David Obey: “Mr. Chairman, this country is engaged in a war which is the consequence of the inability of the West to act going as far…”

“Mr. Chairman, this country is engaged in a war which is the consequence of the inability of the West to act going as far back as 1982. Mr. Milosevic has been consistently and perniciously grinding people into the dust in Bosnia, in Croatia, in Kosovo for over a decade. And because action was not taken to stop him more than a decade ago, the cost of stopping him now is going to be much higher than it otherwise would have been. We can all argue about how we got here, but the fact is we are here, and we owe the troops in the field and we owe the President an obligation to deal with this issue on the merits--right down the middle. I do not think this House has done a very good job of doing that. We have seen an incredible array of political comments the last few weeks. Last week, for instance, we have seen one Member of this body indicate that this needed to be clearly understood as Clinton's war rather than the national problem that it really is. We saw a good many efforts being made to simultaneously oppose what the President is doing and what NATO is doing and at the same time double the spending for conducting that war.”