[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 109 (Tuesday, August 9, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 9, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
MAKES NO SENSE TO INVADE A FRIENDLY NEIGHBORING COUNTRY WHEN THERE ARE 
                            OTHER SOLUTIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
February 11, 1994, and June 10, 1994, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. 
Goss] is recognized during morning business for 5 minutes.
  (Mr. GOSS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his 
remarks.)
  Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, last week Secretary of Defense William Perry 
and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Shalikashvili, came 
to the Hill hat in hand. They were seeking approval here to reprogram 
$800 million; that is million, to cover the cost of the military 
operations in Haiti and an additional $270 million emergency 
supplemental for Rwanda. That obviously totals over a billion dollars, 
and it is a tremendous amount of money that was not foreseen to be 
spent.
  I think any American; we are all compassionate people, would quickly 
say that there is a terrible problem in Rwanda. We have to respond to 
it on a timely basis. People are starving there, disease is rampant, 
and there is a terrible dislocation, and I think there is a 
humanitarian mission. Whether it is the appropriate mission for the 
military is another question, and how we go about dealing with those 
kinds of missions is something that has eluded the administration. We 
do not have a proper response mechanism at all.
  But the hundred million reprograming for Haiti is to solve a problem 
of our own making. That is a consequence of American foreign policy to 
rattle the sword, and get tough, and talk about invading a friendly, 
neighboring country just to our south.

  The Pentagon explained that, if they do not get help, they are going 
to have to have certain consequences to deal with, and let me just 
quote what we were told. The Pentagon said that the military is going 
to have to curtail training exercises, delay aircraft and ship 
maintenance, stop purchases of repair parts and release civilian 
employees. Well, I think we should probably do with a few less civilian 
employees in the military, but the other areas, curtailing our 
training, or delaying our aircraft and ship maintenance, or stopping 
purchase of repair parts strikes me as a little bit alarming. I would 
not want to send anybody under my command into a hostile situation 
unless they were 100 percent trained and I were satisfied they were 
ready to do everything they could to carry out their mission in the 
safest way possible for themselves on behalf of their country, and I 
certainly would not send anybody out in an airplane that I thought to 
have faulty parts or was not properly maintained, nor would I send 
anybody out on the high seas in a ship that I had serious reservations 
about.
  So, what we are talking about here is, if we do not reprogram this 
money for this Haiti invasion, this nonsense we keep talking about, 
then we are in a position of either having to stand down some of our 
troops or send them out in situations where we have not got the proper 
maintenance or the necessary spare parts on hand to complete their job 
with the degree of safety that they should have. That is absolutely 
intolerable, and it is totally unnecessary because this Haitian 
invasion is only a signal of a foreign policy that has gone bankrupt, 
$800 million of bankruptcy here both in dollars and in common sense. It 
makes no sense to invade a friendly neighboring country when there are 
other solutions.

                              {time}  1100

  The question about whether our military is overburdened, and there 
seems to be lots of cases of humanitarian relief needs in the world, 
and our military has been assigned to them, with differing degrees of 
success and differing degrees of danger. Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, 
Burundi, Zaire, Nigeria, Algeria, former Yugoslavia, North Korea, 
Bosnia, India-Pakistan, Kurdish territories of Northern Iraq, and now 
Cuba again, the front page of the paper today, and probably tomorrow, 
we are going to be hearing a lot more about the Cuban situation.
  So we have got plenty of those missions out there, some on our front 
doorsteps, as it were, and we have not really even worked out how to 
deal with the humanitarian missions and sort them out from the proper 
military missions yet. It seems to me that is something that the 
administration ought to be working on.
  But looking at our military missions, we get the testimony, while 
they are asking for this $800 million last week from General 
Shalikashvili, that what is happening, because which are running around 
the world doing all these missions, he is simply saying the strain on 
our soldiers is very great, it is measurable, and many of them are 
being run ragged.
  What for? To contain people in Haiti? The Haitians are our friends 
and have been for 200 years. And the fact we are sending 14 warships 
down there, and now talking about invading their island, certainly just 
strains my sense of credulity.
  All of this, incidentally, is going on, this talk about moving $800 
million, and in fact the total invasion cost of Haiti and the cost of 
those ships that down there will be over $1 billion, just by itself 
now, we are talking of this at the same time we have been stripping the 
DOD budget. Everybody knows we have downsized our military 
dramatically.
  We are now in the position where I don't know that anybody from the 
administration can come up here and say we can carry out two actions 
simultaneously. What would happen, I suppose, if we had an invasion of 
Haiti on the one hand and Fidel Castro decided to make some mischief 
with more refugees on the other. It is an interesting thought and one 
that deserves more attention from the administration.

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