Iraq

IRAQ -- (Senate - January 11, 2007)

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, following the other two speakers in regard to Iraq, I want to say a couple things. No. 1, anybody who criticizes what the President is proposing or anybody else is proposing or what has been done cannot get away with criticizing. There has to be another plan. I want to hear plans from people who think that what the President is doing is wrong. What would they do?

The second thing is that even the Iraq Study Group, which is very bipartisan, said there should not be a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.

In regard to what my distinguished leader of the Republican caucus had to say, that there has not been any attack on Americans in the 5 years since 9/11, those who are criticizing our efforts on the war against terror would be the first ones, if we had an attack this very day, of criticizing the President of the United States: Why wasn't he on top to prevent some sort of attack? And because America has not been attacked, there tends to be a short memory about the fact that we did lose 3,000 Americans. And we know it can happen again.

We know that terrorists came into O'Hare with the idea of a dirty bomb in America. We know there were people who were going to blow up bridges in New York City who were caught and the plans known. We individual Senators have been told by the CIA and by the FBI about many instances of where terrorist attacks against Americans have been stopped, and American lives have not been lost because of that. But they cannot talk about it because we do not want the terrorists to know what we know about them.

Too much attention on Iraq detracts from the fact that there are terrorists in 60 different countries around the world waiting to kill Americans. Evidence of that was American military people working with the Filipinos over the weekend to kill two terrorists connected with radical religious groups.

We finally were able to get at some of the people who should have been arrested in the previous administration, if a proper relations with Saudi Arabia had brought it about, who thought up the bombing of the embassies in east Africa when 12 Americans were killed and 200 other people were killed. We believe one of those persons was killed in a strike we were making in Somalia over the weekend. So we are involved in more than just Iraq in the war on terror.

People who forget what happened to America on 9/11, and if it happened again, some of the people who are criticizing what the President is doing would be there saying, as they were soon after September 11: Why wasn't the President on top of what happened on September 11 so it wouldn't happen again, when there were five instances of Americans being killed: 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, before 2001, and this body passed the Iraqi Liberation Act unanimously in 1998 because President Clinton was saying what a threat Saddam Hussein was to the United States or to the world as well and that he had to go.

When you have that bipartisan support at a time when Americans are being attacked and killed--in 1993, 1995, 1997, and 1999, before 9/11 somewhere around the world--you have to stop to think, it isn't just Iraq. It isn't just Afghanistan. It isn't just 9/11. These religious radicals have been out to kill Americans going way back to 250 marines being killed in Lebanon in 1983. And there are individual instances of terrorism before that.

The war on terrorism isn't something new. What is going on in Iraq is not the war on terrorism. What is going on in Afghanistan is not the war on terrorism. The war on terrorism covers many nations, many threats to American people. The life of every one of us in this Chamber right now, if we were to go over to some parts of the world, would be threatened. We expect the President of the United States to protect us because he is Commander in Chief and because the responsibility of the Federal Government under the Constitution, No. 1, is the protection of the American people.

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