August 16, 2006

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Speech about the War on Terror
Marietta Rotary Club and Marietta Kiwanis Club

You should never clap before you’ve heard the speech; it may not be that good.

Henry Hill has been my dear friend for thirty-five years and it’s a treat and a pleasure every time I’m with him. He has stuck with me when sticking with me was a difficult thing to do and I have never forgotten it. I wouldn’t be here to day were it not for he and so many other friends in this room who, if I started mentioning them all, I would mention literally almost everyone in the room. I will mention two guys though, because two of my favorite men of the cloth are here today – Dr. Speed and Captain Fulz – and seeing them reminded me of the time I asked my mother, when I was a little boy – I don’t know if I was a teenager yet, might have been a pre-teenager – about how I could be sure God was answering my prayers. She said, “Well you can’t know you’ll get an answer unless you listen.” I thought that advice was strange at the time, but through my life I have learned that you know if you listen, your prayers are answered through many different conduits.

I struggled on the way over here unto what title I would give this speech to convey how deeply I feel about that of which I’m about to talk. And I couldn’t think of what to say. And I listened to your prayer today and the last three words before “Amen” were “Lest we forget” and that’s divine intervention and it sends the message I want to send today.

Because, to begin with, I want to talk about the world conflict in which we’re engaged: the war on terror, terrorism, what happened in Great Britain, what happened on 9/11, and how important it is to never forget. When the Kiwanis Club of Marietta was kind enough to ask me to speak at the Field of Flags three years ago and I gave that speech, I said then that we were in the ultimate war between good and evil. Nothing has proven to be more true. We’re in the ultimate war between good and evil. Have we made mistakes as a country in this war? Sure. You’re going make mistakes. But the gravest mistake of all would be for us to look the other way.

In 1996, Al-Qaeda issued a fatwa against the United States of America and declared war on us. And on seven separate occasions before 9/11 they attacked us, they killed American servicemen and not interested people and we never responded. We didn’t even respond on the first attack on the World Trade Center. But finally, on 9/11, a tragedy worse than the attack on Pearl Harbor, we responded. We were right to respond, we’re right to continue to respond and though from time to time we may make a mistake, the gravest mistake would be to believe that you can accommodate terror, that if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.

This is the fight for everything we in the United States of America believe in. It’s so important to understand this is the first war in the history of, certainly our republic, where our enemy doesn’t want what we have; they just don’t want us to have what we have. They don’t want the Salvation Army to be able to worship and change lives in the way they see fit, or me to choose to attend a Methodist church, or an Episcopal church, or a Jewish synagogue. They don’t want a law abiding citizen to be able to carry an arm freely and legally, they don’t want me to be able to make this speech today, the press to be able comment on it however they want to comment on it, or you to challenge it when I open the floor for questions.

Everything our forefathers fought and died for in the Bill of Rights and our Constitution are the enemy of terror and a radical element of the Muslim religion. Now, we are not at war with the Muslim religion, but we have seen the hijacking of that religion by a small segment, used to guide people to do horrible things. If we don’t confront it, if we don’t stay vigilant, if we don’t stay the course, then what you and I have known and what we hope and dream for our grandchildren and our children will never, ever be seen.

Now, I feel responsibility as a United States Senator and as someone you elect, when you ask me to come to talk to you to try and help educate you, as well as tell you why I feel so deeply about what I’m telling you.

The most recent attack by Hezbollah in the capture and kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of three others and the subsequent raining of missiles on Israel and Israel’s subsequent attack on Hezbollah is very instructive in terms of what we confront because Hezbollah and South Lebanon had crews of camera crews, who immediately after an Israeli attack go and videotape the results of that attack: if the videotape showed a child that was killed or a woman that was killed or an innocent building that was destroyed and they would immediately escort the international media and Al-Jazeera and gladly share the tape with them and let them report to the world about what a horrible thing had happened, yet if one of those bombs hit a Hezbollah stronghold and wiped out hundreds of their missiles, Hezbollah wouldn’t let the press get anywhere close to it.

We’re in a war of public relations, in some regard, not different than the Vietnam era. When America finally got out-PR’ed, politicians fought a war and tied the hands of our military leaders behind their back and we left it saying, “They didn’t win; we didn’t lose.”

We quit.

We cannot quit on the war on terror. And as tragic as the last thirty-eight days have been, some things may show a light in the tunnel. The moderate Arab world, trapped in the middle of all that’s going on, hopefully can separate and say, “Wait a minute, what do we choose? Do we choose tyranny and victims of terror and death, or do we choose to fight for freedom and liberty?” They need look no further than Afghanistan to see a country that, three and a half years ago, the soccer field was turned into a killing field. And seven days a week the Taliban executed five, ten, or fifteen people just to send the message, “You better do what we say.”

And today they have their own elected leaders, their own elected representatives. Are the Taliban still trying to come back? Sure. But who’s fighting them today? Who’s fighting them today is NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, thirty-three nations, the world community, the French. The French have come forward in the Lebanon issue and to their everlasting credit, although critics of us in Iraq, critics of us in Afghanistan, have take a leading role in trying to drive a settlement or a truce, and then an instructive protection of a barrier between Lebanon and Israel enforced by multinational troops, of which some will be French. The Germans, since their new election of their new leader, she has taken the initiative to help the United States of America and the German people in this war against terror.

This is not a war that is going to be won or lost one day on a beach like Normandy, where one side is obviously defeated and another one wins. This war is going to be won in the hearts and minds of free people, lest we forget and we see an end to freedom because we quit. And as I have said, mistakes will be made. Arthur Crow will tell you, anytime you are at war, mistakes will be made, but the gravest mistake would be to forget what the United States of America is and stands for. To forget the attacks against our people and the innocent people who have died and to forget when the world has seen great crisis in the last two centuries it has been the resolve of the United States of America, standing to free individual countries and people that has ultimately prevailed.

The last week of May, this year, as a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, I presided over the Memorial Day Ceremony at seven American cemeteries in Europe and Northern Africa. In the cemetery, and I get emotional about this, in Margraten, the Netherlands, as I walked amongst the row of over seven thousand Americans who died in the Battle of the Bulge, I walked past a grave of a private, first-class, Roy Irwin from New Jersey. Roy Irwin died on December the 28 th, 1944. That was the day I was born. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. That young man sacrificed everything on the day he died, so that I could have everything I have, sixty-one years later.

We owe it to our men and women in harm’s way, we owe it to those who are fighting for us today, and fighting this time for the free world, to support them. If we make mistakes, correct them. But do not make the mistake of leaving, for if we leave in a war on terror, there will be no return, none at all.

Lest we forget.

Now, thank you for that line, by the way, because it helped me a lot, Pastor.

The second thing I want to talk about, for just a second, which I think is of particular interest if you filled up your tank recently, is the price of petroleum. And it in part is affected by what is going on in the Middle East right now, obviously, because we are very dependent on oil that comes from that part of the world. In fact, if you look around for a second, we’re very dependent on oil from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and then you come over here – Mexico and Venezuela. That’s not a very nice neighborhood to be dependent upon.

We need to be more interdependent, and the Congress of the United States, in the Senate and the House, just before we left, passed two different versions of a piece of legislation upon which we will agree shortly after September the 5 th. It’s going to make a remarkable difference and you’re going to see the difference pretty rapidly. We rejected the ban and overturned the ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a hundred miles off-shore and will open up the largest natural gas field known in the world. And you do anything the least bit connected with natural gas, knowing that it has gone up five-fold over the last three years and we’re consuming it at such a rapid rate, it’s going to continue to go unless we expand greatly the supply.

It also will help us in terms of supply with petroleum. In the energy bill we passed a year ago, we have reopened the licensing of nuclear plants and are working now with the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to streamline, not by shortcutting, but to streamline the process so we can bring online nuclear reactors in a timely fashion. Southern Company will be applying for two licenses in Plant Vogtle for the third and fourth generators at that particular facility.

We also put in tremendous tax incentives for the development of renewable alternative sources of energy. Georgia farmers, business people, and investors have raised sixty million dollars to build the first ethanol plant in our state in Camilla, Georgia. And you will see ethanol plentiful in that part of the state when that becomes a reality. The biggest problem with ethanol, however, when it’s corn-based is Georgia doesn’t grow enough corn to run one ethanol plant. It takes a lot of corn to make a lot of ethanol. However, Georgia’s richest resource, we lead the nation in pulp and timber and cellulose-based ethanol is every bit as good – and in some cases even better – than corn-based ethanol, with switch grass probably being the most prominent, but as we all know because President Bush introduced it to us, it’s more in Texas than in Georgia.

But nonetheless, our country is moving at a rapid rate to develop those alternative and renewable sources of energy, which help us not only with expanding our opportunity and our supply of petroleum or fuel or energy products, but also helps us from a standpoint of the production of carbon, mercury, SOx and NOx and the other things that we’re doing a great job of producing, but continue to threaten us and certainly potentially hurt us in terms of the environment.

But we cannot forget as we develop all those alternative resources that we still as a country are going to need to develop all of our natural resources. It is wrong for our nation to not explore resources within our own territory. I supported the repeal of the ban on drilling in the Gulf, further than a hundred miles off-shore, and I have supported drilling in ANWAR and I know as a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, the parameters upon which that drilling is allowed is environmentally friendly and absolutely from an economic sense, essential to the people of the United States of America.

So, there’s good news on the way, but it’s going to take a while. The other goods news that I tell everybody is as a bad as seventy-five dollar a barrel oil is, it makes a lot of things economical that used to not work. At thirty dollars a barrel ethanol is not a good competitor to produce it with petroleum. But at seventy-five dollars a barrel, or at sixty-five dollars a barrel, or at fifty-five dollars a barrel, or at fifty dollars a barrel, ethanol is very competitive with petroleum, so what you have happening below the radar screen right now is a huge investment in new fuels, new energy, and cleaner burning fuels all because the economics of energy are working. The pain of seventy-five dollars in the interim may bring back an awful lot of ease as time goes on.

Now lastly, as we are moving toward the election, the first Tuesday in November, Congress is going to be in session for about three more weeks in September, then we will recess until the election and then we’ll go back for what’s known as a lame duck session, what that produces is highly unlikely because it’s going to depend entirely on what is produced in terms of the polls and the election. If there’s a switch in the body of the House, the majority, minority, that will have an effect, whatever might happen. So, we don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’ll just end with this one comment, if I can.

One thing we must do is stay the course on this issue on immigration and not look the other way. Now, I have received from the national media and from some of my colleagues, some criticism for my stance originally when we debated the immigration bill in the Senate. But the worm is turning. The tide is turning the American people and the elected officials of this country are beginning to analyze the proper way to reform immigration in this country. And I think there’s a chance that we can have some substantial reform passed before the end of the year. But it cannot pass and it must not pass and it should not pass unless this country first commits to secure our border to the South with Mexico.

And to that end, the amendment that I tried to put in the McCain-Kennedy bill and failed by fourteen votes was an amendment that simply said this: No program, granting legal status to anyone who is here illegally may take effect until the Secretary of Homeland Security has certified to the President and the Congress that every border security provision in Title One and Title Two of the bill is funded, in place, and operational. And what that meant is five-hundred and seventy-one miles of barriers in those geographic locations where barriers work. It meant twenty-four UAV’s, 24/7 eyes in the sky, to watch the border twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It meant six thousand more border patrol officers trained. It meant more detention facilities so we end the practice of catch and release. And it meant more money for law enforcement so the judiciary and the prosecutors of the U.S. District Courts on the border between the United States and Mexico can prosecute people who violate the law.

The price tag on that is $6.2 billion, which in one sense is a lot of money, but in the sense of the cost of the United States of America in our security and our social service system in terms of what we see today with our border leaking like a sieve is a drop in the bucket. So, I just promise you this: the battle that I started waging when the McCain-Kennedy bill came forth back in May is still on and I’m not leaving the United States Senate this year until seeing to it that if an immigration bill passes, it secures our border first to ensure we finally keep the promise this country started making twenty years ago on immigration but has failed to look in the right direction since. We must make border security a reality.

With that said, I promised Billy that I would like to open the floor for questions; I always hate political speeches when they look at their watch and say, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got to leave.” I’d rather hear what you have to say.