Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

Mr. Speaker, if this were a sermon, I would use as the text Romans 12:19 which says, and I want to remind the House that we are a Christian Nation, that says, Avenge not yourselves, for it is written, vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord.

Now we are in the process of beginning a trial which is going to be the trial of the century. I think the United States people and the Congress should think about what it is we are setting out to do. On Wednesday, the trial of the century will begin. It will start at a secret Green Zone location by an anonymous court and under extreme U.S. military-imposed security measures.

It is a made-in-the-USA affair in administrative and financial terms. The court and the training and the whole proceedings cost us $75 million of our taxes. About 300 people, all hired by the Americans, are working on the trial. The five secret Iraq judges, Shiites and Kurds, no Sunnis, are paid by the Americans, are living inside the Green Zone and are protected by the Americans from being either kidnapped or killed. They have received special training from U.S. and British and Australian legal experts, and they have even staged a mock trial.

If the defendant in this case is convicted, he will be able to file appeals and then will, within 30 days of those appeals being denied, be hung in that country in which he lives.

Now, this special Iraq tribunal was substituted by former American proconsul, Mr. Bremer, in December 2003, curiously almost 3 days before Saddam was captured, supposedly. Now, that is the view of this case from the Arab world. That comes from an article in the Asia Times by a reporter named Pepe Escobar, and it is called ``The Occupiers' Trial.'' This is how it is seen from the Arab world.

Now, you say, well, you know, that is just those Arabs. Pick up today's New York Times and there is the story on the editorial pages of the New York Times: ``Saddam and Iraq on Trial,'' and here is what it says: ``The opportunity created by the trial of Saddam Hussein to introduce the rule of law and the ideal of national reconciliation into Iraq has been largely squandered . . . At almost every turn, ill- conceived decisions by the United States and Iraqi-dominated Shiite religious and Kurdish nationalist parties have put politics and score- settling first.''

Remember that quote about vengeance:

``The cost has been an indifference to legal scrupulousness and they are waging a costly vendetta by Kurdish and Shiite victims against Sunni Arabs who were once their oppressors.''

That is the New York Times talking to our President who insists on doing this.

Now, the question you might ask yourself is, Why did they do it this way? I mean, any reasonable person might ask that. Well, this trial was set up this way for a variety of reasons. It should have been a scrupulously fair trial where you would have at least one Sunni among the judges. I mean, Saddam Hussein is a Sunni. We insist on a jury of your peers, and we have gone to a lot of trouble in this country to make sure there are peers on the juries, but not in this case.

We are looking to prove him personally accountable. Now, in the case in Iraq where legal training and appointments have been bent for decades to the political whims of the political, they should have called for enlisting help from international legal experts and used relevant precedents in international criminal law.

Why did they not do that? Why did they not call in an international tribunal like they did at Nuremberg at the end of the Second World War? This is the New York Times talking. Bush administration and its Iraq allies strongly oppose that step because it would have precluded the death penalty. They want a public hanging.

Now, once that decision was made, Iraq lawyers and American lawyers were the ones they were going to rely on. They were not going to get anybody national. They should have been well insulated, those people who were doing, this from political pressures. Instead, this special tribunal who organized the trial has been subject to constant manipulation and intimidation by Ahmad Chalabi. Remember him? The ceaselessly conspiring emigre politician who wants to make anti- Baathist vendettas his latest political platform.

We are setting ourselves up for a serious problem.

[From the New York Times]

Saddam and Iraq on Trial

The opportunity created by the trial of Saddam Hussein to

introduce the rule of 1aw and the idea of national

reconciliation into Iraq has been largely squandered even

before the courtroom proceedings begin. At almost every turn,

ill-considered decisions by the United States and Iraq's

dominant Shiite-religious and Kurdish-nationalist parties

have put politics and score-settling first. The cost has been

an indffference to legal scrupulousness, as well as a failure

to distinguish between pursuing the specific crimes of a

dictator that must be punished in a court and waging a

collective vendetta by Kurdish and Shiite victims against the

Sunni Arabs who were once their oppressors.

There is still time to shift this exercise in victor's

Justice to a more constructive course because the trial will

adjourn for several weeks after today's televised opening.

For that to happen, the Iraqi lawyers and judges will have to

stand-up to intense and continuing pressures from their

political masters for a choreographed proceeding that seems

timed to gain short-term advantages at the expense of

national healing and an airing of recent Iraqi history.

When invading United States forces drove Mr. Hussein from

power two and a half years ago, Americans naively expected

rejoicing throughout Iraq and rapid efforts at democratic

reconstruction. One main reason that did not happen, apart

from the well-known mistakes by the American occupation

authorities, was the arbitrary, violent and fragmented nature

of the society left behind by the dictator, who had ruled

through murder, fear and persecution.

One of the best ways to repair such a damaged society is a

systematic judicial investigation of the regime's crimes.

That should be followed by a scrupulously fair trial of those

found personally accountable. In the case of Iraq, where

legal training and appointments had been bent for decades to

the political whims of the dictatorship, that should have

called for enlisting help from international legal experts

and using relevant precedents in international criminal law.

The Bush administration and its Iraqi allies strongly opposed

that step because it would have excluded the death penalty.

Once the decision was made to rely on Iraqi lawyers and

American Advisers, they should have been well insulated from

political pressures. Instead, the special tribunal organizing

the trial has been subjected to constant manipulation and

intimidation by Ahmad Chalabi, the ceaselessly conspiring

emigre politician who has made anti-Baathist vendettas the

latest political platform.

Finally, this prosecution would have been conducted

differently if it were a serious attempt to uncover the murky

lines of authority and responsibility within the Baathist

regime and establish Mr. Hussein's clear personal

responsibility for at least some of the roughly 300,000

murders committed in his name. It would have built up its

case methodically, from the field operatives carrying out the

killings to the officials who gave them their orders and on

up the chain of command to Mr. Hussein himself.

Instead, today's trial will begin with what prosecutors and

politicians decided was the easiest case to prove, a mass

execution in a Shiite town that followed a failed 1982

assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein. These killings

ought to be prosecuted. But if the aim is to uncover the

broader criminal conspiracy in order to punish the truly

guilty and absolve those guilty only by association, other

trials should have come first.

What we have is a narrow sectarian government, still

struggling to come up with a

nationally inclusive constitution, that is conducting what

looks like a show trial, borrowing noxious elements of

Baathist law to speed the way toward an early and political1y

popular execution.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the well tonight as part of our continuing Iraq watch to talk with the Members and the folks who are watching about the issues that face us in Iraq.

During the last few months, we have had everything sort of arranged so that we should not pay any attention to the chaos and the deaths and everything else. We were told again and again that the democracy train was on the track and it was going down the track. And a big date was on Sunday, this past weekend, when the Iraqis would vote on a referendum adopting a constitution.

Now, that constitution appears to have been ratified by the Iraqi people. But when I came to this House many years ago, there was an old Texan here who I came to know and respect a great deal. He was the ranking member and then was the second and then finally the chairman of the Committee on Banking and Financial Services. He once handled a very contentious committee of the House in a way that was very respectful and very understanding and gave everybody, Republicans and Democrats, a chance to say whatever they wanted. And, boy, it took forever, but he was always in control.

At the end of it, I congratulated him. I told him I thought I had never seen a committee handled more masterfully. The Committee on Banking and Financial Services at that point was the largest committee of the Congress. There were 50 Members. This man's name was Henry Gonzalez. He was from San Antonio. His son now serves here. Well, Mr. Gonzalez said to me, Jim, I learned two things from an old guy in San Antonio. One of them is, never try and lasso a cow running downhill. Let him run out until he is tired. And the second one is, it is always too soon to congratulate yourself.

I think it is useful for us tonight to think a little bit about that old Texas aphorism as we consider what happened in Iraq in the referendum for the new constitution. This is a constitution that was voted on by people and was created by people who were selected by us, basically. We put them together, molded them and talked to them and kept shaping what was going on inside the organization.

There are three groups of people basically in Iraq, although there are some others, but there are the Shi'a and the Sunnis. Those are two sects of the Muslim faith. And then there are the Kurds, who also happen to be Sunni believers in Mohammed. Now, those three groups of people have all different interests.

The Sunnis have been in charge of Iraq for many, many years. Going back to the end of the First World War, Sunnis have generally been the leadership. In fact they have been the leadership in the country during that entire period. And the Shi'a, although more numerous, have never been in charge because it has not been a democracy. It is very obvious that a minority people, the Sunnis, were running the country. And it was obviously something that was a real irritant to the Shi'a. And in the midst of this, the Kurds got totally forgotten. The Kurds simply were pushed aside.

So when it came time to write a constitution, the United States did something which I think you can understand the thinking that might have gone into it, and that is that if you want to control Iraq, pick the largest group. They are not a majority, but pick the largest group and add one of these other groups to them and that will give you a majority. And if you can get them to see things the way the United States wanted them to see it, we could then drive a constitution which would be acceptable and be voted on by the 18 provinces.

Now, they did that. The Shi'a and the Kurds together wrote a constitution, and it is an interesting constitution because it sets up this kind of a situation. It says that the Sunnis can make their own state and the Kurds can make their own state and the Shi'a can make their own state and they will be loosely connected at the center, in Baghdad, by a federation. So there will be a federal style of government like we have, except for the fact that states will have way more power than the federal government does. Each state can

go its own way. If they want to use Muslim law, sharia law, in the Shi'a area, they can put that into place. If they do not want to use that in the Sunni area, then they do not have to put it in place. And if the Kurds want to do something entirely different, they can do something entirely different. So it is a very, very weak bringing together of this country.

Now, one of the issues that is a contentious issue, of course, is the control of their natural resources. Iraq is a very wealthy country. It has oil. One of our diplomats said, Iraq is important because it swims on a sea of oil. The oil is under the area where the Kurds live and where the Shi'a live, so they can pump the oil in their little area and have money to make a nice country. And the Kurds can pump oil and make a nice little country for themselves. But the Sunnis are left out in the cold, because there is no bringing all the money to Baghdad and deciding it should be distributed equally among the three. There is no requirement that that happen. They do not have to give anything to the federal government. They can make their own way.

So now you can begin to see why the Sunnis might be a little bit reluctant to get involved in this new Iraqi government, why they opposed the issue of the constitution, because there was no protection for the minority.

One of the things about our Constitution is that it is designed to protect the minority. That is why we have a Bill of Rights. The government, the President, the Speaker, the Senate cannot run over people in this country because every citizen has a Constitution with a Bill of Rights which says what they are entitled to.

If you do not feel like you are getting it, you can go to court and exercise it in the courts and have the courts enforce your rights to free speech or ability to live without search and seizure, or your right to bear arms. All of these are rights in our Constitution.

This Iraqi Constitution has none of those rights for the minority. So there is nothing guaranteed to the Sunni or to the Shia or to the Kurds. In fact, the Constitution was written so that the 19 provinces in Iraq, if any three of them have a two-thirds ``no'' vote, the Constitution would have failed. It would not have been ratified. They would have had to have gone back and come up with another Constitution that made better sense or had more public support.

Now, in an election like this you would say, well, this is a free and fair election. We are going to let everybody vote. And we basically walled off the whole country. They walled off each province. They put a curfew on. They simply restricted the movement of people throughout the entire period and had some very interesting results.

Now, when Saddam Hussein was president of Iraq, he won with 100 percent of the vote and everybody kind of laughed; that is interesting. That must have been some election. Nobody believes 100 percent of the vote. In the Soviet Union when there was 100 percent, you knew the fix was in. There was no real opposition.

What has happened is now that the vote is over and we now look at this election through the eyes of some analysts, the first one is in Time magazine of October 18, today, and there are allegations of ballot stuffing that make this election tainted in the eyes of the Sunni. More than 90 percent of the voters in many Shiite and Kurdish provinces were reported to have voted for the proposed Constitution. In Anbar, a Sunni area, the numbers were equally high. In the swing provinces, the numbers simply look implausible. When you look at the number of votes that they say are there and how many people are supposed to be there, it does not look like things were as they might seem.

So from the eyes of the Sunnis, this is an illegitimate election. It did not ratify the Constitution as far as they are concerned. It is stolen.

Now, what do you think is going to be the reaction to that? What do you think the reaction will be to that? Well, one does not need to be a political analyst or read the New York Times or Washington Post to realize if people think the election has been stolen, they are not going to respect the results and they are very likely going to continue the insurrection.

I think everybody who looks at this situation from the very start said that if this passes, given the way it was put together and given the way the vote came out, there was no way a victory could be declared by the passage of this Constitution.

Now, I am sure the White House and others will come down and it will be in the press tomorrow about how wonderful it is, they have taken another step down the road toward democracy. Well, they have taken another step. I do not know if it is toward democracy. Other papers suggest what is coming is chaos. If you look at the San Francisco Chronicle of today, this says the government is facing a big challenge. Many questions are still to be resolved. Now why is that?

Well, this Constitution was a kind of a moving target. It was not like they wrote it and then they printed up a million or 5 million or 10 million copies and sent them out all over the country to people. They never got it finally written, so most people voted for something today that they had never had a chance to read. They might have heard about it in the mosque or in the street or somewhere, but they never saw and read a copy of it.

One of the things that was happening, one of the groups of Sunni people or politicians, they decided they would go with the Constitution. They were going to support it, but they had a meeting and they talked about some amendments. They needed six or eight or 12 or 14 amendments. Who knows what they wanted. Nobody knows. I do not know. Nobody knew in Iraq. Certainly the average person in the street who voted on this never knew what it was about. And so what this says is the Constitution, they put an amendment in at the last without meeting in body. They just stuck it in there that says they can have major changes in this Constitution before the next election, which is supposed to occur in December. This Constitution was supposed to set up the procedures for them to elect a real constitutional body, a real parliament in December. The one that they have now is called the interim. That is the one we kind of appointed. The fact is that no one knows what is going on.

Now, for PR purposes, our government will say we have taken a further step, we have now moved forward. No one should be surprised. No one in the United States should be surprised if we continue to have our young men and women die. Five of them died the day after the election. Almost 2,000 Americans have died already. We have spent somewhere in excess of $200 billion on this war.

When you think about it, and probably some Members have forgotten, remember when we were told we would not have to pay for this war. When they start pumping oil, the Iraqis will have enough money that they can do all of their own reconstruction. They do not have enough oil pumping to keep the lights on. Most cities do not have lights on but about 2 hours a day. Many do not have fresh water. This is after the United States, with all of our military power and all of our political clout and everything else, has been unable to bring order to this country.

Now, the President will tell you, and I can almost make the speech for him, Well, this election went off very well, and it is because the Iraqis that we trained as policemen and soldiers were out in the streets and things were quiet.

Mr. Speaker, there were Americans standing with machine guns standing prepared to back them up in every situation. This was not an Iraqi-run election; this was an American-run election.

The analysts do not see an end to this. There has been an average of 570 attacks per day, despite the apparent approval on Sunday. Think about it, is that country at peace? Are these people satisfied with what is going on if there are 570 attacks per day?

If we had one attack, we would think the sky was falling, much less having a bomb going off here and there and everywhere all over the place, 570 a day. If we had that going on in this country, we would probably be doing a whole lot different in this body than we are.

We had the mayor of New York who apparently did not want to go to a debate, and suddenly there is a big terror alert in New York and they are searching people's bags. And then it comes

out people are not even sure about this information and where the information came from. You realize the use of fear continues in this country on a daily basis. That is what is going on in Iraq. They are creating fear everywhere.

I was over in Amman, Jordan, a few weeks ago. You come there and you realize that there are no hotel rooms. There are a million Iraqis living in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Anybody with money and the ability to get out of Iraq gets out because it is so unsafe. It is so unstable. It is hard to live there with no electricity, no water. It does not make any difference if you have money. If there is no water in the pipes, you do not have water. It does not make any difference if you have money, if there is no electricity. You may have your own generator, but that is a tough way to live with a generator; and then you have to worry about getting gasoline for it. They have a shortage of gasoline. They are importing gasoline into Iraq because their own refining capacity is not sufficient to meet the needs of the country.

When you look at that situation and say, we are going to have another election in 3 months and then we will have a duly elected parliament and then we can go away, folks, what is happening here is the American people are being taken along 1 week at a time. Wait one more week; I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. You are going to see and hear from people that somehow if we just last a little longer, we are going to make it. Some people have accused me of having a certain bias, and perhaps I do.

There are columnists, and this is in The Washington Post. This is George Will's column. George Will and I have one thing in common: we are both Cubs fans; otherwise I do not think we agree on very much. But George Will wrote a very interesting article today. His title is ``Standing Up a Constitution.'' Like you bring in an 18-wheeler with a constitution on the back of it and you push it off and stand it up, now it is in place, we have had elections, and so we must now have a constitution.

He says the first civilian leader of the U.S. occupation, retired Army General Jay Garner, and you may remember General Garner only lasted a couple of months. Well, the reason was he laid out his timetable, reconstruct the utilities, stand up the ministries, appoint an interim government, write and ratify a constitution and hold elections. He said there would be a functioning government in Iraq within 90 days. Ninety days. This was just after Baghdad had fallen. He was the governor, and he was going to run the place. He made this prediction we would get out of there in 90 days.

That was never going to happen. We knew it was not going to happen. The people in the White House did not want it to happen that way. They immediately pulled him and put Bremer in there. The first thing that Bremer did was to disband the army. Think about this for a minute. You have 500,000 people in the army. Are all of those people evil? Are they all bad? Are they all members of the Baath Party? Probably not. The sergeants and the privates and the lieutenants. Yes, the generals and the colonels perhaps. But what Bremer did with one swipe of the pen, he wiped out the entire army so there is no pay. Everybody has to go home to their village disgraced. They cannot take care of their families, cannot pay their bills. What he did was put 500,000 Iraqis underground with a rifle and a grudge. This insurgency that we are seeing, this civil war that we are watching, actually, and it is going to get worse, is one that is simply being driven by decisions made by the United States.

Now what George Will says in this article is that we should not get too excited about a big turnout. He said the fact that people voted in tribal factions enmeshes them in the democratic process and its civilities. They voted, and so now they are stuck with it. Perhaps, but he says in 1929 through 1933, the turnout in German elections was especially high because so were the stakes. In Germany's turmoil, the issues included which mobs would control the streets and which groups would be persecuted. In Iraq's turmoil, the issues are exactly the same.

What followed that period when Hitler came to power was the same chaos that he came out of and put a hold on Germany.

What is going to happen here? We think this constitution is going to stand up? We think that somehow they are going to sit down there when members of the parliament are being killed, when members of the parliament cannot leave the country because they do not dare to leave because they do not know if they will be able to get back in? They simply are a nonfunctional government. This is a failed state.

And Mr. Will finishes by saying: ``When America's Constitution was ratified in 1789, federalism was an unfinished fact. It still is but today's adjustments of States rights and responsibilities are'' usually ``minor matters'' that are handled out here in the floor. We basically know what the Federal Government does and we know what the State Government, and it has taken us 200 years to work all that out.

``If the Federal Government of 1789 had not grown in strength,'' and it did not start strong but it gradually got stronger and stronger, ``relative to the States, far more than most ratifiers of the Constitution anticipated or desired . . . '' They never thought the Federal Government would be as strong in this country as it was when we started. But they had a mechanism by which that could happen. This constitution that we gave the Iraqis prevents that from happening. What we have done is basically we have divided the country up on a religious basis or ethnic basis. We have not done anything to create nationhood in Iraq. We say we have, but the acts, the things that we have forced down their throat as a constitution basically have not worked.

``So,'' he says, ``the question today, which will be answered in coming years by the political process framed by Iraq's new constitution, is whether the constitution `stands up' a Nation or presages the partitioning of it, perhaps by the serrated blade of civil war.''

He is really saying this question is not over by any stretch of the imagination. There are many analysts, when we read the newspapers worldwide, particularly in the Middle East, who believe that we are going to have 18 separate states. All these states will have their own power, and they will fight war among themselves, and they will always be weak. Some people say that is exactly what the United States wanted. They did not want a strong Iraq. That is why we had to take out Saddam Hussein. We had to take out this strongman who had this country and he controlled it.

Nobody controls Iraq today. I do not care how many soldiers we put there now. We do not control it. We go and control this area, and then we walk and we go over to this area, and suddenly the place that we controlled a couple weeks ago is back right where it was when we went there in the first place. So what is now developing in this country is continued chaos.

Now, there are other articles in today's paper. Many of my colleagues are responsible for all kinds of things in this country, and it is not easy to have a full chance to read all the newspapers, so that is why I am coming out here to talk about this, to talk about what is in the newspaper.

This is a column written by a doctor who is the chief executive of the Iraqi National Movement, which is a Sunni political party. This is a Sunni political leader, in the New York Times in today's editorial page, and his name is Hatem Mukhlis. And the title of his article is that we are ``Voting `Yes' to Chaos.'' From the point of view of the Iraqi Sunni, this vote that happened a couple days ago, what he says is, ``The Iraqi constitution, if it passes, will break the country apart.'' That is not it might break the country apart or I am fearful that it will break the country apart. It will break the country apart.

Now, when people are of this level of political understanding, we are not talking about a taxicab driver that somebody stopped and asked him. This guy is a political leader in the country, and he does not say that is what he wants. That is not what he wants. But what he is implying is that this is a situation that we have created, and he says, ``Anyone who thinks that such a constitution would calm the insurgency has probably been spending more time than he should have reading Alice in Wonderland.'' The guy obviously knows a little bit about America. He probably was educated here. One would

be surprised how many Iraqi leaders were educated in United States universities.

When I went to dinner in Amman, I was at a table with 12 people, of which seven had been educated in the United States and four had been educated in Great Britain. These people are not uneducated or unaware of the ways of the world. They simply know the place in which they live and the people with whom they live. They know the history. They know the way Iraqis think. They know Arab customs. They know what can happen, how people will think about a given situation, and they know that if we put this thing together and say, well, anybody can go off and run their own state, that some are going to go off and run their own state. There is just not any question about it.

And when the country starts coming apart, what is the United States going to do? Are we are going to stand back and say, well, okay, they can have Shi'a country over here and a Sunni country over here and a Kurdish country over here, it is all right with us? Is that what we set out to do when we went in there?

We certainly have not gotten what we thought we were going to get, although we now have passed a constitution. It got so bad, there was so much fear in our government that we were not going to be able to pass this constitution that they went in in the last couple of weeks trying to change the way the votes were going to be counted. They said it has to be two-thirds of those registered to vote. Not two-thirds of those who voted, but it has to be two-thirds of those registered. If they have got 100 people registered, two-thirds is 66. But if 54 of them vote, how do they get 66 against even if everybody voted no? It has to be two-thirds of those 54 who vote. And there was so much uproar over this change that we put through in the days just before the election, the United Nations came in and said if they do that that is not going to be a fair election. We were worried up to the very last minute whether or not we could control what was going on there and have it come out the way we wanted to have it come out.

Now, this Iraqi says: ``Rather than unifying Iraqis, this constitution would only increase the rift between our ethnic and religious groups. It could also lead to the Balkanization of the nation, as the 18 states coalesce into three superstates, with the Sunnis trapped between the Shiites to the south and Kurds to the north. Hatred toward those Iraqis who return to Iraq on the backs of American tanks will be nurtured. Inevitably this would lead to more hatred towards the United States, since even though it is the American troops that are preserving Iraq's unity, it was the invasion that has led to this chaos.''

We are in a no-win situation at this point. The President cannot win this. Unfortunately, and I think it is unfortunate for all of us, not just Democrats, it is unfortunate for Republicans, the President has said we are going to stay the course. This course has led into more and more and more problems. And it is almost impossible to imagine that the President is going to let this happen right on through the next election.

Images of the Americans leaving off the roof of a hotel in Saigon in 1975 are not out of the realm of believability for this particular situation in Iraq today because the American people want to have their own security taken care of. What they saw with all this money wasted in Iraq was that there was not enough money to take care of the problems of people of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Somebody said that the loans that they give in Iraq are free but the ones that are given in Mississippi for reconstruction have interest. So somebody down there said, What I am going to do, I am going to go over to Iraq and try to pay it off, get my money in Iraq and bring it home. The point being that the American people have realized that the wasting of our resources abroad is not what we elected the President to do. He promised us in 2004 he would protect us, and yet when a hurricane comes FEMA does not exist. He is reduced to telling some guy, when there is a mess everywhere, Gee, Brownie, you did a good job. Brownie did a terrible job. He did no job really. And this war is sapping our energy as well as sapping the goodwill that we have in the world. In fact, it is building more and more hatred out there.

Now, the solution, at least if people have been reading the newspapers, there are two other things the President can do to make things look better. One of them is to distract us. I mean anybody who has ever seen a magician operate knows that they put their fingers up here and snap their fingers so people will pay attention to what they are doing up there, but with this right hand they are doing something else somewhere. They are pulling something from someplace. The distraction in the political process that this government has used has been a very common one.

Last night I was watching a DVD about the Vietnam era, and one of the things that happened during the Vietnam era when things were not going well in this country, there began to be a message from the White House that this was not being caused by Vietnamese. This was being caused by fighters coming from outside. They were coming from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and we had to attack Laos and we had to attack Cambodia because if we did not, the fighters would be coming from the outside.

When I was watching this DVD last night, I thought to myself we could take those lines and pick them up and put them into the mouths of the President and his advisers today around the issue of foreign fighters. Iraq, they tell us, is not caused by Iraqis. It is caused by those people who were coming from outside. They are the ones. If we could just stop them. Why do the Syrians not close their border?

I am sorry? They mean that if the Syrians would close the border, suddenly this would be all over? Is that what they are telling us? His own generals say that not more than 10 percent of the people fighting in Iraq are from outside. It may be as low as 4 or 5 percent. It is a very small number of people. This is not being caused from the outside. However, if we could start some kind of border fight, they had one, a short one, last weekend up on the border with Iraq, then maybe if we could get something going on on the border there, we could get people thinking that must be what it is. The President is right, there are too many people coming in from the outside.

It is not true. It is not true. There is no evidence of that. The people who really know and who tell us the truth say it is not happening.

They produced a letter the other day. They said we have got a letter from Osama bin Laden's second in command to the guy running al Qaeda in Iraq. If you read today's newspaper, there is all kind of doubts about whether that letter is even legitimate. It was picked up about 3 or 4 months ago. Certain parts of it do not make any sense. It is simply very, very unlikely that that is a legitimate letter from Osama bin Laden. He is asking for 100,000 American dollars in that letter. I mean, come on.

What are we talking about here? I mean, none of that holds together, but it did happen that that letter came up just at the time of the election. Days before the election, here comes a letter.

Every Member of the United States Congress who has been in a campaign in their life at any time has had the sort of Thursday surprise of election before Tuesday. It always happens. They come out with something about that you killed your favorite billy goat in the backyard with an axe or something. Then, after the election's over, it turns out it was not true. Well, here is another one of these things that is coming, and people have to say I wonder if we can believe anything that comes out of this administration.

They will not let us have hearings here. They will not let us get anybody in here to find out what is going on in Abu Ghraib prison. They will not let us have hearings on the issues that threaten our image in the world. We say that we care about human rights, but then you look at what we do at Guantanamo and what we do at Abu Ghraib, and you have to ask yourself why would the President even go to the point of saying we cannot see the caskets coming home? Some young man or some young woman goes out and dies for our country, and they come home and the parents would like to be

there at Dover when the casket comes home. Is that too much to ask? I mean, is it really? Would it be that much trouble to make it possible for a family to go when their loved one's coming home? The President said we cannot have any pictures and it will just confuse the public; the public cannot handle it.

The United States population does not need to be hidden from the truth, and the truth is that the foreign fighter argument from Syria is phony, and they are going to use that. If they do not go into Syria or create some kind of a coup or something in the next few weeks, I will be very surprised.

On the other side of Iraq, you have Iran. I think I talked out here on the floor before, but Iran is primarily a Shiite country. It is not all Shiite, but it is primarily Shiite, as is the southern part of Iraq, which has been a back and forth flow of people for a long time. Many of the issues that arise out of this whole confederation idea are troublesome because the Arabs who live in Iraq say you are going to give the control of this country to the Persians, Iraqis and Persians.

We do not think in those terms. We do not know about that kind of stuff. We are such a hodgepodge in this country. We look at somebody and we think, well, maybe I can figure out if that person is Irish or Polish. If there is an African American, I do not know if they came from Africa or the West Indies. If we hear a Hispanic voice, we do not know where they came from. We have no idea. But in these countries, where for 1,000 years they have lived in the same place, they know where everybody is from, and they know who has responsibility for what and so forth.

We now have manufactured this business about nuclear weapons. This is the United States. We have more nuclear weapons than the whole world put together by a factor of 10, and we suddenly get up on our high horse and say you cannot have any nuclear power, because we know if you get nuclear power, you are going to go and make weapons. We have talked about that, and why do we not let the United Nations inspectors go in?

The United Nations inspector Mr. Al Baredei, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the guy who went into Iraq and said I cannot find any weapons. We said we are going to have to go to war anyway. We would not accept the judgment of the United Nations that there were not weapons of mass destruction. The President had decided that the best way to confuse and scare the American people was with the threat that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was going to be an imminent danger to us within 24 hours. So he was going to drive that idea, whether the inspectors found it or not. In fact, he was not going to let the inspectors there long enough so that they could at some point give a clean bill of health on that particular issue. He simply would not allow it.

What we are facing now today is that we now have the possibility of going into Iran because we say they are developing nuclear power. We have nuclear power plants all over this country, all over this country. Why can they not make electricity out of nuclear power?

We do not want weapons. Sure, we can deal with the weapons part, but how about having a nuclear power industry? We are not saying people have to close down here in this country or that somehow the British cannot have it or the French and the German. Everybody else has nuclear power. Why can the Iranians not have it? Because we say they are going to use it to make weapons. Well, that may be true, but we have a mechanism by which we can monitor that, through the United Nations. Through the International Atomic Energy Agency, it can be monitored.

Where we stand today is that we have a situation, and I say this in summary, we have a situation where we have rammed through a Constitution in Iraq that both Iraqis and American conservatives are being convinced absolutely it will not work, to being very dubious about whether it will work. If that is where we are and we read in the newspaper, I bring this up because I want people to be thinking about when they read about Syria, why is Syria coming up? Why is Iran coming up? Why are we widening the war rather than pulling out and bringing our troops home?

I happen to be one of those who believes that we could be out of there by Christmas. There is no reason we could not. People say, oh, it will get worse. Get worse than what? Get worse than what is going on right now, where we are losing five Marines at a crack? I do not know how much worse you think it could be if we brought them home and let the Iraqis work it out themselves. They will find a way. They do not enjoy killing each other. That is not the Arab way.

The Arab way is to sit down and figure out a way that they can live in peace. They call it atwa. It is an arrangement that they establish between peoples, and they find ways to resolve these kinds of conflicts. It is foreign to us. We go to court. We are always going after somebody or we go militarily. The idea of sitting down and working it out, having a cease-fire and having a big peace conference in Iraq or in Jordan for that matter, with all the countries around, the Saudis do not want there to be a war. The Egyptians do not want a war. The Lebanese, the Syrians, the Turks, Iranians, none of the people around Iraq want this thing to continue to fester because the possibility of it boiling over into their people is very likely, and they are worried about that.

There is really a lot of cultural interests in bringing this thing to an end if the United States were to allow that to happen, but what is required? It is for the President to listen to what is going on in the world, and I take some hope.

The President has got one of his very trusted folks out. He has given her a new job at the State department, Ms. Karen Hughes. She went out on, I think they thought it was going to be a PR goodwill trip, and got an earful of what was going on out there. She came back with a wholly different view. She had been sitting in Washington, listening to all that goes on in the White House. Everybody's telling everybody, everything that is going is fine; everything's going wonderful; do not worry about a thing. Everything is going to get better tomorrow. She went out and find out how really bad it was.

When she came back, she brought a group of Arab negotiating women into the White House to meet with the President. That is how much things had changed. Imagine the President sitting down with a bunch of Arab women, talking about peace, about what is really going on out there?

This is not a situation that is going to be resolved with guns and military might. We have the best Armed Forces in the world. The people are the best. They are the best trained. They have the best equipment in most cases, if our military people pay attention and order stuff. We have the best and most powerful, but we cannot control the world that way. It will have to have a diplomatic aspect to it, which up to this point has not been there, and it is going to have to be there.

We cannot run Iraq as though it was a colony of the United States. There are 16 bases, which we have built, various sizes of installation. Why are we building permanent bases in Iraq if we want to get out?

It makes you wonder exactly what our plan for Iraq was. I do not think we have ever been told the truth about that, and I think that there are a lot of issues that will continue to come up and will lead us to have this Iraq Watch once a week on the Democratic side because we do not think that people on the other side really want to talk about the chaos and the problems it is causing us, both internally in the United States and externally, and the death and the cost. All of that needs to be discussed.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, our hearts go out to the people in the Southeast. The magnitude of the destruction and distress and the dislocation of the gulf coast cries out for a national response that only the Federal Government can meet.

Instead, we continue to see missteps, mismanagement, misinformation, sort of reminiscent of the continuation of the Brown Factor.

Hurricane Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people wet, homeless, and

destitute. And the Federal response is leaving thousands more high and dry.

We have not provided adequate housing for the homeless, health care coverage for the sick, protection for vulnerable children, and unemployment benefits for the jobless.

This bill, in my view, is like throwing a 100-pound sandbag on a ruptured New Orleans levee. There is some relief, but it is totally inadequate.

While suggesting otherwise, this legislation provides almost no real relief to jobless disaster victims, and I must say at this point I feel for the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. McCrery). I think he would like to do better, but the portions on his side are such that this is what we have.

Those who survived the natural disaster in the gulf now face a man- made disaster in the House of Representatives. There are three major problems we are ignoring.

First, over 6,000 people have already exhausted unemployment benefits in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Another 20,000 jobless workers in these States are projected to run out of benefits by Christmas. These workers need a federally funded extension of their benefits while they put their lives back together and search for unemployment.

Secondly, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana have the three lowest levels of average weekly unemployment benefits in the entire country. In all three States, the average benefit is less than $200 a week. That is $800 a month. That is about half the poverty level for a family of four. Such small amounts are difficult to defend during any period of job loss, but these paltry sums we have to remember are unconscionable when a family has lost not only their job but their home, their car, their belongings, the very fabric of their lives; and we give them 40 percent poverty and stand out here as though we are doing something.

The third is that the disaster-affected States are seeing an enormous surge in unemployment claims and bankruptcy claims. In Louisiana alone, new claims for unemployment benefits have surged 10 times above their normal levels, and State officials expect Katrina-related unemployment benefits to exceed $800 million. Now, the money is supposed to come from a State economy that has been devastated by the loss or dislocation of 70,000 businesses, many of which, they estimate less than half of those, are going to go back into business.

Under Louisiana law, once their unemployment trust fund slips below a certain level, benefits are automatically cut for jobless workers and tax increases for employers are triggered into effect. That means that people who get the unemployment benefits in Louisiana can see their benefits being slashed by as much as $37 a week. Remember, they are getting $170 a week. That is the generosity we have already given them, and it started in January. It could easily be cut another $37. That is like Rita hitting after Katrina except that we can control that. We can make it different.

We owe the people of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama a full measure of national compassion.

Instead, in response to these enormous problems, the bill before us simply sends a lump sum of money that forces these hard-hit States to bear another burden. The mayor of New Orleans yesterday laid off 3,000 people. Tell me how that economy is going to come out of it.

What we are sending covers less than half the cost of regular unemployment claims caused by a disaster. There is no money at all for extending expiring benefits or to supplement the meager benefits currently available. Does anybody on this floor really believe this is the best we can do? I know the chairman does not believe that.

Ask the people in the shelters, with no place to call home. Ask Americans on any street corner in any American city. They would be embarrassed all over again if this got on the television.

Perhaps part of the reason this legislation is limited in scope is the sudden demand by the Republican majority to cut spending regardless of the need or consequences.

Fiscal offsets did not concern Republicans when they gave every millionaire a $100,000 tax break or kept charging $215 billion for the Iraq war to future generations. Nobody's talking about offsets there, but we have got to have offsets here. We cannot spend too much on these unemployed people.

But now that it comes time to meet the needs of unemployed Americans, Republicans require that an American get hurt for another American to get help.

Mr. Speaker, President Bush promised that we would do whatever it takes. It takes more than what the President's party has offered today.

People in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi are waiting for the President to make good on his promise. People across the country are watching and hoping the President will say something other than, ``Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.''

It was not so then, and it is not so now in this legislation. We can and should do better.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin).

(Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Cleveland, Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), and I ask unanimous consent that he be allowed to distribute the time.

Mr. Speaker, I missed votes on September 27, 2005. Had I been able to, I would have voted ``yea'' on H.J. Res. 66 (Rollcall vote 494); ``yea'' on H.R. 438 (Rollcall vote 495) and ``yea'' on H. Con. Res. 209 (Rollcall vote 496).

I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, it has been said that society's humanity is judged by the way it handles the problems and the protection of those who are least able to take care of themselves. And having watched television for the last few weeks about the issues around Katrina, one clearly understands that sometimes people on the bottom do not get handled very well. Somehow, the things do not happen that should happen for them. That gave us an ugly glimpse at that part of our society.

And then as the country began to come out of that, the President walked out of the White House and said, we are not going to give prevailing wage to the people who work on the reconstruction of their own houses and their own countryside, that we were going to put them down at the minimum. We are going to take away the set-asides for minority and small business. Now, it is no wonder that these organizations would be concerned when they see this kind of manager's amendment.

I am not a lawyer. We could stand out here and argue about all the lawyer technicalities inside and outside. And I will enter into the Record a letter dated September 28, 2005, from Hilary Shelton. When the NAACP and all the women's organizations come out and say we oppose this manager's amendment, it is understandable why they might be a little concerned, because every time we turn around, the safety net is being ripped.

The language that is being taken out here that has been in the bill before is requiring the States to ``describe how they will address the needs of racial and ethnic minorities and other underserved populations'' and ``to recognize and meaningfully respond to the needs of racial and ethnic minorities and other underserved populations.''

Now, for us not to be able to put that in the law because somebody says on the fringe that this is some kind of affirmative action or anything else, we have to take care of people who are not served in this society. If they happen to be in underserved areas, they do not necessarily have to be black or brown or red or yellow. They could be white. The question is, how are we going to deal with the underserved people in this country no matter who they are? And this amendment does not need to be made so that those groups can say, well, we are going to take you to court and fight you for 3 years.

That is what the chairman just said. He said if we put that in there, they are going to go into court and say this is a quota and we want to fight it, and they will stretch it out for 3 years or 5 years or however long, a typical tactic of the right to do unto those who are least able to do for themselves.

I urge the rejection of the manager's amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot think how we could have had two better speeches than that of the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), which he just made, and mine. My real sadness about this House is that this is not being done in a debate where all the Members are talking and listening about this very, very important issue.

The question that I think the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) well raises is, why are we in Iraq? Now, I recently was in Jordan, and I was confronted by many of the Iraqis who have fled from Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. There are about a million Iraqis of middle class and above all living in Amman. The prices of real estate have gone up. It is very hard to find a hotel room. They have left.

I sat at dinner with a number of them, and the question that many of them asked me was, why is the United States in Iraq? And I sort of dismissed the ideas that have been advanced at various times in this Hall, that we are there for weapons of mass destruction, or we are there because of al Qaeda. Many people say we are there for oil. I think that is way too simplistic an explanation for what is going on.

Are we there to stop terrorism? Well, it is very hard to look at what is going on in Iraq and say that what we have done is to end terror. Rather, it seems like we have become a breeding ground and a training ground for terrorists.

After I had exhausted my ideas about what it might be about, I asked the Iraqis to tell me what they thought this was about. And they said, well, it is pretty clear that what your goal was, and you succeeded almost at this point, in dividing Iraq into three pieces and destroying Iraq as ever being an Arab nation. That was your goal from the start; and you have, by every decision you have made, you have worked in that direction.

Now, it was not a design that was clear. People have not understood this, in large measure because it was never enunciated in a public way by public figures saying we are going into Iraq to destroy it. We have talked about liberty, we have talked about democracy, we have talked about every other thing under the sun except the fact that the effect of our actions have been to destroy Iraq.

Now I will take you back to the appointment of the first governor of Iraq. Most people, if you ask them who that was, they cannot remember the name. It was a retired army general by the name of Jay Garner. He was appointed and he went over there, and he had the idea that perhaps the Iraqis should begin to take their own existence, now that Baghdad had fallen and with the Americans in control militarily, let the Iraqis put their country back together.

What happened to him? Anybody know? Well, I will tell you what happened to him. He was immediately relieved. He was taken out of the situation and Paul Bremer was brought in because Garner was not following the script, and they knew that Bremer would.

Now, just take a couple of things very early that Bremer did and you understand why the Iraqis feel the way they do about the situation today. The first thing he did was to dismantle an army. He disbanded an army of 500,000 people or so, all of whom had families, had homes, had children, had grandparents, had all the responsibilities of citizens of Iraq. They had salaries. They could pay for their families' food. They could pay for their families' housing. All of this was what they had been accustomed to.

Surely they had worked for Saddam Hussein. But to think that they all were bad and, therefore, should be disbanded and thrown to the winds was a terrible miscalculation about the attitude of the average soldier in the Iraqi Army. And what that action did was to send 500,000 Iraqis underground with a rifle and a grudge. We created 500,000 insurgents instantly by that action.

Now, why would you do that? Why would you want to go into a country that has an army that is functioning and not take off just the top layer, no, no, no; not take off the first couple of layers, maybe down to the sergeants or something, but to fire everyone and take away their income, their whole existence, if you thought that was in the best interest of the Iraqis?

But if you want chaos, put 500,000 people out on the street with guns and a grudge.

The second thing that we did, equally disruptive and equally destabilizing, was the decision to de-Baathize the government. Now, the Baath Party, the party of Saddam Hussein, which is secular, not religious, but a secular party of Arab nationalism, basically, and the decision to say that everybody in Iraq who belonged to the Baath Party was suddenly out of a job and out of government took another hundreds of thousands of people who were simply public servants who ran the utilities, ran the electric company, ran the sewage system, taught in the schools, did the marriage licenses, recorded land deeds, and whatever public servants in a society do. We suddenly said, if you are a member of the Baath Party, you are out of here.

We absolutely denuded this country of any government whatsoever. Now, you would not have to be older than about a seventh grade kid in this country to realize if you take away the Army and take away the government, you have chaos. If you go into the schools and you take away the teacher, take away the principal, the hall monitors, the kids are not going to run a very reasonable operation. That is what the educational system is about. Well, we did that to a whole society.

You can say we know, and you are standing down there in the well talking about this, but you never wanted to go to war in the first place.

One of the interesting things that I have done over the course of time since this all began was to read widely in the international press. It is very often difficult in this country, either in the press or in the media, to get anything like a comprehensive view of what is going on in Iraq and why we have so much difficulty. We have the strongest Army in the world. There is no question about that. We have the bravest, the best trained, the most able people in the world are over there representing in the United States Army and Marines, and Navy and Air Force. That has never been the problem or the question.

The question has been after the gunfire stops, what do you do? How do you run things? And from the very start, the administration has been dominated by people whose intention was to destabilize Iraq, in fact, into destabilizing very wide portions of the country. Not many of you have probably ever read the Jordan Times. That is the main newspaper in the city of Amman which is the capital of Jordan.

On August 10, 2005, an article appeared called, ``The Triumph of Neoconservatives in Iraq,'' and which I will include for the Record.

The article was written by a man named Abbas J. Ali. He is a professor and director of the School of International Management at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; obviously an Iraqi living in the United States, and he wrote this article.

If you read just this one article, and I wish I could get it into the head of every Member of Congress, part of the reason for putting it in the Congressional Record is people can get it and read it and see it. You do not need to Google it. It will be in the Congressional Record. He begins by saying that three recent developments in the Iraqi political arena reaffirm the growing fear of destabilization and things are becoming worse. First, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld predicts that the mess in Iraq could go on for 12 years. The New York Times reported on June 30 that a type of federalism, as supported by Washington, where each region in Iraq gains power approaching true sovereignty, and that means creating three separate countries.

Mr. Speaker, our goal or what we are actually doing right now is creating three separate countries. We are not creating Iraq. We are going to put some shine on it and try and say it has a constitution, but the pieces will be sovereign from one another.

The third thing he says that happens is the appointment of Zalamy Khalilzad as Ambassador, who is a neocon and will do the neocon bidding from the start.

Now, this did not start with George Bush the second. This is not something new. I do not think you can lay it all off on the present occupant of the White House.

Dr. Ali writes that back in the 1970s, the neoconservatives recognized Iraq constituted a threat to their design for the Middle East, not because Iraq had ample natural resources, especially oil and water, but because the Iraqis were considered a spirited and cultured people displaying pride, patriotism and independent thinking. It had the best water system in the Middle East, it had the best sewage system in the Middle East, it had the best health care system in the Middle East. It was really a functioning country. For whatever you want to say about Saddam Hussein, and no one wants to say a good thing about him and we should not, his actions as a leader were awful, but when he was dealing with the running of the state, he did a reasonable job.

Now at that time in the 1970s, General Shinseki, then the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, pointed out, and remember Shinseki was the guy they fired because he gave them the truth about how many people this would take, Shinseki pointed out that in 2002 Paul Wolfowitz, and remember that name, now the head of the World Bank, as a young Pentagon analyst and a neoconservative, designated Iraq in 1979 as a menace that must be dealt with. Since then the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been primarily a neoconservative venture. The neocons have wanted this and that is why this article was entitled ``The Triumph of the Neocons in Iraq.''

If Wolfowitz was not enough, in 1982 a man named Oded Yinon accentuated the usefulness of internal strife and war with Iraq to foster the demise of Iraq as an Arab state. He notice that in the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel and that a division of Iraq into provinces along ethnic religious lines is possible. So three more states will exist around the major cities: Basra in the south; Baghdad in the middle; Mosul in the north; and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.

This is 1982, people were laying this out.

It is for this reason that the neoconservatives have made a very powerful argument, he goes on to say, and he quotes a man named Michael Ledeen, who is not just some newspaper reporter or somebody drifting in off the street. He was the former U.S. Under Secretary of State and he stated, ``Stability is an unworthy American mission.'' This is a man who was in the State Department, saying that stability is an unworthy American mission and a misleading concept to boot. He said we do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or even Saudi Arabia. We want things to change. The issue is not whether but how to destabilize.

Think about that. The minds in the State Department, and this is an Under Secretary of State saying we want to destabilize.

Now there have been books. Lawrence Kaplan and Bill Kristol, they asserted in their book ``The War Over Iraq'' that this is more about even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror, it is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the 21st century. They argue that the only plausible and sensible mission is to persistently supply American might in these parts of the world that constitute a threat to American interests.

And the mission, Michael Ledeen goes on to say, is ensure the total submission of the people in the region. He stated this in 2001. We have gone from 1979 all of the way up to 2001. We will not be sated, and this is an Under Secretary of State saying we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheik, ayatollah either singing the praises of the United States or pumping gasoline for a dime a gallon on American bases in the Arctic Circle. Gasoline is not a dime a gallon.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ledeen and his men have worked and been very consistent and very determined. We are talking about a 25-year effort from 1979 to the present. But in the Bush second term, this article goes on, the neoconservatives appear to have secured indisputable domination in designating American foreign policy. They have situated themselves at the core of the three primary agencies responsible for foreign affairs: the National Security Council, and State and Defense Departments. Now, with Ambassador Khalilzad in Baghdad, they have him in position to carry this out from the green zone.

They are building the biggest embassy in the world in Baghdad. Why would you be building an embassy of that size for a country of several tens of millions of people unless you had some grand design, strategy into the future?

Now, if you look at this, you say to yourself, why? We have sacrificed 1,900 of our young men and women in this war. They have died. For what? To destabilize Iraq? That is what the people in the State Department and in this government are up to. It is why it has never made any sense.

We have had thousands of people come home to Walter Reed Hospital. I have been up there. I was a physician in the Vietnam era. I dealt with casualties coming back from Vietnam, 1968 to 1970. You do not have that experience and forget it. That is what got me into politics. I was going to be a doctor, a research doctor. I thought my life would be spent in medicine. But that experience of dealing with those casualties and realizing what the government did by its foreign policy, what it did to all of the people of this country, brings me to the floor today to talk about what we are doing in Iraq.

We have been misled in many, many, many ways. I do not go to these secret briefings they have in the House, because I know that the people who led us into this war are not going to tell us the truth even when the doors are locked when we are in private. They simply are not leveling with the American people.

The President says we are going to stay the course, and we put our governor in there, Mr. Bremer. We destabilized everything and things fell apart, and now we say oh, they are all coming over the border from Syria. There are only two places where they can come in where there are roads. It is very difficult to get in from that side. They are not capturing these people. They are killing people and they identify them just as they did in the Vietnam War. We have killed so many soldiers. The body count in Iraq is people who have died. That is okay. They have died, but they are not insurgents coming from somewhere else. By and large, the insurgency in this country of Iraq was created by sending 500,000 soldiers underground with weapons and a grudge. We are tasting the fruit of our planting those vines. Unfortunately, we have also in the process killed I do not know how many thousand because no one will count the number of Iraqis. It is as though they do not matter.

Nor do we talk about the number of them that are injured. When we look at that situation and we see what we are doing, we have to ask ourselves how much longer can we persist in staying there. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) and I might disagree at this point because he thinks that it is just going to be the end. Well, my belief is that we are already in a lose-lose situation.

Let me explain why I say that. We have gone into a country that was a secular country. People did not think of themselves as Catholics and Protestants like Northern Ireland. They did not fight about that kind of stuff. They thought of themselves as being tribal: I belong to this tribe; you belong to that tribe. We take care of our tribe; you take care of your tribe. We work out an arrangement. You get some; we get some. And that is basically how Iraq has run for thousands of years.

So the Americans came in, and suddenly we whipped up this business that is understandable in this country about religion. Shi'a do not like Sunni and Sunni do not like Shi'a. There is a much bigger force at work here that people simply, I think, maybe because it is complex, and I have got an hour, so I can talk about it a little bit and explain it, but simply do not understand the makeup of the Middle East.

There are two large groups of Muslim people. Iraq had Muslims from Shi'a and Muslims from Sunni. They also had Christians living there. They had Jews living there. They had Kurds living there. They were a secular society that did not go around checking people's religious card to see what they were. Our attempts, as we have gone in there, to create this chaos and turn it loose and say, well, you Shi'a have always been under the control of the Sunnis forever here, you are the majority. This is your chance to be the majority. So we have gotten them fighting. It is an old, old strategy. The British Empire used to use it all the time: let you and him fight and I stand by and watch and I control what is going on.

So we have gotten the Sunni and the Shi'a to fight each other. But what we do not understand is there is more than one kind of Shi'a. Some of the Shi'a are those living in Iraq. They are Arab in background. They are Arab tribal people who are Shi'a. And then there are the Shi'a who live in Iran. Iran, before it was called Iran, was called Persia. So in Iraq, people talk about Arabs and Persians. And the fight between these two countries is not about Sunni versus Shi'a. It is about whether those Persians are going to come in and take over our country. If this situation that we are setting up where we are going to have one part being Shi'a in the south and a little bit of Sunni here in the middle and the Kurds in the north, if that three-part government is set up, we will have set Persia, Iran, with a chance to invade. And as some of us said many, many months ago, the danger of this war is we are going to wind up with two Irans, one next to the other.

Now, one can say whatever they want about that; but, of course, Iran has been the source of a lot of tumult and terrorism and all kinds of stuff. So the question of having two of them does not sound like that makes things better in the Middle East. But that is what we are driving toward right now. We are driving in that direction.

What will derail it and the name people see on television once in a while, it is a young man and his name is Muqtada al-Sadr, S-a-d-r. Muqtada al-Sadr is a young flamethrower of a Shi'a, but he is Arab. And he, last week, turned out 200,000 people on the streets in Iraq to protest this constitution, which is going to give the control of the country to the Shi'a. He himself, Shi'a, that does not matter. What matters is he is Arab; so he is now aligning himself sort of imperceptibly, at least as far as Americans seem to be knowledgeable, with the Sunnis. The Sunni army that was sent underground is now aligning itself with Muqtada al-Sadr.

We then have created two equal forces. And every Iraqi I met said almost the same thing one way or other. They would say, If you succeed in pushing that constitution you people are pushing, and you wrote it and you gave it to those people and said pass it, there was never any agreement on it. They just passed it and brought it out.

They are going to put it out for referendum in October. If you succeed in passing that, you will have civil war in this country for 15 years or more. That constitution will not serve as a governing document for the Iraq of today because you have created so much dissension and given the Iranians such a chance to come in.

Now, we hear our President say, well, not only are they coming in from the west, from Syria; they are coming in from Iran. Of course they are. The leading spokesman for the Shi'a in Baghdad to whom everyone listens and is the one that our government responds to is a man named al-Sistani. Al-Sistani is a Persian. Someone told me, and I am not sure because I have not had a chance to check, that he did not actually vote in that Iraq election before because he was not a citizen of Iraq. He is a citizen of Iran. So the main spokesman with whom we have been dealing, and people will see his name, we call him a moderate, that he is a moderate Shi'a and all this. We have built him up. Well, he is a Persian and he is connected to all the Persians.

And Muqtada al-Sadr, of course we can see. I mean we have had plays from the Greek times of Oedipus Rex. We have got the old man and the young kid and they are fighting. Whatever the reasons are, the Shi'a- ness does not hold them together. Certainly their Arab-Persian thing is pushing these two apart, and Muqtada al-Sadr is going with the Sunnis.

Now, the Kurds sit up in the north; and for the first time since the World War I, they have been promised over and over again, and they have been let down over and over and over and over again, that they are going to have their own state. There are about 40 million Kurds. Most of them will live in Iraq, but large numbers of them live in Turkey to the north and Syria to the west and in Iran to the east.

And they are a fierce, independent people who are Sunni by religion; and the Shi'a, who are writing the constitution, say the Kurds' army, which are called Peshmurga, the Peshmurga has to come into the Iraq army. We cannot have an army in Kurdistan and an army in the rest of Iraq. It has got to be one army. Well, the Kurds say, I do not know how thick the ice is going to be on hell before that happens because we are never going to allow any army to come into the territory we have in Kurdistan. We are prepared to die because we finally have our own country.

They have a parliament that functions. They have two factions there that fight with each other, and it is like every other country. There are Democrats and Republicans. That is fine. They need that for government to work. But they have put down their arms against one another and are dealing with the outside world and saying, no, we will be a part of Iraq. We certainly will. We have oil up here in Kirkuk in the north, and we think we are entitled to some of the revenue from the oil, and we will run our area and we will educate our children and we will send them to the United States for medical school. There are a lot of Kurds in the United States going to school. They are very bright, very hard-working, very tough people. They have gone through a lot in the last 85 years since World War I when they were promised that they would have their own land.

If we look at that situation, we have the Kurds and we have the Sunnis and we have the Shi'a. One says to himself, gosh, you have just now painted a picture that you are saying a constitution will not bring them together. Well, let me say there is some hope. There is hope in this. But what it requires is the United States and the people, the neocons who think they have won, to recognize that they have not won anything. They have created a horrible, horrible costly mess that has cost us at least $240 billion so far and God knows how much more it is going to cost us, and it made us incapable of responding to our own people when problems came in New Orleans.

Part of the Governor of Louisiana's problem was that 13,000 of her National Guard were in Iraq. She could not call them out, to get their trucks and go out, help people, put sandbags, do whatever they do in that kind of situation. They were not there. That is just one element of what went on. Because we were enmeshed in this war in Iraq, we were unable to respond to them.

Now, God forbid that we are waiting for another hurricane, Rita, to hit the coast of Texas. We do not know what it is going to do. Are the Texans ready? How could they have gotten ready since what went on over here in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama? Do people think they have suddenly magically gotten ready for Texas? The Texas National Guardsmen who are over in Iraq, they are not home to take care of their people.

And we simply have a President who says we are going to stay the course, that we are going to keep doing the same thing we are doing in Iraq because it is the right thing to do and we are going to keep doing it. Well, there is an old joke in psychiatry about the definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. We get the same result.

We are doing the same thing. We go into a town like Fallujah. We flatten it. Now we have gotten rid of those terrorists. We go away. And lo and behold, they come springing up again, coming back into the town. They know where we are. They just run off and hide. They are not going to confront our military head on head. That is not guerilla warfare. Guerilla warfare is to let the enemy figure that they have got it made and then get them when they are not paying attention. That is what they have done all over the country. We do not control any part of Iraq at the moment, except the Green Zone where we have a fence and barbed wire and razor wire and everything else. And the only way we are going to manage to undo this situation is for our administration to find some way, some way, to honestly say we are not going to establish permanent bases in Iraq.

When I suggested that to the Iraqis I talked to, they laughed. They said, your President is not going to say that. But our administration is going to have to say something like that, and then do a second thing. Because they have to say, we are not going to have permanent bases and we are going to leave the country in some orderly period in an orderly way. But before we go, we want to set up, and I suggest, and I do not know, maybe there is another place to do it; maybe Paris or some place, but Amman in Jordan, not very far away; it would be a place to convene an Arab summit made up of Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Turk men, Turk men are people who came from Turkey and have settled in this basic area; and have them go to a peace place and sit down and work this out among themselves.

They do not want their families killed. They do not want to have this continuing warfare. I mean, they are like everybody else. They want a place, a house for their family, they want food for their kids and their wife or their mother or their father, whoever; they want schools, they want health care, they do not want this continuing warfare with the people dying in the streets and the awful pictures we see. They do not want somebody falling down with a bridge, because there is a threat of some sort, people run out on a bridge and it collapses. They are not looking for that.

If we would get that summit going where everybody who had a stake would come and sit down and say, let us have a cease-fire in Iraq while we work on the problem here and see if we cannot come up with a way to govern a new country without Saddam. Everybody is glad he is gone. You do not find many people who say, boy, I sure wish Saddam was around. There is not anybody.

So it is not that they want to bring Saddam back at all. Some people say, oh, you are just talking about bringing Saddam back. No. These groups can sit down and work it out. Arabs have worked things out in their culture for thousands of years.

Now, there are also parties that would be interested in being helpful, perhaps, because my colleagues will remember we talked about Iraq has got Shia and Sunni in it. Well, what do we have in Syria? It is all Sunni. What do we have in Jordan? Almost all Sunni. What do we have in Saudi Arabia? Almost all Sunni. What do we have in Turkey? Almost all Sunni. These other countries have a huge stake in this not becoming a second Shia Persian threat

to their way of life, because they think, well, take Saudi Arabia. The area around the oil fields from which we get our oil, or the world gets its oil, the biggest oil fields in the world are right in the middle of a Shia area. So, if you have Iran and Iraq, and you moved on into Saudi Arabia, which is not very far, you suddenly have a crescent of Shia control of almost all the oil in the area. A big threat to everybody; to the Sunnis, certainly, to the Americans, to the Europeans. Everybody has a stake in this. And if you get a conference going where you have people sitting down talking and not killing each other, then they can work out an equitable arrangement and find a way to resolve this.

It cannot be dictated by the United States. Unfortunately, what happens again and again is that we have these parliaments. We have elected a parliament, and then we go in and tell them what they have to do. Here is what it has to look like. It has to have this provision, that provision, we do not like this, you take that out. We, by our heavy-handedness, have really tried to run everything in this situation. And it can be ended. It can be ended, if we will allow a process to begin in which Arabs can sit down among themselves and solve it.

Now, I tell my colleagues this because let me tell my colleagues how it works. I have a very good friend, a Jordanian, who told me a story that he knows. And this is Arab culture. A man was driving a cab and he drove the cab and he hit a man and killed him. Well, that means you are responsible, and the crowd was about to get him. This guy ran up the street and ran into the home of a young man and demanded that he be given sanctuary. That is the Arabic custom. You will give sanctuary. In fact, the young man, when the police came and when people came, he said, I never saw this guy you are talking about. I do not know what you are talking about. The crowd went away. He called his brother and said, take this man and take him home, so the man went home, was taken to a safe place. Then he went down in the street and discovered that the man that had been killed was his father. So now he has a legitimate cultural right to exact a price for his father's death. What would you do? You now know where the guy lives; you can go over to his house and kill him. He did not do that. He just left it alone. He met him in the street some months later, about four years later, met him in the street and he said, the guy knew who it was and he was frightened and he said, look, you and I will have coffee together. So they had coffee together. And he said, the man whose father had been killed said, you must put on a feast for our family in memory of my father. So the man put the feast on and the issue was gone.

People in this Arab culture have a long history of certainly violence, but also of peacefully resolving situations. And what we are doing by continually bombing; one of the things the Iraqi said to me was, you have to stop this business of kicking in the door of a guy's house and going in and dragging his wife out of bed and embarrassing her and him and making him look weak and impotent and all the rest, you have to stop that. You keep doing that, you keep making Iraqis angrier and angrier, and yet we continue to do these things. As long as we continue to do war and do not allow a peace process to begin to spring up, actually, the King Ab'dullah was here in the city today talking at the prayer breakfast. He, or his uncle, the Crown Prince al-Hasan, or there are other people who are trusted by both Shia and Sunni who could be seen as an honest broker.

But we must take the first step. We have to allow that to happen. If we continue to do what we are doing and stimulate, this will go on until probably the next election or beyond, until one day we do what we did, and that image, the very famous picture in Vietnam of that helicopter lifting off that building, it was not the embassy actually, it was a hotel down the street where people are hanging on the skids of this helicopter as it lifts off the ground, that is going to be our fate in Iraq if we continue on this path. Because we cannot win it with military might.

The time has come to talk. And we have never been able to get the gunfire down to the point where this constitutional process that was supposed to lead to peace, that was supposed to be a peace conference under other names, but the Sunnis did not participate in it. So you cannot have it be that way. It cannot come out with a peace if one of the groups has boycotted it. You can say, oh, it was stupid for them to boycott it, they should not have done that. You can blame all you want. But it did happen that way. They did not participate. So the only way you are going to get it is a conference some place where you can get all the parties sitting down and saying, all right, look, how are we going to work this thing out? We have oil revenue, we are a rich country, there is no reason for us to be in poverty like we are in; we can use that wealth for everybody, not just for one group or another group. We will let everybody have a part of it, and we will make this again the country that it was. This country has a long tradition of being a place of refinement and intelligence and civil society, and it can be that again if we will allow that to happen.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that you will ask the President to reconsider the advice he is getting. I know it is very difficult to be President of the United States and you do not know everything that you are going to face. Certainly, one can have empathy for the President having suddenly been confronted by 9/11 and all the rest. But the advice that he has been listening to and following is leading him deeper and deeper into chaos, and it is time for the President to lead us out of that chaos by taking the role of saying, I believe it is time for us to convene a peace conference somewhere. We will not have any part of it, but we think it ought to happen over there, and maybe so-and-so could be the leader. I mean, maybe it would be better if the President did not suggest anybody, because it would probably work better if he just said to the Arabs, who would be the one to convene the conference? Let them decide. If we want peace and we want democracy and we want liberal treatment of women, and if we want all of those things for the Iraqi people, we have got to change our policy.

The Triumph of Neoconservatives in Iraq

(By Abbas J. Ali)

In his speech on June 28, President George W. Bush

accurately characterized the situation in Iraq as

``horrifying, and the suffering is real.'' Previously, Bush

had described the invasion of Iraq as a ``catastrophic

success.'' Foreign affairs analysts agree that in both cases,

Bush accurately captured the reality of the Iraq mess, but

were equally surprised by his insistence on staying the

course. The fear is that Iraq hardship and bloodshed may be

deepened and reversing the state of disorder is a remote

possibility.

Three recent developments in the Iraq political arena

reaffirm the growing fear. US Secretary of Defense Donald

Rumsfeld predicts that the mess in Iraq could go on for 12

years, The New York Times reported (June 30) that a type of

federalism is supported by Washington, where each region in

Iraq gains power approaching true sovereignty, and Zalamy

Khalilzad assumed his position as the American ambassador in

Baghdad. The last two developments are interrelated and are

certain to turn the transformation of Iraq into a bloody

mess.

In particular, Khalilzad is a pivotal factor in the Iraqi

equation. Khalilzad was a member of the team that planned the

invasion of Iraq and aggressively promoted a vision for Iraq

where the Iraqis play only on advisory role in determining

the future of their country. As a hard line neoconservative,

he is an adamant advocate of the virtue of perpetual war and

the use of forceful approaches to world problems. When Henry

Kissinger, a neoconservative strategist, in November 2001

articulated a plan for creating ``a central Kabul government

of limited reach, with tribal automany prevailing in various

regions,'' in Afghanistan, it was Khalilzad who translated it

into a reality.

Back in 1970s, the neoconservatives recognized that Iraq

constituted a threat to their design for the Middle East. Not

because Iraq has ample natural resources, especially oil and

water, but because the Iraqis were considered a spirited and

cultured people, displaying pride, patriotism, and

independent thinking. General Eric Shinseki, then the US army

chief of staff, pointed out in 2002 that Paul Wolfowitz, as a

young Pentagon analyst and a neoconservative, designated Iraq

in 1979 as a menace that must be dealt with. Since then, the

invasion and occupation of Iraq has been primarily a

neoconservative venture.

In targeting Iraq, the neoconservatives envision war and

military intervention as instrumental in the polarization of

Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions and ultimately ending

Iraqi Arab identity. For example, in 1982, Oded Yinon

accentuated the usefulness of internal strife and war with

Iraq to foster the demise of Iraq as an Arab state. Yinon

noticed that: ``In the short run it is Iraqi

power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel'' and

that a division of Iraq ``into provinces along ethnic/

religious lines . . . is possible. So three (or more) states

will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and

Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the

Sunni and Kurdish north.''

Critics and political commentators agree that the

neoconservatives are obsessed with a grand design to

militarize the globe and globalize fear. Knowledgeable

observers, however, acknowledge that the core of the

neoconservatives' thinking revolves around the Middle East

and the role of Israel. Unlike Bush, the neoconservatives

harbour the belief that freedom for the Arab people,

prosperity, and cultural renaissance are a threat to Israeli

security and vitality. It is for this reason that

neoconservatives make a powerful argument for creating

instability and chaos in the Middle East. This was well

expressed by Michael Ledeen former US undersecretary of state

and a leading neoconservative, when he stated: ``Stability is

an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to

boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,

and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real

issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.''

Indeed, the neoconservatives have been exceptionally

successful in promoting four primary propositions:

1. The welfare of American people and the prestige of the

US in the world are contingent upon the ability to dominate

the world and especially the Middle East.

2. The U.S. invasion of and military presence in Iraq

ensures American safety, security and world peace,

3. The U.S. goals coincide with Israeli goals. Therefore,

the invasion of Iraq served the interests of both countries.

4. The Arab people are inherently anti-American and a

threat to American interests. Thus, the presence of American

forces in the region is an imperative necessity and is

essential for world peace.

Neoconservative thinkers Lawrence Kaplan and William

Kristol assert in their book, The War over Iraq, that the

decision about what course to take in dealing with Iraq, ``is

about more even than the future of the Middle East and the

war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United

States intends to play in the world in the 21st century.''

They argue that the only plausible and sensible mission is to

persistently apply American might in these parts of the world

that constitute a threat to American interests and foresee

Iraq as a starting stage; the ``mission begins in Baghdad,

but it does not end there.''

The mission, as Michael Ledeen defines it, is to ensure the

total submission of the people in the region. He stated in

2001, ``we will not be sated until we have had the blood of

every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East . . . and

every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah,

imam, sheik, and ayatellah is either singing the praises of

the United States of America or pumping gasoline for a dime a

gallon on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.''

From the beginning, the neoconservatives viewed the

invasion of Iraq either as a staging ground for their

perpetual war or securing its instability. While the

introduction of economic sanctions against Iraq in August

1990 and the subsequent attack in 1991 along with the

presence of an oppressive regime have tremendously weakened

Iraq and demoralised its people, it was the invasion in March

2003 that enabled the neoconservatives to directly manage

Iraqi affairs and put their vision into practice.

Contrary to their claim of nation-building in Iraq and

nurturing democratic institutions, the neoconservatives have

made sure that every effort must be made to prevent the

Iraqis from exercising their rights to run their own country

and establish an open and free country. When General Jay

Garner attempted, in early 2003, to allow Iraqis to chart

their own destiny, he was immediately replaced. His

successor, Paul Bremer, closely followed the

neoconservatives' agenda.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported (June 3, 2005) that

the occupational authority has institutionalised corruption.

The corruption has paralysed the economy and fostered the

creation of dysfunctional institutions. This, along with the

ever rising new trend of terrorism, constitutes a threat to

Iraq's social fabric. Indeed, a growing number of Iraqis

question the virtue of the decision taken by the occupational

authority in mid-2003 to dissolve the Iraqi border police and

leave the Iraqi borders open for extremists. The Iraqis also

question the reluctance of the occupational forces to train

the newly-established Iraqi army and police and supply them

with adequate weapons to defend themselves and their country.

In a radical but alarming move, the neoconservatives have

espoused a sectarian and ethnic policy in conducting

government and political affairs in Iraq. The policy is

contrary to America's officially pronounced goal of nation

building and constitutes a formidable obstacle to Bush's

vision of a democratic and unified Iraq. In fact, the policy

has devastating consequences and may lead to the ruin of

Iraq. It should be mentioned that, in practice, Saddam

Hussein espoused a sectarian and racial outlook after 1978.

But this was never acknowledged as a guiding principle and

was disliked by the majority of the population.

In Bush's second term, the neoconservatives appear to have

secured undisputed domination in designing American foreign

policy. They have situated themselves at the core of the

three primary agencies responsible for foreign affairs: The

National Security Council, and the state and defence

departments. With the presence of Ambassador Zalamy Khalilzad

in Baghdad, the neoconservatives are positioned to pursue

their vision for Iraq with zeal, confidence, and energy.

Middle East experts and responsible international observers

make a strong point that the neoconservatives are

progressing with unexpected ease in translating their

vision for Iraq into practical steps, which will

eventually change the fate of Iraq profoundly. In

particular, the neoconservatives have strengthened and

widened their network of influence well beyond their

traditional allies (e.g. Ahmed Chalabi, Masood Barzani,

Barhem Saleh, Ayhem Al Samarai, Meshaan Al Jabory, Moufaq

Al Rebuey, etc.) and include powerful individuals and

newly emerging organizations inside and outside Iraq that

actively promote and espouse the neoconservative design

for fragmenting Iraq and creating semi-independent

sectarian/ethnic units in place.

The presence of terrorism and extremism in Iraq is a

development that accompanies the occupation. Its threat is

real with predictable consequences, especially the sudden and

mass exodus of whatever is left of the middle class.

Nevertheless, once the Iraqis are free and are in charge of

their destiny, they will more likely be able to uproot

terrorism and extremism. The kindling and

institutionalisation of sectarian and ethnic discord,

however, have unpredictable and frightening consequences. For

many decades sectarianism and racial discrimination were

almost alien concepts for the majority of Iraqis. Since the

invasion, sectarian and divisional ethnic terminologies have

become conspicuously common in daily political discourse.

Regardless of the outcome of the ongoing debate concerning

the constitution, the neoconservatives have already inflicted

damage to the fabric of Iraqi society.

Fragmenting Iraq and kindling sectarian/ethnic discords are

weapons of cultural and national destruction, a menace to

civilization. They represent a threat to American interests

and to regional stability. More importantly, they evidence a

purposeful activation of the clash of civilizations.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 42 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, September 26, 2005, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Would the Chair please make a ruling on when the vote has been signaled by the Chair. I was of the opinion that when the gavel came down, that was the end of it.

I see there are no rules in the House.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to commend the President for his quick and compassionate helping hand that he has extended to the people of New Orleans. Now, some people might carp about the poor planning by the horse-show man that turned into a 5-level hurricane.

But the President was right on the job. He immediately noticed that there were going to be some reconstruction jobs. So he immediately signed an order to cut their wages. He said, we do not want truck drivers making $9 an hour. Why, we can get them for minimum wage.

We do not want these people who have had their houses lost and lost everything getting a decent wage when they are doing reconstruction. We want as the public policy of the United States that no one gets anything but the minimum wage.

I tell you, this President has more heart than I can believe. How he could stand up and say that, and do that, given the failure of his administration, shows that he has a big heart.

Mr. Speaker, I recently journeyed to Amman, Jordan, where I met with Iraqi exiles and Jordanian leaders. While there, I had the privilege of addressing a special meeting of the widely respected Arab Thought Forum, a community of leaders from throughout the Middle East.

For a quarter of a century, the ATF has examined issues affecting the Arab world and developed realistic solutions. There are over 200 members from throughout the Arab world. His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan is the president.

My goal was to listen, to learn, and to bring back whatever message this distinguished organization wanted America to hear directly. Their perspective is uniquely valuable. They are not anti-U.S. or anti-West. They support us even as they champion a strong and safe Arab world. The ATF wants Iraq to succeed. They live every day what we see for a few minutes every night on the news. They do not hate us, but they know who does. They know that hatred is a cancer that spreads if not treated, and they know that Western words that defy Iraqi reality is not treatment.

Every night we witness the unbearable heartbreak of another child dead, another family wailing in agony, unaware of the news camera that acts as a voyeur in their anguish.

How often have we neutralized our feelings to the sight of an Iraqi convulsed in the street, rocking back and forth, holding on to the lifeless body of a loved one? Even the most callous cannot help but admit that Iraq has become a minefield of hatred and violence that pierces Western rhetoric to the very heart. Iraq is close to civil war, and the presence of U.S. forces is a focal point for this blind rage.

Saying it is time to get out would be very easy for me. Saying it is time to find a way out is not, but I am saying just that. The United States needs a plan that protects our soldiers and offers some chance to stabilize Iraq. We are nowhere close to that today.

Over 1,900 U.S. soldiers have died, between 25,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, and tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis have been wounded, and the violence goes on.

The development of an Iraqi Constitution was supposed to be a peace process by another name to bring Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis together, but the Sunnis leaders strongly rejected the process and the document it produced.

Middle Eastern leaders told me that the constitution is sort of a ``damned if you do, damned if you don't'' sort of affair. They say, as written now, passage would mean another 15 years of war and civil war at the least. If it fails, the insurgents will claim victory over the United States and plunge Iraq even deeper into violence.

As many Arab leaders see it, we are rushing headlong into a lose-lose situation. To these people, the conclusion is inescapable. Many I met privately believe that the United States' actions can only mean the U.S. entered Iraq for oil. They fear the United States will remain not because it is in Iraq's best interests, but because it is in America's oil interests.

Why else, they ask, would the administration refuse to pledge that we will not build permanent military bases? Why else, they wonder, would the administration stubbornly refuse to alter their course in the face of reality? These are our friends talking.

In that spirit, they offered an idea, a breakthrough that changes everything. They do not condemn the administration or America. They do not call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. Instead, they asked me to bring back a message of hope that peace can be achieved not by force, rhetoric, or the United States alone.

The Arab Thought Forum believes the road to peace can only be found by having a respected Arab leader convene an Iraqi summit conference without the West dictating the terms. Without the West dictating the terms. It may even be possible for his Royal Highness al Hassan to lead such a summit, but only if the United States stops talking and starts listening. No one I met believes the present course will lead to peace in Iraq.

This weekend, thousands of Americans will participate here in Washington and across the Nation in Operation Cease-Fire. The event will convulse the Nation, pitting Americans who want us out of Iraq immediately against those who believe it is worth going on. We remain deeply divided.

Mr. Speaker, urge the President to stop the rhetoric and get the Arab Thought Forum on point to have such a summit. Only by sitting down with all the parties, led by an Arab, can this be stopped.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Texas for yielding me this time.

I rise in support of section 214, which was introduced by the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird), my friend and colleague.

This is a critical piece of legislation for many States including Washington, and I hope that every member of the delegation rises to voice strong bipartisan support.

We have, in the last few weeks, seen in Katrina what nature can do, and section 214 enables communities to fund a fast-track Federal permit process by the Army Corps of Engineers. A modest investment by local governments can reap enormous community benefits in time and money without compromising either the independence or the integrity of the permit process.

Seattle, the community I represent, has used section 214 to save time and millions of dollars on a number of important local projects including the Seawall-Viaduct project. Unless we act, this important tool will expire by the end of the month.

Hurricane Katrina reminds us how vulnerable we are to natural forces. Seattle is an earthquake zone. There is no one living in Seattle who does not think we are going to have another earthquake. And we must move quickly, in my view, to replace the aging and fragile viaduct along the waterfront which carries over 100,000 cars a day. The viaduct is a lifeline of the region. If it falls, the port of Seattle will be blocked. It will create havoc in the whole area. It connects our communities and is the transportation artery for goods arriving at the port of Seattle and going to the middle of the country. In fact, Seattle is often called ``Chicago West.''

It would be a national catastrophe if we lost the viaduct, and we are trying to prepare for it. We are counting on 214 as part of our comprehensive viaduct replacement strategy, and we really do not want to lose this tool at this point. Without it, the seawall, the viaduct's foundation, will surely take much longer; and time is not on our side. We had an earthquake here about 3 years ago which shook for 60 seconds. Had it shaken for about 90 seconds, we probably would have had the catastrophe at that point.

It is not a matter of if. It is really a matter of when this happens in Seattle, and we must prepare. And we need this tool.

I thank the committee for bringing this bill forward and urge every Member to support it.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in defense of children. While I stand alone at the podium, I wish we were all standing together on behalf of foster children created by Katrina.

The other day I introduced the Emergency Action for Vulnerable Children Act, H.R. 3711. Today I offer 3711 as an amendment to the Child Safety Act of 2005.

There is really not a moment to lose. We must accept responsibility for the safety and welfare of foster children affected in this crisis. When Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, thousands of foster children were separated from foster families in shelters, and they will fall through the social safety net unless we act.

In drafting this legislation, I worked closely with organizations like the National Foster Parent Association and the Child Welfare League of America. These organizations are working directly with others on the ground in the affected region, and they said what we needed to hear: the Federal Government must become an immediate and reliable partner for States trying to cope with the human needs that are outstripping their individual ability to effectively respond.

Late yesterday the Child Welfare League, which represents 900 public and private caregivers across the country, endorsed the Emergency Action for Vulnerable Children.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to quote from their letter: ``Many Child Welfare League of America member agencies are working in the disaster area to connect children with their families and to continue to provide services to those children in care.''

They report to us directly about their struggles in attempting to meet the needs of children and families devastated by the disaster.

H.R. 3711 begins to address these issues. It is clear that it will take a sustained effort on the part of volunteers and local, State and Federal governments, to help these children and families, quote, and continuing to quote, ``this legislation provides an assurance that the Federal Government stands as a partner with State and local governments to meet the needs of these children.''

Mr. Chairman, there are no gotchas in this amendment. Its intent is clear, and will focus much more needed Federal resources on foster children affected by the hurricane.

The legislation is bipartisan in spirit and humanitarian in fact. The current child welfare program simply cannot handle a crisis of this magnitude. Rules of eligibility vary from State to State. In many cases, vulnerable children may not be receiving mental health treatment or family counseling.

We must change that, and we can. Because H.R. 3711 cuts through the red tape and makes the Federal Government, appropriately in a national crisis, responsible for paying for urgently

needed care. This is no time to have a boatload of rules and regulations. This is a time to provide a boatload of help.

With one vote, we can demonstrate our leadership in this time of national crisis. With one vote, we can make every foster child entitled to immediate Federal help. There is no reason to wait. There is no justification to wait.

Katrina is a natural disaster and a national crisis. This act is a rescue mission, plain and simple.

Mr. Chairman, given the magnitude of the crisis and the urgency of the need, I urge my colleagues to allow my amendment to be voted on. If there was an alternative before us, I could accept that as a price of speaking for the minority party, but no such legislation exists.

Mr. Chairman, the question really is, if not now, when? If not us, who will defend and save these children?

We witnessed the horror and the tragedy on TV. Thousands of foster children lived through that. The image in their minds, the insecurity in their hearts is real and overwhelming. We cannot leave them alone.

As the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Human Resources, this committee is responsible for protecting these children. We cannot turn our backs and hope that somehow, some way, someone somewhere will respond to the needs of these children.

Across this country, Americans are responding to the crisis the only way they know how, by stepping up with a big heart and an open wallet to help their fellow Americans in need. They are looking to us to lead the Nation through this crisis. We did it once together. We can do it again. Let us prove it by saving the children, today.

Child Welfare League of America,

Washington, DC, September 13, 2005.

Hon. Jim McDermott,

House of Representatives, Longworth House Office Building,

Washington, DC.

Dear Congressman McDermott: The Child Welfare League of

America (CWLA), with our 900 public and private child-serving

member agencies, endorses H.R. 3711, the Emergency Action for

Vulnerable Children Act. We applaud your leadership in

highlighting the needs of vulnerable foster children and

families affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Many CWLA member agencies are working in the disaster area

to connect children with their families and to continue to

provide services to those children in care. They report to us

directly about their struggles in attempting to meet the

needs of children and families devastated by this disaster.

H.R. 3711 begins to address these issues by providing

federal assistance to ensure that foster children receive the

supports and services they need, including mental health

treatment. H.R. 3711 allows the kind of broad and flexible

funding that will assist Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi,

as well as help other states that are extending their hands

in support of the relief efforts.

It is clear that it will take a sustained effort on the

part of volunteers and local, state, and federal governments

to help these children and families cope. This legislation

provides an assurance that the federal government stands as a

partner with state and local governments to meet the needs of

these children.

Thank you again for your continued leadership on behalf of

children and families. Count on CWLA to work with you in any

way possible to help the children and families affected by

this disaster.

Sincerely,

Shay Bilchik,

President/CEO.

Point of Order

Offered By: Mr. McDermott

Amendment No. 10: Page 69, after line 17, insert the

following:

Offered By: Mr. McDermott

Amendment No. 11: Page 69, after line 17, insert the

following: