the case has not been made. Let's have a vote in this body, as we will, on the Kucinich resolution, of whether or not to support what is going on there or not, but we should not simply be asking the President for something he has already provided. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield the gentleman from Virginia 1 additional minute.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I do thank both Speaker Boehner and Representative Kucinich for bringing these resolutions and bringing this issue to the floor because I completely agree that this is an issue that Congress should debate, discuss, and should ultimately express its opinion on. We have not done that. We are now past 90 days that this mission has been going on in Libya, and I feel we should have brought this up much sooner. Now, I would prefer a much cleaner resolution that simply came out and made a resolution of approval of the President's mission and of the mission that we and NATO have undertaken in Libya and gave Members the chance to vote it up or down. In that sense, Mr. Kucinich's resolution is much more straightforward. It's a resolution of disapproval, but, again, it gives us the opportunity to at least debate the issue and express the will of Congress. I do, however, oppose Mr. Boehner's resolution. I also oppose Mr. Kucinich's resolution because I don't think we should pull away from this mission, should pull out of what NATO is doing and the very important work that is going on in Libya. Mr. Boehner's resolution doesn't do any of that, but it does rather boldly state that the President has not made a case for the mission in Libya, and I very strongly disagree with that assessment. Now I will agree--and Mr. McKeon and I share the frustration--that prior to the launching of this mission, there was an inadequate amount of communication between the President and this Congress, indeed, between the President and the American people, explaining the reasons for getting into that mission; but since that time the President has made it very clear why we went into Libya. We had a unique situation. I do not believe the American military should intervene in every conflict in every country. In fact, I don't believe it should intervene in almost any of them. It takes a unique set of circumstances to call for that intervention; and in Libya we had, I believe, that unique set of circumstances. Number one, we had broad international support. The U.N., NATO, the Arab League all looked at that situation and said intervention was necessary. Number two, we had a clear humanitarian crisis. There was no doubt at the time that we intervened that if we had not, Muammar Qadhafi would have slaughtered his own people and reasserted control over Libya. He made it clear that is what he was going to do. It was clear that the people rising up for the legitimate opportunity to be heard in their government did not have the power and the force to stop him. We did. If we had not acted, there is no question that Muammar Qadhafi would be back in charge of Libya, and we would bear at least some piece of the responsibility--at least that is the way the rest of the world would have looked at it. We in the United States had the power and the force to stop a humanitarian catastrophe and chose not to act. And that's one of the most critical elements in deciding whether or not to intervene: Can we intervene in a successful way? Yes, there are many countries throughout the world that face crises right now, in Syria, in Sudan, in the Congo, a whole bunch of places. But most of those places--in fact in all of those--there is no clear military mission that we could accomplish and achieve. In Libya, there was. If we intervened, we could stop Qadhafi from regaining control of his entire country. At the time we understood there was no guarantee that that would mean that he would be driven from power immediately, but we could at least stop him from doing that. It was a humanitarian crisis that our actions could prevent. I think it made sense, and I think the President has clearly articulated that. So for the Congress to pass a resolution saying they have no earthly idea what the President is doing in Libya simply means that they haven't been paying attention for the last couple of months. It has been made clear. Now, I think it is appropriate that we ask the President to regularly keep in touch with us, let us know where the mission is going. I supported the resolution that said no ground troops in Libya. I think that is a step too far. I don't think that is something that would clearly be able to be accomplished militarily, so I do think that's appropriate. But the part of this resolution that I must oppose is the part that says the President has made no national security case for why we should be involved in Libya. I believe that he has, and I don't think we should support a resolution saying otherwise. To have simply allowed Libya to fall apart and not helped a people that we could clearly help, that were legitimately calling for greater freedom and greater opportunity, I think, would have been a mistake. So I will oppose the Boehner resolution, and I will also oppose the Kucinich resolution because I don't believe we should pull out of the mission. But again, I thank all of those involved for bringing this debate to the House floor so that we can have that debate so that we in Congress can assert our authority and express our opinion on this very, very important issue. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I reserve my time.