We have some defense issues in that part of the world. They are Iran. They were Afghanistan and still are. And they're in North Korea. The president has left the two most serious problems, after Afghanistan, for either his successor or who knows what? And the spectacle of a president who says he's tough on defense letting Iran and North Korea become nuclear powers on his watch is just unbelievable.
The idea that Republicans are going to defend the country and Democrats won't is exactly the wrong idea. This president has really not done a terribly good job defending America, with the exception of the war in Afghanistan, which I think we all supported. He squandered our military strength, put it in the wrong place and is allowing enemies of the United States to become nuclear powers. That is not a prescription for a strong defense of America.
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The other people that are creating the mayhem in the streets of Baghdad are people who are fighting for their country. They are local people who disagree with the occupation.
Look, I make no excuse for terrorism. People who blow up women and children ought to have the full wrath of the United States down upon them. What I have a problem with is the bad judgment of this president and his administration in deciding how you can best fight terrorism.
You send troops over there. They don't have adequate body armor. They're still taking up collections to make sure they do have body armor. When the secretary of defense goes over there, he gets his Humvee flown in, and the guys over there don't have adequate protection on the bottom of their Humvees.
This is not the way to run a war, and it's not the way to treat our soldiers.
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I think the president made a terrible, terrible mistake in getting us into Iraq. And now we really have a big problem on our hands. We have a security problem that we didn't have before.
Now the president's trying to make this into a war on terrorism. It is a war on terrorism in the sense that there's certainly international terrorists in Iraq. The point is, there weren't any to speak of before we got there. The president made a big error in judgment, and he's now trying to combine what's going on in Iraq with the war on terrorism.
There's a war on terrorism going on in this world, and we are a part of it, and I agree that we need to fight them over there before they get here. The problem is, the place that we need to fight those people are in Afghanistan, hiding over the border in Pakistan. The Iranians, who sponsor state terrorism, these are our enemies. And these are folks that are not being paid the kind of attention to that need to be paid attention to while 138,000 brave American men and women are pinned down in Iraq because of a gross error in judgment by this administration.
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