[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 132 (Tuesday, September 20, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                                 HAITI

  Mr. PRESSLER. Madam President, I know that there is much gratitude to 
be expressed to former President Carter, General Powell, and Senator 
Nunn for averting bloodshed. But this Senator still disagrees with the 
basic decision to send troops into Haiti. I know our troops are there 
now. I support our troops but not the decision to send them there. As a 
former second lieutenant in the Army who served in Vietnam, I can say 
firsthand that I want our soldiers in the field to be well cared for 
and well supported in terms of logistics. And they are obeying their 
Commander in Chief. But I disagree very strongly with the decision of 
their Commander in Chief to send them there even though it is not an 
invasion. Let me explain why.
  I feel very strongly that we are not going to be able to install 
democracy at the point of a gun in Haiti. I feel very strongly that we 
will not be able to do much for the economic reconstruction there. I 
have been for lifting the embargo for a long time. I stood on the 
Senate floor in early September and said that we should have a clear 
policy in Haiti that would say no invasion is to be expected, that 
Haitians will have to solve their own problems, a clear policy to lift 
the economic embargo so there would not be so much poverty there, and a 
clear policy to follow traditional immigration and refugee rules that 
have been used in this country for many years; that is, no mass 
deceptions.
  That would have sent the word forth that Haitians have to solve their 
own problems, and they will have to in the end. Now the burden is on us 
to put someone in power. And I guess Aristide does not want to be 
president now. He has changed his mind. He really does not want to be 
President of Haiti after all. He wants to stay up here. He has found a 
good life, and it is better to pontificate at a distance than to try to 
manage or to run.
  So who are we going to put in as president? We will have to find 
somebody else apparently unless we can persuade Aristide to go. Maybe 
he will be persuaded to go down after a while. He is a very 
controversial figure down there.
  So this invasion which looks so glorious and will look so glorious 
during the first 3 weeks, just as Somalia did, will not turn out very 
well in this Senator's judgment. I do not mean to pooh-pooh or naysay 
what President Clinton does because I support him frequently on this 
floor. I want our President to be successful in foreign policies.
  I want the President of the United States to be successful. But I 
have said on this floor that these types of occupations are very 
exciting, very exciting on TV, and it will give the President a boost 
in the polls. We all like to see military helicopters landing and 
troops going ashore. But it is very expensive to the taxpayer--to the 
janitor in Sioux Falls, SD, who supports a family of three or four; to 
a farmer, to a factory worker, to a teacher. This is a very costly 
adventure, and it is going to be more costly in the future.
  Look at what happened in other countries where our troops were sent, 
like Somalia, where we are being sued to rebuild bridges that our 
trucks went over. They claim our trucks broke them down and, in 
reality, they were in bad shape in the first place. By the way, from 
this desk on the Senate floor, I opposed the invasion of Somalia on the 
day our troops went in. So I am not speaking as a latecomer to this 
issue. The American taxpayers are going to be paying for years to come 
for things that result from our soldiers being in Haiti. It is not just 
a matter of them being withdrawn, and I hope they are withdrawn 
quickly.
  I noted, with some irony, that yesterday the House of Representatives 
passed a resolution in which they seemed to have approved of all of 
this, and they added at the end ``but we want a hasty withdrawal.'' If 
you are sending troops down there, you do not want to withdraw them 
until they do their jobs, do you? But that gives political protection 
for incumbents running for office. I find it rather hypocritical. I 
will not vote for such a resolution in this Chamber.
  With the invasion fever, let me raise a very telling point. I would 
genuinely like to see troops come to Washington, DC, and so would the 
Mayor. She has asked for them. Here we have 22 aggravated assaults or 
rapes a day. We have between 1 and 2 murders each day. We have nearly 
400 murders and shootings on the streets of the Nation's Capital per 
year. Our level of violence on a per capita basis is higher than it has 
been in Haiti this last year.
  We have poor people here. In fact, the infrastructure in the District 
of Columbia is so bad that a Federal judge has ordered that the Federal 
court should take over the public housing in the District of Columbia 
because in brand-new housing built by the taxpayers, the water does not 
work, the toilets do not work, because nobody cares. They are not being 
assigned to people. The infrastructure is broken down here in the 
Capital of the United States.
  The Federal court took over the foster children division of the 
District of Columbia last week. Nobody is doing the paperwork on the 
500 babies. It is a sad day when the Federal court has to take over a 
jurisdiction's local government. But the infrastructure in the Capital 
has collapsed.
  We have a situation in the Nation's Capital where violence, drug 
dealing, poverty, and infrastructure problems are just as great as they 
are in many parts of Haiti. We have problems on our American Indian 
reservations that are just as great. We have similar problems in many 
of our Nation's cities. Maybe troops could come here, as they did some 
years ago, and restore order and be on the street corners and end the 
drug dealing and work with the infrastructure as they are doing in 
Haiti.
  We are going to be spending all this money on Haiti. There is going 
to be a supplemental aid appropriation coming to the floor soon to 
appropriate millions of dollars to rebuild the infrastructure in Haiti, 
and a lot of it is going to be wasted. I have been on the Foreign 
Relations Committee for 16 years, and three-fourths of our money is 
wasted when it goes abroad. It should be spent here on problems in the 
United States, where it is spent efficiently in a businesslike way, and 
at least spent on American citizens, and at least American lives will 
not be lost. How long can we go on in the Nation's Capital, where we 
have 22 aggravated assaults and rapes a day? How long can we go on with 
between one and two murders a day on the average?
  So I think we need to think about this foreign adventure we are 
conducting in Haiti. Why are we doing it? What are we going to 
accomplish?
  Now, the House passes a resolution that they want to withdraw the 
troops quickly. Well, why did we send them in the first place? I would 
be in favor of withdrawing them quickly because I was against ever 
sending them. Do we think that a country with those traditions of 
violence and no democracy is going to be transformed? I doubt it. In my 
opinion, it is going to be as ill-fated as the Somalia adventure.
  In early September, I said on the floor of the Senate that I think 
this invasion--or occupation, or whatever it is--is a great mistake. I 
hope that we will make a pilot project--I am not picking on the 
District of Columbia because there are a lot of hardworking people in 
the District who try--but I hope at some point we will make a pilot 
project of the District of Columbia and turn it into a gleaming example 
of what a nation's capital should be.
  It seems that we think about it as being much easier when things are 
far away. When I was growing up in my hometown, it was exciting in 
church to take up a collection for something far on the other side of 
the Earth, or to hear a sermon about something happening that was many 
countries away. But there were a lot of problems in the hometown nobody 
wanted to touch because they were controversial, hard to solve, and not 
glamorous. That is what this whole Haiti thing is all about.
  We are 6 weeks before elections in this country. Let us not paper 
over the fact that the opposition party is leading in the polls, and 
this Chamber may be taken over by a different party. I do not like to 
accuse the President of using our troops for political reasons. But as 
a former lieutenant in the Army, I feel strongly that the White House 
is looking for a political boost in the polls with this occupation.
  But I do not think they are going to find it. During the first month 
of such an occupation, things seem to go gloriously well, and by the 
time reality sets in, the elections will be over. But those people who 
vote for resolutions in the Senate that commend the President and 
everybody, and at the end say, ``By the way, we think the troops should 
be swiftly withdrawn,'' and tell their constituents ``I voted to 
withdraw the troops swiftly,'' that is hypocrisy at its greatest. That 
is why I will not vote for the resolution.
  I will conclude by saying that I am very interested in democracy 
flourishing. But I believe we have set the cause of democracy back in 
Haiti. We do not have anybody to install at the point of the gun. We 
are trying to find somebody. The military is still there in control. We 
are just at a crossroads. We are just swimming in inconsistency. We are 
doing it while our own domestic priorities here in Washington, DC, 
within a mile of this Chamber, are not being met.
  I hope that we will wake up and meet our priorities here at home. I 
hope we will end the occupation of Haiti as quickly as possible so 
American taxpayers will not be hurt as much as they could be.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Wellstone). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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