Political Quotes

“once again, these Status of Forces Agreements, which are pretty run of the mill, do not manifest security commitments by the United States to protect the countries that they are made with. They talk about the treatment and describe the treatment of Americans with respect to getting licenses, licensing their vehicles, how they're going to be treated in cases of civil or criminal actions. Basically how the American who is in that particular foreign country, and again we have got 80 of them that we have done, how they are going to be treated by that host country. Now, they are not security commitments, and if you have something that does, in fact, commit the United States to a security agreement with another country, and in this case Iraq, I have no dispute with my colleagues, that at that point you have a treaty, and a treaty, because it manifests commitments, has to be ratified. But I don't understand why we are saying that the Status of Forces Agreement, which is going to talk about how our troops are treated in the same way that we talk about how American military personnel who are in Germany or Japan or 80 other countries are treated, how that now becomes something special because it's Iraq and, in the case of Iraq alone, we have to have a ratification by Congress.”