Political Quotes

“I rise not to refute or answer the comments that we just heard for the last several hours, but I will make a couple of comments. First of all, rather than listen to Members of Congress and this body talk about the conditions in Iraq, tomorrow the American people will have a chance to listen to the Prime Minister of Iraq himself whose life has been threatened 4 times, attempted assassinations on him. I think the American people should listen to that gentleman, Prime Minister Alawi, to have us get an understanding of how well his country is responding to our effort. In terms of the need for the use of our Reservists, as the vice chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, I would just remind our colleagues that it was during the 1990s that our troops were deployed 38 times. None of those deployments were paid for and, as a result, we had to cut the size of our military. The Army, for instance, in almost half, cutting our armored divisions down to 20; the Navy was cut from 585 ships to 314. As a result of those significant cutbacks during the 1990s, it was necessary to go to a policy that included the use of our Guard and Reserve forces.”