Authorizing Limited Use of Armed Forces in Libya
Floor Speech
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.
I rise in support of this resolution. This is Congress exercising its authority as appropriate. And I agree with the people who say that Congress should do this, and I just wish we would understand that Congress has a certain responsibility in that regard.
Yes, the President should have asked us, but it's been over 3 months and this House has chosen not to act until now. I think it's appropriate that we are. I think we should authorize this mission in Libya, and I strongly support that mission.
Now, like most Americans, when this issue first came up, when the people in Libya started rising up against their oppressive dictator, I was very reluctant about the idea of U.S. military involvement, as I think we always should be. I think in the past we have been too over-anxious to use the U.S. military in places where it was not a good fit. We need to think carefully about this. And in every instance we need to strike a balance.
On the one hand, what is the positive impact that our involvement could have and, on the other hand, what are the risks of that involvement? I think there was a unique set of circumstances in Libya that made this make sense.
First of all, our involvement could have a very positive impact. We had international support. The U.N., NATO, the Arab League, everybody in the world wanted Qadhafi to be stopped from slaughtering the civilians who were rightfully standing up and asking for the basic rights that we take for granted in this country. In addition to that, our military budget is roughly equivalent to the entire rest of the world's combined. That gives us a unique set of capabilities. That unique set of capabilities was critical to stopping Qadhafi from crushing again the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Libyan people. If we had not acted, they would be crushed, many more civilians would be dead, and Qadhafi would be back in power. We cannot walk away from that responsibility and say that, well, yes, we don't like Qadhafi, we wish the people there would do well, but we simply don't want to support the action that is necessary to give them that opportunity. So in this case, I think the mission did make sense for that reason. The United States was in the position to make a difference and stand up for people who were asking for legitimate rights.
But then the broader question is, well, what does that have to do with the United States? That may be true, but it's true in a lot of countries. The reason this is so important is because of the broader movement that is going on, the so-called Arab Spring, people in Muslim countries rising up and demanding representative rights. That has an incredible impact on us. The greatest threat that we face as a country right now is from al Qaeda and their ideology. That ideology arose in part because of a whole bunch of repressive governments across the Muslim world that weren't providing for their people, a number of repressive governments, by the way, which the United States has in the past supported. We had an opportunity to do the opposite, to stand up for Muslim people. Let me tell you, in the history of this country, I don't think we've ever gotten as much positive press on the Muslim TV stations and Muslim media as we got for standing up to Qadhafi. This has been enormously helpful to us in that broader ideological effort. We had national security interests here for standing up.
Now as a House, I don't want us to stand up and say that we're going to back down from that commitment that we made. Make no mistake about it, if we defeat this resolution and pass the Rooney resolution, we will stop the mission in Libya and empower Muammar Qadhafi, something that I know nobody wants to do.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, consistent with the policy in here, it says: ``Congress does not support deploying, establishing or maintaining the presence of units and members of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Libya.'' The resolution clearly prohibits ground forces.
I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).
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