Duncan Hunter for President 2012: Reasons 34 through 37!

34. JOHN KERRY'S ACCUSATIONS AGAINST AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN VIETNAM -- (House of Representatives - April 22, 2004)

(Mr. HUNTER asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, when Americans watched U.S. troops take Baghdad through embedded media, they saw the American GI in his true character. They saw a GI who was compassionate, who was honorable, and who had great courage. In a way they saw also the GIs of Vietnam because in many cases those were the sons and grandsons and granddaughters of people who had fought in Vietnam, people who had the same character, the same honor, the same courage.

Yet we have had a person who is running for President, Senator JOHN KERRY, describe those people as having murdered 200,000 people in Vietnam, being stoned on pot 24 hours a day, that is he said 60 to 80 percent of them, and ravaging the country in a Genghis Khan-like fashion.

I think Americans have a choice. If you feel that your son or daughter did those acts in Vietnam, if that was a true characteristic of American GI's in Vietnam if you served in Vietnam, if you think your husband conducted himself in that fashion, perhaps you want to vote for JOHN KERRY. If you think that is a wild-eyed, nutty statement that is not an appropriate statement for somebody running for President of the United States, vote against JOHN KERRY.

35. MOURNING THE PASSING OF PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN -- (House of Representatives - June 08, 2004)

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) for yielding me this time, and I want to thank my great friend also for not only helping to preside over this special tribute, but for everything that he did in helping to lead the California delegation to be a source of strength for President Reagan when he put forth those monumental changes in the direction of our government.

I have listened to his statements and just now to the statement of the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes), and many others, in talking about this wonderful American, Ronald Reagan; and I thought I might just touch on a couple of the things he did in the way of national security.

We have short memories, Mr. Speaker; and President Reagan was not always popular, especially with the media and often with our European allies. I can remember in the 1980s, when he responded to the Soviet Union's ringing Western Europe with the SS-20 missiles and he started to move those Persian missiles and ground launch cruise missiles into Europe to offset the Soviet strength of their strategic programs and their intermediate range ballistic missiles that they were moving in. And there were massive demonstrations against Ronald Reagan and against those who supported him in Europe and lots of sniping by the press in this country.

And yet because of that strength and because he rebuilt national security, the Russians at one point, especially after the Reykjavik summit when he refused to give up the Strategic Defense Initiative, that is missile defense, the right of Americans to defend themselves against incoming ballistic missiles, after he did that, there was lots of hand-wringing among the elite media and lots of our European allies who said, there it goes, the last chance for peace, and lo and behold, the Russians picked up the phone and said, can we talk?

Ronald Reagan at that point started to negotiate with the Soviet Union, and not just to negotiate a peace, but to negotiate the disassembly of the Soviet empire, the tear-down of the Soviet empire, which is manifest today in numerous free states where once there was one state ruled by tyranny.

Mr. Speaker, I remember the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) was present as one of our senior members, and the gentleman from California (Mr. Herger) had not been elected yet, along with the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier), and Bob Lagomarsino, and John Rousselot, and Chip Pashayan, and my colleague Bill Lowery, and Bobby Fever, new Republicans who had come in in the Reagan win of 1980, and the President invited us to Blair House. The President invited us to Blair House even while President Carter was still in the White House. We were standing in the foyer, celebrated this victory of our Commander-in-Chief-to-be because he had not been sworn in yet, and the President-elect came down the stairs, and he talked to us about being up on his ranch in Santa Barbara and killing an especially big rattlesnake the day before while he was cutting brush. We had a great time talking with the President-elect. After a while he said, I am tired, I am going to go upstairs and hit the hay. He said, you guys turn off the lights when you leave. He went right upstairs; we continued to have a good time. That represented that western hospitality, that great charm that Ronald Reagan had that brought so many people, attracted so many people, even people of very different political persuasion.

My son Sam was not even born in those days when we first came in. I remember the picture of the cowboy that the President drew for my other son Duncan, who is now a United States marine and deployed overseas.

I think the one thing that this President sold in boatloads was inspiration. He was great at inspiration. He realized a little secret, and that is this country runs on inspiration. Whether it is the markets or the economy or people deciding whether or not they are going to join the uniformed services, inspiration is the fuel that this country runs on, and that is something that Ronald Reagan had an endless supply of.

He was tough during the tough times. You have to have good endurance to be a good President, and he had great endurance. He was able to handle the difficult times, the times when he was not real popular, and outlast his critics. It has been kind of fun in the last couple of days to watch people who criticized him very severely to seem now to remember that he was not such a bad guy after all. Not only was he not such a bad guy, but he brought this country together as a family. He was, of course, the head of the family.

It is a time for us to mourn this President, but also to celebrate his great life and the big piece of this life that he gave to our Nation. I will never forget when I was first running for Congress, I was practicing law on behalf of a barbershop on the waterfront in San Diego. My dad came in and said, you can be a Member of Congress. He said, Ronald Reagan is running. He is going to run on a platform of national defense and jobs, and in San Diego that is the same thing. I said, what do I need to start running? He said, we need one thing; you need a picture with Ronald Reagan, and we are going to go up and get it, and we went up and got it in L.A. That launched my foray into politics. So many of us won that year who had no chance of winning because we were riding along with a guy named Ronald Reagan.

Let us take a message and a lesson from this great American and proceed ahead with optimism and with dedication to the idea that you get peace through strength. That was a trademark of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. I think we are following it with this President. I think we need to stay the course and stay steady.

36. HONORING PROFESSOR EDWARD TELLER -- (House of Representatives - September 16, 2003)

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to one of the great Americans of the last century, Dr. Edward Teller, who passed away on the 9th of September and said of his own accomplishments, ``What I did, I did because it was necessary, not to be remembered. The little contributions I made in pure science, I am proud of those, and whomever wants to remember that, fine.'' But Dr. Edward Teller deserves to be remembered, and it is important that we remember him because he perhaps more than anyone else in American science believed that we could achieve peace in the world through military strength. He did everything he could to rally a community of scientists, technical people, engineers to back up the political leadership in this country when we were faced with an enormous military adversary in the Soviet Union. And ultimately as the Soviet ambassador said when he left at the end of his tenure upon the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative, which was largely Edward Teller's, hastened the fall of the Soviet Empire by a full half decade.

Dr. Teller died at age 95 of a stroke at his home in Palo Alto where he had worked for the past 28 years as a senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a towering source of American intellect and ideals, both literally and figuratively. Just a few days earlier, he had put in his last day of work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which he cofounded with his fellow University of California professor, Ernest Lawrence, 51 years ago this month, and where he labored prodigiously for the American cause ever since.

Characteristically on his last Livermore workday, he was reviewing recent technical developments concerning a new source of nuclear energy, an area he was deeply engaged in the past 64 years and upon which topic he coauthored a seminal scientific paper 70 years ago that is still widely referenced today.

But what makes Teller unique among all of the rest of the greats of our time is a vision and courage that he manifested in a most difficult, too-little-remembered era already a half century in our Nation's past when Americans and the other free people in the world came into serious confrontation with the empire led by the Soviet Union.

In the late 1930s, Teller and many others, more than a few being fellow refugees from Hitler's tyranny, had answered President Franklin Roosevelt's call to commit their technical talents to the defense of freedom against the clear and present danger of fascism with historic consequences known to us all. A decade later in the late 1940s when the world's free peoples faced another grave, but less clearly perceived, totalitarian threat, Teller rallied and led American scientists and engineers in providing American political leaders with the key technical means for withstanding the Soviet challenge. He continued his exemplary leadership for the following quarter century until one of our greatest Presidents, Ronald Reagan, sounded the call for the conclusive campaign of the Cold War. Then already at an age when most are content to rest, Edward Teller again rallied and marshaled his professional colleagues from all over America to create the technical core of the interlock set of philosophical, political, economic, and military challenges that Reagan launched at the Soviet Empire, resulting in its unexpectedly swift, bloodless, and utter collapse.

Mr. Speaker, Teller's technical genius and near solitary perseverance gave the United States crucial first access to the most fearsome weaponry, and the vision that he shared with Ernest Lawrence in founding the second laboratory concerned with nuclear weaponry that has endured and ensured America's weaponry excellence through its brilliantly conceived, supremely effective appeal to innate American competitiveness, and as we will do very well to remember this Teller-Lawrence lesson regarding the surpassing importance of competition-based technical preeminence in all crucial national security programs, very specifically including nuclear weaponry, for every bit as long as it takes to undergird America's national security.

It was Edward Teller's Churchillian-quality vision, his simple eloquence, and his unwaivering moral courage, and not just once but twice facing down multitudes of those less committed to the effective defense of traditional Western values, and yes to the triumph of the American cause, that we should most honor and longest remember. To be sure, Edward Teller made mistakes, and he acknowledged and regretted them; but they dwindle into complete insignificance when viewed against his monumental accomplishments on behalf of all Americans and indeed all freedom-loving people everywhere.

Mr. Speaker, I am reminded when Dr. Teller talked about going to meet Albert Einstein in 1939 and asking a little girl skipping rope if she knew where Dr. Einstein lived. She said no as she was skipping the rope. He finally asked about the guy with the big fuzzy white hair, and she directed him to the correct door. He went in with two other physicists and together with Albert Einstein they wrote the letter to FDR that changed the world. Edward Teller was a great scientist. He was also a great American.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I think if he thinks I am one of the greatest Americans he may be in trouble. But I want to commend the gentleman for his great service on the Committee on Armed Services and all the work he has done on behalf of people in uniform everywhere.

It is interesting. This is an interesting time in that we have had several weeks of remembering a great President, Ronald Reagan, and at the same time the criticism of our present President, George Bush, has mounted severely.

I was looking over some anti-President quotes, anti-Republican President quotes, and I thought I was reading some things about President Bush, because, of course, you have these various groups that have been put together, knit together, to come forth in the nature of Henny Penny announce to us that the ski is falling in, particularly with respect to foreign policy, and that we have got to get this guy out of here; and we look at the credentials of the people who have said it, and a few of them have marginally worked in Republican administrations, but most of them came right out of the team on the other side.

It was interesting, I was looking at some statements about a President, and I had a couple of statements I thought bore repeating, because they looked to me like they had been applied to President Bush by his critics.

Here is a quote by a gentleman who is running for President. He said, ``The biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense. Americans feel more threatened by the prospect of war, not less so, and our national priorities have become more and more distorted as the share of our country's resources devoted to human needs diminishes.''

I thought that was JOHN KERRY talking about George Bush, but it is not. It is JOHN KERRY talking about Ronald Reagan. In fact, it looks to me like they simply xeroxed this statement and put this out on the latest ``sky is falling in'' report about the present President.

Here is another quote: ``The administration has no rational plan for our military.'' You heard that one before? There is no plan. ``Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the enemy and a presumed window of vulnerability, which we now know not to exist.''

I thought, well, doggone it, that is Senator Kerry and he is talking again about George Bush. No, that is Senator Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. Of course, the same Senator Kerry now thinks that Ronald Reagan was actually quite a guy, and he said over the last several weeks that he brought us together and was a great President.

Now, here is another one. This one is a little bit personal. ``You roll out the President one time a day, one exposure to all you media, no big in-depth inquiries, put him in his brown jacket and his blue jeans, put him on a ranch, let him cock his head, give you a smile, it looks like America is okay.''

I thought, there is JOHN KERRY talking about George Bush down on the ranch in Texas. No, it is JOHN KERRY talking about Ronald Reagan down on the ranch in California 20 years ago.

``The President certainly was never in combat. He may have believed he was,'' this is another quote, ``but he never was. The fact is he sent Americans off to die.''

I thought maybe that was JOHN KERRY talking about George Bush. We have heard a lot about that issue over the last 3 or 4 months. No, that was JOHN KERRY talking about Ronald Reagan.

Here is another quote: ``I am proud that I stood against the President, not with him, when his intelligence agencies were abusing the Constitution of the United States and when he was running an illegal war.''

Once again, I thought this was JOHN KERRY talking about President Bush. It is not. Twenty years ago, this was JOHN KERRY talking about Ronald Reagan.

After his first major political battle in the Senate over the President's foreign policy, JOHN KERRY said, ``I think it was a silly and rather immature approach.''

I thought, well, doggone it, that has to be JOHN KERRY talking about George Bush's approach to Iraq. No, that is not. That is JOHN KERRY talking about Ronald Reagan's approach to our Central American countries during the contra wars, 20 years ago.

Incidentally, it is interesting, that ``silly and immature approach'' that Senator Kerry talked about 20 years ago ended up and resulted in Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador and Nicaragua all today being fragile democracies; and, interestingly, Salvadorans are standing side-by-side with Americans fighting for freedom in Iraq today. They are some of our best soldiers. In fact, their people have shown absolute bravery on the battlefield. And one time they were on the verge of being assimilated or taken over by a communist-backed insurgency, a Russian backed insurgency back in the 1980s.

It is interesting, what JOHN KERRY called ``a silly and immature approach'' resulted in fragile democracies coming around or springing up in all those countries, which, before the Reagan administration had been military dictatorships.

Now, here is another one. Mr. Kerry spoke at great length about the President's abuse of the Constitution and totalitarian inclinations. This must be him talking about the PATRIOT Act. ``They are literally willing to put the Constitution at risk because they believe there is somehow a higher order of things,'' maybe that is about Abu Ghraib, ``and the ends do in fact justify the means. That is the most Marxist, totalitarian doctrine I have ever heard in my life.'' This is a quote from JOHN KERRY. ``You have done the very thing that James Madison and others feared when they were struggling to put the Constitution together, which was to create an unaccountable system with runaway power running off against the will of the American people.''

Once again, I thought that must be Mr. Kerry talking about George Bush. No, that was Mr. Kerry talking about Ronald Reagan, whom he now reveres.

Interestingly, just a year or so ago, he likened his own criticism of Ronald Reagan to George Bush. He said this, and this is about the President. He says, ``They have managed him the same way they managed Ronald Reagan. They send him out to the press for one event a day. They put him in a brown jacket and jeans and get him to move some hay and drive a truck, and all of a sudden he is the Marlboro Man.''

He goes on. ``We have seen governors come to Washington, and they don't have the experience in foreign policy and they get in trouble pretty quick. Look at Ronald Reagan, look at Jimmy Carter, and now, obviously, George Bush.''

So let me see. We had the former leaders of the free world talking about Ronald Reagan the other day, Brian Mulroney, Maggie Thatcher, talking about the hundreds of millions of people who were freed by the Reagan doctrine of peace through strength. Those days when Ronald Reagan strode out, took leadership of the free world, and when the Russians ringed Western Europe with SS-20 missiles in an attempt to intimidate our allies, the President started to move ground-launched Cruise missiles and Pershing missiles into place in Europe, and the Russians picked up the phone and said, can we talk?

But, of course, before they picked up the phone and said can we talk, there were massive demonstrations in Europe, and liberals like Mr. Kerry talked about the idea that somehow we had lost our leadership of the free world. They called Ronald Reagan a cowboy. They said we need to talk more. We need to get concessions from the Soviet Union.

And what happened? He met their strength with American strength, and in the end we had arms reductions, and in the end Ronald Reagan negotiated not just arms limitations, he negotiated the surrender and the disassembly of the Soviet empire.

Very interesting that we have got now this same collection of people coming together and saying, well, they may have gotten it wrong with Ronald Reagan 20 years ago; but by golly, this time they think they have got it right with George Bush. And you can Xerox these quotes from Mr. Kerry that he used 20 years ago against President Reagan and put them in his speeches today against George Bush, President Bush; and there is not a bit of difference.

Now let us go back to the facts. The facts are that when this country was attacked, this President did what we all needed him to do. He moved aggressively against terrorists; and in moving aggressively, we hunted these guys down in places where they never thought we could get to them. The Tenth Mountain Division soldiers killed them in rifle pits at 10,000 feet elevation in the mountains of Afghanistan, in those rugged areas on the Pakistani border.

We went into Iraq and took out a dictator, who I guess, except for Adolph Hitler, was the only dictator in the history of the world who used poison gas to kill his own people. And those thousands of Kurdish mothers laying on those hillsides holding their little babies killed in mid-stride by that poison gas, according to today's liberals, was not enough of a justification for the United States to change the leadership of Iraq.

What have we done in Iraq? Well, we have occupied Iraq, and it truly is an occupation and occupations are tough. They are tough on both the occupied country, and they are also tough on the occupying country. And if you do not think that is so, look at what happened after World War II when we were occupying Germany and other parts of Europe, and you had the presence of outsiders, Americans are great people, but outsiders wearing very thin on the German populace, just as we wore thin on dozens of countries simply because we were there, we were outsiders; they knew we were going to leave after a while.

We had lots of writings, lots of editorials talking about how the people who had come in and had their tanks strewn with flowers when they liberated those areas now becoming somewhat of a guest who had been there, who had overstayed their invitation and should move out.

Well, we all know that, and we all know that the stray artillery round that accidentally hit civilians, the truck that is going too fast that hurts livestock, the very presence of having outsiders in your country is always wearing thin. But what is the alternative? The alternative was Saddam Hussein and those thousands of Kurdish mothers laying on the hillside killed by poison gas in mid-stride. And I would just say to my friend, those pictures, and I keep them in my office and I look at them on a regular basis, those pictures are as compelling as anything that ever happened at Auschwitz. They are compelling, compelling pictures.

So maybe that question the school kids ask, they ask their daddies, ``Daddy, if Hitler hadn't threatened the rest of us, would we have stopped him from killing the Jewish community?'' Well, that is a pretty profound question. That is a pretty tough question, because generally speaking, the desire or the will to go to war manifested in a declaration of war by an assembled Congress and the President is usually justified based on the threat that a particular adversary has toward you, toward your country.

But I can tell you this, that at least partially the reason that we went into Iraq was because of those dead Kurdish mothers strewn out across that hillside killed in mid-stride by poison gas. It was those thousands of people who were taken in buses to the killing fields where the backhoes worked all night digging the trenches, where the firing squads that kept, according to the farmers, bankers' hours. They showed up at nine o'clock. Would wait patiently for the buses full of civilians, women, old men, children; and they would disembark from the buses and line up dutifully along their trenches, and then Saddam Hussein's gunners would walk down the line and in a very workmanlike way would put bullets in the backs of their skulls, and they would be bulldozed into the trenches and filled up.

One day the farmer said that the ammo people, the executioners, ran out of ammo, and so they just bulldozed them in anyway. They found out that kills them just as dead.

So what is that we replaced, and every American who has served in Iraq, and there are 300,000 of them, incidentally, who have served in Iraq, 16,000 bronze stars have been won. I would ask the gentleman to pull that over. We might ask that that be noticed. That is one of 127 silver stars that have been awarded in combat operations to Gunnery Sergeant Jeff Bohr, who happened to place his body between his wounded people and the adversary until he himself was killed.

And, you know, as I was looking at the stuff about the Abu Ghraib prison and the prison mess, which has dominated the media, I started to look through some of these citations of bravery, and there are tons of them. There are tons of brave, brave people who have sacrificed everything, including giving that last full measure of devotion to this cause.

And I want to say to them, what you have done, the purpose of what you have done is of value. And the real meanness of the left, of these operations, where they say, Well, we like the troops, we support the troops, we do not support what they are doing, is to devalue and take away meaning from the people that serve the cause of the American military. What they did does have value. Every single person whose boot has touched that sand of the Middle East who has served his country in an honorable way has value to this country, and Gunny Sergeant Jeff Bohr is just one of those people.

If my colleagues look through, there are literally dozens and dozens of people, hundreds of people who have done heroic acts; some 16,000 Bronze Stars have been earned in that country. Yet, I saw all this publicity about Abu Ghraib, because there is a couple of newspapers driving that story. They want that story to stay alive, to the point where The Washington Post had an article the other day and on the front page I thought, boy, they are going to try to come out with something really bad.

One of the bad things they cited was that the prisoners at Guantanamo asked for sugar in their tea. These were suspected al Qaeda, some of them, the people that ran those airplanes into our Twin Towers. These people asked for sugar in their tea, and they were told by the cruel American captors that it would be a long time before they got sugar in their tea. The Washington Post, by golly, obviously thinks that ought to be fixed real quick. The other thing they did not get was DVDs for their religious ceremonies. So on the one hand, we have people who drive planes into buildings and kill thousands of Americans; and on the other hand, we have people who commit those acts who are treated in general so well that one of their biggest complaints is that they do not get sugar in their tea and they have only The Washington Post to fight for their rights.

Now, I looked at the number of articles that The Washington Post did, because I made the statement the other day where some people said, well, that puts you out on a limb. I said that the biggest event, military event in our history, the event upon which the freedom of our world hung in the balance, and that was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy when we were fighting the forces of Hitler, that day, that event, that operation received in The Washington Post, in those days when The Washington Post wrote a lot about our military operations, that received some 57 articles in The Washington Post. We counted them up. Now, if I have missed a couple, I want The Washington Post to set me straight and send in the other articles, and we will sure put them in our count. Fifty-seven articles The Washington Post printed about the invasion of Normandy.

Now, on the other hand, The Washington Post likes the prison story like the one they just printed about the prisoners not getting enough sugar in their tea. They have printed twice as many articles about the prison mess, about Abu Ghraib, 127 articles, and they are still going, so it is not over yet. They have printed 127 articles about the prison mess, twice as many articles as they printed about the most important day, arguably, in the history of this country during the 20th century, and that was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, when thousands of ships and thousands of airplanes and hundreds of thousands of fighting Americans, including thousands who lost their lives, did everything they could to win back freedom for the world.

So the invasion of Normandy, D-Day, had roughly half as much importance to The Washington Post as the Abu Ghraib prison mess. I think that is imbalanced. And I think it is time for us to refocus on winning this war and, maybe more importantly, now that we have come to the first phase of this hand-off, handing off this country to a new government, a government that is led by people who are responsive to their constituents, that means to the Iraqi people, with a military that will respond to a civilian leadership; and maybe it will not be a Jeffersonian democracy, and it will not have all of the complex attributes that a country that has been free for hundreds of years has.

But, hopefully, it will be a country where the average guy has a modicum of freedom and protection, like freedom of speech, freedom to come and go, freedom to buy or sell, freedom to know that somebody is not going to knock on your door in the middle of the night and take you on a bus to the killing fields and dig a trench and execute you and push you into it.

So, hopefully, we are going to turn this country over to a government and a military, a new military that we are standing up, which will be strong enough to back that government and be responsible to that civilian government. And the United States, which is much chastened by the rest of the world, just as Ronald Reagan was chastened by the rest of the world when he took on the Soviet Union for them, and when he freed literally hundreds of millions of people, all we are asking of the people of Iraq is this: be free. Be nice to each other. Be representative if you are in government. Be responsive to what your people want. Be good to each other. Have a rule of law. Have a court system that works. Have an education system that works. Have economic opportunities so a guy with a good idea and a machine shop can make some money. Very basic, simple things.

Arguing against that, of course, are our so-called allies who really have not been our allies in many cases. The French, for example, are not our allies. The French have, on occasion, been very strong, stood strongly with the United States. Certainly they did when our people were shedding our blood at Normandy. The French liked us then. We have Mr. Lafayette gazing at us from his framed picture here on the House floor. We sure remember him.

We remember those allies in those early days, and also in World War II and, of course, the French have contingents fighting terrorism in other areas. But the idea that the French would not agree with us to get rid of a man who left all of those Kurdish mothers killed with poison gas with their babies laying across that hillside, or gunning down people in wholesale quantities and pushing them with bulldozers into open graves, or taking people who he suspected of having done things against the State and having their arms removed from them, that prison, and having schoolchildren who wrote graffiti on the blackboard ‘‘Saddam Hussein is a bad guy’’ taken out, schoolchildren, and hanged from the neck until they are dead, certainly the French would agree with us that that is the kind of a government you want to change. And certainly the Russians should agree with us that that is the kind of government that you want to change.Now, maybe they will not agree with us; maybe they do not agree with us. I am just reminded that when we hit Mr. Qadhafi in the days when Ronald Reagan was then called a cowboy by the left, hit Mr. Qadhafi in those days when Qadhafi’s agents have bombed Americans in Germany, a terrorist act, and we flew a responsive aircraft, we flew our bomber aircraft out of Heathrow in England, I remember Maggie Thatcher stood with us. And when she stood with us, even a majority of the British people were right on the bubble as to whether or not they should support us because they thought this might bring trouble on them, but Maggie Thatcher stood with us.

But when we flew over France with our bombing runs, we had to go around France, because France, even then, did not like our actions, and this particular action against a terrorist who I think they felt they could deal with, Mr. Qadhafi, so they told our planes not to cross their soil. That was not under George Bush; that was under Ronald Reagan. Do my colleagues know what Ronald Reagan did? He flew those planes right through the Gulf of Sidra and he flew a couple of cruise missiles right down to meet Mr. Qadhafi and he changed his attitude. Maybe that change of attitude is going to result in new openings in Libya.

Other actions that Mr. Qadhafi has taken lately would indicate maybe it is not. But the point is that that President stood strong against lots of criticism back here from the left and lots of criticism from allies like the French, but he did the right thing.

This President is doing the right thing, and we are on the verge now of making this hand-off. We are going to have elections in December. It is going to be a rough, tough, difficult road. We drove that steel column up through Baghdad very quickly and did it in what I think was a historically effective manner.

This occupation is a tough occupation. It is always tough when you have to provide a shield behind which a new government can knit itself together and that is what we are having to do. We have to provide that shield. That shield has vulnerability. When you are out there shielding people, you have vulnerability just when we have seen when they bombed U.S. headquarters; they have bombed hospitals; they have bombed lots of places where people are doing good things but we will continue to provide that shields until we make this hand-off.

I will just say one thing to the gentleman that we have learned in these United States that freedom is not free. It is also not guaranteed and freedom is not going to be guaranteed for the Iraqi people either. We are going to give them their freedom and a running start. They will have to have some grit to maintain that freedom. They have lots of enemies in the neighborhood. I hope they make it because we put an enormous investment, an investment like the gunnery sergeant who is in that particular citation.

In fact, if the gentleman will look at that, is that for the Navy Cross or the Silver Star?

Mr. HUNTER. There are lots of folks who have given a great deal, not just for our country, but for Iraq; and it is a very, very important thing that the Iraqi people take hold and have discipline and have tenacity and have toughness and grab hold of this idea of freedom and evolve that idea, that policy, that desire into a Nation that can endure, that will have a good relationship with the United States.

I thank the gentleman for taking out this time and I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. TANCREDO), who is just a great contributor to these discussions for letting me talk about Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, I just thank the gentleman for his very astute analysis that there are no guarantees in this war against terrorism and this is a central part of the war against terrorism.

It is interesting that we had America hit with these aircraft taken over by terrorists, shocking Americans beyond their wildest nightmares and in a way that no one could imagine just a few years ago. I think that is going to be for this country, even Iraq aside, that is going to be the pattern for the next many, many years.

We live in a new age. The age is terrorists with high technology. And we had a Soviet Union which was big and strong and fielded literally in the Warsaw Pact hundreds of divisions. It had a lot of might. It had 309 SS–18 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each of which had 10 warheads, each of which was about 30 times as powerful as the bomb that hit Hiroshima. And they had those bombs and those missiles aimed at American cities, and they had at times over the last 20, 30 years very aggressive foreign policies. But they were fairly predictable, the Soviet Union.

We certainly should not lapse into nostalgia for the Soviet Union because they were very much an evil empire. From where the sun now stands we will have people excavating graves, many of them mass graves that were caused by the Soviet Union, but this is a new era. This is an era of terrorists with high technology, and it is an era that will see bad people doing everything they can to leverage technology and to hurt Americans and our allies in ways that go far beyond the scope of what was possible just a few years ago. And just a usage of those American aircraft that were taken over by the terrorists and the thousands of people who were killed and hurt by those actions are representative of what we can expect for the next 20 or 30 years.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when the Soviet Union went down. We look forward to an era of peace. Unfortunately, we will only have an era of peace if we have strength, and one thing that we will have to have if that we dissembled in the days when liberals in this country thought that it was not Marquis of Queensbury rules for us to have good intelligence. We are going to have to have really good intelligence. (snip)

Mr. HUNTER. That is one thing this President has done in moving so aggressively because lots of people cautioned him to hold back and wait and delay; and by moving aggressively, he kept the terrorists off balance. Many people have said, well, how come we have not had more strikes and have not had more actions against Americans. Very simply, when you have a meeting and a bomb-guided precision munition comes through the window and blows up your meeting, it is pretty tough to conspire to kill Americans, and the literally hundreds and hundreds of bad guys have discovered that the Americans were able to find them in places where they thought they were totally inviolate.

That is because of the aggressive posture against terrorism that this President assumed. He did the right thing by doing that.