Showing Our Support for the People of France

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of our allies, the people of France, and in strong condemnation of the terrorist attacks in Paris, France, carried out by the Islamic State this past Friday.

The people of France have been our allies since the American Revolution, and having traveled to Normandy and seeing the American flag over Omaha Beach, it underscores the important alliance that we have had with the people of France throughout our history.

Ever since the founding of our country, we have been united with the people of France by our shared values of freedom and civil society and democracy. The attack on Friday was an attack on these values by barbaric terrorists who want to impose their brutal and twisted version of Islam and authoritarian rule across the world.

We grieve for the massive loss of life, not just for the French people, but also for the victims and their families around the globe, including Nohemi Gonzalez, an American student from El Monte, California.

We join the voices from around the world to condemn these attacks, but condemnation is not enough.

As I saw firsthand while visiting Iraq and Afghanistan last month, the President's strategy of withdrawal and containment is clearly not working.

By underestimating the threat, referring to ISIL as the JV team, declaring that ISIL has been contained just hours before the brutal attacks in Paris, President Obama has allowed this radical Islamic cancer on humanity to fester and grow.

Indeed, the key lesson of my trip to the Middle East is that American retreat has made the world a much less stable and a much more dangerous place. The weakness of the President's foreign policy and U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East has allowed our adversaries, ISIL, Russia, Iran, the Taliban, al Qaeda, Jabhat Al-Nusra, to fill the vacuum, to grow stronger and become a much greater threat to our homeland and our interests.

In contrast, our allies, Israel, the Jordanians, the government of Iraq, the Kurdish regional government, the unity government in Afghanistan, they have all become more threatened and more vulnerable.

There is not a single place in the world which is safer or more stable today or where our adversaries are weaker or where our allies are stronger than on the day President Obama took office.

The President has, in recent days, lectured his critics to come up with their own plan and regurgitated his tired old attacks on his predecessor's successful national security policy.

But if there is any lesson to be learned from the Obama policy in Iraq, as contrasted with U.S. policy after World War II in Japan and Germany, it is that once you win a war, do not leave. A residual security force and continued diplomatic engagement to prevent sectarian divisions would have reassured moderate Sunnis and prevented the rise of ISIL.

The President implies that his critics would lead us into another unpopular ground war in the Middle East, but we do not need to fight the Iraq war again. We have already won that war.

But we do need to do more to combat ISIL. What about authorizing use of military force that doesn't constrain the Commander in Chief, which is what the President sent us?

Why don't we do what our ally, Prime Minister al-Abadi, in Baghdad, wants and has asked us for, which is more U.S. air power, more U.S. special operators on the ground for better coordination of the air campaign, more funding for the Iraqi train and equip fund?

We must do more to help the moderate forces, the indigenous forces on the ground, such as the Kurdish Peshmerga, to take back territory controlled by ISIL.

We must address the surge of refugees pouring out of Syria and other war-torn countries across the Middle East. These people are in desperate need of help, but the answer is not to resettle them halfway around the world here in the United States.

An open-ended resettlement program is, in fact, an admission of defeat, that their homes will never be safe for them to return to, so we had better assimilate them to new lands with new languages and new cultures.

That is not the best solution for these refugees. And because we know that at least one of these terrorists involved in the Paris attacks entered Europe by blending in with those trying to flee ISIL, it could pose a national security risk to the United States.

We shouldn't take the indigenous fighters away from the anti-ISIL campaign through an open-ended refugee program. Instead, let's actively protect them in their home country by helping them defeat ISIL and win the war.

The best thing we can do for these people is to defeat the enemy and to end their reign of terror, rape and oppression. We need a new strategy, not to contain ISIL, but to eliminate them.

The refugee issue is a simple matter of common sense, but the problem is larger than the refugees. As we were reminded so tragically on Friday in Paris, failure to confront terrorists and radical ideologies abroad gives them an opportunity to grow and spread and attack us here at home.

So let's grieve and pray for the people of France, but let's do more. Let's rise up with them, with new resolve, to defend our shared commitment to liberty, security, and freedom.

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