Bill Lee: “I stand to urge a ``no'' vote on the motion to table. We are involved as cobelligerents in hostilities in someone else's…”

“I stand to urge a ``no'' vote on the motion to table. We are involved as cobelligerents in hostilities in someone else's war--in a civil war in Yemen. It is very difficult to dispute the contention that there is no decision made by a government that is more severe, more serious, that carries with it more dire consequences than sending brave young men and women sworn to protect us into harm's way, into battle, into hostilities. We have been faced with the debate here about what amounts to hostilities. We have the executive branch of government that understandably has defined that term narrowly but in this case so narrowly as to obliterate any meaning behind that word, basically suggesting that we are not in hostilities unless we have people on the ground firing upon an enemy and being fired upon. That is not always the way modern warfare is conducted and hasn't been for some time. The fact is that we have our uniformed military personnel who are engaged in things like midair refueling on combat missions, refueling the combat aircraft of another country when those combat aircraft are in route to a battlefield, to a theater of warfare. If those aren't hostilities, I don't know what is. We have been told that we need to do this in regular order. Let's talk about regular order for a minute because, as I mentioned a moment ago, there is nothing more serious than sending our uniformed military personnel into hostilities.…”