[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 189 (Wednesday, November 29, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H13787-H13795]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE IN BOSNIA

  The Speaker pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 
60 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. I did not realize your time was wrapping up, Mr. Burton. 
I just wanted to, in a colloquy with you, underscore what you said 
about the targeting of Americans by people from outside Bosnia. The 
MOIS, the secret police of Iran, have people in all the areas in Bosnia 
and around there. They are the security for shipping arms to the Moslem 
Bosnians through Zagreb with the complicity, the tolerance of the 
Croatian Government, all the way up to President Franjo Tudjman. They 
have targeted Americans for over a year.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. And they are having Americans killed, you 
might add.
  Mr. DORNAN. Yes.
  Now here is what adds a dimension to this today. Someone who has told 
me who I trust--now this makes it hearsay and puts it in the category 
of rumor for our friends in the dominant media culture. The liberals 
will go wild here, but a meeting took place at the White House, all the 
key players from Defense and from the State Department and security 
agencies, and Clinton himself expressed concern and asked many 
questions about the mujaheddin from Iran, the bad mujaheddin, just like 
we had good and bad in Afghanistan--the Hamas, some of the groups you 
have named, and the secret police, the terrorist secret police of Iran. 
He asked about them targeting Americans. He has known about this for a 
year.

                              {time}  1645

  The President is purported to have said, looking at Leon Panetta, my 
classmate from 1976, ``Do not let the Congress get fired up on this. 
Downplay this when you talk to the Congressmen and the Senators.''
  In other words, instead of telling the American people the danger 
that we are in, and, to quote his own words which I will do in a 
minute, he is asking them to downplay the threat to our Americans.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the gentleman will continue to yield, the 
fact of the matter is we know there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 
Moslem terrorists from Iran who are in the Bosnia area right now. We do 
not know how many. We have no idea. The fact of the matter is that some 
of those people were involved in such tragedies here in America as the 
World Trade Center bombing. They do not like our policies, they do not 
like America very much.
  When you put troops, American troops strung out between, say, 
Sarajevo and Tuzla, that long corridor 2\1/2\ miles wide, you are 
leaving them open for an attack anyplace among that line. That means 
that you are probably going to have, anyplace along that corridor for 
Sarajevo to Tuzla that there could be a bomber, there could be a mortar 
attack, there could be any kind of attack on our troops and they will 
not know when it is coming.

  I remember when President Clinton had a number of us in the White 
House when we were in Mogadishu, in Somalia. The President came up with 
a new policy. He said he was going to billet our troops on the tarmac 
at the airport there in Mogadishu. He said they would be safe. They 
would be there as a security measure, but they would not be involved in 
any combat or other operations. This was after we started nation 
building, we quit the food handling over there.
  Two days later the Aideed forces, the terrorist tribal leader over 
there, lobbed mortars into the exact spot where our soldiers were going 
to be billeted. That was not anything like Bosnia, yet if we had had 
troops in that area where the President said they were going to be, and 
they found out about it, there would have been many of them killed. 
Think about that when you talk about a corridor between Sarajevo and 
Tuzla, 2\1/2\ miles wide with 25,000 American troops in there. They 
could pick any spot along there, any time day or night, attack our 
troops and kill hundreds, maybe thousands of them. This is a recipe for 
disaster.
  I appreciate the gentleman for yielding to me. The President should 
reconsider, and he should come clean with the American people. If he 
said what you alleged he said to Leon Panetta, you know, we do not let 
the Congress get into this thing, then he should be taken to task. I do 
not know if he said it or not.
  The American people need to know the risks. There are going to be 
young women lose their legs, their arms, their eyes from these land 
mines, but even a greater risk is the possibility of a terrorist attack 
from possibly Bosnian Serbs who are going to be upset about losing 
their homes and the problems around Sarajevo, or possibly Moslem 
terrorist from Iran. There are a number of people who do not like what 
is going on over there. They do not like anybody very much. I think our 
troops are really at risk. It is a mistake to get into this quagmire.
  Mr. DORNAN. Dan, stay with me just a minute here, because I have been 
to Central America with you several times, we have both been to Haiti 
and been very concerned about what is happening there. We both have 
taken a personal interest in the calls that are coming into our offices 
from families of men who are in active duty in Germany and who resented 
Clinton referring to them as volunteers.
  One mother said to one of my staffers,

       My son is not a French legionnaire or a mercenary, he did 
     not join the military to fight under any flag, he joined and 
     took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States 
     against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

  And he did take a follow-on order that we do not take as Congressmen 
Newt would like this probably at this point, that we will obey all 
lawful orders of our commander. But it is coming down to the word 
``lawful.''
  Because you suffered through Mogadishu and spoke so forcefully and 
eloquently on the floor, I want to share something with you. When I was 
in my thirties I produced my own TV show. We had, the year I started, 
just gotten state-of-the-art close-up lenses where we could go in on an 
ant on the set and fill someone's television screen at home with that 
ant. Here we are, 27 years later, since I first started in December of 
1967 28 years later, and we cannot call for a close-up with these good 
Americans down in the control room a couple of floors below us, and it 
is too bad. I think the day is going to come, just like some day we 
will have color in the Congressional Record.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I would like for them to see this map.
  Mr. DORNAN. If they can see this Posavina corridor that we are 
supposed to widen by the Dayton-Wright Patterson treaty, widen and 
enforce----
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the Americans could see the corridor we are 
supposed to try to defend----
  Mr. DORNAN. Hold that steady and maybe the camera here in the 
southeast corner of the House could come in, point with your finger----
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. It is going to run all the way this way.
  Mr. DORNAN. Take it from there at the top. The little pink strip 
there, between the part of Serb-held Bosnia that is against Milosevic's 
Bosnia-Serbia proper and Montenegro, and this huge glob in the northern 
part of what is Bosnia, this little, tiny Posavina corridor, 2\1/2\ 
miles, is supposed to be expanded to five.
  Keep in mind the Israelis were properly always exercised about the 
distance from the furthest west point of the West Bank, Judea, from 
Natanya, by the sea, was 18 miles. They say that is an artillery-lobbed 
shell. This is 2\1/2\. Our men----
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. You have been in the military you might tell 
our 

[[Page H 13788]]
colleagues how far a mortar will go, how far they can stay back from 
that 2\1/2\-mile-wide corridor to hit American troops if they wanted to 
lob something in there.
  Mr. DORNAN. The mortars that hit the marketplace in Tuzla when I was 
in Zagreb the 28th of August, and threw bodies every which way, killed 
60 or 70 people and maimed 150; when I look at that ``maimed,'' I 
always think ``Who is blind? Who has no legs there? Who lost all their 
fingers there?'' We always put the death toll in bigger caps than the 
maimed. That is lives changed forever. A person will never earn the 
same income. Those mortars could be 5 or 10 miles from the corridor and 
lob these shells into the corridor.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The point is they could get within a half a 
mile and be more accurately targeted in. That is the problem.
  Mr. DORNAN. I wish almost, like in every television show, we had a 
monitor buried in the table here so we could see. I don't know how 
close they can come in on this picture, but I am going to walk over 
there and give it to you so you can look at this handsome young 
American soldier's face, First Sergeant Randall Shughart. I visited his 
grave 2 weeks ago in Carlisle, PA. His parents sent me this picture 
because they did not like the standard Army picture. They said, ``This 
is more what Randy looked like when he was helping us on the farm.'' I 
am sure that as close as they can get, it is just a color picture of a 
handsome young fellow with a closely cropped beard and a cowboy hat, in 
his barn. Take a look at this while I tell you this story.
  Randy Shughart, together with Gary Gordon, begged the headquarters at 
Mogadishu International Airport to let them go down and disembark from 
their helicopter, because they could see movement in the cockpit of 
Michael Durant's crashed Blackhawk helicopter. Three times they were 
told no. They were, in a sense, because they knew the odds, begging to 
die for their friends. St. John the Evangelist 15:13, ``Greater love no 
man has than he died for his friends.''
  They saved Durant. Durant hugging me, and both of us crying, told me 
that he owes his life to Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon. All four men 
had spine injuries when that helicopter made a hard landing. The 
helicopter that he disembarked took a direct hit of a rocket-propelled 
grenade and blew out one of the door posts and tore the leg right off 
one of the door gunners.
  I talked to the young Corporal Hall who jumped in and took over the 
door gun, and they flew back to Newport and crashed the helicopter, 
totaling it out. So that day we lost Wolcott's helicopter, Cliff 
Wolcott, killing him and his pilot, and then we lost this one, 
Durant's, and then we lost that one to a total accident after they were 
out of it.
  They held off for about 30 minutes. I have asked the Army for their 
last transcriptions. Durant told me the last thing Gordon or Shughart 
said to him was ``Good luck, pal. I hope you make it.'' Went around the 
front of the helicopter, heard him take a couple of shots, heard him 
grunt with pain. Hopefully they died with the rifle shots as the crowd 
overwhelmed the helicopter and captured Durant.
  Durant told me another man was lying on the ground, and I will not 
give his name because of his parents, and he was taken alive with 
Durant. They beat him to death. Then they began to so abuse their 
bodies that now that it is 2 years and 2 months later, a former 
Congressman said to me tonight, ``Congressman, these men are owned by 
America. Why don't you tell the country what happened to them?''
  I will not, but I will go further than I have ever gone before. These 
five men, including the two that won the Medal of Honor and including 
Randy Shughart's picture you have there, they did not just mutilate 
their bodies and drag them through the streets and stick rifles and 
poles into every bodily orifice, including their mouths, and have women 
and children dance upon them in the streets for Canadian Broadcasting, 
the guy won a Pulitzer Prize for his video and film coverage, Paul 
something, they cut their arms off the bodies. We never got those limbs 
back. They dumped their burned remains on the steps of the United 
Nation every 2 days until we had gotten back----
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If I may interrupt, that was never reported to 
the American people?
  Mr. DORNAN. Never. Look at Randy's handsome face, and he was born in 
Lincoln, NE. I showed this to our Medal of Honor winner, the Senator 
from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, and he started at him intently, and I said, 
``This guy is from Lincoln.'' And he said, ``Are you sure?'' and I said 
yes, I thought he was buried there. And then the Army told me where, so 
I went to his grave, because the week before when I was at a 
presidential forum in Bangor, ME, and I had asked where the other 
Lincoln was, in Lincoln, ME, where Gary Gordon is from. ``Two Young Men 
from Lincoln'' is the story I would like to write.
  They said, ``50 minutes north of here,'' and I took my son and drove 
up this first week of November to Gary Gordon's grave. I said to Mark, 
``I want to see Randy Shughart's grave.'' His dad, that man there, his 
father is the one who refused to shake Clinton's hand in the East 
Ballroom of the White House, and Bob Kerrey, Senator, told me he was at 
this ceremony and remembers it vividly. I said, ``How is it Bob, the 
press never reported that story, that it only came out on talk radio?''
  Mr. Shughart, a basic American farmer type, retired in Carlisle near 
his son's grave. He told me that he said to Clinton, ``Why did you fly 
Aideed down to Addis Abbaba days after this people killed and 
multilated my son's body?''
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. He was the dictator and tribal terrorist over 
there that was responsible for that.
  Mr. DORNAN. Another Fidel Castro, another General Jopp, another 
Aristide, the same mold, all of them. He said Clinton told him, ``I did 
not know about that operation.''
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the gentleman will yield, that is a 
ludicrous statement for anybody to make, because the administration had 
their Ambassador over there, negotiating with Aideed during a lot of 
this stuff that was going on. They knew entirely, from intelligence 
sources, what was going on. It is absolutely unbelievable that they 
would make a statement like that.
  Let me just add one more thing.
  Mr. DORNAN. It is Clinton making the statement to the father of a 
dead, murdered, Medal of Honor winner.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I just cannot believe that is the case. The 
President said in his speech----
  Mr. DORNAN. He meant the operation, taking Aideed down to Addis 
Abbaba.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The President said, ``I take full 
responsibility for whatever might happen over there.'' The fact of the 
matter is he should take full responsibility for what happened in 
Mogadishu to those men who got killed. They did not send proper 
equipment there, they did not send M-1 A-1 tanks, they did not send 
Bradley armored vehicles. He knew they should have sent those over 
there. The men trapped there, they did not get to them in that little 
town for 40 or 50 minutes because they could not get through the 
crowds.
  Mr. DORNAN. Eleven and one-half hours before they relieved the 
Rangers.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The fact of the matter is we lost some of 
those men because we did not get there quick enough.
  Mr. DORNAN. Four or five died during the night.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The fact of the matter is we are going to lose 
more young men and women, many more times, 40 or 50 more times in 
Bosnia. I think the President is making a terrible mistake.
  Mr. SCARBBOROUGH. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DORNAN. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding, 
and thank him for all of his service on the Committee on National 
Security, where we have worked together. I certainly appreciate the 
comments you have made about the horrible treatment that American 
soldiers have to go through, and humanizing this process.
  Let me tell you something that really has disturbed me during this 
debate. There have been three falsehoods. The first is that we should 
blindly fall in line behind our Commander in Chief, regardless of what 
he suggests. We 

[[Page H 13789]]
should send out troops, whether we know if there is a vital American 
interest, a time line, or all of the things we need to make this 
successful.

  I remember back in the mid-1990's, before I was in Congress, and you 
were here, maybe you can expand on this in a minute or two, just to 
remind Americans that there can be a loyal opposition. I remember when 
we were trying to remove Communists, when Ronald Reagan was trying to 
remove Communists from Central America, there were actually Members of 
this body that wrote Communist leader Ortega in Nicaragua and 
apologized for our support of the freedom fighters. These same people 
tell us that we cannot even debate this openly, so America can decide 
whether they want young American men and women killed in Bosnia?
  Let us make no mistake of it, we have sat through the briefings on 
the Committee on National Security. Everybody that comes in says, 
``Young Americans will die if they go to Bosnia and get involved in a 
civil war that has been raging for over 500 years.'' What have we kept 
asking? We have kept saying, ``What is the vital American interest?''

                              {time}  1700

  They have set up straw men and tried to knock them down, saying that 
if we did not get involved that somehow our credibility in NATO would 
be greatly diminished. That is a joke. The fact of the matter is, we 
are NATO. We have protected NATO countries for a generation from the 
threat of communism, and we will continue.
  Mr. DORNAN. A generation and a half.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. A generation and a half. We are NATO. So that is a 
straw man.
  Then they talk about it expanding and starting World War III. I heard 
the Vice President make that statement. That is blatantly false. It 
will not expand. The testimony that we have heard in the Committee on 
National Security clearly shows that that will not happen.
  I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say that I remember when the other 
side, when we were in Vietnam, and they were talking about the domino 
theory, they pooh-poohed that. Of course, now the same people who are 
doing that are saying, oh, my gosh, this may be a world war. The fact 
of the matter is, this war is not going to spread unless everybody 
decides that they want to let it spread.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Is it not ironic that the very same people during 
the Vietnam war that were protesting in the streets and on campuses 
across this country were saying, we cannot be the world's policeman. 
These are the same people, 30 years later, who are saying, let us 
sacrifice young Americans because it will make us feel good about 
ourselves.
  The fact of the matter is, there is no vital American interest. The 
Secretary of Defense admitted as much, and it was in Time magazine, 
that there is not a vital American interest. But what is disturbing to 
me is, now we are seeing people saying, well, maybe, since we are 
beyond the cold war, maybe we do not need a vital American interest.
  I hear that we have a volunteer army. You notice that is what they 
are saying. It is a volunteer army, they signed up for this, so we can 
send them off. It does not matter whether there is a vital American 
interest, and we spend all of this money on the military, so let us use 
our military. That is obscene.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, it is.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. That is why I thank the gentleman from California 
and the gentleman from Indiana for talking about the harsh realities of 
war.
  Does it mean that Americans are gun-shy and that we do not believe 
that any American troops should ever be sent into harm's way? No. But 
is it asking too much to say, let there be a vital American interest so 
when the President of the United States picks up the phone and calls a 
parent and says, your son was just blown apart in Bosnia, but he did it 
for a good reason. He did it because, and that is where they start to 
fade out. Because, maybe the NATO people will feel better because we 
have sacrificed, had human sacrifices in Bosnia.
  I do not want to trivialize this point, but it is so central to this 
argument, we have to define what a vital American interest is.
  We have head the Secretary of Defense, we have heard the Secretary of 
State, we have heard General Shalikashvili, we have heard a lot of good 
military men and women come before our Committee on National Security, 
and all have failed to state that vital American interest. I do not 
fault them; I fault the Commander in Chief.
  Mr. DORNAN. Let my good colleague from Florida pause for a moment 
while I show the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton] and the gentleman 
from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] another photograph, and a series of 
photographs starting on the cover of Paris Match magazine that you are 
not going to forget. I guarantee you that you will be bringing this up 
at town hall meetings.
  First of all, I hand to Mr. Burton a picture from a war that has 
great personal significance for me that started in Sarajevo, Bosnia and 
Herzegovina, on June 28, 1914, when a Bosnian Serb murdered Archduke 
Ferdinand and his wife, Carlotta, the heir to the throne of the Austro-
Hungarian empire, and changed Europe for this whole century and began 
the bloodiest war in its time, 11 million killed, the flower of 
European youth, and it set us up for World War II where 55 to 60 
million died, and it set up Stalin and Lenin and communism where 100 
million more died, including China.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. And your dad was there.
  Mr. DORNAN. I do not have but one studio photograph of my father from 
World War I.
  A gentleman called me from North Carolina last fall and said, ``I 
bought for 100 bucks in a garage sale a bunch of postcards from World 
War I.'' He asked my staff, ``Does the Congressman have a father who 
was a lieutenant in World War I?'' Yes. I called him back. Send me the 
photograph.
  He sends it, and it is a photograph of my dad with about 15 French 
children and another young captain. My dad had suffered poison gas, 
mustard gas twice, shrapnel in his face under his eye, three-wound 
chevrons turned into Purple Hearts in a ceremony that I witnessed in 
the Seventh Armory in New York.
  If my dad were still alive, he went to his reward in 1975 at 83 years 
of age, he would be saying to me, in the last 4 years of the bloodiest 
century in all of history, ``We are going back to the hills around 
Sarajevo where this killing started?''
  Now I want to show you both something. I am going to read the text 
while Dan looks at this and then he gives it to you. I have been on the 
French Embassy for months to get photographs of the two French pilots 
in a double seat Mirage 2000 that were shot down while I am at Aviano 
greeting our pilots back on August 30.
  They said, ``Uh-oh, we have lost an airplane.'' My heart starts 
pounding. Is this guy going to be as lucky as young Captain Scott 
O'Grady? Is he coming down on our side of the line like a British 
Harrier pilot 2 years earlier? Is he going to come down into Serb 
hands?
  Then they come in. I was talking to my wife on the phone. You cannot 
talk on the phone, but it is a French airplane. We take a two-seater. 
Then we hear there were good shoots. I am supposed to greet the 
squadron commander. He bends around in the air, goes back to the tanker 
and goes back to cover him.
  On the evening news here you saw their two good parachutes come down. 
That was August 30. Fifty-two days later, an indicted war criminal 
indicted at The Hague in the Netherlands by an international war crimes 
tribunal, Radovan Karadvic, says, ``Oh, the two French pilots were 
kidnapped from the hospital. What were they doing in a hospital 52 days 
after? They had good parachutes.''
  I am about to show you their pictures the day of capture.
  The French embassy calls me about Frederique Chiffot, C-H-I-F-F-O-T. 
I misspelled it when I said it on the floor last. The other one is 
Souvignet, Jose, J-O-S-E. Let me spell his name, S-O-U-V-I-G-N-E-T. 
These two pilots are in captivity here. One of them looks like he has a 
sprained ankle, no cuts on 

[[Page H 13790]]
their faces. The French Foreign Minister thinks that they have been 
murdered, beaten to death.

  When Karadzic says they were kidnapped he says, maybe by Moslems; 
Moslems would not do that, not with the support we are giving them; and 
he said, or by some band of a rogue brigands for a hostage reward. 
There has been no asking for money.
  Look at these pictures. Look at this man's face. The lieutenant, 
probably the back-seater; well, not necessarily, maybe the captain was 
the back-seat radar intercept officer. Turn the page. Look at how, like 
our pilots first captured in Vietnam, he is making this mean grimace 
into the camera like, I am resisting and I am okay. They are mature 
men. They are in their mid 30's, you can tell.
  Why at Dayton, at Wright Patterson, did not somebody say to 
Milosevic, by the way, all of this is predicated upon the return of 
these two French allied pilots who are our friends and comrades in 
arms? The whole deal is off, and here we are on day 82, 30 days after 
they announced they were kidnapped from a hospital that they should not 
have been in, and that could be two Americans in a heartbeat.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Bob, it is probably going to be more than two. 
We are going to have 25,000 there, plus support troops, in that 2\1/2\-
mile-wide corridor, and they will be able to attack at any point along 
that corridor, at any time, day or night, with mortars, land mines, or 
they can use a terrorist attack with a truck bomb. I am telling you, 
you are probably going to see, and I hope I am wrong, but you are 
probably going to see a lot more Americans than two or three.
  Mr. DORNAN. Look at the faces of the Serb fighters there. How old do 
you think they are?
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. They are probably in their 20's and 30's.
  Mr. DORNAN. And some in their 40's. Are they tough-looking, warrior-
class people?
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Oh, of course.
  Mr. DORNAN. Have you ever seen tougher looking guys in your life?
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I saw a 60-year-old gentleman in Sarajevo, a Serb, 
with an assault rifle on the evening news saying, I will kill anybody 
that comes in here to protect my family. We are getting involved in a 
three-way civil war that we cannot begin to fathom, the emotions and 
the hatred. It is just like Mogadishu that you talked about before.
  We are going even beyond the original U.N. charter where we were only 
supposed to get involved when the sovereign state was attacked. Why are 
we putting Americans in the middle of a three-way civil war with what 
you talked about, war-hardened criminals, for the most part, that will 
kill Americans as soon as look at them?
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say something here.
  Mr. Speaker, this administration has a history of blunders in foreign 
policy decisions. Haiti, we are now finding out, is costing us hundreds 
of millions of dollars, and all hell is breaking loose down there. 
There are a lot of political killings that have been instigated in part 
by Aristide's own rhetoric. He is now saying he may not leave power, 
and he is using almost $2 million of American taxpayers' money to lobby 
Congress for more money.
  We have Mogadishu and Somalia and the tragedies that occurred there, 
and now we are going to do the same thing or worse in Bosnia? It makes 
no sense.
  This administration needs to get a foreign policy compass. They need 
to get some direction in their foreign policy, get some experts up 
there that know what they are doing and know what they are getting us 
into.

  Mr. DORNAN. But where was Clinton this morning? Speaking to the 
British Parliament, instead of over here counseling with us and 
figuring out how we can contribute to this.
  Now, let me bounce off of both of you my notes from Clinton's remarks 
on Monday night.
  First of all, he did take you on with that first question of yours 
and me. Because I put 50 questions to him in the Congressional Record 
just yesterday and put in the Cap Weinberger-Bob Dornan principles, the 
10 things that you must satisfy before you put men, and now, thanks to 
Les Aspin, women, in harm's way.
  He said, this is Central Europe. It is vital to our national 
interests. So he used the word. He said so.
  This House, by a vote of 243 to 171 says no, and it shows you that if 
there is ever a constitutional power that does not involve the purse, 
the President can send people anywhere in this world.
  Wilson asked for a declaration of war. So did Roosevelt. But Harry 
Truman got into Korea and did not know how to get out and it cost him 
his Presidency.
  LBJ, thanks to Kennedy, got into Vietnam, did not know how to extract 
himself, threw his hands up on March 31, 1968, and said, I am out of 
here. I will serve out and try and conduct the war. He did not do 
anything except keep a bombing pause on for all of 1968 that he made 
even more severe to try and throw the election to Humphrey and 
destroyed his Presidency.
  Listen to what Clinton says. They, that is you, Mr. Scarborough, Mr. 
Burton, and me, and a majority of this House and Senate, they argue 
America can now step back. As young people would say, excuse me. Step 
back? We have almost 500 men in Macedonia. We have air power, sea 
power. We lost that French airplane and lucked out with our American 
air crew. We threw 90 percent of the strikes that cost those two 
Frenchmen 82 days of freedom. Please, God, that they are still alive 
and being moved from village to village.
  He says, we are going to end the suffering. How much money are we 
pouring into that area with airlift and sealift? You men should walk 
through the hospital at Zagreb at the airport. You should look at the 
U.N. facilities and the U.N. personnel there who are all overpaid, and 
every nickel they get is tax-free, all the bureaucrats.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say, he said he is going to end 
the suffering and we are going to be there 1 year. In 1 year we are 
going to be in and out, we are going to end the suffering, and this is 
a civil war, civil strife that has been going on, as you said, for 500 
years or more. I am telling you, you are not going to change these 
people's attitudes, take away their homes and give them to somebody 
else, solve all of these problems in a year and make this country 
whole. It is just not going to happen.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. To expand on that briefly, getting back to the 
testimony we heard from the Committee on National Security, and I am 
sure you were there. When a retired U.N. general from Canada talked to 
us about the folly that you were just talking about, about us believing 
that we can send in one division in 1 year and bring peace to Bosnia 
for the 21st century, he said that he was responsible for surveying the 
crimes against humanity, being a monitor for what the Serbs did.
  One morning he was on the roadside and had to go out and look at a 
slaughter. The Serbs had slaughtered Moslem children, they had 
slaughtered women, had slaughtered elderly people. As he was looking 
at, surveying the scene, a Serb came up to him and he said, well, it 
serves them right. And the U.N. general turned and said, it serves them 
right for what? And the Serb responded, it serves them right for what 
they did to us in 1473.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. In 1473.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. And then the general was silent for a moment, and he 
looked at the committee. A smile went across his face, and he said, and 
you Americans believe that you can send in one division for 1 year and 
make a difference? You are kidding yourselves. You had better stay out.
  That comes from a man who had been there a lot longer than anybody in 
the administration and who understands it a lot better than anybody 
serving in this administration.

                              {time}  1715

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say one thing, there is an old 
statement, ``Those that don't profit from history are destined to make 
the same mistakes over and over and over again.'' This administration 
in its foreign policy decisions has not looked at history. They do not 
have the underpinning, the background necessary to be making these 
decisions. Yet they are going right ahead, hell-bent for leather, 
making these decisions, putting our young people in harm's way.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. The irony is, I know this is sort of the electrified 


[[Page H 13791]]
third realm, we do not want to get into it because he is our President, 
our Commander in Chief. I will just talk about the administration 
generally.
  The irony is that the people that are sitting in this administration 
now are the same people 20 years ago, 30 years ago protesting the 
Vietnam war. Not only have they not learned from European history, they 
have not learned the lessons of Vietnam that they taught the country: 
that unless the American people are solidly behind a military action, 
and unless there is an immediate vital interest, we do not get involved 
in other people's civil wars.
  I thought that is what the Vietnam protests were about. I thought 
that is what the President and many others in good conscience protested 
about during the Vietnam war, that this was not our war, that there was 
not a direct American interest, that America had to leave that civil 
war to Vietnam.
  If they wanted to protest that 25, 30 years ago, I am not going to 
second-guess them or challenge them. That was their right. But why are 
these same people 30 yeas ago who were telling us that we cannot be 
policemen of the world and get involved in other people's conflicts, 
why are these same people, now that they are in charge 30 years later, 
asking us to do the same exact thing?
  Mr. DORNAN. Try just 26 years ago, this very week. Clinton himself, 
ditching class at Oxford, left for Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, 
Leningrad, 2\1/2\ days in Moscow, in Prague, on a tour to help secure 
victory for Hanoi. It had nothing to do with peace or ending the war in 
some sort of neutrality respecting the DMZ at the 17th parallel. It was 
to secure a victory for Hanoi.
  Here is an article in the current Insight magazine, the one that has 
Newt on the cover. It says, ``McNamara met the enemy and it turned out 
to be him.'' On Bosnia, ``There is a chilling McNamara-like rhetoric'' 
coming from administration people. ``Perry's assertion,'' Secretary of 
defense Perry, ``is the same guff that McNamara tossed off during 
Vietnam.''
  It says, ``Only industrial strength arrogance can account for Robert 
Strange McNamara's visit to Hanoi on Veterans Day. The former defense 
secretary at least is unchanging in the lack of sensibility that 
characterized his Pentagon tenure during the Vietnam War.''
  This is the man, McNamara, that said that we cannot use college men 
in the Vietnam struggle; they are our future. Clinton told his draft 
board, ``I'm too educated to go.''
  Now we have, just as you pointed out, Joe, the very same people 
making sure Clinton does not make any reference to Vietnam in his 
speeches about suffering, I am looking at my notes again from Monday 
night, he says 250,000 people have been killed. In Cambodia it was 2 
million, 8 times that.
  He says 2 million are on the road. They are alive. Because the road 
in the South China Sea meant sharks, pirates, and the death of 750,000 
people, 68,000 who worked with us executed. And always the one order, 
the one order from Ho Chi Minh that they pursued even after he died in 
September 1969 was kill Americans.
  Are they thinking that when Haitians that we talked about on the 
docks were jumping up and down and saying, ``We're going to give you 
Somalia,'' at the end of October, referring to the man who was killed 
on the 6th, Matt Rearson, they had a dud land at the feet, 5 feet away 
from a two-star General Garrison. He told me about it himself. The 18 
Rangers and helicopter pilots and Delta commandos like Randy Shugart 
and Gary Gordon, they are yelling about this on the docks of Haiti, 10, 
12 days later, and turned around the Norton Sound.
  Do you not think that these people in Sarajevo who have constant TV, 
CNN, probably watch some of our C-SPAN debates, are not aware that the 
key to get Clinton to bug out is Clinton's next words? ``We must expect 
casualties,'' he said.
  Of all people, who is he to say that?
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say on the front page of the New 
York Times this week they quoted a gentleman from Sarajevo who lives, 
one of the 60,000 Bosnian Serbs that live around Sarajevo, and he said, 
``What you're going to see is what you saw in Somalia when you saw that 
American dragged through the streets dead.''

  Another lady who lives in one of those suburbs said, ``I'll kill 
myself and my kids before I'll let them take over my home and my 
property here.'' And those people are going to be coming back. I am 
telling you, when people say that they will even kill themselves and 
their kids, what do you think they are going to do to somebody else who 
tries to take their property?
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. If the gentleman will yield, once again drawing 
comparisons between Bosnia and Vietnam, I remember after the war was 
over listening to the words of the generals for North Vietnam. They 
said ``We knew we could not win the war in the jungles of Vietnam, but 
we knew we would win this war on the streets and the college campuses 
of America.''
  Mr. DORNAN. In the Halls of the Congress.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. ``That is why we kept fighting.'' The same thing is 
going to happen now. That is why the Weinberger doctrine, which the 
gentlemen from California [Mr. Dornan] also worked on, that is why one 
of the key components was support from the American people. We have to 
have a campaign that Americans support. It is the President's 
responsibility to step forward and explain what the vital American 
interest is.
  Let me just say this. I will tell you this. A lot of people will say, 
``Well, why are you all talking about Bosnia in such strident terms,'' 
and I will tell you, this is my feeling. We have to do it now. It is 
our responsibility. Because once those young men and women get in 
Bosnia, at that point I shut my mouth, I follow the Commander in Chief. 
I will not do what Members of this Congress did in the 1960's and play 
politics with the lives of American troops.
  So now is the time that we have to voice our opposition to this, 
because once the President makes that move, and I can only speak for 
myself, at that point I believe we as a country fall in line behind the 
Commander in Chief if he chooses to do that. But until that time comes, 
I think we need to point out that this is the most misguided foreign 
policy decision not only that this administration has made but any 
administration in this country has made since Vietnam. We have to do 
all we can to draw the line in the sand and tell the President, do not 
send young Americans.
  I already have men and women from my district over there. I have NAS 
Pensacola, Eglin Air Force Base, Hobart Field. I have got a lot of 
other bases.
  These are not just the military. It is not abstract terms. We are 
talking about men and women and the children of people I know, and also 
my own peers who have children that go to school with my 7-year-old boy 
in Pensacola, FL, talking about how their father is going to be going 
to Bosnia. We are talking about killing real people.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Human beings. Real people. The gentleman has 
said it very well. I do not think anybody could have said it better.
  The fact of the matter is that I think everybody in this Chamber, 
once our troops are on the ground, are going to say, ``Hey, we didn't 
want them there. They shouldn't be there, but they're there and we're 
going to support our American young men and women who are over there to 
do a job.''
  But the fact of the matter is, I will be supporting our troops, but I 
certainly will not be supporting this President and this policy that he 
has adopted because I think it is going to get a lot of them killed.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. What frightens me is this: The fact of the matter is 
that this has been a very emotional decision by this administration and 
it has been a decision based, I believe, on emotion.
  Because I watch TV. I talked about my 7-year-old boy. I saw on ABC 
News several months back a young 7-year-old Muslim boy was blown off 
his bicycle, and the boy was screaming and crying, and it looked just 
like my son. He said, ``Please don't cut off my leg. Don't cut off my 
leg.'' And the ABC reporter said ``Well, the 7-year-old boy's leg was 
not cut off but he did die 3 hours later.''
  That hit me, and I said I know what the President has to be saying at 
times. We have got to do something. We have got to stop the killing. 
That is what my immediate response is, and that is what a lot of 
Americans think. 

[[Page H 13792]]

  But then you step back and you think through this process, and you 
are not run totally by emotion, and you say, ``Wait a second, it won't 
be young Bosnians that we are going to be seeing killed and TV 2 months 
from now, 3 months from now, if we go over there. It is going to be 
young Americans.''
  We better make sure that it is a cause worth dying for, to make sure 
we do not repeat the same mistakes we made in Somalia, where we made an 
emotional decision to go over there. Then Americans were slaughtered, 
drug through the streets. Americans then made an emotional decision to 
bring them back. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not base it 
on emotion. Let us base it on sound foreign policy.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say one thing about Somalia. When 
President Bush sent our troops over there initially, it was to feed the 
hungry masses, and those people welcomed us with open arms and treated 
our troops very well. It was not until President Clinton made the 
decision to get into nation-building, which is what he is leading us 
into in Bosnia, that we started losing troops and ended up having to 
pull out of there and leaving that dictator Aideed back in power.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. This is what is so frightening. I have heard 
testimony again before the Committee on National Security and I 
actually had somebody with a straight face tell me, from the 
administration, that we needed to go into Bosnia to, quote, reknit the 
fabric of the Bosnian society, close quote.
  That, my friend, is extremely frightening. It is extremely naive, and 
it is going to be young Americans' blood that will be spilled because 
of that naive view of geopolitical realities.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, some of the members of the dynamic freshman 
class of the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] have joined us.
  I want to put one set of figures into the Record and make one 
comment, because Clinton at least heeded the warnings of this Congress 
not to put our men and women under the United Nations. I would ask 
people to please save their Reader's Digest. I will put this in the 
Record following our remarks, Dale Van Atta's article commissioned by 
Reader's Digest on ``The Folly of U.N. Peacekeeping.'' It begins 
thusly.
  ``Sonja's Kon-Tiki Cafe is a notorious Serbian watering hole 6 miles 
north of Sarajevo. While Serb soldiers perpetrated atrocities in all 
the Bosnian villages, local residents reported that U.N. 
peacekeepers,'' and it hurts me to read these names, ``from France, 
Ukraine, Canada, and New Zealand regularly visited Sonja's, drinking 
and eating with these very same soldiers'' committing the atrocities 
``and sharing their women.''
  However, the women of Sonja's Kon-Tiki Club were actually prisoners 
of the Serbs. These are Muslim and Croatian women.
  ``As one soldier, Borislav Herak, would later confess, he visited 
Sonja's several times a week, raping many of the 70 females present and 
killing two of them'' because he felt like it.
  Then I go down to Haiti and I see white U.N. vehicles, this wonderful 
dream that grew out of the League of Nations in my father's war, see 
white U.N. vehicles lined up at the houses of prostitution in Haiti, 
and wondered why the United Nations is so disrespected. Well, here is 
what we are doing, and these figures come from the U.N. peacekeeping 
ops office up in New York.
  At this time, when Clinton says we are going to pull back, we have 
2,267 people in Haiti.
  I did not know we had 30 in the western Sahara. The gentleman from 
Indiana [Mr. Burton] is the African expert. I did not know that. The 
part of Africa that Morocco has taken over. In Macedonia we have 494. 
When I was there it was 530.
  We already have 3 in Bosnia, an advance team is arriving as we speak 
in Tuzla, where that rocket hit on August 28 when I was up in Zagreb, 
could not believe the imagery on the news that night. We have 361 
already in Croatia. I do not know if that includes all the hospital 
people.
  We have four in ex-Soviet Georgia. What kind of a Christmas are they 
going to have? We have 15 still on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, and 11 in 
Jerusalem. Grand total, 3,185.
  And not spending Christmas with their families will be 17,000 support 
troops all around Bosnia that are there now, air power, sea power, 
airlift, sea lift, hospitals, intelligence, more than they know how to 
use, and Clinton has the gall to say we are pulling back and not 
helping, and we are going to close out this century with American kids 
dead in the tinderbox of the Balkans?
  Let me share some time, and thank you for staying, Dan. I really 
appreciate it. My wife is calling me all day long, why are you 
discussing all these mundane things, when for the first time in 
American history a leader is saying not ``They will be home by 
Christmas'' but saying ``I think we can have them all in place by 
Christmas.'' The opposite of MacArthur, of Truman. I have never heard 
of such a thing in my life.
  Here is the way I want to allocate some time. Mr. Speaker, how much 
time do I have left on my hour?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Taylor of North Carolina). The gentleman 
has 13 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Then let me share this, and let me cut it just a bit, 
then Steve Chabot of Ohio, I will give you 4 minutes, Steve, because 
Cynthia McKinney missed her opportunity, and I want all of her people 
in Georgia waiting for her special order to know she is still here and 
going to talk about the problem of gerrymandering in Georgia. But, 
Steve, I will give you 4 minutes, Mark Neumann 4 minutes, Sam Brownback 
2 minutes, Mark Sanford of South Carolina 2 minutes, and Jack Metcalf 4 
minutes, and that ought to do it. Then on to Cynthia.
  I yield to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Chabot].

                              {time}  1730

  Mr. CHABOT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank the gentleman 
for using the French pronunciation of my name, which I do not hear very 
often. Thank you very much.
  I have been listening to the arguments and points made by my 
colleagues here. I think they made some very good, some very persuasive 
arguments.
  I would just like to reiterate some of the things they have made and 
make some new ones myself.
  First, I think it is important for us to always remember that these 
people in that very, very dangerous area of the world have been 
fighting with each other for centuries now, for hundreds of years. They 
have been battling each other, and, unfortunately, our President is now 
talking about and pushing forward with a plan which will put young 
Americans, both men and women, on the ground in Bosnia right in the 
middle of that bloody mess. I am very concerned that, rather than 
fighting and shooting at each other, in the very near future they are 
going to be shooting at Americans, and I hope and I pray that I am 
wrong. But I am very concerned that many, many Americans are going to 
come back to the shores of this country in body bags.
  There are many other dangers besides the snipers and rogue Serbs or 
rogue folks on either side lobbing mortars, mortar shells, artillery 
shells into our U.S. troops. There are 6 million mines in Bosnia. Many 
of those mines, nobody has a clue as to where they are at. People can 
be out on a routine patrol just walking down the street and could very 
easily set off a mine, could be mangled and mutilated or killed, and I 
am very concerned we are going to lost a lot of people to those very 
lethal instruments. That is the 6 million estimated mines there are 
throughout the Bosnian area.
  In addition, I think we really have to recognize that, whereas the 
Serbs have certainly been the most aggressive and have performed the 
most atrocious acts and have killed the most innocent people, that none 
of the parties really have clean hands in this incident. The Moslems, 
the Bosnian Moslems, and the Croats have also allegedly committed a 
number of atrocities themselves. All three parties have done some very 
awful things in the past couple of years in that very, very dangerous 
part of the world. Certainly, the Serbs have been the worst.
  In addition, the President is talking about our troops will be out in 
an estimated 1-year period of time. Again, go back to the point that 
these people have been fighting for hundreds of years now. How anyone 
can predict 

[[Page H 13793]]
that our troops will have solved the problems over there, kept the 
peace and then pulled out in a year's period of time, I think that 
there is no way in the world that is going to happen. If our troops are 
pulled out, it is very likely that in a very short period of time the 
atrocities will start again, the fighting will start, and we are going 
to have the same type of chaos and death that we have over there now. 
So the 1-year period of time, I think, is a period of time that has 
been grabbed out of the air, and some would argue that it has to do 
with the fact that there is an election a year down the road. Who knows 
why the President picked 1 year.
  But I do not think there is any way we are going to be able to go 
over there and then suddenly peace is going to break out in that very 
dangerous part of the world after we have been there for a 1-year 
period of time.
  This is in Europe's backyard. It is very, very difficult for anybody 
to make the argument that this is in the vital interests of the United 
States. We have an interest to the extent that I think we think it was 
a good idea for the President to get the parties together. I think it 
is appropriate for us to play a role in getting people to talk about 
peace. I think we can play a role in supporting the Europeans through 
our air power, which we are able to project without great loss of life 
to American citizens. But I do not think that a legitimate argument can 
be made that it is necessary for U.S. troops to be at risk on the 
ground, and it does not take very long for anybody to pick out a couple 
of examples of the type of things which could very well happen in the 
very near future in that very dangerous part of the world.
  Look what happened in Lebanon. You know, it was something as 
unsophisticated as a truck filled with explosives to blow up a building 
and kill over 200 United States Marines in Beirut, Lebanon. In Somalia 
we went in with the best of intentions to feed people, and then mission 
creep set in. The goal got expanded. We were trying to build 
democracies over there. We got in the middle of the warlords. Our 
helicopters got shot down. American lives were lost, and the bodies of 
young Americans were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
  What we are trying to do here is to prevent the President from making 
a very, very tragic mistake. He certainly has not convinced me that 
this is in the vital interests of the United States to put United 
States troops on the ground in Bosnia. From the calls that I am 
receiving in my office every day, he certainly has not convinced the 
people of Cincinnati, the people that I represent, that this is the 
right action. The calls are overwhelmingly coming in that we should not 
put United States troops on the ground in Bosnia.
  I have talked to many, many of my colleagues here on both sides of 
the aisle, both Democrats and Republicans, and the calls are coming in 
from people all over this country, ``Don't do it. Don't put United 
States troops on the ground in Bosnia.''
  The President apparently is determined to move ahead with this 
venture. I think he is making a terrible mistake. I wish he would 
listen to Congress, and I wish he would listen to the American people 
and, please, prevent this tragedy from happening. We do not need to 
lose American lives in Bosnia. I beg the President to reconsider this 
effort that he seems to be determined to make. I think it is a very 
tragic event. I hope I am wrong. I hope and pray that my concerns are 
unfounded and things will go well.
  But I am very, very concerned that I am right, and if that happens, 
we are going to have many, many Americans who lose their lives in that 
very dangerous part of the world.
  Mr. DORNAN. I thank the gentleman for his excellent remarks. I yield 
to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Metcalf].
  Mr. METCALF. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  I just want to start out by saying this is under no circumstances a 
partisan issue. It makes no difference whatsoever and would not ever 
make a difference to me whether the President was Republican or 
Democrat on this kind of an issue.
  I listened really carefully to President Clinton's' speech, and I re-
read the speech word for word just so I was certain what he said. The 
vital United States interests the President laid out in his speech were 
broad, universal interests and would apply to any trouble spot in the 
world. This is not satisfactory.
  I have said since I ran for Congress that I would support committing 
American troops only if vital, specific U.S. interests were involved, 
and the interests that he gave were not.
  Militarily, U.S. troops are not needed. Our own Chairman of the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff stated that Europe can handle the military aspect 
themselves. European powers have direct interest in Bosnia, and they 
should step up to the plate on this. Britain and France have done so 
and will be part of the operation as it is planned.
  You know, it is interesting, Germany had not pledged troops until 
today. I guess Germany remembers World War II, when they occupied that 
area for several years during World War II. They understand the 
problems there of an occupying nation, and it just seems to me that 
maybe their reason for not joining until today is that they understood 
better than we do some of the problems that are involved.
  The President promised that the troops in Haiti would be home in a 
year. Remember? It has now been 16 months, and the troops are still 
there. Why should we believe that Bosnia is different?
  One of the things that the President did say was he said he would 
provide a clear mission statement, a specific operational plan, what 
are the objectives, how will these troops accomplish the objectives, 
and what is the exit strategy. Thus far, and he said he would present 
that, and I assume that that is still coming. I am not being critical 
at all. We just do not have it yet. We certainly need it before we can 
make the judgment as to whether or not troops should be sent.
  Also we do not have the money to engage this operation. That is 
another very critical factor. We fight and work very hard to cut $2 
million here or $12 million there from the budget. The estimate of the 
cost of this is $2.1 billion at the present time. Judging from all 
previous estimates that I have seen, you should multiply it at least by 
2, so we are talking about, I believe, close to a $4 billion cost. 
Remember, this is money that we do not have. This is money that will 
have to be borrowed if we move into Bosnia.
  The idea of balancing the budget is absolutely critical, and there 
are circumstances certainly where we would go ahead and even if we had 
to borrow the money, but only if we are certain of what is going to 
happen, what is the vital U.S. interest that is involved, what is the 
plan to actually achieve the kind of peace we are looking for and set 
up the conditions by which we can exit.
  Those are the points that I see, and we will try to have an open mind 
and watch what the President comes up with for these things.
  As of now, from what I have seen, my vote would be an absolute 
``no.'' I certainly hope and will do everything I can to see that we do 
get a vote on this in the House of Representatives.
  I think the Senate should also vote on whether or not to authorize 
troops, ground troops in Bosnia.
  Mr. DORNAN. I say to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Metcalf], I 
want to recommend a book to you on Mogadishu. On the cover is the 
picture of Durand's helicopter crew, the ones that were killed, Ray 
Frank, three full combat tours in Vietnam, big, handsome, blond David 
Cleveland, William, his mother called him David, the men called him 
William, like his father. He was one of the door gunners, and Tommy 
Fields, another door gunner. It is just called ``Mogadishu.'' It tells 
a story of a tragedy in the Clinton administration that he just put 
behind him.
  Let me ask you something, I say to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. 
Metcalf], there is a report from my district office today. The calls 
dropped to 100 for the first time. It is usually 200. Not a single 
person calling my district office, oh, they will call now, detractors 
and stuff. We are going to ignore their calls, and I have every right 
to be as tough as I want on this because I am the one who went to 
Mogadishu less than 10 days after the last man was killed there, to 
photograph this whole area. They are saying 100 calls a day in my 
office without one saying ``Go; we should go.''

[[Page H 13794]]

  How are they in your office from the great Pacific Northwest?
  Mr. METCALF. Our calls are running more than 30 to 1 against sending 
troops to Bosnia, and there comes a time certainly that you should 
listen to the American people.
  Mr. DORNAN. I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. 
Sanford].
  Mr. SANFORD. I do not know how much more actually can be added 
between my colleague, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough], my 
colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan], and the 
gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton], go down the list, and therefore I 
mean you have touched on this idea of 200 American men, best-case 
scenario, dying. You have touched on the idea of spending $1.5 billion. 
You have touched on the idea we do not have a clearly defined exit 
strategy. You touched on the idea of 37,000 American boys being 
directly involved.
  Mr. DORNAN. I have run out of time. We did not give you gentlemen 
enough heads-up over here.
  The documents referred to are as follows:

                [From the Reader's Digest, October 1995]

                     The Folly of U.N. Peacekeeping

                           (By Dale Van Atta)

       Sonja's Kon-Tiki cafe is a notorious Serbian watering hole 
     six miles north of Sarajevo. While Serb soldiers perpetrated 
     atrocities in nearby Bosnian villages, local residents 
     reported that U.N. peacekeepers from France, Ukraine, Canada 
     and New Zealand regularly visited Sonja's, drinking and 
     eating with these very same soldiers--and sharing their 
     women.
       The women of Sonja's, however, were actually prisoners of 
     the Serb soldiers. As one soldier, Borislav Herak, would 
     later confess, he visited Sonja's several times a week, 
     raping some of the 70 females present and killing two of 
     them.
       U.N. soldiers patronized Sonja's even after a Sarajevo 
     newspaper reported where the women were coming from. Asked 
     about this, a U.N. spokesman excused the incident by saying 
     no one was assigned to read the newspaper.
       The U.N. soldiers who frequented Sonja's also neglected to 
     check out the neighborhood. Less than 200 feet away, a 
     concentration camp held Bosnian Muslims in inhuman 
     conditions. Of 800 inmates processed, 250 disappeared and are 
     presumed dead.
       Tragically, Sonja's Kon-Tiki illustrates much of what has 
     plagued U.N. peacekeeping operations: incompetent commanders, 
     undisciplined soldiers, alliances with aggressors, failure to 
     prevent atrocities and at times even contributing to the 
     horror. And the level of waste, fraud and abuse is 
     overwhelming.
       Until recently, the U.N. rarely intervened in conflicts. 
     When it did, as in Cyprus during the 1960s and '70s, it had 
     its share of success. But as the Cold War ended, the U.N. 
     became the world's policeman, dedicated to nation building as 
     well as peacekeeping. By the end of 1991, the U.N. was 
     conducting 11 peacekeeping operations at an annual cost of 
     $480 million. In three years, the numbers rose to 18 
     operations and $3.3 billion--with U.S. taxpayers paying 31.7 
     percent of the bill.
       Have the results justified the steep cost? Consider the 
     U.N.'s top four peacekeeping missions:


                                 bosnia

       In June 1991, Croatia declared its independence from 
     Yugoslavia and was recognized by the U.N. The Serbian-
     dominated Yugoslav army invaded Croatia, ostensibly to 
     protect its Serbian minority. After the Serbs agreed to a 
     cease-fire, the U.N. sent in a 14,000-member U.N. Protection 
     Force (UNPROFOR) to build a new nation. (The mission has 
     since mushroomed to more than 40,000 personnel, becoming the 
     most extensive and expensive peacekeeping operation ever.)
       After neighboring Bosnia declared its independence in March 
     1992, the Serbs launched a savage campaign of ``ethnic 
     cleansing'' against the Muslims and Croats who made up 61 
     percent of the country's population. Rapidly the Serbs gained 
     control of two-thirds of Bosnia, which they still hold.
       Bosnian Serbs swept into Muslim and Croat villages and 
     engaged in Europe's worst atrocities since the Nazi 
     Holocaust. Serbian thugs raped at least 20,000 women and 
     girls. In barbed-wire camps, men, women and children were 
     tortured and starved to death. Girls as young as six were 
     raped repeatedly while parents and siblings were forced to 
     watch. In one case, three Muslim girls were chained to a 
     fence, raped by Serb soldiers for three days, then drenched 
     with gasoline and set on fire.
       While this was happening, the UNPROFOR troops stood by and 
     did nothing to help. Designated military ``observers'' 
     counted artillery shells--and the dead.
       Meanwhile, evidence began to accumulate that there was a 
     serious corruption problem. Accounting procedures were so 
     loose that the U.S. overpaid $1.8 million on a $21.8 million 
     fuel contract. Kenyan peacekeepers stole 25,000 gallons of 
     fuel worth $100,000 and sold it to the Serbs.
       Corruption charges were routinely dismissed as unimportant 
     by U.N. officials. Sylvana Foa, then spokesperson for the 
     U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, said it was no 
     surprise that ``out of 14,000 pimply 18-year-olds, a bunch of 
     them should get up to hanky-panky'' like black-market 
     dealings and going to brothels.
       When reports persisted, the U.N. finally investigated. In 
     November 1993 a special commission confirmed that some 
     terrible but ``limited'' misdeeds had occurred. Four Kenyan 
     and 19 Ukrainian solders were dismissed from the U.N. force.
       The commission found no wrong-doing at Sonja's Kon-Tiki, 
     but its report, locked up at U.N. headquarters and never 
     publicly released, is woefully incomplete. The Sonja's Kon-
     Tiki incidents were not fully investigated, for example, 
     because the Serbs didn't allow U.N. investigators to visit 
     the site, and the soldiers' daily logbooks had been 
     destroyed.
       Meanwhile, Russian troop commanders have collaborated with 
     the Serb aggressors. According to U.N. personnel at the 
     scene, Russian battalion commander Col. Viktor Loginov and 
     senior officer Col. Aleksandr Khromchenkov frequented lavish 
     feasts hosted by a Serbian warlord known as ``Arkan,'' widely 
     regarded as one of the worst perpetrators of atrocities. It 
     was also common knowledge that Russian officers directed U.N. 
     tankers to unload gas at Arkan's barracks. During one cease-
     fire, when Serbian materiel was locked in a U.N. storage 
     area, a Russian apparently gave the keys to the Serbs, who 
     removed 51 tanks.
       Eventually, Khromchenkov was repatriated. Loginov, after 
     finishing his tour of duty, joined Arkan's Serbian forces.
       Problems remained, however, under the leadership of another 
     Russian commander, Maj. Gen. Aleksandr Perelyakin. Belgian 
     troops had been blocking the movement of Serb troops across a 
     bridge in northeastern Croatia, as required by U.N. Security 
     Council resolutions. Perelyakin ordered the Belgians to stand 
     aside. Reluctantly they did so, permitting one of the largest 
     movements of Serbian troops and equipment into the region 
     since the 1991 cease-fire.
       According to internal U.N. reports, the U.N. spent eight 
     months quietly trying to pressure Moscow to pull Perelyakin 
     back, but the Russians refused. The U.N. finally dismissed 
     him last April.


                                cambodia

       In 1991, the United States, China and the Soviet Union 
     helped broker a peace treaty among three Cambodian guerrilla 
     factions and the Vietnamese-installed Cambodian government, 
     ending 21 years of civil war. To ease the transition to 
     Cambodia's first democratic government, the U.N. created the 
     U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). In less than 
     two years, about 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers and other personnel 
     were dispatched at a cost of $1.9 billion.
       Some of the Cambodian ``peacekeepers'' proved to be 
     unwelcome guests--especially a Bulgarian battalion dubbed the 
     ``Vulgarians.'' In northwest Cambodia, three Bulgarian 
     soldiers were killed for ``meddling'' with local girls. One 
     Bulgarian was treated for 17 different cases of VD. The 
     troops' frequent carousing once sparked a mortar-rifle battle 
     with Cambodian soldiers at a brothel.
       The Bulgarians were not the sole miscreants in Cambodia, as 
     internal U.N. audits later showed. Requests from Phnom Penh 
     included 6500 flak jackets--and 300,000 condoms. In the year 
     after the U.N. peacekeepers arrived, the number of 
     prostitutes in Phnom Penh more than tripled.
       U.N. mission chief Yasushi Akashi waved off Cambodian 
     complaints with a remark that ``18-year-old hot-blooded 
     soldiers'' had the right to enjoy themselves, drink a few 
     beers and chase ``young beautiful beings.'' He did post an 
     order: ``Please do not park your U.N. vans near the 
     nightclubs'' (i.e., whorehouses). At least 150 U.N. 
     peacekeepers contracted AIDS in Cambodia; 5000 of the troops 
     came down with VD.
       Meanwhile, more than 1000 generators were ordered, at least 
     330 of which, worth nearly $3.2 million, were never used for 
     the mission. When U.N. personnel started spending the $234.5 
     million budgeted for ``premises and accommodation,'' rental 
     costs became so inflated that natives could barely afford to 
     live in their own country. Some $80 million was spent buying 
     vehicles, including hundreds of surplus motorcycles and 
     minibuses. When 100 12-seater minibuses were needed, 850 were 
     purchased--an ``administrative error,'' UNTAC explained, that 
     cost $8.3 million.
       Despite the excesses, the U.N. points with pride to the 
     free election that UNTAC sponsored in May 1993. Ninety 
     percent of Cambodia's 4.7 million eligible voters defied 
     death threats from guerrilla groups and went to the polls.
       Unfortunately, the election results have been subverted by 
     the continued rule of the Cambodian People's Party--the 
     Vietnamese-installed Communist government, which lost at the 
     ballot box. In addition, the Khmer Rouge--the guerrilla group 
     that butchered more than a million countrymen in the 1970s--
     have refused to disarm and demobilize. So it was predictable 
     that they would repeatedly break the ceasefire and keep up 
     their killing. The U.N. has spent nearly $2 billion, but 
     there is no peace in Cambodia.


                                somalia

       When civil war broke out in this African nation, the 
     resulting anarchy threatened 4.5 million Somalis--over half 
     the population--with severe malnutrition and related 
     diseases. U.N. Secretary General Boutros 

[[Page H 13795]]
     Boutros Ghali, the first African (and Arab) to hold the position, 
     argued eloquently for a U.N. peacekeeping mission to ensure 
     safe delivery of food and emergency supplies. The U.N. 
     Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) was deployed to Mogadishu, the 
     capital, in September 1992. It was quickly pinned down at the 
     airport by Somali militiamen and was unable to complete its 
     mission.
       A U.S. task force deployed in December secured the 
     Mogadishu area, getting supplies to the hungry and ill. After 
     the Americans left, the U.N. took over in May 1993 with 
     UNOSOM II. The $2-million-a-day operation turned the former 
     U.S. embassy complex into an 80-acre walled city boasting 
     air-conditioned housing and a golf course. When U.N. 
     officials ventured out of the compound, their ``taxis'' were 
     helicopters that cost $500,000 a week.
       The published commercial rate for Mogadishu-U.S. phone 
     calls was $4.91 a minute, but the ``special U.N. discount 
     rate'' was $8.41. Unauthorized personal calls totaled more 
     than $2 million, but the U.N. simply picked up the tab and 
     never asked the callers to pay.
       Meanwhile, the peacekeeping effort disintegrated, 
     particularly as warlord Mohammed Aidid harassed UNOSOM II 
     troops. As the civil war continued, Somalis starved. But U.N. 
     peacekeepers--on a food budget of $56 million a year--dined 
     on fruit from South America, beef from Australia from frozen 
     fish from New Zealand and the Netherlands.
       Thousands of yards of barbed wire arrived with no barbs; 
     hundreds of light fixtures to illuminate the streets abutting 
     the compound had no sockets for light bulbs. What procurement 
     didn't waste, pilferage often took care of. Peacekeeping 
     vehicles disappeared with regularity, and Egyptian U.N. 
     troops were suspected of large scale black-marketing of 
     minibuses.
       These losses, however, were eclipsed in a single night by 
     an enterprising thief who broke into a U.N. office in 
     Mogadishu and made off with $3.9 million in cash. The office 
     door was easy pickings: its lock could be jimmied with a 
     credit card. The money, stored in the bottom drawer of a 
     filing cabinet, had been easily visible to dozens of U.N. 
     employees.
       While the case has not been solved, one administrator was 
     dismissed and two others were disciplined. Last summer, 
     UNOSOM II itself was shut down, leaving Somalia to the same 
     clan warfare that existed when U.N. troops were first 
     deployed two years before.


                                 RWANDA

       Since achieving independence in 1962, Rwanda has erupted in 
     violence between the majority Hutu tribe and minority Tutsis. 
     The U.N. had a peacekeeping mission in that nation, but it 
     fled as the Hutus launched a new bloodbath in April 1994.
       Only 270 U.N. troops stayed behind, not enough to prevent 
     the butchery of at least 14 local Red Cross workers left 
     exposed by the peacekeepers' swift flight. The U.N. Security 
     Council dawdled as the dead piled up, and a daily horror of 
     shooting, stabbings and machete hackings. The Hutus were 
     finally driven out by a Tutsi rebel army in late summer 1994.
       Seven U.N. agencies and more than 100 international relief 
     agencies rushed back. With a budget of some $200 million, the 
     U.N. tried unsuccessfully to provide security over Hutu 
     refugee camps in Rwanda and aid to camps in neighboring 
     Zaire.
       The relief effort was soon corrupted when the U.N. let the 
     very murderers who'd massacred a half million people take 
     over the camps. Rather than seeking their arrest and 
     prosecution, the U.N. made deals with the Hutu thugs, who 
     parlayed U.N. food, drugs and other supplies into millions of 
     dollars on the black market.
       Earlier this year the U.N. began to pull out of the camps. 
     On April 22 at the Kibeho camp in Rwanda, the Tutsi-led 
     military opened fire on Hutu crowds. Some 2000 Hutus were 
     massacred.
       Where was the U.N.? Overwhelmed by the presence of nearly 
     2000 Tutsi soldiers, the 200 U.N. peacekeepers did nothing. A 
     U.N. spokesman told Reader's Digest, meekly, that the U.N. 
     was on the scene after the slaughter for cleanup and body 
     burial.
       With peacekeeping operations now costing over $3 billion a 
     year, reform is long overdue. Financial accountability can be 
     established only by limiting control by the Secretariat, 
     which routinely withholds information about peacekeeping 
     operations until the last minute--too late for the U.N.'s 
     budgetary committee to exercise oversight.
       In December 1993, for example, when the budget committee 
     was given one day to approve a $600-million budget that would 
     extend peacekeeping efforts into 1994, U.S. representative 
     Michael Michalski lodged an official protest: ``If U.S. 
     government employees approved a budget for a similar amount 
     with as little information as has been provided to the 
     committee, they would likely be thrown in jail.''
       More fundamentally, the U.N. needs to re-examine its whole 
     peacekeeping approach, for the experiment in nation building 
     has been bloody and full of failure. Lofty ideas to bring 
     peace everywhere in the world have run aground on reality: 
     member states with competing interests in warring 
     territories, the impossibility of lightly armed troops 
     keeping at bay belligerent enemies, and the folly of moving 
     into places without setting achievable goals.
       ``It has been a fundamental error to put U.N. peacekeepers 
     in place where there is no peace to keep,'' says Sen. Sam 
     Nunn (D., Ga.), ranking minority member of the Senate Armed 
     Services Committee. ``We've seen very vividly that the U.N. 
     is not equipped, organized or financed to intervene and fight 
     wars.''
                                                                    ____


                  [From the Paris Match, Oct. 5, 1995]

                 Our Pilots are Prisoners of the Serbs

                      (Translated by David Skelly)

       Two tiny points in an incandescent sky. These images have 
     been holding us in cruel suspense for nearly a month. The two 
     points are two French officers, a captain pilot and a 
     lieutenant navigator, shot down on August 30 in their Mirage 
     2000-K2, almost directly above Pale, the capital of the 
     Bosnian Serbs, during the first NATO raid. Three exfiltration 
     missions according to the CSAR (combat, search and rescue 
     procedure), which had succeeded in rescuing Captain O'Grady, 
     failed. The Serbs have confirmed that they are holding two 
     men alive, but no one, not even the Red Cross envoys has 
     actually seen them. These photos reached us from Pale. Here 
     are the faces of the two prisoners whom France has been 
     anxiously waiting to see. The first scenes of their 
     captivity.
       Peasants turned the lieutenant over to the `special forces 
     commandos'.
       Being helped to walk by two Serbs from their special 
     forces, Lieutenant Jose Souvignet seems to be suffering from 
     a leg wound. Peasants turned the two airmen over to the 
     ``specijali,'' who have been hiding them from the whole world 
     ever since.
       The captain, Frederique Chiffot, snarls at his guards.
       Contrary to what happened with the American pilot, ours 
     were brought down in broad daylight, above a mountain in an 
     area with a high density of Serbian soldiers. Militiamen in 
     the city of Pale were able to be there when they came down, 
     and so it was impossible for the Frenchmen to escape. As soon 
     as they hit ground they were captured and stripped of their 
     warning, location, and survival equipment. Since these unique 
     photos were taken, probably very shortly after their capture 
     (in the foreground, a militiaman is still holding their 
     helmets), they have probably been moved from their place of 
     captivity, making it very difficult to exfiltrate them.
       According to rare Serbian information, it was thought that 
     only Lieutenant Jose Souvignet had a leg wound. But here, 
     Captain Frederique Chiffot, grimacing at the camera, also 
     seems to be supported by members of the militia.
       Three attempts already: NATO is doing everything possible 
     to free them.
       From September 5th to the 8th, three times over, NATO 
     commandos have flown off in search of the two Frenchmen. 
     These very complicated missions make use of airplanes and 
     helicopters which have taken off from different bases, from 
     Italian territory or the aircraft carrier ``Theodore 
     Roosevelt.'' On board this ship, the Admiral Smith's general 
     staff is coordinating, second by second, the delicate 
     precision engineering of this warriors' ballet. The first 
     attempt was completely American, but the weather was not on 
     our side. The second and third attempts were French and 
     American. Only the latter enabled the commandos to set down 
     on a meadow near Pale. In vain. They had to withdraw under 
     fire from the Serbs before having found the prisoners. When 
     they were taken back up in the helicopter, two had been 
     wounded.
       In the control room of the ``Theodore Roosevelt'' 
     operations are being followed in real time. It was in an 
     identical Mirage 2000 that the two pilots were brought down. 
     Photos of the debris from the crash were widely disseminated 
     in the press by the Serbs.

                          ____________________