[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 188 (Tuesday, November 28, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S17590-S17592]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   SENDING AMERICAN TROOPS TO BOSNIA

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I feel compelled today to make a couple of 
statements about the President's message last night.
  I am very disturbed at what is happening, and I think all of America 
needs to know what is going on. I commend the President on giving a 
beautiful, persuasive speech, as he is very good at doing. However, I 
suggest, Mr. President, that as we are speaking now and as time is 
creeping by, our troops are on their way to Bosnia.
  It is my understanding that the distinguished Senator from Colorado, 
who will be here in just a moment, made a trip over Thanksgiving, which 
is essentially the same trip I made the week before, into the northeast 
sector of Bosnia, which is the area where our troops are going to be. A 
number of people have gone over to Bosnia but have not gone beyond 
Sarajevo and do not really have a feel for the environment in which our 
President has this obsession of sending our American troops.
  Mr. President, last night he talked about morality and about what our 
moral obligation is in Bosnia, and the fact that we have a moral 
obligation to see how many people we are going to be able to save from 
the brutality that could be taking place there.

  He talked about our commitment to NATO. And I would like to throw out 
a couple of ideas, a couple of thoughts. Mr. President, when I went to 
Sarajevo it was the middle of a blizzard, a snowstorm. We had a hard 
time getting up there. There were not any Americans up there. There 
were not any Americans going to the northeast sector, that area around 
the Posavina corridor and Tuzla, and south of Hungary, which is an area 
where our troops are going to be deployed from the lst Armored Division 
where they are being trained for this kind of deployment. And that may 
be happening and is happening, I suggest, as we speak.
  I heard several people say that we need to wait until we have 
hearings and let some time go by. But each hour that goes by, the 
American people need to know the President has a strategy to get our 
troops over there, to put us in a position where we are going to have 
to, by denying the authorization of sending troops into Bosnia on the 
ground, we are turning our backs on troops who are already there. And 
this is a position that we are now getting into. And each hour that 
goes by we are getting in deeper and deeper.
  I can recall not being able to get up there until General Rupert 
Smith, who is the successor of Michael Rose as the commander there of 
the U.N. forces in Bosnia, he agreed to take me up. And as we went up 
we went over almost every square mile of that area that is called the 
northeast sector, where our troops are going to be deployed, not more 
than 100 feet off the ground--because I have a background in aviation, 

[[Page S 17591]]
I know we were not anywhere higher than that--we were in the middle of 
a blizzard.
  Mr. President, this is not the Rocky Mountains we are talking about. 
This is an area of cliffs and caves. For the first time I could see why 
during the Second World War that they were able to withstand the very 
best that Hitler had to offer on a ratio of 1 to 8 because of the very 
unique geography we are dealing with.
  As I looked down I thought, there are not any roads down there, there 
are not any valleys, not the traditional valleys that you would have in 
the terrain that we think of as being mountainous terrain. And so all 
these tanks and all these armored vehicles would not really have any 
way to maneuver in that area.
  And, Mr. President, I think the President of the United States is 
putting us in a position where it is going to be too late. You know, we 
could come back and talk about whether or not we should send troops 
over, whether or not there are strategic interests as far as our 
Nation's security is concerned. And by that time, we are going to have 
our troops over there.
  I think the President is looking at--he has been talking about 20,000 
or 25,000 troops for so long now, for 2 years, I think it is an 
obsession with him. He is no longer thinking of them as being faces of 
real human beings. I think it is a faceless gesture when he says, we 
want to send 20,000 American troops into Bosnia.
  But I went up to where the lst Armored Division was training these 
young men and women who will be the first to go, who I suggest--I had 
breakfast with many of them in the mess hall. And they are on their way 
to Bosnia right now as we speak. And those individuals all asked me, 
``What is our mission? We don't understand what our mission is.'' Of 
course, I tried to be as optimistic as possible. I said, ``We're always 
behind our troops. Whatever happens, we're going to be supporting our 
troops.'' But as far as the mission is concerned, I do not know what 
the mission is.

  In the speech last night the President kept using the term over and 
over again--he said, ``The mission is clear and limited.'' But he never 
said what the mission was. It is a humanitarian mission. And I think we 
have about half the world that is covered with problems, with ethnic 
cleansing, with human rights violations. I am not sure whether we feel 
that we--or the President feels that we--have the resources and the 
military assets to go out and take care of all these problems. 
Obviously, we do not. We are operating on a defense budget now that is 
down comparable to what it was in 1980 when it could not afford spare 
parts. Yet we are taking on all these humanitarian problems around the 
world.
  I had occasion to talk to James Tayrien. James Tayrien is from 
Poteau, OK. He would be one of the first ones to go. I came home and 
talked to his mother, Estella, down in Poteau. She asked me the same 
question. I cannot answer it. It is very easy to get engaged in these 
things and send troops in, but it is hard to bring them out.
  Look at Vietnam. It was very easy to send them in. Look at the other 
cases that we have. Mission creep. If there was ever a classical 
environment for mission creep, that is it over in Bosnia. In fact, we 
have already crept. The mission was to be peacekeeping. Now it is peace 
implementation. There is a big difference, Mr. President, between 
peacekeeping and peace implementation. Peace implementation is the 
recognition there is no peace to keep right now.
  The President last night said, of course, the war is over. The war is 
not over. We went up there. We were in Tuzla. We could hear the firing, 
the firepower that was going on. It has not stopped. And we are dealing 
with three major factions over there. And I suggest to you that one of 
the factions was not in Dayton, OH. Milosevic does not speak for the 
Bosnian Serbs.
  It was my experience--and I see the distinguished Senator from 
Colorado is here. He is the only other Senator or House Member, to my 
knowledge, who has been in the northeast sector, in the Tuzla area. The 
point I am trying to get across here is that those people who are 
around that peace table are not speaking for the factions that were 
firing guns as we were up there just a couple weeks ago.

  I mean, they are up there. They could be Croats. They could be Serbs. 
They could be Bosnian Serbs. They could be Moslems. We do not know who 
they are. They could be any of these rogue factions. We hear a lot 
about the major factions that are over there. We know that three major 
factions have fired on their own troops just to blame the other side 
for sympathy. Anyone with that mentality is going to be firing on 
American troops. But we do not say anything about the other rogue 
factions, such as the Black Swans, the Arkan Tigers. We have Iranians. 
We have all kinds of factions up there, more than just three major 
factions.
  I would like to ask the Senator from Colorado, if that is the same 
environment as I have just explained that he experienced just this past 
week? I am sure he would have rather been doing something else on 
Thanksgiving. But it is my understanding he was up in that northeast 
sector during Thanksgiving. Is that correct?
  Mr. BROWN. I did. We had taken a plane, U.N. plane into Sarajevo and 
got a U.N. crew, a Norwegian helicopter crew, to take us in that 
region. And we did a flyover over much of that area. I must say the 
Senator's description is right on.
  What I found was in that area that is absolutely ideal in terms of 
guerrilla warfare. What I was surprised to find, and I think Members 
may be surprised to find, is that the plan is not to set up a border 
and patrol of that border. In other words, in fact, they indicated many 
of these areas where the line has been drawn, it simply does not even 
correspond to things on the ground. It is not the peak of a hill or the 
depth of a valley or the flow of a river. It is a line on the map that 
has not been translated on the ground.
  And their plan is not to erect a fence or even to check people coming 
across. There would be free flow of people across it. But I found very 
rugged terrain, and I found the roads that were there were very narrow, 
and very heavy timber cover so that it would be very difficult to spot 
things from the air. And it would be almost impossible to get our 
armored personnel carriers and our armored vehicles, tanks, into full 
play in that region. It is as difficult a situation from a terrain 
point of view as I have seen almost anywhere.
  Mr. INHOFE. Let me ask the Senator from Colorado, since this was 
about a 10-day period between the time I was in the northeast sector of 
Bosnia, south of the Posavina pass and south of Hungary and north of 
Tuzla, if he did have occasion to speak to any of those who were in 
command up in Tuzla, such as General Haukland?
  Mr. BROWN. I did talk to the Norwegian general. He said he would be 
relieved when the U.S. troops came in. I also talked to Gen. Rupert 
Smith in charge of the U.N. forces there, as well as a discussion at 
the Embassy with all the U.S. forces. As the Senator knows, there is a 
number of U.S. military personnel who are stationed in Sarajevo. They 
indicated a couple of things. One, none of them expected this to be 
wound up within a year.
  Mr. INHOFE. This is the question I was going to ask the Senator. Even 
last night we talked about 12 months.
  When the Senator and I sat next to each other at the Senate Armed 
Services Committee, when we had Secretary Perry and General 
Shalikashvili, and we asked the question that they had written up, 
``Are you going to commit yourself to 12 months, to a time period after 
which we withdraw and we come back?'' they said, ``Yes, we are 
absolutely committed to that.''
  Did you find anyone, who were the military people, either with NATO, 
the United Nations, with any of our NATO partners, or anyone up there 
in the Tuzla area who felt there is even a remote idea or notion we 
could be out of there in a 12-month period as far as achieving peace?
  Mr. BROWN. I talked to Norwegian personnel, military personnel from 
Iceland.
  There were doctors there from Sweden. I talked to a general from 
Great Britain. I talked to U.S. military personnel. I talked to Embassy 
personnel. I talked to Bosnian officials. Nobody, not anyone, none of 
them thought this mission could be achieved or completed within a year. 


[[Page S 17592]]

  Mr. INHOFE. That is exactly what they thought 10 days prior to that 
time. I have these horrible visions of what happened with Somalia. I 
can remember when we were trying to bring our troops back from Somalia, 
and we sent resolutions to President Clinton month after month to bring 
our troops back from there.
  It was not until 18 of our Rangers were murdered and the mutilated 
corpses were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu that the American 
people finally woke up and said, ``We want them back. We don't have 
strategic interests there that are worth this kind of a sacrifice.'' I 
see similar things like this are happening over there.
  When you talk about the morality of the issue and the fact that we 
are, in a sense, rewarding those individuals who are guilty of the most 
serious war crimes, because we are now saying we are on their side and 
we are doing this, this is something that I think we need to talk about 
before a decision is made that we are going to go along with this, 
because I see that happening.
  I see discussions taking place in this Chamber and outside the 
Chamber, ``Well, let's wait until we have some hearings. Let's wait 
until this,'' and as this is happening, our troops are being deployed 
over there.
  Mr. BROWN. Let me say to the Senator, if I can, in response, I think 
it is very analogous to what happened in Somalia in this respect: There 
is not a clear military plan. There is not a clear plan as to what we 
are going to do once we are there.
  For example, one of the things you could do is put up a fence and man 
a border. That is not what they plan to do. One of the things you can 
do is you can stop people from moving from one side of a border to 
another, stemming terrorism, guns, ammunition. That is not what they 
plan to do. When I asked what they do plan to do with the troops there, 
there was no clear answer by anyone.
  The reality is, the President is committing troops to that area for 
show. There is no clear military plan, and there is no clear, effective 
way to defend or protect those troops.
  I might say, it is cold as can be right now in Bosnia. There is no 
structure there for our troops to stay in. There is no structure there 
for our troops to stay in. There is no supply of clean, healthful 
water. There are no normal sanitary conditions. There is no established 
supply line at this point. I suspect there will be at some point in the 
future. But this is a catastrophe in the making, and I believe it shows 
a reckless disregard for those who serve our country.

  I think we have an obligation to people who put on the uniform of 
this Nation. You can agree or disagree with the mission, you can agree 
or disagree with the personalities, but we have an obligation when 
someone comes and puts on the uniform of the United States to make sure 
that we do not endanger their life without a real purpose.
  Some will say we should not endanger their life. If you are not 
willing to put your life on the line, you should not be in the 
military. I understand how these men and women would risk their lives, 
and our freedom is important enough to do that. But, Mr. President, and 
I say to the Senator from Oklahoma, keeping our prestige high or 
avoiding an embarrassment because someone made a commitment they should 
not have is not a reason to commit American troops to a situation where 
they cannot defend themselves or cost American lives.
  We have an obligation to people who put on that uniform to stand 
beside them and do all we can to protect them, and it is very clear--it 
is very clear--that we are not able to do that in this circumstance, 
and, moreover, we have not even supplied them with a purpose or a 
reason for them to sacrifice their lives.
  If they were there to defend freedom, I think the Senator from 
Oklahoma and I would be right there with them to stand behind them and 
support them and to encourage this action to stand up for freedom. But 
this is not that effort. This is an effort to save face in the world 
community, and I think it is much more important to stand behind our 
troops.
  Mr. INHOFE. Let me ask the Senator from Colorado----
  Mr. PRESSLER. If my friends will yield for a split moment, we are 
trying to get a vote ordered at 5:15, and I have to make a unanimous 
consent request. If I can do that, then you can go back into your mode, 
because they are going to hotline this.
  Mr. INHOFE. I yield to the Senator.

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