[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 192 (Tuesday, December 5, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H13978-H13986]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN THE BOSNIAN WAR

  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 as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, you will notice that the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon] and I are not in tuxedos. A lot of the 
membership from both sides of the aisle are down at the White House 
tonight in tuxes at the Christmas party.
  The last time I was at a Christmas party was 3 years ago tomorrow 
night. George Bush's personal Pearl Harbor was that December 7 
Christmas party, and I touched him for the first time in his 
Presidency, put my hands on his shoulders and I said, ``Mr. President, 
I'm going to run for President in 1996 for one reason, to avenge you, a 
58-combat-mission Naval carrier attack pilot being defeated by a triple 
avoider of serving his country who let three high school kids from Hot 
Springs and Fayetteville go in his place.''
  The reason I asked you to stay for a second in the well, Curt, you 
are a subcommittee chairman under Chairman Floyd Spence of National 
Security. It used to be Armed Services--it still is in the Senate--
Committee on Armed Services. There are five of us. We did away with 
Oversight.
  I nicknamed us the Marshals. You can pick a Napoleonic field marshal 
image with batons, or I prefer the Old West being a westerner. In 
Pennsylvania you have sheriffs still, do you not?
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Yes.
  Mr. DORNAN. So we are his 5 marshals. His deputies. So the two of us 
on the floor means we have 40 percent of the subcommittee chairmen on 
the House.
  I just came from a CAT meeting. That is one of these new unofficial 
groups that is supposed to be the toughest tigers, panthers, leopards 
on the hill, Conservative Action Team, CAT. They do not know what to do 
over Bosnia.
  I am putting you on the spot because you know I respect you. I think 
you are a Russian expert. Nobody tracked the Kremlin harder than you 
did when the bad guys were in power, and now that the bad guys are 
still all over the place with different titles and we have a Communist 
taking over the Secretary-Generalship of NATO, fought to keep Spain out 
of NATO, you described to me, because I am on your R&D subcommittee, 
you described to me before I had to leave to go to a 2-hour 
intelligence briefing on Bosnia and Chechnya, that it was a nightmare 
beyond description, the nuclear waste problem all across Russia and 
Siberia.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DORNAN. I will. I want to hear a little bit more about it in a 
dialog.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. The problem is so extensive that the 
security forces of Russia went into the headquarters of this Norwegian 
nongovernment organization, Ballona, which was about ready to release a 
report, confiscated all of their computers, all of their software, all 
of their data and their photographs. They were able to save a 
significant portion of that which we will release tomorrow at 12:30 
which in fact show photographs of spent nuclear fuel that have been 
exposed in the outdoors for 30 years, of nuclear waste on land that is 
sitting with no protection.
  The situation is so severe in the area of the Northern Fleet up in 
the area of Murmansk and the ports where the Northern Fleet is 
headquartered--Severodmorsk is the other port--that Dr. Yablokov and 
the Yablokov Commission report estimated that perhaps as much as 10 
million curies of radioactive nuclear waste is currently being stored 
because the Russians have no capacity to safely dispose of it.
  By comparison, Three Mile Island at its worst only gave off a few 
curies, relatively speaking, to the Russian threat that is there. So 
there is a terrible problem as the Russians downsize their military, as 
there are nuclear-powered submarines that are being decommissioned. 
They do not have any way to deal with this.

                              {time}  1845

  The point that we have to understand is, as we look at those nuclear 
weapons that are still in Russia, and we are concerned about the 
command and control of those nuclear weapons, certainly when you look 
at the way they are treating the waste gives you some indication that 
there are serious problems in the way that Russia deals with its 
nuclear power as well as its nuclear waste, and, as you know, I say to 
the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan], and as a member of our 
subcommittee, we have been extensively looking at Russian command and 
control.
  In January of next year, our subcommittee will have a hearing that 
will be the conclusion of a 4-month investigation where we have 
interviewed over 40 witnesses on the issue of intelligence gathered and 
provided to Congress on command and control of the Russian nuclear 
arsenal. Some of the results of those interviews are startling in terms 
of the lack of security and the concerns that many of us had which now, 
in fact, may be verified that Russia does not have adequate control and 
that perhaps the potential for an accidental or a rogue launch, or even 
worse, a sale of one of those systems to a rogue nation is, in fact, 
something we have to look at in a serious vein. That hearing we will 
hold in January will even consist of people who have worked in the 
administration.
  Mr. DORNAN. Hearing under which subcommittee?
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. R&D subcommittee, which Chairman Spence 
asked me to chair, took testimony from at least three people whose 
stories have been corroborated that perhaps there has been some dumbing 
down of intelligence reports relative to Russian command and control. 
So the purpose of the hearing tomorrow is not to just look at the 
environmental problems of Russia and to work with those good people 
like Dr. Yablokov, who are not afraid to stand up and speak the truth, 
but also to point up the fact that we in this country who want improved 
long-term relations with the Russians, and I certainly do as chairman 
of the Russian-American energy caucus and as a member of the 
environmental caucus that works with Russian duma member Nikolai 
Veronsov on environmental issues, that we must never oversee the way 
that Russia deals with the most potent force that they have, and that 
is their nuclear arsenal. Dr. Yablokov, who is in our country right now 
to be present at the press conference and hearing tomorrow is the prime 
person in all of Russia who has been willing to stand up and question 
the leadership.

  Just last week I read the FIBITS reports, as I do everyday, on 
Russia.
  Mr. DORNAN. Flesh out that acronym.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. That is the foreign intelligence reports 
that we get summarizing all the foreign media.
  Mr. DORNAN. Broadcast from all around the world in English.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. There were three specific articles from 
Russia, all three quoted Dr. Yablokov by name. One of them was 
highlighting the fact Dr. Yablokov has stated on the record that Russia 
has as much as 100,000 tons of chemical weapons despite the fact the 
military leadership only says they have 40,000 tons. Dr. Yablokov has 
come out publicly in Moscow and said that cannot be correct. Dr. 
Yablokov has also come out and publicly criticized the leadership over 
the small nuclear weapons that Russia, in fact, has accessible to it. 
So he is not afraid to speak his mind. He is someone for whom I have 
the highest respect. He is with us. He will be with us tomorrow at the 
hearing. He will be very candid and tell us what he feels are the 
problems of his country.
  But I also expect him to be very candid about problems we, in fact, 
have in 

[[Page H 13979]]
our country. We are not totally without blame. In fact, part of our 
hearing tomorrow, I expect, will focus on the 30,000 barrels of nuclear 
waste that were dumped off the San Francisco coast a few years ago and 
what we are doing to monitor that. We, in this country, have been very 
critical of the Russians because of their lack of control over the 
Komsmolensk when it went down off of Norway, yet we have not been 
willing to discuss openly the fact that we have two nuclear subs on the 
bottom of the ocean floor, the Thresher and Scorpion.
  We are saying we must join together to understand the problems 
created through the use of nuclear technology. This will be a first 
step tomorrow. I am looking forward to having the gentleman whose 
special order I am infringing on to be there, as he so eloquently is on 
all of our national security issues, to help us understand what is 
happening in the former Soviet states as relates to these and other 
issues involving nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
  Mr. DORNAN. For letting you get in those extra words, I wanted 
everyone in the million people watching C-SPAN, not only our 
distinguished Speaker pro tempore in the chair, to know that, but I 
wanted to read you something. This is the price you are going to have 
to pay to bounce this off you, if you knew about this particular 
atrocity: Bosnian Serbs swept into Moslem and Croat villages, 3,800 of 
them, 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.

  To me, the sickest thing in the world is not only murdering an 
innocent person in cold blood, but torturing them for hours knowing you 
are going to kill them anyway. Girls as young as six were raped 
repeatedly. I am reading from Readers Digest, the October issue. In one 
case, three Moslem girls were chained to a fence, raped by Serbian 
soldiers for 3 days, then drenched with gasoline and set on fire.
  Now, for all of my Serbian-American friends, and I have plenty, I 
know you cringe at the sound of these atrocities, and I know because 
you have got them in Pennsylvania as I do in California, great 
Americans of Serbian heritage, and they say, well, what about the 
atrocities committed following the battle of Kovoso, June 28, 1389, 606 
years and 5 months ago. Yes, the Ottoman Turks committed atrocity after 
atrocity. Then the Serbs began to give as good as they were taking it, 
and then it became a three-way split with Catholic Croatians fighting 
orthodox Serbs, back and forth, Austria, the province of Styria, 
holding the line, look at the big army in Groz, in Austria, it shows 
there, 400 or 500, half a millennium of defending Christendom from 
Islamic warriors coming up from Istanbul.
  However, this is the 20th century, and no matter 600 years of 
suppression and persecution and then Tito's crimes, you do not do that 
to women and children. You do not target innocent people, and although, 
and this is the best ballpark figure until I am disabused of this, 
although five percent of the atrocities are committed by Moslems, they 
can quibble 4, 3, let us just say 5, and 10 percent by Coatians, they 
can quibble it down to 8, 9, 85 percent is Serbian atrocities. And they 
now are going to get to keep maybe half of the 3,800 villages where 
they destroyed the minaret and destroyed every shred of culture, town 
halls, anything that would be a memory draw to bring people back when 
the killing was over.

  We are putting our young men and women into that, and I will tell 
you, Mr. Speaker, from this chairman, if CAT, the conservative action 
team, cannot figure out what to do, then I want everybody within the 
sound of my voice, I am telling you for the first time, I got my 50 
signatures today to have a conference tomorrow. I, Bob Dornan, 
circulated the letter on this floor those last 5 votes. I got 64 
signatures. All I needed, 50, under Republican rules, no Democrats, 
just Republicans, tomorrow to discuss Bosnia. The feeling I am getting 
around here, we are going to do nothing. We have already voted twice. 
We had a vote 243 to 171, we are not doing anything. The freshmen are 
telling me we are not in yet. Let us have 1 more vote tomorrow while 
only the enabling advanced team is in. I hate to put you on the spot. 
Do not you think, in the midst of this budget talk, the impending 
second train crash on December 15, possibly that we should talk Bosnia 
tomorrow for at least an hour?
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield further, 
absolutely. As a matter of fact, as he knows, last week, I believe it 
was on Monday or Tuesday, I did a 45-minute special order on Bosnia 
where I expressed my outrage at portions of the President's speech. The 
gentleman from California just acknowledged the atrocities that have 
occurred against human beings, and what offended me most was when 
President Clinton went before the American people and made the case of 
how kids and women have been abused and tortured in ethnic cleansing.
  In a bipartisan manner on this House floor, we have been saying that 
for 3 years, and in bipartisan votes on three separate occasions this 
body and the other body voted to have the administration lift the arms 
embargo so that there at least would be a leveling of the playing field 
so people could defend themselves. All of those three times over the 
past 3 years, the administration failed to listen to us.
  But now, all of a sudden, they want to put American sons and 
daughters in between these warring factions. I would say to my 
colleague from California, as he knows, I have developed legislation 
which I will be back on the House floor tomorrow to present to this 
body which, in fact, will call for a vote.
  Mr. DORNAN. Good.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. As you know, the President, I voted with 
my colleague from California on three occasions to say we do not want 
ground troops in Bosnia; unfortunately, again, the President is not 
listening. He has told the American people it is going to be between 
20,000 and 25,000. They are not the numbers. The numbers are 32,000 
ground troops, with about 20,000 support troops, for a total of 
somewhere over 50,000 American kids.

  Here we are sending 50,000 American kids into a region that borders 
Germany where they are sending 4,000 Germans. To me, it is not just 
unfair, it is outrageous.
  Mr. DORNAN. Are you going to the Christmas party?
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. No.
  Mr. DORNAN. My I publicly make a presentation of a gift to you? As I 
come down to the well to give it to you, do you feel any problem with 
being told you are not supporting the troops, the First Armored 
Division, Old Ironsides, if you somehow or other vote to stop them from 
going there?
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will further yield, I 
will tell you what I said to Secretary Perry in very emphatic words in 
our hearing last week. I said, ``Mr. Secretary,'' he asked me what do 
we tell the troops if this Congress were to vote against the 
President's policy, and I said, ``Mr. Secretary, let me say this to 
you, you go back and tell those troops that this Congress and our 
national security committee supports those troops with every ounce of 
energy in our bodies to the core and bone of our bodies.'' In fact, if 
I have my way, we will have a vote this week, as my good friend and 
colleague knows, and that vote will be on having this Congress go on 
record to say that we will give the theater command officer in Bosnia 
with the President sending our troops there, General Joulwan, every 
resource, piece of equipment and support that he feels he needs to 
protect our troops. Secretary Perry said, ``We do not need that. I will 
do that.'' I said to the Secretary we were told that three years ago, 
and because the Secretary of Defense said the climate was not right, 
politically, in Washington, he denied the support that was requested of 
him by the commanding officer in charge of the Somalia theater that led 
to not only the deaths of 18, actually 19, young Americans, but had 
their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. So we are going 
to support the troops, and we are going to support them most 
emphatically, because we are not going to let this administration 
repeat Somalia.
  Mr. DORNAN. Let me tell the audience here something, and the Speaker, 
because foreign affairs went first, and now named international 
relations, they got most of the coverage that 

[[Page H 13980]]
night on C-SPAN. We went in the afternoon. You sit to my immediate 
left, to the senior position, going up toward Floyd Spencer, our great 
chairman, and they wired the mikes all the way down to your mike for C-
SPAN. Remember, I said, I am not using my mike. I want to use your 
mike. I want the C-SPAN cameras to hear my voice clearly, the sound on 
tape. They came up to me afterward and heard me lean over to you, when 
you asked the question of Christopher, the Secretary of State, what 
about Somalia, and I leaned to you, and I said, ``We learned our lesson 
in Somalia,'' half a second later Christopher said, ``We learned our 
lessons in Somalia.'' I went, ``Oh, my gosh, yes, over the dead bodies 
of 19 men.''
  What have we learned in Vietnam, for God's sake? What have we learned 
in Grenada, Panama; what did we learn in every single conflict? We are 
always learning from the immediate last prior struggle. We learned the 
U.N. command structure is flawed.
  What I am going to do with this patch of Old Ironsides is, on my 
blazer, it looks funny on a suit, I am going to make everybody else pay 
me three bucks, yours is free, because it is a House floor 
presentation.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I will pay you.
  Mr. DORNAN. No; no.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Remember the gift ban.
  Mr. DORNAN. You pay me for the cloisonne, $6. I am going to get a 
little cloisonne pins, regimental pins they wear up here for the First 
Armored Division. On my blazers, it looks good on a blue blazer with 
gray slacks, I am going to sew this on my blazers for the next 11 
months. Nobody is going to tell Bob Dornan I do not support the troops. 
You and I are going to probably take a codel over there after New 
Year's, maybe New Year's Day. We can arrive there as Clinton did in 
Moscow in 1969, New Year's, to welcome in 1970. We are going to go over 
there and meet these guys and tell them, ``Gentlemen,'' and they are 
men and women; we call them kids because we love the young guys and 
gals. They are men and women.
  Did you see this picture in the weekend papers of Clinton leading the 
troops in Germany? Do you know what he had to do to get this picture? 
The most offensive picture, even worse than the whole Joint Chiefs of 
Staff and our late pal Les Aspin on the stage at Fort McNair, to abuse 
Sam Nunn's law, and Ike Skelton and us on homosexuals in the military, 
to twist it into ``Don't ask, don't tell,'' a confusing policy designed 
to lose in the courts; he, worse than that, Fort McNair, July 19, 1993, 
was May 4, ending Operation.
  Hope, Restore Hope, in Somalia, end of George Bush's operation, only 
three men killed in action on patrol, 27 more to go, 19 on the third, 
fourth and sixth of October, he lined up 30 Marines, including about 8 
lady Marines, lined abreast in his new blue suit, he marched down the 
lawn of the White House 50 feet or more to a prepositioned mike.

                              {time}  1900

  You know how he got this one? He meets with the division commander of 
the 1st Armored and all the officer corps division level of Old 
Ironsides, and he says, using infantry Fort Benning, GA words, 
gentleman, would you follow me for a second? And he turns his back on 
them for a second and says follow me, and walks down this driveway at 
their command headquarters in Germany.
  Here is one of the White House people that screwed up the Waco 
hearings, the gentleman from Massachusetts, Peter Blute, just 
recognized him, from twisting all the Waco joint hearings here in the 
early summer; he starts walking down, he gets that look with his chin 
in the air, flexes his jaw muscles, and poses just like he did in 1993. 
It is December, and I nominate this as the most offensive photo 
opportunity using our military men and women that I have seen this 
year. That is the worst staged thing I have seen. But he does not say 
follow me all the way to Bosnia, because he is on his way home to be at 
the Kennedy Center last night. He says follow me down this driveway to 
the camera, thank you for the photo op, and enjoy your Christmas in the 
snow of Tuzla, 5 kilometers from the biggest chlorine plant in all of 
the 8 provinces of former Yugoslavia that a Green Beret who is over 
there helping the Muslims told me, and nobody has contradicted it, one 
bomb or terrorist attack on that chlorine plant and poison gas starts 
down the valley to Tuzla, and it can kill everybody in town and every 
American man and woman in the whole area. I hope to God we are going to 
secure that plant.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield, I just want 
to add, I agree, there is the worst administration photo op I have 
seen. It offends me, not just a photo op like that, and I share my 
colleague's feelings about that, but that we would in a case of having 
our troops deployed overseas ever deny adequate backup and support as 
requested by the on-scene commander.
  In the 9 years I have been here, that has only happened one time, and 
that was in Somalia. We in the Congress did not find out about it until 
after it was over. That led to the resignation of Les Aspin, who was a 
good friend of both of ours. That is never going to happen again. As I 
said to Secretary Perry and Christopher and General Shalikashvili, this 
President, through his chain of command, has put General Joulwan in 
charge of that theater of operations.

  Mr. DORNAN. We helped to make that happen. It is under NATO because 
of us.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Whatever General Joulwan wants, this 
Congress and this administration better give it to him. And we will be 
watching every request that comes over from General Joulwan, who has 
been given the responsibility to protect our troops and give them the 
resources we need. And this Congress, and I know the gentleman shares 
my feelings as chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Personnel and 
perhaps no one speaks more eloquently for our men and women in the 
military than the gentleman, and with the experience he has had and 
with the background he has had, he is the perfect chairman of that 
subcommittee, but that we will make sure that we will not have a repeat 
of Somalia in this operation, even though the overwhelming majority of 
our colleagues disagree with sending ground troops there in the first 
place.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, just one thing, before the chairman goes, 
infringing on his time again, because I have always found that a 
dialogue is more interesting to watch only C-SPAN than a monologue, and 
I am going to give them one hell of a monologue here in a minute, the 
gentleman and I both know one of the biggest misconceptions, although 
the American people are beginning to understand if you look at the 
polling data, that we are expending massive treasury in that whole 
Balkans area. I am trying to tell people if you want to get down the 
debate, think of it in couplets. Sealift, 95 percent ours, and airlift, 
95 percent United States of America taxpayers. Sea power, the Adriatic. 
You notice that Pat Schroeder, bless her heart, finally starts asking 
good questions after she announced her retirement. I whispered to the 
gentleman they will not answer this question, and they did not. We have 
the 6th fleet in the Med. We always have people up there. It is 
steaming longer, they are costing more money at sea. The minute your 
put a carrier battle group out there, that is another 6,000 men on top 
of everything else.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Easy 6,000, probably closer to 7,000. How 
about air strikes that we provided?
  Mr. DORNAN. That is next. Sealift, airlift, sea power, air power. 
Close air support. I was at Aviano August 30. I am told again that the 
two French pilots, Frederique and Jose, are probably beaten to death, 
murdered, and they were known prisoners. I held up their pictures on 
the floor here the other day. Captain Chiffot and Lieutenant Jose 
Savignon.
  These two pilots, this is day 90 they are missing in action. If these 
were American pilots, particularly if one was a woman, that is the way 
Americans respond to a woman in trouble, Clinton would not be marching 
at this photo op in front of the 1st Armored. He would not be doing it 
if those were American pilots.
  Well, what are these Frenchmen, allies of ours or not? They were 
flying under our command or control, our AWACS, our airborne control 
centers, our combat control out of Aviano. 

[[Page H 13981]]
They took off from Villaparte, maybe 10 more air minutes to fly over 
Aviano, and they are gone. They are lost. They disappeared. And the war 
criminals know where they are, because I have got all their faces 
picteled out, so the Serbs turned over the pictures to Perry Match. So 
that is the first quadrant of it. Sea power, air power, sea lift, air 
lift.
  Now, food. What are we? 80 percent? 70 percent? 90 again? Fuel, what 
are we? 70, 80, 890 percent, supplied and transported there?
  Now down to hospitals. I told you we are going to go back to Zagreb. 
I hope to God there is never a person in there as badly wounded as Bob 
Dole was just a few kilometers across the Adriatic in mid-Italy. I hope 
we do not fill up the hospital in Zagreb. We have most of the hospital 
supplies.

  The whole other range of logistics. You know I am on my 7th year that 
Newt extended me on Intelligence. We are 95 percent or more of the 
intelligence. We have the no-longer-secret unmanned aerial vehicles, 
that is under my other subcommittee chairmanship, Technical and 
Tactical Intelligence. Our satellite architecture, which you are an 
expert on, that is ours.
  I mean air power, sea power, sealift, airlift, fuel, food, logistics. 
Here is the other one. The war will spread. Certainly not across the 
Adriatic. The 6th Fleet is there. Will it go south into Greece? No, 
because we have got 500 men and women in Macedonia, a blocking action. 
What are they? Chopped liver? We have men on the ground hemming them 
in.
  They are not going to blow through Hungary. Tom Lantos will stop that 
and take over a CO-DEL and physically stand on the line to stop that. 
What are they going to do, charge into Romania and Bulgaria? They are 
not going to come through Croatia. They got their clock cleaned in the 
whole Krajina area, the old former Slavonia. Slovenia is not going to 
let them come up there. They are begging to come into NATO. More than 
NATO, they want to be a United States ally, just like Albania.
  Where are they going? Nowhere. In other words, we are doing 
everything except putting our men and women on the ground in the 
toughest quadrant around Tuzla in harm's way. I think that I as a 
Member feel blackmailed, Curt, that when NATO says to me, and Senator 
McCain repeated it this weekend, that NATO said they would not go 
without us.
  Vice President Gore said on the show, the expanded Nightline, 
Viewpoint, with Ted Koppel, well, look, we had to go over there in 
World War I. My dad was wounded three times. We had to go in World War 
II.
  Curt, do you like to go in European museums? Have you ever seen so 
much culture in your life, from Greece to the British Parliament? These 
people we are told they are incapable of not slitting one another's 
throats unless they have Americans standing between them. We are going 
to end this century in Sarajevo, well, the French get that, Sarajevo or 
Tuzla, the way we began it in Sarajevo.
  It is offensive to be blackmailed and be told by intelligent 
Europeans, a bigger population than we have, bigger gross domestic or 
area product than we have, to be told unless you are, there, we are not 
going, and the raping of little 6-year-old girls can continue. We want 
you in the trenches.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. If the gentleman will yield on that 
point, that was the second major problem I had with President Clinton's 
speech. He said that those who oppose his policy are isolationists.
  Nothing could be further from the truth. He knows that this Congress 
has gone on record three times saying to lift the arms embargo over the 
past three years. He knows that since August this Congress has gone on 
record three times. The most recent vote garnered 315 in favor, 
Democrats and Republicans alike, saying do not send ground troops in.
  This Congress has said America should not be asked to do it all 
alone. When you add up the amount of troops that you have just 
outlined, and you total in the ground troops, we are talking in excess 
of 50,000 American troops, costing the taxpayers between $2 and $3 
billion, that we are going to incur for this Bosnian operation.
  The question that made me so upset as I thought through this whole 
situation, was why are the Germans only putting in 4,000 and why does 
the Bundestag have to approve that before they can go? Why are the 
Italians putting in 2,100, and why does the Italian parliament have to 
approve that before those 2,100 can go? Why are the Scandinavians only 
putting in a collective total of 2,000, and certain of the Scandinavian 
countries have said we will come, but you have to pay for our travel, 
our food and our lodging?
  Why are these other countries in Europe putting all of these 
conditions and providing so few troops, when America is putting again 
50,000 young American sons and daughters on the line. And the French, 
who I will admit are putting 7,500 in, are the same French that denied 
us access to their air space when we wanted to go down to Libya to pay 
Quadafi back for the terrorism he caused. The same people we are now 
joining with, because they feel it is important for America to be 
there, denied us that air space.
  Let me just say that is what we are concerned about. And this 
President, as he usually does, twists that around and convolutes it to 
say we are isolationists who do not care about human rights abuses. It 
is outrageous.
  The real mistake here was when this President 3 years ago opened his 
mouth and said, ``If need be, I will put American ground troops on the 
ground for a peace agreement.'' Long before the negotiations began we 
all knew that was a given. That is what we all found so offensive, that 
we never had a chance to play a role in this process, because the 
President committed the ground troops long before any leader in the 
Balkans decided they were going to come to terms for a peace agreement.
  Unfortunatley, young kids are going to lose their lives over that. 
That is why you and I, as chairman of appropriate defense 
subcommittees, have got to use every ounce of energy in our body to 
protect those kids. And we will do that.
  Mr. DORNAN. You know where the Germans are going? Croatia. There is 
no fighting in Croatia now around Zagreb. They will live in Croatian 
military barracks and hard facilities because of their cozy 
relationship during the Second World War. I am not going to bring up 
the ghost of the Istasa, the Coatian gestapo. They had their sins, so 
did the Serbs under Tito. The Muslims were importing terrorism early 
on, just like World War I, fiddling around with the terrorist groups in 
the Middle East. Every side there has plenty of guilt.
  But this is the German relationship. The German Embassy is in Zegreb, 
Croatia, is the biggest one here. Here may be the dreaded gray hand 
behind all of this, the European Economic Community. The EEC is 
interested in one thing, bigger import into the United States then we 
export to Europe. More Volkswagens and Mercedes and Volvos coming in 
here than we are putting out there. They see this area as a trade area.
  One thing I have said for 3 years, 4 years, I told Bush, the 
Europeans are dragging their feet and demanding we put our people in 
danger on the ground because they simply do not want a Muslim State in 
the European area west of the Ural Mountains. They do not want it. So 
now that we are down to the place divided up, half of the villages 
where atrocities took place going the other way, Clinton said last week 
something that made my blood curdled again.
  He said ``We have fought all these wars.'' Not we. He wasn't there 
when this country called him. And it is not that he has to say you 
folks and get in a Ross Perot problem. All he has to say is ``America 
has fought these wars.''

  A lot of people are calling my office and saying ``Are you going to 
impeach him, Congressman Dornan,'' because I read this on the floor? 
This is an article from Mr. Phil Merrill, in the Wall Street Journal, 
November 14, it seems like a long time ago, 22 days ago, ``Bosnia, we 
shouldn't go,'' Phillip Merrill, the former Assistant Secretary General 
of NATO.
  The new Secretary General of NATO is a former Spanish communist who 
fought to keep Spain out of NATO. Suddenly he has been picked to be the 
head of NATO, and he is Clinton's candidate. I read this on the floor 3 
weeks ago. These are former Deputy Secretary General Phillip Merrill's 
words.
  ``It is very doubtful that the Balkans can sustain a multi-ethnic 
society of 

[[Page H 13982]]
the kind envisioned by Clinton. The U.S. has no strategic stake in this 
fight and cannot and should not be the military arbiter. Our policy 
seems to be,'' and I wish Mr. Speaker, Americans would memorize this, 
``to simultaneously threaten the Serbs from the air. The Aviano-
Villaparte-Brindisi air threat is still there. You do something wrong, 
we tear you up from the air.''
  Two: Now we are going to act as peacekeepers on the ground.
  Three, we are going to train the Croatian Army. We have been doing 
that. I witnessed it in August. We are going to arm the Bosnian 
military.
  When Ted Koppel on the aforementioned Friday or Thursday show last 
week said ``how are we going to do that, Mr. Vice President,'' he 
seemed very uncomfortable, Mr. Gore, and he said ``Well, with third 
parties.'' And he said ``Well, who would those be?'' And there was this 
long uncomfortable pause, and he said contractors.
  Contractors. Like Vernell? Are we going back to RMKBRW, the big huge 
conglomerate that LBJ built out of Texas and Idaho and other firms, to 
put in 20 10,000 foot runway bases and a couple of parallel 13,000 
runway bases at Bien Hoa and Cam Ranh Bay so he could come in in a 747 
to visit with the troops?

                              {time}  1915

  Mr. Speaker, I am hearing all of the Vietnam doublespeak, all the 
McNamara crazy rationalizations, and this time one of my staffers said 
to me, Bob Dornan, isn't this your dream when you were 31 years old, 
after the Tonkin Gulf, that you wished you were in Congress as a 
forceful articulate voice to stop men dying? You thought it would be a 
couple thousand, turned out to be 58,000 plus, and 8 women engraved on 
that wall down there, and friends of mine, like David Hrdlicka left 
alive behind in Laos, Charlie Shelton, Eugene Deburen.
  No. I am here now, and I want to see if I cannot do what I thought I 
could do as a young man if I had only come to the Congress, which was 
10 years ahead of the curve in those days.
  So after we threaten the Serbs from the air, act as peacekeepers on 
the ground in the toughest quadrant of all, around Tuzla, train the 
Croatian army, arm the Bosnian military, then we are going to make sure 
that the Dayton peace negotiations are implemented, and then we are not 
going to go out of our way to seek out or hunt down, like a good tough 
Simon Wiesenthal, these people that sanctioned the raping of children 
and the burning alive of women who had been desecrated, hanging on a 
fence for days. No, we will not hunt them down, and we are going to try 
not to bump into them, but if we find them in the room with us, we will 
arrest them, these 53 Serbian and 3 Croatian war criminals.
  Now, as Mr. Merrell continued, any one of these policies is 
defensible. Taken together they are incoherent. As flareups occur, 
these inherently conflicting policies will leave us powerless in the 
end to act effectively, even if we do not have any casualties, which I 
pray to God we will not. I do not want one first armored division, Old 
Ironsides, same name as that great naval ship of the line that still is 
a commissioned naval fighting vehicle up there in Boston Harbor that 
they take out and turn around every six months so the sun bakes both 
sides equally. That Old Ironsides is where this armored division--
actually, it is Patton's tank battalion from World War I, that my dad 
tried to get into because he was an automobile man from New York City 
and did not make it. This is the outgrowth. Our very first armored 
division commissioned before World War II grew out of the prophetic 
statements of General George S. Patton of what would happen in the next 
war with armor.
  Now, here is the way Merrell closed, and I read it on the floor, so a 
lot of people across America say Bob Dornan is the man to carry the 
articles of impeachment against Clinton. I read these words of 
Ambassador Phillip Merrell. To endorse the President's policy comes 
close to an act of murder of young Americans, who have sworn allegiance 
to our country but who will serve and die under circumstances that will 
neither advance U.S. interests nor the cause of freedom.
  Certainly not if we are going to fail to arrest the war criminals 
guilty of astrocities and invite the big kahuna war criminal Milosevic 
to Dayton.
  When the American body bags start coming home, it will be a political 
disaster for those who did not oppose sending troops to Bosnia. What 
does that mean; that Senator Bob Dole, who at this point in time has a 
percentage lock on the Republican nomination to challenge Clinton, does 
it mean that Clinton is doomed; that he will add to the two Democratic 
Presidents who have gotten a second consecutive term since Andy 
Jackson, when he got his second term in the election of 1832? Only 
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have gotten a second consecutive term, so 
that means Clinton does not get a second term? Maybe he can make a 
comeback in the year 2000 like Grover Cleveland, another Democrat. 
Separated terms.
  Does that mean that Dole does not win? What does it mean; that Ross 
Perot is going to be emboldened; that United We Stand America will grow 
into the major party and eclipse the other two; because hearing the 
haunting twang of Alabama's George Wallace, there is not a dime's worth 
of difference between the two of them; that the Senate votes a 
resolution to support and the House goes impotent and silent, neutered, 
we do not do anything?
  He says should President Clinton send American troops into Bosnia 
without congressional approval, he should be impeached. The time to 
face the choice is now, before we enter this war and before American 
blood is shed.
  If he sends them in without a congressional approval, which the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon, Chairman Weldon, just said the 
French have to do and the Germans have to do--by the way, the most 
foreign ownership of property in this country is British. The mother 
country. It makes some sense. Guess who is right up there with the 
Japanese. I think they own more property. The Netherlands. The Dutch. 
Holland. The Netherlands, where in the Hague, in their capital, Richard 
Goldstone, the distinguished justice of South Africa, is conducting the 
war crimes tribunal.

  The Netherlands are sending 180 troops only, and their parliament 
will have to approve their going. No aircraft will be flying in harm's 
way over the SAM sites along the Danube, being tracked by radar sites 
from inside Melosevic's Serbia proper.
  Here is the map, Mr. Speaker. It is not classified. I swear in the 
next Congress, if we get a freshman class as big and as aggressive as 
this, I will get you to sign on a letter for me, Mr. Speaker, where we 
can have, within reason, with tightly written rules, a Congress man or 
woman on this floor saying I would like the camera to come in, with 
your best lenses, and I will hold it steady, we would have it on a 
tripod, and come in and cover this map frame-to-frame on the camera, 
like I used to do on my Emmy award winning television show 27 years 
ago.
  Here is the footprint of the Dayton line. They are going to get the 
Croatians to give back this huge chunk of yellow territory. This is 
Croatia, the beige, and this big chunk of yellow was where the 
Croatians, with American training, cleaned the clock of the Serbians 
along the Krajina area.
  Krajina is Serb-Croat language for border. That is all it means, the 
borders. The fighting of the vicious border line between the vicious 
Ottoman empire, the corrupt killers, and the equal killing vengeance 
forces developed from Austria all along this area. Hungarian knights. 
Croatian knights. Remember, we got our neckties from Croatia. When they 
rode with Napoleon, he loved it that they put their cravats on their 
lances and their scarves from their women around their wrists or their 
throats. And that was the beginning of neckties, Croatian forces 
fighting with Napoleon.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, here, what used to look like a country that was 
shaped like an arrowhead, the penetration of the Islamic Ottoman 
arrowhead into the belly of Europe, an arrowhead shape, it now looks 
like a very sick amoeba with some big tumors on it from the Bihac 
pocket all the way down past beautiful Dubrovnik, which I visited in 
1972 and thought it was a dream village, and then the Serbs pounded the 
blazes out of it and burned down monasteries that were 500 and 
600 years old, and here they had survived both the world wars of this 
period.

[[Page H 13983]]


  Here is Montenegro. I met with one of the freedom fighters from there 
3 weeks ago. They want to break away from Serbia. Here is the blown-up 
map of the city, with neighborhoods cut in two, just like Clinton 
visited Belfast for the first time. I have been there nine times. Shot 
in the back with a rubber bullet the week after Bloody Sunday in 
February 1972. I have walked along the Shankle. I have been in Derry. 
Not Londonderry, but Derry. I understand what it is like when a 
neighborhood builds corrugated steel walls and people hate each other 
from apartment building to building.
  There are 100,000 people demonstrating in Sarajevo saying they will 
not accept the Dayton map lines through this city of Sarajevo. Here is 
Pale, the Serb capital, just a hop, skip, and jump over the Igman 
Mountain area into the area. That is where the French pilots were shot 
down in the Mirage 2,000. Pale. Probably beaten to death and murdered 
by Serbs. That is a war crime, to kill a prisoner of war. They both had 
leg damage. In the pictures I showed last week on the floor we could 
see they were being held up. Again, the camera could not come in close. 
Trust me, I will change that.
  Now we have the Postojna corridor. Then this chloride plant. The 
biggest in all of the eight provinces of Yugoslavia. That means the 
Hungarian province, Vojvodina; Kosovo, which is 90 percent Albanian, 
although attached to Serbia. Those were the two autonomous regions. 
Serbia makes three; Bosnia-Herzegovina, four; Croatia, five; 
Montenegro, six; Macedonia, seven; and Serbia itself eight. Those are 
the eight areas.
  This was the biggest plant, and it is just a few miles from Tuzla. 
Right there, Ruckevach. That is where it is that can kill everybody in 
that area, if somebody decides to hit that with a missile from Serbia. 
So, hopefully, we will secure that plant. I will go over there around 
New Year's and make sure we do.
  So there is the Dayton line. They have built a corridor out to 
Gorazde. We have written off Srebrenica. I have just found out it meant 
silver. That was a big silver plant contracted by the Germans. The 
Venetians had it first. All of this area, what Churchill called the 
tinderbox of Europe, and the Europeans cannot solve that problem 
themselves.

  Mr. Speaker, this is the script, the written text, of Steve Kroft on 
60 Minutes, a piece entitled ``Over There'', the song from my dad's 
period, interviewing two people who worked hard over there, Lieutenant 
Colonel Bob Stewart, the British commander, and Canadian General Louis 
McKenzie, a great sports car driver, I might add, with a love for MG 
sports cars, as this Congressman has, and I passed it on to my son.
  Here are the words of General McKenzie and Colonel Stewart saying you 
will be in there for 30 years, just like Cyprus. And I thought, no, we 
will not. Clinton is going to pray, and I will be praying right along 
with him, that not a single man or woman from Old Ironsides is hurt, 
and that he will be back in time for the election. He will hope that 
Haiti does not explode. So I want to put in the words of General 
McKenzie and Colonel Stewart.
  Mr. Speaker, here is the paper from over the weekend, that same 
photo-op. I was at Normandy watching young soldiers shake Clinton's 
hand. Afterward, I said do you like this guy? They said, no, he beat it 
out of the service. He did not serve. We love Reagan. But, hey, he is 
the President. I want to send a picture home to my mom. I want to say I 
shook the President of the United States' hand. He is the Commander-In-
Chief. Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw was saying these GI's love him. They 
cannot get enough of him.
  Well, here is something. This is why he loves these photo-ops. These 
GI's are so good, they will do their best to make him look good in 
spite of himself. The troops saved their most enthusiastic response. 
Roars of hoo-ah for Clinton's description of rules of engagement. Now, 
this is dangerous, Mr. Speaker. That will allow them to protect 
themselves against perceived threats.
  We are coming to Clinton's exact words. Their orders, Clinton said, 
spell out the most important rule of all in big bold letters. If you 
are threatened with attack, you may respond immediately and with 
decisive force. Everyone should know that when America comes to help 
make the peace, America will look after its own. In his speech a week 
ago last night he said we will meet fire with fire and then some.
  Mr. Speaker, this is what costs men's lives. We cannot tell the 
youngest troopers in this armored division, with their tanks all locked 
up in a tank park, or left behind in Germany because they cannot get 
across some of those bridges in that area with a 70-ton M-1 Abrams 
tank, to tell young people that if you perceive a threat, fire. It is 
not going to work.

  This division commander, and I am going to go visit with him before 
we have somebody killed over there, or a woman shot at night, or a 
child shot, or somebody trying to come over to our camp for food shot 
at night by some nervous GI who watched his friends step on a mine the 
day before. Remember that Lieutenant Calley, who should have been shot 
for what he did to the U.S. Army and to his unit and to his men? 
Remember what Calley's unit did? They had not been in serious fighter 
fights, having their men shot up with AK-47's. They had been stepping 
on land mines for months, an unseen enemy. Men screaming, their private 
parts and their legs all shredded. That is what built up in the tension 
where suddenly he could turn to people like Paul Meadlow, who told him 
get lost, Lieutenant, and walked away, a real hero, but told other 
people, kill that little boy over there throwing his leg over his 
brother.

                              {time}  1930

  Kill that Buddhist monk. And then they asked later, ``What was that 
Buddhist monk saying?'' And he was saying, ``Please, please, please, 
help me. Please don't hurt me. I'm a man of religion.'' And they 
murdered him.
  That is what happens when you tell troops loose rules of engagement. 
Again, nice man; wrong man for this job: Warren Christopher, saying we 
learned our lesson from Somalia. I am going to ask permission to put in 
this Reader's Digest article. That is October. I understand the 
November issue is just as bloodcurdling.
  I am lucky enough to have on my staff one of the greatest young 
authors to come out of the Vietnam conflict, Al Santoli. He is 
masterful with oral history. Here is a chapter from his book, ``Leading 
the Way: Lessons Learned.'' About real leaders.
  He interviewed Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell for this book. Here is 
First Sergeant Anthony McPike, Saudi Arabia, 1990 to 1991. Tank leader, 
C Company, first tank battalion. I think they did have Abrams tanks, 
but it is Marines. First marine division.
  He says, ``In one incident,'' the first sergeant says, Sergeant 
McPike, ``I was on road security. There were two captains, a warrant 
officer, gunny, a master sergeant and me. We found some enemy prisoners 
of war who surrendered. These two captains did one of the stupidist 
things I have ever seen. Without even securing the area, one captain 
tried to order some troops that were flanking outside the POWs'' which 
they were doing correctly, but the captain grabs a rifle and runs 
across the field. He did not even know what was in front of him. 
``Myself, and the other first sergeant saw that, we shook our heads. We 
went back to the Humvees and just sat there.''
  It is nice to have sergeants that understand combat to keep some 
rather aggressive young officers in check.
  ``Something else that I felt important to keep in check was that a 
lot of troops wanted to open fire. The first sergeant and I talked to a 
lot of them. We said, `Y'all don't understand. The minute you pull that 
trigger and kill somebody, your life is changed forever. That's a 
feeling you'll never get rid of.' '' To kill a human being.
  `` `You might think it's funny now, but it's not. You might take the 
life of another human being that is not even offering a threat to you. 
I can understand if a man is running at you with his weapon blazing or 
with a fixed bayonet. But if he's standing there with his hands on top 
of his head, don't tell me you are just going to take him out.' ''
  ``They said, `Hell, Top, he's the enemy.' '' These are Marines now, 
Mr. Speaker. ``I said, `That's right. But you've got to realize that 
enemy should be treated humanely. You are an American fighter. You are 
not a paid killer. How about if somebody did that to your child?' ''

[[Page H 13984]]

  ``They said, `Wow, Top, we didn't think of it like that.' ''
  ``In Saudi Arabia, a chaplain gave us a class on combat leadership. I 
think that this class should be mandatory. He said, `There is a fine 
line between reality and fantasy. Once you cross that line, all the 
psychiatrists in the world will do nothing but get wealthy on you.' ''
  ``Under the stress of combat, anyone can cross that [psychological] 
line without realizing it . . . If that young man is allowed to mess 
up, you defeat yourself. Because it affects the whole platoon. And once 
a leader loses the respect of his troops, he'll never get it back.''

  God forbid we kill some innocent Moslems, innocent Serbs, or innocent 
Croatians in this Tuzla hot area soon to be under heavy snow cover in 
another terrible, pneumonia-producing Balkan winter. Because if we get 
some young trooper that kills some innocent people and the Army decides 
to court-martial him, you know what he is going to say? He is going to 
say that he was in Germany in the first week of December in 1995, and 
he heard Mr. Clinton, who managed to avoid service and have his draft 
induction date of July 28, 1969 politically reversed and suppressed, he 
will say, ``Here the president's words were: The most important rule of 
all, in big bold letters, if you are threatened with an attack, you may 
respond immediately, even if you perceive it to be a threat.''
  These are the wrong rules of engagement for peacekeepers. But then 
the first armored division was trained to take on the best Russia could 
throw at us in the Fulda Gap to save Europe with American lives for a 
half century after the Nuremberg trials, which started two weeks ago 50 
years ago.
  Here is a letter from Ike Skelton, to show that this is bipartisan 
angst here against what Clinton is doing. He writes to Secretary Perry, 
``If the U.S. Department of State insists on arming and training the 
Croat-Moslem federation, will an American guarantee and coordination of 
the effort, as testified by Secretary Christopher yesterday, will the 
20,000 American soldiers in the Bosnia-Herzegovina region be forewarned 
of this additional security risk? Will they be informed of the 
possibility of vengeful acts by Serbs or of hostilities from Moslems 
expecting, but denied, favorable treatment? This is a major security 
issue.''
  He has two sons on active duty, Army officers. ``I urge the 
Department of Defense to issue memoranda to each soldier to be on extra 
alert as this State Department policy will put them at higher risk.''
  I would like to put in the Record, Mr. Speaker, a background paper 
from the Heritage Foundation that I think is great, questioning the 
Bosnia peace plan. I want these questions asked and answered in print. 
If it is too expensive, I will get permission on the House floor 
tomorrow to put it in.
  We are talking about saving lives. Then here is the House Republican 
Conference issue brief. ``Bosnia: Questioning the Clinton Plan, But 
Supporting Our Troops.'' The reason, again, Mr. Speaker, and you will 
be there, that I want this conference, unless you are on the floor in 
the chair, that I want this conference tomorrow, is that we have got to 
decide how we draw a line. Do we support the troops, all 50,000-plus of 
them in the Adriatic, in the skies flying air patrols out of Aviano, 
and everybody on the ground? The first armored and all the troops. We 
support them. We want to keep them safe, but we disagree with this 
policy, even though the division commanders are gung-ho to go. The 
young privates that I saw, except for a few sergeants who do not want 
to leave their little, tiny children at Christmastime. Those holidays, 
it is only about from the second birthday to the tenth where Christmas 
is a dazzling event. We only get eight of those from God with each 
individual child, and we miss one, that is one-eighth of a great heart-
tugging memory gone. Then we try to look at the shaky video that our 
young wife took of the kids.
   Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Taylor of North Carolina). The gentleman 
has 4 minutes left.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, let me read this segment on Bosnia. If I run 
out of time, I ask for unanimous consent to put it in the Record.
  This is Readers Digest from Dale Van Atta. I know Dale. He is a good 
reporter. This is not an excerpted article from a news magazine. This 
is commissioned by Readers Digest and it is about the United Nations. 
And I have always avoided beating up on the United Nations, because we 
have had some good Americans serve up there. But this is the most 
unregulated, financially unaccounted for group in the history of 
civilization. It has dictatorships in there. Castro is in there. These 
people submit bills. Nobody ever audits them. They are all overpaid. 
Boutros Boutros-Ghali makes $344,000 tax-free a year, double the 
President, if we include that Chelsea Clinton does not get $12,675 a 
year tax free.
  It is outrageous, the corruption at the United Nations, and these are 
the people that Clinton wanted our troops under. We beat his brains out 
in this House. Is that is why they are under General Joulwan instead of 
some U.N. command? Implementation force sounds like one of these U.N. 
names, but it is not.
  The section on Cambodia I may read tomorrow night, and then Rwanda 
and then Somalia, and then I will get the November issue. But I will 
trail off reading until my time runs out on Bosnia.
  June 1991, Croatia declared its independence. I had just left there a 
few weeks before. Was recognized by the U.N. Serbia-dominated 
Yugoslavian Army invaded Croatia ostensibly to protect its Serbian 
minority. The Serbs agreed to a cease-fire. The United Nations sent in 
a 14,000 member UNPROFOR [U.N. Protection Force] to build a new nation.
  The mission has since mushroomed to more than 40,000 personnel. I was 
all over their headquarters like a cheap suit meeting with Yasushi 
Akashi. It became the most expensive and extensive peacekeeping 
operation ever. After neighboring Bosnia declared its independence in 
March of 1992, the Serbs launched a savage campaign of ethnic cleansing 
against the Moslems and Croats, who made up 61 percent of the 
population. Rapidly, the Serbs gained control of two-thirds of Bosnia. 
Bosnian Serbs swept into Moslem and Croatian villages, 3,800, and 
engaged in Europe's worst atrocities since the Nazi Holocaust. Serbian 
thugs raped at least 20,000 women.
  I will skip ahead of this. The 6-year-olds. The Serbian women hung on 
the fence drenched with gasoline and set on fire alive.
  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, like Cambodia. Accounting procedures were 
so loose that the U.N. overpaid $1.8 million on a $21 million fuel 
contract.
  Kenyan peacekeepers stole 25,000 gallons of gas worth $100,000; sold 
it to the Serb aggressors. Corruption charges routinely dismissed as 
unimportant by U.N. Officials. Sylvana Foa, F-O-A, then spokesperson 
for the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva said, ``It was no 
surprise,'' get this quote, ``that out of 14,000 pimply 18-year-old 
kids, a bunch of them should get up to hanky-panky.''
  That sounds like some good old boy, not a woman. Like black market 
dealings and going to brothels. When reports persisted, the United 
Nations finally investigated. November 1993, a month after Mogadishu, a 
special commission confirmed that some terrible but limited mistakes 
had occurred. Four Kenyans and 19 Ukrainian soldiers were dismissed 
from the U.N. force.
  The commission found no wrongdoing. I will continue this tomorrow, 
and point out that the Russian commander, Mr. Speaker, is the man 
responsible for the atrocities in Chechnya, he is going to be in our 
zone commanding a brigade, a battalion of 800 Russian troops. What a 
massive problem to dump into the arms of our fine young American 
officers and men who are eager to please.

       The State Department announced today, that one way or 
     another, the Bosnian peace talks, currently going on in 
     Dayton, Ohio, will come to a close tomorrow. If that sounds 
     like an ultimatum, it is.
       For 19 days, the Chief U.S. negotiator, Richard Holbrook, 
     has literally forced the three warring factions to negotiate 
     a peace 

[[Page H 13985]]
     treaty to end the war. If the talks fail, presumably that's it. If the 
     talks succeed, President Clinton has pledged to send 20,000 
     U.S. troops over there, as part of a NATO force to keep the 
     peace; actually, most of them are already over there, 
     stationed in Germany, waiting to be told what to do next.
       As the talks near to climax, we wanted to find out what 
     American soldiers could be getting into. In a quarter of the 
     world few Americans knew much about, until the Serbs, the 
     Croats and the Bosnian Muslims started killing each other. No 
     one know that better than the two men you're about to meet.

                               60 Minutes


                             ``over there''

       Steve Kroft: Canadian General Louis McKenzie and British 
     Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart, who we met in London, have 
     both commanded peacekeeping troops in Bosnia for the United 
     Nations. And the U.S. military thought enough of their 
     experience to have them give advice to American officers who 
     might serve in Bosnia. In 1992, Stewart led a battalion of 
     British troops responsible for delivering humanitarian aid.
       Colonel Bob Stewart: ``You know, it's not a question about 
     me not getting through, it's a question of whether I--how 
     much damage I do.''
       Steve Kroft: He knows what it's like to lose friends, and 
     to witness atrocities.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: ``But no man can kill a child . . 
     . and a woman like this.''
       Interpreter: ``They died because they're Muslims.''
       Stever Kroft: When we talked to him in London this weekend, 
     both he and General McKenzie told us the Americans have to be 
     prepared to take casualties.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: My soldiers were shot up by all 
     three sides. You mustn't just deploy soldiers into the middle 
     of a war zone, and think it's just like someone escorting a 
     kid to school in the morning. I'm quite sure the American 
     military are fully aware of that.
       Steve Kroft: General Louis McKenzie was the first UN 
     Commander in Sarajevo, back in 1922; a Veteran of nine peace-
     keeping missions in places like Gaza, Cyprus and Vietnam. But 
     nothing prepared him for the former Yugoslavia.
       General Louis McKenzie: There is a level of--of hatred that 
     certainly, I have never seen before in any other theater of 
     operations.
       Steve Kroft: McKenzie's opinions on potential U.S. 
     involvement there have been solicited by two U.S. 
     congressional committees. His most recent appearance was 
     before the House National Security Committee last month.
       You told the House committee, not too long ago, that you 
     didn't think the United States Government should get involved 
     militarily in Bosnia. Do you still feel that way?
       General Louis McKenzie: Yes, I do. From a military--I--I 
     have to emphasize, from a military point of view, they didn't 
     invite me down there to give them political advice; they had 
     plenty of folks doing that. And I appreciated that they'd 
     painted themselves into a corner politically. And I think 
     they were gonna have to get involved. But from a soldier's 
     point of view, I said, ``don't touch it with a ten-foot 
     pole.''
       Steve Kroft: If there's an agreement signed in Dayton 
     between the warring parties, it will be a triumph of politics 
     and diplomacy. But General McKenzie and Colonel Stewart both 
     caution against euphoria. They say what's going on in Dayton 
     is the easy part. The hard part will be making it work on the 
     ground. General McKenzie says he negotiated nine different 
     cease fires in Sarajevo, and was delighted if they held for 
     24 hours.
       Can these parties be trusted to keep a peace agreement?
       General Louis McKenzie: No, they can't be trusted. There is 
     a history of lying. It depends what their agenda is. And 
     their agenda is--it's not predictable, and it changes.
       Steve Kroft: We can't trust any of these people?
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: No, that's a perfect--perfect way 
     to describe it. If you want a philosophy, don't trust them 
     til they prove their actions on the ground.
       Steve Kroft: Unlike the U.N. forces, American troops 
     training for deployment in the former Yugoslavia, will not be 
     peacekeepers. Their job will be to enforce the agreement, and 
     if necessary, punish violators. They'll have to insert 
     themselves between warring armies, and assist in the 
     treacherous job of moving people in and out of areas, that 
     the agreement decrees will be set aside for Croats, Muslims 
     and Serbs. And not everything will be spelled out in the 
     manual.
       General Louis McKenzie: They will be delivering babies, 
     they'll be delivering food, they'll be moving families, 
     they'll be evacuating burning hospitals, they will be doing 
     all kinds of things that aren't within their terms of 
     reference, because they're going to be the only game in town.
       Steve Kroft: The situation is fraught with peril for the 
     Americans. It was the Duke of Wellington who said, ``Big 
     countries shouldn't involve themselves in small wars.'' The 
     United States would be risking its military credibility in a 
     situation, General McKenzie believes, isn't worth it.
       General Louis McKenzie: In Bosnia, every side there wants 
     America on their side. Forget about NATO for a second; they 
     want America on their side. And to target American soldiers 
     and make it look like one of the other two sides is doing it, 
     is extremely easy. You can hire somebody across the line, in 
     the other ethnic group to fire at American soldiers. And 
     America, historically, has reacted very forcefully to that, 
     and will go after the side that they think is targeting them. 
     And that is the beginning of a slippery slope. So, I think 
     that American soldiers will be subjected, to a degree of risk 
     out of all proportion, to any other nation represented in the 
     NATO force.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: These guys are out of control. 
     That's clear. People on the ground don't give a damn. They're 
     in a position; they're bored. They might just take pot shots 
     because they feel like it. No one is going to bring them to 
     book for it. I haven't heard of anyone being brought to task 
     by their own side. There are no rules of engagement. We 
     talked ages and ages about rules of engagement. There are no 
     rules of engagement for them. And there's no comeback when 
     they fire.
       Steve Kroft: The NATO troops are expected to remain 
     impartial. But that won't be easy. The American military 
     knows it already has enemies in Bosnia; the Serbs, for 
     example.
       Steve Kroft: Last summer, NATO warplanes, mostly American 
     war planes, pounded Bosnian Serb military positions, and 
     inflicted heavy damage.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: How many Bosnia Serbs, sons, 
     brothers and husbands, were killed? And how many children, 
     women? But sure as hell, someone at the far end has lost 
     someone. Someone's got a grudge. And that person will not be 
     under control necessarily, when Americans go in.
       Steve Kroft: Is that realistic, to expect that the--that 
     the United States can go in there and be a neutral force?
       General Louis McKenzie: On the first day you arrive, you 
     could well be impartial. But on the first evening of the 
     first day that you arrive, and one side targets you, Corporal 
     Jones and Lieutenant Smith are probably not going to be 
     terribly impartial.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: If you act at all, you'll lose 
     your impartiality. I'll give you an example: When I was 
     there, our blood . . .
       Steve Kroft: Colonel Stewart told us his Battalion ran into 
     a situation where it had some surplus blood. Rather than 
     throw it away, they decided to give it to the local hospital.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Now, that's a pretty neutral thing 
     to do, you would imagine. No. The next thing I had was the 
     local Bosnian Croat commanders and also the mayor of the 
     town, complaining like hell, that I had given our blood to a 
     hospital that was predominantly Muslim. So, in reality, in 
     order to act at all, you should somehow get a third of the 
     blood supply to Bosnia Croats, Bosnia Muslims, and Bosnian 
     Serbs.
       General Louis McKenzie: I have never run up against that 
     problem in any other mission area. Through Central America, 
     the Middle East, Vietnam, etcetera, where even talking to one 
     side during the negotiation process is seen as collaboration 
     by the other side.
       Steve Kroft: So, it's possible then, in our function there, 
     that we could end up with everyone against us.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Well, that would be perfect.
       General Louis McKenzie: Yeah. Like the General said, ``That 
     would be perfect . . .''
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Then you're neutral.
       General Louis McKenzie: If you can get everybody to just 
     dislike you equally, then you--you're on the right track.
       Steve Kroft: They aren't laughing because it's funny. It's 
     called gallows humor.
       To make sure American soldiers aren't put in indefensible 
     positions, they would bring with them, massive fire power . . 
     . Some of that firepower, was on display a few weeks ago, 
     during live fire exercises in Germany.
       And the Pentagon is promised that American troops would be 
     able to use that firepower. If attacked, they would be able 
     to respond decisively and immediately.
       The Secretary of Defense, Perry, says we are going to be 
     the meanest dog on the block. Is that--is that what's needed?
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Well, I could be quite crude and 
     answer that, ``you can be the meanest dog in the block, but 
     when someone's got you between--between their legs, you howl 
     like hell. Surely, weren't the American troops, the meanest 
     dog in the block in Vietnam. I don't wish to say there's a--
     some kind of parallel here, but you're not necessarily 
     fighting a war that's a standard conventional war in Bosnia. 
     You're not meant to be fighting. In a way, you're meant to be 
     in between. And in between, standing there, trying to get 
     peace, is dangerous, and people get hurt.
       General Louis McKenzie: I'm not sure that the meanest dog 
     in the block is the right analogy; maybe a seeing eye dog. 
     Maybe a seeing eye dog could help these folks, because 
     they're the ones that have to make the peace and keep the 
     peace. It's not--you can't--you can't impose peace more than 
     you can impose morality. You can't kill people to make peace. 
     It just doesn't work very well.
       Steve Kroft: What you need in Bosnia, General McKenzie 
     says, is patience; lots of patients; and realistic 
     expectations about the prospects for long-term peace in the 
     Balkans.
       General Louis McKenzie: I don't think I was exaggerating 
     when I said three or four years ago, if Americans gets 
     involved in this particular game, maybe they should start 
     training their grandchildren as peacekeepers. Because this--I 
     mean, we've been in Cyprus for over 30 years now, on a U.N. 
     mission, and I--it won't surprise me if we're in Bosnia for 
     over 30 years.

[[Page H 13986]]

       Steve Kroft: President Clinton said this is a gonna be one-
     year commitment.
       General Louis McKenzie: Everyone--everyone agrees that 
     that's for domestic consumption. It's just no way you're 
     gonna be out of there in one year.
       Steve Kroft: So, you're saying that you believe that there 
     will be United States troops in Bosnia taking casualties, 
     during a Presidential Election?
       General Louis McKenzie: I--I hope there are no casualties. 
     But I believe there will--if you go in, in the near future, 
     there will be United States troops in Bosnia during the--the 
     Presidential Election, and another Presidential Election, and 
     another Presidential Election.
       Steve Kroft: Do you agree?
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Absolutely.
       Steve Kroft: Is it a mistake to say that you're gonna be 
     out in a year?
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Well, I don't think it's a 
     mistake, but I don't think any--any--I think it's rather 
     foolish statement to--to say, that--there is a time limit. 
     Because I don't think you can actually necessarily put a time 
     limit on something, when we don't even understand--we don't 
     even know what's going to happen there tomorrow.
       Steve Kroft: President Clinton and his State department 
     have heard these dire assessments before. Some have even come 
     from American military officers. But the President and his 
     Administration are taking their cues from history; and their 
     belief that an abdication of responsibility in Europe, could 
     destroy the NATO alliance, and weaken America's position in 
     the world. And even former military commanders, who have 
     spent time on the ground in Bosnia, believe that argument has 
     some merit.
       General Louis McKenzie: With all due respect to NATO--and I 
     served nine years in NATO--I mean, it is looking for a 
     mission. And if it passes this one up, it might be a long 
     time before another one comes along. So this is a defining 
     moment for NATO, overworked phrase, but I think it is.
       Steve Kroft: Is this a situation where the Europeans said, 
     ``This is too tough a problem for us to solve. Let's let the 
     Americans do it?''
       I think, Colonel Stewart, a lot of people probably are 
     thinking that.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: Yeah. I think it's possibly true. 
     I mean, quite frankly, I don't care. Really, I don't care who 
     leads. But pray to God, someone does, and we get something 
     done. I don't care.
       Lt. Colonel Bob Stewart: All I want--I personally, and I 
     know General Lewis is the same, want peace restored to this 
     area. We actually feel quite strongly about the place. We 
     know that the vast majority of the people are crying out for 
     the fighting to stop.
       Steve Kroft: And finally, there is the moral argument; 
     200,000 people killed, 1.8 million driven from their homes. 
     Does the world's last superpower have a moral duty to end the 
     suffering? Is there a chance that the Serbs, the Croats and 
     Muslims really are finally tired of the bloodshed.
       General Louis McKenzie: There's a whole bunch of things 
     involved here, just in addition to doing the right thing. I 
     mean, there's the American political process which is unique. 
     There is NATO looking for a role. There's a country that 
     self-destructed over the last three years, and is looking for 
     some help. There's a whole bunch of very brave non-
     governmental organization working their butts off in the 
     former Yugoslavia, delivering medicine and food, et cetera, 
     et cetera, and all that comes together in Dayton, with three 
     people that we agree we don't trust.
                                                                    ____


 Bosnia: Questioning the Clinton Plan . . . But Supporting Our Troops!

       Republicans don't question the President's authority, as 
     Commander-and-Chief, to send U.S. troops to Bosnia. We do 
     question his judgment. For an operation that will place 
     American lives at risk, the ``Clinton Plan'' for Bosnia is 
     fraught with difficult-to-swallow Administration 
     ``assurances'' and too many unanswered questions. However, as 
     much as we may disagree with the President's decision, there 
     should be no mistake that Republicans will strongly support 
     our troops once they are on the ground.
       The Process--The President's promise to send 25,000 U.S. 
     ground forces to Bosnia was made in an ill-conceived and off-
     hand remark more than two years ago. It became a commitment 
     in search of a mission. Clinton made this promise without 
     gaining the support of the American people and before 
     consulting Congress. As a result, both Congress and the 
     American people have been shutout of the process that now 
     involves sending American men and women to Bosnia. This 
     problem is highlighted by the numerous polls indicating close 
     to 60 percent of Americans continue to disapprove of the 
     Clinton plan to send U.S. troops to Bosnia.
       U.S. Troops As Targets--There are inherent problems with 
     using American soldiers as ``peacekeepers.'' As Washington 
     Post Columnist Charles Krauthammer has written, ``If you are 
     unhappy with the imposed peace, there is nothing like blowing 
     up 241 Marines or killing 18 U.S. Army Rangers to make your 
     point.'' The lessons of Beirut and Somalia are simple--when 
     the United States, the world's only remaining superpower, 
     sends troops to unstable regions of the world, they 
     immediately become targets for those seeking either attention 
     for their cause or retribution for past events, such as NATO-
     led bombings.
       Can U.S. Peacekeepers Remain Neutral?--The Clinton Plan 
     calls for U.S. forces to act as neutral enforcers of the 
     peace while the U.S. also helps arm and train the Bosnian 
     Muslims so they will be able to defend themselves once 
     American troops leave. This scenario, however, ignores the 
     role America played prior to this peace accord. It was 
     American planes that bombed the Bosnian Serbs into submission 
     in order to force them to the bargaining table.
       As for arming the Bosnian Muslims, the Clinton 
     Administration contends that the Bosnians need arms to defend 
     themselves once American forces leave. But if peace has 
     broken out, and the American ``enforcers'' are no longer 
     needed, exactly who will the Bosnians be defending themselves 
     from? The fact that the Clinton plan recognizes that the 
     Bosnian people will need to defend themselves from the Serbs 
     once the American forces are gone illustrates just how 
     illusory this peace really is.
       Is There Really a Peace?--While peace may exist on paper, 
     it is unclear as to whether it exists in the hearts of the 
     Balkan people. Recent news reports indicate that the peace 
     plan is not receiving a very enthusiastic endorsement from 
     the Bosnian Serbs, especially those living near Sarajevo. And 
     it is still unclear to most Americans why 60,000 heavily-
     armed, combat-ready soldiers are needed to ``enforce'' a 
     ``peace'' agreement.
       The Clinton Plan Is Poorly Defined--Before our troops are 
     fully deployed, Republicans will continue to insist that the 
     President outline a clear and achievable objective and define 
     what encompasses a successful mission. Finally, the President 
     needs to develop an exit strategy that is more comprehensive 
     than the simple goal of having our troops home in one-year.
       Republicans Support Our Troops--While Republicans continue 
     to question the wisdom of the President's decision to send 
     U.S. forces to Bosnia, we understand that it is a foregone 
     conclusion that they will go. Indeed, close to 1,500 troops 
     have already begun to arrive in the former Yugoslavia. There 
     should be no doubt that Republicans will unconditionally 
     support our troops once they are in Bosnia. We will make sure 
     our troops have every resource available and as much leeway 
     as they feel they need to defend themselves should they be 
     attacked. Again, there should be no mistake: Republicans will 
     support our troops in Bosnia and we will continue to work to 
     ensure their safety throughout this mission.

                          ____________________