Thank you Mr. Chairman.  I would like to thank our distinguished witnesses, Ambassador Pickering and Director Woolsey, for agreeing to appear before our Committee today.  

Among the highest priorities for the United States is creating a long-term strategy regarding Iran. 

The threats posed to the U.S. and the West by the regime in Tehran has been clear for decades, and all agree that it is growing. 

The line in the sand was first drawn in 1979, when Iranian revolutionaries took over our embassy and held Americans hostage for 444 days.

From that moment onward, the Iranian regime continued to directly challenge the U.S. and the West through terrorist attacks against our citizens and our interests carried out by its terrorist proxies.

We must therefore not fool ourselves into thinking the Iranian threat will somehow go away if we simply talk to them, for that is a clear path to disaster.

Diplomacy does not mean surrender.

Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorism, enabling the murder of countless civilians and endangering international security by supplying weapons, funding, training, and sanctuary to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. 

Iran continues to supply the Shiite Islamist groups in Iraq with money, training, and weapons such as the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are used to target U.S. coalition troops in Iraq. 

Iran’s support for these extremist groups is a major factor in the sectarian strife and attacks taking place in Iraq.

Iran’s goals include regional domination, which is an alarming prospect, as this would result in Iran acquiring control over the world’s oil supply, along with undermining and overthrowing our allies, and destroying our ability to protect our interests in the region.

The reach and threat from Iran is not limited to the Middle East. 

We were reminded last Fall that it has long been active in our Hemisphere, when Argentine prosecutors indicted several senior Iranian officials, as well as Iran’s surrogate terrorist organization Hezbollah, for the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July 1994.

And its influence in our own backyard continues to grow. 

There is increasingly close cooperation between Iran and Venezuela.  Iranian leaders have offered to help Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez build a nuclear program. 

Chavez, in turn, recently awarded the President of Iran one of Venezuela’s highest honors.

But there is an even more ambitious agenda.  Iran’s self-proclaimed goal is the promotion and direction of an Islamist revolution worldwide, one directed at the West as a whole.

The United States has taken on almost the entire burden of confronting the growing Iranian threat, but we cannot do it alone and hope to be successful. 

It is essential that our allies and responsible nations understand that Iran’s determination to acquire a capacity to build nuclear weapons is a threat to all.

They must also be willing to make sacrifices, as the U.S. has, to deny Iran the technological, financial, and political resources to continue along this path.

However, that level of commitment has been slow in coming.

A generous incentives package was offered by the West to Iran to suspend  its uranium enrichment program-- one the entire world knows is intended to produce a nuclear weapon. 

An August deadline was established by the UN Security Council for Iran to fulfill its obligations and comply with the requests made by the IAEA or the UN Security Council.

Months elapsed before the UN took any further action.

Iran has still not complied.

Regrettably, the weak international response to this defiance has thereby convinced Iran’s leaders that their defiance will go unpunished and may even be rewarded.

If Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is successful, it would radically transform the balance of power in the Middle East.

A nuclear-armed Iran could spur a crash program by Sunni-majority nations, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to develop or acquire nuclear weapons in order to defend themselves.

In fact, last week, President Mubarak of Egypt stated that, if Iran attains nuclear weapons, his country will be forced to begin developing its own nuclear weapons. 

Some have argued that the solution to the Iranian sponsorship of global terrorism and its development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is to engage in direct talks with the Iranian regime.  I strongly disagree.

I support the position taken by Mr. Woolsey and Senator Kyl in a recent letter to President Bush addressing the specific recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.

In this letter, they posit that negotiating with Iran would:

• legitimize the extremist regime,
• embolden our enemies, and
• allow the Iranian radicals to buy more time to develop weapons of mass destruction.

I hope there is no need to remind anyone that U.S. policy for several Administrations has been to not negotiate with terrorists.

Instead, we must convince responsible nations to increase pressure on the Iranian regime and deprive it of the revenues it needs to continue its destructive policies nuclear weapons program.

If our allies cease or, at the very least, reduce their investments in Iran and their support for loans and other assistance to Iran, we could severely hamper the Iranian regime, given the Iranian economy’s heavy dependence on oil and gas.

As part of this effort, my distinguished colleague Chairman Lantos and I authored the Iranian Freedom Support Act, which places sanctions on companies and individuals investing in Iran's energy sector.  The bill was signed into law in November and is already being used to great effect.

Already, a number of foreign banks have refused to engage in investment and financing of the Iranian energy sector.  For example, a Japanese company recently backed out of a $2 billion dollar contract to develop Iranian oil fields.

In addition, we are currently looking very closely at an agreement between China and Iran, under which a Chinese company would invest $16 billion to develop Iranian gas fields. 

If the Chinese company is found to be in violation of the Iran Freedom Support Act, my colleagues in Congress and I will seek to ensure that this Chinese entity is penalized to the fullest extent of the law. 

Equally disturbing is this week’s signing of a $16 billion deal between Iran and Malaysia to develop Iran’s southern gas fields, as well as the recent reports of new investments by France’s Total and ongoing developments in the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to India, running through Pakistan, with a possible extension to China.

In order to maintain the pressure on Iran, I plan to reintroduce two bills from the 109th Congress. 
The first would target Iran’s energy sector by encouraging public and private pension and thrift savings plans to divest from U.S. and foreign companies that have invested $20 million or more in that sector.

The second bill would seek to make Iran pay for what they did to our former hostages in Iran and ensure that these brave Americans will be able to pursue the resolution of their judgments by U.S. courts by seeking to remove the restrictions imposed by the Algiers Accords of 1981.
 
I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to secure passage of these bills in the near future and to develop additional measures to tighten the stranglehold on the terrorist regime in Tehran.

We might have hoped that with the passage of time, Iran’s leaders would gradually moderate their policies and seek to reconcile themselves with the international community.  But they have not.

Their rhetoric alone demonstrates that they may be in the process of becoming even more radical. 

The regime has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” continues to refer to the United States as the “Great Satan,” and has recently hosted an appalling conference aimed at denying the Holocaust.

In dealing with Iran, it is wise to remember that we are not dealing with a normal power, not even a merely aggressive one. 

Ultimately, a country must be measured in terms not only of its actions, but in terms of its goals as well.  And these strike at the heart of our security.

That challenge cannot be wished away or negotiated away.  It cannot be bought off or ignored.  There are no magic words to be uttered by the UN Security Council that will deliver us.  We may have few allies.

These are unpleasant facts, but we have no real choice but to accept them and meet them.  For the alternative is to surrender the shaping of our future to a mortal enemy.

I look forward to receiving the remarks, insight, and recommendations of our distinguished panelists to assess the next steps for U.S. policy—a policy that will, not just delay and contain the threat, but compel Iran to permanently and verifiably, cease its support for terrorism and its pursuit of deadly unconventional weapons.

I would like to once again thank Ambassador Woolsey and Director Pickering for testifying here today and look forward to hearing their testimonies.