Bill Clinton: “Our military is the strongest military in the world. It is the strongest, best prepared, best equipped it has ever been.…”

“Our military is the strongest military in the world. It is the strongest, best prepared, best equipped it has ever been. There is very little difference in the budget that I have proposed and the Republican budget over the next 6-year period. We are spending a lot of money to modernize our weapons system. I have proposed a lot of new investments to improve the quality of life for our soldiers, for our men and women in uniform, for their families, for their training. That is my solemn obligation. You asked, when do you decide to deploy them? The interests of the American people must be at stake; our values must be at stake; we have to be able to make a difference. And frankly, we have to consider what the risks are to our young men and women in uniform. But I believe the evidence is that our deployments have been successful in Haiti, in Bosnia, when we moved to Kuwait to repel Saddam Hussein's threatened invasion of Kuwait, when I have sent the fleet into the Taiwan Straits, when we've worked hard to end the North Korean nuclear threat. I believe the United States is at peace tonight in part because of the disciplined, careful, effective deployment of our military resources. Mr. Lehrer. Senator Dole. Senator Dole. Well, I failed to mention North Korea and Cuba a while ago. You look at North Korea, where they have enough plutonium to build six nuclear bombs, where we've sort of distanced ourselves from our ally, South Korea. They lost about a million people in the war, the Korean war, the forgotten war. We lost 53,000 Americans. We shouldn't be doing any favors for North Korea. It's a closed society. We don't have any inspection. We don't know whether it's going to work or not. But we keep giving them these incentives--some would call them something else-- incentives. We don't know what's going to happen. Here we have Cuba, 90 miles from our shores. And what have we done? We've passed a law that gave people the right to sue, and the President postponed it for 6 months. And it seems to me if you want to send a signal you've got to send a signal, Mr. President. The sooner, the better off we'll be if we put tougher sanctions on Castro, not try to make it easier for him. Mr. Lehrer. Well, Mr. President, what is your attitude toward Cuba and how Cuba should be treated?”