We are going to go live to the u. S. Senate. The senators are holding a brief pro forma meeting. Live on cspan2. the presiding officer the senate will come to order. The presiding officer the clerk will read a communication to the senate. The clerk washington, d. C. , july 29, 2016. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable johnny isakson, a senator from the state of georgia, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed orrin g. Hatch, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the Senate Stands adjourned until stands adjourned until this comes in light of recent reports now confirmed of nontravel related cases of the virus in miami, dade and brow wart counties in florida. Abc news reporting this morning it marks the first time the virus was found to be transmitted within infected mosquitoes in the u. S. The outbreak affected four people through local transmission, florida officials saying today. Watch that event with dr. Fauci live at 11 00 a. M. Eastern here on cspan2. The conventions may be over but candidates are still campaigning in full swing today. Hillary clinton and tim kaine will hold a rally as they begin a bus tour through pennsylvania as they kick off the postconvention campaign. That is live on cspan. Well follow that with viewers phone calls and reaction. Donald trump will hold a rally at wings over the rockies air and space museum in denver. That is tonight at 9 00 eastern also on cspan. Donald trump and Hillary Clinton made the republican and Democratic National convention as mustsee on tv. This weekend well show you many of the featured and most talked about speeches from cleveland and philadelphia, saturday night starting at 8 00 eastern, you will see democratic speeches by michelle obama, michael bloomberg, president obama, Chelsea Clinton and the acceptance speech by Hillary Clinton. Sunday morning at 10 30 eastern you will see republican speeches by rudy yule, donald and melania trump, tiffany trump, donald trump, jr. , ted cruz, eric trump, mike pence, peter thiel, and the acceptance speech by donald trump. That is this saturday at 8 00 eastern and sunday morning at 10 30 eastern on cspan, cspan radio app and cspan. Org. National review staff writer david french discussed what he called the fact and fictions on ongoing effort to combat isis. He spoke to College Students on at a an event hosted by the National Review institute. Hello, guys. Were going to get underway with our program this afternoon. Thank you so much for being here. Were just very happy to have you here. My name is nate mills and i am a campus outreach and programs officer at the National Review independence statute. Welcome to our talk today with National Review writer david french entitled, fact and fiction in fighting isis, hosted by the National Review institute. First i would like to give a quick note of thanks to congressman ted powes office for helping us book the venue with their generous help. Thank you very much. Many of you are probably familiar with National Review magazine. You may not be familiar with National Review institute. It is Nonprofit Educational Organization founded by william f. Buckley, jr. , in 1991. Nris mission is to preserve the legacy of william f. Buckley, jr. , promote conservative principles he championed throughout his lifetime an an compliment the Editorial Mission of National Review. Through nri policy fellows, Regional Partnership events and nri on campus and other national programs, the institute synthesizes the best thinking how to guard and build on our nations strengths and add vigor and Practical Application to our conservative convicts. Our event today is sponsored by nri on campus which is our program that partners with student organizations to bring National Review writers to College Campuses around the country. Providing opportunities for College Student to learn about the principles and ideas of a free society and empower them to stan forward with history. In our programs first year, nri on campus hosted 21 events on 19 campuses, four of which david french joins us for. To many students in the audience today, the event we are hosting is similar what we can bring to your campus this year. I encourage you to come speak with me after the event and one of our Staff Members and have our Promotional Materials from the dredge table. For those of us joining oust on cspan, visit us at nr institute. Org for more information about our organization and our programs. After davids talk today there will be time for questioning and answer. There is a note card on your seat there. Please write down your questions and make sure you send it to the outside of the room and our staff people will be there to take the cards and read questions out to david for the remaining time we have. Please note because National Review institute is a nonprofit organization, we will not be discussing any current political contests or any legislation. And now i have the pleasure of introducing our speaker today, david french. David is a staff writer at National Review, an attorney concentrating his practice on constitutional law and the law of Armed Conflict and a veteran of Operation Iraqi freedom. He is the author or coauthor of several books including most recently, number one New York Times bestseller, the rise of isis, a threat we cant ignore. He is graduate of harvard law school, past president of foundation for individual rights in education and a former lecturer at cornell law school. He has served as senior counsel for the American Center of law and justice and Alliance Defending freedom. He is former major in the United States army reserve. In 2007 he deployed to iraq serving in diala province as judge advocate for the second squadron, third armored calvary regiment where he was awarded brauns star. He lives and works in columbia, tennessee, with his wife nancy and three children. Please welcome david french. [applause] thank you very much. Given that this is a studentdominated event ive just been informed by one of our coordinators i need to begin with a trigger warning. So well be talking about issues of war, peace, religion, violent death and you will be exposed to male pattern baldness. If you have a problem of any of those, now would be the time to exit. No, im actually come here for a purpose, a little bit counterintuitive. It is to replace simplicity with complexity, and to replace clarity with confusion. If you leave today more puzzled than ever about what to do about isis and larger of issue of fighting radical islamic jihad, then i have done my job. So im going to do my job by going through a few simple things and youre going to see the pattern here pretty quickly, that i will call facts and fictions about fighting isis. Because if there is one thing that this town is not short of it is stronglyheld opinions and particularly when it comes to dealing with the threat of radical islam, opinions are extraordinarily strongly held. It is even strongly held opinions whether you should use the term radical islam to describe what we face when we face organizations like isis or al qaeda or boko haram, or any of the other enumerable radical islamic organizations. So, what i want to do, is separate fact from fiction in a way i think is a little bit unique. So lets go back to origin stories when we talk about fact and fiction. So lets begin with a fact. This might be come as a surprise from someone who writes for National Review, conservative, fact, george bush created isis. Hmmm. Why on earth would you say that . That sounds like something i would read in salon. Com or the Huffington Post but bear with me for a moment. There are some undeniable historical events occurred in 2003, 2004 and 2005 we have to grapple with. Historical event number one is obvious, an invasion iraq by americanled military forces. What is less discussed and often intentionally left discussed is that invasion was undertaken with a invasion force that was pressured, consistently pressured from senior officials in the pentagon to be smaller and smaller and smaller. Where there grew to be a real concern that the goal of the invasion wasnt so much to topple saddam and create stability in his wake but to prove a theory about military strategy and tactics, particularly what was called a rma, revolution in military affairs. You could do more with less than ever before. And the first six weeks or so of that invasion vindicated Donald Rumsfeld and vindicated the rma notion of the war in iraq. How so . American Armored Forces advanced farther and faster than any other armored force in the history of Armed Conflicts, penetrated into the heart of a great mideast capitol, toppled the government, literally toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in late 2003, with casualties on both sides that were far less than the worst case estimate, far less. For about six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks, nine weeks, three months it looked like one of the most brilliant military campaigns in history but there was reality out there that a lot of people were missing. A lot of people including me were missing. At that point i was celebrating a great military success. I was not in the military at that time. I supported iraq war. I believed in the goals and objectives the iraq war. To this day i still support the decision to invade iraq. To this day i support most of the goals and objectives of the initial invision. And i believe that a great victory had been won but for lack of a better term, there were a whole lot of people in iraq who were both regime hardliners and jihadists and sometimes the two were merged, who were sitting around in cafes, sitting around in their homes and villages going, nobodys fought me yet. I havent been subjugated. No one has taken this town. And what we did was a surgical removal of the head of a regime without dealing with the reality that there may in fact be a movement, a Resistance Movement that emerges from that decapitated regime and that emerges from larger historical and forces in the country. And so, yes, there was an individual there, a guy by the name who later became extremely famous, abu mass saab alzarqawi, a littleknown al qaeda cell leader which grew to formal died in iraq which grew to be the most fearsome organization in the world. In fact one of the most fearsome organizations that the world had seen in modern living memory. How did that happen . How did a terrorist Organization Grow so strong so fast when a nation was under American Military occupation . One of the reasons because our occupation footprint was in fact so light. Instead of 350,000 soldiers. We had 130,000 soldiers. Instead of, viewing our job as imposing stability, we allowed looters to run wild. Rather than creating continuity and leadership we impose ad program of debaathification and disbanded iraqi army, creating hundreds of thousands of unemployed militarytrained, militaryage males, who many of them later became insurgents. So when someone says to you, well, george bush created isis, there is a kernel of fact there. There is more than a kernel of fact there. Then of course that is oversimplified sentence. George bush never intended isis exist. George bush never intended that al qaeda in iraq grow so strong. I mention those two together because al qaeda in iraq is the precursor of isis. Al qaeda in iraq eventually became isis. They just had a name change. Let me move from fact to fiction. Heres a fiction. George bush created isis. All right, youre going to begin to see a pattern in my facts and fiction here. Fiction, george bush created isis. It is simply false to lay all of this at george bushs feet. Yes, there were strategic and military missteps that helped create the problem that we face today. But the problem that we face today predates george bush in some way, by some measures more than a thousand years. George bush is not responsible for the existence of a persistent jihadist universalist, expansionist strain within the islamic faith. That is not george bushs creation. It is not bill clintons creation. It is no american president s creation. In fact if you looked at, if you watched usama bin laden as he spoke after the fall of the twin towers in 2001, a awful lot of you guys were pretty young that occurred, so i doubt you were like surfing the web for bin laden speeches at that time. Let me fill you in on what happened. He gave a speech shortly after, released on videotape, more of an interview, describing what he did and why he did it. One of the things he listed as he was really ticked off about, really infuriating him, that really motivated him to take down the twin towers, the fate of a region called an today lucia. What is andalusia. That is spain and portugal under moorish, under muslim rule. He was upset, the reconquest of spain and portugal by christian forces. Reconquest created, or completed around 1492. And if you remember your history, 1492 is the year columbus sailed the ocean blue. That is how i remember that year, that rhyme from second grade. That wasnt americas fault. America did not take moorish spain from the muslim rulers. Yet we saw our twin towers fall in part because of the grievance dating back to 1492. So the notion that when it comes to this strain of islam, radical, jihadist, expansionist islam, that you can point to the United States and say whatever america does, there is going to be, for every action by america there will be an equal and opposite reaction and all that america has to do to live with peace with people, not act in ways that inflame jihadists. Well i have news for you. Jihadists are already inflamed. Theyre inflamed not by america but by their core fundamental belief system. Even see this more in recent history. I just said a name a lot of people would know which is alzarqawi. This is name a lot of you may not know. I dont even have it on instant recall. I had to regoogle it this morning. The name is mohamed basisi. A tunisia Street Vendor who set himself on fire in 2010. Many poem say that was the trigger for the arab spring, his protest, his suicidal protest was a trigger for the arab spring. He didnt set himself on fire because of george w. Bush. He set himself on fire protesting autocratic tunisian regime, which then ignited this arab spring which spread to syria. When it spread to syria, jihadists began to seize an opportunity they had there, to reform, to rebuild and to strike once again. Because you see the jihadists had been largely chased out of iraq by that time. So what is the overall less on here . The lesson here is twofold. One, if youre going to intervene militarily into the middle east, you had better be prepared for worstcase scenarios. You can not intervene in the middle east against a backdrop of idealism. The middle east is the place where idealism goes to die. Whatever bad you think the middle east is, it is usually worse. That is my rule of thumb. I try not to live in the world of simplicity when complexity is more truthful but here is simple truth. However bad you things are in the middle east, youre probably wrong. It is probably worse. So you have to be prepared for worst case scenarios. And you have to know history. You have to know history. Faulkner famously said of the south, the southern United States, that in the south, the past isnt even the past. Well that is a joke compared to the way the middle east views history. The past isnt even the past in the middle east if the past is 500 years ago, 600 years ago, 700 years ago. You have to understand the past. All right. Lets go to the next fiction. You cant defeat the enemy if you dont name the enemy. Okay. Who here, well, lets not do a show of hands. I assume you will all agree with me. I dont know about you but i am sick to death of every single time there is a terror attack, the following Public Exchange is the first thing that occurs. Say radical islam say it and then on the other side, you cant make me. What purpose does that serve . Look, im a conservative. I, it is no surprise that i disagree with barack obama time and time and time again on many of his decisions but i have to express that i have to admit there was a time recently when he was expressing exasperation over this very debate i was with him. Saying radical islam does not put a single other new marine in the field. Saying radical islam is not a military strategy. Just as the same not saying radical islam of course but weve gotten into this game, it has become a political game there is some magical power, both positive and negative to the words that you use. If you say radical islam, step one, to defeating the enemy is complete. If you dont say radical islam, well then, step one to preventing a cash of civilizations is complete. Well we have to realize is it is not so much the words that we use that matter, it is the tactics we choose to deploy. That is what really matters. Now, look, to he defeat the enemy, the name doesnt matter so much, but we do have to know the enemy. We have to know the enemy. Here is the word that i tend to use to describe the enemy, jihadist. I have dont say radical islam for a lot of reasons. I dont necessarily know that it is all that accurate in some parts of the world to call it radical islam. If y