Henry Bonilla: “Mr. Speaker, I want to empathize that this trip by the congressional delegation was historic. It was a bipartisan trip…”

“Mr. Speaker, I want to empathize that this trip by the congressional delegation was historic. It was a bipartisan trip; and I congratulate my colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis), for putting this incredible group together. It was a large group and it reached across the political spectrum. All of these Members were taking this situation in Iraq very seriously and they were seeking the truth about Iraq. We were all choosing not to just get our information from news media reports that appear each night on the networks or from some of the major newspapers that only take snippets of what is actually happening in Iraq. The truth we discovered was that the 31-member coalition has a solid grip, a real plan on improving and stabilizing a free Iraq by helping rebuild the infrastructure, establishing border security, and also trying to help build a new military for Iraq that would be on our side and would fight side by side with us, Iraqis working with us to create a country that is no longer an outlaw nation and no longer led by a rogue dictator in Iraq. This is important to the safety of our people.”