“Thank you Mr. Speaker and I thank the Gentle Lady for yielding. You know, not long ago I was briefed by an official on Iran’s provocative action and he gave a challenge in that briefing.
He said, print out on your computer a red line. Print a big thick red bar on a white sheet of paper. And if you look at it from a distance you think it’s a solid red line, but if you look at it up close, what you’ll see is that it’s actually a series of tiny little pink lines all pushed together, but they’re individual little pink lines.
And he said that what Iran has figured out is they have figured out a way to break through one tiny little line at a time. Just one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. And that is why we’re here today, because we in the west, we in the United States, are on to what the Iranian leadership is doing.
They’re being incredibly provocative. There is no legitimate nuclear ambition for Iran, this is a regime that has said that Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East has no right to exist. They’ve said one provocative thing after another, and history is filled, Mr. Speaker, of examples of weakness and ambiguity in foreign affairs. What is the result? Largely, the result is calamity.
Now we have a chance to be united, for all of us to come together, to say we’re not going to stand for this, we’ve come up with a remedy, and it is time for the conferees to move forward, and to create these very tough and solid sanctions against the petroleum products going into Iran.
I urge the conferees to move quickly, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Washington, Apr 22 - Deputy Republican Whip Peter Roskam (R-IL) Iran Remarks Delivered On The House Floor April 22, 2010
