Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Indiana. I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this debate. Mr. Speaker, like many others here, previously I typed up different potential remarks for this debate. But as I have listened to the debate…
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Indiana. I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this debate.
Mr. Speaker, like many others here, previously I typed up different potential remarks for this debate. But as I have listened to the debate over the last couple of days, I kept hearing some things being said over and over
again, and I started making notes of some of the things I just really need to address.
As the old saying goes, we are all entitled to our own opinion, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts. Facts are facts.
One of the things I have heard over and over the last couple of days, well, it goes without saying. Normally in reference to we support our troops, it goes without saying. If there is anything I have noticed since I left the bench and came to Congress is that nothing goes without saying in this House . Everything gets said and seems like gets said over and over again. Nothing goes without being said.
But let us talk about that. It goes without saying we support our troops. That has stirred up a great deal of debate and animosity at one point, and led usually into things about the lies the President told before this war, lies the President told before this war. Well, look, some of us believe in forgiveness.
I think there is still potential disagreement. Obviously we know that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He killed thousands of Kurds, gassed thousands of people. Certainly he was killing with mass destruction, but if you happen to believe really, honestly, truthfully that the President lied, then it is time to forgive President Clinton for all those lies. Forgive Madeleine Albright for all those lies. All the time, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton told us over and over again that there were weapons of mass destruction, and if President Bush happened to have believed President Clinton and Madeleine Albright and those people that were saying there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, well, I guess they just should not have believed the Clinton administration.
But there were things that the Clinton administration could base that on, but we have got to get past that. It just seems to engender so much hatred.
I have heard people say over and over this is a historic debate because the Republicans never allowed this debate when they were in the majority. I remember having discussions like this twice in the last Congress. We voted on a couple of resolutions, and people would say one thing and then end up voting another on the resolution.
Now, I did hear one of my friends across the aisle say something I do agree with. He said he did not believe it was appropriate to tell troops they were coming home on a certain date and then change that. I agree, and a number of us have been pointing that out to those in the military and to the White House. That needs to stop. When you tell somebody who is in harm's way you are coming home on a certain date, they need to come home. We can agree on that.
But then I heard another say, we need to avoid a constitutional crisis by shocking this President into a new course of action. You shocked him into a new course of action. He said we are going to send 21,000 troops over there, 21,500. In fact, people like Harry Reid down in the Senate have been calling for that last fall, maybe even as recently as December, but oh, wait, as soon as the President calls for it, then it is a terrible thing; we cannot believe that he is doing this.
So the President has proposed something new. His commanders in the field have said we need this, and so it is being done. We have got troops already arriving and more arriving all the time.
I heard another one make reference to Vietnam, and one in indignation said, have we not learned anything from Vietnam? I would submit, I believe, Mr. Speaker, apparently not, because some people want to rewrite history; but the fact is, if you go back, the people were saying get out of Vietnam, get out of Vietnam are the same people saying this now in Iraq, and so President Nixon tried to get folks out. For all his faults, and he did have plenty, and you will not hear me say I think he was a great President because he lied, but one of the things he did try to do, he saw the polls and started trying to get people out of Vietnam.
When we started the Paris peace talks, things broke down. It was not going well. He decided to bomb North Vietnam. He went on the attack. He was carpet-bombing Hanoi, and as Sam Johnson and those who were in the Hanoi Hilton said, they were worried they might be hit by the bombs, but they were so glad, finally the United States was reacting and responding, and as Sam says, when he left, to get the chronology correct, the bombing went on. They came back to the peace talks, and we reached terms, and the POWs, most of them were coming home. Sam said one of the leaders at the prison said, you know, if you guys had just kept bombing a little longer, we would have had to surrender completely.
That was a winnable war, but people were not doing what it took to win so that we could have a good reputation. If you go look at our enemies and al Qaeda's, the rhetoric now in Iraq, Afghanistan, around the Middle East, they are saying look at what they did in Vietnam. They promised their allies they were going to stick with them.
Gerald Ford has been quoted recently. What a fine man. I hear people on both sides of the aisle at his funeral and after his death. He begged this Congress and this House please do not cut off the funding; we promised them funding even after we pulled our troops out. But this Congress said, no, we are cutting the funding, and we have been harmed ever since.
So in 1979, in Iran, they were bold enough to attack. An act of war, that is what attacking an embassy is, and I was at Fort Benning at that time. Nobody was dying to go to Iran, but everybody I knew was willing to go and die because we had been attacked, and that was the first act of war in this war involving terror, and we did not respond.
We did not respond in 1983 when our barracks were attacked and our marines were killed. We withdrew 1991, on through the 1990s. We have not responded, but I want to touch on one other thing.
I saw the majority leader come down. I saw it replayed in the wee hours this morning. I did not realize it went on, and he came down and challenged what Heather Wilson, who had left the floor, said, and ultimately said basically, that anybody that would come and say, as she did, that there might be a problem with Democrats being willing to support and fund the troops as needed, and he said to come and say anything of that nature was just not honest. I think it comes close to violating the rules if it does not, but the fact is Heather Wilson had stood right here and she had asked her Democratic friends across the aisle, look, if you are really willing to say that, if you are saying that this resolution means we will always provide everything that is needed to our troops in harm's way, let us put it in the resolution. We will have a unanimous-consent amendment, we will both agree, and it was not agreed. The Democratic majority would not agree. The Rules Committee did not agree. The Democratic leadership did not want that in there.
So, to say it goes without saying ain't the way it should be. It ought to be in print. It ought to be here said in black and white because Heather Wilson was right: if you really believe that, put it in black and white where our troops can see, and I would just in conclusion leave you with this: this resolution for what it does and does not do, it is a stay the course, stiffen the enemy, start our collapse, and you look at our friend Mr. Murtha's comments to say, that is what this starts the process for doing.
Mr. Speaker, when people on the other side of the aisle wonder how we can ask, Do you really support the troops? How about this quote that was contributed to Mr. Murtha? ``They won't be able to continue. They won't be able to do the deployment. They won't have the equipment. They don't have the training. They won't be able to do the work.'' There is no question in my mind.
On his Web site that has now been taken down, it says, ``Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq, but undermining other aspects of the President's foreign and national security policy.''
He is the Commander in Chief. That is undermining the President.