[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 91 (Tuesday, June 6, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7743-S7746]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                   UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD BOSNIA

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, at this moment, several thousand United 
States troops and their equipment are headed for Europe to positions 
near Bosnia and Herzegovina. Tomorrow the Armed Services Committee will 
hold hearings on this deployment and U.S. policy. On Thursday the 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee will also conduct hearings to learn 
about current United States policy toward Bosnia.
  These hearings are of critical importance--not only because of the 
seriousness of sending American ground forces into harm's way, but 
because of the continued confusion over U.S. policy.
  Last Wednesday, at the Air Force Academy, the President stated, and I 
quote:

       I believe we should be prepared to assist NATO if it 
     decides to meet a request from the United Nations troops for 
     help in a withdrawal or a reconfiguration and a strengthening 
     of its forces.

  But, a few days later, in his weekly radio address, the President
   stated that in addition to assisting in the withdrawal of UNPROFOR, 
the United States may send ground troops in the ``highly unlikely 
event'' that part of the U.N. force became ``stranded and could not get 
out of a particular place in Bosnia'' and need ``emergency 
extraction.'' The President added that such an emergency operation 
would be ``limited and temporary.''

  The first question each of the committees must ask is what is U.S. 
policy today. Is it to help strengthen and reconfigure U.N. forces, or 
is it to assist in ``emergency extraction''? Furthermore, what is the 
difference between reconfiguring forces and emergency extraction? What 
is the relationship between emergency extraction and total U.N. 
withdrawal? Would such an extraction be a prelude to full withdrawal? 
In other words, what is the mission of U.S. ground forces if they are 
deployed for contingencies other than participating in a complete 
withdrawal of U.N. forces.
  Then the committees will need to turn to basic operational questions:
  What is the NATO-U.N. relationship? When does NATO command begin? How 
far does it extend--to all air and ground forces in Bosnia?

[[Page S7744]]

  What is the command structure and its relationship with U.N. 
commanders?
  What are the rules of engagement? Are they robust?
  What are the threats to our forces? How will they be addressed?
  What is the estimated duration of the operation? Last August during 
DOD authorization conference former U.S. Envoy Chuck Redman told 
conferees that Pentagon estimates were that a withdrawal operation 
would take 3 months--to include equipment. If the current plan 
anticipates a longer duration, why is that the case? If the duration is 
lengthy, is this because of demands by UNPROFOR contributors to take 
all of their equipment--not just lethal equipment? And will U.S. lives 
be risked to save equipment?
  With respect to emergency extraction operations, how are the terms 
``limited'' and ``temporary'' defined?
  What will the United States role be in U.N. decisions which could 
lead to such emergencies, for example if Bosnian Serbs retaliate for an 
UNPROFOR action by overrunning Gorazde?
  In addition, the committees will need to pursue the administration's 
decision to provide close air support to the quick reaction force. 
Reportedly, Secretary Perry has agreed to make helicopter gunships part 
of potential close air support operations for the quick reaction force. 
AC-130's, unlike our F-16's, fly slow and close to the ground--
therefore they are more vulnerable.
  What actions will NATO take to suppress the threats posed by surface 
to air missiles [SAM's]?
  When will such action be taken?
  An American pilot was shot down by a SAM and is missing. Last 
December, Adm. Leighton Smith, our NATO Commander in Naples wanted to 
take out Bosnian Serb SAM sites because of the threat they posed to 
pilots patrolling the no-fly zone. But, NATO did not take out those 
SAMS because the U.N. commanders said ``no.'' Had NATO acted 6 months 
ago, our pilot may not have been shot down. So the question now is, are 
we going to send more Americans into harm's way without taking measures 
to reduce the risk?
  On the diplomatic front, there are also many questions.
  What is the diplomatic strategy with respect to Serbian President 
Milosevic? Are we sure there is a split between Milosevic and Radovan 
Karadzic, or is Milosevic playing good cop and Karadzic bad cop? If 
there is a split how do we explain Milosevic's role in releasing some 
of the U.N. hostages? Has Milosevic been promised anything in return 
for his assistance in securing the release of hostages? I understand 
this afternoon there way be another 50 or so released.
  Are we going to agree to lift most sanctions on Serbia in return for 
recognition of Bosnia and what does recognition mean--really closing 
the borders and cutting off supplies and military contact with the 
Bosnian Serbs?
  If we lift sanctions on Serbia now, how do we maintain any leverage 
over Serbian actions against the Alabanians in Kosova and Serbian 
support for militant separatists in Croatia?
  Mr. President, I have not listed all of the questions that need to be 
asked at the hearings this week. Furthermore, these matters need to be 
placed in a larger context--namely, what is the objective of these 
actions: Is it to remove U.N. forces or to keep them there? Are we 
serious about withdrawal or not? If not, why not?
  This bigger picture should be the focus of administration 
consultations with the Congress. We should not only be informed about 
NATO planning and operations. We should be engaging in a dialog about 
where we are going. Are we at last going to lift the unjust and illegal 
arms embargo on Bosnia?
  I believe that the United States has interests in Bosnia and 
Herzegovina. As George Will said this week in
 Newsweek in response to the charge made by some that the United States 
has no ``dogs in this fight,'' that, and I quote,

       But those in the fight are not dogs and by the embargo we 
     have helped make the fight grotesquely unfair. What would be 
     the consequences on our national self-respect--our Nation's 
     soul--of a preventable Serbian victory followed by 
     ``cleansing'' massacres? Bosnian Serbs have seized 70 percent 
     of Bosnia but they are not a mighty military force and will 
     become even less so if the Serbian Government in Belgrade can 
     be pressured into leaving Bosnia's separatist Serbs isolated 
     in combat with a Bosnian army equipped at last with tanks and 
     artillery. The Serbs fighting in Bosnia are bullies led by 
     war criminals collaborating with a dictator. If we don't have 
     an interest in this fight, what are we?

  Mr. President, I believe that we need to assist our NATO allies in 
the event of U.N. withdrawal. However, I also believe that we need to 
recognize that U.N. efforts in Bosnia have failed--failed to stop 
aggression, failed to bring peace, and failed to protect the Bosnians.
  The New Republic in its June 19 editorial states that, and I quote,

       There is another Bosnian crisis this week. Not in Bosnia, 
     of course. In Bosnia things are the same, only more so. A 
     greater Serbia is slowly and steadily emerging by means of a 
     genocidal war. No, the crisis is taking place in the capitals 
     of the Western powers, which are finding it harder and harder 
     to escape the consequences of their policy of appeasement.

  The European decision to create a quick reaction force [QRF] is in 
itself an admission of failure. The QRF is intended to protect 
UNPROFOR, not the Bosnians. And the very tasks the QRF envisions being 
engaged in, such as securing the Sarajevo Airport, are tasks that were 
originally given to UNPROFOR by the U.N. Security Council. Therefore, 
there is a real question of whether or not sending more forces--even 
with more equipment--will do anything more than supply the Bosnian 
Serbs with more potential hostages.
  The bottom line is that keeping UNPROFOR on the ground indefinitely 
will not bring us to a solution in Bosnia. Indeed it will prevent a 
solution by reinforcing the failed status quo. As the New Republic 
points out, and I quote,

       It cannot have escaped the notice of our policymakers that 
     the U.N. is providing cover for the Serbs, except that the 
     U.N. is providing cover for our policymakers, too. It saves 
     them from the prospect of action.

  Mr. President, withdrawing the U.N. force is the first step away from 
failure and toward a solution. I support United States participation, 
to include ground troops, in a NATO operation to withdraw U.N. forces 
from Bosnia provided certain conditions are met.
  Therefore, sometime over the next few days I intend to introduce a 
resolution to authorize the President to use United States ground 
forces to assist in the complete withdrawal of U.N. forces from Bosnia 
under the following conditions:
  First, NATO command, from start to finish, no U.N.-NATO dual-key 
arrangement;
  Second, robust rules of engagement which provide for massive response 
to any provocation or attack on U.S. forces;
  Third, no risking U.S. lives to rescue equipment; and
  Fourth, prior agreement on next steps, to include lifting the arms 
embargo on Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  Mr. President, we need to support our allies. But we must make sure 
that in so doing, we are neither prolonging a failed policy or leaping 
into a quagmire. I believe that this resolution will provide the 
President with essential support of the Congress and will help put us 
on the right policy track.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the complete article by 
George Will and the article in the New Republic be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:
  ``A Dog in That Fight''? The Secretary of State, a Sweet Man Sadly 
                          Miscast, Is Puzzled
                          (By George F. Will)
       When Hitler sent Ribbentrop to Moscow in August 1939 to 
     sign the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, he sent 
     along his personal photographer with instructions to obtain 
     close-ups of Stalin's ear lobes. Hitler wondered whether 
     Stalin had Jewish blood and wanted to see if his ear lobes 
     were ``ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan.'' This 
     historical nugget (from Alan Bullock's ``Hitler and Stalin: 
     Parallel Lives'') is offered at this juncture in America's 
     debate about Bosnia, as a reminder of a quality European 
     politics has sometimes had in this century. Some American 
     policymakers need to be reminded.
       When Serbians took hostages from U.N. personnel in Bosnia 
     and chained them to military targets as human shields, Warren 
     Christopher was puzzled: ``It's really not part of any 
     reasonable struggle that might be going on there.'' While the 
     Secretary of State, a sweet man sadly miscast, searches for 
     reasonableness amid the Balkan rubble, there are 
     ``peacekeepers'' where there is no peace to be kept and 
     ``safe zones'' where slaughter is random. UNProFor (the U.N. 
     [[Page S7745]] Protection Force) is akin to the Holy Roman 
     Empire, which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. The 
     U.N. force isn't forceful, so it needs more protection than 
     it offers.
       This war has been misdescribed as Europe's first civil war 
     since that in Greece in the 1940s and the most portentous 
     civil war since republicans fought fascists in Spain in the 
     1930s. Actually, this war now churning into its fourth summer 
     is a war of Serbian aggression. It has been a war of 
     aggression since 1992, when the European Community recognized 
     Bosnia as a sovereign state, and since Bosnia became a member 
     of the United Nations. Perhaps Bosnia's inconvenient 
     existence is unfortunate, and perhaps Bosnia will yet be 
     sundered by partition. But it is a state and that is why Pat 
     Moynihan, carrying Woodrow Wilson's torch for international 
     law and collective security, says of Bosnia. ``Everything is 
     at stake here, if principle is everything.'' Says Moynihan, 
     if neither NATO nor the United Nations can summon the will to 
     cope with Serbia, ``what have we gone through the 20th 
     century for?'' We went through it because we had no choice, 
     but you know what he means: A century that began, in effect, 
     at the Somme and went downhill from there to Auschwitz is 
     ending with a wired world watching rape camps used in the 
     service of ``ethnic cleansing.'' All this 80 minutes by air 
     from Rome.
       Europe's first war between nations since 1945 illustrates 
     an astounding fact: In this century of European fighting 
     faiths--communism, fascism, socialism, pan-Germanism, pan-
     Slavism and more--the one hardest to extinguish turns out to 
     be the variant of fascism fueling the drive for Greater 
     Serbia. Like pure fascism it asserts the primacy of the 
     primordial and the goal of perfect national unity achieved by 
     the expulsion or murder of ``unassimilables.'' This explains 
     the violent Serbian loathing of Sarajevo, where Christians 
     and Muslims have peacefully coexisted. Hitler and Mussolini 
     thought they were defending old Europe against the modern 
     menace of Bolshevism. The Serbs think this is the year 732 
     and they are with Charles Martel saving Christian Europe by 
     stopping the Moslem advance at Tours. Or it is 1529 and they 
     are stopping Suleiman at the gates of Vienna. The Ottoman 
     Empire is long gone, but the gunners in the hills surrounding 
     Sarajevo refer to their targets--civilians dashing from 
     doorway to doorway--as Turks.
       Serbia is a raw reassertion of pre-modernity, the idea that 
     uniform ethnicity and shared myths are essential to a 
     political community. This war, which mocks the notion that 
     Europe has become a supranational society, began in 1992, the 
     year the Maastricht Treaty was signed, supposedly to make 
     ``Europe'' a truly political as well as geographical 
     expression. The United Nations, embodiment of the modern 
     aspiration of a morality of nations, has been no match for 
     Serbia. And the U.N.'s arms embargo against both sides--high-
     minded, scrupulous neutrality between Serbian slaughterers 
     and their victims--has been a policy of gross immorality.
       The embargo was imposed in 1991 against the whole of 
     disintegrating Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia disappeared the 
     embargo was continued. That favored Serbia, which had ample 
     weapons from the former Yugoslav army and had a large 
     armaments industry. Now the embargo violates the U.N. 
     Charter, which acknowledges every nation's ``inherent'' right 
     of self-defense. President Bush defended the embargo with a 
     flippancy about the problem in the Bakans not being an 
     insufficiency of weapons. Today defenders of the embargo say 
     it economizes violence because lifting it would prolong the 
     fighting. This argument is especially unpleasant when used by 
     the British, who today might be obeying German traffic laws 
     if Lend-Lease had not prolonged the fighting.
       So far the NATO nations have insufficient political will to 
     impose a solution or use force to help restore the integrity 
     of Bosnia. The Serbs are what the NATO nations are not: 
     serious. The NATO nations want to end the game, the Serbs 
     want to win it. Other people with ancient animosities and 
     modern weapons are watching. It probably is not just 
     coincidental that Russian revanchism became bold regarding 
     Chechnya as the NATO nations became, through the embargo, 
     collaborators with Serbian irredentism. If the irredentism 
     goes unopposed when the UNProFor charade ends, the 
     irredentism will become, even more than it already is, 
     genocidal.
       Secretary of State James Baker famously said of the Balkan 
     conflict, ``We don't have a dog in that fight.'' But those in 
     the fight are not dogs and by the embargo we have helped make 
     the fight grotesquely unfair. What would be the consequences 
     on our national self-respect--our nation's soul--of a 
     preventable Serbian victory followed by ``cleansing'' 
     massacres? Bosnian Serbs have seized 70 percent of Bosnia but 
     they are not a mighty military force and will become even 
     less so if the Serbian government in Belgrade can be 
     pressured into leaving Bosnia's separatist Serbs isolated in 
     combat with a Bosnian army equipped at last with tanks and 
     artillery. The Serbs fighting in Bosnia are bullies led by 
     war criminals collaborating with a dictator. If we don't have 
     an interest in this fight, what are we?
                                                                    ____


                         The Abdication, Again

       This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the United 
     Nations. The celebrations will go on and on, as politicians 
     make banal speeches to command-performance audiences. It is 
     unlikely that Bosnia will appear among their banalities. For 
     it is in Bosnia that the debility of the United Nations has 
     finally been revealed.
       There is another Bosnian crisis this week. Not in Bosnia, 
     of course. In Bosnia things are the same, only more so. A 
     Greater Serbia is slowly and steadily emerging by means of a 
     genocidal war. No, the crisis is taking place in the capitals 
     of the Western powers, which are finding it harder and harder 
     to escape the consequences of their policy of appeasement. 
     The doves, you might say, are coming home to roost. And they 
     still don't get it. When the Serbs made hostages of hundreds 
     of United Nations troops last week, a spokesman for the U.N. 
     thundered that ``the Bosnian Serb army is behaving like a 
     terrorist organization.'' But the Bosnian Serb army is a 
     terrorist organization, unless you wish to include systematic 
     rape among the terms of military engagement. And the general 
     in command of the U.N. forces in Bosnia demanded of General 
     Ratko Mladic ``that he treat the United Nations soldiers in a 
     manner becoming a professional soldier.'' But General Mladic 
     is not a professional soldier. He is a man wanted for war 
     crimes.
       Here is what happened last week. The Serbs moved heavy 
     weapons closer to Sarajevo and fired upon it. They have done 
     so before. NATO issued warnings. It has done so before. The 
     Serbs ignored the warnings. They have done so before. NATO 
     launched a trivial attack against a Serb position. It has 
     done so before. The Serbs responded by taking U.N. troops 
     hostage. They have done so before. The only thing that 
     changed last week, in short, was that the latent became 
     manifest. De facto hostages became de jure hostages.
       Also the iconography of the conflict was enriched. There 
     have been many indelible images of the slaughter in Bosnia; 
     last week's pictures of the scattered limbs in the Tuzla cafe 
     were only the most recent ones. What was lacking, until last 
     week, were images of the West's weakness. Now we have those 
     photographs of those U.N. soldiers chained to those poles. 
     Not exactly a picture of a helicopter lifting off the roof of 
     an American embassy, to be sure; but surely a picture of our 
     humiliation, of the forces of order flouted, of the triumph 
     of tribalism over pluralism, of the lupine post-cold war 
     world in full swing. No amount of ``pragmatic neo-
     Wilsonianism'' (the empty locution of Anthony Lake, who 
     prefers the devising of bold foreign policy rationales to the 
     devising of bold foreign policy) will erase these images of 
     Western impotence from the memories of warlords and 
     xenophobes around the world. They have been instructed that 
     this is their time.
       Two conclusions are being drawn from the success of the 
     Serbs. The first is that the use of force has failed. ``The 
     Bosnian Serbs have now trumped our ace,'' as former Secretary 
     of State Lawrence Eagleburger told The Washington Post. 
     Eagleburger's pronouncement is utterly self-serving; the man 
     was one of the architects of American appeasement in the Bush 
     administration. Still, the Clinton administration will not 
     exactly recoil from an analysis that refuses to entertain the 
     serious use of real force. For this reason, it is important 
     to understand that we did not play our ace in Pale last week.
       Though the West has occasionally acted militarily against 
     the Serbs in Bosnia, the West's response has been 
     fundamentally unmilitary. No sustained air campaign against 
     the war-making ability of the Serbs in Bosnia was ever really 
     considered. (The precision of the wee assault on Pale, by the 
     way, shows what can be accomplished by air power.) Like 
     NATO's previous strikes, NATO's strike last week was more a 
     demonstration of inhibition than a demonstration of the lack 
     of it. This was not what the Serbs were fearing. It was what 
     they were counting on. This trifling retort to the Serbs' 
     violation of the Sarajevo arrangement played right into the 
     Serbs' hands: it was a military response so predictably puny 
     that it could serve only as a pretext for a Serb provocation. 
     It also reassured the Serbs that they will never experience 
     punishments proportionate to their crimes, and they 
     assassinated the Bosnian foreign minister.
       The second conclusion is that we must act forcefully 
     against the Serbs to help . . . the United Nations. The 
     ministers of the Contact Group (including the foreign 
     minister of Russia, who must have been chuckling) announced 
     at The Hague that they intended to expand the size of the 
     U.N. mission and to fortify it with heavier weapons. They 
     said nothing about the nature of the mission itself. For all 
     with eyes to see, of course, the essential absurdity of the 
     U.N. mission was made brutally plain last week. The blue 
     helmets are ``peacekeepers'' where there is no peace in 
     ``safe areas'' that are not safe. They have not impeded the 
     war or the genocide. They have impeded only a powerful and 
     decent response.
       Recall that the ``safe areas'' of Bosnia were supposed to 
     be made safe by the U.N. There are six such enclaves: 
     Sarajevo, Bihac, Srebenica, Zepa, Gorazde, Tuzla. The list of 
     their names is a litany of lament. The U.N. has brought them 
     little respite. When the Serbs attack, the blue helmets 
     retreat. On May 21, The New York Times described a videotape 
     that captured a Serb atrocity on a Sarajevo street: ``The 
     crack of a shot echoes in Sarajevo's valley. He [a young 
     Bosnian man] falls. He lies on his side. He is curled in an 
     almost fetal position. A United Nations soldier looks on.'' 
     In Bosnia, a U.N. soldier [[Page S7746]] always looks on. 
     Bystanders or hostages: that is what the ``peacekeepers 
     really are.
       It cannot have escaped the notice of our policymakers that 
     the U.N. is providing cover for the Serbs, except that the 
     U.N. is providing cover for our policymakers, too. It saves 
     them from the prospect of action. That is why the plight of 
     the U.N. stirs them more than the plight of Bosnia. And 
     nobody is less stirred by the plight of Bosnia than the aloof 
     Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who put an early damper on 
     international outrage when he called this a ``rich man's 
     war.'' The Bosnians, he said, were less deserving than those 
     under siege, by hunger and by arms, in Africa. And the United 
     States followed the secretary general's recommendation. We 
     sent troops to Somalia and we sent no troops to Bosnia.
       It is hard to think of a major crisis since the Second 
     World War in which the president of the United States has 
     wielded less moral and political authority. There are 22,470 
     U.N. troops in Bosnia, from eighteen countries. Britain has 
     3,565 men under arms; France has 3,835; Pakistan has 2,978. 
     The United States has none, and the Clinton administration, 
     the same administration that denounces the Republicans as 
     isolationists, regularly boasts about it. In such 
     circumstances, it is impossible for the president of the 
     United States to lead. But he is not chafing. He does not 
     wish to lead. He isn't terribly interested. When his national 
     security advisers met last week in the West Wing, he stayed 
     in the East Wing. He did tell a reporter, though, that ``the 
     taking of hostages, as well as the killing of civilians, is 
     totally wrong and inappropriate and it should stop.'' And 
     also that ``I would ask him [Boris Yeltsin] to call the Serbs 
     and tell them to quit it, and tell them to behave 
     themselves.''
       To behave themselves. And if that fails, to go to their 
     room. Does Clinton grasp that there is evil in the world? And 
     does he understand that he is not the governor of the United 
     States? It is a requirement of his job that he care about 
     matters beyond our borders, matters such as war and genocide 
     and the general collapse of America's role in the world, 
     matters that will not gain him a point in the polls. The joke 
     on Clinton is that he is almost certainly about to be hoist 
     by his own isolationism. The result of the Bosnia policy that 
     was designed to spare the United States all costs in lives 
     and dollars may be a U.N. ``extraction operation'' that will 
     require the deployment of many thousands of American troops 
     and the expense of many millions of American dollars. And 
     Bosnia will have been destroyed. Nice work.
       It is time to conclude this sinister farce. The U.N. should 
     get out of the way. It's forces must be withdrawn, so that 
     the Serbs may no longer hide behind them, and then the 
     Bosnians must be armed, so that they can fight their own 
     fight, which is all that they are asking to do. Withdraw and 
     strike, lift and strike. Obviously this is not as simple as 
     it sounds. The withdrawal of the U.N. will mean war; and 
     unless NATO provides protection from the air, for the 
     departing U.N. troops and for the training of Bosnian troops, 
     the U.N. withdrawal will expose the Bosnians to the Serbs as 
     brusquely as it will expose the Serbs to the Bosnians, and 
     Bosnia will fall. But there already is war and Bosnia already 
     is falling. Anyway, Bill Clinton and Boutros Boutros-Ghali 
     and John Major and the rest are not keeping the U.N. in 
     Bosnia to spare it horror. They can live with its horror. 
     They are keeping the U.N. in Bosnia to spare themselves a 
     reckoning with their own failure. For it is they who ordained 
     that Bosnia become a place where it is always too late for 
     justice.
     

                          ____________________