[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 142 (Tuesday, October 4, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 4, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                 WHEN POLITICS GIVES THE MARCHING ORDER

                                 ______


                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, October 4, 1994

  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I would encourage of my colleagues to read 
the following editorial by Col. Harry Summers, Jr. (retired), about the 
dangers of pursuing military adventures to gain partisan political 
advantage.
  The United States is facing very serious difficulties in the world, 
and I want to be helpful in bringing safety and freedom to other 
nations. I believe that politics should end at the water's edge and 
that U.S. foreign policy should be coherent and bipartisan. However, at 
the moment, I am very discouraged about the current administration's 
lack of planning.
  I am worried about the Clinton administration's insistence on 
pursuing further reductions in the defense budget while using the 
military to go more places and do more things. There is a very great 
danger that the U.S. military is becoming hollow and will be cut too 
deeply to adequately provide for the defense of United States national 
interests. We cannot afford to take on more missions without providing 
sufficient resources to support our military needs.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope that all of my colleagues will take the time to 
read Colonel Summers' insightful column.

               [From the Washington Times, Aug. 18, 1994]

                 When Politics Gives the Marching Order

                           (By Harry Summers)

       One of the dirty little secrets making the rounds in 
     Washington is that President Clinton's dogged determination 
     to restore ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to 
     power, even if takes an American military invasion to do so, 
     has little to do with democracy there. Instead it has 
     everything to do with winning the support of the 
     Congressional Black Caucus for passage of his health reform 
     bill.
       Shades of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who 30 years ago this 
     August pressed the Congress for passage of the Southeast Asia 
     Resolution (better known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution), 
     ostensibly to ``take all necessary measures to repel an armed 
     attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent 
     further aggression.'' But, as it later turned out, his real 
     reason (and the reason Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright 
     ramrodded the bill through the Senate) was to derail 
     Republican Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.
       Mr. Goldwater had charged that the Democrats in general and 
     LBJ in particular were soft on communism. And LBJ and 
     partisan Democrats like Mr. Fulbright were willing to pay 
     what turned out to be more than 50,000 American lives to 
     prove him wrong. No wonder that earlier American military 
     strategists like Brevet-Maj. Gen. Emory Upton (who committed 
     suicide in despair in 1881) were adamant that when war starts 
     politics must stop.
       Where Karl von Clausewitz had defined ``politics'' as the 
     interaction of peoples and their governments and had rightly 
     said it was the very engine of war, Upton defined 
     ``politics'' as domestic politics, the very kind of cynical 
     profiteering for personal political gain with soldiers' lives 
     practiced by LBJ in Vietnam and now by Mr. Clinton in Haiti.
       It turned out that Mr. Johnson was too clever by half. When 
     accounts of his duplicities began to surface, a ``credibility 
     gap'' developed that ultimately destroyed his presidency. The 
     same thing is beginning to happen to Mr. Clinton as more and 
     more Americans question his truthfulness and his motives. You 
     would think that of all people Mr. Clinton would have avoided 
     such a credibility gap, since as a young man he took to the 
     streets to publicly protest that breach of the public trust. 
     But he evidently wasn't reading his own protest placards.
       LBJ should have gotten the hint when all of our NATO 
     allies, who had previously sent troops to help us in the 
     Korean War, refused to send any at all to help in Vietnam. 
     Instead he had to invent the ``Free World Military Forces'' 
     subterfuge and strong-arm our Asian allies to send troops to 
     provide a pretense of multilateral support.
       Mr. Clinton should also have gotten the word when all of 
     the members of the Organization of American States, who have 
     a greater stake in democracy in Latin American than we do, 
     rapidly disassociated themselves from a Haiti invasion. 
     Instead of furthering U.S.-Latin American relations, Mr. 
     Clinton risks a major setback. President Carter gave up the 
     Panama Canal to avoid Latin American criticism of U.S. 
     ``imperialism'' in the Caribbean. Now by proposing a 
     unilateral U.S. invasion of Haiti, Mr. Clinton will sacrifice 
     all that good will and re-establish the United States as the 
     arrogant Big Brother from the North.
       Lacking an OAS subterfuge, all Mr. Clinton has is a U.N. 
     resolution, and even his own Senate has told him publicly 
     that dodge won't cut it anymore. As Sen. Robert Byrd, West 
     Virginia Democrat, remarked recently, when he looks to the 
     front of the Senate chambers he doesn't see the U.N. flag 
     there, he sees only Old Glory. And so do the American people.
       It was said of the French commander during the Franco-
     Prussian War in 1870 that he had devised a plan that, if 
     successful, would have guaranteed his instantaneous defeat. 
     His descendant must be advising President Clinton today.
       If Mr. Clinton persists in his public vow to invade Haiti 
     over the objections of the Congress and the American people, 
     he may, as planned, get the support of the Congressional 
     Black Caucus for his health reform bill. But if one American 
     is killed in action during that invasion in order to gain 
     that domestic political advantage, Mr. Clinton will surely 
     reap, as did LBJ before him, the disgust and contempt of the 
     American people for playing politics with their sons' and 
     daughters' lives.
       Garry Trudeau's ``Doonesbury'' recently announced a contest 
     for a symbol to represent Bill Clinton, with a choice between 
     a flipping coin and a waffle. More appropriate would be a 
     caricature of LBJ as the ghost of Presidents Past, rattling 
     his chains and warning of the folly of sacrificing American 
     soldiers' lives to gain partisan political advantage. To 
     paraphrase Sir Thomas More in ``A Man for All Seasons'': ``To 
     risk one's immortal soul to gain the entire world is 
     understandable . . . but for Haiti?''

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