Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, as was stated earlier, I do consider it an honor and a privilege to come to the floor of this House to address you, Mr. Speaker, and to carry this message across the waves to the American people.

I would first take up the issue of a balanced budget, and I would submit that we can balance this budget, Mr. Speaker, and we do not need to do so by raising taxes. We need to do so by fiscal responsibility.

I raised an issue today, I testified before the Budget Committee here in the House of Representatives, and I laid out a scenario by which we can balance this budget for this year. And I also acknowledge that it is quite painful. It is not realistic from a political perspective, but I think it is important that the Budget Committee produce a balanced budget so that we can measure the pain to so many of the programs that would have to be cut.

But a simple version, and it is a quick version, it is not the thing that I would propose as a balanced budget, Mr. Speaker, but it is one the ways that we can easily understand the magnitude of the budget situation we have.

First of all, if you would reinstate the Bush tax cuts and calculate those back into the revenue side, it almost does not show at all on the bottom line as to whether we are running a deficit or a surplus in our spending; and I have a calculator in my computer that allows me to do that. It almost does not show on the graph when you calculate that.

But if you look what the Bush tax cuts have done, they have grown this economy and they have grown this economy at 3 percent or better growth each quarter for at least the last 10 consecutive quarters, and that is a growth rate that has been met or exceeded since the early Reagan years. And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, those early Reagan years were the years when we had high interest and high inflation. So this is a real growth in a very low inflation environment with a low unemployment environment with unemployment rates below 5 percent.

It is a very, very good economic time, Mr. Speaker; and it is as good a time as one could ask for. It is the best economic run that we have had in a long, long time. It eclipses any economic run in the last 2 decades, and it also is a controlled growth. It is a growth that has not gotten out of hand, Mr. Speaker. It is a growth that grows from 3 to 4.7 percent quarter after quarter, with an inflation rate that is 2 percent or less and unemployment rates that are in the 5 percent and less range. That is where we want, not too hot and not too cold, a nice steady accountable growth.

And I would point out this that growth that we have in our economy is growing in spite of the fact that 3.5 percent, perhaps, of our GDP is going off the top to the litigation that goes on in this country. We have to overcome that and still grow at a rate of about 3 to 3.5 percent to match a targeted growth rate that will deal with population growth and to deal with inflation and help us develop our infrastructure in this country to accommodate the future as our infrastructure depreciates. That is what it is going to take to grow.

And what it is going to take to balance the budget, should we have the will to do that, would be to go into the nondefense discretionary spending. Recognizing that we have three large entitlements in our budget, and those are the spending that just goes on year after year that is growing at a rate of about 6.2 percent a year and that is aggregate, and that is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those three entitlements are essentially, unless we change some of the parameters, Mr. Speaker, are the right now the untouchable budget items; and eventually this Congress will have to look at them. But those three entitlements will grow at about 6.2 percent of their aggregate. The interest rate will grow perhaps even faster than that in the outyears.

You add all those things up, and if you recognize that to make changes in that for this year is very difficult to do and also recognizing that we have defense spending that is critical to our national security and we need to take that off the table from a cut perspective and what is left is the nondefense discretionary spending. That is the items of all, everything else that we spend that I have not identified as being an entitlement of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid defense spending, that nondefense discretionary spending. We will call that other.

To balance the budget Mr. Speaker, we would need to simply cut the nondefense discretionary spending by 5 percent, a real 5 percent cut, and that would be $0.95 on the dollar. That would be asking Americans to get along with $0.95 out of every dollar that they have right now, today, not grow in relation to inflation and not grow with any kind of a COLA.

Now, if I were looking at this from a business perspective, I would advocate that we just simply balance our budget in that fashion, Mr. Speaker. But I am also aware that the votes on the floor of this Congress will not accommodate

for that. So I will be seeking to put together a budget that looks at some of the other components and gets us to the point where we can reasonably, practically and, in fact, part of the equation here is politically balance this budget. It cannot and should not be done by simply raising taxes. By doing so it would stifle growth, and it would get a reverse effect beyond in the opposite direction that my colleagues who just got finished speaking would say.

I am just going to go backwards, Mr. Speaker, through some of the remarks that I heard made over this past hour and address some of them. I certainly cannot address them all, Mr. Speaker.

But the argument that all of the money that was spent, all, this is a quote, all that money is wasted, meaning the money that was spent for reconstruction in Iraq, all wasted? With no oversight, no oversight, Mr. Speaker? I take exception to a statement such as that.

I went over to Iraq with three of my colleagues last August and returned here about August 20 with the very mission in mind to take a look at where the $18.5 billion that we allocated out of this Congress had been spent, where the practices were, where the projects were, how the money was being spent and what was the return on that investment. And Mr. Speaker, I brought a chart along with me, coincidentally, not knowing that would be the subject matter that was brought up here on the other side of the aisle this evening, a chart that illustrates where these project dollars have gone.

I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that these red dots on this map of Iraq represent 2,200, more than 2,200 completed projects in Iraq. And these projects will be road projects, they will be sewer projects, water, drinking water, potable water projects. They will also be some bridge projects and some pipeline work for the oil pipe lines that are there. You will see along on this border with Iran, the red dots along there, many of those are border defense stations. And what you will not see are the 250 planned border defense stations that are under construction or in planning around these other borders that we have. There is another 1,100 projects that are either in planning or under construction that do not show up yet on this chart, Mr. Speaker. I will have a chart that reflects the projects that are planned, the projects that are started.

Then this one reflects just the projects that are completed, over 2,200; and I visited a number of these. Of course, it would not be possible to visit them in their entirety, but I stopped up here in this region around Kirkuk and there went to the mother of all generators. I forget just how many kilowatts that generator does put out, but I remember what it weighed, 750,000 pounds, brought in on two large loads, and then the other loads would be the rest of the generating plant across about 10.7 kilometers.

Excuse me. It was more than that. It was a long stretch at least across the northern part of Iraq with that kind of a long trail of a convoy to deliver the generator and the turbine that drives that generator down to this location just south of Kirkuk.

And that being one of two huge generation plants that are now in a position where they are up and running in Iraq, this one is fed by a natural gas pipeline. Some of them are using different types of fuel; but up in this area around Kirkuk, there is so much oil that it actually seeps to the top of the ground in some places.

Where I come from, the area, we call it the prairie pothole region where we have these potholes of water that are collected because of the dips that are cut out in the prairie from the last glacier, well, the water that collects there reminds me of the oil; and certainly the oil is in smaller quantities that collects in the depressions within the desert up there around Kirkuk.

And that is not the largest oil location up around Kirkuk; but down here in the southern part, in the Basra region, there is far more oil. And I look at the system of collection, the well system, the collection system, the refinery system, distribution system. All of it is old, tired, dilapidated, has not been reconstructed or modernized in at least 35 years; and yet the oil production out of Iraq is greater than it was, Mr. Speaker.

We keep hearing, no, they are not producing as much oil now as they were then. Not true. The royalties that Iraq was receiving prior to the war were $5 billion a year. The royalties that are coming from the oil that is pumping today are $26 billion a year. That does not necessarily reflect that they are pumping five times as much oil, but it reflects that they are selling perhaps more oil than they did then and pumping more oil than they did.

The electricity that is being generated in Iraq is a number that is close to twice as much electricity at their peak days as it was on a standard day in Iraq at the beginning of the liberation back in March of 2003, Mr. Speaker. And as I measure project after project, benefit after benefit, it cannot be said that, and I will quote again, ``all that money is wasted.'' How could all that money be wasted when we have 2,200 completed projects, 3,300 projects altogether, people that have potable water that never had it before, people that have flush toilets that did not flush before, they did not have water to flush in them?

Looking at the infrastructure that is there in places in Baghdad where they had the sanitary sewer, and I would point out for the lay person listening, Mr. Speaker, that a sanitary sewer is not really all that sanitary. That is what you run your sewage through. And yet that sewer was an easy place for some people to pull a waterline through in those days before the liberation of Baghdad. So their drinking water in many areas was delivered through a black piece of plastic pipe that was pulled through the sewer itself, and they would pull it through, and then the distribution runs out to the locations where it was being used. And that is all fine as long as you keep your waterline in condition, and it does not ever get a leak in it, and you do not ever let the pressure go down.

But both of those things invariably happen; and when that happens, the pressure goes down in your drinking waterline, and the sewage then is drawn into that drinking waterline, and it then pollutes the drinking water. That has happened in a number of areas in Baghdad. We are reconstructing that. We are providing them with clean new sanitary sewer systems and sewer plants to be able to handle their systems in a modern fashion and an environmentally friendly fashion. So the Iraqi people that were living without services now have services.

I will say that the electrical service that was up to 10, 11, perhaps even 12 hours a day in Baghdad at the beginning of the liberation is down to less than that now, perhaps even as low as 4 to 6 hours a day. But the rest of Iraq was getting 2 to 4 hours a day, and now they are up to 10, 11, 12 hours of electricity a day. The next wave is to increase the generation capacity and the distribution so that Baghdad can get back up again to a level that they were before.

But overall there is more electricity being provided into Iraq today than there ever was. The demand is perhaps twice as great as it was, Mr. Speaker, because you know what happens when people get electricity. They figure out a way that they can put another appliance to work and plug it into a wall and use it. Like air conditioners that did not exist in any significant numbers, now they are there in significant numbers, tapped into that electricity.

We also know that satellite televisions were against the law in March of 2003, and today Iraq is replete with satellite dishes on rooftop after rooftop. In fact, I did a survey from the air by helicopter over the top of a region up in Kirkuk where many homes were built in about the same style, and I had done so over the rooftops of Mosul in the fall of 2003; and there my survey showed that about two-thirds of the homes then already had satellite TVs, and now I am seeing that in some of the neighborhoods in Kirkuk there actually are more satellite dishes than there are roofs.

So you will see sometimes two or even three satellite dishes on a single roof that look like they are single-family dwellings from the air. Everyone in Iraq has access to satellite TV, which means access to the outside world. There is access to Internet, cell phones. Those things have grown dramatically. Landline telephones have grown dramatically. The number of newspapers

are up to over 175 newspapers in Iraq. Television stations up and running, communication is flowing, free enterprise is robust in the streets of Baghdad. People that are running shops out there, making furniture out alongside the streets, set it out on the side of the street and sell it.

And, yes, Mr. Speaker, a bomb goes off once in a while, and it is sad and it is tragic. But the people of Iraq clean things up and they grieve and they go back to work, Mr. Speaker, because they are optimistic about the future of Iraq. They are more optimistic about the future of Iraq than the surveys show people are in the United States of America. What went wrong here where people that we say do not have hope have more hope than those of us folks that have the great blessing of living in the United States of America with all of this hope that we take for granted and cannot apparently appreciate?

So the effort that has been put forth there, Mr. Speaker, it is not all that money that is being wasted, not by a long shot, Mr. Speaker: 3,300 projects, all of them worthy and worthwhile. And, no, they were not all cheap. There was money that was spent for security, and there were some projects that were sabotaged that had to be reconstructed again.

There is a project over here on the Tigris River south of Kirkuk where there were nine pipelines that went across the Tigris River, and those pipelines were cut in the liberation operations with the U.S. Air Force. And we went back to patch those pipelines together, did so. They were sabotaged again. They were put across the river on a bridge, and so we undertook the effort to put them all underneath the bottom of the Tigris River. They are backfilling that now, Mr. Speaker, and it is nearly completed; and those lines will be opened up and running by, I believe the target date is February 28.

So another big day to turn those valves on and get that oil flowing south into parts where it can be converted back to cash and be able to help the funding in the great country of Iraq, this emerging free Arab country that has now at least brought forth the name of a prime minister, and I do not think formally has elected him yet. But on that day that that happens and they seek this duly elected parliament, Iraq becomes the most representative Arab nation in the world.

When they sit down at the United Nations and their representative speaks on behalf of the Iraqi people, it will truly be a voice of the Iraqi people, quite unlike the voice of much of the rest of the Arab world where the voice that speaks for the countries that represent those parts of the Arab world in the United Nations often is the voice of a tyrant that would cut the tongues out of its own citizens if they spoke up in criticism of the regime that is there in many of those countries.

But this country can become the lodestar of a free Arab people, an inspiration to the rest of the Arab world, an inspiration that can cause the rest of them to see what Iraq is stepping into, what they are earning along with the coalition forces' efforts and sacrifice to be able to be that inspiration for the rest of the Arab world. And if that day comes, and I pray it comes, Mr. Speaker, we may well see freedom echo across the Arab world in the same fashion that it echoed across Eastern Europe when the Wall went down in Berlin November 9, 1989, on that glorious day that symbolized the end of the Cold War, a victory for the United States and the forces of freedom.

And the forces of freedom could not be stopped, Mr. Speaker. Almost bloodlessly they echoed across Eastern Europe, and we saw country after country be liberated.

Since that time, we have noticed that those who knew freedom the least hungered for it the most. The people on the east side of the wall stepped up to help all of our efforts, our coalition forces in Iraq, in greater numbers than the people on the west side of the wall.

The people on the west side of the wall had the privilege of living with freedom since the end of World War II. The people on the east side of the wall remember the days they weren't free. They remember the day of November 9, 1989, when they had that opportunity to grasp their own freedom, and within a couple of years that freedom did echo across Eastern Europe, and it needs to echo across the Arab world.

So, Mr. Speaker, I submit that there is a vision and mission in this overall War on Terror, and we need to do a far better job of articulating why we are in this war. I would point out that the loss of Americans on September 11 was right at 3,000 Americans. That is more Americans lost there than was lost December 7, 1941, in that day that would live in infamy.

We cannot forget September 11. We cannot forget that we were attacked without cause. We didn't provoke anyone who attacked us. They attacked us because they hate our way of life. They attacked the very center of western civilization.

And no amount of negotiation, understanding, no amount of sitting around and talking, is ever going to resolve this disagreement. These people want us dead. They have demonstrated that, and we saw the celebrations in the streets in other parts of the world as the Twin Towers fell. That should tell us that they will give us no quarter.

If anyone doubts that, take a look at Israel. Take a look and see the circumstances there when the Israelis thought they could trade land for peace, and yet they are still attacked. Hamas won the election there. That means the terrorists, the people who are sworn to annihilate the land of Israel, are running the government of the region that may or may not be a nation called Palestine.

That is a chilling concept, but it also should tell us that there is no negotiated settlement, we must defend ourselves. The Israelis have had to guard every theater, every bus stop, every hospital, every school, every synagogue, and still the infiltrators come in and detonate their bombs and blow their women and children to pieces.

That happens out of a deep hatred that we don't understand in this country, and I don't claim to understand it. But I know that hatred is directed at us. We saw it September 11. We saw it on 18 to 20 other attacks, including the USS Cole. We saw it in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. We have seen the first attack also on the Twin Towers, in other efforts shut off by good intelligence work in this country.

We cannot rest. Our choices though are guard every theater, every bus stop, every school, every hospital, every church, every synagogue and pull back into the shores of the United States and somehow think that we can protect every center in this country, and we won't be able to, and we will see the attacks come, and we will see our women and children and our men blown into pieces.

Or we can take this battle to them, we can fight this war where they are. But going out just to kill the enemy, Mr. Speaker isn't enough. It is not a solution. It is something that has to be done in certain areas of the world and under those circumstances where there are training camps and active leaders that are plotting and planning to attack and kill Americans, that must be done, Mr. Speaker.

But to go out and think that we could kill all of our enemies is the equivalent of realizing that we had a lot of flies on our porch and in our kitchen and then go out to the barn with the fly swatter and think we are going to take care of all those flies in the barn with the fly swatter. No. You can swat flies in the barn all day every day, and you will never accomplish the task. You have got to change the habitat that breeds that many flies. You have to clean the barn, Mr. Speaker, and you need to leave an environment in there that doesn't breed those flies, and then they will leave you alone on the porch and in your kitchen as well.

So I submit that the plan of the United States and the mission that has been laid out by our Commander-in-Chief President Bush is to create a new habitat, to promote a new habitat in the region. This is a habitat called freedom. We happen to know that where there is freedom, there isn't a habitat that breeds terrorists. We have never gone to war against another free people. It has never happened in the history of this country, and I don't think it has actually happened in the history of the world.

So to the extent that freedom can be promoted and we give people that opportunity to reach out and grasp and earn their own freedom, is also the extent to which we can be safer as a people, western civilization can be safer,

and the people in that part of the world can learn some tolerance for Christianity, for Judaism, for capitalism, for free enterprise, for this whole idea of western civilization that they seem to take such exception to. There are good people in that part of the world, Mr. Speaker, and those good people need to be empowered and we need to be supportive of them.

The allegations that were made here on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, about corruption in Iraq with millions of U.S. dollars, we don't know that. And I won't tell you that you can go into an environment with a $18.5 billion mission and spend every dollar that would be competitive with a project in the United States, because I know that some of that money had to go for security, and some of that money had to go for a high price to get the work done, because who would go into that environment and do that work? But, Mr. Speaker, that work was necessary. And to the extent that anyone has defrauded this government, yes, we need to search that out. We need to have oversight.

But Democrats in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, are not absolved from that responsibility. I did not hear a single solution come out here on the other side of the aisle, not one. All I saw was complaints, lamentations, objections, because all things that go wrong are all Republican responsibility according to the other side of the aisle, and, of course, if they were just in power, then everything would be all fine.

But we don't know what they would do, because they haven't proposed a solution, not a single specific solution. They are absolutely without an agenda. But they have enough energy, they have enough air velocity in their lungs to every night come down here and beat up on the people that are out here trying to move America ahead.

One statement was said that I will agree with, made by the gentleman from Florida. He said, ``I am so glad that I am not a member of the majority.'' Well, to the gentleman from Florida, I want to say I am so glad you are not a member of the majority as well, and so are the majority of the American people who have seen to it that there is majority in charge in this Congress.

We do have our work to do, Mr. Speaker. I won't shirk that responsibility. I step up to it gladly. But we need to have our eyes wide open. We need to promote a responsible budget, and I will be promoting a balanced budget and a path we can get to a balanced budget in a way that we can get the votes in this Congress to get it done. If we do that, we can ensure financial security for our children and our grandchildren. But that financial security that can come with fiscal responsibility here in this Congress and a solid pro-growth tax policy isn't security if we have to be continually under attack from an enemy that the other side of the aisle would not have the will to challenge.

This President, our Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Speaker, has had the will to challenge. He has had the will to lay out the vision and he has had the commitment to stand in the face of a tremendous amount of criticism.

It has been a disappointment to me, Mr. Speaker, to hear that criticism. When I go to the hospitals and visit our wounded soldiers, when I visit our soldiers in the field in Iraq and over in the Middle East, when I stop at Landstuhl at the hospital there and land at Ramstein and go over to Landstuhl, Germany, to visit wounded in the hospital there, where I have been three times; when I go to Bethesda Naval Hospital to visit the wounded, generally the wounded Marines and the corpsmen that are there; when I go to Walter Reed to visit the wounded soldiers that are there, and I listen to them talk to me, Mr. Speaker, and there has been a certain Member of Congress from Pennsylvania that has gotten a lot of press relating to the public criticism that he claims comes from wounded soldiers, I have never heard a word of that kind of criticism from a single soldier that I visited, and I do not let a quarter go by without being to one of those hospitals to visit our wounded, and I will always go in an visit. As long as there are soldiers that need to be visited, I will visit them.

I have never heard one soldier tell me that he regretted volunteering for the United States militarily or that he regretted serving or he didn't believe in this mission or in this cause. Not one.

I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a nurse who spent a year-and- a-half at Landstuhl and dealt with hundreds of wounded that came through. Most all of the wounded come through from Iraq into Landstuhl in Germany and then come to the United States.

I asked her if she had heard any of that sentiment about wounded soldiers regretting serving their country or not believing in this mission. And her answer was, no, she had never heard a single soldier utter such a thing. In fact, she said, almost all of them feel guilty that they were wounded and they can't be back with their troops. They want to take that responsibility of going back with their troops into the theater, back to Iraq, to finish their tour of duty. That is the kind of patriotism and dedication that comes with our military. And these are people that some of them have been burned badly, some of them have very severe wounds, some of them are amputees.

I have had more than one amputee tell me, ``I am going to make the military my career. I am going to get this prosthetic, get my leg up and going, I am going to take the therapy, and I am going make a career out of the military. I have come this far.''

I had one tell me, ``This wound where I lost my leg isn't going to change my life in any way except I am going to start a family now.'' That level of vision, that level of commitment, Mr. Speaker, is what we have out there.

Perhaps the best quality people that have ever gone to war for a country are the people that are out there defending our freedom today, and we owe them everything we have, all the support we have, all the best training, all the best equipment. But we owe them a voice of support here on the floor of the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker.

We owe them that voice in our national media. We owe them that voice in our schools, in our town squares, in our town halls, in our coffee shops, in our churches. Everywhere across this land we owe them a voice of support.

And I would point out that Clausewitz, the great writer, his philosophy on war, and I believe that was his work, ``On War,'' stated that the object of war was to destroy the enemy's ability and will to wage war. Destroy their ability and their will.

But we are at war, Mr. Speaker. And our troops are over there in harm's way. And they are actively destroying the enemy's ability to wage war. And as they lose their ability, it destroys their will.

But what, Mr. Speaker, puts the energy back in our enemy? What gives them back their will as their will is destroyed on the battlefield in Iraq, that is being destroyed because their ability is being taken away from them? Their will is being replaced by the voices of some of the people that are quasi-leaders of the United States of America that make such statements as, and I will quote Howard Dean, the chairman of the DCCC, he said the idea that we are going to win in Iraq is just plain wrong. Well, how wrong can that be? How wrong can that be to encourage the enemy, discourage our military, to make that statement over and over again? And that voice comes out of people from the other side of the aisle day after day after day, a constant drum beat of despair.

It has been a constant drum beat of despair over here for the previous hour before I came to the floor, and it will be a constant drum beat of despair every single night that they have an opportunity to have this platform here on the floor of the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. A constant drum beat of despair that encourages our enemy, discourages our own troops, and works to be counterproductive.

Clausewitz said the object of war is to destroy the enemy's ability and will to wage war. Well, the key to this, they are both tied together. Ability and will are tied together. If you have a lot of ability, you also have enough confidence to have the will.

As your ability diminishes, if you lose your munitions and if your troops are being destroyed, you do not have so many tools to work with anymore so you begin to lose your will; you lose your self-confidence.

But I would submit that it is even simpler than Clausewitz said. It is this simple, Mr. Speaker: war is never over

until the losing side realizes that they have lost. It is that simple. When the enemy understands that they have lost, that is when they will give up, not before. They have to realize that they have lost. That requires us to destroy their ability and their will to wage war.

But if their will is weak, and if their will is utterly weak, it does not matter how much ability they have, it does not matter how many tanks they have, how many IEDs they have, how many guns, how many soldiers. If they do not have the will to use them, the war is over.

So if we can win a war simply by sending a letter to the enemy that says, why do you not quit now, because we will not, and we have the ability and we have the will, so you need to have the understanding that it will not pay for you to fight, at that point the war could be over. If we convinced the enemy that they could not win, they would lose their will to fight.

Well, part of that will to fight comes from the voices here on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. And I point out, Mr. Speaker, that on an evening, as I was in the hotel in Kuwait, I was watching al Jazeera TV. On that television show came Muqtada al Sadr. I think we know who he is: Bushy beard, rotten teeth, leader of a militia that has been attacking Americans. He is a Shiaa rather than a Sunni.

And he was saying into the al Jazeera camera, if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. That should tell us what is going on in the minds of the enemy. They have been encouraged by the incidents of Vietnam, by pulling our troops out of Lebanon, about pulling out of Mogadishu. They think that Americans will pull out.

So the voice of the people here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, echoes through al Jazeera, and in seconds it goes through the satellite dishes that are on the tops of nearly every one of those houses in Iraq, and down into the insurgent's homes, and they will hear the English voices, probably will not understand it, and it will come out in Arabic subtitles, and it will say wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. The idea that we are going to win in Iraq is just plain wrong.

Those kinds of quotes that we know from the other side have encouraged our enemy over and over again, and our enemy makes more and more bombs, extends this conflict longer and longer, and it costs American lives. That is the bottom line.

Our job is to convince them that they cannot win, destroy their will. And when they understand that they have lost, that is when they will quit, not before, Mr. Speaker. So it is imperative that we stick together on this. We had a debate in this Congress. It was a significant majority that endorsed the President's authority.

We are there. We are committed. And we cannot pull out. And we are winning. And the statistics are good. You know, we do not wage war by body count anymore, so we do not ever hear the casualty rates that are actually being inflicted on the enemy in Iraq. The numbers that I am about to give are numbers that are several months old. I have not been briefed on those numbers since prior to Christmas sometime.

But I will tell you that the Iraqis themselves on a monthly average for about a 3-month average were losing about 200 of their uniformed soldiers that were killed and most of them killed in action every month, Mr. Speaker, about 200. They were losing about 400 civilians every month.

The enemy was losing, between those killed and captured, taken out of the battlefield, about 3,000 a month. I also point out that the overall casualties of those killed, those numbers that were up there that added up to a number of more than 650 a month on our side, our coalition side with Iraqi civilian, coalition troops and Iraqi troops, that number that was around 650 a month then, now has diminished dramatically, and those casualties are down to around 50 a month.

So big progress is being made. The sad part is statistically that is not showing up in American casualties; they are still suffering a greater proportion of these casualties. Progress is being made, though, Mr. Speaker; and there is great light at the end of this tunnel.

It has almost moved out into the dawn. It has always been a three- component operation going on in Iraq. And the first component has always been the military component, liberation, provide first regime change. Get Saddam out of power, and then provide security in the country.

And that has been an ongoing battle. It has been difficult. I do not think anybody predicted how difficult it would be. But the American soldiers and marines have persevered. And now the second phase of this, and think of them really as intertwined efforts, but the military security effort first.

The second effort that needed to come along behind that and partially intertwined with it is the political solution. If we just have a military security solution and a political solution, that does not get Iraq where they need to go. They need to have an economic solution as well.

So the phases of this, we are nearing the end of the phase of the security military solution, where more than 237,000 Iraqis are now in uniform defending Iraqis, where more than 30 bases have been handed over to the Iraqis to man and maintain and take care of and operate out of.

Those things are happening. That transition is taking place. It is all consistent with a plan that has been in place for more than a year. And so the military solution is coming along. Remember, within a 12- month period of time, Iraq had three elections. They pulled off three elections.

They elected an interim parliament, they brought forth a Constitution and ratified the constitution and under that constitution they elected seats for a new parliament, and just now promoted the nomination for a new prime minister. That is a great long stride into the political solution, coming right intertwined with and intermixed with, but on the heels of the security solution that comes from the military side.

And now I hope that the Iraqi people, once they have the formal election, they elect a prime minister, I hope they sit down and go to work. I hope one of the first items on their agenda is the item that says look at this country that we have. Look at all of this oil up here around Kirkuk. We have got all of this oil down here around Basra. We have got all of these resources that have been producing $26 billion in royalty revenues in oil from this dilapidated structure that we have. We need to find a way to inject foreign capital in here and punch new wells down into the desert and bring that oil to the top of the ground and run it through refineries and down pipelines and out into the gulf and onto tankers that are sitting down here off the gulf in that area, Mr. Speaker.

They need to realize that that is their economic solution. So I would submit the plan that I would submit would be to have a competitive bidding process. Bring in the large oil companies in the world. Give them a chance to come in and bid and have them pay royalties for the oil that they would take out of the ground. And if they need cash up front to continue their reconstruction effort, and they do, I would ask that those bids come with upfront money so they would be adequate, that Iraq could continue their reconstruction efforts and still open up the oil fields and get this cash coming.

This $26 billion a year, I will not say it is a drop in the bucket, that is a lot of money, Mr. Speaker, but it can be a lot more money, and it needs to be a lot more money.

As this situation unfolds and the Iraqis provide for more and more of their own security and the political solution comes into place where it is on the cusp of having a ratified parliament seated with a prime minister, a voice in the world that is credible and a voice in the world for a sovereign Iraq that really represents the people in Iraq, will be controlling their own destiny, and an oil revenue that gives them a measure of financial independence and can actually make them a very wealthy country, then you will see some of these other things happening.

For example, about the only thing being exported from Iraq right now are dates, and the date exports have been

cut perhaps in half as to what they were prior to the liberation of Iraq. That can come back. A number of other industries can come back and a dynamic free enterprise, the economy that you see that all over the streets in Baghdad and around the country can be rejuvenated.

I want to also point out an interesting experience, and that is they asked if I would give a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce. Of course, I always say yes if anyone gives me any speech time, Mr. Speaker, so I said I would if we could fit it in the schedule. I believe it was at three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon. So we came rolling into Baghdad, and we hustled into the Al Rasheed Hotel. They were starting to introduce me, and I was not ready because I had not identified the interpreter. I said, Just a minute. Before you introduce me, I would like to know who the interpreter is so I can speak to the interpreter and I will know how to interact with him. And they said, You will not need an interpreter. I said, Well, I do not speak a word of Arabic. They said, You will not need to. These people, there are about 56 or 57 members of the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce, you will not need to have an interpreter and you will not need to speak Arabic because this group of people speaks English. And I thought, This is sweet.

I spoke English to them for 30 minutes or so. They reacted. They smiled at the right times, frowned at the right times, clapped occasionally. They got up and asked questions. It was like being at home in Iowa.

I thought, if they can pull off this English here in Baghdad, we ought to be able to handle this in most of the places in the United States of America. They have got a great start on their economy there, and it has been a very rough time for them, but we are committed, and we will stay there.

Mr. Speaker, to the people from Iraq who will one day look up this Congressional Record of perhaps tonight or tomorrow, they need to know that there is a broad, solid core of support in this Congress. We took a vote on whether to stay with them or whether to pull out, and this Congress voted 403 to 3 to stick with you in Iraq. We will be there, Mr. Speaker, and we will be there until this is done. And they are picking up this on their own.

I want to say a few words then about the necessity. While they are providing more energy coming out of Iraq, how come it is so important for us here in the United States to have a better energy policy than we have? We passed a couple of energy bills last year, neither of which was I satisfied with, and I voted for them both because they move us down the road a little ways. They did not get enough done. I want to see more done, Mr. Speaker.

We sit here with a shortage of energy in this country, and Hurricane Katrina certainly illustrated that. The shortage of energy that was shut off when Katrina hit in the Gulf drove gas prices up over $3 a gallon. In some places, gas was not even available. In places like Pennsylvania I think diesel fuel was not available, and there were trucks parked there, and I believe there were also trucks parked in places in Georgia. But it shut down this fuel down, and prices went up, and we understood how vulnerable we were to losing that supply of fuel that comes up from the Gulf Coast and Louisiana area.

It is not just that. It is the fact that we have not produced energy to keep up with the increase in our consumption. So we import more and more foreign oil. The last number that I saw that I had confidence in was 61 percent of our oil comes from overseas. I see that number published sometimes significantly higher than that, and sometimes it is predictions. Sometimes they say it is a real number.

Regardless, Mr. Speaker, we need to be less dependent on foreign oil; and I am certainly more concerned about the oil that we purchase from countries who have leaders who take positions that are just contrary to that of the United States.

Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela has often given public statements that have been very, very critical to the United States. He leans towards Marxism. He is agitating for those kind of governments in South America. There have been elections in South America that leaned a number of countries in that direction. Hugo Chavez has allied with Castro.

The direction that has taken place in the Western Hemisphere because of the politics of the people that we are enriching by purchasing natural gas and oil from them causes me to ask, why are we enriching the people who would position themselves to be our enemies? Why are we losing the fertilizer industry in the United States? The cost of nitrogen fertilizer, 90 percent of that cost is the cost of natural gas that it is produced from. We have watched those fertilizer prices go up 4 and 500 percent in the last few years. We have watched natural gas prices go from $2 to $15. They dropped back down some in the last several years as well but peaked out at $15 here within the last couple of months.

We cannot produce fertilizer with natural gas prices like that. Farmers cannot afford to buy the fertilizer. So what is happening is our fertilizer industry is going offshore, and it is a real industry that is being built down in Trinidad Tobago. Also the fertilizer industry coming from Venezuela and Russia, Russia where their natural gas is 95 cents, ours was $15. You can see that we cannot compete with that. One day we will see a fertilizer cartel in the hands of the people that are positioning themselves not to be our friends, Mr. Speaker.

It is important that we have that kind of independence for our food supply. It is important that we have independence for our energy supply. It is important that we develop the natural gas reserves that we have in this country, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the north slope of Alaska, sitting there, waiting to be run down to the lower 48 States in a pipeline. A few political glitches in the way from building that pipeline, Mr. Speaker. I think that should have been done a long time ago.

I am not as concerned about that any longer as I am about our ability to drill on the Outer Continental Shelf like they do offshore in Texas, like they do offshore in Louisiana, like they do not offshore going around Florida and up the East Coast and up the West Coast as well. The Outer Continental Shelf, comparing the fertilizer inventory on the north slope of Alaska, which is 38 trillion cubic feet, with 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore. And that is what we have a pretty good idea of without going out to inventory that natural gas. A tremendous amount.

It is sitting next door to the distribution system off the Louisiana coast. We could just drill our way on around Florida on up the coast. We need to do that. We need to drill for that gas where the market is, where the population centers are. Yes, I am told that Florida plans 33 generation plants coming up within this next year or two, and 28 of them plan to be natural gas and they will not let us drill a single well, not even 199 miles offshore of Florida, anywhere, because someone on a tall tower with a powerful telescope could somehow see the top of that derrick over the curvature of the Earth. And somehow someone would find out about that and they would not go to Florida to sit on the beach when there has never been any kind of environmental negative impact with natural gas anywhere in the world. It just simply vaporizes and goes off in the air, Mr. Speaker.

So I contend that on energy we need to do a number of things, all in the context of grow the size of the energy pie. If you think of all the energy as a pie, and that would include our nuclear, our coal, our gas, our diesel fuel, our ethanol, our bio-diesel, our wind, our hydrogen, and a number of other components of energy that we use and produce, that can all be laid out now. The percentage of each would dictate the size of the piece of the size of the overall pie.

We need to look at that. That is the finite amount of energy that we are producing in this country. We need to grow that. We need to expand the amount of energy that is available to the consumers in America, and we need to change the proportion of those slices of the pie. So, for example, why do we use natural gas to generate electricity when it is becoming a more scarce product that we need for fertilizer, for example?

So I would submit that we would change the overall size of that to more fertilizer, less electrical production. We probably hit the limit that we can

build hydroelectric dams in order to generate electricity.

The limit has been the environmentalists' limit that we would hit there. We need to go back to nuclear and generate a lot more electricity with nuclear. There is a clean coal concept that can be used for baseline, coal-fired plants, and that can be used almost all over this country to produce a tremendous amount of electricity.

All those things need to happen, and as the President said in this chamber just the last day of January, that we need to expand the use of ethanol, and he is very credible when he says that, Mr. Speaker, because a fellow that comes from the oil patch, that is promoting ethanol and renewable fuels, is a person that you know believes in it.

In Iowa, and the congressional district that I have the privilege and honor represent, they will be at nine ethanol production facilities there by the end of this year, perhaps even one more. That will take us to the position where we are producing from corn all of the ethanol that we have the corn to supply. It means we can cannot use all of our corn for ethanol production. We can perhaps use 25 percent of our corn for ethanol production, and ethanol is, of course, going all over the country to be blended with gasoline.

Our markets in Iowa are voluntary. When people go in and pull out the pump and the nozzle and put it in their tank, they choose ethanol 81 percent of the time. It was 42 percent just a few years ago. So it has almost doubled, and that is a voluntary usage because people understand that it is economical, it is environmentally friendly, and it reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

So the President has advocated that within 25 years we reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 75 percent. I think that is a doable goal, especially with some of the technology that is out there, making ethanol out of cellulose. So that would be wood fiber and chips and even weeds and switch grass, and yet corn stalks and all of that kind cellulose that grows up out of the ground is all renewable. We can be energy independent if, in fact, we had to be. It would not take us very long to get there, Mr. Speaker.

We need an overall strategy to grow the size of the energy pie to change the proportions of the size of those pieces so that we use more of certain kinds of energy, and I will advocate, as I said, nuclear and coal and ethanol to be three of those that I would advocate we use a lot more of. We can do some things with solar panels. That is an emerging technology, but change the proportion of the size of the pieces of the energy pie so that we have a prudent, long-term policy that can reduce and, one day, eliminate our dependence on foreign oil.

It also includes not just drilling for oil and gas on the Outer Continental Shelf, not just bringing a pipeline down from Alaska to deliver the natural gas from Alaska, but it also includes drilling for oil in ANWR. That stretch up there, Mr. Speaker, that is 19.6 million acres. Out of that we are going to tap into 2,000. Only 2,000 acres, .01 percent of that region, used to tap into the oil that we know is there. That could bring 1 million barrels or more of oil down to the lower 48 or actually down to Valdez and out on the tanker. That could happen in a very short period of time if we would just step up here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and have the people in the other body do the same thing. The President would sign the bill, and we would be one huge step closer to energy independence.

All of these things need to happen in a country that should be able to plan its future, in a country that should be able to debate its future and take action on the floor of this Congress.

We have stepped forward and taken on quite a task in this overall war on terror. This place called Iraq is not the war on terror. This is a battlefield in the overall global war on terror, but our military has stepped forward and done their job. We need to stand with them. We need to know and realize that we are in a time of war and that means that we need to tighten our belt. That requires sacrifice. That sacrifice needs to let us find the will in this Congress to move towards a balanced budget, a balanced budget that makes the Bush tax cuts permanent because that fixes this growth rate in place so it has a sense of permanency and a sense of predictability. We need to put those tax cuts in place, move towards a balanced budget, and provide a sense of financial security so that this continuity of this long period of 10 consecutive quarters of growth can go on another 10 consecutive quarters.

I would go further with the taxes, Mr. Speaker. Given the time that is allowed here tonight I will simply tie this back with the energy side of this. So, if good things are happening in the overall war on terror, if we control our spending on this budget, tighten our belt and if we sacrifice the way our military sacrifices, we can keep funds and resources going to them so they can do their job. If we provide for more energy, grow the size of the energy pie, we have laid out a destination for America's future that is an economic and a security destiny, and without going into the social side of this, the constitutional aspects of it, that is most of what we need, Mr. Speaker, to get this country where it needs to go.

So I want to thank the Speaker for the privilege to address this House of Representatives.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 55 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 15, 2006, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, as always, I profoundly appreciate the privilege to address this body and on a subject matter before us that we have not had the opportunity to debate and deliberate within this Chamber and one of the broader subjects that I would like to address in this upcoming 60 minutes, Mr. Speaker, is the President's State of the Union address last night. I have a copy in my hand here, the one I took notes on as he spoke in this Chamber last night.

Before I move into that, Mr. Speaker, I would like to address a couple of subject matters that were raised by one of the previous speakers and point out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, this seems to be something that is debated across this country intensively by the mainstream media. It fits within the same category of the PATRIOT Act which we extended at least from this floor today.

I sat through in the Judiciary Committee at least part if not all of the 12 to 13 hearings that we had, and we asked continually, give us some names, give us some specific examples of someone who had their rights trampled or abused or usurped under the PATRIOT Act and I say also under FISA. The criticism continues, Mr. Speaker, but I still continue to ask, name the case, name the individual, give me the circumstances by which these laws that have protected us so well have been abused by anyone this administration or the opening by which that might be done. I have not heard that answer, and I continue to ask that question.

This country has not been attacked because we have been prudent in our surveillance. This surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been used by many Presidents and only challenged now after it was brought forward in the New York Times, the very morning that there is a PATRIOT Act vote in the United States Senate. I would question the motives of that newspaper that sat on that story for a year. We need to continue to ask that question and what was the motive of the paper, and by the way, what was the motive of the Members of this body and the other body when they had been briefed on FISA and those kind of foreign intelligence surveillance, they did not seem to have an objection when they were briefed. They only had an objection when they were briefed by the media. We have a larger responsibility than that, Mr. Speaker, and I would point that out.

Also, one of the previous speakers addressed the issue of ``our addition to foreign oil.'' I would ask those people, help us use this domestic supply of energy that we have. Let us unlock ANWR, let us unlock the Outer Continental Shelf. Let us develop these domestic supplies of renewable energies that we have. Let us join together in a bipartisan effort to grow the size of this energy pie.

So those two in response to the previous remarks that were made, Mr. Speaker, and then I would also address the idea, the President covered a whole series of subject matters last night. Our national defense is one. Energy is another. Education is another.

Of course, one of the key components to our national security is immigration, border enforcement, and here with us tonight to address the border security issue and border enforcement and I expect will have some kind words to say about our brave border patrol is the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Keller) to whom I would be pleased to yield to.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida. I appreciate his travel down to the border. I have done that on occasion myself and traveled the border at night and flown in helicopters and had my meetings with the Border Patrol down there. It wasn't quite as eventful as yours appears to have been, Mr. Keller; but for those of us in the House of Representatives who have not gone down and had personal experience on the border to see how it functions and how sometimes it doesn't function, I think it is important for us to take that visit and do that.

The statement that was given that there were 1.2 million stopped at the southern border last year, of course we know that is a rounded number. The number in a little more precise term is stuck in my head: 1,159,000 illegals, and I say collared at the southern border in the last year. And of those, there were only 1,640 that were adjudicated for deportation. The balance of them, in summary terms, were released on their promise to return to their home country. Many of those who were other than Mexicans, the 155,000, were simply released into this country without an expectation of going back to their home country.

In that haystack of humanity, the Border Patrol has testified before our immigration subcommittee that they believe they stop one-third, maybe one-fourth, of those illegal crossers. So we know that that 1.2 million multiplied times three or four gets you in the neighborhood of how many actually came across and how many came in here and successfully completed their crossing and stayed. That numbers approaches, I believe, 4 million in the last year.

That 4 million-strong haystack of humanity includes people looking for a better life, but also in that are the needles in that haystack that are terrorists, drug dealers, criminals, rapists, and people who wish this country ill will, along with a pretty good sized portion of them that simply see the United States as a giant ATM, who come here seeking their fortune and then wire the money back, go back and withdraw that money from their banks and live happily ever after.

That number, in 2005, when the report comes in, will be very near, if it does not exceed, $30 billion wired south of our border, $20 billion into Mexico and another $10 billion into the other Central American states. That is a huge number. We say we cannot get along without this economy, but the illegal labor in this country is generating about $76 billion in wages. That $76 billion amounts to 2.2 percent of the wages that are earned in the United States, even though they are 4 percent of the labor force.

So the argument we cannot get along without the illegals is a specious argument and is just plain false. We will find a way in this country. There are 7.5 million people being paid not to work, on unemployment. There are another 5 million that have exhausted their unemployment benefits and are still seeking work. So there are 12.5 million people in this country looking for work. And of the 11 million illegals in this country, 6.3 million illegals are in our workforce. So the 6.3 million that we have to replace if we shut off the jobs magnet could come from the unemployed and that 12.5 million that I stipulated.

Additionally, there are 9 million young people in America between the ages of 16 and 19 that are not in the labor force, even in a part-time job, for whatever reason. There are about another 4 to 4.5 million between the ages of 55 and 69 that are not working that might be if we didn't have penalties in there for their work. So you begin to add that up, and it is 13 million added to the 12.5 million. So there are about 25 million people in this country that would be sitting there to fill the 6.3 million vacancies if we shut off the jobs magnet. So one in four. And that doesn't include the 51 million between the ages of 20 and 64, between those ages, that are simply not in the workforce because they are retired, they choose not to work, or whatever the reason might be. That takes us up to 76 million in a potential workforce to tap into or to replace 6.3 million.

I do not think we have examined those numbers or we wouldn't be having the debate we are having, Mr. Speaker.

I want to take this opportunity to yield some time to the gentleman from Texas, who had spoken to us a little earlier about the immigration issue. I appreciate his stance on the energy issue. In fact, we have stood on this floor a number of times and joined forces together. I joined forces with Mr. Poe of Texas in cosponsoring his bill that opens up the Outer Continental Shelf to both gas and oil drilling. So I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, as I look at the gentleman's lower chart, Pollution from Oil, and it shows 2 percent of the pollution from oil comes from offshore drilling and the balance from the composition that the gentleman describes. For the record, I ask what percentage of pollution comes from natural gas? Does any come from drilling for natural gas? Is there any example of a natural gas spill offshore anywhere in the world that has damaged a beach anywhere?

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Poe's presence here.

I did see natural gas boiling up out of the water, and I saw it on fire when I went down to visit New Orleans in the early part of September. There was a great visual for what happens if you happen to get a natural gas leak coming down from 8 or 10 feet of water, and it might come from 1,000 feet of water, the natural gas boils to the top. If there is a spark it burns. It burns without a lot of heat. If there is no spark, it dissipates into the atmosphere. I do not have the statistics how much gas just percolates up through the ocean floor, but my understanding is that it is a significant amount. Do you have any background on that?

We are looking at the distribution of that large volume of natural gas that comes out of Hurricane Alley. We are supplying some of those gaps in that need for natural gas through liquefied natural gas that comes over on tankers, and then we have to run it through a plant and convert it back to our gas form and deliver it through our pipelines. It is essential from our cost to be able to take natural gas as close to the demand as possible and tap into the nearest supply so we do not have that expensive transportation and compression that goes on into the Middle East, bringing it in and converting it back to a gas in the Untied States. It is an expensive proposition.

When I see that red map with leases all around the shore of the United States, that is all accessible to the population centers of the United States which are our coastlines. It would be a natural to tap into the gas that is within 200 miles of its demand as opposed to several thousand miles across the ocean. Would you comment on that?

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Poe.

I would like to pick up on that framework that has been laid out by the gentleman from Texas and talk a little bit about the national security of our energy situation. As I listen to the rhetoric that comes out of the Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, for example, it is a bit difficult to believe he is a friend of the United States. It is hard to think that he had our best interests in mind even though he did donate some natural gas for heating over in Massachusetts. I would think their politics might be a little more sympathetic than they are in Texas or Iowa.

But as I look at that, I question the motives and I see the dollars that have flowed into that administration in Venezuela, and I look across to the Middle East where we are buying that liquefied natural gas, and everybody in the Middle East is not our friend, and they do not have our best interests in mind either. But the wealth of the United States of America is being spent in purchasing expensive energy resources from overseas, expensive supplies of energy, and we are enriching people who do not have our best interests in mind in the Middle East as well as in Venezuela and other parts around the world.

What kind of a nation would sit on all of that oil that we have up in ANWR, and I have been up there and looked at that? The gentleman from Texas spoke about the environmental friendliness and the safety we have with our oil drilling offshore. I would point out the record of developing the North Slope oil that started in about 1972. Up there when you look at the hundreds and perhaps thousands of wells that have been drilled in that area and the millions and millions of barrels of oil that have been pumped down the Alaskan pipeline, and you fly over from the air and you look for that environmental wasteland that supposedly is up there, all I see is green tundra. And I see a white 50-inch pipeline that goes across the country, across the Yukon River and on down to Valdez. We flew over at about 1,500 feet in altitude. They told me we were over the North Slope oil fields, and I looked out the windows and cast my eyes below and said, Where are the wells? I have worked in the oil fields and have been up on the derrick and I know what it looks like. I expected to see pump jacks like you see in Texas or Oklahoma. I saw none of that in Alaska. All I saw was a white rock pad about 50 by 150 feet, maybe 3 or 4 feet up off that Arctic tundra sitting there waiting in case there needed to be some work done on that well, which would take place in the wintertime on an ice road, the same way the drilling took place in the wintertime on ice roads and ice pads.

It is environmentally friendly because there is not a disturbance to that environment when it is not frozen solid. When it is frozen solid, they build ice roads and come in, they set the work-over rig on that rock pad and pull out a submersible pump, put it in the well and have it ready to go. It pumps oil into that collection system, which I do not see either from the air.

I do not know how it could be any more environmentally friendly. The threat that it would reduce the caribou herd, for example, I happen to know in 1970 they did a census. They counted every caribou, citizen or not. There were 7,000 head of caribou on the North Slope, and that is an American herd. Today there are over 28,000 head of caribou in that same place. We surely did not damage their environment.

Those who watch that herd will tell you that caribou cows get up on top of those rock pads and have their calves instead of dropping them in the ice cold water. They will have them in the spring when the permafrost starts to melt. That is one reason they survive better. Another reason is they have a place to get up out of the wet, and the wind blows the flies away. The wind dries off the calves, and they will dry off and live better and do better. So we see a population that has multiplied four times in caribou.

If you go over to ANWR, there is not a resident caribou herd there, notwithstanding as many times as you have seen the commercials on television. It is not a pristine alpine forest. There is not a single tree in that entire plain

where we would like to drill for oil. Not a single tree.

In fact, I have a picture of the furthest most northerly spruce tree that is there. It is about 600 miles further south. I point out for people who did not take 8th grade science and geography, that the circle around the globe known as the Arctic Circle, that is the line that has been drawn around the globe north of which trees cannot grow. So the commercial do not destroy the trees in ANWR is a phony commercial. The commercial that it will disturb the caribou herds is a phony commercial. If anything, it will enhance the caribou herd on the North Slope. There is no resident caribou herd in ANWR which lies just to the east of the North Slope, identical as far as I can tell in ecological regions, at least close to that same kind of climate and ecological region, but they do have a caribou herd that comes in from Canada. They come in and have their calves and when the calves are strong enough to walk, they walk back to Canada. I do not think any thinking person thinks they would be disturbed if we drilled some wells up there and pumped a million barrels a day on down here to the United States to take the pressure off the foreign oil.

That is one thing with drilling in ANWR. There is a lot of gas in ANWR. There is gas developed on the North Slope. That gas that sits there now, we need to build a pipeline from the North Slope on down to the lower 48 States. There is 38 trillion cubic feet of natural feet developed and ready to tap into up there. There is more gas up there not developed, and that reserve has not necessarily been identified in its volume.

But if you recall the map of the coastal regions of the United States that was done in red, the undrilled portion of our Outer Continental Shelf, there are known reserves out there of 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The United States consumes 22.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year. That chunk up there on the North Slope, there is more up there than the 38 trillion, but just by comparison, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the North Slope of Alaska, and 406 trillion cubic feet offshore of the United States.

Those huge supplies of natural gas, the ability to deliver a million barrels of crude oil a day coming out of the ANWR region, all of the oil that is in that red area of the map along with the natural gas, and this Nation goes anywhere else in the world to purchase at a high price energy that enriches people that sometimes are our sworn enemies, and I would say the leader of Iran would be one of those, and the leader of Venezuela has been swearing at us for some time, and he is convincing me he is our enemy, too. So we enrich them and sit on top of our energy reserves. I would declare that to be a form of economic suicide, to pay a high price for energy when we have it right underneath our very feet and not tap into it and instead enrich our enemies.

Those are big things that matter in a big way. This Congress cannot seem to get together on the obvious. As I listen to the gentleman from Washington in the previous hour speak about us being addicted to foreign oil, I think we have been intimidated by the cult of environmental extremism. The idea that we are going to do something to tap in our energy that is going to upset this Mother Nature that some folks would like to convert back to pre Garden of Eden, and when I say that, that would be back before Adam and Eve walked on this Earth. All other species are fine, but this human species should not compete with other species on this Earth, and I will tell you that as I read it, we are put here to have dominion over all those species, plant or animal. They are here for us to use respectfully and to manage, and we do do that, and we are better than we were 30 or 50 years ago, and we will be better in another 50 years.

We have been extraordinarily effective and prudent in our care with our environment, and no one can point to a single natural gas environmental damage of any kind, and certainly your illustration of the very small percentage of oil pollution that comes from spills should tell us that if we were going to do anything, we should shut down the boating in the gulf as opposed to shutting down the drilling in the gulf.

I would open them both up because I do not see that there is a big problem there. I see that I have here tonight the gentleman, Mr. Shimkus, who has, I know, a passion in his heart for ethanol. And I want to make that endorsement before I hand this microphone over to him, in that I come from a district that may well be the one that has its ethanol production build out, all the corn we have to supply turned into ethanol, and we are now an energy export center; and I look for that kind of development across the entire Corn Belt. And I would be happy to yield as much times as he may consume to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus).

I thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus), and I appreciate that presentation. I always learn from these things this evening. And I look across at Illinois and we have a friendly competition in corn production, soybean production and sometimes football, basketball. And I look at the coal production you have and the oil and I think you have gas wells there too running in conjunction with it. It looks like Illinois has a little head start on Iowa when it comes to exporting energy and we are focusing our energies in that fashion too to develop that energy.

I would like to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, a concept and it is a concept I would like to try to sell to America, that we can begin to think about our energy in a little bit different fashion, and that is we need to grow the size of the energy pie. And if you just think in your mind's eye, and I will put a chart out here sometime within the next couple of months that demonstrates this. But there are pieces in every pie, and whether you slice up six, eight, or 10, but just draw that circle in your mind's eye and think there is a piece there for coal and there is a piece for ethanol and a piece for biodiesel and a piece for hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels, both gas and diesel fuel and our oil that we draw out of that.

There is a piece for natural gas that is energy. There is a piece for nuclear power, hydroelectric and there is a piece for solar. There is a piece for wind. There is a piece for hydrogen. And I am probably forgetting two or three pieces out of this energy pie that we have. But the more pieces we have, the more alternatives we have, the more options that consumers have, and the less dependency we have on foreign oil and foreign energy, and then of course the larger those pieces of the pie are, the more supply there is of energy.

And with supply and demand of course the rule is that then the value of the cost of energy will go down if we can grow the size of the energy pie, adjust the proportion, the percentage of the pie that are those pieces, those components of the different kinds of energy so that it reflects the resources we have in this country, the development of those resources, those being coal, nuclear, ethanol, biodiesel, natural gases sitting in the offshore and crude oil that sits out there offshore, drilling in the ANWR, the development of natural gas resources up in the north slope of Alaska, that the natural gas that is across this country underneath public lands, that we have not talked very much in the last year in this Congress about natural gas underneath

public lands; but the statement has been made on this floor and it is in this Congressional Record that underneath public non-national park public lands in the United States there is enough natural gas to heat every home in America for the next 150 years.

And we can drill it and we can tap into it, but we cannot build the roads and the collection system to deliver and distribute that gas because of other environmental infringements and obstructions. And so if we can do things to develop energy that are compatible with the environment, then we have to get away from this cult of environmental extremism, and we have got to get together here and save this economy from America and not commit this economic suicide of purchasing from our enemies, enriching our enemies so that they can buy weapons and hire terrorists and send those people to bomb us, but instead provide that independence for ourselves.

And that is the biggest piece about this energy that I think needs to be laid out here. If we can go at it on all fronts, and I think that the natural gas offshore would be the thing that would reduce the overall cost of the United States the most.

We sit here in the United States of America and the heartland of it and Mr. Shimkus and myself, in particular, are in the middle of the Corn Belt. And everything you raise takes nitrogen to produce it.

And we purchase nitrogen fertilizer. It takes more nitrogen for corn than any other crop that I know of. And 90 percent of the cost of that nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of the natural gas that is converted into that nitrogen fertilizer. We have nearly lost the fertilizer industry in America because we have not developed our natural gas in America. And that fertilizer industry is going offshore in places like Trinidad and Tobago, and those are American interests, and I am grateful for that. But they are also going to Venezuela and Russia. And we are sitting here paying $15 for natural gas, and they are paying 95 cents in Russia so they can ship fertilizer to us. It will not be long, if we keep down this path, before the entire fertilizer industry is gone and we will see a fertilizer cartel pop up in Venezuela and Russia. And if you think it was a tough deal when you saw an oil cartel seek to control the price of crude oil and gasoline in America, think what it would be like if somebody has control over the cost of the production of our food in the United States of America.

So, Mr. Speaker, I would like to recap. I started out by addressing the President's State of the Union address, and he covered a lot of subject matter. We have addressed the energy intensively, and I do not think we mentioned that he addressed the initiative to develop ethanol out of cellulose. Wood chips, stalks and I think cornstalks, fiber like switch grass. There is a lot of energy there, and we are on the edge of being able to open up that technology. And if we accelerate that he believes, and I have no reason to disagree with his statement, that we could have ethanol production out of cellulose competitive with our current ethanol production within 6 years. That is good for all of us that can raise fiber of any kind. And it can convert waste products to put that in your gas tank at E85 levels, as Mr. Shimkus said. And I certainly support his initiative on clean coal, as the President spoke to that as well.

But the point that he made last night that has not been said here, the central point to his speech that I want to make, is that we fight to win in this War on Terror. And it is the most essential battle that we have as our national security. One of the things we are susceptible to, of course, with that is our dependence on that oil. We can get away from that, but we will still be threatened by our enemies from abroad.

We fight to win. We are winning. And the people on this side of the aisle stood and cheered when the President said that; the people on the other side of the aisle sat on their hands. And when the President said the decisions will be made on whether we deploy troops back out of Iraq by commanders in the field, not by politicians in Washington, D.C., people on this side of the aisle stood and cheered; people on the other side sat on their hands, Mr. Speaker. And when he said we stood behind our military, then we kind of got some support from both sides, but it was reluctant on the one side. And I wonder about that. I wonder what kind of sentiment would not be 100 percent behind every man and woman who wears a uniform and puts their life on the line for our freedom and for our safety. I think that is an absolute commitment that we have made. We have had that debate in this Congress. We have endorsed the President's authority to defend our interests in Iraq and around the world. He has done that. And I am grateful to every man and woman who has gone out there and put their lives on the line and those especially who have given their lives for our safety and our freedom.

It is going to be a long row to hoe to get to the end of this War on Terror. But the freedom that is coming in places like Afghanistan, the freedom that is coming in places like Iraq can be the lode star for a free Arab world. We never go to war against another free people, and to the extent that freedom can be promoted throughout the world, that is the extent by which all people on this globe are free from that curse of terrorism.

So I would ask us all to join together in that cause and let us open up this energy we have in this country so we are not hostage to those countries. Let us not enrich them. Let us enrich this economy here in the United States of America and promote the freedom that comes from a free economy.

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate this resolution coming to the floor of this Congress.

I would say that, Mr. Speaker, as we are holding this debate, our Armed Forces overseas are engaged in the active defense of our homeland. Their daily contributions and sacrifices are working to bring democratic stabilization to a country which has never known the freedom it has achieved today.

After decades of tyrannical rule under Saddam Hussein, yesterday, the Iraqi people voted in their third national election this year. They selected a government that will now for the first time establish really true and pure sovereignty for this Nation. And as the Iraqis put together their formal parliament, as they elect themselves a prime minister and are seated at the United Nations, they will be the freest and most representative Arab country in the world.

What a legacy for the United States of America to contribute to? What a noble cause that we are seeing come to fruition today? And I appreciate the tone that I am hearing from over here on the other side of the aisle. It sounds to me like we are coming together in a way we have not in the past, coming together in support and pulling for the Iraqi people and pulling for this common cause of freedom that we all struggled so long for.

When we look back across the history of this country and think about some of the other conflicts this Nation has been involved in, we have always had disagreements about whether to go forward and how to go forward; but look at the legacy of a place that is left in a place like, for example, in 1898 the USS Maine was sunk to the bottom of Havana Harbor. Who said then that the Filipinos would be free today and grateful for a century because of that act of our war against the Spanish at that time?

Who said at the beginning of the Civil War that it was about freeing the slaves? No, it was about saving the Union, but we know it now as the war that freed the slaves.

This will be the war that freed the Iraqi people, the war that established Iraq as the lone star to create a free Arab world which means the elimination of the habitat that breeds terrorists.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And again, I appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and in turn, address the House of Representatives.

This has been a huge week here on the floor of the House of Representatives. We processed a lot of legislation this week. Much of it has been legislation that has been in the works for a number of years. And I think what I will try to do is maybe unravel this coming backwards across the way we passed it and work my way back into the legislation a little bit.

But I want to take up first the immigration reform and point out that in this debate that we heard today in this resolution that came forward, which was H. Res. 612, the continuous message from the other side was about being anti-immigrant, anti-immigrant.

But it confuses the difference between an immigrant and an illegal immigrant. In fact, I know of no one in this Congress that is anti- immigrant. I know of many Members of this Congress that are pro the rule of law.

And that is the distinction that we need to draw the line with. And I take us back to where would be if we went back even 10 years, but say go back 25 years, in a time when we did not have very much illegal immigration. It was a smaller percentage of our overall population; it was smaller in numbers, smaller in percentage, and it was not a very significant problem. It was something that was somewhat manageable back then.

And back in that period of time, if we had been able to control our borders and watched as we needed more employees in certain sectors of the economy, we would have seen a number of things happen that would have resolved this need that we keep hearing from business about labor.

They say that if we deported all of the illegals, our economy would collapse, and we cannot get along without them when perhaps 4 percent of our workforce in America is an illegal workforce. And if we lose 4 percent and retain 96 percent, I cannot believe that this resilient country could not find a way to bounce back from that and accommodate the difference.

So I take us back 25 years and ask, what would we do if we respected the rule of law? What would we do if we had borders that were controlled? How would we adjust to demands in a growing economy if illegal labor, cheap labor that pours in from overseas just were not available?

What if the United States of America, instead of being a large portion of an entire continent, what if we were an island? What if you drew the line on the 49th parallel on the north and our southern border on the south and envisioned the United States sitting out alone where illegal labor does not flow across our borders just because of the jobs magnet but in fact has to find an expensive way of transportation to get across a broad ocean?

Think, for example, of a country like Australia that finds itself in that kind of a circumstance. I take you back to a policy that they had up until 1971. Actually, they did not have a very good name for it. They called it White Australia, and some would be embarrassed about the name for that now. But that was the phrase that they used to describe their immigration policy, which is they were advancing the idea of European descendents populating the continent of Australia.

In fact, I graduated from high school in 1967, and I remember during those years that I was in college, I saw advertisements come from Australia saying this is a great place to move to. We really need you to come down here. There is a wealth of opportunity in Australia. And I thought about it. And so that advertisement that was there was because they needed more people to grow their economy.

In about 1971, they gave up on this mission to some degree, and they changed their policy to allow immigrants to come in from Southeast Asia. Now, how does this work politically? We can learn from these lessons here in the United States of America, and that is that it was big business that wanted the labor to come in, and it was labor unions that wanted to keep the labor out because they understood something in Australia as far as back as 1971 that there was a law of supply and demand.

That law of supply and demand seems to be missing from the rationale of the people who oppose enforcement of our rule of law with regard to immigration. They do not seem to understand that when we have an oversupply of labor, that drives the price down and that labor is a commodity, like where I come from, corn and beans or cattle and hogs, or gold or oil if you come from another part of the world, or currency. It fluctuates in the marketplace according to supply and demand.

So the island, or I should call it the large continent, and it actually is, the large continent of Australia did not have that option of being able to run open borders and let millions come in to drive their wage price down. They actually had to fight the politics out inside Australia and adopt a policy that brought in immigrants from Southeast Asia and other parts of the world to fill their labor supply. The pressure got great enough that they came up with an economic solution.

Well, I submit, Mr. Speaker, that in the United States of America, had we respected the rule of law, had we controlled our borders, the pressure would have been brought politically to do the things necessary to bring in the amount of labor in a legal and a rational fashion.

We would have done some other things, too. Some of these sectors of the economy would have seen their wages go up, and they would have decided they could not afford to pay those kinds of wages; so they would have gotten innovative and they would have used technology. We use robotics today. We use a lot of different techniques to cut down on the amount of labor we need to produce a product. We would do more of that if labor were higher. We would be more innovative. When labor is lower, we are less innovative. In a country where labor is cheap, they do not have much innovation at all. So the pressure of high wages would drive technology, and that would replace some of the labor, and that labor that could be replaced by more technology would then transfer to places where labor could not be replaced as well by technology.

Another thing that happened, and is a little joke here in Congress the last couple of days, is Southern California ran out of Okies that went there to do that hard work from the Dust Bowl. They did. They went over there and they were willing to do the hard work and work in the fields. They were glad to get in anywhere where they could get a job. But they transferred themselves from Oklahoma to California for the opportunity.

I take you to an article that I read in the Des Moine Register maybe 10 or 12 years ago, and it was about a section in Milwaukee that was six blocks by six blocks, 36 square blocks, and in that section for every single dwelling that was there, there was not a single male head of household that had a job and was working. And as I read through the article, I tuned myself to the ear of the writer, who said that it was too bad that they lost their jobs in the breweries in Milwaukee. The automation that came in so they could make beer with a lot less labor caused the good jobs that were there, some of them, to disappear. That caused people to be laid off. And so they went back to their homes and sat inside their homes, and when they went around to do the interviews and to survey, 36 square blocks, not a single working male head of household.

The people had come up from the South, from the gulf coast, from southern Mississippi, Alabama, down in that region, moved up there for those good jobs. They went up to access the good jobs in the breweries and other types of industry that was up there in Milwaukee; and they raised their families there and then, in a matter of a generation or two, found themselves laid off, and their children or their children's children could not get jobs in the breweries the same way that they had. So they sat in their household and did not go somewhere to find a job.

We know why that is. And that is in one of the better States with regard to welfare reform. But it is because the safety net of welfare had become a hammock for everyone in that entire 36-block area. They totally missed the point, though, that the same people's predecessors, that this was the progeny of their predecessors who had transferred themselves all the way from the gulf coast to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for what? For a job, Mr. Speaker.

And now we look at this economy in the United States as if labor cannot be transferred from one region to another to fill the demand. So there is a demand for some 5,000 roughneck workers out in the oil fields in Wyoming, in that area, that I happened to read an article on just yesterday; and we have got 15 to 18 million workforce sitting there unemployed in the United States of America, and we want to do a guest worker/amnesty plan for 11 million illegals in this country. What country in their right mind would pay 15 to 18 million people not to work and then bring in 11 million, or I would say closer to 22 million, people who do want to work at a cheap rate? That does not make economic sense, Mr. Speaker. And that is one of the supply and demand rationales that I would like to point out with regard to the immigration policy.

So if we were a rational Nation, if we were a Nation that did not have this convenience of opening up our borders and allowing the illegals to come in, we would have done these things: we would have transferred labor from one part of the country to another; we would have squeezed down the welfare so that some of the people, and, in fact, I would like it if most of the people, would get up and go to work. That would be two things.

And the third thing we would have done is what Singapore is doing right now. They are advertising to their people, saying have more babies. What is wrong with a fertility plan? That is a natural way to replace labor. Those three things would have happened within our borders, and then within our borders we would have been under political pressure to negotiate a rational immigration policy that was legal.

And, Mr. Speaker, I object to the idea that we would bring in third- class people. People who come to America, I want them to have a path to citizenship. I want them to access the American Dream. I want them to do it the legal way.

So we have addressed this immigration issue, and I actually did not come to the floor to talk about immigration, but it sparked me when I listened to the gentlewoman from Texas.

I came to the floor to talk about another subject matter, and that is the subject matter of Iraq. We have made significant progress there. This is a day of celebration. The reports are continuing to come in from the aftermath of the closing of the polls of their December 15 election. And the ink is fading on my finger and on the fingers of many of us here on this floor of Congress who have in solidarity dipped our fingers in ink. And it helps me, when I see my finger, to look at that and remember what they have all done, risked their lives to go vote, 11 million strong and more. The most people ever to vote in Iraq, the most purple fingers ever maybe anytime in the world.

So today we brought a resolution to the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 612, and that is a resolution to honor the troops, to declare our dedication and our unshaking will to see this through to a final victory in Iraq. And this resolution was written in a clear fashion, in a rational and a logical fashion. And we had a debate on this floor.

And Member after Member from the other side of the aisle came down, and they said, I honor and support our troops and request an open debate on the Iraq war on the House floor. Member after Member after Member: I honor and support our troops and request an open debate on the Iraq war on the House floor. One Member said, In opposition to our policy in Iraq, he also requested an open debate on the House floor.

Well, we had an open debate on the House floor. I do not know why we had 20 or so Members or several more come down and say they honored and respected our troops and requested an open debate on the House floor, because that was what we had scheduled was an open debate on the House floor. We had the debate. The question after I heard that I had was when I saw the vote go up on the board. If I were a soldier in Iraq, if I were in a military uniform, ready to put my life on the line for this country, and I saw this vote, 279 in favor of the resolution dedicated to victory and support of a free Iraqi people, 279 in support; 109, sadly, against, Mr. Speaker. Thirty-four voted present and 12 did not vote at all. So I add those up and come to over 150 who said they did not commit themselves to a full victory in Iraq. For whatever reason, they said they want an honest and open debate. Every of them that came to the microphone said, I honor and support our troops. I wrote the quote down. They were using the same script, I believe.

And I point this out: that you cannot honor and support our troops if you oppose their mission. There was a clear

opportunity here to support their mission in Iraq, to stand with them. This Congress voted to support their mission before the President ever ordered them into battle, and yet they still seek to pull down this effort.

Also, a number of Members in that debate said the Republicans and the President will not define victory. All they want is a deadline, a date certain, by which American troops will be out of Iraq, and accused the Republican side of the aisle of not being willing to define victory.

So, Mr. Speaker, I would submit this: the other side of this argument dare not define victory because if they do, then they will lose their ability to raise the bar and make it harder and harder and harder to meet their standards.

So I will stand here and define victory this evening. And this is a victory that will fit this war and it will fit every war throughout history, every one we know and every one that we will see and every one that our posterity will see. The definition of victory, Mr. Speaker, is when the losing side realizes and acknowledges that they have lost. That is what this effort is about. And if we could have gotten Saddam Hussein to stare into the barrels of a few tanks and decided that he had lost, that would have been the end of the war. We would not have had to send troops into Iraq. But they had to be convinced that they were losing, Mr. Speaker, and that is why we sent troops there is to convince the other side that they had lost.

Yet we have people over on this side of the ocean standing here on the floor of the United States Congress, seeking to convince our enemies that we cannot win and that the enemies cannot lose. That is, Mr. Speaker, undermining our effort and undermining our troops. And yet some of the same people come to this floor and say, I honor and support our troops and request an open debate on the Iraq war on the House floor.

We had an open debate. They voted against the resolution. And I will tell you, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot honor the troops and defy their mission. They go together. You must honor the troops and the mission together. They are integral and they are one and the same.

Madam Speaker, today as we celebrate Iraqi Freedom Day, I want to raise a different subject, and that is that we will be bringing legislation to the floor of this House that will bring some enforcement to our immigration laws. It has been a long time coming. There has been a lot of good work done by a lot of people. I am hopeful that this legislation now will also include an amendment that I hope to propose, H.R. 3095, the New IDEA bill. New IDEA stands for the Illegal Deduction Elimination Act.

The IRS is more inclined, I believe, to enforce our immigration laws than DHS has proven to be. I would submit that they can go in and do their regular audits and check the Social Security numbers of the employees through the instant check program that will be renamed the employer verification system hopefully today or tomorrow and then give safe harbor to those employers that do that verification of their employees. Otherwise the expense that is a business expense that will be written off will have to be denied as a deduction so that it becomes taxable if it is a profitable business. That takes a $10 an hour illegal up to a $16 an hour and lets the legal person have a job instead of the illegal person.

Mr. Chairman, I urge all Members to support Mr. Campbell's amendment to help rid our communities of dangerous illegal alien criminals. I commend Mr. Campbell for his commitment to immigration reform. His amendment would make sure that cities do not get Federal taxpayer dollars if they have policies in place that harbor and give sanctuary to illegal alien criminals. Sanctuary policies tie the hands of local law enforcement officers and keep illegal aliens who commit crimes in our country rather than deporting criminals according to U.S. law. Under these so-called sanctuary policies, in certain cities the police officers are prohibited from reporting the illegal aliens who commit crimes to Federal immigration authorities for deportation. As a result, taxpayers pay to incarcerate illegal alien prisoners who are later released back onto the streets.

Welcome to Congress. You have had an impact right away, Mr. Campbell.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take my Special Order at this time.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be recognized on the floor of this United States Congress and the opportunity to address the Members.

As I sit here and listen to this discussion that has gone on tonight, I would kind of like to unravel some of this from the top down and little bit. And, again, the lamentations come down about all the things that are going wrong in the world and particularly a list of things that are allegedly going wrong in Iraq.

My colleagues might notice that my finger is purple today. And it is purple in celebration and in solidarity with the freedom of the Iraqi people. The people have gone to the polls three times in this calendar year, and each time they said it could not be done, and each time they did an even better job. The January 30 election that elected the interim government that has now put together the constitution; the October 15 election that ratified the constitution; and then today's election that concluded today, December 15 by their calendar, that has now elected a new general assembly that will select from them a prime minister. And he will be seated in March, and they will be the most sovereign, the most representative Arab country in the world. Imagine that, Madam Speaker, sitting at the United Nations with Iraq having the most integrity because they represent the real people in their government.

The argument came from the gentlewoman that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that was allegedly the only reason that we went there. When did this country give up on liberation, Madam Speaker? Did we give up on this when we went to the Philippines after the USS Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor? We had the Spanish-American War that took place, and the USS Maine is still at the bottom of the harbor in Havana. But the Filipino people were liberated by the United States Marine Corps, and today, the Filipinos are grateful that the Americans came and liberated them, and we carried over there our way of life, our free enterprise system, our property rights concept, an educational system, an English language. And today, they are a prosperous people because they were liberated by Americans in 1898.

And look at the liberation that took place in the Civil War, Madam Speaker. There the war was about States' rights. It was about saving the Union. Abraham Lincoln's efforts were focused on saving the Union. And then, later on in the war, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. No one thought too much of it at the time. Now we remember that as the war to free the slaves.

So sometimes we have to have a list of reasons why we have to go to war, Madam Speaker. And this is a war that has freed 25 million Iraqi people, 25 million Afghanis, has established the lodestars for the Arab world to follow this democracy that is going to be now a prosperous Iraq, and that can bring freedom to the entire Arab world, which brings peace to most of the world as we know it and eliminates the habitat for terrorists throughout the world.

This is a very, very noble thing that this country has done. It is a very, very noble sacrifice on the part of the 2,100 and more Americans who have sacrificed their lives for the freedom of the Iraqi people, for the safety of the American people.

It is not a terrorist center there unless you want to say a grave center for terrorists. They are taking 3,000 terrorists off the street every month between killed and captured. That is far more than the casualties that we are taking. Saddam Hussein was killing his own people at the rate of 182 per day, Madam Speaker. That adds up to over 100,000 Iraqis that are alive today that would not be if Saddam Hussein were still running his torture chambers, still running his plastic shredder machine, and with weapons of mass destruction, real gas weapons of mass destruction, killing his own people. This adds up to a humanitarian effort that is not unsurpassed in the world but unsurpassed by other countries aside from the United States of America.

The argument that we are using dollars to purchase propaganda in the Iraqi newspapers. Good night. How far do you to go to make an argument against the American people? Maybe we ought to spend these tax dollars to try to get the real news printed in the New York Times or the Washington Post, Madam Speaker. If that is what it takes, that is what we ought to do because part of this war is to defend our troops and our military. And I am tired of listening on this floor, and I did not hear it happen tonight, of people that say, ``I support our troops but I oppose the war.'' That means they oppose their mission, and they are asking soldiers to put their lives on the line for a mission that they do not believe in.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time, and I particularly thank the gentleman from Texas for bringing and offering this resolution.

I am going to include my prepared remarks, Mr. Speaker, because my remarks that are here reflect the remarks that have been made by the other Members here on this floor, and I wish to associate myself with those remarks, and I appreciate the gentleman from California's support as well for this resolution.

And I would rather speak a little bit from the heart, then, about some of the things that I saw there having traveled over to Iraq a number of times and this last time with Mr. Burgess from Texas. And I saw some of that perspective from the Blackhawk as well. And as we flew into Baghdad, that was not a rare circumstance. It was not a unique circumstance. In fact, I saw numbers of children running out into the streets in twos and threes and waving. It did not happen in every block, but it happened in a number of the blocks that we saw as we came in.

Not only have I seen that in Baghdad but I have seen that also in Mosul. I have seen it in Kirkuk, and I have seen it also in Fallujah, Mr. Speaker. And that endorsement of American power and influence and liberation and coalition power influence and liberation, that comes from the people. And I have watched those Blackhawk helicopters scatter their livestock, and the herdsman and women come out and wave with great joy to see that influence that has provided their freedom.

And an essential component of freedom is to have an independent judiciary. And I asked for a meeting with the Iraqi Special Tribunal because I wanted to get a measure of the men that would be sitting in judgment of Saddam Hussein and the other alleged perpetrators of the crimes against humanity that we know took place in Iraq over the last couple of decades. As we sat in that very hot room and looked across that table and I gazed into the

eyes of these men, there was a deep conviction, a significant amount of courage, a tremendous amount of patriotism that is there. They know that their lives are on the line. Since that time from about August 18, I believe that date was, we have seen this unfold to where we know that there have been already two attorneys that have been killed in the process of this trial.

I stand here on the floor of the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker, standing in support and in solidarity of a free and independent judiciary for everyone in this world, but particularly those in Iraq where it will become the second place on the globe where an Arab can get a fair trial, second to Israel.

And where they sit in judgment now of those alleged perpetrators of war crimes, we need to stand with them. We need to send a message across that says free and independent judiciary, rule of law are essential to freedom, and they have got to be independent of the politics that rule also in Iraq. The old Baathist Party, the people that are looking to try to bring leverage for one political reason or another, we have to hold them separate from that and encourage them to stand on that rule of law, which they quoted to me on that hot day in that building in Baghdad back last August.

So I am proud this Congress stands with them, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the opportunity to present my argument in support of this resolution before this Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague from Texas for bringing this legislation forward. As you may know, Iraq's march towards democracy has not been easy. They are just now emerging from 24 years of oppression and cruel torture under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Now thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of American and coalition forces, Saddam has been captured. Ironically, he is now receiving the benefits of the fair judicial process he denied to so many.

Last night, I spoke to this House about benchmarks in the progress of the new country. In less than three years, Iraq has gone from a nation suffering under a ruthless dictator to one with a new constitution and only hours away from a democratically elected government. As I have heard from numerous American soldiers in and returning from Iraq, every day the nation is relying less and less on coalition forces for support. At the same time, Iraq is becoming increasingly more capable of providing independent government services.

Mr. Speaker, America stands as a beacon for freedom and justice in the world. And the promising nation of Iraq is now demonstrating similar compassion and commitment to the rule of law. As such, the nation's unbiased judiciary is playing a critical role in its development as a democracy.

Of course, there are those who would like to see Iraq resist freedom and return to brutal dictatorship. The terrorists know that the formation of a strong judiciary threatens their efforts. In turn, some of these terrorists wreak violence against those working to dispense justice in Iraq. The judges and other members of the Iraqi judiciary who carry on in spite of the terrorists' best efforts are incredibly courageous and need to be recognized for their bravery. Despite threats to their personal safety, members of the Iraqi judiciary remain dedicated to their convictions and continue working toward a better nation for all.

This resolution sends a significant message, recognizing the importance and credibility of an unbiased Iraqi judiciary for a new and democratic Iraq. I am a co-sponsor of this legislation which will encourage our friends abroad who are working so hard to secure a free and democratic Iraq. I urge your support of this important resolution.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I particularly want to thank the gentlewoman from Kentucky (Mrs. Northup) for bringing this piece of legislation before the House Chamber today. This is an important statement to be made on a number of points, one of them being that this bill sends an important message that sitting Members of Congress should not take it upon themselves to name public buildings or infrastructure after themselves or other Members. This violates our House rules.

Mr. Speaker, often in this Chamber we have the opportunity to name Federal buildings after worthy individuals. We are about to do that here today. As we elected officials have a responsibility to our constituents and to the laws that we pass, we must spend our time and the American taxpayers' money wisely, and we have to do so also honestly with the attention and care that I know my constituents in Iowa expect.

When we name Federal buildings, we should do so and insist that they be worthy of our time, our Nation's tax dollars, and the trust of those who elected us. And I think that my record here in this Congress does demonstrate that, and that is why I am here on this floor this afternoon, Mr. Speaker. But most recently, the Centers for Disease Control buildings appeared in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill named after two sitting Senators. And it is in violation of our House rules.

Because that conference report has not yet passed both Houses, both bodies, the buildings are currently unnamed. But under the Labor-HHS conference report that was filed just today, the buildings would be named the Arlen Specter Headquarters and Emergency Operation Center and the Thomas R. Harkin Global Communications Center Building. This provision

violates House rule XXI, and that prohibits the naming of a public work after a sitting Member of Congress.

Our bill proposes to name the buildings the Rosa Parks Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center and the Mother Teresa Global Communications Center Building. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation. It prevents abuse of power. It adheres to the rules of the House of Representatives, and it also does a couple of very important things, and that is it honors two of the greatest women in my contemporary time: Rosa Parks, who stood tall and sat down 50 years ago, who inspired generations of Americans and actually was a key player in renovating this concept of segregation that still remain.

And 10 years later, we saw the passage of the Voting Rights Act and piece after piece of the civil rights legislation that came about that same period of time was inspired. And I saw a time when it was a glorious time for the civil rights movement, a glorious time when there were peaceful demonstrations throughout the South. And I watched on a black and white television from up in Iowa wondering really what was going on down there. Now I understand it.

At this stage of my life I appreciate it a great deal. I thought I understood it then, but appreciate it far more today, the movement that was begun in significant part by Rosa Parks, who was honored and lay in state here in this Capitol Building, the first woman ever to be given that honor.

And Mother Teresa, a fine Catholic nun, a sister that through prayer and work and sacrifice and devotion and the power of her personality and her character and self sacrifice, moved millions of people, and her legacy remains today.

I look back on Harkin grants that are granted in my State, and also I think of a building named again in that fashion. I have stated that if we are going to name grants after someone, we should name them after the taxpayers that fund them. And if we are going to name buildings, we should name the buildings after people who are not seated Members of Congress, but people who really stand tall for America and for the world.

So I congratulate the gentlewoman from Kentucky (Mrs. Northup) for bringing this legislation today. I am proud to stand on the floor and join in this request to name these two buildings after Rosa Parks and Mother Teresa.

Will the gentlewoman yield?

I thank the gentlewoman. I am referencing House rule XXI. And my point was to illustrate what can come from that. But also it is my emphasis to be here today to honor the two people that we hope to name these buildings after, and that is the focus of my remarks.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the privilege to speak on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. As I listened to the discussion here this evening, some of my material was created by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and I wish to begin by responding to some of the remarks that were made.

Again, I hear a consistent message of pessimism and really no message of solution or a plan. In fact, I heard a lament that they are night after night not coming up with the real answers for the American people, and I lament the same thing, and I agree with those statements, Mr. Speaker.

First, some of the notes I wrote down as I picked up on some of the discussion that went on here on the other side of the aisle were concerns about energy and the price of gas and home heating. In fact, there is a government report out some few weeks ago that it is going to cost perhaps 50 to 51 percent more for the average American to heat their home this winter as opposed to last winter. And that is all true.

We tried to move energy policy through this Chamber. In fact, we did move some through this Chamber, but we did not move near enough. I called for drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and drilling in ANWR. It looks now like we are going to see the new year without a vote on either one of those things. I hope we do and that we get it passed, because it is the right thing to do. But into that bargain there are people that oppose energy development, and here sits this country on 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on our Outer Continental Shelf.

Yes, I would be happy to yield.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I am talking about expanding the energy here in this country. And whether or not you address any kind of subsidies, whether they exist or not, does not affect our overall energy supply except to discourage the development of that energy, Mr. Ryan.

What I am talking about is that we have 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf. A lot of it is around Florida, and it is really much of the Florida delegation, and that is not a partisan issue down in that part of the panhandle; but we need to open up that gas, and we need to open it up all the way across for all of America, particularly in the Corn Belt where 90 percent of the cost of our nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of natural gas. It has gone up 400 to 500 percent in the last 5 to 6 years. It used to be $2, and the other day it went to $15. That is my point.

So that is a piece of it. But what I am hearing, and my issue really from what I have heard out of your discussion tonight that I do take issue with is that adding $1 billion to LIHEAP and talking about corporate welfare does not increase the supply of energy in this country. What I am about is increasing the supply of energy, because there is a law of supply and demand. The more energy we have, the lower the cost.

We cannot sit here and turn up the heat in our homes and turn down the development of energy and expect that we are going to have a viable economy. In fact, it is economic suicide for a country with an energy component of our economy like we have to not develop our energy in this country. It puts a price on everything that we do.

ANWR is part of the aspect of that, too. We are sitting on this massive supply of hydrocarbon up on the Arctic shore. I have been up there and walked on that sod. There is not an environmental reason not to drill up there. There are no caribou that live there. There are no trees. It is a frozen Arctic tundra. We do all the work on ice roads. We have proven we can do it next door on the north slope. There has not been a report of an environmental damage or an oil spill or an effect on that environment.

There has been, because I did see some locations where they have gone in and reestablished tundra and it will grow back, it takes 5 to 6 years to do that, I have seen the examples and flown over by air and am confident it can be done. Although the tundra will be disturbed, it is not something that is a permanent scar on the landscape.

But this energy is one piece of it. We need to open up the energy supplies in the United States. It does not do to stand here on the floor and talk about tax breaks for corporations. Some of those are incentives so that they will develop energy. What we have is a statutory and a Presidential executive order that lingers from a previous Presidency that prevents us from drilling offshore. And with this massive supply of natural gas offshore and with this increase in gas prices, it puts us at a disadvantage with the rest of the world.

It happens to be this same natural gas that is $15 here in the United States that peaked out here the other day has a natural gas price of 95 cents in Russia and $1.60 in Venezuela. And those are the countries that are producing fertilizer and shipping it over to us. We have our fertilizer companies in this country that are put on hold. They have had to slow their operations down and practically freeze the development or stop the production of fertilizer. That means the farmers that were going to take delivery of fertilizer late in the year, and some of them to try to beat their year end for tax purposes as well, are not going to have that fertilizer.

It means there will be a rush in the spring and prices are likely to be very high in the spring. But we are not far away from losing our entire fertilizer industry in this country because we refuse to develop the natural gas that is right under our very noses.

I did some calculations. I thought, well, if we are going to bring in liquefied natural gas from the Middle East, or if we are going to be bringing it in from just across the Caribbean, from a place like Venezuela, which is a place

that has a lot of natural gas, or Trinidad, Tobago, would be another place where there is a lot of natural gas; and it also sounds like the commitment has been made to build a natural gas pipeline from the north slope of Alaska on down to the lower 48 States. So I thought, well, let me do a few simple calculations.

So there are 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the north slope developed at this point that we can tap into. There is likely much more. And it is 4,779 miles, I believe is the number from mile post zero at the pipeline terminal on the north slope of Alaska on down to, and I picked the middle of the United States, Kansas City, so 4,770 miles from north slope, mile post zero, to Kansas City. How far is it to the mother lode of natural gas down on the south side of the Caribbean, Venezuela, for example? Well, it is 2,700-some miles down there, Mr. Speaker.

So would it make more sense to run a pipeline from Alaska or a pipeline from Venezuela, when that gas is $1.60 and ours here on this continent is up to $15? Of course it would make more sense to bring that pipeline from Venezuela up here. It would enrich Hugo Chavez. It does not make a lot of sense. It does not make a lot of sense to run that pipeline right through some of our significant natural gas reserves in this country that we refuse to develop.

But we could cut about a thousand miles off that 2,700-mile pipeline down to Venezuela, or just actually not bother to build the pipeline at all, Mr. Speaker, and continue to drill wells and hook up lines and move our way right around the gulf coast, right on around the tip of Florida and up the other side and right on up the east coast, and some of it up the west coast, Mr. Speaker, where there are some gas supplies offshore in California that are significant and that have not been tapped either.

I think we should open it up, and I think we should open it up all at once. I think we ought to open it up for natural gas and for crude oil, so that we can take the lid off this slow metering of increasing of supplies that is allowing prices to go up while supplies creep up only marginally.

If Alaska can compete with that, great. They are an outstanding State, and I have been quite impressed with what they have done up there. If it makes sense to run the pipeline down here from Alaska, run that too, and let us pump the energy into this country.

There will be, or it is very likely, I should say, a crude oil pipeline to come down through the United States. It will come from up in Alberta where the tar sands are. There is a huge supply of crude oil up there, a very thick oil; and it takes some technology to get it out of the ground. The Canadians are developing, and I believe have developed, that technology. Those kinds of things need to happen.

The rest of the discussion about who got what tax break and what incentive is there and what kind of class envy we can lay out here for the American people and how much pessimism we can pour out here on this floor every night are redundant subjects with regard to the overall question of increasing the size of the energy pie so that we can afford to heat our homes, our factories, produce our products, and produce our fertilizer and produce our food and keep this world economy rolling.

We need to answer those questions and resolve the energy issue. And I will add nuclear to that and expand coal. I would go with hydroelectric if we could get it. I will use wind. I will use everything we can to increase the size of this energy pie. If we let it compete, then supply and demand and costs of capital and the cost of the energy delivery to the system will be what determines how our whole energy supply is provided.

Some of the other concerns here tonight is the concern about this economy. If a person had just woken up from a long and deep sleep and turned on C-SPAN and listened to the discussion about this economy, they would think that the stock market had crashed and people were jumping out of buildings and committing suicide because there was no hope in our economy. There was no signal whatsoever that we have completed 10 consecutive quarters of 3 percent or more growth. And the last quarter was 4.3 percent growth. That takes us back more than a generation to find a period of growth that has an equivalent period of time of consecutive quarters of this kind of growth. That goes back to the early Reagan years where growth after the Carter administration was not that difficult of a challenge.

Mr. Speaker, growth after coming off of the dot-com bubble and the good years through the 1990s is a far more difficult challenge. And growth after September 11, growth after having to pour resources into a worldwide war on terror, growth getting through this bump of Hurricane Katrina, all of that growth came in spite of those things. It is because we have a Bush tax cut plan that stimulated this economy. There is no rational argument that it has been anything but a very, very successful plan. It has done what it was predicted and designed to do.

I hear over here, it just did not pan out over and over again. Mr. Speaker, the numbers are there. It has panned out. It is here, and it is real. Unemployment numbers are going down, down, down. Economic growth numbers are going up, and the interest rate is going up consistently. They just announced that it is going up one more time. I do not remember how many quarters we have had the interest rate increase, but it is an attempt to hold down this economy that is bursting from the seams.

And how does it do that if we are in the middle of an economic and an energy failure? We have failed to develop our energy because environmental extremists, and nearly everyone on this side of the aisle over here, has refused to let us develop the energy supply, and it is irrational to refuse to develop this energy that sits right here under this country and on the outer continental shelf of this country and pay the equivalent of an extortion price to some of the people around the world who are putting this energy into our system and taking the profits out, and we know a significant amount of money from those profits goes to fund our enemies, and it costs American lives.

Opening up energy here in this country converts to more safety for every American, a higher quality of life for ever American, a stronger economy for every American, and an opportunity to move this Nation towards another level of our destiny.

So this economy is strong. We need to do some things to open up energy. The lament that we are evicting Americans, and we are giving them a notice, telling them they have to find another place to live because we do not think that the taxpayers can fund flying people from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. where the hotels are some of the most expensive hotels in the country and putting them up in five-star hotels indefinitely; that is the lament about evicting Americans.

It is a notice that says, after Christmas some time, you are going to need to find a place to live. I advocated for and wish we had simply put a voucher in their hand instead of trying to find a place for them to live and said go find yourself an alternative location. Rent yourself an apartment, buy yourself a house, do what you need to do.

But this idea that we are going to take everyone by the hand and manage their lives because they lived in a disastrous, counterproductive situation, so Americans have to step up and take responsibility for themselves.

Who among us, if we were going to be bunked in a five-star hotel and there was no limit, no end to that, would not just stay in that five- star hotel? Good room service, laundry service, you have all of the facilities that you need. I suppose the bus picks the kids up for school. I cannot imagine living in a hotel for months on end and thinking that was somehow an entitlement.

There are many things we could have done better with Hurricane Katrina and done them better, but there is not a justification for keeping people in five-star hotels in Washington, D.C. and then feeling guilty when we ask them to find an alternative place to live. I think that is about the end of America's generosity when we go to that point.

Food stamps. The argument that we are starving children comes up over and over again. I sat through hours of that in the Committee on Agriculture when we marked up the reconciliation

package. We needed to find some savings. I looked back in the last reporting year, and I wanted to know how many dollars worth of food stamps were handed out to people that did not qualify, food stamp fraud. And in the last reporting year, I would find, $1 billion was handed out to people in food stamps, people that did not qualify, so food stamp fraud.

So we set some conditions on this that were minor conditions and, over the grand scheme of millions of Americans, saved a few million dollars, and it had to do with a policy that said, when you come to the United States, you agree you are not going to put pressure on our welfare system for 5 years, and we extended that to 7 years for food stamps.

A couple of tweaks of that nature, and we found all of the savings we needed to find in food stamps. It is not the issue of starving children. There are no children that are going to go without food stamps. Their nutrition is going to be there. I do not know anyone in the United States that is suffering from malnutrition, but yet the wailing and the crying from the other side of the aisle has to come up again because there are some Americans that will listen to that and believe that.

A billion dollars in waste in the last year that was reported to me leaves plenty of room for a little tightening of the belt in food stamps. I think we should tighten that right up to the last dollar of the billionth dollar that is there and take all of the fraud out and take a little of the fat out while we are at it. We did not go anywhere near that, but the demagoguery persists.

As I listened tonight to this group of nattering nabobs of negativity, it reminds me of a Vice President that laid that out on the news media some years ago, and I wonder, the argument was that we should not have troops over there in the Middle East spending money on those troops, a hundred billion or $200 billion, whatever their number was tonight, because we do not have a perfect health care system. We do not have a perfect retirement system. Our jobs are not perfect for everyone; our educational system is not perfect for everyone. So? So we should not be defending the safety and freedom of the American people and in the process liberating tens of millions of people who yearn for that freedom? Where are our priorities?

When would this team that is here every night, when would they ever say we think we have it right now, Mr. President? Let me rephrase that, when would this team that we have here nearly every night say, We think we have it right now, Mr. Republican President? When would they ever say the word ``Republican'' in a fashion that had anything to do with objectivity or complimentary fashion? When would they ever say the health care system is as good as it needs to be, and we think we can now take care of our national security? And when would they say our retirement, especially for our military, is up to snuff so we can go ahead and protect our security with the military that we have in uniform, the active duty and Guard and Reserve people that are serving us so well and so honorably?

When would they ever say there is an adequate number of jobs for an adequate price that pays an adequate amount of wages and benefits so now we can take a little extra money and put it into our military and defend our safety and our security?

When would they ever say, Mr. Speaker, that the educational system was adequate for all of our children and our young people and that they had an opportunity for a good K through 12 government education and they could go off to higher learning and they could all go off to college, all at the expense of the taxpayer, of course, Mr. Speaker. When would the health care, retirement, jobs education, when would all of that ever meet the satisfaction of the nattering nabobs of negativity that are here every single night, lamenting how terrible it is here in the United States of America.

Meanwhile, we cannot defend our own borders, and 4 million illegal aliens pour across our southern border every single year for the last few years. Why are they coming here? Are they not watching C-SPAN at night? Do they not see how bad it is? I submit, Mr. Speaker, that they see how good it is. They can go on the Web page. They can click on and see what the Department of Labor statistics are. They can see the economic statistics. They know that there have been 10 consecutive quarters of 3 percent or more growth. They know unemployment is going down. They know there is health care accessible to everyone. They know there is nobody malnourished in the United States of America. They know there is a free education.

How can you go wrong in the United States of America when you compare it to any other nation in the world? And so, at what point, Mr. Speaker, do we say we must provide for the safety and security of the American people, and while we are there, let us give the people that are in those countries that opportunity for freedom and liberty so they can erase the habitat that breeds terror. That is what is going on over there.

And then I hear, well, all we are asking for, Mr. President, is we have got benchmark, benchmark, benchmark. Yes, they mentioned some of the benchmarks, Mr. Speaker, and I have some of them here. And I want to point out these benchmarks in Iraq. March 20, 2003, was the beginning of the liberation of Iraq and it was March 19 over here at 9:30 a.m., if you want to mark your calendar and put the time on, eastern standard time. That was March 20.

By May 12, Paul Bremer was in place. He had replaced Jay Garner as the civil administrator in Iraq, May 12, 2003. July 13, Iraq's interim governing council was inaugurated. So just a few short months, April, May, June, halfway through July, 3\1/2\ months, and the Iraqi interim governing council was inaugurated.

By July 22, Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Kusay, were eliminated in a fire fight in Mosul. And I have been to that site, Mr. Speaker, and the building is gone. The lot is razed. The only sign of it there is I imagine you have to have a GPS locator to figure that out. The neighbors know. But that was the end of the terror of those two terrorists on July 22, 2003.

December 13, 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured. If my date serves me correctly, this is the 2-year anniversary of the capture of Saddam Hussein. And we have something to celebrate here, Mr. Speaker, and that was that we handed over Saddam Hussein to the civilian government then, and a little bit later down the line, or I will pick that date out here in a moment. But this is the 2-year anniversary of the capture of Saddam Hussein. We were delighted on that day. I am still delighted. He is before a court in Iraq. He is receiving a fair trial. It looks a little bit like a circus from time to time, but the Iraqis will bring this out. And they will provide justice.

I have met with the judges over there. They are courageous people. Their lives are on the line. They must have an objective court, and they have got to get into the record the crimes of the administration so that it is recorded in history and once it is recorded and packaged up, then when punishment is meted out to the perpetrators that committed those crimes against humanity, then the Iraqis can move forward and put that stage into their history. So that was December 13, 2003, 2 years ago today, Mr. Speaker.

On March 8, 2004, the Iraqi governing council signed the interim constitution and that guided them. It was a bill of rights, it was a system of checks and balances, and it made the military subordinate to civilian rule. Those were all significant milestones. A bill of rights for the people that have never had a bill of rights before. And on May 28, 2004, Iyad Allawi was designated Prime Minister in the Iraqi interim government, a Shiite neurologist by profession. And it happened to have been my birthday that day as well. So I will try and remember that as a milestone for a couple of reasons.

And I have admired Iyad Allawi, who came to this Chamber and spoke to a joint session of Congress, and he said thank you America, thanks for liberating us, thanks for making us free. It was a moving speech that he gave, not so much for the language, for the words. The words were very appropriate, but for the way it poured from his heart that day. You could feel that reverberate in these Chambers, Mr. Speaker.

Then on June 1, just 3 days later Mr. al-Yahwir was chosen as president. So

this set up the Iraqi governing council and gave them leadership. And then the plan was to hand over the governing of Iraq to their interim governing council on June 30 of 2004. But, Mr. Speaker, the Iraqis have been meeting every deadline, every milestone, except when they beat them. And on this milestone they beat it because the United States transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government on June 28 as opposed to June 30, 2 days early. And I think it was a good move. It said that nothing has been delayed along this way. It has always been done on time.

Then on June 30, was the day, 2 days after, we handed over the civilian control of Iraq to the Iraqis on June 30 of 2004, we just 2 days later handed over control of Saddam Hussein, the legal custody of Saddam Hussein and 11 other high profile, I will say, perpetrators, Baath party officials to the Iraqis. And they took control of that, and it is entirely appropriate that this trial be conducted by Iraqis. They must do this. Then, another milestone. A huge milestone, January 30, 2005 purple finger day. That was the day that millions of Iraqis went to the polls to elect themselves a new national assembly, and this national assembly's job was to draft a Constitution. So they were elected January 30, 2005 and on March 26 they were seated.

The Iraqi assembly was convened and they went to work in drafting not an interim Constitution now, but a real Constitution, a Constitution that was amendable, but a Constitution for all time. So they went to work to draft that Constitution, a Constitution that was amendable, a Constitution for all time. To the polls, dipped their finger in purple ink. January 30, convened their assembly March 26, 2005. Their new Constitution was presented to the Iraqi National Assembly August 28, 2005.

October 15 of 2005 the Iraqis went to the polls. Seventy-nine percent of them voted to ratify their new Constitution. That sets up the stage that we are in right now, and there are elections taking place in Iraq as we speak, and they are elections that build up to the final and formal election day which takes place on the 15th of December. And at that point, Mr. Speaker, there will be named a full general assembly; a sovereign nation will be formed when, in March, the new general assembly is seated under the new Constitution and that will make Iraq as legitimate a government as exists in the Arab world and, in fact, they will have an argument that theirs is as legitimate a government as exists anywhere in the world.

When seated at the United Nations under their new Constitution and their new sovereignty with leaders that are chosen by the people, they will have and enjoy a measure of legitimacy that meets or exceeds the measure of legitimacy of almost every country in the world, certainly in the Middle East. They will surpass that and set the highest standard of legitimacy. They will be an Arab constitutional republic, a democracy.

That is what we have been working for, Mr. Speaker. That is what the treasure has been poured into Iraq for is to change that habitat in that terrorist part of the world, and it is working. Last Friday, Mr. Speaker, I made a trip out to Bethesda to the national naval medical center. I make it a point to go to either Bethesda or Walter Reed or at Landstuhl in Germany if I happen to be going through there at least once a quarter to visit our soldiers and marines and our corpsmen who are wounded and in the hospital and who paid a significant price to defend our freedom and to promote it throughout the world. It is always an uplifting experience for me. It is always something that encourages me and gives me strength and great faith in this country. Sometimes you walk in the room, and no matter the injuries, if they are in pain it is one thing, but there is often laughter in the room.

There is often a measure of optimism. That optimism often comes from the family, the wife, mother there, maybe the children that are there.

I had great conversations with these Marines last Friday. They pointed out that while so much good work is getting done, the media has not highlighted their efforts to rebuild the critical infrastructure in Iraq and that these important pieces of critical infrastructure lead Iraqis to democratic independence, but we do not hear about it here, Mr. Speaker. And I would point out that there was a report released by the Media Research Center, and it confirms the concerns of the Marines. Out of 1,388 reports broadcast on network news programs, only eight were devoted to recounting episodes of heroism or valor by U.S. troops and only nine featured instances when soldiers reached out to help the Iraqi people. Eight of heroism, nine of helping hand. Calculate the rest of the 1,388 were stories about what was sensationalized bad news, Mr. Speaker. If you sensationalize bad news long enough, the people in the world that are inclined to be the nattering nabobs of negativism will believe it, and that is what is being poured out here on the floor of the House of Representatives each and every night, and this focusing on negativity encourages our enemies.

I will take us back then to the benchmark argument. I have read down through the list of benchmarks that have been met in Iraq. Every benchmark has been met or exceeded. One was exceeded by 2 days of the civilian takeover for the Iraqi people from our CPA and Paul Bremer, and the argument now is, what about all these benchmarks, Mr. President? We need a benchmark to get out, to quote the gentlewoman from Florida.

No, Mr. Speaker, that is the last thing we need, is an announcement on when we might pull out of Iraq.

I happen to remember the previous President set a benchmark to get out of Kosovo. He said we will be there 1 year, no more. We are going to send troops over there, and we are going to send air cover over there, 1 year and no more, and we will be out of Kosovo.

I think we are into the 11th year now since that deployment has been taking place, Mr. Speaker, but it is at least 10. So that benchmark really did not work so well. Benchmarks do not work well in wartime. And even if one could measure that kind of progress and pull out, the enemy is still going to use that to strategize against us. Why is that a difficult concept to understand? If we would say, here is a date on the calendar by which the first American troops are going to get out or the last American troops will be gone, we know very well that the enemy will husband their resources and change their tactics and go underground and store up their munitions and recruit their personnel. They would be able to go out and say, Here, we will take over of Iraq. It will be a terrorist center, and here is how we will handle that: They will be done taking casualties until such time as the Americans are gone.

Remember what happened when we deployed, and that is the kind of word that has been used here, deployed out of Vietnam? I went back and read through some of that legislation from back in that 1973, 1974 and early 1975 era. The legislation that is there confirms my recollection, although my dates were not exactly precise. This Congress took this debate, this national debate, this cut-and-run philosophy to the point where they passed legislation here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate that forbade any resources from going to even supporting South Vietnamese troops. Not an M-16 bullet for a South Vietnamese troop defending his own freedom in his own country. The Vietnamization program that President Nixon had established, all that shut off. No air cover, no missions flown to protect them, no munitions to support them, squeezed the valve down so there was not a drop of help. In the ensuing aftermath, when helicopters were lifting people off of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and people were doing everything they could to hang on to the struts of those helicopters and they were pouring into boats and going out into the South China Sea to go anywhere to get away from Vietnam and many of the boats capsized and some being sunk intentionally and militarily and thousands of people dying, in fact, tens of thousands of people dying even in the immediate aftermath, millions dying in Southeast Asia in the subsequent aftermath because we did not hold our bargain with the people in Southeast Asia. And millions died, Mr. Speaker.

I heard the gentleman from Ohio say, ``No one is going to tell me that I am

not supporting our troops.'' Mr. Speaker, I will submit this: If you do not support the mission, you are not supporting the troops. If you send a soldier off into a hostile region, send him off to war and ask him to go defend your freedom with his life and to do so in a cause that you say is not justified, wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, Mr. Speaker, how can you ask a person to put his life on the line for a cause you do not believe in, a cause that you will not even put your vote behind or your voice behind? How can you ask them to put their life behind that and then say, No one is going to tell me that I am not supporting our troops? Well, supporting the troops, supporting the mission, and they are inseparable. If you do not support the mission, you are not supporting the troops.

Here is a measure of optimism, Mr. Speaker. We hear about casualties continually. The only measure I found in my research over the last 2\1/ 2\ years or a little more is that Saddam Hussein was killing his own people at an average rate of 182 per day. I have gone back and measured some of that, and I can come up with a bigger number and a little smaller number, but that number seems to fit about in the middle of the Iraqis that were killed at the hands of Saddam Hussein. And so I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we have been at this operation and Saddam has been out of power for approximately 1,000 days; so there are 182,000 Iraqis alive today that would not be if we had not enforced a regime change in Iraq and liberated the Iraqi people; 182,000 alive today, Mr. Speaker. And, yes, there have been casualties, and we have lost more than 2,000 Americans. And there have been something in the neighborhood of 30,000 or perhaps more Iraqis that have been killed in this conflict, civilian Iraqis for the most part. So if we are at the 32,000 to 34,000 number, let us just say 32,000 because that number works out round enough that I can do the math in my head, subtract that 32,000 from 182,000, and we come up with 150,000 Iraqis alive today that would not be if they had not been liberated by coalition troops, especially Americans. That is no small feat. That is no small endeavor to free 25 million people and to have a net savings in lives over 2\1/2\ years of 150,000 people. Do we not ever measure the positive side of this ledger, or is it always that the nattering nabobs of negativity cannot get to that plus side so I have to come down here nearly every night and bring this thing back around to reality, Mr. Speaker? And I will continue to do that as long as this message needs to come out to the American people.

I carry a few more messages here that happen to point out some points that I think we do not see in the news media. I have to put on my glasses for this one.

What are some of the changes that are taking place in Iraq in a positive way? And I have a chart here before me. This is a chart that shows the number of Iraqis taking action to provide tips they received from the population. In March of 2005, the early part of this year, there was not much confidence in Iraq that we were going to stick this out. So there were 483 tips given on who the terrorists were, and how do we send troops in there to bust the terrorists? Four hundred and eighty-three tips. They did not all pan out, but that is an indication of the Iraqis being willing to cooperate. That was March, 483. April, 1,591 tips; May, 1,740; June, 2,519 tips; July, 3,303; August, 3,341. And that is where my bar chart stops. So we have gone from 483 tips in March to 3,341 in August. That tells us the Iraqi people are stepping up to provide their own safety, their own security, cooperating with American troops and coalition troops and Iraqi troops, of which about 210,000 are trained. Most of them are combat ready. All of them are operational in one form or another. Some of them are top-ranked troops that will match up with any in the world.

Yet, I hear this drumbeat, the nattering nabobs of negativity, that there is only one battalion that is really combat ready. Well, that is really not true. There are quite a few battalions combat ready. At the time there was only one battalion that was ranked at the very highest level of ready. All of our troops are not ranked at that highest level all the time either. They waiver in and out of that level of readiness, depending on where their training is and what kind of condition that their equipment is in.

So I wanted to make a point here in the last couple of minutes of why it is important to support our troops.

Muqtada al-Sadr. This is a quote that I heard from Al-Jazeera TV in Kuwait City as I waited to go into Iraq June 11, 2004. ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.''

Where does a person like Muqtada al-Sadr get such an idea that if he keeps attacking Americans, we are going to leave? Is it from reading the history books? Is it from reading other literature, Mr. Speaker? Is it from observations of history as wishful thinking? I would submit it could be all of those things. But I want to do a little bit from history.

I have here, Mr. Speaker, a book written by an author who hails from my district, Sioux City, Iowa. This is Colonel George Bud Day's book, ``Duty, Honor, Country.'' Colonel Day is the most highly decorated American hero that we have who is living today.

This book is about him being a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Speaker. It lays out a tone that I think every American should know, every American child should study, and this book should be turned to page 155, Duty, Honor, Country by Colonel Bud Day, Medal of Honor winner.

He writes as he is in the prison camp in Vietnam, and this is the mindset of our enemies, he writes, ``The Vietnamese were positive of victory and that their cause was predestined for success. Their propaganda organs had been convinced that massive rioting against the war was commonplace in the United States and in support of the commies. That was the Jane Fonda message.''

He goes on. He says, ``It was disheartening at a quiz, which means an interrogation, to have Senator Fulbright or some looney politician declaring himself on the enemy's side of the argument. Many a torture was accomplished just to force a POW to say or agree to the same things that were attributed to fellow Americans, Senators and Representatives. It got to the point where the Vietnamese did not have to write their own propaganda against the U.S. They could simply quote Senator Gruening from Alaska, Fulbright from Arkansas, Kennedy from Massachusetts or a Congressman of the same ilk. I was sickened by these statements,'' writes Colonel Day, ``for the U.S. Congress passed the questionable Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which sent me to Southeast Asia. Loyalty I felt was a two-way street. It is a bit disconcerting not to be able to tells the difference between the words of a U.S. Senator and those of your enemy. More devastating to our cause was the fact that the North Vietnamese thought these statements to be semi-official U.S. policy. When combined with propaganda, it stiffened the Vietnamese backs immeasurably,'' and I emphasize this point, Mr. Speaker, ``adding significantly to the U.S. death list on the battlefield and the death of several POWs in Hanoi.''

That is not a hard lesson to understand when you encourage the enemy by sitting in the gun emplacements in North Vietnam, as Jane Fonda did, or speaking out against this effort relentlessly night after night, as happens here on the floor of the United States Congress. It encouraged our enemies in Vietnam, it encourages our enemies around the world today.

In fact, I happened to come across a Web page, and there is a quote here from Colonel Bud Day, and his answer today is, ``John Kerry launched his political career more than 30 years ago by comparing the actions of U.S. troops in Vietnam to those of the armies of Genghis Khan.'' I think that is not a refuted statement. But here is a point that exists today.

Mr. Speaker, after the comparison of the acts of Genghis Khan to create the political career, now we have the same individual saying to the American people, picked up immediately by Al-Jazeera, we all know, saying ``American soldiers in the dead of night terrorizing kids and children, women, breaking religious customs.'' The same individual, this is the Senator that came to Iowa for a year-and-a-half and said wrong war, wrong place, wrong

time, gave aid and comfort to our enemies then, gives aid and comfort to our enemies now.

Mr. Speaker, if that were the only one, it would not be so bad. Maybe we could isolate an individual like that. But it is sad to say it is not the only one. I have another example, a blast from the past.

Here is our blast from the past, the individual, the other Senator from Massachusetts. I will not tell you that I just happened to pick a State randomly and pick two of their Senators. No, this is on purpose, Mr. Speaker.

This is the Senator referenced in the book Duty, Honor, Country from more than 30 years ago. He is still here and today he says, ``This war was made up in Texas. This whole thing was a fraud. Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam.''

Now do we understand, Mr. Speaker, why our enemies believe that Iraq can be another Vietnam? Not because of the forests or the mountains to hide in or the place for guerrilla warfare to take place, because we read in Zarqawi's letter that there are not any mountains to hide in, there are not any forests to hide in, and that the Iraqi people are willing to take the insurgents in and protect them and let them operate from their are as rare as red sulfur.

So the structure of this war in Iraq does not allow for that kind of guerrilla warfare. Yes, it is an urban warfare of a kind, but it is not at all like Vietnam. Iraq is a desert, Vietnam is a jungle. Vietnam has mountains and forests and jungle, Iraq has sand dunes and buildings. There is a huge differential though between the two countries because the Iraqis really do not want to hide these insurgents, and in Vietnam they were forced to hide them. In fact, there were places for the enemy to hide regardless of whether they had the cooperation of the civilians.

But the same individual who encouraged the enemies then, who is attributed by the most decorated American hero as contributing to the loss of American lives and particularly the lives of POWs, is still at it, Mr. Speaker, still at it. ``This was made up in Texas. This whole thing was a fraud. This is George Bush's Vietnam.''

Is that not some good Al-Jazeera material, Mr. Speaker? And I am not done. This material roles out every day in this country. We are trying to keep up with it by printing posters and putting quotes in there, and I am going to try to come down here on a periodic basis and try to keep the American people up to speed.

But I am glad that our soldiers are too busy with their diplomacy and the liberation of Iraq to be watching the news and have to listen to all of this debate. But I am determined to stand here and defend their efforts. And I support their mission and our soldiers, and that mission and the soldiers and the support for them cannot be separated. You cannot argue that I support them and I do not support the mission, Mr. Speaker.

So, in conclusion, we have a duty here on the floor of the United States Congress and in our jobs across this land as we represent our country and the people from our districts and as we interact with them and with the media to inform the American people that our military mission is on track in Iraq, the political sequence of events is on track in Iraq, and that the economic solution is around the corner. When they truly establish a sovereign Nation in Iraq, which will take place after these elections on the 15th, and when they are seated in March and when they sign a contract to develop that oil and the cash starts to flow into Iraq and free enterprise kicks in and the government gets the kinks out of its systems, and as the Iraqis step forward and do more and more providing the safety and security for the Iraqi people, this will be resolved to the satisfaction of history, if not the satisfaction of the nattering nabobs of negativity.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until today, Wednesday, December 14, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized on the floor of the United States Congress, and have this opportunity to address you on the issues that I think are important to this great country, this great country that all of us on the floor of this Chamber, all 435 of us, love so much and so desperately try to do our best to represent.

Just a reflection upon the conclusion of the remarks made by the folks ahead of me in the previous hour and seeking to go to the new C words of cooperation and coming together. It is quite incongruous for me to try to understand how that would be when 1 or 2 hours a night there can be a relentless drumbeat challenging the motives, the integrity, the character and the intelligence, the planning and the convictions of the entire team over here on the Republican side of the aisle.

In fact, I said Republican here, and that is the first time that word has been said on this floor in over an hour that did not sound like a word that was based on some type of profane term.

This has gone on day after day, hour after hour, week after week, again relentlessly trying to undermine the hard work being done by the people here in the trenches, doing the work out on the floor, in committee, and behind the scenes.

There is an awful lot that goes on behind every one of those office doors in Congress. Many, many things are happening behind those doors; the staff that multiplies the efforts of the Member, the grapevine that is out here feeding this information; the network; the information- gathering process, the analysis of that; the input that comes from our constituents, and the trips back home of many of us every weekend to get our feet on the ground and look our constituents in the eye and listen to them to hear what they have to say.

I am one of those people that I am pledged to listen. I am pledged to hear what they have for input. But I am also pledged to owe my constituents my best judgment. My best judgment includes, if I happen to disagree with them, but I will absolutely lay out the case as to why and hear their rebuttal. So far we have had a pretty good working relationship over the years that I have had the privilege to serve here, Mr. Speaker.

Yet this undermining of our national effort that goes on continually is not conducive to coming together. It is not conducive to cooperation. It is not conducive to comity. It is not conducive to any type of cooperation that I can think of. It draws a bright line and drives a wedge between the two parties. We should try to find things we can agree on.

I heard the gentlewoman from Florida say there were only a handful of things when she was in the State legislature in Florida that she disagreed with, and that the two parties disagreed with, and the rest of that they came together and found common ground. Well, I am wondering if that was the case.

I have served in the State legislature myself, Mr. Speaker, and I did not find that every one on the other side of the aisle sat their alarm in the morning, got up and read the newspaper to figure out what they could do to attack the other side. I did not see the State legislators focus their energies from the first sunup in the morning to try to identify what they could do to undermine the other side. They actually came to work to try to find how they could come together. They tried to find common ground and how to move their State forward. That is the way it was in Iowa, and I suspect that is how it was in Florida, at least I have not heard otherwise.

That is not the way it has become in this United States Congress. In fact, in the time I have been here, this is as partisan as I have ever seen it. There is as much partisan disagreement as I have ever seen.

An example might be our trade agreements, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement would be one. There was a time when we negotiated trade agreements and they were bipartisan agreements. There was a good sized group of Members from the Democratic side of the aisle that would support a free trade agreement. They believed in free enterprise. They believed in world trade. They knew if we traded with other countries, that whenever you make a deal with anyone, whenever it comes to free enterprise, if you trade a dollar with one entity or two or more entities, everybody involved in that circle all has to have profit. It is good for all of us, and that is why we agree to those trade agreements. But it has become a sharp, bright-line partisan issue.

Many, many more things have become partisan here in the last couple of years that, to my recollection, were not. And so to argue for cooperation is one thing, but the actions and the words over the months of this relentless effort here down on the floor have done the exact opposite. They have driven a wedge between us, Mr. Speaker. So that means we have to try to move this Nation forward sometimes without the help of the people on the other side of the aisle, and then it turns into a partisan debate. It also forces us to do the best we can with the votes we have to move this Nation forward.

So a free trade agreement is one thing. This Nation has a large economy and we can recover from a few mistakes and the few difficulties that come with partisan opposition to some of those things that were, before this, bipartisan.

But when it comes to a time of war, when it comes to a time that our United States military is deployed overseas and their lives are on the line 24/7, and have been ever since March of 2003; at a time when the destiny of the world hangs in the balance; at a time when the presence of the United States in the Middle East itself has brought Lebanon towards freedom, and caused Qaddafi in Libya to turn over all his hold cards, to play his cards face up on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, which had developed far ahead of where we thought it was, but Qaddafi contacted us and said I want to drop this. I do not want to play this game any more.

Our presence in the Middle East meant too much. The threat was so great, he figured we would find out about his weapons and go eliminate his weapons, so he decided he would simply cease to develop them and eliminate the foundations he had built for those weapons of mass destruction. That came because the United States has a positive image in the world, in spite of the message that comes from this other side of the aisle.

I have stood here on this floor, Mr. Speaker, for the third time, this is the third hour I have initiated to come down here and talk about the President's agenda, the Commander in Chief's agenda, the mission of our troops and the destiny of the entire world that is part of this plan that has been laid out by President Bush. I laid this out last night, Mr. Speaker, and I spent some time doing it in not necessarily a concise fashion, but a thorough fashion. And anybody that was listening should have understood.

I walked off this floor, perhaps after 10 o'clock last night, and another hour of this relentless criticism flowed down here again, and they picked up the same old drumsticks and began beating the same old drum with the same old song: WMD, WMD, WMD. Weapons of mass destruction. Everything that goes on is illegitimate because, according to them, it has been proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, you would think that anybody that arrived in this Congress and went through the crucible and testing process and was elected to owe their best judgment to their constituents, as I do, would know one of the most simple principles of rational logic, and you do not have to be a Rhodes Scholar or a Harvard lawyer to know this, but many are and still do not know this; that you cannot prove a negative. Yet they continually say it has been proven that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

I would say tell that to the people up there in the region of Kirkuk and the area that is Kurdistan. Tell that to the swamp Arabs in the south; those that have lost perhaps 75 percent or more of their population because of the attacks of Saddam Hussein.

Try and carry on this argument as the trial of Saddam Hussein goes on and this 140 or so people that he allegedly murdered in the one small city because of the assassination attempt on him. When that becomes the larger, there will be 180,000 or more deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein and the people who took orders from Saddam Hussein.

In fact, as I was in Baghdad in the month of August, I met with the judges that are trying Saddam Hussein today, and we talked about the upcoming trial. They could not be specific about it, in order to protect the integrity of the system, but I did understand and learn in that room that the charges of killing 180,000 people that are charged against the person whom we know, or are familiar with his moniker as Chemical Ali, that he protested and said, that is not true, I did not kill more than 100,000 people. It was not 180,000 people. So how do you kill 180,000, or even 100,000 people, which is apparently the confession of Chemical Ali, how do you do that without weapons of mass destruction?

How do you convince someone who lost their family in a gas attack in Halabja that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction? I met a young lady that was raised up there near Kirkuk, in an area I will call Kurkistan, about an hour from Kirkuk. She has a friend who survived that gas attack in Halabja. He was able to get on a tractor and maybe went upwind and got away from it somehow and survived. A random act, I am sure, that kept him alive, and he probably wonders why he survived and not his family. His family was all wiped out in this.

I would submit that you could take that individual or any other survivors that are there, and if they could come down on this floor and listen to this, I think they would plug their ears. They would plug their ears because they would not know how to react to this relentless drumbeat of ``there were no weapons of mass destruction.''

Well, what caused all those deaths? Why is Saddam Hussein on trial? Why are there 180,000 people that have died

and that are part of these court records and which will be part of this prosecution as it unfolds?

Why does Chemical Ali say ``I did not kill any more than 100,000. I was not so bad.'' That is his defense?

There are more deaths than that. There are hundreds of thousands of deaths, and some of the Members of Congress have been to the mass graves. I have not seen those mass graves. I have been to Iraq a number of times, but I have not seen the graves. But I have seen the pictures, seen the film, and I have read the reports and I have talked to the people that have been there. I cannot be convinced that anyone can kill that many people without weapons of mass destruction. Hitler could not. Neither could Saddam Hussein.

So this drumbeat of no WMD, no WMD. Well, the King law of physics is everything has to be somewhere. And since we do not know where it is, it has to still be somewhere. If you find something you lost, it is always in the last place you looked. So perhaps we just have not looked in the last place yet. Perhaps it is buried in Iraq. Perhaps it has gone to Syria.

We know before the Desert Storm operations in 1991, Saddam Hussein took his fighter jets and flew those to Iran. I remember the flight pattern that showed those jets going up and landing. I have never gotten a report that they ever came back. It may be that the ayatollahs in Iran kept them and maybe thought this is a nice way for us to get even for the war we had in the 1980s. He has a modus operandi of spiriting things out of the country when conflict is imminent.

So if he would fly the MiGs out of Iraq into Iran, why would people not presume that he would haul weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq into perhaps Syria, or why would they think that he would not bury those weapons of mass destruction when, in fact, we discovered a fully operational MiG-29 buried in the desert, not because of any intelligence report, not because of some detector, not because David Kay was over there scouring that countryside for weapons. No, we found that fully operational MiG-29 because the wind blew the sand off the tail fin. They buried it in the desert.

So he has an MO of bearing weapons and spiriting them out of the country when times get tough. Why would we presume that he did not do one or the other or both? We know everything has to be someplace. You cannot prove a negative. No one can honestly say with a rational mind that there were no weapons of mass destruction, because we know he used them at least 11 times. There are survivors from those attacks. The only way a rational person could contend there were not weapons of mass destruction would be to believe that Saddam Hussein used his last canister of gas on the Kurds and simply depleted his inventory and he decided not to rebuild it, but he decided to keep a system in place so he could reestablish that inventory any time he chose.

He kept the system in place for both chemical and biological weapons. We know that. That is all in the David Kay record and the Duelfer Report. It is the same report that came to this Congress that is being quoted by the other people that says it proved that they had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no proof that there were no weapons of mass destruction. What there was not was a great big warehouse full of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, we found some canisters of nerve gas and we found munitions designed for gas, small quantities, not great warehouses. Out of the million tons of munitions that we found in Iraq, some of them were weapons of mass destruction components. Not in large volume. If there had been, we would have stacked them all up in the middle of a warehouse and brought in the inspectors, and maybe there would be a different story on this part.

But I would contend if that were the case, if there had been warehouses of weapons of mass destruction there, then these people who are continually pulling down our national spirit every night with this massive, relentless pounding of pessimism, and they need to get away from the ``p'' words over there and get to the optimistic words, they would have moved the bar. They would have raised the bar and said maybe there were weapons of mass destruction, but. And I do not know their argument. I cannot think like they do; and I am grateful I cannot. But they would have raised the bar.

Mr. Speaker, I submit this: if we ever get them now to set the standard on how to define a victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, if we could compel them to set a standard, then you would see that it would be such a high bar that they would know it could never be achieved. They would always find a way to define themselves away from that high bar because they will never admit that the President of the United States made a decision that could result in something that would be a fantastic result, a noble thing for this country to do, and an ultimate result that freed 50 million people and has every prospect of freeing hundreds of millions more throughout the Arab world, which is the only formula for ever getting to a victory on this war on terror.

No, they say we are in this war on terror and they will keep attacking us until we get out of the Middle East. We were not in the Middle East when we were attacked on September 11.

A couple other principles, Mr. Speaker. Since there was not a warehouse full of weapons of mass destruction that we have yet identified, and they make the allegation that they did not exist and do not seem to be quite up to that 8th grade level of ``you cannot prove a negative,'' since that seems to be the standard, what is wrong with liberating 50 million people, 25 million in Afghanistan and 25 million in Iraq? That is a noble thing. Is that not something that the United States has done throughout history?

Do they not know that the Civil War was fought to save the Union? Do they not know that Abraham Lincoln's effort was to keep this Union intact? Do we not call it the war to free the slaves? Did we not liberate every black American, and it took a while to get it right, and we are still working on getting some of those pieces right. Do we call it the war to free the Union? No we call it the war to free the slaves. That was the result of the war. It was a noble thing.

I will pick up some of these other issues, Mr. Speaker, and I would like to go back to that; but I see my colleagues here on the floor, and I wonder if maybe the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is prepared to speak.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas. I was not aware that you were actually on the ground in Iraq during the elections in January. What was it like to be in-country at that time?

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that narrative. I wanted to be there that day. I was not able to set the trip up to make it work; but I recognize, as you clearly did and Mr. Shays clearly did, that was the best place in the world to be on that day.

I remember watching the pictures as they unfolded on television and the Iraqis coming out of their polling booths with their purple fingers in the air, proud that they had made a mark for freedom and defiant about the threat to their lives that was supposed to keep them away from the polls.

As I recall that day, 50 people were murdered, 108 polling places were attacked. And I believe on the October 15 elections, we were down to about 19 polling places were attacked. I do not know how many casualties there were. It is far safer for the ratification of the Constitution on October 15 than it was in January when you were there.

On top of that, you did not go to Baghdad or on up to Kirkuk or down to Basr or some place where it might have been more stable. You went to Fallujah. What a place to be to see that happen. I know that is a memory you will never forget.

I appreciate the gentleman's contribution down here night after night, the things the gentleman stood for, the things I stand for, and I sometimes wonder, if I have to check my conscience, I will go down to Texas and check with you.

I have a number of thoughts to roll out here. But I think before I go on into those thoughts, I have an opportunity, I see the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) here, my good friend, another individual that if I need to check my conscience, I know where to go down to Arizona and check with that. But also the gentleman's vision and his commitment to this country and this Constitution, he is a fine colleague that sits with me on the Constitution Subcommittee of Judiciary, where we stand up for those foundational values together.

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks).

I appreciate the gentleman's contribution to this debate. And you have really, you set the tone, I think, that I am going to need to have to carry out the balance of this time that we have here.

I think too about parts of history and how far back we go and how our military set such a tradition for so many years. And as I stepped away from this microphone the last time, I had taken us to this point, I think I made the point that it cannot be stated that there were no weapons of mass destruction and be rational about it, because you cannot prove a negative. And we know that they existed.

So setting that argument aside, I will just say when it comes out, it is bogus, they will pound on it until they get embarrassed and embarrass themselves. So we will hear it more. We will hear it every night down here. But one of the things that I can move along to, maybe expand this discussion a little bit is to go back then to that point that I was making earlier, that point about why we went to war in the civil war and what the objective of that war was.

Now, the objective was to save the union. And anything that you read about Lincoln in his earlier debates and his efforts and his decisions that he made along that process, it was a super human effort all targeted to save the union. And part of freeing the slaves, yes, it was something that was in his heart.

He conceded that Dred Scott was actually a constitutional decision, but we needed to amend the constitution to eliminate slavery. Lincoln had so much respect for the constitution that he made that point. But he had so much respect for the binding nature of our Constitution that it was an irrevocable agreement between the States, that he was willing to stay at war and the cost in that civil war was over 600,000 American lives, over 600,000 American lives at a time when our population was perhaps a third of what it is today or less.

So that was the greatest loss of humanity ever in a conflict in this country, and yet, he stuck to the central purpose, save the union, save the union, save the union. In 1863, the subject came up on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. A great and powerful leader and one of the most profound stories of leadership that I have ever read throughout history comes back to the question, as he sat down with his cabinet, and there was the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves, and he asked his cabinet, gentlemen, what say you? And they started on his left and it went around the table at the cabinet table and the first member of his cabinet said Mr. President, I advise you do not sign it, and here are the reasons why.

And the second and the third and the fourth and so on until it got around to the last member of the cabinet. And each member of the cabinet said, Mr. President, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Some of the reasons were we are at this to save the union. Some other, well do not confuse the issue. Some of them were political reasons of the time that I do not have a feel for today. But as President Lincoln, in his singular motivation to save that union, listened to their recommendation, do not sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, well, gentlemen, the ayes have it. And he stepped forward with great courage and leadership and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He did not really free anybody south of the Mason Dixon line because we did not have jurisdiction down there at the time. We were at war with the South.

It didn't really free anybody north of the Mason Dixon line because the people north of the line were free. But what it did is it set up an image and a goal and a dream and it mobilized some people that had been mobilizes for a long time to abolish slavery, and it became historically, looking back on that, now we are taught we fought the civil war to free the slaves. So how can it be that here we are today, when a civil war began to save the union, it ended to save the union, but history interpreted it to mean that it was about the freedom of slavery, which I absolutely think it was worth the price. How can we sit here today and say we did not find mass quantities, great warehouses full of weapons of mass destruction, therefore all the rest of this is illegitimate. When did the United States decide that we did not free people? When did we decide that liberation of humanity was not a worthy cause? When did we decide that going to war, if it had multiple reasons, if one of those reasons did not meet your standard over here on the other side of the aisle, then all the rest of it is illegitimate.

There were plenty of reasons and whole constellations of reasons to go into Iraq and, in fact, there really was not a choice. If you sit down and analyze the circumstances at the time, there really was not a choice. Saddam Hussein did not give President Bush a choice. And I think, well, I do not know what Saddam was actually thinking. But if we went to the war to save the union in the Civil War and it became to free the slaves, and by the way, in about 1898, when the USS Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor, it is still at the bottom of that harbor, by the way, and the mast and the anchor are out here at Arlington Cemetery. But the Maine is at the bottom of the harbor.

And we went to war against the Spaniards because, and history can reanalyze this, we believed that we were attacked by the Spaniards and the ship was scuttled in a hostile act and that triggered the Spanish American War. Sure, there was tensions that brought that about and you can argue about the details. Some will say that the USS Maine really was not sunk by a hostile attack. Some will say it was an explosion in the magazine that sunk it to the bottom of Havana harbor. Some will say it was a pretext for war. We went to war just the same and defeated the Spanish in the Spanish American War that began in 1898. And I will tell you that one of the things we did as a result of that war, we went to the Philippines. Now, was that consistent with the reason for the war in the first place?

Was there something about sinking the Maine down there in Havana Harbor that would cause us to send the Marines to the Philippines? Well, you can argue that either way too, but I can tell you that I listened to a speech by President Arroyo of the Philippines a couple of 3 years ago here in Washington, D.C. at a hotel. She said thank you America. Thank you for sending the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for liberating us. Thank you for bringing us freedom. Thank you for teaching us your free enterprise, your way of life, your rule of law. Thank you for sending the missionaries over here that made us a Christian Nation. Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers to the Philippines so that we would learn your way of life and the American values and we could

learn English. And English is the national language of business and commerce. And today, 1.6 million Filipinos go throughout the world. They can get a job about wherever they want to because they have the language skills that are universal. They send their money back to the Philippines. A result of a detonation of an explosion in the hull of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 where it sits at the bottom of that harbor yet today. The result are free people in the Philippines. When did the United States give up on liberating a people? When did we give up on our culture and our way of life and projecting that way of life throughout the world? When did we give up on our legacy of western civilization? Whose idea is that, to cut and run because what?

The reasons that you think maybe were what justified it do not quite uphold the way you would analyze that today. What kind of idea is that? What were the circumstances when we were attacked by Pearl Harbor? And by the way, September 11, 2001, I remember where I was, I was on the road on my way up to a county fair. My wife called me on the phone and said turn on the radio, there has been a plane that crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I turned on the radio and a few minutes later a second plane crashed into the Twin Towers. And the individual that was riding with me was a World War II veteran and the first words out of his mouth were Pearl Harbor. I will never forget that tone in his voice. The second plane into the Twin Towers made it clear it was not an aerial accident. It was a planned, stealth attack against civilians in the United States of America, the worst attack ever on our soil, and it was not against a military installation. It was against civilians. Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor happened December 7, 1941. It was the anniversary just a couple of days ago, Mr. Speaker.

We went to war. We declared unconditional war against our enemies, and a few days later, Hitler declared war on us from Europe. Now we were involved in a two-front war. What was the objective of our declaring war on the Japanese in the first place? Unconditional war, that it would be total and unconditional surrender of the Japanese. Then we found ourselves in Europe, fighting a two-front war, which the Germans had found was not very successful, but for the United States it has been. We put troops on the east, we put troops in the west and in the South Pacific. And we were successful on both fronts of that war. Was there a clamor in this country at the time to say we were attacked at Pearl Harbor; what are we doing fighting Germans? What was the idea of that?

And, by the way, all the people that were liberated around this globe as a result of the Second World War are all beneficiaries. Look at the Japanese today, their culture, their economy, their prosperity. The size of their economy compared with the rest of the countries' in the world is fantastic considering the population and the limitations that they have geographically living on that island. They are well off today as a country, and a big part of that has been the result of the reconstruction afterwards and the liberation that came to them. They were living under an imperialistic Japan.

So this idea that the American people do not liberate anyone, that freedom is not a goal of a war is just simply false throughout history.

And there are other examples throughout history, and I am wondering if the gentleman from Arizona might have one to add to that. I noticed the look in his eye.

I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

He did bring up another war that I did not include in this when he mentioned the Cold War. The Cold War went on for perhaps 45 years, beginning shortly after World War II and ending, I am going to say, November 9, 1989, when the wall went down in Berlin. And it took about 2, 2\1/2\ years for freedom to echo all the way across Eastern Europe. But the liberation that took place at the culmination at the Cold War, and it was a glorious victory. We say a bloodless victory, and I have stood on this floor and called it a bloodless victory. But it was not without price. The mutually assured destruction, the millions of men and women that needed to be mobilized, the capital that had to be poured into the research and development to be ahead of the Soviet Union it came to the arms race, and not just the price in treasure but the price in blood as well.

There is a price in blood as a price to be ready, Mr. Speaker, and we do not often talk about it. I asked the Pentagon to put some numbers together for me so I had a sense of that. I wanted to know how many of our soldiers in uniform die in the line of duty not at the cause of combat but perhaps at the cause of an accident, a training accident, for example, an on-duty accident, an in uniform on-duty accident. And I had them look back through a whole number of years, and I put that together and I boiled it down into a figure that I could at least commit to memory so that I could put it into proportion and talk about it in a way that made sense.

The number that they gave me worked out to be an average of 505 American lives lost every year during peaceable activities in uniform, deaths as a price to be ready to go into combat. Five hundred and five Americans a

year. Now, that is the average that takes place during the 1990s up until the year 2001. The average prior to that, during the Cold War, I do not know that number, and their records were not very available. But I would suspect it would be greater, not less because we have more safety, not less, and we had more people in uniform, not less. But I took that number and just said 500 a year, and as the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) was talking, I multiplied it across the 45 years of the Cold War. And the number I came up with was 22,500 American lives. That gives us a sense of the magnitude of the price of winning the Cold War, not to add the treasure. That is the blood. That is the sacrifice. There is a price to be ready.

There is another whole price out here that is paid for our freedom that is never acknowledged by the pessimists on the other side of the aisle, and that is that price to be ready. And it is measured in this victory in the Cold War, 22,500 lives perhaps. A quick scratch here on the paper is all that supports that statement and some good information to support it. But with that number of lives, hundreds of millions of people were liberated in the aftermath of the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain descended down across Europe and those people lived for 45 years behind the Iron Curtain in a kind of a world where we were in full technicolor and they were living in black and white, it gives us a sense of how bad it was where they did not have free enterprise, did not have opportunity, did not have freedom. And today they do.

And, by the way, the most recent people who have achieved freedom are the ones that cherish it the most. They are the ones that are the most eager to be part of our coalition forces in Iraq to defend the freedom of the Iraqi people.

So this price for freedom has been great, but the value has been astonishing. The pessimism on the other side of the aisle has been stupendous. And I have brought some posters along to talk about what happens when we send a pessimistic message from this Congress; from the leaders of this country; from the people who are viewed, at least on the other side of the ocean, as the quasi-leaders of the United States of America. And I will start with Muqtada al-Sadr.

This individual here, Mr. Speaker, decided to put his own militia together, Sadr City, Baghdad, in a region south of Baghdad. And his militia attacked coalition troops, American troops. His militia did not fair very well, and it took some really severe, and he has decided a few times that he kind of likes getting involved in politics as opposed to being a general of a militia because it is far less hazardous to be in politics there in Iraq. But I was sitting in Kuwait City on one of my trips over there at night, waiting to go into Iraq early the next morning. I turned the television on to al-Jazeera TV. I always, when I am in a foreign country, want to know what is going on; so I turn on the local channel.

Al-Jazeera is the local channel for the Arab world. And there in Arabic out of his mouth came, with English subtitles, what I will never forget. And this is the date that I was sitting in that hotel room, June 11, 2004, al-Jazeera: ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.''

Where does Muqtada al-Sadr get an idea like that? What encourages him to continue the insurgency and the attacks on Americans and the recruitment of his people and his militia? What encourages him to raise the money and build the bombs and do the things that they have done? And this is not the worst enemy we have over there, by the way. He is not the biggest demon that we have. But it was just the circumstance that I heard this from the television screen while I was in Kuwait. Where does he get his motivation? Why does he think this is true?

Well, there is the legacy of Vietnam. And these people over here every night that are dragging down our administration and undermining our military are the political descendants of the ones that dragged down our devotion to our military and our support for them during the Vietnam era. In the aftermath of Vietnam when Congress voted to shut off all funding for all military efforts in all of South Vietnam and ground every airplane that was flying air cover over the South Vietnamese, and a few months later, we saw the North Vietnamese army sweep through there, and we were lifting people off the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Why? Not because the South Vietnamese would not fight any longer but because the will and the commitment to support them disappeared over here, and the rug was jerked out from underneath not just our military but underneath the military of South Vietnam. And in the aftermath, they say they saved lives. We know 3 million people died in that part of the world in the aftermath of not keeping our commitment with the South Vietnamese military.

That message resounds today and echoes throughout the Middle East, echoes throughout al Qaeda. ``The Americans will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu.'' Is that hard to figure out, then? They watch American TV too. I imagine they turn on C-SPAN and watch this every night and cheer and pop their popcorn and they have a good time seeing that their argument is being supported on the floor of this Congress every night for 1 or 2 hours. They build more bombs, not less, Mr. Speaker. That puts American soldiers' lives at risk. Bombs cost American soldiers lives. That is on the conscience of the people that are leading this country in that wrong direction.

Now, on the chance that one might think that this is a coincidence that Muqtada al-Sadr just picked up this Vietnam idea on his own, maybe he read a comic book somewhere or watched C-SPAN or watched the Congress here and our Special Orders. Here is a statement made by Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second in command. He is al Qaeda. He is a more dangerous enemy than Muqtada al-Sadr. In February of 2004, in a letter to al Qaeda, he wrote: ``The collapse of American power in Vietnam,'' they ran and left. It sent a message, did it not, to Zawahiri? We know it sent a message to Osama bin Laden. It sent a message to Muqtada al-Sadr. It sent a message also to other leaders of al Qaeda. It gave them hope. It gave them spirit. It caused them to have more energy, more courage, more will, more resourcefulness to attack coalition troops and to attack Americans. Is that a hard thing to figure out?

If that is a hard thing to figure out, Mr. Speaker, then I need to make this point very, very clear. In all of those wars that Mr. Franks and I talked about throughout this course of history, in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the Second World War, and the Cold War and other wars in between, what are the conditions by which a war is over? Not because somebody over here passes a resolution and says we are going to pick a date on when we are going to be deployed out, the cut-and-run date. We cannot set a date for the end of a war if the war is not finished. Wars are over when the losing party realizes and understands that they have lost. That is how a war gets over. You have got to convince the enemy that they cannot win, and you do that through violence.

Yes, all history knows that. But when it is a relentless pounding from the other side of the aisle and the quasi-leaders of the United States of America and they stand up here and say the war cannot be won, people like Zawahiri, Muqtada al-Sadr, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, do they not hear that message? Is it not something that encourages them? Do they not think that the will of the American people is being broken because they hear that relentless message every single day coming out of this Congress, coming out through the media? In fact, I would suspect that Saddam Hussein probably has a higher opinion of the United States of America than some of our mainstream media do, listening to some of them out there.

The pessimistic message that gets pounded out of here, that gets run through the mainstream media, that is supported by some people from the other body, that is supported by other leaders, quasi-leaders in this country, gets through to people like Zawahari, Zarqawi, Muqtada Al- Sadr, Osama bin Laden. If you doubt that, Mr. Speaker, if any one doubts that, I have another poster for you.

There he is. The face and the voice of the Democratic Party, the leader of the left. One of the inspirational voices that mobilizes the other party for pessimism, negativism, and attacks. This individual whom we know pretty well, Howard Dean, DNC chairman, spent a lot of time in my home State of Iowa, about a year and a half in there.

He was there most of the time going through the counties and the cities. I will grant him, he worked very hard running for President. And this is the picture that I think has been made famous by that mainstream news media that finally did turn on one of their own. I do not think he quite deserved the hit that he took over that.

But that frustration from the scream, his failure to win the caucuses in Iowa and his failure to win the nomination on through that process did not really come from the scream. The scream was a result of, but the people who met him in the coffee shops and the living rooms understood the real man here, the man here that says, ``The idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong.''

Do you not think these other people I put up here see this man as a leader of the United States of America, the voice of the Democratic Party, the almost-majority in the House of Representatives? Of course they do. And they hear this message: the idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong.

Now, if you had seen your troops decimated like al Qaeda has, if you had watched 3,000 of them disappear from your ability to utilize them in combat, in battle, 3,000 every month, those that are either killed or captured, and you do not see that in the mainstream news media, that is a number that does not come out here anywhere that I can find. But I can tell you that that is the number that has been the average over the last several months, 3,000 of the enemy off the streets, killed and captured.

So that has got to be dispiriting to them. We are losing casualties. It hurts us. It breaks the confidence of the people on the other side of the aisle. What would our confidence be if it were 3,000 of ours lost every month instead of the numbers that we are facing today?

So what happens? This man stands up and says the idea that we are going to win is just plain wrong. Well, if you are all beaten down after your 3,000th casualty for the month, and if you are looking for some optimism, here is the place to go. There are plenty of voices over here that bring this optimism for the other side.

They keep mentioning the Vietnam War. That is the only war that the liberals ever won; they just won it for the wrong side, Mr. Speaker, and are trying to win another one. They have got so much invested in failure in Iraq, they could not abide by that.

So I would ask this other side of the aisle, define victory. I will define it. We have had this sequence of it that took place. We listened to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) talk about being in Iraq during the elections, the first free elections in January, with the purple fingers in air, 8\1/2\ million Iraqis voted.

We went through sequence of liberations, martial law, a Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer and handed over to a civilian government until such time as they could set up the elections, which they did in January, and they elected then a provisional parliament, an interim temporary parliament whose job it was to write the Constitution. On October 15 then they ratified their Constitution.

And 10 days later we had leaders of this country that were speaking against the effort and undermining their freedom. And now here we are just a few days from a real election in Iraq that finally culminates this whole process and gives them a legitimate sovereignty in Iraq, one that will select a prime minister, gives them the ability now to take this massive amount of oil wealth that they have, market some oil contracts for development so that they can start to get this cash-flow coming back into Iraq, lift that country up.

They are just dilapidated and depreciated from 35 years of neglect. We have given them a little shot in the arm, $18.5 billion. The number was wrong over here, by the way, last night. It was not 87 billion that went in there to rebuild Iraq. It was 18.5. The balance was for the military. But 18.5 billion of that, 12\1/2\ the Army invested, and the balance of that was scattered through some other entities. That was like the down payment on your house that gets them started.

They will be certified December 15. There is hope. There is freedom. We must stick it out.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I will.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I thank my friend and the gentleman from Massachusetts and colleague on the Judiciary Committee.

I have been to Iraq for the express purposes of oversight of those construction projects, about $12.5 billion administered by the Army and the balance of that $18.5 billion by other entities, the sea bees. Yes, I actually faced a number of questions from the people in Iraq. I did not get to the bottom of that. I do not know that they are in a position to actually have oversight on this in that fashion, but your point that you have made is one that is somewhat new and fresh to me. I have done due diligence, I think, to an extent to see where that money's been spent there. I would very much like to sit down with you and have this conversation so that we could bore into this.