VIEW CLIP
I appreciate the Gentlelady’s work, because the bill we have before us, as I mentioned earlier, is a substantial improvement over the one that went through the House before. I had hoped that it would come back to our committee, because I think these issues are worthy of further discussion, and I think there's more fine tuning we can do. For instance, dealing with the provisions in terms of the promotion of pro-democracy: reading the language that's in this bill, the Ayatollah Khomeini in exile in France would have qualified for U.S. assistance under this. We could have had a debacle like we had with Chalabi.
I don't think it's tight and precise as we would like. But it fails to deal with the fundamental choice we need to make between whether we want regime change or whether we want to stop nuclear proliferation. I deeply appreciate the points raised by my colleague from Iowa, Mr. Leach. We could end up actually making this situation worse. I am deeply troubled that we are going to ratchet up the pressure on the very people who are most in need of a diplomatic solution, the people like China and Russia who are going to be key to ultimately resolving it.
Mr. Speaker, part of the problem that we'd have great difficulty with is some of the most disagreeable people, some of the most dangerous people, are people we ignore at our peril. We should not do that. We should engage them directly, diplomatically and not under the auspices of this bill, which I hope the House will reject.
VIEW CLIP
In the years since we enacted our attack against Iraq, the threat from Iran has only grown more difficult and our capacity to meet that threat actually has diminished. It's one of the reasons many of us opposed that action against Iraq. There's no question, Iran's president is a thug, an anti-Semite and a dangerous man. He exploits Iranian grievances to consolidate power and has openly expressed his desire to wipe Israel off the map.
Our troops are bogged down in Iraq, placing them at risk should Iran launch a wave of terrorism. We have done nothing to break our global dependency on oil, the control of which gives Iran its greatest ability to blackmail other countries. I appreciate the goodwill and passion of the sponsors of this bill bringing a critical issue before us. I rise in opposition, however. We've been at this point before. We passed an earlier vision of this bill - the Senate rejected it as an amendment to the Defense Authorization. I appreciate that there have been some positive changes that have been made to this legislation. One is a sunset; the earlier bill would have been unlimited made it permanent. I appreciate that it contains a provision that I authored that would prohibit assistance to groups who had appeared on the State Department's list of terrorist groups in the last four years.
However, the problem is nothing in this legislation points us in the direction of a solution. It is, if you will, a cruise missile aimed at a difficult diplomatic effort just as they are reaching their most sensitive point. The timing for this legislation could not be worse. While the United States has largely been missing in action from the diplomatic game, the European Union and Iran have been making progress at developing a formula that would lead to the suspension of Iran's nuclear enrichment program and the start of serious negotiations. This bill specifically targets Russia which may have some influence with Iran and which is critical to a unified diplomatic front.
This bill has another fundamental flaw. Beside sanctioning people whose help we need to reach a diplomatic solution, it gives equal weight to overthrowing the Iranian government as it does to nonproliferation. These two goals cut against each other. Yes, the regime's human rights record is atrocious, but preventing them from developing nuclear weapons should be our first priority. By not prioritizing behavior change over regime change we pull the rug out from anyone in the Iranian leadership who values survival over the nuclear program and eliminate incentives for diplomatic solutions.
Now, in my opinion, Iran holds, if not the key, a key to many of the issues that confound us in the Middle East. Their cooperation ultimately is going to be critical if we're going to be able to deal with the mess that our policies have created in Iraq, the problems that we are facing in Afghanistan with the resurgence of the Taliban, and it's going to play a key role on issues that deal with Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas. They are like a puzzle, and, sadly, Iran is the missing solution.
After September 11 when the United States took action to overthrow the Taliban our interests and Iran's aligned and we were able to coordinate quietly but surely. They were partners with us in some tough sessions in bond when we were having the negotiations that set up the Afghanistan government. And in the midst of this tentative effort of cooperation President Bush decided to declare Iran part of the Axis of Evil and most hope for progress disappeared. Mr. Speaker, the irony is that Iran is one of the few nations in the world where the majority of the people still have a positive view of the United States. This is difficult, it is not easy, but to simply sanction potential partners and confuse what our priorities are, I'm sad to say, is going to be a step backward. We ought to make clear to Iran that they need to stop their support for terrorism in the development of nuclear weapons capacity, and begin the process of free, fair and open elections. But I am sorry to say that this legislation in front of us ignores the opportunities that we have dealing with the lessons that we learned in our success with Libya.
I respectfully suggest that this is legislation that we ought to reject and that we ought to come back in an area of where we are going to prioritize what our goals are with Iran and we are going to by all means have our sanctions, but not be reckless in terms of the pressure that we try and against the very people who are going to help us with a solution to prevent nuclear proliferation.
