Bill Clinton: “Let me just take 2 seconds of my time, because I'm the Commander in Chief, to respond to one thing that was said. I…”

“Let me just take 2 seconds of my time, because I'm the Commander in Chief, to respond to one thing that was said. I propose to spend $1.6 trillion on defense between now and the year 2002. And there's less than one percent difference between my budget and the Republican budget on defense. Now, on the Middle East, as you know, I've worked very hard for peace in the Middle East. The agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis was signed at the White House. And the agreement, the peace treaty with Jordan, I went to Jordan to sign that, to be there. But--and I think the United States could do whatever we reasonably can. I can say this: I do not believe Yasser Arafat wants us to send troops to the West Bank. We have never been asked to send troops to the West Bank. I saw the agreement that Prime Minister Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed on the West Bank. It had 26 separate maps they had to sign, literally thousands of delineations of who would do what on the West Bank. And I believe if the parties will get together and in a good faith manner make that agreement, that they'll be able to do it. We cannot impose a peace on the Middle East. My position has always been that the job of the United States was to minimize the risks of peace. You know, if they ask me to be part of some monitoring force--as we are in the Sinai and have been since 1978 to monitor the peace between Egypt and Israel--frankly, I would have to think about it; I would have to see what they wanted to do. But I don't believe that will be the request. I think what Mr. Arafat wants us to do is to make sure that everybody honors the agreements they've already made. That's why I brought the leaders to Washington a few days ago. I think they will, and I think we'll get there. Don't be too discouraged. Senator Dole. Well, let me, Jason, come back to you a minute because there is a big difference in the defense budget. We had $7 billion this year, and $10 billion more than the President. He puts his money in the out years--even if he were reelected, you know, he'd be gone before anything happened. And nothing's going to happen, because we don't have modernization now. If we don't build more B-2 bombers in California--and we lost about 500,000 jobs out in California because of this devastation, these big, big cuts. We had to make cuts; we didn't have to make the cuts the President promised he'd make and then he doubled. And so I think we need to go back and take a look. We're increasing defense reasonably, not too much but we are increasing defense some, because we want to be prepared in case somebody here gets called up, Jason. I would say I didn't hear what Yasser Arafat had to say, but I don't want to--you know, I think foreign policy is something we want to be very careful about. And I'm not here to argue about the President on some ongoing foreign policy matter. What I want the President to do, and I think he may have done it in his last statement, is call for an unconditional end to the violence and have the parties keep on talking as they should talk and have a resolution. The last thing we want to do is commit more forces anywhere. But let's sort of keep this out of politics, because it's pretty dicey right now.”