[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 127 (Tuesday, September 13, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 13, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1995 AND MILITARY 
 CONSTRUCTION AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1995--CONFERENCE REPORT

  The Senate continued with the consideration of the conference report.
  Mr. PRYOR. I thank the Chair for recognizing me, and I thank the 
distinguished manager for allowing me the opportunity to speak for just 
a few moments this afternoon.
  Mr. President, I would like to address the attention of my colleagues 
to a particular amendment which has been accepted by the various 
managers of the defense authorization bill.
  I truly believe that this amendment is going to result in a much 
greater efficiency and effectiveness in the way that the Department of 
Defense performs its work. This provision--it sounds pretty simple--is 
pretty far-reaching. It is an amendment that I had added to this bill. 
I am very indebted to the various managers who have accepted this 
language.
  It has two parts which are designed to ensure that the taxpayers of 
this country are not paying excessive amounts of money to private 
contractors.
  Mr. President, not long ago the Senate passed the Acquisition Reform 
Act which was intended to make our Federal procurement system easier 
for the Government to operate and to make it easier for contractors to 
deal with the Government. While I did support this legislation, I also 
thought it was important to recognize that in addition to making our 
system simpler, we should also strive to make it more efficient, and 
more accountable.
  As I have stated, the provision has two parts. The first section 
requires that the DOD Inspector General review a portion of the 
existing service contracts at DOD to determine if these contracts have 
experienced actual cost overruns. This requirement is necessary due to 
the simple fact that all too many GAO reports, IG reports, and hearings 
like the ones that I have held on Government contracts, have documented 
that all too often these contracts awarded to save money actually end 
up costing more than the Federal employees who were replaced.
  This requirement does not prevent DOD from contracting out any 
services, but it does, for the first time, give us some independent 
oversight over those contracts once they are awarded. Perhaps if 
contractors and the DOD know that the Inspector General will be 
checking up on these particular contracts, then the taxpayers will not 
be forced to pay for excessive cost growth that occurs all too often 
when Government work has been farmed out to contractors.
  The second part of the amendment addresses those types of contracts 
that are not now subject to cost comparison. I am speaking about the 
consulting services contracted out for by the Department of Defense or, 
as they are sometimes called, advisory and assistance services. If the 
Department of Defense wants to contract for, let us say, lawn mowing 
services, they do it with a cost comparison between the contractor and 
a Federal employee. However, if the Department of Defense wants to 
contract for planning, for managing, for analyzing, and other such 
services, then there is absolutely no requirement that they first 
compare the cost of using Federal employees versus private contractors. 
This, Mr. President, I have said for a long period of time, absolutely 
makes no sense.
    
    
  Mr. President, again this requirement to conduct a cost comparison 
does not prohibit the Department of Defense from awarding any contract. 
However, for the first time in our acquisition history, the Department 
of Defense and others will at least begin asking a very simple and 
basic question before awarding consulting contracts. That question is 
this: Is it going to cost more to use Federal workers or private 
contractors to perform this same work? This is the first time, as a 
result of the adoption of this amendment, when this particular question 
is going to be asked. This is the information that any manager, I 
think, would like before making a decision that would cost the 
taxpayers large sums of money.
  This is a requirement that allows DOD to consider other factors not 
related to cost when they are performing these comparisons. For 
example, these other issues could include the availability of DOD 
personnel, or whether the work is a one-time requirement or a recurring 
need.
  Mr. President, this amendment sets also a dollar threshold for 
conducting a cost comparison of $100,000. I think this is a reasonable 
figure, and when the Senate was considering the acquisition 
streamlining bill there was much discussion of the need to raise the 
small purchase threshold from $25,000 to $100,000 in order to reduce 
the paperwork burden on the various agencies involved.
  The Senate was informed that the vast majority of contract actions--
close to 90 percent, I think--were under this threshold. This means 
that the agencies could now begin to focus on the larger contracts, 
those over $100,000. I think the same logic applies to cost comparison 
for consulting contracts.
  For many years, I have been advocating this very simple reform, and I 
do appreciate the chairman and ranking member of the Armed Services 
Committee bringing this cost comparison idea to fruition. In 
conclusion, these two requirements will provide DOD and the Congress 
with much needed information on the cost of using private contractors. 
This is a small but a very critical step to take toward a more 
efficient and accountable Government.
  Mr. President, I urge the adoption of this amendment and once again 
thank the managers.
  Mr. President, finally, there are two other amendments which I am 
very proud to have had accepted as a part of the authorization bill for 
the Department of Defense. The first amendment, Mr. President, is the 
early notification of defense contract termination.
  This amendment is designed to provide defense workers early 
notification of the termination of defense contracts. This early 
notification will make them eligible for JTPA reemployment and training 
services earlier and enable these workers to begin their job search 
much earlier, which will shorten the time that they will be without a 
job.
  This amendment will require the Secretary of Defense to notify a 
defense contractor of the likely termination of a contract within 90 
days of the submission of the President's budget to Congress, or within 
90 days of the enactment of an appropriations bill. Contractors are 
subsequently required to notify the subcontractors, who are required to 
notify the workers.
  This requirement currently in law gives the Secretary of Defense 10 
days to give notice, which does not provide enough time in many 
instances for these workers to begin the process of looking for a new 
job or taking advantage of training opportunities.
  Mr. President, I see my friend from Wyoming seeking the floor, but if 
I might have an additional 2 minutes, I will briefly describe the third 
amendment included in this authorization bill that I think our 
colleagues need to know about.
  This amendment will make JTPA reemployment and training services 
available to workers who lose their jobs as a result of reductions in 
defense exports caused by Government policy decisions.
  Workers who lose their jobs because of a base closure or cutbacks in 
Pentagon procurement, currently qualify for JTPA services and I think, 
it is only fair that defense export workers who lose their jobs because 
the Government prohibits the export of their product, should be 
receiving these same services also.
  Mr. President, this is a summary of three constructive amendments, 
not only in the acquisition area, but also in the job training area, to 
those workers who are employed by defense establishments within our 
great country.
  Once again, Mr. President, I thank the ranking member of the 
committee, Senator Thurmond of South Carolina, and the distinguished 
chairman of the committee, Senator Nunn of Georgia, for their 
cooperation and their acceptance of these amendments.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. WALLOP. Mr. President, will the distinguished ranking member, 
Senator Thurmond, yield time to me?
  Mr. THURMOND. Mr. President, I will be pleased to yield to the 
distinguished Senator 15 minutes.
  Mr. WALLOP. I thank the Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. If the Senator will withhold, the Senator from 
South Carolina controls 9 minutes, so the Chair understood the Senator 
to mean he will yield the remainder of his time to the Senator from 
Wyoming.
  Mr. THURMOND. I believe I only have 9 minutes. I yield the Senator 
that.
  Mr. WALLOP. I thank the Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming has the floor.
  Mr. WALLOP. Mr. President, the Defense authorization bill does not 
authorize enough defense to keep America strong. It is really a very 
simple equation. We do not have enough money in here to close the bases 
authorized for closing by the Base Closure Commission. So savings to be 
realized down the road are not going to take place.
  Mr. President, top gun is not going to fly for a month at a naval air 
station because they do not have fuel for the aircraft. I am told that 
three Air Force fighter wings are not able to fly for training. This, 
just a couple of short years, Mr. President, after the greatest 
military force the world had ever known was honed and ready.
  It would not have required a lot of extra money. It would not have 
required the same sustained effort that we were in. But it would have 
required a little bit of common sense, and it has not been applied.
  Mr. President, this defense authorization sets the military of the 
United States to environmental exploration, it sets the military of the 
United States into job training, and it sets the United States into a 
lot of displaced worker programs when defense contractors are putting 
on hold every piece of new research that we have.
  Mr. President, this is a disaster. How big a disaster? The Defense 
Department said we have to call up the Reserves to invade Haiti. To 
invade that little miserable island nation, we have to have Reserves. 
We have spent or will have spent two-thirds of $1 billion by the time 
the invasion of Haiti has been completed. And for that, Americans get 
not one piece of safety. They get a big piece of politics. They get a 
big risk to the reputation of the military.
  Let me just tell you what is going to happen when the U.S. troops go 
down there. All of a sudden, they are going to be confronted with 
somebody trying to take their lives. And in defense of their lives or 
their unit, they are going to shoot. And somewhere along the line, a 
child will be killed, a pregnant woman will be killed, or somebody that 
ought not to be killed will be maimed or shot or wounded by people who 
have been put into a position under which no rational human could react 
differently. But all of a sudden, the reputation of the men and women 
of the armed services of the United States will be sullied and damaged 
by a President who put them in harm's way, which does not make any 
sense in the national interest.
  Let me move from there to Cuba.
  I have had calls from constituents of mine stationed in Guantanamo 
that the military presence there is not sufficiently armed to defend 
itself against a growingly restive Cuban population held hostage, 
imprisoned, by the United States for the crime of seeking freedom. And 
when the President of the United States joins with that dictator, 
Castro, to keep these people in prison and to use his secret service to 
suppress the desires of other people leaving, maybe we ought to rethink 
this.
  Just think about it for a moment. The Cubans held prisoner in 
Guantanamo are now devoid of hope. There is nothing for them to look 
forward to--release from Guantanamo, back to Castro's prison; stay in 
Guantanamo in prison; go to Panama for 6 months and return to prison. 
They are not going to be let go. There is no hope. No wonder they are 
getting restless.
  This is a policy that has nothing but failure attached to it. What 
kind of a role is it for the defense forces of the United States to 
start shooting people who are rioting because all they ever sought was 
freedom? Make no mistake about it. In controlling the prison population 
at Guantanamo, sooner or later that restive population is going to 
force a person of the U.S. Armed Forces, in defending himself or a 
comrade, to shoot somebody whose only crime is that they want to be 
free. What have we done? We have joined with Mr. Castro to use his 
secret police to suppress the rest of that population.
  Now, going back to Haiti, we have a government in exile with Mr. 
Aristide. The Clinton administration denies that anybody ought to be a 
government in exile for Cuba. They are going to invade Haiti. But they 
are going to imprison those who seek freedom in Cuba.
  Mr. President, no wonder we are going broke in the defense business. 
We are spending money for things that are not the role of the military. 
We are spending money to invade a little island nation; $250 million 
now already spent, and $490 million yet to go if we invade.
  Mr. President, something is very, very wrong when Top Gun cannot fly, 
when Air Force training flights cannot fly, when the Navy is close 
quartered, when all of the training operations that we have are coming 
down, down, and down to the hollow Army that we had, only worse, in the 
Carter years.
  Yet, we have money enough to invade Haiti. We have money enough to 
assign our forces to the command of the United Nations so that not even 
the President of the United States nor the Secretary of Defense knew 
when American aircraft had engaged and shot down Serbian planes in 
Bosnia. We have time enough to assign them to Rwanda and money enough 
to do all of this, but not to train them for the roles and missions 
which they have contemplated all these years. Mr. President, something 
is very, very wrong.
  This authorization bill spends money on civilian programs when the 
funds could better be spent by purchasing and acquiring the equipment, 
the fuel, and the research that is necessary to keep us alive. Now we 
are told that the President of the United States is going to cede to 
the Russians when Boris Yeltsin comes here all manner of controls on 
tactical ballistic missiles under new agreements on the antiballistic 
missiles program, and this without submitting those to the Senate of 
the United States, in violation of the Nunn-Byrd interpretation of the 
obligations of the executive branch with regard to the treaty.
  We do not have money enough to buy our soldiers gas to train. We do 
have money enough to invade a little island nation and put back in 
power a man who is every bit the infamous dictator as the one we wish 
to replace. We do have money enough to tell Mr. Aristide that we are 
going to have 20,000 troops down there, and 7,000 of them are going to 
be policemen in his nation.
  Mr. President, something is very, very wrong when we have money for 
these kinds of things but not to train America's young men and women 
for the kinds of roles that will defend this country from harm should 
it ever arise again. And if the President of the United States does not 
believe that the world is still dangerous and that we can fritter away 
the rest of what we have on this basis, then the President of the 
United States, Mr. President, is wrong.
  This Defense authorization bill is a catastrophe because it does not 
buy Americans the defense they need with the money we are spending, and 
yet we have money enough to assign the roles to the Armed Forces that 
are not their roles. They should not be peacekeepers. They are not 
social experimenters. They are not environmental folks. They are 
soldiers, sailors, and airmen, whose role is to defend this country. 
And we are letting them down.
  I thank the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time allocated to the Senator from Wyoming 
has expired.
  There are 21 minutes and 26 seconds remaining.
  Who yields time?
  Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I wish to speak on behalf of the bill. Is 
it possible to inquire----
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. FORD. Mr. President, on behalf of the managers of the bill on 
this side, how much time does the Senator need?
  Mr. WARNER. Six or seven minutes.
  Mr. FORD. Mr. President, I yield the distinguished Senator from 
Virginia 7 minutes.
  Mr. THURMOND. Mr. President, I wish to thank the Senator from 
Kentucky for his kindness.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia has the floor.
  Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I wish to thank the distinguished Senator 
from Kentucky and also my good friend and colleague, the ranking member 
on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Thurmond of South 
Carolina.
  Mr. President, I wish to say that I thought the statement of the 
Senator from Wyoming was a very interesting one. I associate myself 
with several of his points. I will address one of those points in the 
course of my remarks. I first want to again compliment the 
distinguished Senator from Georgia and the Senator from South Carolina 
and the membership of our committee for again this year compiling what 
I believe is a very credible piece of work, strengthened as best we can 
given the restricted resources for our Nation's defense.
  We endeavor to take care of those who serve in our military services. 
We provided a 2.6-percent pay raise--modest, nevertheless a raise--for 
military personnel, and we enacted other measures to improve their 
standard of living and quality of life. We also authorized funding to 
ensure cost-of-living allowances for military retirees, known as 
COLA's, which were equal to their Federal employee counterparts. This 
was a matter in which there was a strong contest here in the U.S. 
Senate, and I was able to lead the effort, along with several others, 
to have an overwhelming vote. And I hope the men and women in the Armed 
Forces found it reassuring that the Senate of the United States wants 
in every way possible to assure them a good quality of life in return 
for their heroic work on behalf of our national defense and, more 
importantly, to ensure freedom for ourselves and that of our allies.
  It was essential that Congress provide the final chapter of funding 
for the next phase of nuclear power, the CVN-76. Incremental funding 
was provided over the years, but this was the last chapter. I always 
view our great country in some respects as an island nation, surrounded 
by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The sea lanes of the world are 
literally our lifelines of survival in terms of our strategic defense 
and in terms of our ability to come to the assistance of our allies 
and, of course, what is quite obvious, our ability to maintain trade 
and commerce with the other nations of the world in this one-world 
market that we have today.
  Along with other members of the Armed Services Committee, I am 
concerned that the future years defense plan [FYDP] is seriously 
underfunded. This has been commented on by almost all of my colleagues 
in one way or another. We draw the attention of others not on our 
committee to the comments of the Secretary of Defense and Deputy 
Secretary of Defense, who have indicated that the FYDP is underfunded 
by about $40 billion, while the General Accounting Office reports that 
the underfunding in the outyears is close to $250 billion. This will be 
a major challenge for the Armed Services Committee next year to try to 
analyze that disparity and come to some conclusion and a sense of 
direction.
  The Deputy Secretary of Defense in a recent memo asked the military 
services to consider the cancellation of 22 of the top modernization 
programs. Recent reports of canceled training, deteriorating 
maintenance, and other indicators of declining readiness are also of 
major concern to the committee and reflect serious underfunding to the 
future years defense budget.
  As I look back on the many years I have been privileged to be 
associated with defense, America has always been on the cutting edge of 
technology. We have been able to use our vast resources, research and 
development, and our magnificent industrial base to buy the very best 
equipment for those who step forward and proudly volunteer to wear the 
uniform of our military services. I am concerned that we may fall back 
in our ability to provide the best airplane, the best ship, the best 
gun--not gold plated, just the best. When we ask the American families 
and the young people of this Nation to step forward and volunteer, they 
are entitled to nothing less than the best equipment to provide not 
only for their own security in the furtherance of their missions, but 
the ability to protect our Nation.
  Mr. President, I heard the Senator from Wyoming touch on this 
subject. I want to express concern about the way our military forces 
are being used more and more for missions with less and less military 
justification. What effect is this having on our services and on the 
DOD budget? The continuing use of our military forces for humanitarian 
purposes is having three distinct impacts, in my judgment. I am not 
opposed to--and, indeed, I have joined with many here to do so--
authorizing the appropriations and expressing the desire for our 
Presidents to employ our Armed Forces in the cause of helping others in 
their fight for freedom and in the fight to simply survive. But we 
should stop and think.
  I will be recommending to the chairman and ranking member of our 
committee that our committee in the coming year make an in-depth study 
with respect to the use of our Armed Forces for missions which do not 
have a clear military objective. We spend enormous sums of taxpayer 
dollars to train the men and women in the Armed Forces to perform those 
military missions which are central to our national defense. But these 
are borderline situations in many instances, equally putting in 
jeopardy the safety of those performing the missions, and is very 
costly in terms of the American taxpayer. But does that erode from 
their ability to be trained to perform their specific missions? Does it 
take the dollars that we need to provide a reasonable lifestyle for 
these individuals?
  In that vein, Mr. President, I commend to my colleagues a recent 
article by Caren Elliott House in the Wall Street Journal. I know this 
author and have participated with her in several conferences on 
defense, and she has written a very provocative piece on this.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 1994]

                           The Wrong Mission

                        (By Karen Elliott House)

       Aspen, CO.--The U.S. military: Are its troops warriors or 
     welfare workers?
       As American society wallows in domestic debates over 
     whether bureaucrats should administer health care and crime 
     bills should finance midnight basketball, the same sort of 
     debate is now engulfing the institution whose mission has 
     always been the clearest.
       Since the end of the Cold War--and especially under the 
     Clinton administration--U.S. armed forces are being turned 
     away from their historic role of defending the nation's 
     security interests and toward a new, thankless and open-ended 
     task of administering global social welfare.
       An institution that is trained and equipped to protect this 
     nation and, when necessary, to wage its wars is now being 
     deployed in the world's Somalias and Rwandas to deal with the 
     shambles of failed political and economic systems by 
     dispensing welfare to hapless victims.
       There are several reasons for this.
       First, armies follow orders and get things done. Thus, 
     whatever the task at hand, whether building tent cities for 
     refugees or dispensing food to starving children, the 
     military has the men, material, discipline and efficiency to 
     do what failed governments or well-meaning international 
     relief agencies clearly are less capable of doing.


                         fashionable philosophy

       Second, these days the American military is led by a 
     commander in chief who never served in uniform and who 
     largely buys into the fashionable philosophy that the post-
     Cold War world poses few, if any, threats that require 
     military preparedness or response. For those who hold this 
     optimistic world view, the logical extension is to shrink the 
     U.S. military and to find ``peaceful'' uses for what remains.
       Third, using the military for humanitarian purposes not 
     only ``feels'' good to well-meaning politicians but, by their 
     Alice-in-Wonderland accounting, has the additional virtue of 
     being ``free.'' Since the military must absorb the costs of 
     these ``humanitarian'' missions from its own maintenance and 
     operations budget, Congress can duck decisions to set up 
     large international relief brigades or otherwise appropriate 
     new funds for relief work.
       Fourth, this ``freebie'' plays into the hands of political 
     cynics whose interests have less to do with helping starving 
     peoples than with starving the U.S. military. Every $100 
     million of defense spending for humanitarian relief is that 
     much less spent on the true purposes for which the U.S. armed 
     forces exist. By the same token, sending troops to dispense 
     aid in Somalia or Rwanda preserves the fiction of an activist 
     foreign policy while relieving pressure on the administration 
     to act in places like North Korea, where real national 
     security interests are at stake.
       None of this is to argue that the U.S. should not help 
     alleviate human suffering in distant places or foster 
     political stability and economic development in the Third 
     World. The point simply is that the U.S. military is the 
     wrong instrument to advance these purposes.
       That the post-Cold War world no longer has Soviet nuclear 
     weapons targeted on U.S. cities doesn't make it a kinder, 
     gentler world devoid of threats to American national 
     interests. The collapse of one enemy--the Soviet Union--
     doesn't mean the end of history.
       What is more, the ``freebie'' argument is a fallacy. 
     Taxpayers foot the bill whoever dispenses humanitarian aid, 
     and armies do it most expensively of all. More important, 
     dipping into military budgets for humanitarian missions saps 
     the readiness of the armed forces to deter real threats to 
     the U.S., whether those be an Iran or Iraq intent on 
     controlling Mideast oil reserves or a North Korea intent on 
     developing and spreading nuclear bombs.
       Using the military as a social welfare agency is ultimately 
     self-defeating. It places U.S. troops in a succession of 
     situations where no U.S. national security interest is 
     demonstrable. As a result, the U.S. public rebels at the 
     first casualties. Somalia, a humanitarian mission launched by 
     George Bush and inherited by Bill Clinton, was a textbook 
     case. So long as Americans could watch their troops 
     dispensing food, they went along; as soon as the public saw 
     pictures of a U.S. serviceman's body being dragged through 
     the streets of Mogadishu, they wanted their troops home.
       Such murky missions will eventually undermine public 
     support for engaging the military even in those situations 
     where national interests are at stake. Worse yet, to cut and 
     run at the first deaths undermines American credibility 
     abroad and encourages the world's aggressors. In the end, the 
     more the U.S. military must dabble in nonmilitary missions 
     around the world, the less likely the public will support its 
     use in another genuine crisis like the Persian Gulf War.
       Worst of all, nonmilitary missions eventually destroy the 
     fighting capability of a military force. Armies, in the end, 
     are largely composed of young men and women in uniform, not 
     diplomats and philosophers. Such young men and women can be 
     trained as soldiers or as policemen or as aid workers, but 
     not as all three. As former Defense Secretary Les Aspin says 
     in an interview, ``If a soldier reacts like a policeman in a 
     military situation, he's dead; if he reacts like a soldier in 
     a police situation, he creates an international incident.'' 
     The world offers all too many examples of armies like 
     Canada's that have been reduced to relief agencies and those 
     like Israel's that have been undermined by too much policing.
       The broader irony, visible at an Aspen Institute gathering 
     of national security experts here, is that political liberals 
     now want to make increasingly liberal use of a weakened U.S. 
     military, while political conservatives want to conserve a 
     stronger U.S. military for fewer but clearer traditional 
     military missions. Not surprisingly, it is the liberal view 
     that dominates the Clinton administration and Congress.
       The conservative position, however traditional and 
     consistent, fails to deal with the initial public demand to 
     ``do something'' when faced with network footage of starving 
     children. For the liberals, there is a larger burden of 
     needing to sort out the many and ambiguous challenges for 
     which they suddenly are all too willing to commit U.S. 
     forces. Do they really want U.S. foreign policy, including 
     military deployments, set by CNN's Christiane Amanpour rather 
     than by a president who defines America's global priorities?
       In sifting these dilemmas one need not be heartless to be 
     hardheaded. There's little debate that the U.S., by virtue of 
     its material wealth and moral standing, has a responsibility 
     to help alleviate massive human suffering when and where it 
     occurs. This, however, requires U.S. political leaders to 
     explain forthrightly to Americans that there is likely to be 
     an ``emergency'' like Rwanda almost every year ad infinitum; 
     that taxpayers must pay serious new money for an adequate 
     humanitarian response; and that large and effective new 
     civilian institutions will be needed to dispense relief.
       A sensible policy also should involve, besides political 
     honesty, a realistic reevaluation of the rule of the United 
     Nations. Both liberals and conservatives sought to find 
     common ground in using the U.N. primarily as an international 
     relief agency. As a corollary, liberals should drop the 
     pretense that the U.N. can be an effective agency for the 
     resolution of international disputes. Conservatives, for 
     their part, should recognize that it is better to fund the 
     U.N. than to watch the U.S. military evolve into the Dutch 
     army.
       The prerequisite for all of the above is a U.S. 
     administration with a far clearer sense of America's national 
     interests. What, in fact, distinguishes Kuwait, Rwanda, Haiti 
     and Cuba? All entail some element of human suffering, but not 
     all are humanitarian. Kuwait clearly involved U.S. national 
     security and thus merited a U.S. military response. That's 
     because there was an external aggressor, Iraq, and a threat 
     to U.S. oil supplies. By contrast, Rwanda, like Somalia 
     before it and Burundi and others to follow, amounts to a 
     civil war and involves no U.S. interest beyond the 
     humanitarian.


                             Haiti and Cuba

       Somewhere in between are Haiti and Cuba. Haiti is not a 
     vital security interest for the U.S., but it does involve a 
     flood of refugees to America and a coup against an elected 
     regime in our hemisphere, where the U.S. seeks to promote 
     democracy. Thus, arguably, there is some national interest 
     and some logic to using military force to dislodge the 
     dictators. But if one buys that logic, how much more 
     compelling the argument for using military force against 
     Cuba's dictator, who is actively exporting an invasion of 
     refugees as a weapon against the U.S.? Regrettably we have a 
     U.S. administration that seems incapable of seeing, much less 
     defining, such distinctions.
       There is, of course, a third and more likely alternative to 
     either military or civilian response. And that is apathy. It 
     is all too likely that an American public bombarded with 
     flickering images of starving peoples soon will react to them 
     much as we do to nightly local news reports of murders and 
     assorted mayhem on the streets of our own cities. The eyes 
     glaze over, the heart hardens and the faceless victims are 
     ignored. We should wish for better both at home and abroad.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I yield 6 minutes to myself to speak on a 
subject other than that which is currently before the Senate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized.

                          ____________________