The Honorable Duncan Hunter                                                                              Member (CA-52)                                                                                                       United States House of Representatives

Duncan Hunter - Employment- Member, United States House of Representatives (CA-52); chairman, House Armed Services Committee (2002-2006); Vietnam veteran, United States Army, 173rd Airborne and 75th Army Rangers (1969-1971). Special Mention- Candidate, Republican Nomination for President; wrote the Secure Fence Act, extending the San Diego fence 854 miles across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Education- University of Montana; University of California Santa Barbara; BSL; J.D., Western State University Law School (1976). Personal- Father of two; married to Lynne; they live in Alpine, California"

"Peace Through Strength"

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  Thank you.  Steve, I thank you, and, Tim, thank you.  What a warm introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for letting me be with you today.  I was asked to talk about peace through strength.  Until a couple of weeks ago, I was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and today, I have got a good view of the Capitol and some nice drapes, but until a couple of weeks ago, I was the chairman and have been for the last four years.

You know, I thought I would talk to you about national security, where we stand, talk a little bit about the warfighting theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan and then maybe look over the horizon at what we may have in the future, and also talk about another aspect of national security which is what I call, and what we have always called, the "arsenal of democracy."

It was about 7:24 this morning that the sunrise hit the crosses and Stars of David at Arlington Cemetery, and I always think that is the most important set of monuments in Washington, D.C., because it manifests the most solemn obligation of a President to the citizens of this country, and that is to protect it. But as that sunrise spreads across the East Coast, what it really illuminates from the tip of Florida to the north of Maine is the arsenal of democracy, and that is this vast complex of factories and businesses and plants that basically produce a domestic product during peacetime, but can be used during wartime to secure our nation.

The "arsenal of democracy," I think that term was first coined by FDR, and in World War II, we produced over 100,000 tanks, 41,000 pieces of artillery, 36 billion yards of textiles, and thousands of planes and aircraft.  In fact, I think in San Diego, we produced an aircraft, a bomber an hour, and that means you could have built the entire force of B-2 bombers and have had three hours left over.  So we had a vast arsenal, and we really utilized that arsenal of democracy to win World War I, win World War II, and in fact, win the cold war, because along with Ronald Reagan's strength and his idea of peace through strength, we had strength, and that strength was manifested in our industrial base.

Today, that arsenal of democracy is being fractioned and moved offshore, and I can tell you as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, two years ago when I started to send out teams of our professional staff to find high grade armor steel that we could use on our Humvees to offset the roadside bombs that were popping up around Iraq and, to some degree, Afghanistan, we found one company left in America that could make high grade armor steel.

And when a Swiss company cut off the production and the sale to our nation, because they disagreed with our Iraq policy, when the Swiss company cut off the production of the tiny crystal that is used in perhaps our most important weapon, that is our Smart bomb, our joint direct attach munitions, we found precisely one company left in America that had the ability to replace that production and make that crystal, that guidance component. And you can go down the line and look now at the capabilities that we once had in large array, which are now down to ones and twos, because the arsenal of democracy is being pushed offshore.

Now, there is a reason for that, and there is a reason why you can find large pieces of it in places like France and Germany and I think, ominously, Communist China.

China is cheating on trade, and let me tell you how they are cheating.  First, we got a bad trade deal with them, and as President of the United States, I would remake the trade deal, and I think trade deals are business deals between nations.  They are one of the important requirements and the important obligations of the chief executive, of the President of the United States.

The President of the United States puts together arms control deals, and upon those deals depends our security.  He also puts together trade deals, and they are business deals between ourselves and other nations, and there is no individual businessman in America who can go to China, for example, or go to Paris or go to other capitals and make a separate regimen under which he is going to trade his product.  Only his government can do that.

Let me tell you how China is cheating.  First, if this gavel, this is a pretty good gavel!

[Laughter.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  If this gavel was 100 bucks, and it is made by China and they ship it to the United States, the government of China refunds….if this was a $100 gavel, it cost them 100 bucks to make, the government of China will refund them all of their taxes if they do one thing.  That is export it to the United States.  So they have a 17 percent tax rebate rate.  So this $100 gavel will result in the government of China handing a check for $17 to the guys that make this in China, to their exporting corporation who is sending it to us.

When we send our $100 gavel in to be sold in China, they give us a bill for $17.  What that means is that the American company that is competing with the Chinese company now faces a 34 point spread on the scoreboard before the opening kickoff, before there is any competition with respect to labor, cost of commodity, cost of components.  We have signed a deal that allows them to rebate their taxes to their guys, charge us for that rebate when we send our product in, and in fact, every major trading nation in the world under the world trading regime that we have signed can do that, except one nation, the United States.  We are the only country in the world that can't rebate our taxes under the rules to our exporters and make that same charge to the other guys coming in.

China has at this point a 34 percent spread on the scoreboard, and the competition hasn't even started yet.  Just to make sure that the American company has no chance of winning, they devalue their currency by 40 percent.  That means that these two gavels are sitting on a world showroom floor someplace in some other country around the world, and there is the American gavel and there is a Chinese gavel, the one made by their company, and they are both 100 bucks.  For practical purposes, the government of China, with the full force of its banking system behind it, walks in and says, "We just had a markdown on our side.  Ours just went from 100 bucks to 60 bucks.  We do that by devaluing our currency by 40 percent.  So you want to buy ours and not the American’s."  That is pushing the American product off the shelves around the world, and that is the reason you can pick up The Wall Street Journal and regularly check on this $100 billion plus trade deficit with China.

The ominous aspect of this is that China is using American trade dollars, these billions, to arm.  China is clearly arming, and as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, I can tell you that they are buying ships, planes, and missiles with American trade dollars.

In fact, we did a report that I want to offer to everybody here, and I don't think we have given any of these out to the public at this point, but I want to do this, if you would like it, and I have got about six copies.

This is the House Armed Services Committee defense review that I developed and we put through last year, and it has a special section on China.  I would commend it to you for reading.  It also has lots of recommendations about where we should go with national defense.

But China is going at American defense strengths.  They are going at our technology, and you know, we saw that submarine that popped up next to the Kittyhawk a couple of months ago, about 80 miles east of Okinawa, and that was a Song Class Chinese submarine.

I thought it was important for the American people to see that because they got to see what China is buying with American trade dollars and what they are producing with American trade dollars.  Today, they have got 17 submarines under production.  They have now developed and built 750 medium range ballistic missiles, and I predict that they will utilize those ballistic missiles to hold off the American fleet, so that there will never be an opportunity for American tactical aircraft to engage in a Taiwan Strait scenario, that they will stand off.  I believe their plan is to stand off our fleet and to develop anti ship capability with these ballistic missiles and to hold the American fleet at bay hundreds of miles away from the mainland and from a place where we can engage our tactical aircraft.

Another thing happened that I think is very important for Americans to take note of last month.  January 11th, they shot down a satellite.  It was an old weather satellite.  They tried a couple times to shoot it down, and they blew this thing out of space on the third attempt, and it showed their desire to develop the capability to regularly blind adversaries in space.  Presumably, nobody shoots their own satellites out of space, except on tests, and that means that China understands now that a great deal of our defense array is dependent on our space assets.  A lot of our economy is dependent on our space assets, also.  They are now developing the capability to take those assets out, and the most important adage in military operations is protect your eyes, protect your ability to see where the enemy is, and protect your ability to send precision strike, which we now can send with great, great precision to fairly small targets.  You lose a lot of that if you lose your eyes, if you lose your satellite capability.

So we see a China which is taking big pieces of the American industrial base, and they are doing it pursuant to a bad trade deal, and they are cheating on the trade deal that we have.

Mr. Bernanke went over, the head of the Federal Reserve Board here, several weeks ago with our trade mission, and he said as much as China is cheating on trade.  He wrote a great speech, and in this speech, he said that China's devaluation of their currency amounts to a subsidy.  Now, that is a key word because that means it is illegal under our trade regime, and he wrote that speech, and the press got hold of it, and it was printed throughout the world, but before it was given to the leadership of China, they pulled the word "subsidy" out, so they wouldn't anger their hosts, and I can tell you it is very clear to free traders, fair traders, all traders that they are cheating on trade, and they are using the money that they are gaining to arm, and at some point, we may have to face that technology, that capability on the battlefield, and it is a new battlefield.

My son, Duncan, incidentally, is campaigning with me in South Carolina.  He just got out of the Marines, and he did two tours.  In fact, I am very proud of him. I drove back after 9/11, drove back to San Diego.  I was driving out to Alpine, our hometown, and I saw my son running up a canyon wall.  I said, "What are you doing?"  I pulled the car over, and he said, "I joined the Marines.  We are going to go get them," and he did join the Marines.  He quit his job, left his wife and baby at home, and did two tours in Iraq and just got out.

So he has now been in politics with me for three weeks, and he said he wants to go back to Fallujah.    

[Laughter.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  And we may let him.

But ladies and gentlemen, if you follow that great sunrise across this country, a couple hours after it illuminates Arlington Cemetery, it illuminates a little town called Kingston, Texas, which is the home of Audie Murphy, who was our most decorated soldier in World War II.  About 500 miles away, it illuminates the little town of Cuero where Sergeant Roy Benavidez, who was a Special Forces sergeant, that was his hometown, and he was a Special Forces sergeant.

You may have remembered Ronald Reagan gave him the Medal of Honor, and he got it for going out to save a penned down Special Operations team, and he had no weapon.  He couldn't find a weapon in the headquarters.  So he went out with only a Bowie knife in his belt, and he rescued a large part of that team.

About 1,600 miles away from there is the home in Scio, New York, where Corporal Jason Dunham lived, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Bush a couple weeks ago at the White House for saving his comrades in Iraq.

Those three individuals are very tightly bound to each other, and they are bound to us by a couple of things.  One thing is they all won the Medal of Honor, but the second thing is that they all won the Medal of Honor fighting to extend freedom around the world and fighting for what I call the American interest in extending freedom, and it is in our interest.

In Audie Murphy's case, we extended freedom to hundreds of millions of people by winning World War II decisively.  In Roy Benavidez's case, we failed to extend freedom on the peninsula in Vietnam, and in Jason Dunham's case, the issue hangs in the balance right now, but it is in our interest to extend freedom around the world.  That is a truth that goes to the heart of America's purpose, and no one can argue with the fact that it is in our interest to have, for example, a free Japan, a democratically elected government, an economic power, and an ally of the United States on that side of the Pacific.  Nobody can argue that it is against our interest to have a free El Salvador, and lots of you were here during the contra wars when Ronald Reagan was accused of getting ready to start another Vietnam.

In fact, I think we have got liberals who die of old age waiting for the next Vietnam, but it is in our interest to have an El Salvador that is an ally of the United States.  In fact, they have Salvadoran troops now fighting side by side with Americans in Iraq.

It is in our interest to have Poland and the other nations that were behind the Iron Curtain to now be American allies.  So it is in our interest to extend freedom, and it is in our interest to extend freedom in the Middle East.

I can tell you this as a dad who has had to worry about his son, this is a tough, difficult mission, and it is tough and it is dusty and it is dirty and it is dangerous.  I think the mission, the mission of extending freedom in Iraq, is worthwhile for several reasons.

If we can have a country that is a friend, not an enemy, of the United States, if we can have a country that will not be a state sponsor of terrorism and has a modicum of representative government, it is in our interest over the next 5, 10, 15 to 20 years.

It is tough in that part of the world, and my take on Iraq has always been that this is a difficult job.  You have got these tribal fractures and ethnic fractures that are deep and long rooted, and there will always be bombs going off in Iraq.  That has been my statement since this war began, just as there will always be bombs going off in Israel, and if resources could stop that from happening, they wouldn't be going off in Israel, but they are because of the neighborhood that that country lies in.

But we are undertaking now this operation in Baghdad, and I call it Operation Baghdad.  The President with his warfighting commanders    and I have looked at the plan    has entered this mission in which we divide Baghdad into nine separate sectors, and we have two or three Iraqi battalions in each sector with an American backup battalion.  They are out front, and they are working with the Americans to back them up and to mentor them and to advise them and help them.

Now, to carry out that mission and to carry out the Marine mission in Anbar Province, which is a tough, difficult province as it has Ramadi and Fallujah to the west,    we are moving 21,500 soldiers into theater. That is a combination of movement into theater and some soldiers who are remaining in theater longer than their tours of duty were projected.

I have got colleagues now in the House and Senate who are busily drafting resolutions saying that they don't like the plan.  Well, I've got news for them.  The plan is already being carried out.

We have got over 3,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Brigade and have already crossed the line from Kuwait into Iraq.  They are in the warfighting theater.  We have got a shooting war going on.  We are carrying out a military plan, and now is not the time for Congress to be back in the rear deciding that maybe they don't like the plan after all and evolving into 435 Secretaries of State and Secretaries of Defense and the House of Representatives and 100 of the same in the U.S. Senate.

This plan is going forward, and we are using these reinforcements to carry that plan out.  I think the plan has got a good chance of working.  I have looked at it, and there is no plan, no military plan in the world, that comes with an ironclad guarantee of success, but it is a good plan.  It has got a good chance of working, and my recommendation to the President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Pete Pace, is to do this.  It is to use this plan as a blueprint to stand up the entire Iraq military force.

What you have to do is stand up the Iraqi force.  They have 129 battalions.  Now, some of those battalions are located in areas that are very peaceful.  Half of the 18 provinces in Iraq have less than one attack a day occurring.  They have almost no fighting going on.  So my recommendation to the President is to ensure and secure the commitment from the Iraq Ministry of Defense that they will rotate every single battalion, Iraqi battalion, into the fight, bring them into each of those sectors, get them three or four months experience in combat.  Nothing stands up a force better than actually being in operations.  Then rotate them back out and rotate in another green unit and get them some experience.  When you have done that with 129 battalions, and you can do that at the same time with lots of battalions in lots of areas, you have got an Iraqi force which is capable, which has shown it can survive under fire.  It can operate.  It has got a chain of command, and when the Ministry of Defense picks up the phone and says, "Saddle up, Colonel, and get your battalion up out of Babylon and move them into the fight in Baghdad, you know that he comes when called.  That is always kind of important when you are standing up a new government.  So that is my recommendation.

I know it is going to be tough and difficult, but I think that this mission has value.  It is the American mission, and it serves no purpose to have this foreign policy go forth from our shores in a fractured way.  We need to have solidarity at this point.

[Applause.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  Now, let me tell you just a couple other things.  I have been the chairman of the Armed Services Committee for four years.  It has been a great, great privilege, and we have done a lot.

One thing that we have done is increase the size of the Army by 30,000.  When the Clinton administration left the White House, the U.S. Army had been cut from 18 divisions, that is what we had in 1991, to 10.  So they were puffing very strongly about the cuts that they had made and spending, and that is where they got most of them, right out of the United States military.

So we have increased the end strength of the Army by 30,000, and another thing that I did was increase the size of the U.S. Marine Corps, working with my great friend, John McHugh, who was chairman of the Personnel Subcommittee.  We increased the size of the U.S. Marine Corps to 180,000.

Now, I just talked to the director of OMB, and the administration is going to put forth a proposal to increase the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army substantially beyond where we have increased it already.  I think that is good, and as I give you this copy of our analysis of where we have to go in defense, you will see that we recommended this to them last year.  I think it is good, and I think it fits the obligations and the problems we are going to have.

What we have to be able to do in this country with our defense apparatus is have broad capabilities.  We have to be able to handle a conventional war where you have got lots of armor, lots of artillery, the kind of war you might have on the Korean Peninsula.  We have to be able to handle guerilla warfare, and we have to be able to handle, of course, this war against extreme radical fundamentalists in the Islam communities throughout the world, and that is going to take a heavy emphasis on intelligence and special operations.  So we need to be able to do all those things, and we are the one country in the world that has to have a full service, broad operation.  We can't be a niche military.  That is going to take money.

My recommendation is that we move up from the 4 percent of GNP that we are spending on defense.  We spend 4 percent of everything that we make on defense, and my recommendation is we move that up, get it up to about 4.5, 5 percent.  That is what we are going to have to do if we are going to maintain superiority in critical areas and look beyond the horizon at these threats that were broadly heralded when that anti satellite weapon, that ballistic missile was utilized by the Chinese to blow a satellite out of space last month.

So we have a challenge.  We can meet that challenge.  We are going to move out.  There are always lots of problems in a huge bureaucracy that we call the Department of Defense, but you know something, we do a lot of things wrong.  That is brought up in our multiple hearings.  We do a lot of things right, too, and we have today an extremely efficient, capable force.

And let me lay out one other thing.  As you watch the debates on Iraq, you keep hearing the liberal Members of Congress saying this is stretching our forces, we are getting bogged down.  It is almost as if they are hinting, and they are saying other nations may try to take advantage of this.  They think the American forces are tied down.

The last four years, when President Bush assumed the Presidency of the United States, I went in and had a meeting with him and asked for all of my colleagues in the House who were on defense committees to come in with me, and we worked primarily on one thing, and that was to massively increase the precision firepower of our country.

I can tell you right now, our figures are classified on what we have in terms of Smart bombs and precision missiles, but we have more than doubled the precision firepower of this country over what we had when the last administration left the White House.

So, if there are any countries out there that think that they can take advantage of the United States, my recommendation is don't bet your life on it because you are going to lose.  So we have a very strong military right now.  It has got great agility.  It has enormous firepower.  What we have to do is look out beyond that horizon and make sure we are ready for the next 10 to 15 years.

Now, just one other thing, and I would love to take questions.  I’d like to follow that sunrise, because that is how I fly back out to my district in San Diego, and a couple hours after it lights up the East Coast, it is out there on the Southwest border, and that is that thin green line of Border Patrolmen who are protecting 2,000 miles of our southern border.

That first fence we built in San Diego, that first seven miles of fence, was built out of Desert Storm type landing mats, those big steel planks that you knit together and make an aircraft runway.  We found 79,000 of them at bases all over the world.

Incidentally, if any of you ever want any old equipment, we have got it at one of those bases.  There is everything.  You can find anything you want if you search enough military bases.

We got all that in.  It was all surplus, and we put that first fence up.  When we put that fence up, the smugglers corridor between San Diego and Tijuana was the number one smugglers corridor in the world, and through it, most of the narcotics and most of the people who were smuggled into this country traveled, that little corridor, 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the coastal hills that Steve talked about between San Diego and Tijuana.

We had armed gangs, often with automatic weapons, who would rob, rape, and murder the people who were coming in illegally.  Most of the time when people come in illegally, they got all the money they have in life in their pocket in cash.  You had an average of 10 murders a year on that little border section.  It was so bad, we had a plain clothes unit in San Diego that the best selling author, Joseph Wambaugh, wrote a novel about called "Lines and Shadows."  That was about the No Man's Land that existed between San Diego and Tijuana.

We had a plain clothes unit that went down there and invited attack by the armed gangs, so that they could arrest them or have a gunfight with them.  It was that bad.  When we put the border fence up and then we wrote the law -- I wrote the law that passed when Republicans took control in '94 -- and we put it in an immigration bill that President Clinton signed.  We mandated a triple fence along that border, and we got that design from one of our great National Laboratories, the guys that design nuclear weapons, and we asked all of these great scientists to pause from their weapon designing jobs and tell us how they would stop illegal smuggling of people and narcotics across the southern border.

These great minds huddled for a while, and then they said, "We have got a very profound answer for you.  How about a fence?"

[Laughter.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  They said, "Actually, how about three fences?"  So that when a smuggler comes across, he has got to cross the first fence.  He has got to cross a high speed Border Patrol road.  He is not on the U.S. side of the border.  Now he has got to sit down with his welding gear, and if you look at the fence, you see the fence in my brochure here that we built.  Now he has got to sit down for a long period of time and go through the second fence, cross the second Border Patrol road, go through a third fence, and by that time, you have caught them. We have caught them.

We have stopped smuggling cold in our 14 miles where we have built the fence, and it has worked so well that the Clinton administration came in, sat down with me and said, "You know, we don't think we have got enough money to build three layers here.  Can we do two?"  I said, "I will tell you what, we won't change the laws.  We will keep the law the same, three fences, but we will let you build two, and if we don't need a third layer, we won't build it."  We have never needed the third layer because the first two work absolutely, and we have knocked down smuggling of people and narcotics in that area by more than 90 percent.

Now, the Democrat Governor of Arizona has made lots of comments about the fence, the double fence.  He says, "You show me a fence that is 21 feet tall, I will show you a 22 foot ladder."  Then in her next sentence, she says, "Doggone those Californians, they fenced San Diego.  Now everybody is coming through my State."

[Laughter.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  She needs to have a good debate with herself over whether the fence doesn't work or works too well.

The fence works.  The fence works, and I wrote the bill that the President signed.  It is embedded in the large homeland security bill, and I did it with respect to every smuggler's corridor across the Southwest from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, and it gives dates and times when the fence has to be completed, and it provides for 854 miles of double fence across those smugglers' routes.

We took the areas where the smugglers are going straight out, where the border literally is on fire right now with smugglers' operations.  We passed that, and it passed the House overwhelmingly.  The Senate passed it after The Washington Post huffed and puffed that there wasn't much support for it.  It passed the Senate, 80 to 19, and the President signed it.

Right now, we’ve got $1.2 billion in the bank in homeland security, despite what The Washington Post says.  That will build a couple hundred miles of fence, and one thing we learned is in San Diego, when we built about a third of the fence, we started to really knock down the smugglers because the smugglers now were channelized.  They could only go through a couple of areas, and we were able to pull Border Patrolmen off the areas that were now fenced and concentrate them at the holes, the gaps, and we really took down the smugglers.  We will have a salutatory effect on smuggling people into this country once we get up 100 miles of fence.

So, ladies and gentlemen, that is what we are going to be working on over the next several months.  It is not to pass a law.  We got the law passed.  The President signed it.  Homeland Security has this ball.  They have got money in the bank.  They need to let the contract and build that fence.

I have now walked you across America starting on the East Coast and the arsenal of democracy and talked a little bit about defense and border security.  Let me just leave you in San Diego where there is a cemetery called Rosecrans Cemetery that is 3,000 miles away from Arlington Cemetery, and that stands guard over San Diego Bay.

Let me see.  What did I do with my glasses?  I may read this to you.  I got them right here, Steve.  I am always losing them.  Let me dust them off with my tie a little bit.

1945, a Marine came home through San Diego Bay, and he wrote this to his wife: "I think that just to be able to live with your wife and family, to be able to take care of them every day is the greatest privilege a person can enjoy."  Sixty one years later, another Marine returned to San Diego from a place called Fallujah, and he wrote, "At some point in a dangerous environment, you forget about your own safety.  You try to keep your men safe and place your own life in the hands of God, but your family, your wife and kids, never leave your mind.  Families lift our country up.  They support us with fidelity, morality, faith in God, and raising the next generation of Americans."  Those two Marines were my father and my son, Duncan Hunter, and reflecting on them  

[Applause.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  So, just reflecting on them, ladies and gentlemen, I came to the conclusion, God still loves our country.  Thank you.

MODERATOR: We have about eight minutes for questions, to stay on time to get to the general session.

ATTENDEE:  If we get all this fence put in on a southern tier, what is to prevent the same thing from happening across Canada?  We have property very north of New York State, and there is nothing preventing people from crossing the border.

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  I held a hearing, an Armed Services hearing this summer on the northern border looking at that very question.  We brought in the Border Patrol that is there and the agencies.

The thrust of their answers to us, and we toured the border, and they gave us their take on whether it is secure, is that right now, with the small flow of people that try to get across illegally, they have got it well in hand, but I would say this.  If we stop the flow on the southern border, we may well have a lot of pressure on the northern border, and if that happens, we are going to have to do lots of things.  We are going to have to have fences and sensors and the capability to stop people.  Very simply, we have to know in this post-9/11 world, border security is now national security.

We have to know two things: who is coming into our country and what are they bringing in with them.  You have got to know it, and so we may have to do a lot on the northern border, but right now it seems to be fairly secure with the low flow that is coming in.

ATTENDEE:  Congressman, you have touched on rather thoroughly, plowed the ground of the two important issues that I think are a problem and done very well, by the way.  Ronald Reagan said a nation without borders is not a nation.

Now, my question is we are hearing, I am hearing, this undercurrent of conversation, some of which is coming from well-heeled Republicans, that a big, open super highway running up and down through the northern American continent is the goal anyway.  Could you speak to that, sir?

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  Yeah.  You know, I don't know a lot about it, but I understand that is the so called "NAFTA highway" that has been proposed.

I was the leading Republican opponent, at least I gave the final speech against NAFTA, I believe it was in 1994.  Was it '94 when we passed NAFTA?  '94, '96.  At that point, we had a $3 billion trade surplus with Mexico.  We went immediately to a $15 billion trade loss with Mexico.  So don't put me down as undecided.  I wasn't supportive of NAFTA, but I would oppose anything that infringes on American sovereignty or accelerates the movement of the American industrial base offshore.

I will try to get some details on it, sir, and get back with you on that.

ATTENDEE:  Sir, you talked about Fallujah and Iraq and what have you. We are sending the troops over there.  After we win, what is going to happen to the Iraqis who are right now dominated by the Shiite?  Are we going to give it to Iran?

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  Well, you know, if you look at all the potential results and activities that can take place in that part of the world, it is like going to these lotteries where you got the big cage and you have got all these balls, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  You got hundreds of balls, and you spin them, and then they come out in a little row, and it is 8, 4, 3, 2, 1, and that is the winning combination, it is a million to one.

You have literally hundreds of factors with respect to the leadership of Iran, whether the leadership of Iraq will feel compelled or intimidated to make a closer alliance with Iran, and remember there were a million casualties in the Iran-Iraq war.  So there are lots of strong feelings on each side that aren't conducive to coming together, but you have huge pilgrimages in southern Iraq back and forth.  So lots of things could happen.

Here is what we need to do, in my estimation.  We follow the same pattern we followed for 60 years.  You stand up a free government.  We have done that.  You stand up a military capable of protecting the free government, and that is what we are doing right now, standing up the Iraqi army, and third, the Americans leave.

Self determination is self determination.  The one thing that I am concerned about with respect to Iran is this.  They have 164 centrifuges that are refining and upgrading material, uranium ore, that at a certain point in the refinement process becomes material for nuclear devices.  There are 164 centrifuges that we can see.  We don't know what we can't see in caves and hidden areas, and they have threatened to build some 3,000 centrifuges that would refine enough material to make some nuclear devices.

I think it is clear that Iran at this point is not deterred from developing a nuclear device, and anything we try to do tough with respect to sanctions will be blunted by two nations with economic interests in Iran.  That is China and Russia.  They will water down any tough sanctions that the Americans try to impose on Iran.

We may have to take at some point the military option.  In fact, Tim LaHaye and I have a mutual friend, Dan McKinnon, who wrote the book "Bullseye," the strike on the nuclear reactor that the Israelis made in 1986, I believe, in Iraq.  That may have to be replicated at some point by a coalition of American allies.  So we have got to keep that military option on the table.

So my answer is there are no smooth roads, and it is going to be tough and challenging and dangerous.  We have to do a couple things.  We have to be prepared and be capable and be tough.

ATTENDEE:  I appreciate the fact that we have plans to build the fences, but I am wondering about…  

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  We got a law to build the fences.

ATTENDEE:  Right.  That's great.  I am just wondering about the fact that when our Border Patrols do attempt to capture these people, that they are ordered to stand down or they are not thrown in jail, I am wondering how that is going to go.  

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  If you are talking about Agents Campean and Ramos, the two Border Patrol agents who shot the drug dealer in the rear end -- and you know, I have asked the President to pardon them, along with a number of other Members, and no pardon was forthcoming, and they went into jail, as you may know. They are in jail.

I immediately contacted the director of the Bureau of Prisons and asked them to segregate them from the general population because about 27 percent of the people in the Federal penitentiary are criminal aliens.  Most are drug related crimes, and that would be very dangerous for our agents, but I drafted a congressional pardon.

I asked our lawyers in the Capitol if Congress had the power to pardon under the Constitution.  They were split.  They said there are some cases that suggest you can.  It has never been done before.  Some suggest only the President can do that.  I said, "There is nothing to lose.  Let's do it."

I drafted this pardon, congressional pardon bill, and before I could walk it across the floor and deposit it in the Speaker's box, I had 72 Members of Congress come up and co-sponsor it as I was taking it across the floor.

[Applause.]

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  There is a lot of spirit in that regard.

So I would like to see us give those two guys a pardon, and we also need to give them a week's shooting lessons at the range.

ATTENDEE:  Congressman, I asked one of your competitors last night, Governor Huckabee, this question.  There is a lot of anger, frustration, sometimes a sense of betrayal amongst conservatives at our Republican leaders out there, in the White House, in the Congress.  Can you identify for us those issues in the domestic area and the social area where you would disagree with the Republican leaders in the White House and the Congress, one? Two, where you have disagreed publicly with them? Let me just add this, Congressman.  Goldwater and Reagan became our leaders because they would speak truth to power.  They would regularly disagree with the Republican leaders.  Where have you done so privately and publicly?

REPRESENTATIVE HUNTER:  Sure.  Absolutely.  Well, first, with respect to trade, the free trade agenda that we embarked on in the 1990's that set in concrete this non-level playing field between American industries and those that are in other places, that was heralded by NAFTA.

I think maybe the one article that describes how triple A stubborn I am is an article they just did on the Hill that says Hunter's arm doesn't twist, and it went over those times when I have disagreed strongly with my Republican colleagues.  In fact, as I said, I gave the final debate against NAFTA for the Republican side in 1994, and that has always been my position, and it has been a very public position.

I think we have done the worst thing in the world as Republicans.  We are business people.  We have made a bad business deal with other nations.  We are not getting enough for what we are giving.  We are giving them our huge market, which is massive leverage, and we haven't gotten anything back.  I will let all the other candidates speak for themselves, but I believe all of them on our side are free traders, are satisfied with the relationship that we have now that is sending hundreds of billions of dollars, $200 billion a year more to China than they are sending to us.  So I think there is a difference there, a strong difference.

Secondly -- and it is one in which I have fought openly and publicly, and a few people call me the last Republican protectionist -- I think American jobs are worth protecting, Richard, but I think it is not in the Republican interest and it is against Republican business principles to make a bad deal, and Presidents, when they got a bad arms control deal, like Ronald Reagan, they change it.  They say, "I am going to do another one.  We will bring you guys back to the table."  We need to do the same thing with our trade deals, bring them back to the table and make a trade that is a two-way street, where we have global trade, but it is a two-way street.  They don't have 74 points on the scoreboard before the opening kickoff, which is the deal now.

The other one I think is clearly the border.  The administration did not like the border fence, and the first bill I wrote was for all 2,000 miles.  The second bill I wrote was for these 854 miles, but we got that up to the floor.  It passed overwhelmingly.  My bill was embedded in the homeland security bill, and the President signed it, but clearly, I saw a lot of the same comments emanating from lots of folks who are Republicans about the 22 foot ladder and how you needed to have an amnesty bill or a guest worker program going arm in arm with border enforcement measures.

As a guy from the border, I will tell you, you can't do that, and here is why.  Human nature.  When people read that there is a real or perceived benefit about to be created in the United States by an act of Congress and the President, they will rush the border because human nature is to get in under the wire, to get in before the door closes.

I have been down on the border in San Diego every time the President has made a speech in which he mentions amnesty, and border arrests go up like a rocket because people say, they turn to their wife and they say, "Let's get in across the border before it closes."

So the idea that we are going to have this so-called comprehensive bill that some of my colleagues who are running for this office have supported is absolutely the wrong thing.  It will cause a rush for the border.  It will overwhelm the border patrol.  It will overwhelm the National Guardsmen that we have sent down there.  You have to have enforcement first.

We are like a house that doesn't have any sides.  So they want to debate how wide the front door should be, and there are no sides on the house, and people are rushing in.  Let's put sides on the house and tell people knock on the front door when you want to come into America.