John Spratt: “Far from supplanting that bill, which was the Afghan War Powers Act, we reassert in this legislation the primacy of our…”

“Far from supplanting that bill, which was the Afghan War Powers Act, we reassert in this legislation the primacy of our policy, and that is to go after al Qaeda. We do that by saying to the President, before we go off in pursuit of another armed objective, military objective, we want you to tell us that this is not going to divert our focus from the primary objective, which is to get the guys that did what they did in New York on 9/11. We do not want to divert or dilute our focus from that at all. That is in the centerpiece of this particular bill. My good friend, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde), has said that many of us on this side of the aisle voted for action in Kosovo. I did. And I am proud of it because we stopped another butchery in the backyard of Europe by doing so. We did not go to the U.N. then, and the gentleman knows why. Because the Russians are on the Security Council and they would have blocked us. Politics and diplomacy is a pragmatic thing. That is why we did not go there. But it was multilateral, because it was an undertaking by NATO, and we tried to use collective defense in that particular case.”