Dan Burton: “Mr. Speaker, is this war in our national interests? Does it involve the security of the United States? I think anybody…”

“Mr. Speaker, is this war in our national interests? Does it involve the security of the United States? I think anybody who is familiar with this operation realizes that it is not. The Persian Gulf, on the other hand, did involve our national security, because 50 percent of our oil reserves came from that part of the world, and it also involved one country invading another. Should we be involved for humanitarian reasons? Look at the Sudan. Two million people, 2 million people, died in the Sudan. We did not do a darn thing about it. In Ethiopia, there have been 10,000 deaths in just the last couple of months. In Tibet, nearly 1.2 million people have died, and we have not done anything. In Sri Lanka, 56,000 people have lost their lives; 200,000 in Indonesia, and I could go on and on. In Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, 10,000 Serbs were killed and 200,000 were driven out in ethnic cleansing in 1995, and we did not do a darn thing about it.”