Jim Inhofe: “No, I will not yield unless I yield on your time. I would like to have a better solution than the solution that is in…”

“No, I will not yield unless I yield on your time. I would like to have a better solution than the solution that is in front us. Frankly, I think we should have done this some time ago, but this seems to be the only vehicle in town. There are reasons we should not have been involved in Kosovo. It is not in our vital national security interests. There is no clear mission objective or schedule to accomplish it. There is no exit strategy. The thing that really concerns me more than anything else, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, is what this has done to our state of readiness. I have been saying since before we sent the cruise missiles into Kosovo that the United States is in the most threatened position we have been in as a nation in this Nation's history. I have been saying that for a long time. It finally was redeemed the other day--our chairman will remember this--when we had George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, before our committee. I made that statement. I asked him to respond live on C-SPAN. He said, yes, we are in the most threatened position we have been in as a nation in the history of this country. Why is that? It is because of three things. First of all, we are at one-half the force strength that we were in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war. Second, we do not have a national missile defense system.…”