Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address this Chamber and appreciate the opportunity for some dialogue with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle and particularly Uncle Bill from Massachusetts whom I did yield to the last time when he asked me, and so we have a little engagement going.

I think it is constructive dialogue that we have. I know we disagree often. We are looking for the best thing for this country all together, Mr. Speaker, and disagree with the method of how we get there, and sometimes we disagree with our definition and analysis of how we approach these things.

So to begin my hour, Mr. Speaker, I would like to address some of the concerns that were raised in this previous hour, many of which I did not hear in great detail, some of which the philosophy I heard ad infinitum here one or 2 hours a night after our session every week for the last months.

One of the issues that came up, Mr. Speaker, was the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and yes, I have been to Iraq. I have been there three times. The last time there was I came back the latter part of August, and I make it a point to go to the places where some of the other Members of Congress have not gone. I make it a point to find soldiers there, generally I ask for Iowans, anybody here from Iowa. We sit down and talk, and I meet with people all the way up the line to the top brass and also to the U.S. ambassador, representatives of the Iraqi government. I have tracked this through the history of the liberation of Iraq and on through to this point that we are today.

It saddens me a great deal, Mr. Speaker, to hear some of the leaders of the party on the other side and a very small number of people on my side of the aisle who have lost their faith, lost their faith in their own judgment, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we had this debate here in this Congress in the fall of 2002, and this Congress voted by a solid majority to endorse the President's authority to use force to enforce the resolution of the United Nations in Iraq. Those resolutions had to be enforced, Mr. Speaker, and without that, there would have been no teeth whatsoever to the United Nations.

Our President did that. We knew that was going to be the case. We knew when the debate took place in this Chamber that there was going to be a majority decision. I would like to think when we meet here to have these debates, Mr. Speaker, that we stick with the decision of the majority. That is the will of this body. When the will of this body is reflected and the will of the Senate is reflected and that resolution makes its way to the White House, where statutory legislation the President signs it, if it is a resolution the President takes account of the judgment of the House of Representatives and the judgment of the Senate. The judgment of the House and the judgment of the Senate was to endorse the President, the commander-in-chief, and grant him the endorsement of Congress to use authority to enforce the United Nations resolutions, particularly 1441. The President did that.

There is a long argument as to why he did not have an alternative, and our troops went into Afghanistan. Our troops went into Iraq and liberated 50 million people, and they are grateful today, extraordinarily grateful today, to have that opportunity to be free.

If anyone doubts that, look back in your mind's eye to last January when the Iraqis went to the polls to elect their interim parliament. Eight to 8.5 million of the Iraqis went to the polls to vote, and they voted and they dipped their finger in the purple ink. They proudly and they, in fact, defiantly marched out of there with their purple fingers in the air. When they were threatened with their very lives for going to the polls to vote in that January, there were 108 attacks on the polling booths in Iraq by some suicide bombers, all terrorists, trying to intimidate the entire country from voicing their voice of freedom, their voice of directing their national destiny through their elected leaders. Yet, they went to the polls and defied all of those threats and, in fact, upset the predictions from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker.

So the people that did not have faith that there could be legitimate elections in Iraq saw them happen, and those people that were so invested in failure, that they could not abide admitting that there was a success, began to explain it away.

Well, we had kind of an election, kind of a legitimacy came out of the mouth of John Kerry. So how much more legitimate can you get when people defy a threat of death to go for their first time and vote for the first time in their lives, and legitimately, their argument can be made the first time in all history on that piece of real estate. They had that courage to take advantage of that opportunity, and they voted in greater numbers in percentage-wise than Americans did in the presidential election.

Yet, we had people over here that said, well, it is a kind of legitimacy; it really is not a real election; we really do not know how many people that did not participate that would have if somehow or another they believed in the process, had more courage or been less threats on their lives. Yet, they voted in greater numbers than Americans did, and they call it kind of a legitimacy. That was January.

October 15, by then this new parliament has written a new Constitution, another milestone, a milestone that set on the calendar a sequence of events that need to take place in order

to take Iraqis who lived under tyranny, of murderous torture and tyranny, once that is taken, the resources of the country, and focused it on building palaces for themselves and glorifying their own leadership of Saddam Hussein, at the very expense of the people, a country that spent less than 50 cents per person per year on health care, did not let the girls go to school, that did not allow freedom of speech or press or religion, a country where you could not own a satellite dish or there were not free newspapers or there was not a television station that did not project the very opinion of Saddam Hussein himself, that, today, on a very short period of time of liberation, which really took place in the latter part of March of 2003, now nearly every home, everybody in Iraq has access to satellite TV, which is access to the world.

I flew over up in Kurdistan up at Kirkuk, and I looked at the difference. I was over Mosul in October of 2003 and looked down. Two out of three homes had a satellite dish. I flew over the suburbs of Kirkuk up in Kurdistan, and I saw homes there. At each one of the neighboring homes were typical, about two stories, flat roof, many of them had three satellite dishes on one roof. All of those dishes would have been illegal just 3 years ago, Mr. Speaker, along with the mobile phones that are there, the cell phones that now are replete all across Iraq.

There is something like, and I get conflicting numbers, somewhere between 100 and 170 new newspapers, some of them printing the real truth where none of them printed the real truth when it was under Saddam's regime. New radio stations that have grown to significant numbers out there, and television stations, the media has gotten out to the people, and some of it is the truth. It is not all the truth. We all know it is not all the truth in this country.

One thing we have is the check and balance on our mainstream media, who has a certain desire to destroy our effort over there is the bloggers and the Internet. They do tend to get the truth out, and they are a check and balance. In a free country, you will get that check and balance, but people on that side of the aisle do not have that faith in this new freedom that 25 million people began to realize and appreciate in Iraq, that began the latter part of March of 2003, that freedom the Afghanis have known for a little while before that.

Afghanis that had not gone to the polls ever in that place on the globe now have, and they have freedom, and certainly there are uncertainties. Yes, they have enemies. A Nation that has really not known anything but war is not going to be at peace just overnight, and Iraq's had it share of strife. There will be more ahead of us.

We have lost 200 Americans in Afghanistan, and we have lost more than 2,000 Americans in Iraq, and their sacrifice is great value. It has great meaning and it is profound, and their conviction and their demonstration of courage and their leadership and their sacrifice will echo throughout the ages, Mr. Speaker.

It is going to echo a long ways into the future in a way that never would have happened if we had receded from this challenge; if we had listened to the people on the other side of the aisle that wrung their hands and thought we should not have gone to Afghanistan but could not figure out how to say we should not, and so only one Member voted against going into Afghanistan, and that is all.

But we sit there, having lost more than 200 Americans in Afghanistan, and do not hear a peep out of this side. What is the distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq? The difference is between 1,800 American lives. All sacred in my mind. All precious American patriots in my mind. All deserving their legacy for which they paid the ultimate price. All of them deserve our very best, Mr. Speaker. All of them deserve for us to keep the faith, to keep the honor, to keep the pledge, and to keep the commitments that were made in this Chamber in the fall of 2002 when a significant majority voted to endorse giving the President the authority to use force if necessary, and when this Chamber established a policy of regime change in Iraq.

Now we are hearing it from the other side, over and over and over again relentlessly. And what is it about? I will submit this: it is about politics. It is about such a hunger and such a lust for power it would tear down the very destiny of the United States and put our American troops at risk because they want to be in the majority. They want the Presidency and they want the majority in the Senate and they want to change the face of America and send us down another direction that is against the will of the American people.

But why? Why would someone put our troops at risk for political lust? I do not understand that, Mr. Speaker. I look back in history and I wonder when, when has there ever been a precedent where the well-being of America, when disagreements that we have had in this country did not stop at our shores; when we did not have political campaigns that focused on our economy, on our domestic life and the future of America, but joined together to support our military operations overseas when at time of war.

How many of the people over here are saying wrong war, wrong place, wrong time? Howard Dean says a war that cannot be won. John Kerry said wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. Teddy Kennedy said it is a scheme cooked up in Texas. Do they not think that our enemies listen to them? Do they think that our enemies know what we know about them, that they really are not the spokesmen for the foreign policy of the United States of America?

They are the naysayers, the critics, and the gadflies. The majority of the American people understand this. We voted in this Chamber when, and I will say the Murtha amendment or the Murtha resolution came up on the floor of this Congress, and that resolution said we should pull out of Iraq immediately. That was the recommendation that was made across the aisle, or at least by the news media. It was not verbatim to the resolution drafted by the individual. We debated that in this Chamber for 3 hours; and when the 3 hours were over and we debated the rule and we debated the resolution, at the end of that 3 hours, Mr. Speaker, the vote went up and three Members of the United States House of Representatives voted to immediately pull out of Iraq. Everyone else, Mr. Speaker, voted to stay the course, voted to support our troops, voted to defend their mission and ratified the authority and the direction that has been given to our military by their Commander in Chief, our President of the United States, George W. Bush.

Those are the facts. Yet night after night after blessed night the team comes down here and relentlessly assaults the integrity of the administration, rearranges the facts of history, and seeks to dupe the American people, believing that somehow or another if they can erode the confidence of the American people, they will not have any alternative but to accept these people as their leaders. It is a frustrating thing to watch. But it would be even more extraordinarily frustrating if I did not have so much confidence in the American people and in their judgment.

History has shown that in times of difficulty and in times of strife the American people have risen up together and that their judgment is sound. They believe in the principles, the Constitution and individual rights, and in freedom; and they know that freedom is not free. They know intuitively that if we are going to support our troops we must support their mission. We cannot separate the two.

We cannot say to a soldier or a marine who puts on that helmet and puts on that uniform and salutes that flag and then goes out and puts their life on the line, that we are for you, but we are against your mission. We can never ask someone to put their life on the line if we do not support their mission.

And we have asked them to do that. And duty and honor and country says that they do that, and they do that proudly. But when we look them in the eye, we know it is a dedication. They take their share of the risk. And when the grim reaper visits some of those homes, it is a sad time. And I draw my strength from those families and their belief in this country and in our freedoms and in our patriotism. It is stronger than the belief that we find in the average American household because they understand.

One of the reasons they understand, I think, is because they have also imparted those values to their sons and daughters who have gone forth to protect our freedom. When that call has come for them, they have stepped up, and we owe them. We owe them 100 percent full support. We owe them all we can that is due them if we are to respect their memory. We have to give our level best as they fight to preserve these freedoms.

Yes, we fight that out on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker; and we fight it out in the debates that take place in the coffee shops, in the workplace, in our churches and schools, and in our homes across this country. But I want the young people to understand that there are certain fundamental truths that we have to stick with; and one of them is that if we are going to support the troops, we must support their mission. We cannot have it both ways.

We cannot have our cake and eat it too. We cannot undermine their mission and say that we support them. And when we argue that somehow or another there could have been a better plan, and we Monday morning quarterback and look back over 3 years and say, gee, knowing what I know now, this is what the President should have done then. It does not help the cause.

When my colleague from Massachusetts seeks to discuss these issues in open hearings, I will not deny his right to ask for that. In fact, I will not deny a congressional right to have those kinds of open hearings. But I will say that it is not constructive for us to have these discussions out in the open. It is constructive for us to have these discussions behind closed doors, to reach a consensus and determine if we need to look further into any of these issues.

Mr. Speaker, we have seen $200 billion get poured into a country for military support and reconstruction efforts, and by the way, the reconstruction efforts were the smallest part of all of that. As I mentioned to Mr. Delahunt, I have been there to review the construction that took place in Iraq, $12.5 billion done by the Army and the balance of that, $18.5 billion, that was done by other entities there, including the Seabees and others, subcontractors that were put together.

I looked at the roads and the sewers. I looked at some of the bridges and the streets and the water lines. I have looked at the generating plants. I went up to Kirkuk to see the mother of all generating plants, 725 tons of generator and turbine, two pieces bolted together which came across 1,057 kilometers of open desert and came on a caravan with other components of that mother of all generators which was over a mile long.

That generator, Mr. Speaker, had to arrive at that location out in the countryside near Kirkuk, Iraq, without a bullet wound in it. Because a bullet wound into the windings on that generator would have incapacitated it. But it arrived there safe and sound. They took a big crane and set it into place, the generator. They took the same big crane and set the turbine in place and then bolted them together. Several hundred Iraqi workers began to scurry around and put the pieces together of this mother of all generating plants.

Now, we are told that this is far too dangerous a place for people to invest capital, for them to develop anything or put any commitment into energy. But in that area, for all those months that they constructed that huge generating plant, and after coming across 1,057 kilometers of desert, and after they had to rebuild and reconstruct eight bridges to get the strength there to cross those bridges with that caravan, throughout all of that, there was one little attack by insurgents, and that was fairly feeble, which resulted in one wounded person from a little bit of shrapnel.

There was not a wall built around this generating plant. There is not a trench. There are not terraces pushed up with soldiers behind them all. There are not tanks dug in. They do not have Blackhawks hovering over this generating plant 24 hours a day. It is not sitting there rimmed with armed guards. Sure, it has a little security, but it is not ringed with armed guards. It is out in the countryside near Kirkuk, up in an area where the Kurds live.

And throughout all of that, there sits that generating plant, the mother of all generators, pumping electricity into Kirkuk, pumping it into the surrounding communities. That can be a model of the energy that is unleashed into that part of the country. And I might add that if this were a highly dangerous area, an area that you could not control the security in it, then would there be a 12-inch natural gas pipeline that runs on the surface of the ground down to that generating plant that runs the turbine that turns the generator? Would that not be a highly sabotagable natural gas line? And would they not take that up every night, if they could?

The reason for all that is that those folks up there are not interested in that. And 14 of the 18 provinces in Iraq are not interested in that kind of violence. They have a sense of security. They are building for the future. The children play in the streets. The families plan for their future. They go off on vacation. They go up to the lake and go swimming, like you and I do. Many places in Iraq have a normal, normal life. People on this side of the aisle would not want you to know that.

Many do not want Americans to know that during Saddam's regime he was killing his own people at an average rate, Mr. Speaker, of 182 a day. Now, this was a tough day in Iraq, Mr. Speaker, but I cannot remember the last day in Iraq that there were 182 people that died at the hands of violence. Every day that goes by there are another 182 Iraqis that are alive that would not be otherwise if Saddam were in power.

He is on trial today, and in a few hours they will gavel in in a courtroom in Baghdad, and he will be back under trial again. They are putting together a record, Mr. Speaker, a record of the atrocities that were committed under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

I have met some of the people that were victims of those crimes. The other night I sat down in a coffee shop for 3 hours and talked with a young lady from Kurdistan. She had grown up there in that region, within an hour of Kirkuk. She has a friend, a friend that survived Saddam's gassing of Halabja where 5,000 Kurds were killed: men, women, and children, the most innocents of civilians.

We have all seen the pictures of civilians lying there dead, gassed to death, a mother holding her child and families lying there dead. One of this young lady's friends is an individual that escaped from that gas, that gassing death at Halabja and lived to tell the story.

As she told me the story of that friend, I asked her if she believed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Ladies and gentlemen from the other side of the aisle, I challenge you to try to convince that young lady of that. No weapons of mass destruction, when 5,000 of your neighbors are dead, when one of your friends has escaped the gas? How would you convince someone who had lived through that that it did not exist, because we did not find huge warehouses of gas, huge warehouses of chemical weapons, huge warehouses of biological weapons? Because we did not find a nuclear bomb affixed to the tip of a missile that had the capability of going to Tel Aviv? Would that have been enough? Or Washington, D.C.? Would that have been enough not to have detonated?

I submit, Mr. Speaker, that the people on this side of the aisle have so much political capital invested in failure that they cannot abide victory. In fact, I challenge the people that will come out here on this floor in another 40-or-so minutes to define victory for me. Define victory for the American people.

Let us hear what is the upside of this. I hear a relentless drumbeat of pessimism night after night after night. The pessimism is so deep and so dark, I could not wake up in the morning and face myself if I thought the world were really like that. What is victory, Under 30 Group? How would you define victory? And I will submit that they will never, Mr. Speaker, define victory because the investment in defeat is so great and the fear of victory is so great that they know as soon as they define victory, they will not be able to raise the bar again and again. They will not be able to redefine victory again and again and again. They will not be able

to challenge the wisdom of this administration and continually give us a pessimistic viewpoint that causes so many people in this country to lose faith on where this Nation is going.

I will define victory. Victory was defined by this administration, in fact, more than 2 years ago. It was defined shortly after the Iraqis were liberated in March and early April of 2003. Our President laid these principles out clearly. It was already defined in advance, and now I can back up and I can tell you the sequence of events.

You liberate the Iraqi people, do so militarily. Our troops did that in a miraculous way. Even though detractors said you do not have enough troops to do that, Colin Powell had over half a million, you are going to do it with less than half, how can you hope to do so when you are going up against one of the largest armored militaries in the world? How can you go across the desert with your own armor in a fashion that has never been done before? How can you attack a city and liberate that city that is larger than any city that has ever been invaded and occupied by a foreign power in all of the history of the world. It will be another Stalingrad, they said. But before we got to the Baghdad, about 3 days in we got hit with a 4-day sandstorm and then there we were all bogged down in this quagmire.

It was said the Iraqis are the only people that can see in the sand, and here our troops were hiding. The argument is will be slaughtered by the Iraqis because they are desert fighters, and our troops do not know about that environment.

Mr. Speaker, it turned out to be entirely different. The world found out that our airplanes could see through that sand and they could identify the Iraqi armored columns. The Iraqis had their heads in the sand and they were waiting that storm out. And a lot of them did not live to see the end of that storm because we had the ability to see through the sand and we hit their armored columns, and we knocked much of that out during those days. And when the sand stopped blowing, our armored columns started up again and they headed up to Baghdad.

Mr. Speaker, it was the longest and fastest advance across the desert in history. They arrived in Baghdad almost in a sequential column between our Army and our Marine Corps from two different directions. On a Thursday they went in and drove around through Baghdad with a tank and a couple of armored personnel carriers and looked up at the hotels and buildings. Essentially they met no resistance to speak of. They came out of Baghdad and said we really have liberated the city, and they had. It is the largest city in the history of the world to be invaded and occupied and liberated by a foreign power. It is an astonishing accomplishment.

Was there an effort then to go forward from that martial law period of time and establish a civilian government in Iraq, you bet. In Mosul, the liberation took place in March, and in May, they elected a governor and a vice governor from Mosul. They sat down and again to craft how to govern that region.

I met with those people in October 2003. They were doing business as usual. It was already usual in Mosul. So we went from liberation to martial law to the civilian government. We went to the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer. Under that we had regional elections in some regions. We put the people that lived there in power. That was another great milestone.

Under the CPA, we had local governments that were functioning well. We needed to get the head of this government put back on again, and that was Paul Bremer's job to do that. He knew that we needed to hand over that authority to a Civilian Provisional Authority in Iraq. That happened in June. The date was set, but unlike most of the milestones for any other effort in history, the Iraqis and the American military did not just meet that deadline. Generally they get delayed, delayed, delayed, but they beat the deadline by 48 hours and took over control of Iraq with an interim civilian government from Paul Bremer and the CPA. Another milestone reached, Mr. Speaker.

And that milestone went on. As the interim Iraqi government began to put the pieces in place so they could begin to get some connections between Baghdad and the rest of the country, and it was their job to prepare for an election. That election took place in January. That elected the interim government, and their number one job was to craft a constitution. Between January of this year and October 15 of this year, they crafted a constitution. It was a tough task. A lot faster than we crafted our Constitution here in the United States of America. This Constitution that I carry by my heart every day I have a jacket on for a pocket for it, it was a struggle to get our Constitution established. We had a Constitutional Convention.

We had an effort for ratification. Essentially it happened in 1789. We had a Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, so 13 years and several months later, we had a constitution ratified by the people. We have not been in Iraq anywhere near 13 years, and I do not expect the effort is going to take anywhere near that long.

It was a struggle to establish this constitutional republic that we have in the United States of America, and it is a struggle to establish a free government in a region of the world that has not had one before. But the Iraqi people stepped up and reached each milestone and crafted a constitution. Now 108 polling places were attacked by terrorists in January in the election that elected the interim government, the interim parliament that crafted the constitution.

By October 15, 2005, the election that ratified the constitution that was drafted by that interim parliament, there were 19 attacks on polling places as opposed to the 108 that took place in January. That is a measure of progress, Mr. Speaker.

We look throughout Iraq and we measure progress after progress. But now we are sitting here with a ratified constitution and our interim parliament and an election coming up December 15. Of all of the milestones that have been laid out in this sequence that I have talked about, liberation, local elections, establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, an election to elect the interim parliament whose job it was to run the country, a constitution, you add all those things all up, and this election on December 15 is more important than the others by far because this election puts in place a parliament in Iraq that truly represents the people. It will be the voice of the people and it is a certified voice of the people. It will be, among the Arab world, the most legitimate voice of any Arab people in the world.

I would submit there is only one place where an Arab can go for a fair trial outside of Iraq, and that might be Israel. We are watching a fair trial take place in Iraq today, and that will be the second place in the Arab world where a person can go to get a fair trial. When this election takes place on December 15, 2005, several days from now, it will put in place a parliament that is elected by the people of the sovereign nation of Iraq. They will select a prime minister, and they will then be more legitimate than any other Arab nation that sits at the United Nations.

And the sovereignty that comes from that and the consent of the people that empowers their representatives in almost the same fashion as we consent as people to empower representatives here, will give this government the authority to move quickly and decisively down the paths of progress.

I am hearing naysayers. I am hearing detractors. Why? Why when we are roughly a week from time we are going to have a certifiable, sovereign nation of Iraq that has the ability to sit down and negotiate oil development contracts with some of the most effective oil companies in the world, to come into this country that is rich with resources, so rich with resources that oil seeps to the top of the ground, and I have seen it, Mr. Speaker.

So rich with resources that more oil wells need to be punched in and more pipelines need to be laid and refineries built, and the export of the wealth of Iraq will pour the capital back into that country, and we will see that economy start to grow and multiply and flourish. Why do we hear these negative comments and detractors? Do they not know that our soldiers over there want and need their support? That the people that watch al-Jazeera TV see these voices as quasi American

leaders. They see these as people that are directing the policy of the United States of America. They do not understand that the Commander-in- Chief is not listening to this every night. Thankfully he is not listening to this every night, and I hope he is not.

The Commander-in-Chief has to lead us down a path without regard to public opinion. He will take into account our judgment, but the destiny of this country is more important. If the mainstream media and the relentless drumbeat on the floor of the House takes the confidence of the American people down so low that they have lost their will, it is the job of the President of the United States to step up and take the debate to the American people and do the fireside chats in this modern technological world, lift our spirits up and give us the facts. I am here to help him do that.

He has given us some of these fireside chats and speeches. He understands, as I understand, that our freedom, our freedom depends upon our soldiers, yes, but it also depends upon our will. There is something that is a universal truth throughout all of history and that is a war is never over until the loser realizes they have lost. That is a fact, Mr. Speaker. War is never over until the loser realizes they have lost.

If you are down in the dumps and you are losing your soldiers and troops and you are losing your ability to combat a battle, losing your munitions, losing the funding network, you are really down and out, there would be some people in this country that think that I am talking about the American or coalition forces, and I am talking about Zarqawi's people. They are down and out. They can barely put together enough munitions to conduct any kind of opposition. They do not have a lot of logistical support. They are hiding in caves and cowering in mud huts in places throughout Iraq, and they are going out one or two every day dying for their cause, dying for a lost cause.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit that the people on the other side, the al Qaeda people, the Zarqawi people, they have it pretty tough where they are right now. A lot of them are dead. Perhaps 75 percent of their leadership is dead. We decapitated the number 3 man in Afghanistan within the last week.

They have been writing letters back and forth from Zarqawi to Bin Laden. We know they are short of resources. One of them asked, could you kindly send me $100,000. Zarqawi wrote a letter a while back that said in this country we do not have any place to hide. This is not Vietnam. They do not have any mountains. They do not have any forests to hide in. The only place they can hide is in the homes of the Iraqis, and Iraqi homes that are willing to hide al Qaeda terrorists, he said, are as rare as red sulfur.

Red sulfur does not mean a lot to us here. I submit it is quite rare. Red sulfur fits in the category of maybe as rare as hen's teeth or chicken lips or frog hair. It is a rare commodity. He draws the distinctions between Vietnam and Iraq: No mountains to hide in, no forests to hide in, and the homes they have to cower in where Iraqis are willing to house them are as rare as red sulfur, rare as chicken's teeth, rare as chicken lips, rare as frog's hair.

So they feel that taste of defeat. When they are about ready to give up, we can take the tone of that letter some months ago, and have to think they are very close to the end.

Then we hear the voice from the other side that says we cannot win. Howard Dean, This war cannot be won. The esteemed gentleman, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, This war cannot be won.

In the same debate he said, Our military has accomplished their mission, bring them home.

Was not their mission to win? And how do you define your exit strategy? Victory, Mr. Speaker. That is how we define the exit strategy, victory. There is no other exit strategy. In fact, I would submit why would you want to leave.

I certainly want the Iraqis to take over the defense of their own country, and that is our administration's policy, and it is one that I support. There are over 210,000 Iraqis in uniform that are trained, and you will hear again from this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that there is only one battalion that is combat ready. One battalion. Maybe there was a time there was only one battalion, that there was not one American in that was truly combat ready that had the logistical support that they could go out and engage in combat without cooperation, coordination with American troops and American know-how and American logistics and American ingenuity and ability. Maybe one.

Mr. Speaker, I would submit to you that 30 to 40 percent of the Iraqis that are in uniform, trained, equipped, ready for combat, having the courage to defend their country, 30 to 40 percent are engaged and ready to engage; and some of them have some American advisers there, and these people on this side of the aisle argue that disqualifies them from defending their country. I wonder what the mothers and the fathers and the wives think when they have an Iraqi soldier that is killed in the line of duty and they are told by the floor of the United States Congress that they were not really qualified for combat, they really were not ready to defend their country.

Mr. Speaker, these people are ready. They have the courage. And many of them are ready for combat. Many have been in combat. Most of them go in combat with American soldiers, and it is a good thing for us to have. I would not want to say there are 210,000 Iraqi troops with uniforms and equipment and training and they are all ready to go into combat right now and all we have to do is just turn them all loose, Mr. Speaker, and they can all go into combat and at the same time, same day, same night American troops come back to their home bases, to their wives, their husbands, their sons and daughters and their parents. I wish they could, Mr. Speaker, but that would not be prudent. It would not be wise and it would not be good policy.

It would not be good policy not to have an American involvement there to go through a transition, a transitional period, Mr. Speaker, that provides for a gradual transfer of power so that the Iraqis that are willing and eager to defend their country are handed over those reins of responsibility in a fashion that ensures success. So maybe sometime ago there was only one battalion that did not have any American involvement. About that same time that you heard the remarks about one battalion, one Iraqi battalion that did not have any American involvement, at that time we really did not have any American bases either that were under the control of the Iraqis.

But since that time, we have 20 bases that have been handed over to the Iraqis to manage, 20 military bases. Have you heard that from the other side of the aisle? Have you heard that the Iraqis have taken over the control of 20 bases? Because we have confidence that they can provide the security and the logistics out of those places and dispatch their troops, take care of the communications, food and housing and training, all the munitions and equipment, the logistics that take place there and provide the security in the region.

Twenty bases the Iraqis have today that they did not have when the allegation was made that there was only one battalion that was combat ready. So you get a real twisted view here, because we have people that get out of bed every morning and they scour the television, they scour the newspapers, and they scour the Internet trying to find the most negative that they can so they can bring this down, hustle down here and trot out onto the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, and begin to inform the American people of the most pessimistic view point, not always substantiated, by the way, but the most pessimistic view point possible because they want to dispirit the American troops.

Well, that is some of the effect, only our people are so courageous and they do not listen to you all that much. But they are sure, in a word, encouraging our enemies. Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, Zawahiri, Muqtada Al-Sadr, all of those people. They believe that the Americans are going to lose their will; and if we lose our will, so will the rest of the coalition forces. Last night I put a poster up here on the floor that showed a picture of Muqtada Al-Sadr, big old blow up of his bearded face, and the quote beneath his face that I heard come out of al-Jazeera TV in Kuwait

City. The quote was, he said it in Arabic, I watched the English subtitles, 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.

Now, if you are an enemy, and you are dispirited like Zarqawi was dispirited when he wrote the red sulfur letter, and you hear that quote out of one of their leaders, by the way that same quote has come out of, in similar language has come out of the mouths of all four of those leaders that I have talked about, Muqtada Al-Sadr, the non-al Qaeda, the Shiite leader who is actually I will call him a revolutionary in some fashion. But Zarqawi, Zawahiri, bin Laden, Muqtada Al-Sadr, all of them have made statements that you will find out there on the Internet that says the Americans have left in the past. They have pulled out of places like Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu. They will pull out of Iraq. Just persevere, blow yourself up one more time, get your 72 virgins, turn yourself into smithereens, take a few people with you if you can and you will be adding to this cause somehow and some of the rest of us will figure out how we can come in here and create this civil war that will split this nation into three different section.

What is the future for Iraq if we let that happen? Think about it for a minute. What is the alternative? What is this idea that was presented by the chairman of the Democrat National Committee that we ought to evict ourselves from Iraq and pull ourselves out of there and go someplace where we are wanted. Did you ever know there was a need for an army or you were really wanted? Anybody ever invite you all in there and say, gee, we like you folks. Why do you not come in here and stay because we like the way you spend your money downtown. Actually, there is a place in Germany like that. They are glad to have us. But that is not a reason to send an army there. An army goes a place generally where you are not wanted to free the people that are under the tyranny of those who do not want you there.

But Mr. Dean has advocated that we pull our troops out of Iraq and go to another Middle Eastern country where we are more wanted, and then we can fight Zarqawi from there. Boy, you know, Zarqawi, I wonder if he is writing those press releases for Mr. Dean. That is what I would want if I were Zarqawi. I would be trying to convince Americans, get your troops out of here. Why do you not go someplace where you are wanted, and then Zarqawi would be free to turn Fallujah into an armed camp, to turn Ramadi into an armed camp, to turn Tikrit into an armed camp, to turn all of the Sunni Triangle into an armed camp and pull in money from around the rest of the Arab world and bring in and arm all the troops and recruit more al Qaeda and turn it into a training camp, and, yes, develop more weapons of mass destruction, both gas, biological to get the money.

We are watching what is happening over in Iran. Nuclear. Add that all together, take the advice of the chairman of the Democrat National Committee and pull our troops out of Iraq, go to an Arab country where we are more wanted so we can fight Zarqawi from there, Mr. Speaker? That does sound like something that has been put out by Zarqawi himself. And it would be the very worst scenario that we can imagine. We are there now. Zarqawi is at least under our thumb. We have him surrounded. We do not know exactly where he is, but we have him surrounded. So we have to stay there; we have to finish this job. And every time we squeeze them down a little more, a little more, it gets harder and harder, and Zarqawi gets ready to write a letter and to sound a little more desperate each time when he puts out a plea for help that goes to Osama bin Laden, who essentially has not had much of a voice in what is going on in this effort for a good long time, Mr. Speaker.

Pull out of Iraq. Go to a place where we are more wanted in the Middle East to fight Zarqawi from there. Think what happens if we ever pull out of Iraq. If we pull out of there, and it is not clear to history that we have a victory, if we pull out on our own free will, if we redefine victory ourselves, history will define it anyway. History will define victory as the effort that prevailed. And we have said here is what we want: we want the Iraqi people to be in charge of their own country; we want them to have free elections; we want them to elect a parliament, which they will do December 15.

We want them then from that parliament to elect a prime minister, set up a civilian government, a government that represents the people of the state of Iraq, a sovereign state, a sovereign nation. They will go sit at the United Nations, and they will have more credibility there than any other Arab nation, Mr. Speaker. That is our definition of victory, and it is going to take a while for the violence to disappear in Iraq. And the reason for that is, Mr. Speaker, that as I said earlier, a war is never over until the loser understands that they have lost. If we stand on the floor of the House of Representatives and tell our enemies that here is how you win, if we tell them we cannot win, but they have, some of them are going to believe us. I do not believe it. Some of the American people believe it. I do not believe it.

I believe that Iraq is going to be a certified sovereign free nation on the date of December 15, and maybe it will take a little while to count the votes, and maybe it will take a little while to elect a prime minister, and maybe it will take a little while to gavel in that first parliament, and it will take a little while for them to get all the kinks out of their new government. And it will take a little while to get the enemy, the insurgents, purged out of that society.

But as they see this inevitable march, this inevitable march towards freedom, the enemy will begin to understand that they have lost. When they understand that they have lost, then we will have victory because the rest of the principles are there. We have followed the sequence of liberation, Coalition Provisional Authority, interim Iraqi civilian government control, an elected interim parliament, draft the Constitution, put it on the ballot October 15, get a great turn out, ratify that Constitution, and now set an election for December 15. We are now a free people. Free people go to the polls again, and I predict they will go to the polls again in greater numbers than the percentage of the American people do, because people that have never had freedom cherish it even more.

That will be the definition for victory, Mr. Speaker, when we see a free people that are controlling their own destiny and going to the polls and directing their own leaders. They have got their Constitution. It is ratified. They have a tremendous amount of natural resources, and some day very soon after December 15 they can sign a contract with one or a dozen companies that have the technology and the skills and the capital to develop that massive amount of oil that they have. It is theirs. It has been our principle that it has been their oil from the very beginning. Our Commander in Chief said that to the world. And, in fact, if you go read the Iraqi Constitution there are two references in there as to the possession of their oil, and it is their oil.

And it is there for the Iraqi people, and the Constitution defines that it will be distributed proportionally in a fair fashion and equally across the country so that there is equal development of Iraq from that wealth. And soon, within 6 months I will predict we will start to see the oil export from Iraq. Right now, the only thing that is really exporting from Iraq with any kind of profits are dates, and it is about half the date crop that it used to be. That can be improved too.

But when the oil starts to flow out, it is their oil, the profit is theirs, the capital comes in. And when you have capital that comes in, you know what you have. You have capitalism. And capitalism really is the solution to this. We have the military who are doing their job. And behind the military solution is the political solution which is taking place on December 15 in this election. And when that free parliament is established and they elect a prime minister, the next step is hand over some of this development to some people that will risk some of their capital to develop those oil fields so that capitalism can sweep into that country, sweep into that country and so the linkage of military solution, the political solution and the free enterprise

capital solution all come to pass, all in their sequence, Mr. Speaker.

When that happens, then we do have a definition for victory in Iraq. And we cannot expect miracles, and it is hard and it is bloody and it is costly. But they can become, and in fact I believe they are, the Lode Star for the Arab people. This inspiration that gets established, when people are cynics in the world think that because of what ethnicity you are, what tribe you belong to, what country you come from, what religion you might be, you cannot handle freedom, well, I agree with the President. Freedom beats and yearns in the heart of every person and all people yearn to be free.

Now we have not gone to war and fought and handed them their freedom. They fought alongside us and some of that freedom they have earned, and they needed to earn it because it is precious and it has more value if it is them earning that freedom instead of us. But I believe this has been a very noble thing that we have done, Mr. Speaker; and I look around the world and I think throughout history, when has this country ever gone to war against another free people? I will say never. Never once in the history of the world has the United States ever gone to war, a clash of arms, against another free people, because we resolve our differences in open debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate and across this country.

And one of those things also that beats in the heart of all of us is we have a certain capacity for change in all of us.

That change is within us. It is natural, and it is human, and it is described pretty much in the book ``The Case for Democracy'' by Natan Sharansky. He spent a fair part of his life in the gulag up in the Soviet Union, and he watched how there they struggled for their very lives and very survival. And the effort that came from them just to stay alive every day consumed almost everything that they did, and he thought that was the world that a lot of people lived in too, but that was a narrow thing that he was in at the time.

When he was liberated from the gulag, he went to Israel, and he became a free person in a free society that had a democracy and open dialogue, and he went to the Knesset, and he watched that debate that was taking place there, and he saw that same energy go into the debate in the Knesset, sometimes arguing and debating and struggling over things that he saw as minutia because he had spent a lot of his years on survival, and the same effort on survival was being burned up and consumed on minutia in a free country.

And he concluded, and I think rightfully, that we all have within us this energy for change, this desire for change, and we will use that energy for a constructive change whether we do so in open debate and dialogue like we do in this country, like they do in Israel, or whether we use that same energy and desire, when we do not have this freedom of speech, to take it out on our neighbor, take it out on our enemy, and do so in a violent fashion and often in the form of terrorism. That is the habitat that breeds terror, the habitat that is anathema to freedom.

So some years ago, shortly after September 11, we had a guest lecturer there at Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, Iowa. Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan. She gave a wonderful lecture, and it was fascinating. And afterwards we sat down and had a little one-on-one conversation, and I asked her a couple of questions, and one of them was what percentage of the Muslim world are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda. How great in numbers are our enemy?

She did not hesitate. In fact, her answer was so spontaneous that I concluded that she had answered that question before, and she said, Not very many, perhaps 10 percent.

Well, not very many, perhaps 10 percent of 1.2 or 1.3 billion people is a whole lot of enemies, in my opinion. That is 120 to 130 million scattered throughout the world. We cannot attack all of them, and we cannot turn our military effort on all of them. We have to find another solution.

So I asked her then how do we get to this point where we can ever define victory? What is victory going to be? How will we ever craft a victory given this global enemy we have that is committed to our death, people who believe that their path to salvation is in killing us?

She said, You have to give them freedom. You have to give them democracy. You have to give them an opportunity for their future, and they will turn their minds, their hands, their hearts from hatred and killing towards their families, their neighborhoods, their communities, their mosques.

That is the difference, and that is the climate that we need to create. That is that climate that is there in Afghanistan, and that is that climate that we are in the process of creating in Iraq. That is how Afghanistan and Iraq can link together and be the inspiration that shows the world that freedom can echo across the Arab world the same way it did across Eastern Europe when the Wall went down on November 9, 1989. And that is some insight.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, there were a number of motives, and I will concede there were other motives; but in the 60 seconds that I have left, I am not going to be able to address all of that.

I will just say that, yes, liberation was part of that; and, in fact, I believe it is the broader vision, this vision that has been brought to this global effort by our President. I think he is a leading thinker on this in the world. Not a receptive adviser, but I think he is a leading thinker. And that is why I raise this issue. It is bigger and broader than weapons of mass destruction. It is bigger than many of the things that are discussed here on the floor of this House, and I bring this message here so that we can see the benefits of the sacrifice and the reason to carry on and the price if we fail to do so.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address my colleagues and the people in this country.

There are some important issues before us, as there always are in this Congress, and sometimes I have a little difficulty sorting between which of those issues it is that I would like to speak to my colleagues about, Mr. Speaker.

Tonight, I would like to address the subject matter of the future of this country, the future of the Middle East, the future of this global conflict, this assault on Western civilization that comes from radical, militant, Islamic extremists, the will of the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, to stand up and defend the cause that our Forefathers have fought so hard for and to preserve not just our freedoms which are essential and worth the struggle and worth the sacrifice, but our very safety and lives are at risk, Mr. Speaker.

We need to understand this war that we are in. We need to understand our enemy, and as I listened to the debate here on the floor a couple of weeks ago on a Friday when we debated the resolution to immediately pull out of Iraq, it occurred to me that there were a lot of people actually on the floor of this chamber, Mr. Speaker, that I thought did not have a long-term view for the future of the United States of America or the free world for that matter.

I want to raise a point, and I want to then continue to illustrate that point. I have brought in a picture and a poster to help with that point.

This is not the number one villain in all of Iraq or all of this war against radical, militant extremists, but this is Muqtada Al-Sadr, who is actually a Shiite leader, an individual we have heard quite a lot about. He got into the military business and brought his militia to bear against U.S. and coalition military forces and Iraqi military forces and with mixed results I think we can say at best.

I made a number of trips over to Iraq, and what we do is we go into Kuwait and then usually leave very early in the morning to go into Iraq in the morning. In the evening, I was sitting there, and I had turned on my television set in the hotel in Kuwait and turned it to Al Jazeera TV because watching Al Jazeera TV tells me a lot about what people are seeing in the Middle East and across the Arab world.

As I watched that television, it was Arabic audio, but it had English I call them subtitles. On that date, which was June 11, 2004, this particular CODEL, I watched the television and saw Muqtada Al-Sadr come on there, and I heard him say in Arabic, with the English subtitles underneath, just what you see here, Mr. Speaker. He said, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq, the same way that they left Vietnam, the same way that they left Lebanon, the same way that they left Mogadishu.''

Now, what does that mean? It means that the word has been spread throughout al Qaeda world that Americans do not come and stay till it is over, that they will pull out, and that we are not committed to this cause. He would like to convince his followers and those he would recruit to be his followers that Americans are prepared at any moment to pull out of Iraq.

That is far from the case, Mr. Speaker, and this is the cause where we must stay, and we must carry this message across this world to our coalition partners, to our soldiers that are over there, those soldiers that have just not too long ago celebrated a Thanksgiving in foreign soil again, and again to our allies but especially to our enemies.

This language, this statement, that Americans do not stick to it, is a thread that goes through many of the writings and the statements of al Qaeda leaders. I believe I can find that in a Google search in words phrased a little bit differently but the same meaning, out of Osama bin Laden, out of Zawahiri, out of Zarqawi, and that coupled with Muqtada Al-Sadr.

That message has been sent. It keeps getting sent. It is echoed out off Al Jazeera. That means whoever is watching Al Jazeera hears this message. Many of them believe this message that America is not going to stay until the job is done.

We had a debate on this floor, Mr. Speaker, and that vote took place in the fall of 2002. It authorized the President to use force to enforce the United Nations resolutions, all for a good cause. That is how a free Nation should do this. We should have a free debate, and it ought to be an open debate. The people in this country should engage in this debate and carry their message to their Members of Congress and let that echo in these chambers, Mr. Speaker, and it did in that debate.

The resolution after the vote went up, and it was a solid majority to give the President the authority to enforce those U.N. resolutions and to use force, if necessary, to bring Saddam Hussein in line. In fact, it is the policy and was the policy of this Congress to establish a regime change in Iraq. We had our debate. When debate is over and there is a majority vote that prevails, then the people in this chamber need to abide by that decision.

If we pass a law in here, we do not go out and say, okay, I am going to ignore that law and undermine that law. We live by that decision. It is a majority decision. There is nothing more important than when you have men and women in uniform, put their lives on the line, and you do so by a majority vote and you endorse it, you do not want to see people undermining that effort. Undermining that effort indexes directly with this statement by Muqtada Al-Sadr.

Mr. Speaker, I will pick that up in a moment and carry some more details of this, but I want to take the privilege of yielding to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. King), my friend, the first of the Caucus States, the first in the Nation primaries.

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to team up with Mr. Bradley and help direct our Presidential candidates on to South Carolina, too, in about another 3 years. I appreciate you turning this tone over to the tone of the progress that has been made in Iraq. We do not hear about that very often, and Mr. Bradley brings to mind

some issues I would like to add to that tally.

Two elections already this year in Iraq, one in January that elected the interim Iraqi Government and the one in October which was for the referendum that ratified the Constitution. We have heard the Iraqis cannot hold elections. There will not be enough safety, they will not be legitimate. And all of those criticisms got rolled out.

In fact, I would take us back to the first election after the liberation of Iraq that I know of, and Mr. Bradley mentioned General Petrais who commanded the 101st Airborne that went in there in March 2003, and he liberated the region of Mosul and approximately three of the provinces up in that area. That was March.

I was in the region of Mosul in the fall, and I met with the governor of Mosul and the vice governor of Mosul, and one or two other officials of that region. How can you have a governor and vice governor of Mosul? They were not appointed by General Petrais. It was interesting, the governor sat at the head of the table next to the vice governor, and General Petrais sat at the side of table, and he was giving deference to the elected leaders. The governor and the vice governor, and I do not know how many other officers were elected in May of 2003, but there were free and fair and open elections in Mosul. The governor was a Sunni and the vice governor was a Kurd. You could tell by the way that they worked and cooperated and laughed and did those things that they worked together comfortably. At the time in Mosul, it seemed like it was very much back to normal.

I point out that the first successful election was in May 2003, and since that time there have been a number of elections in Iraq. The milestones established early in this process, at that point it was liberation first and it was martial law to stabilize the security in the country, get a handle on the looting but put the military law in place, and then shortly after that we established the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority. That was headed by Paul Bremer, who ran that region then, as Coalition Provisional Authority had, for quite a long time. But there was another milestone that was set on the calendar and that was the following June.

Not recalling the specific date, but before that date by 2 days we handed over the control of Iraq to a civilian government before the targeted deadline to do so. We established the dates for elections and set the milestones to elect an interim parliament, and the voice of the people would then write and draft the Constitution, present the Constitution to the people of Iraq, and then the people of Iraq would have the opportunity to vote and ratify the Constitution. Each one of those milestones was met or exceeded by the Iraqi people at the direction and cooperation of the coalition forces.

Now, you may think that is not such a difficult task, you simply open up the polling booths and hold an election. In order to have a legitimate election, you need to have voter registration. You want people to have an opportunity to vote and only vote once. It has to be safe to travel to the polls, and you have to maintain the confidentiality of their vote and the integrity of the tally of the ballots and the reporting process.

An election has no value in a free country if the people who are being represented by those elected in the election, if the people do not have confidence in the process. But they had confidence in Mosul in May 2003. They had confidence in the process in January of this year when they elected their interim government. It was not as safe in January as it was later, but there were 108 different places attacked by the terrorists when they elected their interim parliament, but still the turnout for that election was greater than the turnout for the Presidential election for the President of the United States.

We saw millions of Iraqis proudly waving their purple fingers in the air, proud that they voted. In fact, the fear factor was supposed to set in and cause people to stay home and not vote, but instead they voted. They voted with a proud and a free and a patriotic and, in fact, a defiant attitude, waving their purple fingers in the air and saying they directed their national destiny when they waved their fingers.

But 108 of those polling booths were attacked by terrorists on that day. That did not deter the Iraqis. They went on without interruption. No one has challenged the legitimacy of the election. It was a legitimate election. That was January. On October 15 when the Constitution that was drafted by that interim parliament, and it was hard fought and there were many tough decisions to be made, and to reconcile the differences between the regions in the country, the resources in the country and the differences between the religious factions that were there and the tribal factions that were there was a very difficult thing.

How do you divide up the resources of a country so all of the people benefit from those resources when you have that proprietary notion that because the oil is underneath the soil in one region, it should not be shared with people of another region that does not have oil underneath their soil?

They came to an agreement on that, and the known and developed reserves are distributed equally around the country with exceptions to put extra resources in those regions where they have been at a greater disadvantage, and it is going to take greater resources to get them up to speed. But, essentially, the language in the Constitution calls for taking existing resources and providing kind of a parity so the Iraqis can benefit almost equally.

But that Constitution that was so hard fought, the one that down to the last minute they were changing some language in it so they had the best chance of getting it ratified in the referendum, on October 15 of this year they ratified their Constitution.

Now, one might say, so Iraq has gone through these milestones and the milestones of liberation in March and April of 2003, and the milestone of martial law converting into the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer, and then handing it over to the Civilian Provisional Authority, and then having the elections that elected the Iraqi interim parliament and then having the referendum that ratified the Constitution on October 15, one might say what is all of that about.

Well, all of them together were required sequentially to get to the point where they are today: poised to have an election of a new parliament in Iraq, a new parliament that will be established upon the Constitution that the people have ratified in their referendum last October 15. The new parliament that will be seated shortly after those elections of December 15 will be a parliament that truly represents a sovereign nation of Iraq.

When they seat themselves at the United Nations and the representative that is appointed to represent Iraq in the United Nations, they will be the most legitimate government represented in the United Nations of the Arab world that is there because they will be the ones that are elected by a free people. The voice of the representative from Iraq will actually be the voice of the people of Iraq.

That is a misconception that many of the people in the United States of America have about the United Nations themselves, the idea that the United Nations is a voice of the world, that it is a free and democratic global forum where we can resolve all of our differences, when in fact many of the countries represented are not free countries. They do not allow their people to have freedom of speech, press, and religion. They do not allow their people to step forward and voice their opinions. In fact, some of those countries will cut their tongues off for doing that, but they have a voice for their dictator sitting at the table of the United Nations.

This will be an Arab country, Iraq, which has a free and duly elected government that sends a representative to the United Nations that will be more representative of the people of that country than any other Arab country represented in the U.N.

And so this is a huge milestone coming up December 15. But for a lot of other reasons too. Now the Iraqi people can start to direct their national destiny. This really is the milestone that allows that to happen. And I have traveled over to Iraq three times. The last trip in was in August, and I asked to go

down into Basra where I believe we were the first congressional delegation to visit the coalition forces down in that region. General Dutton commands the forces there. He is a British general. And I stood in one place with soldiers in the coalition forces that represented Romania and The Netherlands and Denmark and Australia and Great Britain and Poland. I am sure I am missing one or two others. Put them in a group and took their picture because they really did represent the coalition forces.

And down in that region, there the largest oil reserves are down in that region around Basra and we reviewed that and then went up to Kirkuk, as the gentleman from New Hampshire had mentioned, that he had been up there earlier during this conflict. And there, I saw places where oil seeped to the top of the ground. There was so much oil that I could drill a well and hit oil on it because I would hit the oil before I started to drill. But there needs to be a lot of oil that is developed in Iraq in the south around Basra and in the north up around Kirkuk and those distribution lines and refineries and the export systems have got to be set up so that they can get some cash flowing back into that country. This milestone of a truly sovereign Nation with a duly elected parliament that will select, that will elect themselves a prime minister so that they can move and act and build on the future of the country is an essential milestone. And it has taken blood and treasure to get to this point, and it will take blood and treasure for a while beyond this point. And it has been a price that has been painful to pay, but it is also a price that has freed 25 million people and it has the opportunity for Iraq to become the lone star nation that inspires the entire Arab world, inspires them to freedom and that freedom that becomes contagious like it did in eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, November 9.

Freedom echoed across eastern Europe and almost bloodlessly and in almost the blink of a historical eye, Mr. Speaker. And I do not expect that kind a change to take place in the Middle East that fast, but we are seeing those yearnings for freedom and yearnings for democracy. We have seen Libya give up their weapons of mass destruction and openly show that they are were further along on their process of developing nuclear than one had ever imagined. Our intelligence did not get that one right either. And intelligence, by the way, is never perfect, and I do not mean to be critical of our intelligence. It is the inspiration that Iraq was becoming a free nation, that American and coalition presence in that region comprised a threat that might have deposed Qadaffi, I think was his motive to turn his nuclear cards over face up and drop and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction.

We have seen Lebanon for the first time since 1979 throw off the yoke of Syrian occupation and move towards freedom. And we have watched some things change in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt. So it is happening, Mr. Speaker. There is progress that it is being made and the inspiration that is there, the inspiration of a free Iraq is an important inspiration.

But 108 of those polling booths were attacked in January of 2005. And the following October, the security situation in Iraq had improved so much that that number became 19 polling booths attacked as opposed to 108 just the previous January, 10 months before.

So that is an indicator, I think, Mr. Speaker, of the progress that has been made in Iraq. There are a number of other indicators and some of them are, we need the cooperation for intelligence of the Iraqi people. And so what are we getting for tips? Where are they coming from? We are finding about 50 percent of the improvised explosive devices, about 50 percent. Almost all of those IEDs are being found because of tips from the Iraqi people. The tips that we were getting in March, 483 in the month of March of 2005. In April, 1,591, it has grown five times better, a little greater than that, just from March to April. That is the sign that they have more confidence, that they can take the risk, that their country needs them to weigh in and put their neck on the line to give tips that will protect the lives of American and coalition forces. So March, 483, April of 2005, 1,591, May of 2005 up to 1,740 tips in that month, in June 2,519, in July 3,303 tips, and in August, 3,341. This trend is a fantastic trend line that shows that the Iraqi people see the future and they are committing themselves to helping save and protect the lives of the American soldiers. This goes on.

There is more and more good news. And Mr. Bradley talked about 210,000 Iraqis in uniform that are trained or in training to defend their own country. And that is what needs to happen. Of that 210,000, there are quite a lot of battalions that are really combat ready. We keep hearing that there is only one battalion that has no American advisors in it and that can operate in a combat situation, Mr. Speaker, without having U.S. support.

Well, I do not know that we want to be in that situation where we do not have any U.S. involvement in combat battalions in Iraq. There is too much at stake there. And we have handed over 20 bases that were coalition American controlled that now it is all Iraqis that control those 20 bases. And at least a third of the battalions that are there are ready for combat. And a lot of them are engaged in combat. And they are going in with American forces. And so the question of whether they are totally 100 percent independent, it is just a moot point. And the question of what is our exit strategy, when are we going to leave, you know, when the previous President sent our troops into Kosovo, he told America they would be out in a year. I never hear that from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, as to this is the longest year.

I think this year is over 3,000 days long, and we are still waiting to get the troops out of Kosovo. Well, no one raises that issue because the situation is stabilized there. And American casualties are not zero, but they are very, very low. And I support our efforts there to provide peace in that region. But look around the world, Mr. Speaker. We have troops in nearly every place that they have been engaged over the last 60 to more years, and those troops remain in Germany. They remain in Korea. We have other troops in other locations around the world because we need them there strategically.

And so, you know, when are we going to get out of Iraq? Why would we want to leave? Why would it be our goal to go there and pull the troops out, especially if it risked the goal of the mission entirely? And I heard Mr. Bradley address the importance of supporting our troops and their mission. And I want to emphasize that, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot send a soldier off to war, ask him to defend your freedom, put his life on the line for you, and then say, I support you, soldier, I am with you, but I do not like your mission. You cannot ask somebody to put their life on the line and tell them you support them but you oppose their mission.

And that is what I am hearing over here. That is what I am hearing from the liberal news media. That is what this fellow right here, Muqtada al-Sadr hears. It is what Osama bin Laden hears, it is what Zawahiri hears, and it is what Zarkawi hears. They hear I am with you, troops. I think you ought to be home but I do not support your mission, and if something happens to you, then you know, you were a casualty of a failed and flawed mission. Not true. This is, I believe, one of the most noble things that the United States of America has ever done.

Many, many times we have sent our soldiers off into foreign lands and here in this city, Mr. Speaker, if one would go down to the Korean Memorial and there in the sidewalk, etched in that stone in the sidewalk is a message at the Korean War Memorial that says, our country honors the men and women who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met. A very profound statement etched in the sidewalk there at the Korean Memorial. It definitely reflects the sacrifice of the Korean war. It reflects, I believe, Mr. Speaker, the character of the American people, the American soldier and marine. The history of this country has always been to reach out and promote our freedom.

I think about a speech that I heard here in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago about this time of year. It was given by President Arroyo of the Philippines, and as she delivered that

speech, it was in a hotel downtown and I was not before a Congressional delegation. I may have been the only Member of Congress that was there. But I point this out because she was not speaking to Congress. She was speaking to a gathering of people that showed up for a dinner in a downtown hotel in Washington, D.C. and we went out of respect and her message was that she said, thank you America, thank you America for sending the Marines to the Philippines to liberate us and free us in 1898.

Thank you for sending over your interests that taught us your way of life, free enterprise and the freedoms that you have and the constitutional structure that you have. Thank you for sending the missionaries to the Philippines where we learned Christianity, and thank you for sending 10,000 teachers to the Philippines.

She had a Filipino name for those teachers, and one day I will learn that name.

Thank you for sending 10,000 teachers who taught us the English language, who taught us the American culture, who educated us, and today we have over 1.6 million Filipinos that travel elsewhere in the world that can get a job anywhere because the universal language of business is English and they make good money, and they send that money back to the Philippines in significant dollars. She is grateful. She made that message to the United States of America 103 years at least, probably 105 years, since the time that the Marine Corps landed on the shores of the Philippines in 1898.

That is a profound message, and I believe the gratitude that I heard from President Arroyo will come from the mouths of the Prime Minister of Iraq 100 years from now. It will come here to the United States, and Iraq will have established this image, this vision, of a free Arab country; and I believe that the rest of the Arab countries will see the prosperity that comes and they will adopt that same kind of freedom hopefully through a peaceful change rather than a violent change. But I expect the people of Iraq will express their gratitude to our descendants 100 years from now.

So a loss of 2,000 American lives in Iraq, painful, every one, a personal loss to every family, a real profound sacrifice on the part of every soldier and Marine. We have lost over 200 of them also in Afghanistan. I have heard nothing from the other side of the aisle about why it is right to be in Afghanistan and wrong to be in Iraq. It is just on their part wrong to be in Iraq, and it seems to be that the number of casualties is the measuring stick.

So I would submit that it is time now for the people on the left side of the aisle to give us a number of how many casualties they are willing to sustain in Afghanistan before they say we ought to get out of there too. This is not a cause that is measured simply in direct relationship with casualties. It is far more important. It is far more timeless. It is far more profound. It is something that the echoes of this will flow throughout history.

Beyond 100 years from now, the world will be a different place because of the nobility of the American soldiers and Marine Corps. And the voices of Muqtada Al-Sadr and Zarqawi and Zawahiri and bin Laden, those voices that are saying things like, if we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq-Afghanistan, name your country, the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. Those voices must be silenced. They must be silenced in this place at this time.

I picked up a quote from the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Howard Dean, and I listened to him campaign in Iowa for 1\1/2\ years as he sought the Presidency and I heard some of these things then too. But in typical fashion he said, ``The idea that we are going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.'' He said that to more than 150,000 Americans who are there in Iraq and the numbers of coalition forces that are there.

And they hear that and he compares it to Vietnam. Even Zarqawi describes the difference between Vietnam and Iraq. He said there are no mountains to hide in in Iraq. There are no forests to hide in in Iraq. This is in a letter that he wrote, I think, a year ago last April. And he lamented that they cannot stay in Iraq very long because they do not have places to hide. And he said that the only place that they can hide and operate out of would be houses, the homes of the Iraqi people that would be willing to take them in and let them run their operations out of there, and that the Iraqis that would be willing to let them do that are ``rarer than red sulfur.''

Now, I have been to a lot of places in that country, and I looked all over for red sulfur and I did not see any, and I asked some of those pilots that flew helicopters if they have seen any red sulfur, and they said no. No one I know has been able to identify that; so I am going to tell you that is pretty rare. I do not think there are very many Iraqis that are willing to let Zarqawi operate. In fact, there are a lot less of Zarqawi's allies. We do not hear these numbers, Mr. Speaker.

We see the American casualties, the coalition casualties, and we see the Iraqi civilian casualties; but the numbers come down to how many of the enemy are being taken off the streets out of the operation, how many per day, per week, per month? And per month I can tell the Members, Mr. Speaker, that number, and the number was last brought to me in August of this year, I will say very close to 3,000 of our enemy are taken off the streets both in those killed and those captured, 3,000.

The Iraqi people are losing about 600 a month. We are losing about 73 a month on average. A painful loss for all of us, but the enemy is losing more by far than we are, Mr. Speaker. And it is wrong on the part of Howard Dean. We are a long ways away from losing this war. Where he says that we are going to lose it is just plain wrong, that is just undermining the President, that is undermining our foreign policy, and it is undermining our military. And he identified it with Vietnam. I laid out the difference.

He suggests that we redeploy our troops to Afghanistan because that is where we are welcome. Now, when in history has it been important to deploy troops to a place where the troops are welcome? It is nice to have them there for security reasons, but a strategic redeployment of troops because that is a place where they are welcome? And he suggests we ought to pull our troops all out of Iraq and take them to a friendly Middle Eastern country where they can have a strategic redeployment and they can be someplace where there is support for our troops there, Mr. Speaker.

Another point that was made on this floor by the gentleman that was the purpose of our debate, he, Mr. Dean, both say that 80 percent of Iraqis want us to leave. Mr. Speaker, it is not 80 percent of the Iraqis that want us to leave. I do not know where that number comes from. I asked that question over and over again. We have had surveys over there that come a little bit different, but it depends on how they ask the question. Now, if we would ask the Iraqis someday sometime when they get full control of their country and they have safety and security and their freedom is established and the economy is flowing and they are not worried about enemies from without and enemies from within, they would like to have the last American soldier pull out of Iraq, maybe 80 percent would say yes, I think that would be a good idea.

I think the responsible people in Iraq do not look forward to the day that American troops pull out anytime soon because they know that their future and their freedom is contingent upon American and coalition troops being there to guarantee it for now, as the 2,010 Iraqi numbers grow and increase and their training increases and their commitment increases, and, in fact, their courage has been increasing substantially too, and they do have the courage to fight for their country. I am hearing that from our generals over there now too.

But I asked the question of the Iraqi people, if there is a referendum today, the same referendum that was on the floor of this House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, that only found three Members of this 435-Member body that would vote to move our troops out immediately, if that referendum were laid out before the Iraqi people, the Iraqis that I talked to say that 90 to 95 percent would say stay, please stay, we

are so grateful for our freedom. When we come home, we expect our family to be there instead of wondering if Saddam has taken and spirited them away.

I met with a Kurdish young lady who is here now on a scholarship, that has been here several months. She said up in that region around Kirkuk, every household that has boys has a crawl space for the boys to hide in when Saddam's henchmen came to conscript them into the military. She grew up with brothers and could not admit to the neighborhood that she had brothers because they would be conscripted into the military. The list goes on and on.

The testimony that is taking place now in the trial of Saddam and his fellow henchmen that are there are bringing out atrocity after atrocity, Mr. Speaker. We will hear more about these atrocities as this trial unfolds. And when this trial is over and a new one begins and the history of Saddam's regime is written into the court records of those courageous jurists that put their lives on the line to provide a fair trial for a person whom I believe is a murdering tyrant, they need to be honored. They need to be respected. They need to put that in the history, and the American people need to watch it, Mr. Speaker. We need to all understand this, and we need to understand that when we speak up and we speak out and when we undermine our American troops, meanwhile posturing that we support them but not their mission, what happens is people like Muqtada Al-Sadr say on Aljazeera TV, ``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.''

Never again, Mr. Speaker. This is where that stops. This is where the bright line in history gets drawn. This is where the legacy of the freedom that emanates from America is established in the Middle East and where the lone star of Iraq inspires the rest of the Arab world and eliminates the habitat that breeds terror.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the Members in the Chamber this evening.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, December 7, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding me this time. I appreciate the opportunity to address this House and the opportunity for us all to sit and listen to this debate.

I hear a couple of different numbers, 25,000 wounded but 15,000 wounded coming from the same side of the aisle. I am wondering if that is indicative of some of the other statistics that we have heard.

But I ask this question: Why have I not heard any objections to our operations in Afghanistan? Twenty-five million people liberated and freed and standing on free soil, voting for their own freedom and their own national destiny, a cost of 200 American lives. Nobody set a value on that. How many is too many in Afghanistan?

Twenty-five million Iraqis free, voting on free soil for the first time in their real lives, and what does this mean to America? It means that we have erased some of the habitat that breeds terror. Do we not understand this greater mission here is to eradicate that habitat so Arab people can breathe free and that free people do not go to war against free people? Could we look at this broader mission of 50 million people freed? 2,200 American lives, tens of thousands of other lives. We have not been attacked in this country since that date for a lot of good reasons.

You cannot separate the mission from the troops. You cannot sit here and say, I support the troops. Mr. President, we ought to bring the troops home. I do not support their mission. You cannot ask somebody to put their life on the line for your freedom and not support their mission, but tell them that you support the troops.

Further more, I sat in Kuwait City and watched on television as Moqtada al-Sadr said, ``They will go home the same way they did from Vietnam, Lebanon, and Mogadishu.''

We must stay the course.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity always to come to this floor of Congress and have an opportunity to address the Chair and also the people in this Chamber here on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and all across America.

A lot of important issues come in front of us here in this Congress, and one of the hardest things that we have to deal with is the priorities always change day to day. We keep this big stack of issues, and we continually pull one issue off that has drifted down below the stack aways and put it back up on top, pulling those issues out, putting them on top, trying to get them moved so that we can get them off the table, send them to the Senate, and take up the next most important issue. It is a constant process here of hundreds, in fact thousands, of issues being reprioritized.

But what we do also is keep sitting at the top those most important issues, those that are critical, those that are urgent. Sometimes we have that difficulty of taking up the issues that are urgent at the expense of those that are important, Mr. Speaker. But we have an issue before this Congress that I believe will come to this floor for a vote sometime this week or at the latest we could come back and take it up early in the first week in December, and that is the issue of methamphetamines.

I represent a district in roughly the western third of Iowa, and we have found ourselves in a situation where we have perhaps as much experience, and I will say sad and bad experience, with methamphetamines as any place in the country.

Some of the reasons for that are that the precursors for methamphetamine, and that means the components that are required in order to produce it in a meth lab, are and have been readily available in Iowa, and particularly in the Corn Belt. One of those components is hydrous ammonia, and because it is available essentially everywhere in the Corn Belt, it has been relatively easy for a meth cook to go in and to steal a tank of hydrous ammonia, take that back to their meth lab and use that to produce methamphetamines.

We did not think we really needed to have a security policy and post guards around the hydrous ammonia tanks because, after all, when you crack one of those nozzles, you get a lesson that you will never forget. Yet, these meth cooks are so intent on producing methamphetamines that that kind of a danger has not been a deterrent to them, and they have some experience with hydrous ammonia also, being from the region, and so they are more comfortable using it and handling it.

But, Mr. Speaker, there is a precursor to methamphetamines that is significantly different in that regard and still has been, up until now, readily available on the shelves of most of the stores in America, and that is a component that we are comfortable with that we know called ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and then there is a PPA, another precursor that is used in some of this. But I brought some of this along tonight so that I can speak about it, Mr. Speaker. So when we have a cold and we have congestion, we will go down to the store and we will purchase pseudoephedrines of some kind.

Here is one example here, and I have another example here. Most people are familiar with that. The active ingredient is pseudoephedrine, and that pseudoephedrine is what the meth cooks are after.

Now, I would point out that about 10 years ago, we recognized this and began to address it legislatively. One of the things we did in Iowa was realize that the people who were making methamphetamine then, and it was fairly early in our experience with methamphetamines, they would go to the drugstore or the grocery store and buy themselves a big pill bottle; and that big pill bottle might have pills in there, mostly it was pills that were 30 milligrams each. They would buy several bottles of those dry pills, those starch-based pills, bring the bottles back to the labs, take the caps off of the big bottles, dump them all into their overall vat, and produce their methamphetamines out of those. No restrictions, easily available, go buy it off the shelf. Nobody asked any questions. After all, it was entirely legal; and up until the time they figured out how to use this, there was no negative to people having pseudoephedrine or ephedrine products in their own medicine cabinet, so there was no restriction.

Once we figured out that that is what they were doing, they were using the pseudoephedrine product in order to produce methamphetamine, in Iowa we decided we are going to fix this. We know how to outsmart these people. Since they buy these big bottles and there are 100 or more in a bottle, sometimes 500 in a bottle, we will just limit the size of the container, the numbers of pills that can be sold in a container.

So in Iowa we said, you cannot have 100 or more of these pills that contain pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, or the PPAs. Well, we thought that would solve the problem. I did not get that involved in the language; I supported it; others worked on it. It seemed to me like it was a step in the right direction. Perhaps it was. It was a step in the right direction for just a little while.

Congress understood that there was a problem too, and they concluded here in about 1995 that, you know, it is just too easy to go into the store and buy a bottle of pills that have pseudoephedrine in them and, like we thought in Iowa, take them back to the meth lab, take the cap off, dump it in their batch and cook an ounce of meth. So Congress did not address it the way we did in the Iowa legislature.

Iowa said less than 100 per container, and Congress said, well, no, no meth cook is going to go to all that work if we just require that these pills go in blister packs. So if you have noticed, for the last 10 years when you go to buy your pseudoephedrine, you will find that it is in blister packs. So you have to take it out and tear one open. I have one in my pocket because of the condition I have been in, Mr. Speaker. There is a pair, that is 30 milligrams per pill, 60 milligrams in there, and you have to tear a little corner off, tear the tin foil off the bottom, push those out of there. It is kind of hard, but you can get them out if you are sick and take your pseudoephedrine in that kind of way, because Congress said, we will put these in these blister packs so that it is too hard for the meth cooks to open up

hundreds of these, and then they will not be making methamphetamines in America any longer. So that was Congress, in blister packs. Iowa was less than 100 per container.

So you put those two things together and that means you get these kinds of packages here. This is one that I picked up at the pharmacy in Iowa a little over a week ago. This is 96 pills. These are dry pills, they are in a blister pack, and they are 30 milligrams each, and that is 96 pills in there because Iowa law said you cannot have 100 or more. Well, that did not take them very long to figure out that they could comply with Iowa law, set these on the shelf, the retailers and the pharmacists had no problem, they complied with Iowa law, they did not complain very much, if at all. And the meth cooks looked at that and said, well, there we go, 96 pills per container. I will grab a stack of those containers, take them back to my lab and make myself a little tool where I can lay these blister packs down, drill some holes in a board, use another one for a press, pop all these pills through and they rattle down into the vat below, and they can quickly remove from the blister packs thousands of these pills and turn them into an ounce of methamphetamines.

So between Iowa's method of less than 100 per pack, now we have 96; between Congress's method of they will all be in blister packs, which these are, Mr. Speaker, and all of them that we can purchase today are, it did not slow the meth cooks down very much, if at all. It made it a little bit inconvenient, but it did not really raise the cost of their transaction.

So here we are, we are back on the floor of this Congress today, tomorrow, perhaps the next day; and part of that time we will spend debating how we are going to control methamphetamines in this country.

I will tell you that this is a bipartisan effort. We have the Meth Caucus that is really headed up by the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder). He is one of the four formal leaders there and I would say the most active and the most effective of them. They all deserve credit.

We put together legislation that I was part of back in the early part of this session called the Meth Lab Eradication Act, but the Combat Meth bill is part of this. It is a foundation for a bill that has been brought by Chairman Sensenbrenner of the Judiciary Committee. They have added to it, made some changes, and taken input from some other areas.

So here we are functioning in the fashion that was envisioned by our Founders when they established this Congress and our Constitution, and we are listening from all over the country. But we come to this: we have toughened penalties, we have done a number of things that are all logical and rational, and I support all of those changes that are in there in the overall meth legislation. Yet, when we come to the piece that is designed to remove the meth precursors from the shelves so that the meth cooks cannot get at it, we have not done enough.

So the proposal that is before this Congress that seeks to remove these kinds of products from the hands of the people that are out there producing methamphetamines, sometimes cooking it, sometimes using other methods, it all takes pseudoephedrine of some kind or a precursor, ephedrine, pseudoephedrine or PPA.

The legislation that is here, I am going to argue, does not do enough. First I want to describe, what does Iowa do? Iowa has this long history of methamphetamines; Iowa has struggled with this for a long time. Iowa is in the corn belt and has anhydrous ammonia readily available almost everywhere.

Iowa, like every place in the country, has had Sudafed and those precursors readily available, almost everywhere, convenience stores, grocery stores and pharmacies. They have struggled with this, gotten it wrong in the past; the package in 1996 did not do much good, just like Congress has struggled with this; a blister pack does not do much good.

So what we have done for more than a year, we have done the research, examined this, we have interviewed retailers, convenience store owners, pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies, meth lab cooks, meth addicts, the law enforcement people, the drug czar in Iowa, put our heads together, churned this legislation through.

A retired highway patrolman, who has been 10 years or more in the Iowa House of Representatives, Trooper Clel Baudler did a lot of work to put together the language in Iowa so that we could provide the medication for the legitimate use, that it absolutely has a legitimate use, so that a mother could have a sick child, run to the convenience store, the grocery store, pick up enough medication to just supply the need.

We had enough medication on the shelf that we are supplying an inventory for a meth cook. With all this work that was done by a team in Iowa, they passed this legislation through. After a long period of work, it was passed March 22 of this year. The Governor signed it into law.

Again, this is bipartisan legislation. Since that period of time, I want to point out the success in addressing the meth labs in Iowa.

I would say here, the taller, the brighter color, is the numbers of meth labs per month that were busted by our drug enforcement teams and our law enforcement officers all across Iowa. 2004, we are up there: 142 for January; 122 for February; 299 meth labs busted in Iowa in March of 2004; then it went down to 213 in April; and in May, the number dropped down to 16.

You can see there is a little seasonal cycle to this, where in the summertime, the meth lab numbers, at least those that are busted, go down, even in 2004, 92 in July; 79, August; 68 in September. By the time October came around, of 2004, the number of meth labs busted jumped back up to 114. November of 2004, 130; December, 110. So you can kind of see the pattern that there is a little seasonal cycle here. Yet we have hundreds and hundreds of meth labs that we had to go in and take down and clean up and pay the clean-up costs, the environmental costs, the risks and the risks to children that we have there.

So this history goes back a number of years prior to 2004, and they looked at this history and determined that we want to do something about this. We want to end, we want to eradicate meth labs in Iowa; we want to eradicate meth labs in the United States of America.

So the legislation came forward, having had input from most everyone involved.

Mr. Speaker, the legislation was put together in Iowa, having taken input from all these other areas and weighed everything. They sat down, talked to the retailers, the pharmacists, the pharmaceutical companies, the consumers and came up with this proposal. The proposal was this: Let us reduce the amount of precursors, the Sudafed, we will call it, the pseudoephedrine, that can be available on the shelf easily at the grocery store, convenience store, at a normal outlet.

Let us set an amount there that is going to raise the transaction costs for the meth cook so that he cannot stop in at enough places and buy enough precursor to come home and produce himself, I will say, an ounce of meth. We have to make it so it is no longer practical to do that.

What we did was we passed a law in Iowa that says, you can buy a daily limit of 360 milligrams of pseudoephedrine, 360 milligrams. Here is an example of it. They just began packaging it in 360-milligram packages. That is 12 gel caps, another distinction. When you use the gel, it takes almost twice as much gel to produce the same amount of meth as it does the powder or the starch-based pills.

So the inconvenience of a gel, I don't know if you can really measure that. You take a gel cap or you take a pill. It is kind of inconsequential as to what you prefer. I can tell you the meth-based cooks prefer the starch-based pills far more than they do the liquid gel caps we have here. So we say, anywhere in retail, you can buy in a day anywhere from 360 milligrams of gel only.

So, for example, if a meth cook wanted to go out and produce an ounce of methamphetamine, you can go to 380 retail stops and those 380 retail stops, buy a package of this everywhere. When you get done, you can come back with 380 packages of this, that times 12

would be the number of pills that he would have to have in order to cook, produce an ounce of meth, 380 stops.

Well, that made it a little difficult for the meth cooks to be able to run around and make 380 stops and produce enough meth that paid for them to be able to do that. The results are clear. They are here in my chart.

Mr. Speaker, this is in blue; this is 2005 compared to the green from 2004. This is under the old law that said under 100 pills, and no other real restrictions on that: January, 81 meth labs busted; February, 27, actually, more than 2004; in March, down to 185, less than 2004, but still a high, high number of meth labs; April, 146, still a high number. You can see enforcement is making a difference.

But we get to this point where the bill was enacted on, actually, the first day of June, past year, March 22, the message went out that said these precursors are going to come off the shelf in large quantities, meanwhile, while we let mom go in and get 360 milligrams in a package. When that happened, the inventory began to be reduced on the shelves in Iowa.

By the time we got to the day of the bill's enactment when it had to be off the shelf, except in compliance with these smaller packages, then we saw the meth labs go up from 116, from the year before, down to 42, Mr. Speaker, a significant difference the first day that bill was enacted into law. The following month, it went down from 42 to 29; July, 25 meth labs; August, only 12; September, only 12; October, only 10.

That is the end of my statistics, but my statistics work out to be this: An 80 percent reduction in the number of meth labs in Iowa. An 80 percent reduction. That means 1,011 fewer meth labs in this 5-month period of time that we have experienced now under the new Iowa law.

You think, boy, what would not be worth it to achieve those kinds of results? How much meth came out of the hands of the addicts? What difference did that make in the lives and the lifestyles of the people that are the addicts and the people that have to live around them? We can compare this number, 1,011 fewer meth labs, 80 percent reduction in meth labs, down to around 10 a month or before we were doing 114 that same month. Who knows what it is going to be like for November, December.

By the time we come around here to January, February or March, I think we see this number way down here or maybe perhaps even in the peak month, it was 229 labs that were busted in 2004, 185 in 2005. I think we see a number down here to around 10 or fewer. But we still have a problem.

Mr. Speaker, we have a problem, because these meth precursors, this pseudoephedrine that is available, is available on the shelves of some of our surrounding States. That allows the meth cooks to drive across the river, across the border, go to the store, buy a big sack of it and bring it back home and then sit there and cook up meth for a while.

I think that these remaining labs that we have here, these 25, 12, 10 and 10 per month that we are busting now, and those that we are not uncovering because we do not have 100 percent enforcement in Iowa. I wish we did, but we do not. I think they are being supplied by the surrounding States that do not have a law that produces this kind of result. Mr. Speaker, this has been recognized. Illinois has adopted a law that is very, very close to that of Iowa.

Oregon has a law that simply requires a prescription in order to purchase anything that has pseudoephedrine in it. Oklahoma has a pretty good law. There are some States out there that made some changes in this language. But what I want to do is have a law that gets this job done. I do not want to come back to Congress 1 year, 2 years, or heaven forbid, 10 years from now and put the fix in place of the things like we did in 1995 when we said, surely a meth cook will not go to all this work to pop a pseudoephedrine out of a blister pack, or if you put it in a package under 100, that is too much trouble to screw the cap off a bottle of 96 or 99. These people are resourceful. We have to raise their transaction costs.

Mr. Speaker, my point is this, if you go to a retail stop and you are a meth cook, and you want to do an ounce of meth, you do 380 stops to get these, times 380 gets you enough to open up all of these caplets and turn it into an ounce of meth.

But under the proposal that is before us today, and this Congress, it allows for 3.6 grams a day rather than 360 milligrams, Mr. Speaker. I would point out the difference. The difference is 10 to 1. I have it just stacked up here, this is, if it does not explode in my hands, this represents 3.6 grams of methamphetamines, a typical purchase-size package that you would have.

Under the Federal law that may pass here tomorrow or the next day, one could go to a store and purchase this anywhere in a retail outlet, grocery store, a convenience, Wal-Mart, wherever it might be, and walk away with this much in one's hands. That is a daily purchase rate.

Now, that is not enough to really bother to fire up the old meth cooker, but it is enough to get one-nineteenth of an ounce, and it would allow an individual then to make 18 other stops around the retail establishments. Yes, they have to sign the book. I am glad they do. They have to show their identification. I am glad they do.

These people are breaking the law regularly. They are not going to be concerned about lying when they sign their name or the fact that we are not able to index other retail establishments so that those 19 are not going to be checking the other 18 records. Neither is law enforcement going to be able to have the resources to do that.

We will just go back on that. If we catch somebody with a truckload of this, then we will say, where did you buy it? We will find out they violated our new law. What we want to do is we want to raise the transaction costs. This meth cook can go 19 stops, get this much legally at every stop, come back home, make an ounce of methamphetamine out of that. By the way, he can buy the starch-based powder as opposed to the requirement for the gel that I have spoken about.

Nineteen stops, an ounce of meth. He can probably do that in a couple of hours, come back home and cook a batch of meth. An ounce of meth is enough to last an average addict 90 days.

The other 89 days he can continue to go out and do the same thing and continue to sell the meth. That is the result we are going to have. Or you can have three people join together. They will go around, have six stops, come back with 18 times this amount, make 1 ounce of meth and then that is good enough for each of those three addicts for a month. There will be an ounce of that meth. Yes, it will be a month.

It is about a 90-day supply for one, 30-day supply for each of the other three. Then he will have 29 days to go out there and do this for a profit.

Mr. Speaker, I do not want this Congress to be short. I do not want a solution that seems to be a solution that retailers and pharmaceutical companies agree to, but not one that is going to inconvenience and raise the transaction costs adequately for the meth cooks. I want to get this done. I want to get it done right. I want to honor the work done by the meth caucus here, all the serious work of people who put up vote after vote after vote. I will recognize it through the appropriations process.

When there was amendment after amendment that came to this floor that struck a blow against methamphetamines, I saw people on both sides of this aisle stand up and put up that vote regularly and consistently. There is a real conviction in this Congress to get this right. Sometimes we have a little trouble being able to get down into the depths of the details in order to get it right.

One of the individuals who has provided that kind of background, that kind of knowledge, who has been one of the leaders here when we introduce one of our friends and colleagues, but this time I am going to say that I am introducing the leader of this meth effort in the United States Congress, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) who is the chairman of the meth caucus.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Indiana. This has been no small task on your part, and I appreciate the chronology and the narratives of the efforts at the hearings across this condition and the history you have brought to the floor of this Congress. I know I have got a fair sense of how much work was done here, but you chronicled it in a way that is broader than I appreciated, and I am glad I have a better perspective of it now.

You pointed out some things that I think need to be explored a little bit further, and the language in there that lowers the threshold for drug kingpins is a plus, and the tracking of the few sources in the world that actually produce pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and PPAs is another important part of this legislation. It is things that have been brought together very thoughtfully, and of course, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Blunt) has been a leader on this, and we rolled up our sleeves and put this language together quite a while back.

I want to point out something else, too, which is the concern, what happens with children when they are brought up in an environment where the ma and pa meth labs are and where the fumes are there replete throughout a connection of homes that these poor children are in this toxic environment?

One of the things that we recognize is a statistic that I did not offer here is that, in that 5-month period of time that we have had our law in place that removes the precursors and makes it a lot harder to find those in Ohio, the number of abused children now has gone down in that 5-month period of time. The cumulative fewer number of children is 455 for the State of Iowa, and if that is one child, it begins to be worth the effort; 455 is an astonishing number and a huge success.

It saved $2.4 million in meth labs cleanup. As the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) mentioned, it is 4 to 6 hours to clean up a meth lab. That is not just a one-person team. It is a multiple-person team. These people are trained. They have to have equipment. They have to have the suits to protect them from the toxic material. When it is all done, then they have to throw that all away and go get new stuff.

So between the manpower and the equipment cost and the time that is there and the logistics, and when you charge that back out, a cost to clean up the lab runs somewhere around $4,000 or more. You can kind of figure about $1,000 an hour, but there is a lot of capital involved in just having the equipment to clean up a meth lab.

What we are after here, and I am sure that, Mr. Speaker, you have to be thinking and a lot of the listeners have to be thinking, well, if you are only going to be addressing 15 percent of the meth problem in Iowa and maybe none of the meth problem in New York or in Boston, what purpose is this to try to eliminate as much as we can of the ma and pa meth labs? The purpose is logical, and it is rational because there will be many fewer children that will be abused in that kind of an environment, for one thing. There will be a lot of money that is saved and a lot of law enforcement time that is saved and a lot of resources that are saved if we do not have these ma and pa meth labs out there.

They are scattered. They are divided. They are diversified. They are hard to find. We cannot get them all. So, if we could get them all cleaned up, what remains in the area I represent is 85 percent of the meth now comes across the border from Mexico. We can turn our resources to that.

I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder).

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, you also pointed out something that I think is important when you talked about how we need testing and how we need that as a deterrent.

Traditionally, what we have done with all of our drug enforcement that goes clear back to the heroin days is that we see it from two different ways. One of them is interdiction, and interdiction, you go out on the highway, pull a car over, check to see what they are hauling around, search somebody. When you arrest them, yeah, if they have drugs on them, you take them away from them. You prosecute them. We try to lock some people up in jail. That is the interdiction part of this.

The other side of that is the rehabilitation part, the drug treatment part. Those two things are on opposite wings of the entire problem.

I want to say to the interdiction portion of this, yes, it is important; yes, we need to be aggressive. That is really part of what we are doing. We are trying to take the components of meth out of the hands of the people that make it for one thing and remove some of those components from even overseas on the way that it is funneled through this distribution system that we have, make it harder to access. That is interdiction.

What interdiction does, by definition, when you remove a product, the more successful you are with the interdiction, the higher prices are going to go because this law of supply and demand manifests itself. Another thing that happens is, and I am not particularly concerned about this, is the quality of the drugs will go down because they will be able to sell a lower quality than they can when there is an ample supply for a cheaper price.

So the price of the drug goes up with interdiction because of this law of supply and demand. The quality will go down. In the end, if you only do the interdiction side of this thing, you can reduce that down. If it is hard enough to get, there will be fewer people that are addicted. There will be fewer people that will hand some over to their friend and get them started. It will become a more precious commodity. It will be held together in a smaller group of drug addicts. That is one of the functions that will come from interdiction.

I believe we need to do it, but it is not a solution to it all because on the other side of this is the rehab, the treatment, and meth is one of the hardest things to be successful with the rehab.

I want to at some point ask the gentleman from Indiana what the percentage of success is on rehabilitation and treatment. Do you have some numbers on that?

As I recall, the gentleman from Nebraska's (Mr. Osborne) charts are incremental pictures of a lady, by the way she was an Iowan, and I believe the last picture was in the morgue. So that is the end result of an addict that takes this to the `nth degree, and the odds of being successful on rehab, somewhere between the first time if there is conviction, maybe never if they really do not want to get cured, but six or eight times, one in six or eight might be one of those numbers then. So it sets the framework then I think for the center of this I would like to see us all focus more on.

Yes, push interdiction as much as we can, and let us get treatment for the people that we can help but in between all that is the deterrent portion of it. In between that is the testing portion that you brought up and something that I worked with. Nine years ago, when I was elected to the Iowa Senate, one of my intense planks in my platform was I will work to rewrite Iowa's drug testing law.

As a contractor and employer I have dealt with meth addicts on a construction crew. In fact, I was required to sign contracts where I would pledge a drug-free workplace in order to be able to apply for a Federal contract, and yet, there was no way I could guarantee a drug- free workplace because we did not have a law that allowed me to test my employees.

Well, today we do. On St. Patrick's Day of 1998, our Governor signed that bill into law, spent 2 years working on it, authored it, floor managed it, and pushed it through the legislation. No one's tried to amend it since then that I know of, but it allows for and sets up the legal parameters for an employer to voluntarily drug test their employees, provided that they treat each employee fairly and equally. If they offer treatment, they must offer it to every employee. They have to have a drug assistance personnel there that understands these issues, gone through and taken the educational and training.

So now we have employers that are voluntarily testing their employees, and this drug testing, if I were charged with this responsibility to eradicate all illegal drug use and abuse in America, first, I would have to have the will of the people behind me that would support the will of the people in Congress because believe me these voices in here reflect the will of the people in America. I would say the solution to this is drug testing. Testing in the workplace, people make a decision then that they like their job better than they like their drugs. When that happens, their children go to the ball game, go fishing, spend time with dad, instead of not having a new pair of shoes because the money went for meth or mom for that matter.

We have got to be equal opportunity here even on the other side of this equation. But the positive decision that gets made because drug testing hangs over their head as an employee is deterrent enough to keep people from even trying it, many, many times. That is just in the workplace. We have also the educational. We have the welfare system. Each one of those zones out there, if we brought our drug testing to those zones, we would be able to eradicate drug abuse in America, and I think that is the most effective way to go.

I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I am very happy to hear Mr. Souder present that here on this floor tonight, and I am an enthusiastic supporter of that philosophy, and I will tell him that I have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours in that very subject matter, and it lights me up to hear it come from him. I am anxious to engage in this battle next year, and I believe that I will be able to bring some background to this that will be part of this team that can bring a solution.

And I have argued that if they test in the workplace, and I would be happy to drug test Members of Congress, but if they drug test in the workplace, that is a huge zone of influence in America, and we could clean up the workplace almost 100 percent. We would have a little trouble with the sole proprietors out there. It is going to be hard to get them to participate if they happen to be an addict. Most of them are responsible business people. But if we can

clean up the workplace, then the other zones of our country that we would address would be the educational system, for example, and that is a little harder nut to crack. There will be significant resistance in a place like that. But that is a place where a lot of the drug addiction gets started. Then the other place is on welfare, those people that are on public benefits.

By the way, I would only do the random testing in any of those places. I would not make it 100 percent testing of anyone. And the way we set up our law, we allow that random to be on a sliding scale. The employer can decide what that percentage is. And if that employer decides that he wants to test 100 percent of his employees once a quarter, he can do that. If he wants to slide that random number selector down, and it must be random, it cannot be personal, down to one-tenth of 1 percent, then fine. Nobody needs to know what that equation is. But the deterrent is always there.

So, Mr. Speaker, I think that we have given a good dialogue to methamphetamines here tonight on the floor of Congress and raised the issue. I hope that we bring this bill to the floor tomorrow. I know that we will do good things for methamphetamines and drug addiction in America.

One of my concerns is we are going to end up with 19 stops to get enough precursor to make an ounce of meth versus the 380 if we have the model that I brought before here. As long as I continue to believe in that, I will continue to bring it to the floor of this Congress. But mainly we have got a broad thrust. We have got a good start, and by next year I hope we do take up drug testing. But this is good work done by the meth caucus led by Mr. Souder of Indiana. The hearings that he has had all over this country, the work that he has done deserve a great deal of applause from the parents of America.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and the opportunity to address the House tonight and until tomorrow begins I understand.

First, I would speak to this issue that we have heard as the conclusion of my friends and colleagues from the other side of the aisle, however optimistic they may not be in their presentation to the American people on a regular basis.

As I go through some of the things that are in front of me and I listened to the allegations that have been made that somehow the President has manipulated the intelligence and led this Nation into war because there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I will point out that I flat out reject that statement. It is not possible to prove a negative in the first place, and a rational person would understand that from the beginning.

Additionally, we know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We know that he used them 1 time.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would point out that I will not concede the accuracy of that, and I do not because I do not have that evidence and I have not seen that. I acknowledge the gentleman's statement for the honorable individual he is, and I would point out that we can concur then that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, President Clinton made that statement in 1998 very clearly and unequivocally, and my point is that either Saddam Hussein used his last canister of mustard gas on the Kurds and simply ran out of inventory or else those weapons of mass destruction still have to be someplace, and he constructed then an elaborate ruse to dupe the world and dupe seven or eight or nine different countries on the intelligence.

I point out President Clinton's statement: Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. This is December 1998. With Saddam there is one big difference; he has used them. The international community has little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, says President Clinton, that left unchecked Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons.

Again, 1998, Mr. Speaker, and allegations here on this floor and around this country are that somehow President Bush has manipulated intelligence and apparently misrepresented this to the American people, and the implication is also that he has duped these people that have made these statements, including former President Bill Clinton and a number of other high-profile people within his administration.

The allegation would then have to hold true that somehow the governor of Texas, now President Bush, found a way to dupe the national leaders to somehow manipulate and maneuver hundreds of billions of dollars worth of national intelligence to produce these kinds of results.

It is simply a ludicrous position to take. It will not hold water, it is not logical, it is not rational, and the more the American people hear about this, the more they begin to think about it, the more they begin to understand it, the less they are going to believe these allegations.

I would also point out that the individual who has had his 15 minutes of fame and then some, the erstwhile ambassador who was sent by the CIA to go to Niger to investigate the question as to whether Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, that individual, of course, we know as the husband of now publicly discussed Valerie Plame, at her recommendation. As we understand, he was sent by the CIA.

He had not been in Niger in 20 years. He was not a weapons expert like his wife may have been. But he went there, and he came back and gave one story to the New Republic Magazine. He gave another story under oath to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which thoroughly eviscerated his viability and his credibility.

So the statements that were made for publication for the fame did not hold up under oath, did not hold up under scrutiny. One thing we are confident of is that erstwhile ambassador

who went on a mission to supposedly represent the United States, Joseph C. Wilson, the individual who went over there for the CIA, if one is on a mission in a foreign country for the CIA, one would think that they would have some level of integrity they would have to hold up, have some level of confidentiality that they would have to hold up. One would think that if they went on a mission, a secret clandestine mission, first, that they would be qualified; second, that they would maintain that level of secrecy and confidentiality, that they would come back and report back to their superiors and it would be an accurate report and it would be precise and it would be credible and it would hold up under oath.

That report, alleged to have been delivered in print by one Joseph C. Wilson, erstwhile ambassador, was not delivered in print. It was delivered verbally, and the verbal report that we have the notes of and the knowledge of, Mr. Speaker, is a verbal report that indicates that the Iraqis were seeking weapons of mass destruction, yellowcake uranium in Niger. It indicates the very thing that he alleges today was not true.

Yet this seems to be some kind of allegations by the other side, if they like what they hear, are enough for them to say this is confirmed and absolute proof; and rational, thinking Americans know better. Critical thinking Americans know better. In fact, this President would not use any language in a State of the Union address or any other kind of speech unless he knew that it had been thoroughly vetted, it was reliable. And it was, by the way, vetted and reliable and delivered into that speech on January 28, 2003, in these Chambers from just in front of where the Speaker is right now when the President gave his State of the Union Address.

Those now infamous 16 words that are alleged to have been untruthful to the American people start out with ``we have learned from the British'' that the Iraqis have been seeking uranium from Africa. Now, ``we have learned from the British'' is true. That is a fact, and no one has challenged that fact. ``We have learned from the British that the Iraqis are seeking,'' that qualification precludes any of the rest of that statement as long as the rest of that statement is consistent with what we have learned from the British; and to turn that into something that is now called a lie is disingenuous and dishonest to the American people.

I reminded the body here last week, last Wednesday night, that there were commercials that were run across this country on television in the 1996 Presidential campaign. There were issues there about integrity and honesty in that Presidential campaign. Charlton Heston went on television, and he said, looking into the camera, ``Mr. President, when you say something that is wrong and you do not know that it is wrong, that is a mistake. But, Mr. President, when you say something that is right and you know it is wrong, that is a lie.'' That is the distinction between a mistake and a lie. That distinction has not been recognized by the other side of the aisle, and it is willfully being ignored.

I will not concede that a mistake was made. I think the words in that State of the Union Address are precisely accurate. I think the British would concede that point today. I think any rational, critical thinking person would concede that point today, Mr. Speaker. But this has been twisted and warped to the point where it is jeopardizing our national security, and that is why I am on the floor here tonight.

I have been over in the Middle East a number of times. The last time I came back was August 20 of this past summer. I have been there with our men and women in uniform when they are strapped on with helmets and bullet-proof vests. I have been in and ridden in and inspected some of those armored vehicles that have been hit by enemy fire, hit by IEDs. I happen to have inspected an armored Humvee that was hit by a rocket and an RPG almost simultaneously. It rolled off the road upside down, and the four American soldiers that were in that armored Humvee walked away and were on patrol the next day thanks to the armor that is there.

I have been to Fallujah, I believe a year ago last May, where the Marines were bolting on armor then and preparing for battle that was ahead. So we have accelerated the production of our armor for all of our vehicles there. Some of them are not armored. They stay on the base where they are safe. But almost all of our vehicles that go out anywhere where they are in danger are fully armored, top, bottom, and sideways, with bullet-proof windows in them. We have done a fantastic job to ramp up the construction and development of armor and done a pretty good job.

We were not ready for this. The Humvees were not designed to go into combat. They were not designed to drive over IEDs. They were not designed to take direct hits from RPGs or rocket fire. In fact, they were not designed to take hits from AK-47s. They were not a combat vehicle in the beginning of those operations. So we had to adapt to the circumstances that were there.

We began sending steel over there, and it was cut and fitted and it was bolted on or welded on, and our military went right to work as quickly as they could to get as much armor up as fast as they could. We started our factories up here. We took an existing production line and multiplied its production capability by at least 10 times to get our armored Humvees out in place and to put the armor on our trucks and to get ready.

Now we do send out convoys that are fully armored on a regular basis, and it has been a long time since we have exposed significant numbers of vehicles or American soldiers out there in vehicles that were not armored, Mr. Speaker. So this argument that it is something other than that I think is specious, and I do not think it is based on fact.

The statement that the President made about the irresponsible statements when people undermine our military efforts, I will go further than that, and I will relate an incident for me a year ago last June, about June 17. I was in a hotel in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq the next day early. I turned on the television to Al-Jazeera TV. As I watched that television, it was Arabic audio and it was English subtitles, and on that television came Moqtada al-Sadr, a big black beard, and as he spoke in Arabic, the English subtitles came on underneath on the screen, and the subtitles said, ``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.''

Listen to that echo in the ears of Moqtada al-Sadr, and we know that his voice was echoing in the ears of our enemy, the people we call the insurgents on our nice days, the people who are sitting somewhere in a mud hut or a stone building and they have some 155mm rounds. They have got explosives. They have got detonating devices. They have got shrapnel built into this, and they are making improvised explosive devices. They are watching their new satellite dish TV.

Some of the communities there in Iraq have more than one satellite dish per household. They were illegal when we first came into Iraq, but every Iraqi today has access to satellite TV. Every Iraqi today can watch Al-Jazeera TV. And on Al-Jazeera TV, they would see these kinds of scenes of Moqtada al-Sadr saying, ``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.'' And the enemy who are making improvised explosive devices see that on television. It encourages them. It causes them to build more bombs, not less. It causes them to plant more bombs, not less. It causes them to detonate more bombs, not less. It causes them to have more courage, more hope, a stronger spirit to fight our American soldiers because of the words that came out of Moqtada al-Sadr.

Now, imagine how encouraging that is to our enemy over in Iraq, and many of them are not Iraqis. In fact, most of the enemy, I understand, are not Iraqis but imported fighters from other countries. Imagine how encouraging it is when they see on their Al-Jazeera TV, when they hear the voice and see the face of a quasi-leader of the United States of America, someone from the floor of Congress, someone from the floor of the United States Senate, someone who is doing a press conference out on the steps of the Capitol,

someone who is doing talking head television, someone who says, wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, get them out of there, Mr. President, we need to get out of Iraq. Imagine how much encouragement that gives to the enemy. And what is the enemy going to do? They are going to recruit more. They are going to build more bombs. They are going to attack more Americans.

I reject the idea that one can say they fervently pray that the troops come home and they support the troops. I reject the idea that they can support the troops and reject their mission. Mr. Speaker, if you are for the troops, you are for their mission. And if you are against the troops, you are against their mission. But these things are inextricably linked. They cannot be separated.

We cannot ask an American soldier to go in this country or overseas, risk their life, perhaps give their life on a mission that we do not believe in. We would not send them on a mission we do not believe in. We would not ask them to do that. It would be the most dishonest, disingenuous thing we could do as the United States Government in Congress and the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief to order men and women into a theater of battle and not support their mission.

When I talk with the families that have lost a loved one in this war on terror, it is a sad time, and that price they have paid cannot be felt unless we ourselves have had that loss, but we can empathize with them. We can pray for them. We can sympathize with them. We can try to understand. But invariably those that I talk to, those that I meet with, will tell me they want their son or their daughter's life to have meaning. They want that sacrifice to have meaning. And they will say do not give up on this mission. My son believed in what he did. He volunteered for this mission. Let us have meaning. Let us have freedom for the Iraqi people. Let us have freedom for the Afghani people.

By the way, while I bring that up, what is the distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq? Why do I not hear from the other side of the aisle ``get your troops out of Afghanistan''? The statement is never made. We forget about the naysayers that were here before we went into Afghanistan and before we liberated the Afghanis. There were plenty of naysayers. They said we cannot go into that part of the world. No one has ever been able to be go into that part of Afghanistan or even Afghanistan at all and be able to liberate, invade, occupy because the terrain is so difficult, that Mujahideen are such tough fighters.

So 2 months after September 11, the American military were in there, coalition forces were in there, and we still heard the naysayers. But as the operation got wrapped up, as there was more security and more safety and votes coming along in Afghanistan where people had never voted before on that particular piece of real estate, they did so and they have done so twice. They have done that because of the American soldiers giving them that liberty. But the critics essentially shut up about Afghanistan but not about Iraq.

Is the difference the number of lives, Mr. Speaker? Is the difference that 200 Americans have lost their lives in Afghanistan and 2,000 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq? If that is the difference, then I would challenge the left, the pacifist left, the people who have difficulty figuring out how they are going to support the troops and oppose the mission, and if they were rational, they would admit that that dichotomy could not be accepted or tolerated. They cannot seem to draw the line on what the difference is between Afghanistan and Iraq, 200 lives versus 2,000 lives. If the number of lives were the difference, then they should tell us from their position how many are enough. How many lives would they spend to free 25 million Afghanis? How many lives would it cost to free 25 million Iraqis?

And, yes, the price has been high, and it has hurt. And it will hurt far more if this job, this task, is not completed, if this freedom that has been so hard fought and won is allowed to go back to a state of tyranny where a dictator would take over in Iraq and where we would see a center for Islamic terrorism for al Qaeda.

It would clearly be there if we pulled out of there today. I would wager if you put this up for a ballot to the Iraqi people and asked, do you want the United States and the coalition forces to pull out as fast as they can, that ballot referendum, I believe 95 percent would say, no, we would like to have the Americans leave not real soon, just soon enough to get control of our country.

That is moving along at an acceptable rate. I will not say I am happy about the speed. It is a tough job. The infrastructure in Iraq has been depreciated and dilapidated over 35 to 40 years of neglect. So there is old equipment that does not function very well. Parts and materials to keep it in shape, many have to be manufactured. The oil fields need new wells and distribution systems. They need to get their refineries up to shape. They need a distribution system that will get that oil out of the country so they can get some cash coming back in.

But Saddam Hussein, when he was in power, was killing an average of 182 of his own people every day. Every day on average. Hundreds of thousands of them have been found in mass graves. The 800,000 Swamp Arabs that were there before Saddam Hussein decided they were an enemy of the state were decimated down to 220,000. Some escaped. In the end, about a fourth of the population of Swamp Arabs in the area of the wetlands, Saddam Hussein dried them up in order to take away their livelihood and way of life. That area is twice the size of the Everglades, and that way of life was destroyed by Saddam. We have reconstructed about the size of the Everglades, and the Swamp Arabs are starting to repopulate. But that is one-thirtieth of Iraqi population doing what they can.

The argument that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and now we hear from the gentleman from Massachusetts that he did, what did he do with them? Where did they go? Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Saddam Hussein said, I have those weapons of mass destruction. He defied 17 U.N. resolutions stretching back to 1990. We know from September 11 that we cannot wait until a threat is fully developed.

The question still remains, we do not know, we do not know how large the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were. We just know he had stockpiles. He used them. We do not know what happened to them. But the King rule of physics is everything has to be someplace. So where are they? There is no evidence he destroyed the weapons of mass destruction. But due to Saddam Hussein's obstruction, the materials once declared by the Saddam regime were never accounted for, even though he declared them.

I also want to point out that in October 2002, a bipartisan majority of Congress authorized President Bush to use force if necessary to deal with the continuing threat posed by Saddam Hussein. We also had a national policy that Congress endorsed of regime change in Iraq.

All of these things were consistent with the will of the people of America, as debated and voted on in Congress. H.J. Res. 114 stated that by continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, and actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations, those were the activities going on by Saddam Hussein.

And the intelligence of countries that concurred with ours. The 15 members of our intelligence community in this country, and additionally some of the other countries who concurred with our intelligence were Great Britain and France. France opposed our operations there, concurred with our intelligence. Germany opposed our operations and concurred with our intelligence. Russia same story: concurred with our intelligence, opposed our operations there.

What do those three countries have in common? The answer is those three countries were three of the most vocal opponents to the liberalization of Iraq. I said at the time that the decibels of their objections to the liberation of Iraq can be directly indexed to their interest in the oil development contracts that they had access to that they designed with Saddam Hussein prior to the beginning of our operations of the liberation of Iraq.

They had a vested interest in the oil in Iraq. They had contracts signed with Saddam Hussein, which of course were nullified by the liberation of Iraq. Come to find out after the fact, it was not just legitimate oil contracts that had them all in a dither; it was also the Oil-For-Food fraud campaign that was replete through those three countries, a number of others besides, and through the United Nations itself. Also, the U.N. Security Council echoed the congressional assessment of the threat posed by Iraq. Even the U.N. Security Council agreed with our intelligence: there was a fair amount of fraud going through the Oil-For-Food program.

I have to point out George Galloway, as a Brit, was apparently profiting significantly from Oil-For-Food, and his wife had a number of six-figure checks deposited in her checking account; and the facts are coming home to roost in the case of Mr. Galloway.

So the objections to the liberation of Iraq, many of the countries that objected had a conflict of interest. That vested interest reminds me of Barbara Conable's famous statement of hell hath no fury as a vested interest masquerading as a moral authority.

That is what we heard prior to the liberation of Iraq. We know Saddam Hussein had sufficient time to shuffle his weapons of mass destruction. They could have buried or spirited them out of the country.

By the way, Iraq is a country where everybody digs holes. It looks like one big prairie dog village. That countryside has a lot of open holes and a lot of things buried. We found a fully operational MiG-29 buried in the desert in Iraq. That is a whole lot bigger than you would need for a stockpile of the weapons of mass destruction. Did we find it because of intelligence or we had a metal detector or because somebody had good instincts, or because we had some scientific way to fly over the top and notice the difference in the terrain? Or did somebody tip us off to find that fully operational MiG-29 buried in Iraq?

Mr. Speaker, no, we found it because the wind blew the sand off the tail fin. If there had been weapons of mass destruction inside that plane, if it just filled the cockpit, that would have been plenty enough to convince even the skeptics on the other side of the aisle that the weapons of mass destruction are not really the question that is before this country or the world, but a red herring that is designed to throw the American people into a frustration with the decision- making process and the effort to convince Americans that things are going badly there.

Whenever we lose an American, that is something going very, very badly. Whenever we have Americans exposed to enemy, we will have casualties, Mr. Speaker. But when we look objectively at what has been accomplished in Iraq, when we objectively look to see that there were milestones set on the calendar, the effort over there has met or exceeded every single milestone.

Certainly the liberation of Iraq came around a lot faster than anybody thought it would. I point out to the American people that the city of Baghdad, about 5 million people, is the largest city in the world, ever in the history of the world, to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power. It happened in the blink of a historical eye with an extraordinarily small number of casualties for a city that size. No one quite believed on that Thursday, an American armored column had gone into Baghdad, driven in and came back out, and the enemy had given up the ghost and essentially disappeared.

But that is what happened. They met that deadline. They set a new milestone for armored columns going across the desert and for the liberation of 5 million people. They were way ahead of the agenda, the targeted timetable.

And then we set up the CPA, the provisional authority under Paul Bremer. The idea was to establish a functional government in Iraq and be able to pass that over to the Iraqis so they could govern themselves. This began in March of 2003. March 22 was the date Baghdad was liberated.

I happen to know, since I was in Mosul sometime after that, that General Patrais and the 101st Airborne that liberated Mosul, they held open and free elections in May of 2003. They elected a governor and vice governor and put together a government of the people by the people and for the people, a Kurd, and I am not sure actually of the religious definition of the other individual, but I watched them interact with each other and I watched them do business. They brought a businessman that could speak English. They were optimistic about the city of Mosul.

In fact, when the 101st Airborne left Mosul and deployed after their year tour of duty, the Iraqis took a boulevard, a broad boulevard in Mosul. And I only saw one street sign in all of Baghdad my first trip. Most everything had been looted and stripped for the metal. The one street sign in Baghdad was a street named Jihad. So they left that up and tore down the other street signs.

Go over to the city of Mosul and I did not notice any street signs there, but I have a picture of a street sign in Mosul, that sign is 101st Airborne Air Assault Division. They named that street after the 101st Airborne. And this was not something put up by the 101st Airborne unless they had the same difficulty with spelling that the Iraqis had. They misspelled ``division'' and they misspelled ``assault.'' That makes it genuine in that effort.

I am quite proud of the way the Iraqis responded to the Americans. I am proud of the way they respond to them in most of the areas of Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to fly over Fallujah, where we have had as much conflict as anywhere, and see people come out into the streets and wave and smile. They come out and wave because they are grateful to Americans for giving them a chance at freedom.

But this message that the American people are getting that the credibility of the administration is not there disappoints me a great deal. It undermines our American troops. It does give aid and comfort to the enemy. It encourages the enemy to attack more Americans. It is costing American lives.

When people come to this floor of Congress, when they step out into a press conference, when they speak on the floor of the Senate, they are viewed as quasi-leaders of the United States of America. This encourages our enemies. When I see a soldier anywhere in America, particularly in my district, serve their second tour of duty, and they lost their life defending freedom in their second tour of duty, it is infuriating to me because I believe if we stuck together as a Nation, if we stuck by the deal and the agreement that this Congress has when we have our vote on the floor of this Congress, when the vote goes up and men and women go to war, you stand with them, you stand beside them, you support them with everything you have. That means, yes, bulletproof vests; yes, armored Humvees; and, yes, support and equipment and training and tactics and technology and great leadership.

But it means support the mission, Mr. Speaker. You cannot ask a soldier to go to war and tell him that you do not support their mission. And so the pessimism that abounds that seeks to undermine the presidency here and seeks to establish a majority in the House and the Senate in the upcoming election is all about negativism. It is all about dragging down our foreign policy. It is all about trying to prove to the American people that the administration has not been successful.

But each milestone that is reached in Iraq, handing over the CPA of Paul Bremer's over to the temporary civilian government, that happened 2 days early. And then they had elections, and the elections were there to put people in temporarily into their temporary parliament and the temporary parliament got together and they agreed on a constitution and the constitution was rolled out on time. And they had an election to ratify the constitution, Mr. Speaker, all in an extraordinary amount of time.

The United States of America declared its independence July 4, 1776; and yet we did not get our Constitution ratified until 1789, 13 years later. Now it took a while to earn our freedom, I grant, and the war was long, and it was bloody, and it was costly, and it was brutal. We have our freedom, and we have our Constitution. In fact, the Iraqis have their constitution far sooner than the American Constitution has

been established, and it is ratified by a full vote of the Iraqi people.

Now, about 1 month from today, the Iraqis will go to the polls, and they will select a new parliament, and this will be a sovereign nation when that new parliament is seated. It will have all the legitimacy of any nation that sits at the United Nations today. Iraq will be fully, fully legitimized. The vote of the people will seat the members of parliament. They will select a prime minister and their leaders and that legitimacy that is there takes them to another level.

But this is an astonishing thing. This is far, far more freedom, far, far closer to establishing a functioning rule of law than has ever been seen in that part of the world before. And the inspiration for the Arab people all around Iraq that see that a nation like Iraq can have freedom, when people breathe free, they give inspiration to others who see them breathe free and out of that yearning will bring them to the streets like it did in Lebanon.

The Lebanese reached out for their measure of freedom, and that is part of the inspiration of Iraq, and it is part of the inspiration of Afghanistan. It is part of the inspiration that this President has laid out in an articulated way to the world, the inspiration that we have been attacked by enemies from without. We did nothing to provoke them. They attacked us and killed approximately 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. And we went to Afghanistan and liberated 25 million people, and we went to Iraq and liberated 25 million people. Fifty million people that had not been free before in any substantive way are free today. Those two countries can become and I believe will become the lodestar nations, the Arab nations that can be the inspiration for the rest of the Arab world.

The habitat that breeds terror is a habitat that breeds poverty, ignorance, jealousy and hatred. That is the environment that is being exploited by the wahabis and the madrassas that are teaching this hatred in the young people. And the pressure that comes on those countries from the measure of that kind of hatred, they are being taught that, somehow or another, it is part of this age-old philosophy.

I really do believe that if you would scramble up all of our cultures and all of our people and erase our institutional memory and toss us into a totally new environment in a random way, some of us would wake up in the morning and think, huh, my glass is half full, and I am going to go to work and see if I can fill it up the rest of the way. And others, they look at their glass and say mine is half empty and that fellow over there, he is seeking to fill his glass. If he were not doing that, mine would fill spontaneously. That is the class envy, jealousy, hatred that comes.

It has always been this conflict between freedom and communism, freedom and fascism, freedom and national socialism, and freedom and militant Islamic extremism, all the same kind of class envy jealousy, the hatred that comes from the idea that if somehow other people were not industrious and did not earn a profit, somehow those resources of the world are finite and they will flow at random to other folks who do not quite try so hard or have the technology or have not developed the education. But this spirit of entrepreneurship and free enterprise will establish itself in a strong way in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

In fact, I gave a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce. I did not know they had a Chamber of Commerce. We pulled into Baghdad at the al Rashid Hotel, and they asked me if I would give a speech to them. So I said yes I would.

It was about 3:00 in the afternoon. Walked in there, and they were getting ready to introduce me, and I said introduce me to the interpreter first. That is going to be really helpful. And they said, no, we do not have an interpreter. You do not need an interpreter, Mr. Congressman, because they all speak English here at the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce. About 56 to 58 of them sitting at the dinner tables.

So I gave them a little speech, and you could tell they understood English. They laughed at the right time, and they smiled at the right time, and they clapped at a time that I thought was appropriate anyway. I was quite encouraged at the level of interest in developing a culture of free enterprise in Iraq.

When that speech was over, I needed to get on to the next meeting, but it was an instantaneous cluster, huddle like, actually. They had to eventually just pull me out of this huddle. We were passing back and forth business cards and writing notes and trying to find a way to connect with the inspiration of free enterprise that is embodied in almost every American that walks the streets of Baghdad or Iraq. They look to us to be leaders in a lot of ways, not just military but on free enterprise capitalism perspective, and as they continue to develop that their economy will grow.

It takes a level of integrity and morality to have a functioning free enterprise system. It works on trust is why. As that trust gets built and established in the culture in Iraq, it is going to be a stronger and stronger economy. As the free enterprise economy flows out in Baghdad and the other cities in Iraq and connects itself with the new thing that will come, that will be available for the Iraqis after December 15, when they are a truly sovereign nation in control of all of their own assets, then they will be able to sit down and negotiate or have competitive bids for the development of the oil resources in Iraq.

They must have that. They must have outside capital, foreign capital and foreign technology and foreign know-how, and a lot of it should be and hopefully is American technology capital know-how to pour into Iraq, to go out and punch in hundreds of new oil wells and new pipelines and distribution systems and refineries so that that oil can pour out of that country and the money can pour in.

Another allegation that comes from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, is that somehow we did this all for oil. But oil is something that you can purchase on the open market around the world. We did not go in there to steal anybody's oil. We went in there to protect that oil for the Iraqis.

It is absolutely clear that the oil resources of Iraq belong to the people of Iraq, and we protected that, preserved that, and we are keeping our pledge with the Iraqi people. They will develop the oil resources with foreign capital and, when that happens, then the cash will flow into the economy and it will multiply itself over and over again. And Iraq becomes the lodestar Arab nation that brings freedom to that part of the world.

Like, as the European, the eastern European nations saw, an echo of freedom go across eastern Europe when the wall went down on November 9, 1989, I believe we will see an echo of freedom go through the Arab world, probably not as dramatically, probably not as quickly, probably not as bloodlessly. But I believe we will see a free Arab people some time within the next generation.

At that point, the habitat that breeds terrorists will disappear. It will not be the culture that can create that kind of a thing. And I mean that two ways. But the culture of freedom does not produce a culture of terror. In fact, free people never go to war against other free people. This country has never gone to war against another democracy, another group of people that had an opportunity to go to the polls and select their leaders and their national destiny. That is another known fact that does not seem to get out on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker.

So I am optimistic about the solutions there. I applaud the President's vision and having the courage to step in and take the initiative to free 50 million people, 50 million Arab people, to give them an opportunity. And those people will be our allies, by the way, for a long, long time to come in a part of the world where it is pretty important to have those kind of allies.

As I listened to some of the other laments that were here earlier this evening, the discussion about the Budget Reconciliation Act, the people who are critical of that, of the Deficit Reduction Act that we brought some $53 billion to come out of the proposed spending up until the year 2010, not enough, but a start. A half of 1 percent of our budget is all that amounts to, Mr. Speaker. I do not think it is very hard to step up and do a very small half of 1 percent trim, given the kind of spending that we have had.

But the other side of the aisle does not offer $1 in fiscally responsible cuts,

not one; and they do not offer one vote to support our fiscal responsibility, not one. Additionally, they demagogue the very things we have done that are responsible.

The statement was made over here earlier tonight that we have cut $40 billion from the student loans and that somehow it is going to come out of the students, their loans and their aid. Not. Not $40 billion from the student loans. The students are not going to notice any difference unless there is more cash available, not less, because we have made administrative changes, changes that affect the interest rates and the fees that are being charged by the lenders. This is not going to affect the students. This is reform. That is efficiency in government and efficiency in business.

But you know the demagoguery again. If I was as pessimistic as this and if I had this philosophy, this argument that everything is wrong and you cannot trust your leadership night after night after night, I think I would swim to Cuba and try to find a place where I would be happy. That would be my advice to the people that are here every night tearing down the optimism of America, undermining the truth that is America and making it difficult for us to move forward into this bold and brave future that we need to.

And, by the way, they have no confidence in our economy. I would go down through the whole list of economic indicators. We have had the longest period of consistent growth over 3 percent for 10 consecutive quarters. That is the longest since for the last two decades to have that kind of growth. Unemployment is down to 5.0 percent, when 5.6 is considered to be a pretty good position to be in. It has been ratcheting down. This economy has been creating more and more jobs. Nearly every economic indicator is stronger and stronger and stronger.

That in the face of the negatives, that in the face of Hurricane Katrina. This in 10 consecutive quarters of growth over 3 percent is after we got hit by September 11 and the attack on our financial markets. It is after some of the business circumstances that were brought up short by this Congress, and I am pleased that they were, hit the markets as well. After people lost confidence in the markets, September 11 came and destroyed the financial industry. We still came back and recovered with 10 consecutive quarters of growth over 3 percent, Mr. Speaker.

So this is a strong and robust economy, and it is a credit to the Bush tax cuts, those tax cuts that we need to make permanent, the extra resources, the billions of dollars that we have in our Treasury today because we had the courage to cut taxes so our economy could grow and create jobs. That is the kind of vision that is sorely lacking on the other side. They are good at criticizing, but I am waiting for a positive agenda, Mr. Speaker.

This idea that American soldiers should be, go off and fight without support for their mission has got to come back to the people who believe somehow they can support our soldiers but not support the mission, Mr. Speaker. So I just tell you that I am optimistic about the future of America. I know our economy is strong. I am optimistic about the future of our economy.

I am watching a confirmation process begin over in the United States Senate for Judge Alito. I think he will be the individual that comes to the Supreme Court and begins a constitutional restoration process. I am looking forward to that. We must restore this Constitution. It has been eroded over the last 30 to 40 years with activist judges.

The Kilo decision was the last straw for me and a lot of us. I agreed with the liberals on that. I will say that the gentleman from Massachusetts and I, whom we most generally disagree, he and I agreed and spoke essentially back to back here on the floor in opposing the Kilo decision. That is Mr. Frank from Massachusetts. When he and I agree on a constitutional issue I am going to say and oppose the Supreme Court, chances are the text of the Constitution ought to be respected.

We will get back to that, Mr. Speaker, with this confirmation of Judge Alito. The corner needs to be turned. The American people need to be informed on how positive things are over in Iraq and that our economy is strong and we are going to move forward in a bold future with a bold agenda.

We need to pass this reconciliation act so that we can offset the costs of Hurricane Katrina. I will do more. We need to drill for oil in ANWR. We need to drill for natural gas and oil on our Outer Continental Shelf and hand this future over to our children and grandchildren with oil supplies, good tax programs, a national security program, a whole package. So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence tonight and the privilege to speak to this House.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the managers on the part of the House have until 2:00 a.m., November 16, 2005 to file the conference report to accompany H.R. 3058, making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development, the Judiciary, District of Columbia, and independent agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2006, and for other purposes.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at midnight), the House adjourned until today, Wednesday, November 16, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

First, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank Chairman Sensenbrenner and Mr. Gohmert for bringing this underlying bill to the floor, H.R. 1751.

My amendment specifically addresses the problem of violence in and around Federal courthouses. The amendment authorizes any Federal judge, magistrate, United States Attorney, or any other officer of the Department of Justice who represents the U.S. in a court of law to carry firearms. They would be subject to training and regulation as prescribed by the Attorney General.

Currently, a number of States permit State prosecutors to carry firearms. However, this right is not extended to all Federal prosecutors and Federal judges. My amendment would allow both Federal judges and Federal prosecutors to carry firearms for their and their families' protection and provide for training and regular certification.

The need for my amendment was made clear by the recent tragedies involving, and we have heard the chairman speak to these issues, the brutal

murder of family members of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow; the slaying of Judge Rowland Barnes, his court reporter, deputy sheriff, and a Federal officer in Atlanta; the cold-blooded shootings outside the Tyler, Texas courthouse, among others. These situations underscore the importance of security for judges and prosecutors.

There is a significant need to allow judges and U.S. Attorneys to carry firearms because threats and dangerous assaults upon them are steadily increasing. By virtue of their positions, United States judges and prosecutors are high-profile targets. They and their families have often been victims of violent crimes, murder, and threats to their personal safety.

United States judges, justices, and U.S. Attorneys bravely serve the people of the United States of America. They prosecute our most serious, sophisticated, and violent offenders. These offenders range from international terrorists to armed career criminals.

Protecting the courthouse is important, Mr. Chairman, but the courthouse is just a building. This amendment is designed to provide meaningful protection to the actual person and his or her family. My amendment extends protection from the courthouse to the homes in the areas where the judges and prosecutors live.

Our Nation relies and depends upon the sound and unintimidated judgment of these dedicated public servants. We owe them every reasonable tool to protect themselves and their families. This includes the right to carry an effective personal security tool.

Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``yes'' vote on this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Yes, Mr. Chairman, it applies only to Federal officials who will represent the United States of America in a court of law, the voice of the Federal Government in a court of law.

Mr. Chairman, on that specific question, I cannot answer ``yes'' to or ``no'' to. I am working with a piece of language I believe in, and I have not looked a Federal official in the eye that specifically asked me.

I have been informed that, yes, we have Federal officials that have asked for this legislation. I would point out that it is not mandatory that they accept carrying a firearm; it is their option that they exercise under the regulation provided by the Attorney General.

It is subject to training and regulation as prescribed by the Attorney General.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for organizing this Special Order and her leadership.

At this time I would like to address the Deficit Reduction Act. It seemed like it was heavy lifting for a lot of people in this Congress; it should not be. It should not be when you are going to reduce by one- half of 1 percent the trajectory of the increase of Federal spending down range 5 years. I do not find that heavy lifting. I find that a piece of cake for somebody who has had to balance a family budget, a business budget, and meet payroll with my own employees for over 1,400 consecutive months. We had to find a way to make it work, and we did not have a budget like this to work with, and we made it work.

I want to talk about the agricultural aspect of this. First, we brought this package before the Committee on Agriculture, and we went for approximately 3 hours in debate, listening to demagoguery about how painful it was to squeeze down some of these categories within the agriculture budget. And this is over 5 years.

One of those subjects is the commodity programs direct payments. We reduce that, the projected spending, by 1 percent. That is $1 out of $100. The actual effect out in the field is approximately one-twentieth of the payments going into a region like I represent where we raise corn and soybeans.

The people that I represent there are fiscally responsible people. They watch their budget. They invest their dollars wisely and do a good job of marketing and managing, all because it is good business. That is what it takes to have black ink on the bottom line instead of red ink.

I am very confident I can take this back and look my neighbors in the eye and say we did the best we can for the agriculture economy. We did the best we could for our agriculture producers. We pinched that down by 1 percent on direct payments.

We are looking at WTO trade negotiations coming up in Hong Kong in December. We are talking with the rest of the world about how we want to really eliminate export subsidies, and we can do that without great pain to this country and reduce domestic subsidies and be able to get access to the developing world so we can sell our products.

Our agriculture producers know they can compete with anybody in the world if they can get access to the markets without having punishing tariffs at every developing country in the world. We brought some of those people in as trading partners. We are going to expand that. But if that 1 percent here is a painful thing, then I am going to say

we are going to have one difficult debate when the time comes to adjust our long-term trade trajectory.

By the way, there was not a single Democrat that would support any of this reconciliation package, and it became a partisan issue just to pass CAFTA. People in sugar said, no, it might take a teaspoon a day out of our markets. Possibly so. Aside from that, there was not even an argument that CAFTA was not good, but it became a partisan issue. I am watching trade become a partisan issue. I watched budget responsibility become a partisan issue, and I listened to criticism after criticism from the other side of the aisle about what we are doing to our producers during a time of need. It is always a time of need.

But it is also a time where we have just pulled in the best 3 years in agriculture ever where I live. We have harvested the best crops in the last 3 years. Their overall accumulated value is more than it has ever been. We raised more corn and soybeans this year than any time in history, except last year, which was a record. That came upon a good crop for 2003. It is a good time to be responsible in agriculture, and I believe the producers will stand up and take this just fine.

We minimized some of the damage to agriculture as well. Some money was left over in the watershed rehab program, and so we put that in our Deficit Reduction Act. The Conservation Security Program, I like that program. I spent my life in soil conservation. I have built more terraces than any Member of Congress, and I do not have to wonder who is second. More waterways, more watershed dams. I have spent my life protecting soil and water. I like those projects. We took no money out of any one that was qualified today, but were required to pull some money out down range in order to come with these savings that we needed to get, which is $3.7 billion out of agriculture.

Skipping across some of these, the food stamp program, that probably consumed, out of 3 hours, probably 2 hours of the apportioned demagoguery for the day. It was how we could take food out of the mouths of babes, pregnant mothers, senior citizens, everybody you can imagine. I sat there and listened to that, and if I did not have a brain of my own to work with, I would have felt so guilty I would have crawled out of that room after they got done with me. The truth is when you look at it, we did not take any food out of anybody's mouth. We saved overall $844 million up to the year 2010.

I went back and looked, how much waste do we have in food stamps just for the last year we have records. Well, $1 billion in food stamp waste. That is fraud.

Mr. Gingrey spoke about how we will cut waste, fraud and abuse. We did that in the food stamp program, and we did not do it randomly. We realized there are States that grant food stamps to people who do not qualify for any other benefit. That is a pretty good sign it is a fraud. We conditioned it if they need another benefit, like TANF, it will qualify them for food stamps. Unless they do, we are not going to give them a bunch of food stamps because, likely, they are not qualified. Most of the States are that way. Iowa is that way. It works for us. We do not hear complaints because it is a responsible way to manage.

The other side of the food stamp piece was we extended the period of time. When people come into this country legally, they pledge they are going to be self-sufficient. We say to them, under current law that means you do not get these benefits for 5 years. Then you can be unself-sufficient and we will help you out. We extend that time on food stamps from 5 years to 7 years. That picked up $275 million. We found our $3.7 billion without a lot of pain.

I will not say it was easy, because I had to listen to 3 hours of demagoguery; but we did not hurt anybody, and we helped people and we helped the taxpayer.

We have another way we can help this country. I have got to say this because agriculture is so susceptible to energy, but we have 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out there under the Outer Continental Shelf. We are paying $14.50 per million Btus here in this country. In Venezuela it is $1.60 compared to our $14.50. The same with Brazil, Argentina, and most places on this continent; and we have got 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas right there next to the pipeline. All we have to do is move our drill rigs a little further to the east, sink them in the ground, hook the pipes up, and go to the same refineries and we can drive this price down. If we do so, we can cut fertilizer prices down and gas drawing prices down for our grain as well.

Go up and drill in ANWR, fix the energy piece in all of this, and we are going to see a big difference in this country. This is not all of the work we need to do, but this is a bunch of the important work we need to do. I am looking forward to getting on with it.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be recognized, and as I get organized here, I would point out that I have had the privilege to listen to this dialogue here tonight. I know that this group comes to the floor nearly every night, and that shows a certain kind of tenacity, and I appreciate that effort they put into this. But I wanted to just start down the list of some of the things that I heard and address some of the remarks.

I happen to have seen a poster that I hope was not presented here, because I believe it would have challenged the mendacity of the President, and I believe that would have been out of order here in these Chambers, Mr. Speaker. So I hope that kind of poster is never presented. But I will say that I have heard that challenge made in a number of different oblique ways.

I have looked into the eyes of this President, and I think there is a distinction that should be made in a very clear way to the people here on the floor every night, the 30-something Group and all the Members of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and the people in this country, and that is there is a difference between a mistake and a lie.

I look back on a Presidential campaign, and I remember the face and the voice of Charlton Heston as it came on television over and over again. He said to the previous President over the airwaves of television, ``Mr. President, when you say something that's wrong and you don't know that it's wrong, that's a mistake. When you say something that's wrong and you know that it's wrong, that's a lie.'' That distinction seems to be lost amongst many of

the Members of the minority party in this Congress.

And by the way, I would not concede that the President has made a statement that was even wrong, let alone a mistake, and certainly a long ways away from a lie. When you look into the eyes of this man we have as our commander in chief, you see those eyes look back at you with conviction. You hear it in his voice, you can see it in his bearing, and you can see it in his actions.

I would like to go back to an event that maybe was not designed to be spoken about necessarily in public, but I think it speaks well of this President, so I want to mention it at this time.

A few Members of Congress were invited to the White House for a small luncheon. It was on a Monday noon, and I recall it was the Monday noon after the Columbia had gone down on Saturday. It was a hard time for all of us. We saw our space program go up in flames, along with the lives of the brave men and women that were up in space. We knew that our NASA program was going to be suspended for a good, long time.

Thankfully, we are back on track, at least to some degree.

I was surprised that the President had gone ahead with the luncheon that day, because I believed he would be taking care of so many issues that he would not have time to sit and talk with us, but he did. There were maybe 15, 20 people in the room, a few of the President's closest staff and about 10 or so, maybe a dozen Members of Congress, myself among them.

As we sat around the tables and had our lunch, the President got up and stood at an old, rickety, wooden podium, a podium not as stable as this one. I wondered if it was really quite suitable for the White House. And as he leaned on the podium this way and that way, he went through the whole spectrum of issues that we were concerned about at the time, Mr. Speaker.

He talked about the impending operations in Iraq. He talked about our national security and al Qaeda, and about September 11. He talked about the overall budget and the tax cuts that we needed to stimulate this economy. And he talked about education. Now, remember, we had not gone into Iraq at that point. It was speculated about certainly, but we had not gone in at that point.

As he got through the education cases, he said, just a minute. I want to back up a minute and I want to tell you this with regard to Iraq. My critics have me wrong on Iraq. The media has me wrong on Iraq. There is only one person that orders our men and women into battle, and that is the person that hugs the widows and the widowers of those who do not come back home.

I will never forget the tone of his voice, the look in his eye, and the look on his face. He told me afterwards that to finally give that order, he knew it was going to be hard, but it was a lot harder when the time finally came that he had to make that decision and give that order.

I look at this entire operation in this view of the war in the Middle East and in this war against terror and this war against militant Islamic extremism, and I will always see those eyes and hear that tone in his voice; and I will always understand that this is not a President that would give an order that would put anyone in harm's way and do so for any reason other than a profound conviction that it was necessary for the protection, the preservation, the future of the people in this country and the destiny of the United States of America. Never would that order come unless it fit that standard, unless it fit that very high standard and that qualification.

The order was given. And it seems as though there are a couple hundred Members in this Congress that do not understand this war against terror, as we define it, and this war against militant Islamic extremism, as I define it.

I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that this battle that is going on in Iraq right now is a battle. It is not a war; we are at war with an entire group of people who are philosophically opposed to us, and we have known that for a long time.

We did not do anything to offend their sensibilities, not to such an extent to justify losing 3,000 Americans in the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. That was an unprovoked, sneaky, stealthy, I guess I would say a pretty well strategized attack on American people. We had never had that loss of life on our own shores in the history of this country.

That should epitomize the level of the hatred that is embodied in the people who are pledged to kill us. Yet I still hear from the other side of the aisle that somehow, if we would just pull our troops all back home to the shores of the United States of America, plant more flowers around our bases, and ask them how can we better understand you, can we sit down and have some kind of an encounter session, can we somehow feel or emote in some other way so we can connect with the people pledged to kill us.

I do not believe you can negotiate with people like that. They want to establish their caliphate across this country and across this world. Their number one enemies are capitalism, coupled with Jews or Christians. I think they actually prefer Jewish capitalists first, probably Christian capitalists second, but anybody that is not like them, even other Muslims. If you look at the death loss around the world, I think you will see that al Qaeda and their colleagues have killed really more Muslims than they have any other category.

But, Mr. Speaker, they hate us worse than they hate the other Muslims, because some of the other Muslims are sympathetic. In fact, many of them are sympathetic, and that is another part of the problem. But we have seen the terrorist cells in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and we went there and settled that question.

And, by the way, for the first time in the history of the world they had free elections on the soil of Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. It was an astonishing accomplishment, something never accomplished before in their history.

We went there so quickly and were successful so quickly that most people in this country do not remember the voices of the naysayers, the voices of the people that said no one has ever gone up the Khyber Pass and not been slaughtered. No one has ever been able to go into Afghanistan and invade or liberate and occupy. It is impossible to bring freedom to people that have never experienced freedom before. The American military cannot do what has never been possible before in the history of the world.

It came from this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, over and over and over again. And it was only muted when it was clear that there was a full victory established in Afghanistan. And when we saw the elections come up, we had at least 750 Iowa Guardsmen on the ground in Afghanistan protecting the voting booths, protecting the travel routes to and from the voting booths to make sure that there would be free and fair elections in Afghanistan. It was astonishing accomplishment, an accomplishment that came about because of the vision of George W. Bush, because of the courage, the training, the tactics and technology of our U.S. military and because of the selfless sacrifice and risk that was taken by our men and women in uniform.

Mr. Speaker, those men and women in uniform went to war as the single highest quality military ever to take the field in any war, and I am including this entire war against the militant Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and whatever theater we might be in right now and not know about, or whatever theater we will be in in the future and find out about sometime down the line.

The reasons for that high quality are many. One of them is that we have a strong mix of our National Guard people. These volunteers had a little more age on them, probably more gray hair in this military than we have ever had before in a foreign war. But this is a day when we have high technology. It takes a lot of technology and a lot of training to be able to manage that technology.

Our National Guard and military Reserves are seasoned to the point where they bring their professionalism from their walks of life into their military, and when they are deployed overseas they perform extraordinarily well. Couple that with an outstanding active duty force, all of them volunteers, because everyone who has gone to war has gone as a volunteer, that does

something for the spirit. That does something for the esprit de corps, as they say in the part of the world that is in flames now, which would be France. And I may get to that subject matter before this hour is over, Mr. Speaker.

I want to speak highly of the people who went to Afghanistan. We have lost 200 Americans in Afghanistan, liberated 25 million people. That is a legacy for the world and a legacy that the United States is leaving there for them to pick up as they earn their freedom.

Why is nobody saying, Pull your troops out of Afghanistan? Can their troops not handle the security? Can Afghanistan run their country themselves? Why is no one on this side of the aisle addressing that? Why are they not saying, Get the troops out of Afghanistan, or Kosovo, for example.

Mr. Speaker, the President that ordered the troops into Kosovo promised the world that our troops would be back from there in 1 year. I have to go back and check the calendar, but I know it has been over a decade; I expect it is 12 years. They are still there. No one on the other side of the aisle is saying, Bring the troops home. No one is saying the President previous to our current President Bush, no one is saying, He did not tell the truth to the American people when he ordered troops into Kosovo and said, They will be back in a year. But I would submit that the accuracy of this President exceeds the accuracy of that statement.

So we have troops in Afghanistan, and 200 Americans have lost their lives there. One of my constituents was lost there, the son of a friend of mine. I stop at his grave, and I commemorate him and all of the soldiers we have lost from time to time. That is how I symbolize his loss, it is how I remember everyone.

I remember the freedom in Afghanistan and the pride that the remaining troops had when they came home, how his father led them all in with a big American flag on the back of his motorcycle, and how the highway was lined with American patriots who stopped, took off their hats and saluted that young man that had given the ultimate sacrifice and helped free 25 million Afghanis, and no one is saying, Let the Taliban grow their ranks or let al Qaeda go back into Afghanistan. No one is saying, Bring them home, Mr. President. What is the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq?

I think the people that are critics of the operations of Iraq ought to draw a distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. I believe from a national strategic standpoint they are one and the same. They are not the same by the numbers of casualties. By those that say, We have reached the 2,000 death casualty list in Iraq, bring them home, that is too many casualties, none of those people had the courage or the foresight or the conviction to make an announcement as to what was a tolerable number of casualties to free another 25 million people.

No one was willing to speculate how many lives they would be willing to invest of American patriots to preserve and protect the lives of 282 million Americans. No one is willing to say it is not worth risking a single American life to protect 282 million Americans. No one is willing to look back in history and say, I wish we had not stepped in and defended ourselves in Korea or World War I or World War II, I wish we had never fought the Civil War to free the slaves or fought the Spanish American or Mexican American, or I wish we had never fought the Revolutionary War.

None of those people that say that risking a single American life is never worth it is willing to go back and unravel history. They would not be standing on the floor of this Congress if not for the lives of the brave men who have gone before us who have carved out our freedom from the jaws of tyranny.

That brings us back to 1898. I recall a speech by President Arroyo of the Philippines here in Washington, D.C., at one of the hotels. My wife and I went to that dinner and sat and listened to that speech. I believe I was the only Member of Congress that was there to hear the speech, the rest was downtown people and other Representatives.

She was not speaking to the faces of Congress, she was speaking to Americans. She saw that group as a few hundred Americans that had gone to dinner to listen to her keynote address. But President Arroyo said, Thank you, America; thank you, America, for sending the United States Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thanks for their sacrifice, thanks for liberating us. Thank you for establishing that stability and establishing a stable government in the Philippines and allowing us to be a free people.

Thank you for sending your missionaries over to the Philippines that taught us Christianity. Thank you for sending 10,000 American teachers over to teach the Filipinos reading, writing and arithmetic. Thank you for teaching us your language because we learned English, and today 1.6 million Filipinos leave the Philippines and go work anywhere else they want to in the world, and send that money back to the Philippines because they have a command of the language that is universal in the commercial world. All of these blessings have come from the freedom that came to the Philippines as part of the Spanish American War, I will say.

Now we have a friend over there in the Philippines. Now we have a people that speak English, who are engaged in commerce. And because of that, a people who understand democracy and a constitutional republic. That is an example of what happens when you are willing to take a risk, when you understand that this mantle of freedom is not something you can wear lightly, and it is not something that comes without responsibility.

There were people that believed that prior to September 11 and, in fact, even after September 11 that we did not have a responsibility to the rest of the world, that we could just retreat back to our own shores, our own borders, run the United States of America, disregard the rest of the world, not do any trade treaties, not engage in any foreign conflicts. If we were not at risk, we should not be involved in anything else going on in the world.

But we know what the history of the world is. In fact, I take you back to the years that built up to World War II, and I want to compare that to the war we are in now against terror and the militant Islamic extremists.

We are having trouble today connecting the idea that you can have al Qaeda that is run out of perhaps the mountains in Pakistan, Afghanistan, up in that region. So al Qaeda is there, and some of the other sympathizers that are around the world. There are a whole number of different splinter groups, groups that are in Iraq and Indonesia. We have seen these attacks around the world, and we know there are cells all around the world.

We know there are second-generation Pakistanis that set off bombs in the subway in London. We have first-and second-generation Middle Easterners, both North Africans and Middle Easterners, mostly Muslim, probably all Muslim, that are running all over the streets of Paris as I speak, burning approximately 1,000 cars a day, and buildings, and attacking the very facilities designed for them.

So how is that Saddam Hussein could have been cooperating with Osama bin Laden when bin Laden is an Islamic fundamentalist and Saddam Hussein is a secular Arab and a Baathist and a Sunni? They could not get along, surely, because they are not motivated by the same things.

We forget about this thing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Well, we are the enemy of those enemies. It is easy for them to be friends, whether you are secular or a fundamentalist. In fact, Saddam had the entire Koran written inside a mosque with his blood. It is kind of hard to be secular when you give that much blood to be written inside a mosque.

So he kind of joined himself with his blood with Osama bin Laden. There is a philosophical connection. You do not have to be on a e-mail list and distribution tree from Osama bin Laden to be wired in with the philosophy worldwide. So this network rolls around here. People can work autonomously. The bombers in the subway in London may or may not have had direct orders from Osama or Zarqawi or whoever else the leaders might be.

The people that are out running in the streets of Paris today, I do not think each one of them gets their daily marching orders from on high. It becomes spontaneous after awhile. You

get a sympathetic support and a kind of synergy that grows and a philosophy that connects. And they start to think, if they can cause this trouble, so can I. If they can blow up this embassy, I can blow up the USS Cole. And if Ramzi Yousef can go in and strategize the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the next person can come along and figure out how to fly two planes into there and take it down. It does not have to be one command person sitting at the top distributing all of this.

Now going back to World War II, and that is that people in those days prior to World War II had a little trouble connecting how it could be that a national socialist, a Nazi like Hitler, could be connected with and allied with a Fascist like Mussolini in Italy. That did not quite fit. People said they are not philosophically connected. And we had the civil war going on in Spain, and people did not put it together as any kind of axis powers. There is no genesis of the axis of powers.

Furthermore, how could, for example, the Soviet Union be allied with and make any deals with Hitler because they really are not philosophically connected. One is a Nationalist-Socialist and the other is a Socialist or a Communist, take your pick. And I say, if you take people's freedom away at the point of a gun, you are a Communist. Stalin was a Communist.

You look across and you see that the revolution was beginning to form itself in China, culminating in 1949. And looking at the Japanese, they invaded Manchuria and wound down the coast of China. They invaded Singapore. How in the world could the Imperial Japanese have something in common with the Nazis in Germany and be tied with an axis power effort of the Fascists in Italy? And how does it work with the Soviet Union in the middle that really has a little bit of trouble figuring out who their friends are and who their enemies are?

All of that was an unfathomable equation to most people until September 1, 1939, when the Soviet Union, and I will say the Russians, and the Germans carved up Poland. It did not last very long. It was over in a matter of 3 weeks.

Then they began to see maybe they can find a way to cut a deal, shake hands and make a treaty. So World War II began. As it began, we did our best to stay out of it. We did a lend-lease program, and we tried to help the Allied powers.

The British essentially were standing there without a lot of help. The Australians were with them from the beginning, and then the attack came on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese. As soon as that happened, as quick as administratively it could be done, Hitler and Germany declared war on the United States.

Now it all starts to fit together. We know it from the historical perspective because we have seen it unfold. Now it makes sense. Now we do not even ask the questions: What are the philosophical differences between Nazism, Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, and the Communism that was Russia at the time? How did they all get together?

Well, if you have a common interest, you can be joined together. This common interest of opposing the United States, this great Satan that they declare us to be, is plenty enough to join together the people that danced in the streets when the Twin Towers were hit on September 11, 2001, plenty enough to bind them together.

We should understand by now this enemy far better than we do, and it is predictable what is taking place in France right now. And I do not remember if this is the 12th or 13th night of riots going on in France.

The population of France, perhaps 10 percent, is Muslim. These people have come from North Africa and the Middle East. France opened up their doors and said, Let us have an open border policy. We will make a place for you.

I am starting to hear they did not make jobs for them, but I am not sure that is the government's job. I do not think government can create jobs. You have to set the structure and let the private sector do that, and we recognize the French have a different view.

What I saw were probably hundreds and perhaps thousands of radical Middle Eastern, North African Muslim demonstrators running all over the place with Molitov cocktails, torching buildings, torching cars and trucks, attacking schools and libraries and churches. Yes, churches. You will listen to CNN for a long time before you will hear ``church burned in France.'' And you will listen to ABC, NBC and CBS a long time before you will hear the words ``church burned in France.''

In fact, we will listen to them for a long time before they will say ``Muslim youth'' torch anything in France. They will say ``youth,'' ``disgruntled youth,'' ``unemployed youth,'' ``disenfranchised youth.'' But they do not want to say ``Muslim youth attack France.''

So what do the French do when they are being attacked? Essentially we could define it as a civil war going on there right now. Had I been Jacques Chirac, I would have declared martial law a long time ago. I would have put the French troops out into the streets. I would have established a curfew. I would have had people on the rooftops with infrared sniper rifles. We would have said looters will be shot on sight. Anybody with a molotov cocktail, we will try to shoot that molotov for you from the roof so you can experience what it is like when you are at the other end of that bomb.

None of that is happening. They had their high-level meeting and put out some warnings; and as far as I know, they arrested 250 people or so. They have not done the hard things that needed to be done early to shut this off. So instead, 1,000 Frenchmen and women put the tri-color banner on and marched in the street for peace.

Well, they have got a little trouble over there, Mr. Speaker, because we have an enemy that is not interested in negotiations. They are not interested in hand-holding. They are not interested in talking. They are interested in killing the people who are not like them.

And, by the way, we are not guilty of doing something. We are not guilty because of something we have done or failed to do. We are guilty and deserve a death penalty by their viewpoint because of who we are, what we are, what we are born; and it cannot be rectified. So we cannot talk and negotiate with these people. This is really difficult for the French, Mr. Speaker, because when 10 percent of their population lives within them and among them and they are out there burning things, some of which you built and provided those facilities for them, day care centers, schools, libraries. Maybe not the churches. I do not think they are burning any mosques. I am pretty confident they are not. But a people that are determined to kill them, and yet there is no organized head from the top to the bottom. The French cannot go surrender to Osama bin Laden. They cannot find him. They cannot find Zarqawi and surrender to him. In fact, if every Frenchman held up a white flag, and I imagine some have by now, there is nobody to surrender to. They do not want us to surrender. They want to kill us. They want to take over Western Civilization. They want to destroy Western Civilization.

And I happen to believe that Western Civilization, as civilizations go, has been a great gift to all the people in the world. I would be willing to state also, Mr. Speaker, that of all of the missionaries that have ever gone to Africa or to anywhere in the world, and God love them for all the work they have done and it has been a lot of good work, free enterprise capitalism has done more for the world, more for the well-being of humanity than all of the missionaries that ever went anywhere from a standard-of-living standpoint, from a medical care standpoint.

I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that the investment of capital and the desire for profit has developed this technology that has raised everyone's standard of living. And the health care that we have, because we have research and development for pharmaceuticals, for example, for new surgery techniques, for preventative health care, most of that was driven as a desire to make a little money. Well, a good thing. A good thing that that happened. A good thing that we have a motivation in this country to lead the world in patents, lead the world in creativity. We have that because we have freedom. That all came from Western Civilization.

Mr. Speaker, this is the Western Civilization that our enemy wants to destroy, this great gift to the world, this

descendant that we can trace back to; and I will say Western Civilization has descended from the Greeks, the Age of Reason, the age where the Greeks sat around and analyzed and set up a structure that let them rationalize their way through and establish science, the beginning of the rationalization that has allowed us to develop technology. And the Greeks took great pride in their ability to reason. And there were philosophies and we can name many of them.

Go back and look at these readings. They did not know a lot about science and technology then, but they established the theorem principles that have carried us through to this day, Mr. Speaker. And that Age of Reason that became the culture in Greece back in those years, 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, found its way into Western Europe in later years and established the Age of Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment, I have to say, centered in France. I will give the French the credit for that.

And as the Age of Enlightenment developed, we saw the technology come. We saw some of the mass production come. We saw that, as that technology and that science took a step forward, took another step forward, Western Civilization had successfully manifested itself in the Age of Enlightenment in France just in time to be transported across the Atlantic Ocean and be established here in the United States of America where it found the most fertile ground it could have imagined because here we were in the United States establishing a free country, a free country unfettered by taxes, by regulation, by restrictions, by managed economies, by managed societies, where we let people go out and invest capital and the sweat off their brow and their labor and to grow technology at the same time and energize this manifest destiny and settle this continent in record time, lightning speed, fertile ground here in the United States for Western Civilization to establish itself.

And, yes, we descended from Europe, but we are different than Europe. The difference is many of the people in this country came here to get away from the restrictions and the oppression that was there, both religious and otherwise. The royalty structure that was there kept people from really being free. The property right structure there kept people from owning and keeping property and passing it along to the next generation, they did not have the freedom that we have.

One of the examples that would be, and I am speaking in of all the Europe, Holland today is probably the most liberal country in the world. They have euthanasia. They have abortion. They have legalized drugs, legalized prostitution. And they have their troubles too with a lot of Muslim immigrants that are there.

But it is a whole different politic than the Dutch areas that I represent in northwest Iowa, where they are very conservative. They would not think of ending someone's life at the end of life. They believe in life being sacred from conception to natural death. Life is sacred from the instant of conception until natural death. They have a maximum number of churches, a minimum number of bars. They do not believe in illegal drugs. Those things that I have said that are all legal and open and open and part and parcel of the culture and civilization of Holland did not get transferred here to the United States because they left there to get away from some of those things. They knew what they wanted to get away from. They knew what they wanted to establish.

That is just an example of the many people who came over here for religious freedom. They brought their standards with them. And the strength that we have in this Nation, Mr. Speaker, is a strength of a three-legged stool built here in this Western Civilization that we have.

And I will argue this: that the strength comes from Judeo-Christian values, free enterprise capitalism, and Western Civilization. Science and technology and the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment and all of its descendants came over here where we had all of these natural resources and this unfettered free enterprise capitalism to join with this Age of Enlightenment and blossom this economy that was here and established more patents than any country had ever created, more creativity, more freedom, more opportunity, more economic growth. And all of that would have created an imperialistic Nation that would not have just been manifest destiny out to the Pacific Ocean, but imperialistic to dominate the rest of the world.

What kept us from doing that, Mr. Speaker? Our Judeo-Christian moral values put the brakes on that kind of a robust desire to occupy or command or own the world. We recognize our responsibility for freedom. We recognize our freedom comes from God. We have a morality and a responsibility to restrain ourselves because of the Judeo-Christian foundation that is the culture of this country. No matter how one tries to secularize America, we have a Judeo-Christian foundation that is part of everything that we do. And that has been the restraint, the brakes that have held us back, that has caused us to try to project and promote our way of life to the rest of the world without imposing it on the rest of the world.

Which brings me back, Mr. Speaker, to Iraq, Iraq where we have lost more than 2,000 Americans. 300 to 400 of them were not combat deaths, but they gave their lives for freedom and liberty just the same. And I have held some of those widows and looked them in the eye and prayed with them, the mothers, the fathers. It is hard, but they are some of the most patriotic people that I have met. And some of the most meaningful times I have ever had as a Member of this United States Congress have been standing in that living room, understanding and to some extent trying to take some of the pain away from a family.

Mr. Speaker, Iraq is a country that is a cell. It is a place where, yes, there was al Qaeda; yes, Saddam did send agents around the world; yes, he did provide sanctuary for the first planner and strategist for the first attack on the Twin Towers; yes, he did send one of his security operatives, who was a colonel in the Iraqi military security, over to Malaysia. He was there. He was in the meeting that planned the second attack on the Twin Towers.

Not only that, but there were al Qaeda training camps in Iraq. And whether or not there were massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the President could not take that chance. We cannot take the chance of having hundreds of thousands of people there and an ability to fund this kind of enemy and someone who has continually funded terrorism around the world, give him weapons of mass destruction.

And, by the way, a lot was made of David Kay's report when he came back to this Congress and reported. As I listened to the other side of the aisle, their interpretation was there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; David Kay said so. And I read the report. It is kind of interesting sometimes when we read the actual text of something after we hear the interpretation. What I read in there was David Kay did not find mass quantities of inventory of weapons of mass destruction when he was there. He was not sure what might or might not have happened to them. He could not argue that they never existed. Certainly not. But in his report he did say that Saddam Hussein maintained the ability to reestablish his system to develop weapons of mass destruction and could do so within 2 weeks.

And, by the way, it does not take a lot of bacterial germ agent to produce a lot of problems. And I would argue that if you give me $2 million and put $1 million in one coffee can and $1 million in another coffee can and give me a posthole digger and send me to California with a GPS, I will go out there and bury those two coffee cans someplace in California and then come back out of there, let it rain, if it rains in California, and you go to California and look for those $2 million. There is almost no chance of finding that. And that is about what chance we had of finding some of the weapons of mass destruction. And we are continually digging up different weapons in Iraq that we stumble across. I read an article just the other day.

But I would argue this to the people on that side of the aisle: we know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He used them against Iran. No one argues that. He used them against his own people in Kurdistan

and killed at least 5,000 people there, perhaps more. In fact, I met with the judges in the tribunal, and in a moment we will hear from the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess). Those three judges talked about, if I have got the number right, and I am going to ask Mr. Burgess to give us a precise number, but it was over 100,000 Kurds killed and slaughtered by Saddam. I do not know how many were by gas, at least 5,000.

But I would argue this: either Saddam Hussein had significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and we know because he used them on Iran and on the Kurds and other places, either he had those quantities or he used up his last can of mustard gas on the Kurds. Is there anybody over here willing to say they believe Saddam Hussein, out of all that inventory that he used against the Iranians and the Kurds, used up his last can of mustard gas and we just lied to America because we knew his warehouse was empty, but nobody else did, not even Bill Clinton, not Al Gore, not the Israelis, not the French, not the United Nations, not the United States, not Great Britain. Everybody's intelligence said the same thing. It was logical. It was rational. And now the ridicule that comes from the other side is an irrational ridicule, Mr. Speaker.

And with that I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), who, by the way, last August joined with me over in Iraq where we saw some extraordinarily interesting things, one who performs so well for the people from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), a person who has become a good friend, and such a good friend that he is over working at night in his office and he sees me having a little difficulty with my voice and comes over to help me out. That is the kind of camaraderie we have here. We have seen a lot of Iraq together, and we do see it through the same eyes, and I appreciate his 4 trips over there and my 3 trips over there, and each time we are there, the troops appreciate it. But I can tell my colleagues that we appreciate them a great, great deal, and it is an honor to be with them at a time like that.

There are so many pieces of subject matter, Mr. Speaker, that I really intended to talk about tonight, and as I got into the depths of this Iraq issue and this worldwide war we are fighting, militant Islamic extremists, I wanted to make sure that we defined our enemy and defined them accurately.

There are a lot of places on this globe, and they are perhaps 16,000 Madrasas in Pakistan alone, places where they teach a kind of fundamentalism that sets the framework, sets the foundation for them to turn that into an active hatred. France and Great Britain perhaps are higher populations and more concentrations and further along in the growth and development of the kind of societies that reject those who have accepted them. They have rejected assimilation, they do not want to live as French or British. In fact, many of them do not really

want to live as Americans. So I am a great proponent of assimilation. I will not take up that subject.

But I have 2 others that I would like to address here in the next 12 or so minutes that we have here. One of them is I wrote down a list of the things that I heard from the people on the other side of the aisle and I really only got to subject number one. The next one that I heard was energy.

Mr. Speaker, there are many things we can do with energy in this country. We are not getting help from the Democrats. There is a strong segment of I will call them environmentalist extremists. I do not claim to be an environmentalist myself. I am a conservationist. I have spent my life protecting soil and water. I have built more terraces than, I said earlier tonight, than any Member of Congress; waterways, farm ponds, larger reservoirs. You name it, we have protected the water and also protected our soil and sent the rain drops down through the soil profile. I believe in all of that. I am one of the people that has been up to ANWR, and I challenge anybody here in this Congress out of the 435, if you are opposed to going up there and drilling in ANWR and have not been there, to see the environmental success that has been established on the north slope.

We began drilling up there with that entire operation in 1972. You could fly an environmental extremist over the oil fields in the north slope and they could look down from a thousand feet, and they would not know they were over the oil slope oil fields. They would say, where are the derricks? Where are the pump jacks? Where are the oil spills? Where are the pipelines? Where are the roads? Where are the electrical lines? Where are the distribution systems? Where are they burning off the gas here? How come I do not see an oil field below me, when you tell me I am right over the top of it?

The reason is because there are no derricks, there are no pump jacks, there are no electrical lines visible, there are not any collection pipelines visible. All of this is underground. The pumps are all submersible pumps. When you fly over there and look at that, it is simply rock pad for a work-over rig. It is perhaps 50 by 100 or 150 feet long of I call it limestone; it is probably not; say 3 feet above that swamp floodplain. There are ice roads to go in there in the wintertime and work on it only. The ice roads melt. There is no impact whatsoever on the environment, except caribou herds now have gone from 7,000 in 1970 to 28,000 head today. So they have done pretty well. We should go up there and drill. God put the oil there. I could not think of a better place. I cannot improve upon that. Where would you have the oil if you cannot have it up there where nobody goes, or we cannot have it up there where nobody goes, where we can do that with almost no impact on the environment, and if we can do so with .04 percent, 4 hundredths of 1 percent of a footprint on that region. Yet, where is our help over here from the other side of the aisle?

Mr. Speaker, 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore in the United States. There has never been a natural gas spill that has impacted anybody's environment. It is just scientifically and physiologically impossible. The gas dissipates.

By the way, there is natural gas bubbling up out of the ocean all the time. No impact on our environment, 406 trillion cubic feet, many times more gas on the outer continental shelf than there is on the north slope of Alaska. Where is our help over here to lower the highest price of natural gas anywhere in the world? And we pay that price, every American. If you want to help, let us do something proactive. They come to the Floor and every single night, negative, negative. I could not get out of belt if I felt like that. By the way, I do not believe that stuff anyway.

The argument about outing a CIA agent, Mr. Speaker. I listened carefully twice through to the special prosecutor's presentation that did bring out the indictment of Scooter Libby. He did not make any allegations that there had been any CIA agent outed. It was the purpose of his investigation. He apparently did not discover that, or he would have brought an indictment for that. But if the special prosecutor cannot find it in 2 years, how can the 30-Something Group find it over here? I would like to hear some more details on that. By the way, I read Bob Novak's column too and he argued that it was a common known thing that there was a CIA agent that was married to the gentleman who went to Niger, and I am not talking about Joseph C. Wilson, our Member of Congress who is Joe Wilson from South Carolina, we call him the good Joe. But the Joseph C. Wilson that went via the CIA to Niger to look and see if Iraq was out there seeking to purchase yellow cake uranium, came back with a report that apparently conflicts his public testimony.

By the way, if you are a CIA agent and you are being paid to go to Africa and investigate as to whether Saddam Hussein is trying to purchase uranium so that he can develop nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, I might add, would that not be a classified report, or is that individual going to come back here and give a report that says, well, yes, there were some people negotiating to do business with Niger, but no, I do not think they are trying to buy uranium. I do not know what else he would buy there, and neither did he. But he makes that report, that when he disagrees with his own report, he makes that public? Why kind of an agent of the CIA would do that, and why are we not challenging that in this country? Why are we not going to wait until there is a trial and find out what really happened under those circumstances, Mr. Speaker. So it saddens my heart that these conclusions can be leaped to from the same people who would say that the impeached President was innocent until proven guilty. Talk about a culture of corruption. No, I do not believe it exists, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, looking at this clock, I want to bring up one more piece of subject matter here and it is of significant importance, especially to the Midwest, but all over this country, and that is the issue of methamphetamines.

I want to point out on this chart, this is the Iowa experience. Mr. Speaker, we have some of the worst meth abuse in Iowa than of anyplace in the country. We have busted quite a lot of method labs. There are only a couple of States that can compete with us in the number of meth abuse labs that there are. We recognize that it takes some things to make methamphetamines, the worst illegal drug this country has ever seen. It takes pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, or a product called PPA. Those things are all available in the midwest. We have more experience with it than anybody else, Mr. Speaker. So we began addressing this.

When I was in the Iowa Senate about 5 years ago, we did some things to take some of that off the shelf. We did not do enough. So in our first try, we found out that these people are creative and they will find a way around you. So they wrote some new legislation. I was not involved in that. But I want to commend the Iowa legislature and the governor for signing legislation into law that was enacted on the first day of June 2005.

This red line on this chart, Mr. Speaker, here are the meth labs that were busted from the previous year, this year, for the same period of time, 2004-2005, meth labs running per month: 229, 185, 122, 127, 213, 146. A law was passed right here, kind of at the peak of the meth labs being busted. March is a big month. And they began, the retailers began pulling the precursors off the shelf by April. By May, by the end of May, we had seen a dramatic reduction in the number of meth labs that were busted by our, I will say, very efficient drug enforcement people in Iowa.

And that May number went down from 42 in May to 29 in June, to 25 labs only in July, to 12 in August, to 12 in September, to 10 in October, and then this is up until October 28. That is an 80 percent reduction in meth labs because we took the precursors off the shelf, except we made sure that moms that had kids that get sick in the night could go down to the convenience store or the grocery store and pick up enough pseudoephedrine to get those kids through the next day.

And this is what you can buy in Iowa off the shelf today legally. This product right here, Mr. Speaker, is 360 milligrams active ingredient of pseudoephedrine in this product that is by one of our grocery stores, a good old

home-grown Iowa chain grocery store. They private-label package this in a 360-milligram package because that is the amount that you can purchase for a single day in Iowa. And you can go out and do that the next day and the next day and the next day in Iowa, or you can go into the pharmacy, in either case, in a monthly supply you can purchase 7,500 milligrams. But in 1 day what I have on display back here, Mr. Speaker, is what I bought in a single day, and all but this from a pharmacy in Cherokee, Iowa.

Mr. Speaker, this represents the pseudoephedrine that you can purchase at one stop, all of these behind me that you can purchase in one stop in Iowa. And that is plenty enough to take care of a family for a good long time.

We have passed some legislation out of the Judiciary Committee today. Instead of limiting it to 360 milligrams a day, it limits it to 3.6 grams or 3,600 milligrams a day. We have a 7,500 milligram per month purchase that we can do in Iowa, but that quantity needs to be purchased from a pharmacist who will watch that volume. The law that passed, the language that passed out of the Judiciary Committee today, that 3.6 grams a day will allow a meth cook to go and make 19 stops around through retail establishments. Now, they sign up each place. They give their ID at each place, but there is not a way to track one retail place to another. So they will go from place to place. They will do 19 stops. They will pick up perhaps 70 grams of pseudoephedrine, go home and make an ounce of methamphetamine and they can get that all done all before noon.

And that ounce of methamphetamine will last one addict 90 days, or their 1-day supply, and then they go sell the 89-day supply, go back again in the afternoon and produce another 90 days' worth of methamphetamine under law that came out of the Judiciary Committee today.

We can do better. I have introduced the Meth Lab Eradication Act. These are the conditions that are part of it. We have set it to comply with Federal law. Schedule 5 drug, penalties are associated with the Schedule 5. This was so easy to adapt to in Iowa with regard to the retailers, the pharmacists and the consumers that the adjustment, according to the author, of this bill was simply pathetically easy. We need to do that in this Congress so we can eradicate meth labs in America.

Mr. Speaker, I promised earlier tonight that I would solve all the world's problems in 60 minutes. And you know, in fact, it is possible, but I did not solve them all tonight. So I am going to pledge to come back and keep working on the world's problems in an optimistic, solution-oriented way. And I appreciate the opportunity to address this Congress.

I appreciate the gentleman picking up this responsibility that actually was mine. And as you know, even though the scheduling around this city does not reflect that you cannot be in two places at one time, in fact, we can only be in one place at a time.

One would think that with all the work that you have done on the natural gas situation here, the need all across this country, that sometimes you are in two places at one time with the media that we have today. And it takes that kind of a voice.

I want to lend my voice in support of the work that you have done, and I am glad that you stepped up to take the lead. I know it takes a lot of commitment and it takes a lot of research. It takes a lot of background and it costs a little sleep from time to time and a lot of energy.

So that is what we are after here is energy in this country, and I want to see if I can add a little bit different perspective to this energy issue.

Of course, we talked about fertilizer costs and we talked about the cost for manufacturing, the cost of heating homes and the list goes on and on. But I want to emphasize that Pennsylvania and Iowa run across about the same latitude. You can draw a line of latitude that will intersect both States, and we are tied together for a lot of other reasons. You are kind of the eastern end of the corn belt and we are kind of the heart of the corn belt where I am.

But anybody that raises a crop uses nitrogen fertilizer. And if you are raising corn you are probably going to use more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. And 90 percent of the cost of that nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of natural gas. And we have seen in the last few years the price of natural gas go up 400 percent here in the United States. That means the cost of your nitrogen fertilizer goes up 90 percent of 400 percent. And that would be 360 percent increase in nitrogen fertilizer cost, just to do the quick math.

Now it is not just the cost of that. And of course we are seeing our grain prices are not showing an increase. And so the overhead goes up and up, and the margin gets narrower and narrower, and the producers, I will say our corn producers, have to figure out a way to increase their yields to compensate for this.

They do that. Of course, the landlord then sees that and raises the rent. It is a vicious circle that we are all involved in. It is free enterprise, I know. But a nation has to have a solid and sound natural gas and energy policy, and you cannot just wake up some morning and say, Gee, I wish I would have done this different 30 years ago, throw a switch and fix it. This is a long-term, down-range plan that we have to have; and we are paying a price for not acting for years and years. In fact, for a generation we have not been nearly aggressive enough in opening up the energy supplies here in the United States.

And we can go down on this argument, this argument that says, Well, gee, if we would just conserve more energy, if we would drive cars that get 30 miles to the gallon instead of 26 miles to the gallon or even 40 miles to the gallon, if we would use alternative energy sources and renewable energy sources, we can do that and we should do many of those things. I will not subscribe to all of those things. In fact, I will tell you that I support the expanded use of nuclear for electrical power. It is the safest and cleanest and the cheapest that we can produce. And the record in this country establishes that.

But that is one part of it, and we are not likely to be able to build more hydroelectric so that we can generate more electricity with just the gravity of water flowing through there. Because of environmental barriers people want to take out dams rather than let us build them.

And so coal is another difficulty. We had a little problem with air quality. We have done pretty well with that. But you cannot do everything with coal. And by the way, it takes, you have got to haul coal sometimes a long way. And I know that there is coal that is trained from Wyoming on down to my area in western Iowa. That is a long way to haul the coal.

Now, but we need gas for a lot of reasons. We need to heat our houses, we need it for our businesses and we need it for our fertilizer. And by the way, you take a fall. Now this is a good fall, and there was not a lot of grain dried. If you have a wet fall, you will dry a lot of grain. And we will use not really exactly natural gas, but we will use LP. And the difference is this, that the LP comes out sometimes from often the same hole as the natural gas and you use a gas separator in there. The natural gas is the methane, and the LP is mostly propane, but it also can have butane in it, so you use the gas separator.

Seventy-eight percent of the LP that we use to dry our grain comes right out of the natural gas well; 22 percent then is stripped out in the crude oil processing and the refinement process when you are making gas and diesel fuel and oil you get the balance of that LP out of there, merge that together, pipeline that up on LP to the Midwest and we put that in to dry our grain in the fall and to heat our houses outside and out in the countryside where we are we do not have natural gas connected to us.

All those things are tied together. It comes out of the same hole. The cost of LP is linked to the cost of natural gas. Energy is all part of the whole equation, but there is a difference in natural gas energy because it is not a

portable energy that is easy to put on a ship and bring it here, because by the time you compress it and liquify it, bring it here and convert it back to gas it costs money and costs time to do that, and we have got limited capacity.

We are looking to build a couple more liquefied natural gas plants refining plants to convert from liquid into gas again. It takes time to do that. But we have a tremendous supply of natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf in the United States. And God bless Ronald Reagan for drawing that dotted line out there at 200 miles offshore in the United States. I believe that was in about 1983. When he did that he opened up a tremendous amount for energy resources for the United States, not just natural gas, other minerals out there too that we have not even found yet, plus a lot of crude oil in the same areas where you will find natural gas in many cases. But that 200-mile limit that Reagan defined for us is a limit that lets us have an almost unlimited supply of natural gas.

Now, I will give you some examples here on how that works. The North Slope of Alaska, where we went up there in 1972 to open that area up and drill for oil on the North Slope of Alaska, where we had to build the pipeline from up there down to Valdez in order to put that oil on tankers to get it down here to the lower 48 States so we could market it.

But the provision was not in place at that time to build a natural gas pipeline because why would you pipe natural gas down to Valdez to compress it into liquid, put it on a ship, send it down to California, turn it back into a gas when you had a countryside that had all this natural gas in it, natural gas that was probably less than 2 bucks back there in 1972.

So we did not develop the natural gas, but it is there. The wells are drilled. It is available. There is 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas on the North Slope of Alaska sitting up there right now. It needs a pipeline down to the Lower 48. It is over 4,700 miles from Prudhoe Bay, mile post zero on the Alaska pipeline on down to Kansas City if you want to pick a place in the middle of the country, over 4,700 miles.

If you go the other way and go south, where is there a lot of gas south? Well, we know offshore in Louisiana, offshore on the entire gulf coast.

Go a little farther. Venezuela, there is gas that we are paying $14.50 for is $1.60 there. You know that is only 2,700 miles from the coast of Venezuela up to Kansas City and it is 4,700 miles from Kansas City to Prudhoe Bay and the North Slope of Alaska.

But it is not just a measure of a pipeline from Alaska to Kansas City which, I do support that because I want more energy into the Lower 48 States for a lot of different ways. But it is not the measure then of 4,700 miles from Alaska to Kansas City versus Kansas City to Venezuela.

It is because there is another measure, and that is the measure of 406 cubic feet of natural gas that is on the Outer Continental Shelf that is right there next to already processing plants, pipelines, drill rigs. We have the network all there. All we need to do is expand that drilling.

This country needs it. And these Americans deserve it. We need to drive this $14.50 price down. We have got to cut it by half at least. We can do it if we can open 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) for bringing this bill to the floor as chairman of the Judiciary Committee which I have the privilege of serving on.

I rise today in support of the Private Property Rights Protection Act.

This spring, the Supreme Court put a ``For Sale by Government'' sign in front of every American home, farm and business. It does not matter how many coats of paint you put on your house or how much landscaping you do, no amount of your investment and upkeep can match the tax base provided by corporate America. If the government thinks that it can get more tax revenue from your property when put to a different use, a bigger house, a new factory, you are out of luck and out of your home.

We were taught as children and read in the Constitution that eminent domain meant that government could take property only for public use, like roads and railroads, but the 15 Connecticut citizens who had their homes and businesses taken away from them in the Kelo case found out that public use now means whatever the powerful want to do with your home, as long as it might bring in more tax dollars.

Whatever happened to our rights to life, liberty and property, which were the very rights so important to the people who founded this country?

Mr. Chairman, the Supreme Court took that right away. The Framers had no intention of allowing Federal judges to impart their wisdom on this issue. That is why they put the eminent domain clause directly into the Constitution by the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution here in my pocket says, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

If we do not act today, the consequences of that Supreme Court decision will not be hard to foretell. The winners are those with great influence, wealth and power. What happens when the potential buyer of a property is a foreign-owned entity? Or if a Nevada church is bulldozed to make room for a brothel?

Americans will not stand for usurpation of their constitutional rights by the Court. Today, we have the opportunity to restore those rights that we fought so hard for. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4128.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the special order of the gentlewoman of Virginia (Mrs. Drake) given earlier this evening.

Mr. Speaker, before I pass this microphone over to my good friend and colleague, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth), I cannot help but express some of the frustration with sitting here and listening to this. I am really grateful that the American people do not have the same sentiment that I have heard tonight on the floor of Congress.

When I go to the coffee shop and to the break room in my district, I do not hear anything like this rhetoric that I have heard here tonight.

When I hear that we have cut food stamps, I was involved in that. We did not cut food stamps. What we did was we changed the regulations so you have to be on some other kind of benefit so there was less fraud. There is $1 billion of fraud going into the wrong people in food stamps just in the last year that I have a report. We only touched about 20 percent of the fraud, Mr. Speaker.

Fuel prices. Help us open up drilling on the outer continental shelf. Help us drill in ANWR. Let us develop the energy that we have in this country, and we will not be looking at $3 dollar fuel. We know who is to blame. It is the environmental extremists. And if Exxon Mobil made $10 billion in the last quarter, let us take a look and see where they invest it. If they invest it in that drilling, the American people will reap the benefits.

There are a whole series of things here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and that frustrates me greatly. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the immigration issue.

I would ask my friend, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth) if he would pick that issue up.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth) for his eloquent presentation on a lot of things that ail us that we heard about here tonight and also the border control and the immigration issue and the future of our country.

As I listen to that group that comes here nearly every night, and it was interesting to see the gray hair amongst the 30-somethings that we had, it is extraordinarily depressing to hear that viewpoint. I happened to at random bounce across some Web pages that must be the perpetrators of that kind of thought process because it just does not connect with the rational reality of what is going on here with our authorization bills, our appropriations bills, the responsibility that we have, the fiscal responsibility, the vision we have for America. And I do not think that you could read the facts and connect the lingo that is coming from the other side and measure the two together. But it is depressing and I think sometimes that if I felt like that I do not think I could get out of bed every morning and go to work in this place and drag everybody else down when we are trying to lift this country up.

Their vision seems to be, I will say, surrender and get out of Iraq, turn that over to Zarqawi, let that be a terrorist center for the world. Let them come in here and attack us whenever they want. Do not take any self-defense mechanism. Soak the rich. Starve the businesses. Get rid of the jobs. And the list goes on and on and on of the lamentations that we heard.

We are an optimistic party. Even though when they say the name of our party it comes off as profanity, it really is an optimistic party. We have always reached for the stars and brought this country forward. The tax cuts that we did turned this economy around from the depths of September 11's trough and, in fact, this year we have $274 billion in additional revenue beyond what was calculated by CBO and anticipated because of the tax cuts that we provided, and we need to make them permanent.

On the immigration issue, which is our subject here tonight, that is important to our national security issues, the issue of the citizenship and immigration services and the job that they are supposed to be doing and the great difficulty they have in carrying out that task, the internal problems that they have, we have the gentleman on my left from Virginia (Mr. Goode), and I would be happy to yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) for his presentation and with clarity I appreciate.

I want to add that we are taking a look into the functionality and the failure to function in citizenship and immigration services. It is this Congress' responsibility to have oversight. It is this Congress' responsibility to investigate. If we believe there is impropriety in some place, lack of efficiency, we are to bring this all together. This is our responsibility to the taxpayers of America, and it is our constitutional duty.

Because there are a couple of minders there that will not allow an individual to speak, then that does not mean that we are going to back away from this. It just means we are going to resolve the situation eventually in the appropriate fashion, with patience and professionalism. That is the perspective that I think we need to take a look at with this.

I want to touch back on an immigration issue, but the moment that I do that, I want to transition over to the energy policy. So, in the interim, I would be happy to yield a few minutes to the gentleman from Arizona for his concluding thoughts with regard to immigration.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona and the gentleman from Virginia on this enlightening discussion we have had on immigration. I am quite pleased that an individual from Arizona would have the phrase, good fences make good neighbors. I thought that was an Iowa phrase.

I want to point out, too, that when you build a fence or a wall to contain people, if you do that to keep them from leaving a place like it might have been East Germany, then that is wrong from a philosophical standpoint. If you have a place that is such an attraction that you build that fence to keep them out, that is a moral thing to do. There is a big difference.

So, the fence in Israel, for example, between the West Bank and Israel proper, that is a fence to protect the people from the folks on the other side that want to come across with bombs. It is not immoral to build a fence to protect yourself from people that are assaulting.

In fact, the southern border in the last year over 1,159,000 illegals that were collared at the border, so to speak. We heard T.J. Bonner, a border patrol, say here a couple of days ago that approximately 4 million came across the southern border during that period of time and we collared 1,159,000. Of those 1,159,000, all but 1,640 of them promised to go back. We cannot verify that any of them went back, but we did actually adjudicate 1,640 of the 1,159,000 to go back to their home country.

So we have got a very small percentage here. The catch-and-release program is real. I got into a little buy-in when I made that statement that it was a seven times catch-and-release program before they were adjudicated for deportation. Some of the bureaucrats took issue with that and wanted to have a meeting. So they brought eight of their people into the room, and the first statement was I am wrong, we need to retract the statement. An hour and 45 minutes later, they admitted that, even though that was not the written policy, it was the practice, and in fact, it might be more than seven times catch-and-release. That is how bad it is.

I want to say just a couple of words about the new IDEA bill that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) mentioned that I have drafted and that we have significant cosponsors on.

It is clear for us, build a fence on the border, beef up the border patrol, but we need domestic enforcement. We know that the administration has not sanctioned a single employer for hiring illegals in the last year. That is an issue that needs to be enforced as well. But, on top of that, how do we dry up the jobs magnet? How do we get a policy in place and get some administration agency that actually is willing to enforce that policy?

So I looked around the country, and I thought who really are the junkyard dogs of bureaucracy? Who likes to go to work and who does their job? Who has a reputation that you know they are going to follow through? The times I have been audited I can tell you it is the IRS. So I said, well, let us see if we can find a way to get the IRS into this game and enforce this illegal immigration.

So that is where the idea comes from to remove Federal deductibility for wages and benefits that are paid to illegals. Let the IRS come and do a normal audit, and if the employer uses the InstaCheck program so they can verify over the Internet in an instant whether that employee is legal to be hired, go back on the Social Security Administration database and Department of Homeland Security database, come back with a positive hit, hire that person.

We put safe harbor in the bill. If you are a responsible employer, you use InstaCheck, the basic pilot program to verify the employability, then the IRS will not touch you on that hire. But if they run the numbers when they do the audit, use the InstaCheck, and it finds out that the Social Security numbers and the identification does not match anything, then the wages and benefits that you spend on that employee become not a deductible expense but taxable income.

So, for example, if you are a corporation and in a 34 percent tax bracket and you are paying $10 an hour to illegals, the IRS will come in and say, well, no, that $10 an hour is not a deduction. We are going to tax that at 34 percent, and we are going to add the interest and penalty on there. Now that becomes about a $6 an hour penalty on the $10 an hour person, so now the illegals cost you $16 an hour. In theory, a least, a legal employee that you could hire for $16 an hour becomes a rational decision.

As that happens, then the illegals that are here working at this discount rate because it is rational for employers to hire the illegals, they are cheaper for a lot of reasons, it becomes rational instead to say, no, sorry, I cannot put you to work because the IRS sometime in the next 6 years can come back and audit me and I will have to pay the bill. So I might as well pay it to somebody who is here legally for the right reason.

This changes this great migration of four million people pouring across our southern border, and it sends them back again. Because what are they going to do if they cannot get employment here? It is a jobs magnet.

New ideas. It is one piece of many things, as Mr. Goode spoke about and Mr. Hayworth did. So I am part of all of this. I want to stand here with it. If we have any more ideas, I want to hear them all. We need them from the American people. The American people are the ones who will move this Congress, so they need to write letters and send the message, and this Congress will hear you.

So I thank the gentleman on the immigration issue tonight. I also had two

subjects in mind that I feel is important to bring up, and energy is the other one.

As we listened to the minority party on the other side do their 60 minutes of nightly lamentations, we heard about the cost of gas, the cost of energy, and I did make a few remarks about how we can help that cause. But I would point out that I represent maybe the number one corn-producing congressional district in America. If you are going to raise anything, you have to have nitrogen fertilizer to do that. All crops take nitrogen. Corn takes a lot of nitrogen. About 90 percent of the cost of nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of natural gas.

Natural gas has gone up 400 to 500 percent over the last 3 years, and we see the cost of natural gas going in the area of $14.50 per million BTUs. We look around the world, and Mr. Peterson will give us more details on this in a moment, and we see not far away, natural gas coming out of Venezuela of $1.60 compared to the U.S. at $14.50.

The other day they said they were going to go ahead and build the natural gas pipeline from Alaska down to the lower 48 States. It is 4,700-some miles from the north slope down to Kansas City, the heart of America. Up there, there is 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we know of. There is probably more in ANWR that we will open up, and hopefully we will drill there for oil as well. So, 4,700 some miles from the north slope of Alaska to Kansas City. Build the pipeline down to the lower 48, and we can get 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Venezuela is making fertilizer and selling it to us now off of gas that costs about $1.60. Russia is doing the same thing off of natural gas that costs us 95 cents. We are losing our fertilizer industry in America. It does not take very much to control food production if you have control of the fertilizer itself.

But down there in that gulf area, for example, all that gas in Venezuela, Venezuela is 2,700 miles from Kansas City, for example. So that gas is closer. But closer than that yet is all of this natural gas that we have on the Outer Continental Shelf of America, with 200 miles, 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Now, tell me, would you go to Alaska for 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and build a 4,000-some mile pipeline to get it down to the lower 48? Would you go to Venezuela and ship that gas in as liquified natural gas and go through the exchange process and the plants at the terminals that it takes to handle that? Or would you just go down there nice and close, where we already have a system all set up, and plug right into that existing massive quantity of 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we have on the Outer Continental Shelf?

To continue to be hostage to energy prices at $14.50 per million BTUs when the rest of the world is getting along on numbers like 95 cents or $1.60. China is up to about $4 something. But we are at a great disadvantage. And if we only open up this natural gas marginally, we will only lower the price marginally and we will still pay a great price economically, because we know that energy is the price of everything we have and everything we own.

Having said that, Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), who is really the lead on this issue, and I am very happy and proud that he has taken this issue to this Congress.