Stop Fighting Middle East's Wars

Sep 16, 2014 Issues: Defense

Madam Speaker:

Many years ago, I voted for the first Gulf War after attending classified briefings about the great threat we faced from Saddam Hussein’s elite troops.

Then I watched as those same elite troops surrendered to CNN camera crews and empty tanks.  I realized then that the threat had been greatly exaggerated.

A few years later, we rushed to war in Iraq against weapons of mass destruction that were not there.  The threat at the time of the second Gulf War was greatly exaggerated, and I am glad that I voted against going to war that time.

After the horrible beheadings of two American citizens, I felt we should respond, and I have publicly supported limited air strikes.

I hope we can at some point, if we are not doing so already, send in a special operations team or teams to get those who have committed these beheadings, just as we got Osama bin Laden.

However, I do not support sending thousands of young Americans as combat troops on the ground into Middle Eastern civil and religious wars.

The primary responsibility for fighting over there should be up to the countries in that region.

And I do not believe we should have some fake coalition where most of the fighting and most of the funding come from the U.S. military as in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

While ISIS or ISIL, it has been referred to as both, is a threat, we have faced far greater threats at other times in our history.

Some of our leaders clamor for war to prove how tough they are –some want to be little Churchills.  Many may believe if they don’t support the strongest possible action, they are afraid they will be blamed if something bad happens.

However, both our President and the Secretary of Homeland Security have said our intelligence and military officials have no evidence of any credible threat against the U.S. at this point.

In addition, we have spent $716 billion on homeland security since 9-11 just at the federal level not counting the billions spent by state and local governments and private companies.

Just one company –FedEx –told me a couple of years after 9-11 that they had spent $200 million on security that they would not have spent had 9-11 not happened.

On top of all that, we spend much more on defense each year than the next top-ten nations combined, and almost more than all nations combined, since the poor nations spend very little on Defense.

If we devoted our entire federal budget to the Middle East, we could not stop all the fighting or solve all the problems of that region.

If we spent our entire federal budget on homeland security, we could not make our country 100% perfectly safe.

Some radical Islamic fanatic may at some point do something bad in the U.S.

But we are really already spending all we can and doing all we can if we are going to meet the needs of our own people.

The first obligation of the U.S. Congress should be to the American people, and the people of the Middle East are going to have to solve most of their own problems on their own.

We do not have the money or the authority to try to run the whole world.

And we certainly shouldn’t panic or overreact to this threat from ISIS.

Just a few weeks ago, their numbers were supposedly between five and 10,000.  Now, we suddenly have them up to 20,000 to 31,000.

But we have over one million in our military and supposedly many other nations are going to help against ISIS.

And the leaders of ISIS have proven themselves to be cowards by beheading unarmed, defenseless men in front of cameras in undisclosed locations.

We fought against Al Queada in Iraq and Afghanistan and then with Al Queada in Libya.  A year ago, our hawks wanted to take out Assad in Syria, now we want to have him with us against ISIS.

I agree with what Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote a few days ago.  He said:

What should Congress do?  It should declare once and for all that we will stay out of this ancient Muslim civil war of Shia versus Sunni.  We have been on both sides of it.  Each side is barbarous. In the 1980s, we helped the Sunnis.  Now we are helping the Shias.  Last year, Mr. Obama offered to help the Islamic State by degrading its adversaries; now, he wants to degrade the Islamic State.  We have slaughtered innocents and squandered fortunes in an effort to achieve temporary military victories that neither enhance our freedom, nor fortify our safety.  We will only have peace when we come home, when we cease military intervention in an area of the world not suited for democracy and in which we are essentially despised.

I agree with Judge Napolitano.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I say again that we cannot take care of our own people and our own country if we are permanently at war in the Middle East.