Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk a little bit more about our policy because, as I said before, I think it is the policy that gets us into these predicaments and that, if you deal with this as a strictly technical/tactical problem that we have to face in how to rectify our problems, I don't think it will occur. I think we have to deal in the overall policy. In many ways, we follow a schizophrenic type of foreign policy because, one time, they are our best friends, then later on they become our worst enemies. This was true with Saddam Hussein. In the 1980s, he was our friend. We took care of him. We encouraged him and supported his war. Then of course that changed. Even right before 9/11, the Taliban were still receiving money from us, and now they receive money from us indirectly. The Taliban gets money from the Pakistanis, or at least information as has been reported, but they literally get some of our money in the process because, in order for us to move equipment through Afghanistan, they literally end up getting American dollars from doing this. So here we are going into Pakistan. One of the arguments to go into Pakistan is that we have to go after the Taliban--that they are over there, that they are organizing and that they want to kill the American soldiers in Afghanistan. This means that now they are our archenemies. Yet the Taliban, especially in the 1980s, weren't called the Taliban; they were called the Mujahedeen.…”