Send this to Jim Talent who blamed Clinton for cuts/torture

Thank Clinton for a speedy victory in Iraq
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/133/editorials/Thank_Clinton_for_a_speedy_victory_in_Iraq+.shtml
By Lawrence J. Korb, 5/13/2003
WHILE IT is understandable that President George W. Bush and his
secretary of defense are receiving plaudits for the relatively swift
military victory in Iraq, the fact of the matter is that most of the
credit for the successful military operation should go to the Clinton
administration.
As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted, the battle plan that led
to the American success was that of General Tommy Franks, an Army
officer appointed to head the Central Command by the Clinton
administration. More important, the military forces that executed that
plan so boldly and bravely were for the most part recruited, trained,
and equipped by the Clinton administration.
The first Bush defense budget went into effect on Oct. 1, 2002, and none
of the funds in that budget have yet had an impact on the quality of the
men and women in the armed services, their readiness for combat, or the
weapons they used to obliterate the Iraqi forces.
Given the way that Bush and his surrogates disparaged Clinton's approach
to the military in his 2000 campaign, this is ironic. The president and
his advisers claimed that Clinton had diminished the armed forces'
fighting edge by turning them into social workers and sending them too
often on ''useless'' nation-building exercises. These same people also
claimed that Clinton had so underfunded the military that it was in a
condition similar to that which existed on the eve of Pearl Harbor.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2000, Vice President Dick Cheney
summed up the Bush team's sentiment toward what Clinton had done to the
military: He went around the country telling the military and the nation
that help and additional support were on the way for our troops.
Anyone examining the facts would know that these claims were bogus. The
Clinton administration actually spent more money on defense than had the
outgoing administration of the first President Bush. The smaller outlays
during the first Bush administration were developed and approved by Dick
Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who were then serving as
secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
respectively.
<b>Clinton's last secretary of defense, William Cohen, turned over to
Rumsfeld a defense budget that was higher in real terms than what James
Schlesinger had bequeathed to Rumsfeld when he took over the Pentagon
for the first time in 1975 at the height of the Cold War</b>.

Is part of it missing?