H6054 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — HOUSE September 14, 2012 

people turn out to the polls and send 

back to Washington those folks who 

care more about the future of this 

country than they care about themselves. 

With that, Madam Speaker, I yield 

back the balance of my time. 

f 

b 1430 

FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under 

the Speaker’s announced policy of January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the 

gentleman from Indiana (Mr. BURTON) 

for the remainder of the hour as the 

designee of the majority leader. 

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam 

Speaker, I have been in this Congress 

for a long, long time, and I have been 

frustrated a lot. I think maybe I have 

learned a little bit. For any of my colleagues who are in their offices watching on television, I thought I would 

make a few comments about some of 

the things that I hope that they will 

take as a little bit of a lesson for them 

down the road. 

I have been on the Foreign Affairs 

Committee for 30 years, and the first 

thing I have learned is you can’t make 

the world over in our image no matter 

how hard we try. There are different 

cultures, different people, different religions, tribal, all kinds of things. 

When we go into another part of the 

world and try to make them like us, we 

cause a lot of problems, we cost a lot of 

lives, and we lose a lot of money. We 

should always realize, in the back of 

our minds, that we should do what’s in 

the interest of the United States of 

America first, last, and always and not 

try to make the world look like us. 

The second thing that I think my 

colleagues, I hope they realize is that 

we’re going to have to work with some 

pretty unsavory persons sometimes. 

Muammar Qadhafi was a terrible, 

terrible tyrant in Libya. When Ronald 

Reagan had to deal with him after he 

bombed a nightclub that killed a lot of 

Americans in Germany, Ronald Reagan 

flew the planes over and bombed Qadhafi, and Qadhafi wasn’t a problem 

any more. A lot of people were killed, 

he was almost killed, and he realized 

that terrorism from his country was 

not going to stand. 

Qadhafi was not a problem for the 

United States from then on. Now, he 

was a problem in his country. He killed 

a lot of people, and there might have 

been some more carnage, but it was in 

his country. 

Because of that, we went into Libya, 

spent billions of dollars of our money. 

We drove him out of office and had him 

killed. Now there’s chaos over there, 

and they killed our Ambassador. They 

tortured him, I understand—I won’t go 

into details, but it was pretty bad. 

They killed three other people, they 

burned our flag, and the place is in 

chaos. 

What did we get when we got rid of 

Qadhafi? He was a bad guy. He was terrible to his own people. But what we 

have now is a complete chaotic situation in that part of Africa. The same 

thing is true in Tunisia. Then, of 

course, our President went over to 

Egypt, and he gave a speech talking 

about how we had to all get along, and 

how there ought to be democracy in 

Egypt. 

Now, Mubarak, who was the dictator 

over there, was a bad guy; but he had 

lived up to what we call the Camp 

David accords. The United States and 

Egypt worked together to make sure 

there was peace in the Middle East, and 

there wasn’t any war going on involving Israel or anything else. 

But we led the fight to get rid of Mubarak. We did it, along with some help, 

and now Mubarak is gone and we have 

the Muslim Brotherhood. A lot of people don’t know much about the Muslim 

Brotherhood, but they have been 

judged a terrorist organization in the 

past. I was told, and everybody else 

was told, when the Muslim Brotherhood left that there was going to be democracy, freedom, and human rights in 

Egypt. We had 78 Coptic Christians just 

murdered recently. 

As you know, they came over, and a 

mob—and it was planned, everybody 

knows about it—it wasn’t because of 

that movie. They came over, and they 

scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy, 

they burned the American flag, and 

they ran around waving the radical 

Muslim flag. They touted their radical 

leaders as the future leaders of that 

area. Osama bin Laden, they were carrying his picture around saying, we 

support Osama bin Laden. 

Now, this is a country that we just 

gave $1.5 billion to, our money. The 

reason we gave them that money is because we’ve been paying them for years 

and years to make sure that they lived 

with the Camp David Peace Accords, 

which meant that there would be peace 

between Egypt and Israel and throughout the Middle East. Mubarak is gone, 

the Muslim Brotherhood’s in charge, 

and there’s chaos in Egypt, and the entire Middle East is threatened further. 

When you look across the northern 

tier of Africa, I hope my colleagues 

will realize, we’ve tried to create governments that agree with us and look 

like us and that will be tokens of the 

United States of America. Instead of 

leaving them alone, we have helped 

create chaos. 

Now, I just got back from the Persian 

Gulf recently. I was in Bahrain, and 

Bahrain is a friend of ours. We have the 

Fifth Fleet there, which patrols the entire Persian Gulf, protecting those waterways, and we get about 35 percent of 

our energy from that part of the world. 

Iran is sending people into that country to undermine that government and 

stir up the people. It’s the same thing 

that happened in Libya, the same thing 

happened in Egypt, and now it’s happening in the Persian Gulf states. We 

get a third of our energy from there. If 

we don’t get that energy, if we don’t 

become energy independent, we are 

going to have the lights off one of these 

days, and we’re going to be paying 

about $5 or $6, $7, $8 a gallon for gasoline. It will hurt the entire economy. 

Now, this isn’t baloney; this is fact. 

The radicals are working that entire 

region to take over, and we’re trying to 

help these radicals or have helped these 

radicals or have helped these radicals 

in a number of countries, and now 

we’ve got a real chaotic mess on our 

hands. 

Yesterday, my colleagues overwhelmingly passed a continuing resolution. Most people don’t know what that 

is, but it’s a spending bill that takes us 

from now until March of next year. I 

came down to the floor when the discussion was going on the recommittal 

motion, and I said, tell me, is any of 

that money going to Libya or Egypt? 

Nobody would answer me. I can tell 

you right now additional monies are 

going to go to Libya, additional money 

is going to go to Egypt, and both of 

those countries are not friends of the 

United States. 

A gentlewoman from Congress told 

me yesterday she was in Egypt not 

long ago, and she talked to one of the 

members of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

She said, What are the goals that you 

have? He said, Our goal is the Muslim 

Brotherhood is to have the al Qaeda 

flag, the Muslim Brotherhood flag, fly 

over the White House in the United 

States. 

He may have been exaggerating a little, but if you look at what the Muslim 

Brotherhood has said just recently, and 

their new president, they said they 

weren’t going to involve themselves so 

deeply in government over there. They 

took over the legislative branch, they 

have taken over the presidency. Their 

president recently said he wanted to 

model their government after Iran. 

Egypt is the biggest country in the 

Middle East, but we went in there. Our 

President went in there and gave a 

speech. We said we wanted to change 

that and get rid of the dictator, Mubarak, who was not a good guy. At least 

he supported the Camp David Peace 

Accords, which Jimmy Carter worked 

on, all the way up to now, and now 

we’ve got a chaotic situation over 

there. We can’t make the world over in 

our image. 

We should not try to nation-build. 

You know, I supported it. I supported 

our efforts when we went into Iraq because I thought we had to get rid of 

Saddam Hussein, and I thought we had 

to stop the movement of radical Islam 

in its tracks. I thought democracy 

would be a good thing there. 

If you look at what’s happened, the 

democracy there is, although it’s a 

fledgling democracy, is very rocky, and 

they are very close to Iran. They have 

met with the Iranian leaders, 

Ahmadinejad, and so this nation-building we did in Iraq right now I think is 

still tenuous. 

b 1440 

I’m not sure it’s going to work out. 

And we spent billions and billions and 


tjames on DSK6SPTVN1PROD with HOUSE
September 14, 2012 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — HOUSE H6055 

maybe trillions of dollars over there 

and lost a lot of lives. And then in Afghanistan. And I support going after 

the Taliban. I think we ought to get rid 

of those guys. We ought to stop the terrorists. It’s extremely important. But 

the one thing that I think that’s very 

important when we go after these guys 

is we make absolutely sure that we’re 

going to get them and we’re going to 

win. And the problem we had with Afghanistan after losing all these lives 

and costing all this money is that 

we’re going to pull out in about a year 

and a half, and, in my opinion, that 

whole area is going to be again in a 

state of turmoil and we will have spent 

billions of dollars, our treasure, and a 

lot of lives, and it will still not be stabilized. And I think that’s really unfortunate because of the problems that we 

thought we were going to solve by 

going in there. 

One of the things that bothers me is 

every time we have a war, we think we 

can have a war that’s antiseptic. That 

we’re not going to kill any civilians. 

You can go in and attack an area and 

kill the Taliban or al Qaeda, and you 

have to be real careful that you don’t 

damage or kill civilians. And as a result, al Qaeda and the Taliban, they 

hide behind civilians. They go into 

schools and churches and they go into 

hospitals because they know that they 

can’t be attacked unless we go in and 

there are innocent lives lost. 

We’ve faced the same thing in World 

War II. And people don’t remember 

this, but we had to do things to win 

that war to stop Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo that we would never 

want to do. We firebombed Dresden, 

Germany. We firebombed Berlin. We 

dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima 

and Nagasaki. We killed millions of innocent human beings. But that was the 

horrible cost of war. 

Now, today, with the television and 

the Internet and everything else, we go 

to war and the next day you see somebody that’s injured, a woman, a child, 

and they say, This is horrible. We can’t 

conduct this war. So our military is 

handcuffed. They say that they can’t 

go in and go after these guys in certain 

areas because of the potential civilian 

casualties. And you can’t run a war 

like that. You either go in to win or 

you don’t go in at all. And we should 

not risk American lives and treasure 

unless we’re going in to win. 

That’s why when I think back on 

Iraq, I think that maybe we should 

have gone in and beat the hell out of 

Saddam Hussein, let them know that 

we weren’t going to put up with that, 

and then pulled out and say, Hey, 

you’ve got a country, you run it properly. But if you conduct yourself in the 

way you did before, we’ll be back. It 

would have scared Iran to death. It 

would have scared the Taliban to 

death. But instead, we went in there to 

nation build. And 10, 12 years later we 

face much of the same thing that we 

faced back then. 

The other thing I think that’s important for Congress to do—and we don’t 

do it—is when the administration, I 

don’t care whether it’s a Democrat or 

Republican administration, when they 

make a mistake, we in the Congress 

must speak out. We must not just go 

along with the administration, whoever it is, because we want to keep a 

good relationship with them. Our responsibility as Congress is to make 

sure that the Government of the 

United States doesn’t go awry. And I’ve 

seen time and time again in the years 

I’ve been here where Presidents have 

made a mistake and we stay here and 

we’re strangely silent. 

We have to speak up. We have to let 

the American people know when mistakes are made and that we have to 

correct them. And we must not let 

unelected bureaucrats decide all of our 

foreign policy. We have people at the 

State Department, people in our government, people who are unelected who 

make decisions that really lead us in 

the wrong direction. And I speak, 

again, for the administration and the 

State Department when I talk about 

Libya. We went in there and what did 

we get? We got rid of Qadhafi. Now 

there’s chaos. Now they’re attacking 

our embassy and burning our flag and 

waving around al Qaeda flags and talking about how the world will be better 

off if all the Muslim radicals are in 

charge. 

The same thing is true in Egypt. We 

went in and got rid of Mubarak. And 

what did we get? We got the Muslim 

Brotherhood, a radical Muslim fundamentalist group that wants to destroy the freedoms that we believe in, 

not to mention our best ally in the entire region, Israel. And Israel is the 

only place over there that we can 

count on if everything goes wrong. And 

so our State Department and the administration and previous administrations have made these kinds of mistakes, and we’ve been strangely, 

strangely silent. 

So I would just like to end up by saying to my colleagues we should profit 

from our past mistakes. We should 

make sure that we don’t try to nation 

build. We can’t make the world over in 

our image. It’s not possible. We have to 

work with unsavory leaders sometimes, 

people that we don’t like, that we don’t 

think are good people, because of stability in the region and because of 

America’s interests. Our interests 

ought to be number one. 

The protection of our country ought 

to be number one. The protection of 

our soldiers and the people who go to 

war and the people of this country 

ought to be number one. And of secondary importance are the lives of 

these people in these countries that are 

radical. But we haven’t been doing 

that. But that ought to be our number 

one goal, the United States, first, last, 

and always. And we should not turn 

over to unelected bureaucrats the control of our foreign policy. We should 

listen to them. We should have our ambassadors over there. We should have 

good people over there like the ambassador that just lost his life. But the 

final decisions ought to be brought before the committees of the Congress, 

and we ought to discuss them and we 

ought to participate in the decisionmaking process with the Commander 

in Chief and not let unelected leaders, 

bureaucrats make those decisions. 

Finally, we must remember we 

should never go to war unless we realize the cost that is going to be involved. You cannot win an antiseptic 

war. You can have a tenuous peace. We 

had that in Korea. We still have a potential war over there in the 38th parallel. We didn’t go in, and we didn’t win 

it, so now we have the Communists up 

north and the freedom-loving people 

down south. We went into North Africa, into Somalia, and we tried to nation build there. And we had to pull 

out because you couldn’t get it done. 

We’ve gone all over the place and tried 

to nation build, and we’ve gone all over 

the world and tried to make the world 

over in our image, and we’ve gone all 

over the world and tried to fight antiseptic wars, and they just don’t work. 

If you’re going to fight a war, you 

have to go in and win it and then leave 

and do what is right for America. You 

can’t stay there for 8, 10, 12 years and 

try to nation build. Because ultimately 

you lose a lot of life, you spend our 

treasure, and you don’t get the job 

done. And I’m a conservative. I’m one 

of those guys that is one of the strongest supporters of the military in the 

entire Congress, and I’m one of those 

people they call a hawk and one of 

those people that says: Get the bad 

guys, wherever they are. 

But I’ve learned over the past 30 

years that you have to do certain 

things if you’re going to make America 

great and survive as a Nation. And 

those things are very important. You 

can’t make the world over in our 

image. You have to work with some 

leaders in other parts of the world that 

are not savory people because of our interests and our stability. You can’t 

spend our money and our treasure and 

the lives of Americans without going in 

to win. And you can’t fight an antiseptic war. 

If we go in, and we go in to win, we’re 

going to have to take some innocent 

lives. And it’s a tragic thing. But that’s 

the way that war is. And the reason 

Dwight Eisenhower and the American 

forces were so great and so successful 

in World War II in Europe and in Japan 

was because we went in and we did 

what had to be done to win. And if we 

hadn’t done that, we might all be 

speaking German today. 

I yield back the balance of my time. 

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b 1450 

CURRENT EVENTS AND LESSONS 

FROM HISTORY 

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under 

the Speaker’s announced policy of January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the 

gentleman from Texas (Mr. GOHMERT) 

for 30 minutes. 


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