Howard Berman

Two weeks ago, the Obama administration announced that it would send about 100 U.S. military advisors to central Africa to support regional efforts to defeat the Lord's Resistance Army or LRA.

I believe it is squarely in our national interest to build the capacity of allied forces so that they can fight bad actors on their own.

It is Congress that played a leading role in putting the LRA on our foreign policy agenda.

While the LRA may not pose a direct national security threat to the U.S. in narrowly-defined terms, it does threaten the stability of a large swath of central Africa.

the administration pursuant to congressional law prepared a strategy which specifically included references to a military objective to remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield

Our best hope for slowing the Iranian nuclear train is to bring its financial machinery to a grinding halt.

Nothing we do, nothing any administration has been doing, can truly be deemed effective with respect to Iran until Iran stops its nuclear weapons program.

The fact that on any given day they do not announce to the world the exact details of a response to a particularly heinous action is not evidence that it is business as usual.

I think the most dramatic measure we could take in terms of this legislation is designating Iran's central bank as a facilitator of terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction.

So if you want to correct that injustice that was just cited, then vote for the substitute.

I believe that anti-U.S., anti-democratic, and anti-reform contingents at the U.N. would think this kind of disengagement was great.

It is ironic that they get to chair these things, but that is what happens when you are a country.

Now the United Nations is not supposed to be our pal. We don't own it.

To abandon the U.N. would only embolden our adversaries.

I appreciate the chairman's concern regarding the degree of favoritism displayed by members of the U.N. to the Palestinians.

the true purpose of the bill is to end U.S. participation in the U.N. and, in the process, deal a fatal financial blow to the world body.

Israel has a permanent agenda item at the Human Rights Council. These must be condemned, and I join every member of this committee in doing so.

We have to be critical, and we have to argue against it and be passionate in our opposition.

I think it is a mistake to view our neighborhood as a constellation of threats rather than a series of opportunities.

It has served as a significant multiplier for our own foreign affairs budget, allows the U.S. to advance our national security interests at a fraction of the cost in lives and money of sustained military operations.

It is because of U.S. engagement that we are able to make advances.

This bill is not in our national interest, and I urge that we support the substitute language of Ranking Member Berman.

I hope nothing you see this morning will cause you to lose faith in democracy.

It is the entitlement that my grandchildren, the entitlement that they grow up in a world of peace.

The U.S. is still recovering from the colossal loss of influence in the region that resulted from those policies.