Joe Wilson: “I would agree with the distinguished minority leader that this is not about partisanship, it is about policy. We have an…”

“I would agree with the distinguished minority leader that this is not about partisanship, it is about policy. We have an advantage here tonight in that we are being asked to authorize something that happened 5 weeks ago. That gives us the advantage because we can see the immediate effects. We have got the benefit here of a crystal ball to see what the results will be of the President's policy. The question for all of us is, do you want to stand behind this? Is this the policy and the results that you want? Because if it is not, you will be endorsing everything that has gone on in the last 5 weeks and taking on the risk of what will happen in the future. What have we seen? The political aims are not clear and they have not been from the very beginning. Mostly they are humanitarian. Our objective was to prevent a humanitarian disaster in the Balkans. We have exacerbated that humanitarian disaster, and hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians have been pushed out of their homes and those homes burned because our military means were not tied to those political objectives. I am a former Air Force officer. I believe in air power, as my father did and my grandfather before him. And despite the images that we see on our televisions of precise attacks, we can hit the bridges, but we cannot change the mind of Slobodan Milosevic. As a result, we have not been able to stop a door-to-door campaign of repression and ethnic cleansing, and we have made it worse.”