Dan Burton: “Let me just say to my esteemed colleague, when the President sent our troops into Bosnia, he said they would be out in 6…”

“Let me just say to my esteemed colleague, when the President sent our troops into Bosnia, he said they would be out in 6 months. It has now been over 3 years, and we have spent billions of dollars. That is why many of us were very concerned and are still concerned. Now, we all want to support our troops. We all want to put additional funding into the hollowed-out military that has been hollowed out to such a degree that we cannot deal with the crises around the world. But let me just give my colleagues a fact. The fact is, from 1950 to 1990, military operations, we had 10 of them. In 40 years, we had 10 of them. In the last 7 years, we have had 25 deployments without the Congress being involved, unilateral actions taking place by the administration, by the President. Now, let us take a look at what happened when George Bush was President. The Democrat Congress, in 1991, insisted that we have a vote on whether or not we go to war in the Persian Gulf. There was proper planning. We had 550,000 troops. General Schwarzkopf was in charge. We planned it fully before we did anything. But still the Congress insisted that George Bush come before this body before we started any military operations.”