Ignorance or Evil

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARRETT. Mr. Speaker, over Thanksgiving, I had the amazing opportunity to accompany some impressive individuals and thought leaders from the Freedom Research Foundation, on my own dime and my own time, into Iraq and northeastern Syria.

There was a debate that ran between myself and one of these individuals over what was more dangerous, ignorance or evil. Ultimately, I suggest that perhaps ignorance is dangerous and evil is dangerous, but the most dangerous thing might be the ignorance of evil itself. In order to vanquish evil, we must first vanquish ignorance. We must recognize the evil that exists in order to correct it.

Tonight, to that end, I will speak to the realities on the ground, not only in the Middle East, but in so many parts of the world, but specifically in Iraq and Syria right now as I speak. If we don't get this right, not only will innumerable lives vanish, but entire cultures will vanish.

To my left is an image of individuals restrained and then set on fire, one of many barbaric acts that I could have chosen to visually depict the horrors that have been visited upon this region since the rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war began.

Edmund Burke once said--and I will paraphrase, ``The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.'' I might submit that the only thing worse than doing nothing is doing the wrong thing. All too often in the Middle East Western governments' policies are some combination of the two: nothing and the wrong thing.

There are any number of ways to illustrate this, but one might be this depiction of an individual who was actively committing atrocities against their fellow man and who was later welcomed into a Western nation as a refugee. That he went through a vetting process and was deemed to be a refugee from the very horror which he perpetrated is an anecdotal but very real evidentiary indicator of the fact that sometimes governments get it wrong.

We have gotten it wrong enough in this part of the world recently that we have seen not only ethnic cleansing but genocide on a scale that really and truly is hard to imagine the mirror of--perhaps Cambodia, certainly during the Second World War. In fact, I spent the better part of a year living in a tent in the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia because of ethnic cleansing and genocide. But let's put this in light.

We look the other way or do nothing so often that it becomes almost second nature. In 70 years, as civil war has raged in Burma, minority peoples--the Chin; the Kachin; the Wa; the Shan; and now, finally, receiving some attention, the Rohingya--are persecuted, exterminated, and displaced by a raging government.

And the West is quiet, perhaps not because we condone it but because we are not aware of it.

In Rwanda, over a period of 100 days, we lost about 10,000 lives a day. That is a million people.

In Bosnia, 8,000 were killed in Srebrenica in 1995.

These war crimes begat the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Yet, as we see ISIS rolled up into its final stronghold in the Deir ez-Zor province of Syria, with fighting currently going on as we speak around Hajin, no similar thing exists.

In fact, we see individuals whom we can identify who have immigrated to Europe who have not at all been held to account. That, in itself, is a shame and a tragedy and something that I would hope to see corrected.

But in Syria and Iraq not only have we done nothing; we have gotten it wrong. We gave roughly a billion dollars to the Free Syrian Army. Components of the Free Syrian Army included Jabhat al-Nusra, which was essentially al-Qaida--we have now armed and funded al-Qaida to fight ISIS--components now of antiregime forces like al-Sham, which has been co-opted by an expansionist, arrogant, hostile, evil Turkish leader named Erdogan. And, in the meantime, we have seen any number of minority communities persecuted, displaced, murdered, and raped across the region.

To my left, your right, you will see a pie chart. It is 100 percent of a pie chart. That represents the approximately 3 million Christians in Iraq and Syria at the high point of their population in the 21st century. What remains of that pie chart is that: 2.7 million human beings displaced, raped, murdered, tortured, et cetera. And we have done nothing, truly, to effectively stop this.

There was lament from the White House and many others, myself included, about the disproportionate numbers of individuals admitted as refugees by virtue of how it reflected the total population of these areas and their faith. But the answer is not to remove Christians or Yazidis or Circassians or Armenian minorities from Iraq and Syria; it is to create a circumstance where they can live in their home safely without fear.

Yet we haven't done that. Mr. Speaker, 2.7 million, ballpark. Again, you can go to CIA World Factbook or any number of sources. That is three people displaced, killed, et cetera, roughly, for every one in Rwanda. That is 325 people displaced or killed for every one in Srebrenica.

And we sit. And our foreign policy seems to be driven, oftentimes, by whatever the largest interests at play are. We are much more concerned with what the Russians are doing, with what the Turks are doing, with what the Iranians are doing. I could say what the regime was doing, but I have already mentioned the Russians.

I understand that from a geopolitical sort of big-picture scale, but I would submit the following, Mr. Speaker: If you want to get the big things right, you must first start by getting the small things right. If you want to understand what is going on in the world and get it right for tomorrow so that we can prevent this sort of suffering and inhumanity in the future, then you must first find those who share your values and align with them today.

What are these atrocities that have been committed, specifically against the Christian community but not exclusively, against the Yazidi community, against Shia or Sunni, depending upon who had the upper hand, where, and when--crucifixions?

There is a cottage industry in kidnapping and ransom. At one point, over 200 Christians were kidnapped and ultimately ransomed off for millions of dollars, which then went to fund the very entities that kidnapped them to begin with.

And when things didn't move quickly enough, Mr. Speaker, three innocent people were murdered just to make a point. We didn't hear about it on the nightly news.

We see a displacement and an ethnic cleansing taking place particularly in Iraq, where collaborators search through titles and then find a cousin and take a deed and sell it to someone who has been selected by entities that seek to change the demographic makeup of an area, who is of a particular faith.

So the Shabak population, perpetually a victim population in itself, has been moved into Christian areas to repopulate them with those who will be complicit in the rearrangement of entire regions.

In fact, before the conflict in Iraq, there were vibrant, thriving Christian communities in Bosra, in Baghdad and Mosul. Now we have seen them rolled up, pushed out of the country, murdered, and then, now, essentially contained, by and large, in an end of a plain.

The Khabur River area in Syria was under siege by ISIS, where churches and homes were destroyed, but where, also, the regime of Bashar al-Assad dropped bombs from aircraft.

And if this victimization isn't bad enough, it is multiplied by the fact that ISIS and those who fight against ISIS, in the case of the Free Syrian Army, hold with great disdain the West. And so, therefore, if you happen to be Christian, you are identified by default as pro- Western, and, therefore, the argument is let them help you.

Well, these people are not any more Western than I am Middle Eastern, but they are victims of that perception. And we do nothing.

So we know that minority groups have been victimized by Sunni extremists and ISIS, Shia extremists, Hezbollah, radical elements of the PMU, the Hashd al-Shaabi, by the Free Syrian Army, by Turkey and their co-opting of some of these very elements, by Russia, and by the regime, who not only drops chemical weapons on those who oppose them in regime-controlled areas, but also in the areas that are not.

All of these exploit or target religious minorities in order to maintain political power. And it is a play that is as old as tyranny itself, that you would find a minority group that was large enough that everyone might know someone in that minority group and then ascribe to them all the problems of your society; and then, in creating a victim, unite your society against that minority group in order to maintain your own power.

It is the face of evil.

And who does this? Well, the regime, Russia, but Turkey. Turkey, in particular, has been guilty and, I think, is egregiously so by virtue of the fact that we refer to them constantly as our NATO ally.

Turkey has taken the occasion of calamity in Syria in order to enhance and expand Turkey itself. This is absolutely, positively, unequivocally undeniable.

To my left, your right, you see pictures of the entrance to the hospital in Afrin, along with al-Bab and Jarabulus areas that the Turkish have taken military control of under the auspices of a cleverly named marketing ploy called Euphrates Shield, which tacitly was designed to help root out ISIS.

If indeed this was designed to help root out ISIS, why do Turkish flags fly above the buildings in Afrin as opposed to Free Syrian flags?

Why is it that the sign in front of the hospital is no longer in Kurdish and Arabic but now in Turkish and Arabic?

Why are they changing the names of the streets in Afrin to Turkish names?

Why have they changed the language in which students are taught in school?

Why is the police force in Afrin equipped with Turkish equipment swearing allegiance to Erdogan, speaking Turkish, and imposing a Turkish will upon a people who are not even ethnically Turkish?

In fact, to compare Afrin or Jarabulus or al-Bab to the Sudetenland is to forget the fact that there were actually Germans in the Sudetenland when it was ceded to Hitler.

So we have seen an expansionist Turkey use the calamity of ISIS and the Syrian civil war to grab land and then impose upon a people a language that is not their own, rules that are not their own, enforcement that is not their own, and tyranny that is not their own.

And this is the tip of the iceberg. These are our NATO allies. They spend millions of dollars a month in this city to influence policy and opinion. They put our air base at Incirlik under siege, quite literally, cutting water and power to that facility where nuclear weapons are stored and, candidly, were a scintilla away from storming the gates and visiting unimaginable terror on our servicemen and -women stationed there.

They brutalized, kicked, stomped, punched, and hit with ASPs and wands American citizens on American soil.

They attacked and killed civilians in Syria with U.S.-made weapons, F-16s, and now we are going to sell them F-35s?

Erdogan speaks in favorable terms of the Nazis. Turkey, our NATO ally, is engaged in three-party talks regarding the future of Syria with such global good actors as Iran and Russia, negating the thoughts or interests of their ``NATO allies'' or, more importantly in my estimation, the very people who suffer under their jackboot.

They have imprisoned over 50,000 people as a result of an uprising and have been rated to have one of the least free presses on the planet Earth.

They conflate truth with fiction, and they manipulate U.S. policy by conflating the YPG with the PKK and the PKK in Syria with the PKK in Turkey and, even now, are demanding a ``Kurdish withdrawal'' from Manbij, where I met with members of the military council, suggesting that the YPG unilaterally controls Manbij.

Well, I have news for you, Mr. Erdogan. It has already been done. The SDF controls Manbij, and the leaders of that military council might have some Kurds among them, but they also include Arabs and Christians and everyone else who lives in that region.

And we are negotiating with them over this because they play word games and they are a step ahead of us.

One of the most amazing stories I heard was outside Jarabulus at the front lines from a local commander who said that when the Turks came into Jarabulus, the ISIS fighters that the Turks said they had vanquished never actually vanished but only changed uniforms.

In fact, where I stood, machine-gun fire had impacted that same very day from forces of the Free Syrian Army who sat about 3 kilometers in front of the Turkish military base on that side of the line.

In other words, and I can tell you this based on my time in a uniform, if Turkey didn't want them to be there, they wouldn't be there. And what was ISIS that the Turkish said they would vanquish is now the same people in different uniforms working for Turkey, spreading the same sort of terror.

And they have the hubris to demand that the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are a multiethnic, tolerant, pluralistic group which represents the various ethnicities and religions of the individuals on the ground, is synonymous with the Kurdish element, the YPG, which, yes, indeed, had a great deal to do with liberating Manbij from ISIS but is no longer responsible for that area. Why? So that they can co-opt control of that area without firing a shot.

And I can assure you of this: The people there are rightly afraid.

And as if Turkey was not bad enough, Mr. Speaker, Iran. We, the United States, withdrew from Iraq to maintain a political promise, thus creating a vacuum, and everyone knows that power abhors a vacuum. And so when that vacuum was created, the Iranian regime took advantage of years of exploitation of Shia in Iraq by Sunni and the Hussein the Ba'athist administrations and essentially flipped the script.

Now, there are people in Baghdad who are working very hard to get this right. We have friends in Baghdad, but Iran is working, as we speak, to undermine this fact.

They promote and fund ethnic cleansing. They help to move properties where Christians or other minorities have been displaced into the hands of other groups, which will change the composition of the area, thus allowing them greater ease in control. They have killed, maimed, injured innumerable of our brothers and sisters, Iranian weaponry on the battlefield in Iraq.

And then there is the regime and Russia. So many people suggest that, perhaps, in the Middle East, in Syria in particular, there are no good guys. Well, there are. And the regime and Russia have sought to play this to their advantage.

Make no mistake; the Russians don't care so much about the Assad regime as they do about a warm-water port in the Mediterranean, which has been a dream in Russia since the czars, transit to the Atlantic through the Mediterranean without the need to cross the Bosporus out of the Black Sea.

But they have also weaponized religious leaders against their own people, essentially creating circumstances wherein, if bishops and patriarchs told the whole story about what was happening to their flock on one side of an imaginary line, they might endanger their flock on another.

They have bombed not only their own civilians but the Khabur River Valley in areas they didn't control, and then stood back and gladly blamed those atrocities on other parties. And they do this because we don't understand exactly what is being done.

So we have identified the problems, but what are the solutions? Long- term solutions mean getting the little things right first. To get the little things right, we have to find the people who share our values. And they do exist.

What can we do to this end? In Iraq, I think, recognizing the KRG as a self-governing subentity of a greater Iraq, their legitimacy, and then fostering and encouraging their devotion to pluralism.

We talk about atrocities committed. It is interesting how many times I heard the story of a million Christians murdered at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, having contracted the Kurdish population in 1915. And so the Christians said when the Iraqi government forces pulled out from in front of the Christian towns, particularly the Nineveh Plains, and left them exposed and defenseless to the rise of ISIS, they knew--they just knew that no one would help because the Kurds had not been their friends 100 years earlier. And yet it was these Kurds who stepped in and stopped ISIS, at least long enough for people to flee with their lives.

And so this commitment to religious minorities to other minorities is perhaps bred of the fact that the Kurds themselves, within the greater nation of Iraq, are a minority. But I am not terribly concerned with where it comes from. I have more concern with what the result is.

So if there is a commitment to tolerance anywhere that has been demonstrated on the ground in Iraq, it is in the subregion of Iraqi Kurdistan. This is a shared value. These are people with whom we can work.

We should insist that Iraqi authorities in the central government in Baghdad adhere to their own constitution. What I do mean by that? Well, in the Iraqi constitution, there is a revenue-sharing agreement that creates a federalist system by virtue of funneling moneys to areas based on population, et cetera. And for years on end, this very money was lorded over the Kurdish regions in order to demand compliance.

And, again, I am not advocating for an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. I am advocating for a self-administrating subentity of a greater Iraq. But if we are going to help the Iraqis, we need to demand that they actually follow their own constitution, because they are right now weaponizing against the very people that they purport to serve.

We should direct U.S. aid in any form that it is administered to the government at the closest level to the people. Decentralize--as Thomas Jefferson once said, that government closest to the people governs best and is most easily held to account.

Too often American aid is pilfered along its way from the United States through a central government to a regional government to a local government or entity. Let's find the good guys. Send it straight to them.

How do you do this? Well, within these subregions, we can find other subregions. For example, the Nineveh Plains in Iraq. I have spoken with Prime Minister Barzani, with the interior minister, with the finance minister--entire communities, literally towns and cities pushed free of their generational inhabitants that could come back and create a bastion of tolerance and adversity inside of a region that knows far too little of both.

And so the establishment of a Nineveh Plains Council and the directing of aid to that Nineveh Plains Council, not as an independent entity of a nation of Iraq or from Iraqi Kurdistan, but there within, in the Federalist construct, we would be siding with those who share our values to create outcomes that are consistent with our values.

And let me articulate briefly on what those values are: that all people are created equal and endowed by their creators with inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, if I could spend 11 days in the United States of America and hear Jefferson and Locke and Hobbes and Madison and Mason quoted nearly as often as I did in north and eastern Syria or northern Iraq, I would think we were getting civics and history right. But these common values are what we will build a sustainable and peaceful future on.

Support concrete steps to establish a true multiethnic, multireligious, pluralistic government in Iraq. The framework exists. So, for example, if Iraq is the United States, then Iraqi Kurdistan is California, and Nineveh Plains is Los Angeles, and separate, between these entities, into the appropriate realms, those government structures of each.

In other words, the political leaders shouldn't be making religious decisions. The religious leaders shouldn't be making political decisions. The economic leaders shouldn't be making security decisions. And security leaders shouldn't be making economic decisions. This isn't Tom's idea. These folks have figured this out. What we are not doing is helping them get it right.

Again, if Iraq is the United States, then the KRG is California, and Nineveh Plains is Los Angeles. Get Los Angeles right, it will help California. Get California right, it will help Iraq.

And the same can be said in Syria. What does right look like? Again, repeatedly, people coming to me saying: Well, Mason said; Madison said; the Declaration said; the Constitution said. The SDC, the Syrian Democratic Council, governs north and eastern Syria, again, just like a State government might govern a subentity of the United States. There is not some desire for independence from Syria, but instead for a greater Syria that respects basic human rights and freedoms. These are American values and ideas.

And it is not just the SDC in north and eastern Syria. They have separate councils in every single town, and these towns' councils look like the towns.

If a population of Circassians exist, the Circassians have representation. There are more women in leadership positions by proportion in north and eastern Syria than there are in the United States House of Representatives. The Turks tell us that north and eastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Council, is a subentity of the Kurds. The Turks are lying.

Let me tell you what the Syrian Democratic Council looks like. It looks Arab. It looks Kurdish. It looks Christian. It looks Yazidi. It looks Circassian. It looks like a man. It looks like a woman. It looks liberal. It looks conservative. It looks like you and me.

And what do we do to get it right? Well, the first thing that we could do that wouldn't involve spending a single dime of taxpayer money is recognize the right of the Syrian Democratic Council to exist as an independent subentity of a greater Syria. Mr. President, you could do this with one tweet.

Again, I am not advocating on behalf of an independent nation in north and eastern Syria. I am advocating on behalf of a Syrian nation that shares values based on what the leaders in this land that have undergone so much tragedy, so much dying, so much rape, have suffered through to beget.

Instead, we shape our policy on what might the Turks do, what might the Iranians do. I have got bad news. There is not a darn thing we can do to make them like us. Meanwhile, we have got people who inherently are drawn to us by virtue of an idea that everyone has a right to go to sleep in his or her own community without fear that they won't wake up in the morning; who just need us to say: Yes, you have a right to be there.

What other steps? Allow visas for the SDC leaders to get to the United States. That is right. They have essentially what is a state government. Their leaders aren't allowed to come here. Their leaders aren't allowed to walk the halls of this building like leaders from every other nation in the world and tell their story.

Stroke of a pen. Suggest that the values articulated in the SDC social contract be mirrored in foundational documents for a new Syria. These values include tolerance, pluralism, secular government--not secular society--freedom of religion, freedom from religion, equal rights for women, no persecution of people based on sexual orientation, the right to aspire and attempt and endeavor and succeed. These are American values.

I am not suggesting that we say that the SDC social contract should be adopted by all of Syria. I am suggesting that we suggest that when we negotiate this, because heretofore they are not even invited to the table, that they look at those values and seek to mirror those as part of any source of a sustainable future in that country.

To that end, we should insist on the inclusion and recognition of the SDC in any peace negotiations. We should establish immediately a no-fly zone over north and eastern Syrian. If the north and eastern Syrian SDC doesn't want you flying and the United States doesn't want you flying, you can't fly. Why? Well, because the Turks have stationed artillery on the border. They have shelled across the border. They have killed civilians across the border. The regime has dropped barrel bombs in the Khabur River Valley and killed civilians across the border, and the SDC--God bless them for trying--doesn't have any way of stopping it.

We should inform Turkey that the YPG is already out of Manbij and that the SDF isn't the YPG. We should inform Turkey, ultimately, that they can get out of Syria or they can get out of NATO.

The farce that suggests that Euphrates Shield is somehow in operation where Turkey collaborates with the world to rid it of the evil of ISIS is proven false by virtue not only of the horrific atrocities committed by the Turks, not only of the allowing of the Turks--of the forces that are ostensibly under their control to continue to attack peaceable peoples in the region, but also by the renaming of the streets, the hospitals, the schools, the police departments in the areas which they have occupied under the auspices of combating ISIS.

When was the last time the United States Army ever liberated an area and then changed the language to English and flew the U.S. flag over the hospital and the county administration building? These are not our allies.

What can we do to help not only in Syria and Iraq but in both? Make a concrete commitment to governments at whatever level--at the local level as embodied by the conceptual Nineveh Plains Council; the state level as embodied by a KRG, who, while not perfect, is acting a whole lot more in alignment with values of tolerance and secularism than anyone else in the region; and the Federal level in the instances of places like Jordan, make concrete commitments to these people who share our values.

This means more than money. Support Iranian opposition groups, insist that our allies ought to do business with us or with the Iranians, suspend the sale of weapons to Turkey until the Turks begin to behave like a nation that belongs amongst the community of nations.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be an American. I am proud of American values. But we, like all human beings, are imperfect.

Contrary to the thoughts of some, America is not the source of all the world's problems, we are also not the solution. But with great power comes great responsibility, Mr. Speaker, and we have been given great power.

It is our duty to get this right. Just like in the parable of the talents--to whom much is given, from whom much is expected. There is no excuse in remaining ignorant. People are dying. We need to get this right.

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