To watch the video of U.S. Senator Chris Murphy's (D-Conn.) remarks, click here

The full text of Murphy's remarks is below:

Mr. President, to her high school classmates it was pretty clear what kind of person Kayla Mueller was going to turn out to be. As a teenager she took up the causes of the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, like when she joined a campaign to stop the city of Flagstaff from using recycled wastewater to make snow on a set of peaks that the Hopi people considered to be sacred. She later went to the most dangerous place on the Earth because people there needed help. She saw suffering on unimaginable scales, brought on by a vicious civil war inside Syria and Iraq, and she wanted to make it better.

No one is responsible for her death except for ISIL. They killed her, as they did James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Abdul-Rahman, Peter Kassig, and thousands of individual innocent Iraqis and Syrians over the course of the last year.

It has been a long time since the world has seen such evil. This is a brutal inhuman terrorist organization that today is a threat to the region in which they prowl, but without question could pose a threat to the United States if their march is allowed to go unchecked.

Mr. President, like you, every time I hear of a new attack or a new execution carried out by ISIL, my blood boils, I get furious, and I commit myself to doing everything within our power to stamp them out. But I also remember that as justified a response as it is, fury is not a strategy; revenge is not security.

If we are going to defeat ISIL, then we need to act with our heads, not just with our heart. That means Congress needs to pass a war authorization that includes a strategy for victory--a strategy that learns from a small little creature called the planarian flatworm. I want to tell you about flatworms for a second. This is going to sound a little strange, but I will bring it back here.

These are extraordinary little things that live in ponds, under logs; they live in moist soil. And what’s amazing about these flatworms is that if you split one of them in two, if you cut it in half, both halves regenerate into new flatworms. In fact, if you cut it into four pieces, all four pieces can regrow into new flatworms. It means that if for whatever reason you are trying to get rid of flatworms, cutting them into pieces does more harm than good. If you take a knife to it, you actually create more flatworms than you destroy.

So why am I talking about this, Mr. President? Because they are a perfect object lesson of the simple truth that if you attack a problem the wrong way, you might not just leave the problem unsolved, you might actually make it worse. If you use the wrong tool to try to eradicate flatworms, you just end up with a lot more of them.

In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr. President, we were told we were going to be treated as liberators. We were told we would be out of Iraq in just a few years. And when that failed, our invasion turned the one-headed monster of Saddam Hussein into a two-headed monster of competing Sunni and Shiite insurgencies.

Then we were told more troops would do the trick. And it worked, for only as long as tens of thousands of Americans were patrolling the sands of Iraq. But ultimately, our occupation was quietly breeding a new brand of an even more lethal insurgency, one that turned into the terrorist group we’re fighting today.

Put simply, ISIL in its current form would not exist if we had not put massive ground troops into the region in the first place. Our presence in Iraq, our mishandling of the occupation, became bulletin board material for terrorist recruiters. Iraq became, in the CIA's words, the “cause celebre'' of the international extremist network. We killed a terrorist, and then the next day, two more showed up.

Now let me be clear, because I don't want people to twist my words here. America is not responsible for this evil ideology, and our troops are not to blame for ISIL. No one forgets that Al Qaeda attacked us and killed 3,000 of our people before we invaded Iraq. But do we believe that having hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers occupying territory in the Middle East since then has succeeded in making us safer?

We killed a lot of terrorists over the last 13 years, and yet there are more of them, in more places, with an even more radical agenda today than ever before.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates understood the lesson of the flatworm when he said, upon his departure from the Department of Defense, that any future Secretary who proposed putting ground troops back into the Middle East should “have their head examined.''

So for me, as we debate this new war authorization against ISIL, I have a bottom line: We cannot authorize a strategy that could result in American combat troops going back to the Middle East.

Now, if this President or the next President put our soldiers into the Middle East to fight ISIL, they would serve with bravery and honor. But an intervention of this scale would ultimately create more terrorists than it destroyed. And to the extent we drove back ISIL, it would only be temporary, lasting for as long as our troops were there.

Why? Because extremist groups like ISIL exist not because of a military vacuum but because of a political and an economic vacuum. They prey upon disenfranchised young men who see no future for themselves in societies with massive, crippling hunger, poverty, and destitution.

These groups work best when autocratic or sectarian governments marginalize and dispossess specific ethnic or religious groups, pushing them into the arms of extremists who pledge to fight the corrupt and dehumanizing status quo.

Foreign ground troops do nothing to address these underlying root causes of extremism. But worse, Mr. President, more often than not, foreign ground troops exacerbate these motivating forces. Bloody ground wars make more economic dislocation, not less. Foreign occupations often empower divisive local leadership, like the former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who pushed people towards -- not away -- extremist groups. And then groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL use this misery to brainwash young men into believing that America is to blame, that we’re the enemy that they’re yearning to fight.

Now that doesn't mean that there isn't a role for military force in the Middle East. Mr. President, I have voted for an authorization in the Foreign Relations Committee that allows for the United States -- our military -- to go in and kill terrorists, but we simply need to understand that ultimately what military force is in the Middle East is a shaping mechanism to give us space in order to achieve the political and economic reform on the ground with our local partners such that those root causes of terrorists disappear.

American military force is useful in this fight, but it has limits. There is a decreasing marginal return and then a point where it actually flips on its head and begins to actually create more of the people we are seeking to destroy.

Now I have heard two arguments over the past few days as to why this AUMF shouldn't have a limitation on ground troops. First, some of my Republican friends say that this kind of prohibition on ground troops would be unwise because it’s going to telegraph to our enemies a critical tactical limitation. My response: Good.

Why do you think ISIL puts up these execution videos? Because they know that the best long-term play for their desired caliphate is predicated on the United States making a mistake and rejoining a ground war in the Middle East. Recent history has taught ISIL that the best tool by far to recruit terrorists -- and estimates are there are as many as 20,000 foreign fighters that have joined ISIL -- their best tool is the United States Army in the Middle East. Thus, I have no problem being transparent with our enemy by signaling to them that we are going to learn from our mistakes and we are going to fight this war with tools that result in victory, not defeat.

Now the second argument I hear is that Congress would be overstepping our constitutional bounds by limiting the power of the President to prosecute a war. But first let's just note that over and over again, starting with Congress's very first authorizations of military force passed in early American times, we have put restrictions consistently on war declarations and AUMFs. Most recently, Republicans and Democrats in the Foreign Relations Committee voted to put some pretty serious limitations on our authorization for the use of military force in Syria in the wake of chemical weapons usage. And frankly, regardless of the precedent, I’d argue that Congress has a constitutional responsibility to help set strategy for war, to help guide the Nation's foreign policy.

Let's be honest here. This AUMF is going to go on for 3 years, according to the limitations that the President proposed, well into the next President's term. And as someone who believes that combat troops in the Middle East would be a mistake, I simply can't rely on President Obama's promise that he won’t use ground troops against ISIL because he’s only got 2 more years left, and many leading Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they would push a President from their party, if that’s who comes next, to put troops back into the fight against ISIL. As an elected representative of the people that I serve, I should get a say as to whether or not we learn from our mistakes of the past 10 years.

Mr. President, I remember my first visit to Iraq. I was there in the bloody spring of 2007. I remember being absolutely blown away by the capability and the bravery and the capacity of the young U.S. soldiers that I met there in places like Baghdad, and Tikrit, and Baiji. So I can understand why it’s easy for some people to believe that there is no enemy that our soldiers can't beat, that there is no challenge that they can't meet, that there’s no threat that they can't eliminate. I believe in American exceptionalism in my heart, but I don't think it allows us to ignore history, to avoid facts, to deny reality, and the reality is that extremists in some parts of the world are like flatworms. If you come at them with the wrong weapon, you may kill one, but you’ll create two more.

So I’m pleased that the United States Senate is finally able to debate a new war against ISIL. This debate is past due. ISIL needs to be defeated, and we deserve to honor the United States Constitution and step up to the plate and debate an authorization.

Make no mistake, we should pass an AUMF. ISIL is evil personified, but for us to beat them, we need an AUMF that makes it totally clear we won’t simply repeat the mistakes of the past that got us into this mess in the first place.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.