Political Quotes

“before we totally leave the missile area, I just wanted to flesh out the question the gentleman from Arizona asked about how we are treating Israel with respect to building a missile defense as opposed to our own people. The Israelis are surrounded by Arab neighbors who want to launch ballistic missiles at Israel. In 1987, the Israelis were trying to develop a fighter, a craft called the Lavi aircraft. A number of us on the armed services program signed a letter that I drafted and Curt Weldon signed it, a number of Members who were still, Hal Rogers of Kentucky signed it, a number of members who are on the Committee on Armed Services today, and we said to the Israelis, do not build a fighter aircraft because a lot of nations make fighter aircraft. But there is one thing that no western nations build, and that is a defense against incoming ballistic missiles. We think that your program, your coproduction program with the United States should not be fighter aircraft, it should be a defense against missiles. And the reason we think that is because we think in the near future, we wrote this in 1987 to Mr. Rabin, we said we think in the near future you will be attacked with Russian made ballistic missiles coming from a neighboring Arab state. And it was somewhat prophetic. We predicted the state might be Syria. It ended up instead coming from Saddam Hussein. But they were attacked by Russian-made ballistic missiles coming from another country.…”