Dana Rohrabacher: “Finally in closing, Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that we have this resolution tonight, and I would hope that those…”

“Finally in closing, Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that we have this resolution tonight, and I would hope that those governments in Central Asia and around Afghanistan focus on what we are trying to do in the United States tonight. Tonight we are taking the first steps towards reinvolving ourselves in a part of the world that the United States walked away from 10 years ago. When the Soviet Union was finally defeated in Afghanistan and the last Soviet tanks went across the bridge back into what was then the Soviet Union, the United States breathed a sigh of relief, and we believed that the fighting there would be over very quickly and shortly. Instead, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, the war in Afghanistan which brought peace and prosperity to the Western world, continues in Afghanistan. Today we spend $100 billion a year less on defense because these scraggly, ill-equipped, brave and courageous men in Afghanistan stood up to Soviet tanks and air power, and because they did, the Soviet role to keep control of what they held in the Soviet empire and to expand that empire was broken. Yes, today we are able to spend those hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars that we are not spending on defense, we are able to bring that out of our deficit spending. We are able to spend that on education, we are able to spend that on making our own lives, an infrastructure, making the lives of our country better so that our children live better lives.”