Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized and to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Of all the things that are on my mind that I would like to express…
Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized and to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Of all the things that are on my mind that I would like to express to you, I know that there are also a good number of things on the mind of the gentlelady from Florida, and so I would be so happy to yield as much time as she may consume to the very classy gentlelady from Florida.
I thank the gentlelady from Florida. And reclaiming my time, I will move to the microphone.
Again, Mr. Speaker, through you I am thanking the gentlelady from Florida for raising this issue and giving me the number of the bill that I expect to sign on in business tomorrow, H. Res. 488. I am of the opinion that here in the House of Representatives we have too few people that demonstrate the leadership that the gentlelady from Florida is demonstrating tonight and taking a stand on foreign policy issues. I am very happy to see the focus that has been brought on Venezuela from some of the leadership that emerges from Florida.
It has caught my attention, Mr. Speaker, when I listen to the circumstances taking place in Venezuela, I can't help but think about essentially the sister state of Cuba and how they have led the Marxist socialist regime in the Western Hemisphere since about 1959. I think of this Western Hemisphere, all of it, as the domain of, as Churchill described it from this hemisphere, Western Christendom; the foundation of Western civilization, Judeo-Christianity; the values that come from the Old and New Testament; the values that Christopher Columbus brought here across the ocean, and that great footprint of the moral values and the ethics that have emerged as part of our Old Testament values and our New Testament values; the idea of the Protestant work ethic, turning the other cheek and building a civilization, a society to provide the best opportunity for salvation to glorify God and our country and to understand, as our Founding Fathers understood, that our rights do come from God, and to promote that. The full-throated Americanism as the leaders of the free world, of Western Christendom, has not been asserted strongly enough in this hemisphere, and certainly not strongly enough in other hemispheres, Mr. Speaker. But it comes home when you see the violence in a place like Venezuela where at least a dozen dissidents have been killed as political enemies to the Maduro regime, and one a beauty queen who was abducted on a motorcycle, shot in the head, and died last week.
The tragedy that is taking place down there, I can't help but reflect back upon my travels in that part of the world and recognizing a trip through some of the places such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Panama, some of the stops I made along the way. I have not been to Venezuela. I have been to Cuba, Mr. Speaker. But one thing that I recognized is that in South America they just don't know America very well. They don't know Americans very well. They look to the United States as the leader in the free world, the economic leader, the military leader, and the cultural leader, but we watched as the beginnings and the growth of the leftist regimes have taken hold in South America for a number of reasons.
Some is because nature and power abhors a vacuum, and we have allowed a vacuum to take place in places like Venezuela.
In Cuba, we have sat back and watched for all these years waiting for the biological solution to take place with the Castro brothers--and that is the vernacular that I picked up on a trip to Cuba some time ago.
If the United States doesn't take leadership in this hemisphere, we are going to see some philosophy, some ideology take that leadership, and we have seen it take place in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez seemed to be enamored with Cuba, and we have seen Fidel Castro led the Marxist regime in Cuba, and influenced Venezuela. It is hard to think of a Venezuela that has been such a Marxist thorn in the side, a belligerent Hugo Chavez, one who called our President ``the devil'' from New York City from the United Nations, from the podium, and went on with, I will say, a smelly description, Mr. Speaker, that was offensive to anyone on the planet, let alone Americans.
Hugo Chavez drove that Marxist agenda in Venezuela, and then he handed this thing over to Maduro, according to Maduro, and now we have a second regime there, a second Marxist regime that is oppressing its people and killing freedom demonstrators and dissidents and people that stand up for freedom, and we have sat here without a strong voice coming from our President of the United States. Not a condemning voice of the violence in Venezuela, not a strong leadership that says to them there is a reason why you are running into shortages. One thing that the gentlelady from Florida didn't miss: a shortage of toilet paper, of all things. Now, how can an oil-rich country that is rich enough to promise that they are going to give free energy and fuel to Americans-- that was just a couple years ago by Hugo Chavez--and yet they can't operate an economy that can provide the simplest necessities of life, like some food products, or toilet paper, for example. Those things are produced automatically and spontaneously by a demand economy that comes from free enterprise.
If there is no product on the shelf, and say it is milk or bread--in Cuba it is the ration of sugar and beans and rice--but if there is nothing on the shelf in America, somebody will look around and think, Why is that shelf bare? Why can't I buy something I want, and they will start to produce it. If you bake a loaf of bread and put it on the shelf, and it is of moderate quality for a moderate price, someone else will come along and bake a better loaf of bread for a lower price, or maybe a cheaper price of equal quality, and that competition of one loaf of bread sitting next to the other decides. When the consumer pulls that loaf off the shelf and puts it in their grocery cart, that is a vote for one product over another. It happens over and over again in this country, and because of that, we walk into a grocery store in America--and I remember the stories when the Russians first were able to come over here and see what a supermarket looked like. It was amazing for them to see that you could grab anything you wanted.
Then I think of my trips to places like Russia and Cuba, and it looks to me like their societies and their civilizations are trained to stand in line. When we went to the Duma in Moscow a few years ago on a trip, we stood outside even though we were expected by their parliamentarians. We waited a long time to get in line and then a long time to get into the line where you hang your coat up. Everybody wears a heavy coat over there. Then to get into the line again to go into the hallway, and then get into line to go into the room, then to go into the waiting room, and I looked around at people that were standing in line, and it looked to me like maybe they didn't all know why they were in line, but it
was what they were trained to do, stand in line. I presume when they got to the front of line, some of them found out why they were there. Maybe all of them knew. I didn't know the language of the culture there. When they finished that, they would go get in another line.
It is a full-time job to go line up and wait for those things that come to us as Americans, offered to us, some of them delivered to us, but free people stand in fewer lines than oppressed people do. You will see lines in communist countries far more often than you see lines in free countries like the United States of America.
You don't want to stand in line to buy something. You don't want to stand in line to receive something. You will stand in line for something free from government. That happens in this country, too. You surely don't want to stand in line to pay for something that you already have. So you will find there is somebody working the cash registers to move you through to get their hand on your credit card and ring that up. That is what happens in a free country.
Lines in Russia; lines in Cuba. I recall seeing a couple of lines in Cuba that I didn't expect to see. One of them was a line for ice cream. As we went down the street, I looked over and here is this long line that went for a couple of blocks. I asked our guide, What is going on there? They have a shipment, a delivery of ice cream, and so the Cubans are lining up to get an ice cream cone. Now two blocks to wait for an ice cream cone? We wouldn't do that. We would walk another block to get an ice cream cone at the competing store, or the one next to that, or the one next to that. That is one of the differences that are taking place.
You know, I reviewed some of the speech that was delivered by Ms. Ros-Lehtinen's Senate counterpart, Senator Rubio, and as he spoke on the Senate floor about doctors and about how the junior Senator from Iowa, and that is my word ``junior,'' who traveled to Cuba and was very happy and proud of what he had seen there and the accomplishments of the Castros and talked about the medical system that they have in Cuba. I think that flows from Michael Moore's movie rather than anything that has to do with fact, Mr. Speaker, but it was stated by the gentleman from Florida that yes, they have good doctors, doctors that are Cuban, and many of them are the ones that defected to the United States. I agree with that statement.
He also mentioned doctors and cabdrivers. I have experienced that. I have hailed a cab in Havana, a legal trip to Havana, I might say, which might have been different than the ones we are discussing, and what do you meet behind the steering wheel? A doctor driving a taxi cab. What was the most logical tax cab when I was there? A 1954 Chevy with a Russian diesel engine under the hood. It looks like it is a rolling repair shop up and down the streets, which are better than I thought they would be. There are cars that have pulled off that break down, and they just come along and jack them up and crawl underneath and fix them with the parts that they can scavenge. When the car is repaired, they drive it on again. It is part of traveling to stop and repair the vehicle you are in. These vehicles are put together from parts from different places.
One of the things also that I noticed was that there were Russian tractors sitting all over the place. They are broken down, and they had been robbed for parts. There would be a circle maybe of grass growing up around the tires where they had been there for a long time.
Then I began to notice that there were these Brahmin oxen around the island in a lot of places, and they are staked down with a rope. There is a stake driven down and then a rope, so they have what I call a pivot-grazing system for these Brahmin cattle that they are using as beasts of burden, and I imagine raising them for the meat they get as well, scattered all over the island. I was able to plow with a team of Brahmin oxen. I had my NRA cap on, and I have a picture of that that I won't forget.
But what happened in Cuba was, back in the 1990s when the Soviet Union was going with a stronger economy than the Russians are today, Mr. Speaker, they saw the Soviet Union meltdown going into the 1990s, and when that happened, the subsidy for Cuba stopped. They weren't able to continue that subsidy. What had been taking place was Cuba raised sugar. The world market for sugar then was 6 cents a pound. The Russians would send them oil for sugar. The Cubans would ship the sugar to the Russians, and the proceeds from the oil would come into Cuba, and they were getting 51 cents worth of oil for every 6 cents of sugar they sent. That was how they propped up the government in Cuba. It was subsidized by the Soviet Union. That was the most important equation of it all.
When the Soviet Union imploded and shrunk back, states declared their independence and the Russian Federation was formed a little bit over time, the Cubans had to stand on their own. When that happened, the subsidies stopped, so did the parts and the support for the Russian tractors that were being used. They got parked as they broke down, and then they were robbed for parts. It is the only economy that I know of that has gone from an industrialized, mechanical tractor production for agriculture back to using animals again and animal husbandry. That is digression, and I would make that point to my junior Senator from Iowa.
Cuba digressed. It wasn't progress, it was digression. They digressed to using animals as beasts of burden again, where once they had tractors, albeit Russian tractors. They digressed from doctors in the clinic and hospital to doctors behind the steering wheel of a 1954 Chevy with a Russian diesel under the hood. They digressed from a country that had a measure of freedom, however harsh the dictatorship was under Batista, to a nation now that has been oppressed and under a communist dictatorship since 1959.
The Senator from Florida also mentioned that they don't have the freedoms there, that even though there was discussion about access to the Internet--I can tell you personally, the Senator from Florida is right, Cubans don't have access to the Internet. I was on a trip up to a college up in the mountains in Cuba. We rode up there in the back of a Russian deuce-and-a-half, and it took, oh, about an hour and 45 minutes or maybe 2 hours to wind our way up there into this little campus in what I would call hills, but they said mountains. As we were interviewing some of the professors there and some of the students there, I was standing next to a gentleman who was from Florida. His parents had escaped from Cuba and still held deeds for land that they owned, real estate that they owned in Cuba that they had never been compensated for. He was perhaps the best interpreter that I had ever experienced. His name is Ed Sabatini, and I hope that Ed Sabatini is out there somewhere.
As they were talking, he was telling me what they were saying, and he was reading their body language, their voice inflection, and what they said and putting this together for me in real time. He was one of those people who could talk and listen and interpret simultaneously. He was very skilled. He said to me in the middle of this, as I was asking questions of the Castro minders, he said, you realize that they are not asking the questions that you are asking, because I would ask a question to one of Castro's minders and interpreters. He would turn to a couple of instructors at the school. He would ask a question in Spanish and return it back to me in English. Ed said to me, You know the minder, the Castro minder, is not asking the questions of them that you are asking, and he is not giving you the answers that they are returning. He is telling you something different than you would be learning if you could understand what they were saying. No, I didn't know that. So we broke away from that conversation.
I had asked, Do you have Internet here at this school, at this university? It was a specific question. Their answer came back specifically, Yes, we have Internet.
You have full access to Internet?
Yes, we do. We are in the modern world. We have full access to the Internet.
When I learned they were not answering my questions, we moved away and went down to talk to the some students sitting on the curb, and began more of a rapid-fire conversation that I was catching up with a little bit after the
fact. I wanted to know what this Internet looked like, tell me some more facts about the Internet. They didn't seem to know how to answer the question on having Internet access. We drilled in to get the answer, and it was this: yes, they had access to Internet, and if they had a question that they needed a response to that they would get from the Internet, then they would formally make that request. They would write that request out in a letter form, and put the letter in an envelope, and when the Russian deuce-and-a-half went down the mountainside to Santa Clara, a small city near there, they would deliver the request in letter form, and then whoever was the minder of the Internet would decide if they would get them the answer off the Internet. They would apparently access the Internet, print out the answer that they thought that the student or the instructor should have, put that on a different Russian deuce-and-a-half after a few days or a week, and it would wind its way back up the mountain again. It was 70 kilometers away at least, to send a Russian deuce-and-a-half down with a letter in it to ask somebody who had clearance from Castro to go on the Internet and get an answer back, to send a Russian deuce-and-a- half up the mountain to a student.
That is Internet access as I saw it and heard it from the lips of students there on that mountain school that is like an extension school, an ag college. Some will know what the name of that school is.
When I found that out, I said I want to see out what you have. So we went into a classroom. As we walked into the class courtroom, there were 12 or 14 computers in there. So yes, they had computers. They were old 386s. There were two or three students sitting at every screen, and the instructor was teaching a course on how bad capitalism is.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I wish I had had an iPhone so I could have taken a picture of that screen and captured it. It was in Spanish, but it was interpreted to me this way, and this is what I can recall. There were five points on why capitalism is so bad. They were instructing these kids, these students, they were college-aged students, and they were all young men, on how bad capitalism is, and one of the lessons of these five points was a capitalist keeps all of the money and all of the profit and takes enough just to feed the worker so the worker can just barely survive while the capitalist gets rich.
That was one of the five points, and it was those kind of Marxist points on down the line. As we walked in, they were in the middle of indoctrinating their students in favor of Marxism and against capitalism.
I don't know who has seen a lesson like that take place in a communist country. I have. It impressed me that how does a young person in a controlled environment with controlled communication ever get the idea that there is a whole great wonderful world out here in America?
But they have a sense of what America is like because then it turned into a question-and-answer period. There were students that were asking questions directly of me. Most of them had to do with agriculture. I was answering them through Ed, the interpreter. Then at a certain point, it became too rapid fire, and he took it over and just did the conversation.
But here is what happened. I remember one big-faced young man sitting in the back of the room, and he asked some of the most prescient questions. But these questions were: Who sets the markets for your agriculture products? And what would be the price of beans and rice and corn, for example, and oats and wheat?
I answered him that the market sets the prices. Well, how does the market set the prices? Well, there is a buyer that makes an offer and a seller that decides whether or not to take it. If the seller says no, then the buyer might decide to raise his price until they get to a place where they agree. That was an amazing concept, and it looked like they had never heard that before.
Then it is, well, no one sets the prices; how can that be, that no one sets the prices? And the second thing will be, well, how often does the price change? That can change hundreds of times a day. It changes every transaction because the buyer and the seller can reach at a different point down to the tenth of a penny, a hard concept for them to understand.
Another question, who sets the price of farmland in the United States? Well, I know about that. The market sets the price of farmland.
Another new concept was, well, no one steps in and assigns a price? No, the buyer and the seller have to agree. That sets the price. You can see that soaking into their minds as they were asking the questions.
And then a question was, Why does anyone ever sell land? I had to explain that sometimes you reach that point in life when you don't want to work the land anymore; maybe you want to retire; maybe you want to take your capital out and roll it into another business; maybe you want to put it into savings; maybe you want to sell it to a neighbor who can utilize it better and the price is high enough; maybe you are overleveraged with a lending institution and you have to sell off a piece of land to get liquid again; maybe the economy went bad and you went broke and you had to sell it all before the bank foreclosed; or maybe the bank foreclosed and then sold it all out from underneath you, as we would say.
All of these were new concepts for these young men in this classroom in Cuba that I had been told by Castro's minders that, yes, they had full access to the Internet, they had computers, and they were connected to the modern and real world.
Well, what I found out was they only had old 386's. They were sharing them two or three at a station. They were learning on the screens of these computers in the old font style that you would see, with that kind of green screen with white lettering on it. They were learning the perils of capitalism and the merits of Marxism.
So that is the kind of minds that are influenced by the Castro regime. We have had an embargo on trading with Cuba for a long time, and we have got a lot of years invested in it. We need to keep it in place. We have to have the kind of leadership in this country that can inspire people to step up and take their island back.
We need the kind of leadership in this country that can inspire the people in Venezuela to step up and take their country back. We need the kind of leadership in this country that will send the message and go down and stop and visit and inspire, in country after country in this hemisphere--even if we are only speaking about this hemisphere--to inspire the people of Central and South America to embrace the kind of life that we enjoy here.
The difference between the United States of America and countries in points south isn't because we are blessed with an extraordinary amount of natural resources that sets us apart. They have a lot of natural resources down in Central and South America, too.
It isn't because our climate is so much preferred to theirs. They have a favorable climate in most of their continent as well, and a lot of people go down there because their climate is favorable to ours.
I have a cousin who spent 8 years in the Peace Corps at Tegucigalpa. He sat in the mountains. He had the only refrigerator for miles around. That is because he is a diabetic, and he needed to keep his insulin in a propane-powered refrigerator.
I talked with him those years ago, and I said, what is the yield potential for corn? Now, we will raise now over 200 bushel an acre in our neighborhood. Down there, a decent crop back then was a little over 100 bushel. He said it has got the potential to raise 100 bushel.
What does it need? It needs fertilizer. It needs seed corn. I said, can't you get fertilizer and seed corn down there?
After I pressed him very hard in those idealistic years when we were still young and haven't experienced a lot of the world--and he more than I have--and his answer was, you have to understand the mindset when you are in subsistence agriculture as opposed to agriculture for profit.
He grew up on a farm. He said the difficult thing you have is to try to not get so hungry that you have to eat your seed corn. That is a different mindset.
We do capital investment here. We wouldn't think of starting a house and
building a house very often, at least, unless we had the capital lined up to go in and build that thing and frame it up and close it in and get it wired and get the utilities all set up, put the roofing and the siding on, and pave the driveway. We might even sod the lawn and have that all penciled into our deal, and then we start.
Down there, it is a different attitude. If they get a little bit of money together, they will go buy a few bricks and put that in the wall of the house. If they get a little more money, they do a little more. They might be building on that house for years and years and years.
Maybe they don't ever get to live in it, but their children do. Maybe their grandchildren move into that because they don't have access to capital like we have because--guess what, Mr. Speaker--because they are not capitalists. They are Marxists. They live with the oppression of Marxism, and it has to be mind control and thought control.
If you fear that your neighbors are going to report you to the regime, if you even fear that your family members that sit around the supper table with you, that one of them might be currying favor with the regime and report what you said at the supper table at night, after a while, it disciplines your thought to not think those things anymore because what you think eventually you might say and what you say might get you in trouble with the regime and might get you imprisoned, incarcerated. And then you can be the subject of the regime and have to suffer through the incarcerations that we know of, of the dissidents that are there in places like Cuba and Venezuela.
I am amazed that one could be impressed with what Cuba has built. I don't know that anybody is particularly impressed with what Venezuela has. They do have oil. They are blessed with natural resources. They have got the wrong forum and the wrong system of government, Mr. Speaker.
What gives people an opportunity, that gives them prosperity, that let's them plan not only for their future and put in capital investment, build a home, get it paid for, put some money in the bank, have an investment for a 401(k) so that you can live comfortably in your retirement, those things come from capitalism, from free enterprise--a free enterprise economy. They don't come from a Marxist state that has a central command that controls it all.
I am very troubled that the inspiration that the United States is isn't being utilized to the extent that it needs to be. So as I look at the void in our foreign policy and I look at a President who has made it his foreign policy to lead from behind, and then I look around the world and I see where is the leadership vacuum--and power abhors a vacuum, so it rushes into that vacuum. Right now, there is a bit of a power vacuum in Venezuela.
But I don't know that we have any kind of a plan or a strategy to even voice that strong support for the freedom-loving people that live in places like Venezuela and Cuba. Let our light shine, send the message to them, get this operation going so that one day we can see the Western Hemisphere not only just be the foundation of Western civilization in the modern world, but it can grow and prosper, and we can live in peace and harmony by free enterprise and free trade and open access to everybody's market on an equal basis, not on a preferential basis.
When we passed the free trade agreement, the CAFTA-DR Free Trade Agreement, which is many of the Central American countries and the Dominican Republic, that opened up markets for us. We had already given them access to our markets. It opened up our markets.
We need to go down there now and say thank you and meet people and build the kind of relationships necessary. An American presence--and I mean a United States of America presence in Central and South America-- should be grown and should be expanded, and it should be part of our strategy to strengthen our leaderships in this hemisphere.
If we do a far better job than we have done in the past, then we also have the moral authority to strengthen our relationships outside of this hemisphere in the Eastern as well as the Western Hemisphere.
Mr. Speaker, I am very troubled also by that strategy of leading from behind in country after country. I am troubled that President Obama, as he came into office, and he was elected in early November of 2008, and on the 17th of November of 2008, then-Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who is a stellar public servant and an impressive individual as far as an Ambassador is concerned, and someone who, if you listen to him talk, you know that he has got a deep knowledge base on that part of the world. But Ambassador Ryan Crocker signed the agreement, the status of forces agreement, in Iraq. In it, it just simply cleared out all U.S. influence and all U.S. troop presence in Iraq, with the exception of a few marines inside the Green Zone at the new U.S. Embassy.
I looked at the bases that we had established there, the airstrips that we had established there, the billions of dollars invested in military and logistical infrastructure. Essentially, our pledge was to sack up our bats and go home.
I was troubled when I read that agreement. It was already signed on November 17 when I read it. I contacted the White House and said, You are pulling everything out of Iraq, with the exception of a few marines in the Green Zone near the U.S. Embassy, giving away air bases.
And the answer was, We wanted to clear the field so that the incoming President will have free rein, and we hope and expect that he will renegotiate a U.S. presence on these bases in Iraq.
Now, I don't know the depth of the agreement that took us to that point on November 17, 2008; I just know what that agreement said. Of course, Obama was already elected President. Later on, he was inaugurated January 20, the following year, 2009. He continued with this strategy of the pullout in Iraq.
The negotiations that I think should have and had a real opportunity to be successful failed, so that agreement of November 17, 2008, essentially stood, and all of our military and our munitions, the foundation for security that we had established in the entire country of Iraq, gone, gone down to just an embassy security personnel presence was it. All the blood, all the treasure handed over to the Iraqis who were led by a Shi'a and Maliki.
We were advised by some of our top foreign policy people that we shouldn't worry because Iran won't be exerting its influence in Iraq. There is a natural tension there. We should remember that they fought a war back in the eighties, and so they are not going to team up in a way; they are not going to line up against American interests; they are not going to be a thorn in our side or troublesome.
Look what happened in Iraq instead. Yes, a strong influence on the part of the Iranians, the Iranians pushing military supplies through Iraq, reported in the news just a couple of days ago, and also, the al Qaeda flag flying in places like Fallujah and Ramadi, places I have been to, places that were all shot to pieces, places where their mayors and their local leadership said, We are going to rebuild this city, and we are going to live in peace and prosperity.
We all know, Mr. Speaker, you can't live in peace and prosperity if you are living underneath that black al Qaeda flag. That is a result of leading from behind. That is a result of stepping out of Iraq and handing that country over. That is a result of not focusing on the negotiations necessary to establish a status of forces agreement in Iraq that could have provided the security and the stability and the training necessary for the Iraqis to protect themselves from the outside influence that now has a powerful influence in those places that were paid for, some of them more than once, and that includes Fallujah, in American blood, Mr. Speaker. That is Iraq.
Afghanistan, the President found himself pushed into a situation where he had to order a surge, even though he rejected the surge that was ordered by President Bush in Iraq--and it was, by all objective accounts, a successful surge in Iraq. President Obama, Mr. Speaker, ordered the surge of a minimum number of troops in Afghanistan.
I recall General McChrystal laying out those numbers. I don't have them exactly committed to memory, but something to the extent of 75,000 troops will get the job done. With 50,000
troops, it will take a while. There will be a greater risk, and maybe we can get the job done. We kind of think so. And if you get down to 35,000 troops, you hope that you can get the job done.
The President opted for the lesser option and went in, in a minimalist attitude, and leaked out there and in a slow way reinforced our troops in Afghanistan. As soon as he ordered the surge, at the same time, he announced when the United States would pull out.
I don't know how any military strategist would announce when they were going to pull out. That says directly to the enemy, You have to hold on past this date; you will no longer have anybody to fight when they are gone.
I think, Mr. Speaker, that leading from behind has created a vacuum in Iraq that is being filled by al Qaeda and by the Iranians and the conflicting Iraqis again, and leading from behind in Afghanistan, that is creating a vacuum that is being filled by the Taliban.
When we look at where this is going, I am asking, what is our objective there any longer? What are we trying to preserve? I haven't heard this President tell us his goal or his objective.
But I do know this: in listening to the chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the news press conference just yesterday, how it boiled down, is what I heard from the esteemed chairman, Mr. McKeon, and that is this: If you are going to order our troops into battle, Mr. President, Commander in Chief, then you owe them, you owe them your support for them, but also for their mission. You can't say you support the troops without also supporting their mission.
That needs to be, in a full-throated way, articulated by our Commander in Chief. If you support the troops, you can't do so, unless you also support their mission. If you are the Commander in Chief, you have to articulate that mission and let them know that the sacrifice is worth it and why the sacrifice is worth it. If you don't think so, you have to give a different order.
Those are those parts of the world.
Now I take us to Egypt, and these are the foreign policy discussions, Mr. Speaker, the ones that we don't have very often in this Congress. We can go a whole year and not have a debate on foreign policy. Throughout the Middle East--Egypt and Libya and Lebanon and Israel-- these are countries that I visited with a small delegation of Members right before Christmas, so it is fairly fresh. Egypt was a very interesting stop. The things that I learned there and the view that I have on Egypt don't match up with our State Department's view, which, I think, is mirrored in an effort to reflect the President's view. Mr. Speaker, in September, which is when we went in and met with the interim President, Mansour, and also with General el-Sisi, the commander of the military, it was only just June 30 through the 3rd of July that the Egyptians had come to the streets.
I think I have to back up on the history a little bit more in that, yes, Mubarak was a heavyhanded dictator. He was there for a lot of years as a heavyhanded dictator. Yet he was someone we had done business with. If you look back through the history of our relationship with Egypt, it warmed up considerably when Dwight Eisenhower told the British the Suez Canal is not yours. You need to move out of there, and the Egyptians will control the Suez Canal. In '54, that built a bond between the United States and Egypt. It was the right call on the part of Dwight Eisenhower. The British did pull back from their operations going on in the Suez, and it brought about a greater degree of stability in that part of the world.
Then take us to 1979--'79 is the year, as I recall, that we began doing joint operations with some Egyptian troops and other interests-- but with American troops--and some of them were National Guard personnel from my neighborhood. It was joint operations in the Sinai. We have conducted those operations since 1979, up until this year, so we have a strong relationship with Egypt. Since 1979, their military equipment has been, by and large--and I don't know that I can say it has been exclusively the U.S., but it has been vastly, predominantly the U.S. The Russian influence in Egypt has been minimal, so that is how I want to keep it. If we are going to have peace in the Middle East, Mr. Speaker, Egypt is an anchor that is necessary for peace in the Middle East.
When our President went to Cairo and gave his speech in Cairo on June 9 of 2009, he seated the Muslim Brotherhood in the front row. Now, that is something that would have been missed by me at the time because I don't recognize the faces of the Muslim Brotherhood, but Egyptians do. They knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed in Egypt, was pushing to do a takeover of Mubarak, and they didn't understand why the message that was sent by President Obama was at least implied or implicit support for the voices of those folks sitting in the front row. Shortly after that speech--sometime after that speech--our then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the statement that Mubarak needs to be gone yesterday. The Egyptian people didn't understand why it appeared to them that the new administration at the time was supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing Mubarak and implying that the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood should come to power, which is what happened.
As they demonstrated in the streets, the unrest brought it about that Mubarak was pushed out, and into power and into elected office was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was incompetence in the government. Plus, each move that was made was assuring the Egyptians they would never see another election again, that their individual and their human rights that they had were going to be diminished as Morsi strengthened his power grip on the control of Egypt. There were 83 million Egyptians, of which only 5.6 million voted for Morsi as President. He did an incompetent job in Egypt. As the economy went into shambles and they saw their freedom go, they thought, What could be worse? We were better off under Mubarak. It wasn't so great, but we were better off under Mubarak.
On June 30 of last summer, the Egyptian people emerged into the streets. Of the 80 to 83 million Egyptians, 30 to 33 million went to the streets to protest peacefully to remove Morsi and put in a government of the people of Egypt.
What happened from that, after that June 30 to July 1, 2 and 3, is that they pleaded with the military to step in and take over. At that point, General el-Sisi and others stepped in to take over the Government of Egypt, and they provided that stability. Yes, it was bloody in the streets of Cairo and in other places in Egypt, but throughout that, you saw radical Islamists who were going in, raiding Christian weddings and slaughtering the wedding parties and others there at churches. While we were there in September, they burned down 70. Then I learned it was as many as 100 Christian churches in Egypt.
How is it that the Christians were caught in a conflict in a mostly Sunni country and were being attacked in that fashion?
The reason was the Muslim Brotherhood wanted the Christians to enter into it to create more of a civil war and more chaos because they believed that they could take power in the chaos. Instead, the Christians said--and there are less than 9 percent who are Christians and over 90 percent Sunni Muslims in Egypt--we are going to pray for these people who are destroying our churches and killing us. We are going to forgive them, and we are going to pray for peace. That was a component that brought about the demonstrations in the streets last summer that I mentioned from June 30 until at least July 3.
Out of that came the stability from the turmoil, however bloody, with interim President Mansour and with General el-Sisi in command of the military, who told us in September of last year, as did President Mansour, We are writing a constitution, and we are going to offer it to the people when we get it polished up and ask them to go to the polls and ratify the constitution in Egypt. That was September when they made that promise.
When I returned in December, shortly before Christmas, I sat down with the chairman of the constitution committee, and I remarked as they had written the constitution, which had been published a couple of weeks before we got there, You promised us that you were going to produce a constitution
and have it delivered to the people of Egypt in November, and I noticed that it didn't show up until December.
He looked at me, and he said, We were only 72 hours late, 72 hours into December. I think that is pretty good for government, don't you?
I smiled and laughed, and said, If you were in my country and asked me a similar question, I would hope that I would be astute enough to give a similar answer that you gave to me.
Seventy-two hours into December they produced a constitution. They put it on the ballot after we left, which was January 14 and 15. It passed overwhelmingly by a vote of the people of Egypt. It sets up elections in Egypt in a couple of months and then elections for a new President down the line, less than 3 months after that. We are seeing the pieces being put in place.
Even though the news media reports every outburst of unrest that is there, I see stability being anchored in Egypt, but it is not being anchored by the leadership of our administration, and it is not being anchored by the leadership out of our State Department. It is being anchored by the voice of the people of Egypt and by the good judgment of those whom they have empowered and, I think, whom they will continue to empower in the upcoming elections.
We are told we don't have to worry about the Russians doing business in Egypt because they don't give anything away, because they don't give any military equipment away. They have to sell everything. If the Egyptians don't have any money, it would seem that there wouldn't be a calculation done for the loans that were offered out of the Saudis and out of the United Arab Emirates, but now we have the Russians, who have negotiated a military equipment deal with the Egyptians for the first time that I know of since 1979 or, I will say, pre-1979. We didn't need the Russians in Egypt. They filled a vacuum--a vacuum due to a lack of leadership, a vacuum created by the implication that the President and our administration is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptian people ask us: Why do the Americans support the Muslim Brotherhood? We are trying to get them out of here. My answer to them in a press conference in Cairo twice was this: the American people do not support the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the American people oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.
I believe this administration is on the wrong side of the issue in Egypt, and I think they will have to turn that giant ship of state around slowly because the administration will have to save face. I can't expect that the President is going to go out into the Rose Garden and step behind the podium with the Great Seal of the United States of America and say, ``I came to confess that I was wrong in Egypt.'' No, there will have to be some smoke and some mirrors. If things go as well as they can over a period of time, we can ratchet our policy around to get behind the voice of the people in Egypt and strengthen our relationships there--the economic relationships, the trade partnership relationship and the military relationships--so at least they have the equipment that we had promised them so they can fight off al Qaeda in the Sinai.
So we say al Qaeda is growing in the Sinai, and we say to the Egyptians, You are going to have to go short of some of the equipment you expected from us because we don't like the idea that there was a duly elected Muslim Brotherhood president that was so bad that 30 to 33 million Egyptians poured into the streets.
Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, if that percentage of the population-- say, roughly, 40 percent of the population--of the United States were all in the streets on the same day? Can you imagine what that would be like? If 125 million Americans came to the streets and stayed there from June 20 until July 3, do you think it would bring about a change in the policy and in the government of the United States with that kind of unrest? That is the magnitude. I have only seen this magnitude a few times.
I can think of a time when we had the magnitude of that kind of response in the nation of Georgia, when the Russians went in and invaded South Ossetia and the other client state. They went in and invaded and occupied. It was shortly afterwards--a week or so after that--that they had hands across Georgia, where they said a million of the, roughly, 4 million Georgians were in the streets. I saw thousands of them with their flags wrapped around their shoulders and their babies wrapped up in their flags, standing together in unity. When people come out of their homes to the tune of 25 or 40 percent of their population, you know something is wrong, Mr. Speaker.
That didn't get the attention of this administration enough for them to start to ratchet our policy around and get behind the voice of the people. Still they insist that there was a duly elected Morsi, and despite whatever happened after that, we are going to stick with the guy because the people of the Muslim Brotherhood were sitting in the front row, and our President gave a speech in Cairo. It sent a message, and it was a factor in the change in power in Egypt. It was helpful to bring Morsi to power. When Morsi came to power, the Muslim Brotherhood was in power. They did consolidate their power, and they did begin to shut down the rights of the people of Egypt, and the Egyptians rose up.
It is because of a vacuum, and it was because of leading from behind, and it is from having sympathy for people who carry within them the values that are contrary to that of the United States. That is the Muslim Brotherhood. That is just Egypt.
Now, if I go on and I look at the things that have happened in the more than 2\1/2\ years of the Arab Spring, and in each of those things, when the Arab Spring erupted within country after country, across North Africa and across and around the Mediterranean, each change that was brought about went against the interests of the United States.
But somehow, the myopic belief that I think was in the mind of Jimmy Carter when he saw the Ayatollah Khomeini return to Iran from London, if I remember where he was based back in 1979, another watershed year, because there was a religious leader we ought to be supportive of him instead of the Shah of Iran.
Look what that got us, the beginning of the radical Islamic uprising, and we have been fighting that ever since, but not with the knowledge, the full knowledge base of what is going on.
In Libya, you have got a civil war that really hasn't ended, it just is suspended, and you have terrorists and radical Islamists that are controlling Benghazi.
You hear people that go to Libya, and you get the idea that somehow they went to Benghazi and walked around the ashes and the ruins where Ambassador Chris Stevens and our three other heroic Americans died. But they are not going there. They can't go there. We don't have the security personnel to go there. Neither do the government officials from Tripoli.
The country is divided at this point, and the terrorists are in control of most of Benghazi, and they go into Tripoli once in a while, and they have surrounded the Parliament and other government buildings and exerted their control there, Mr. Speaker.
There is still a void and a vacuum. We didn't get it resolved in Libya, in spite of all of the treasure and some of the blood that was spilled, thankfully, not American blood.
In Lebanon, it is an even bigger mess with a less decisive future, and you have Hezbollah controlling a significant component of that country and standing out on the streets in their uniforms under their yellow flags with their weapons, defiant. They are a terrorist organization, and they are occupying parts of Lebanon, parts of the Beirut.
The results in Israel: constantly, the pressure is on Netanyahu and the Israelis. Don't you have a little more land that you can sacrifice in the belief that somehow you can trade land for peace?
There is no model in history that I can find that you can successfully trade land for peace, but still, our administration pushes, negotiate to give up something. A two-state solution. Let's move the Jews out of the West Bank because, after all, doesn't everybody know that they have no business living in a place like Judea, where they have lived since antiquity?
It is their ancestral homeland. What justice is there in pushing people out?
If 20 percent of the population of Israel proper is Arab, and they can live in peace and harmony there--remember, the fence is to keep people out, but the 20 percent of Arabs that are inside are peaceful. They are happy enough to live there. They vote. They serve in the Knesset. They serve in the Supreme Court. They have a voice that many will say is equal to that of Jews that live there. There is some question about it.
But if they can live in relative harmony in Israel proper, why is it that the Jews don't have a right to live in places like Gaza or the West Bank?
Then the problem is Netanyahu; the problem is the Israelis.
I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. I think we need to be in full-throated support with every kind of commitment necessary to bring about the kind of solutions that promote God-given liberty and things that we know here as American ideals.
We need to elect the next President, a very astute foreign policy president who believes in free enterprise, who believes in the pillars of American exceptionalism, and believes in exporting them to the rest of the world, because we are far better off with an American policy and a promotion of our beliefs and our ideals in other places in the world, where they want to embrace our way of living, than we are pulling back and allowing that vacuum to be filled by the power-hungry despots of people like a Castro, a Chavez, a Maduro, a Putin.
That is the mission for America. It is one of the missions for America. When the Presidential candidates come to Iowa, Mr. Speaker, I want to ask them, speak on foreign policy, become a student of foreign policy. Go travel, draw your own conclusions.
But, in the end, we are a world player. We have been a world player for a long time. We need to stay a world player.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
