[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 192 (Tuesday, December 5, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H13992-H13997]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     BOSNIAN CONFLICT IS CIVIL WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Taylor of North Carolina). Under a 
previous order of the House, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Souder] is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to discuss my opposition to sending 
our troops to war in Bosnia. As one of the new freshman Members, I do 
not pretend to have the experience of our earlier speaker, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan], who has traveled to many of 
these areas and has much knowledge about our military.
  I am a country boy from a small town in Indiana of 700. I come here 
on behalf of common-sense Hoosiers who are very concerned about what 
our President has committed us to do. I want to make a couple of 
general comments first before plunging into some specifics.
  The first and core question is, is sending ground troops in our vital 
national interest? I think not. The primary question regarding the 
United States role in Bosnia is whether this is a civil war or is an 
act of aggression between two sovereign nations.
  This conflict is a civil war because the Bosnian Serbs are fighting 
with the Bosnian Moslems and the Bosnian Croats over political control, 
power and authority. Since the conflict is a civil war, there is no 
legal obligation for the United States to get involved.
  President Clinton even admitted the conflict in Bosnia is a civil war 
in an interview with Rita Braver of CBS News on April 20, 1994, stating 
the President of the United States as follows: ``I think this is a 
civil war in the sense that people who live within the confines of the 
nation we have recognized are fighting each other for territory and 
power and control. It is clearly a civil war.'' That is not a 
Republican stating that; that is the President of the United States.
  Although the United States has numerous interests in a peaceful 
resolution of the Bosnian war, for example, ending the atrocities, 
preventing further human rights abuses and ending the suppression of 
minority groups. Much of this, I think, is coming out of a heartfelt 
concern for those who are hurting in other nations and watching the 
terrible torture. The conflict does not in fact threaten our national 
security.
  Given the terrible nature of war, I am supportive of sending troops 
into combat situations only when there is a vital national security 
interest at stake and when a clear military objective is achievable.

  So then the next question is, has the President provided a clear 
mission or exit strategy, which will place our troops in imminent 
danger because he has not provided such a mission or strategy. He has 
promised to commit at least 20,000 troops. We have heard 30,000, but it 
appears to be 20,000 here at the beginning, before an agreement was 
reached, instead of designing a plan that could coordinate troops with 
this specific goal. In other words, it was a mission looking for a 
purpose.
  Clinton's implementation force has no clear mission. In theory, they 
are poised to act as buffers between warring sides, and in reality, 
they are targets for snipers. His is an arbitrary time period for exit 
and not a national exit strategy, which means anybody who wants to wait 
out the last months can do that. The potential for United States troops 
becoming targets for those who have no interest in bringing peace to 
the area is simply far greater than any national security interest in 
Bosnia.
  Mr. Speaker, let me tell a local story that has ties to northeast 
Indiana. Marine Lance Corporal Jeff Durham of Fort Wayne, who graduated 
from Blackhawk High School, was involved in the rescue of Air Force 
Captain Scott O'Grady. The 20-year-old Durham and other members of the 
24th Marine Expeditionary Unit were awakened on board a carrier in the 
Adriatic Sea around 3 a.m., were briefed, and departed for a mission 2 
hours later.
  Jeff was on board a backup helicopter which was prepared to defend 
the rescue team against the enemy if things went wrong. Their mission 
was to get between the rescue chopper and the enemy. Fortunately, 
O'Grady made a clean escape and the Marines did not have to get out of 
the chopper.
  We may have a voluntary army, but it is wrong to view our troops as 
missionaries or use them in missions that do not have clear American 
interests at stake.
  I know that the people of Fort Wayne and Jeff's family do not 
consider him a disposable asset, a mercenary just to be thrown around 
in the process of pursuing whims by our President. I also believe we 
have shown that there is strong congressional and public opposition to 
sending ground troops.
  The House has voted on three separate occasions in opposition to 
United States involvement in Bosnia. In the DOD appropriations bills, 
the original House-passed bill contained the Neumann amendment by Mark 
Neumann, a fellow freshman from Wisconsin, which will restrict the use 
of funds for deployment of United States forces in Bosnia without the 
prior approval of Congress. It passed by a vote of 294 to 125 on 
January 7, 1995. In conference, this was modified twice to become a 
nonbinding provision and then was dropped completely.
  By the way, many of us who opposed that DOD Conference Report the 
first time, one of the three main criteria that we opposed it on was 
the pulling of that Bosnia language.
  Part of the agreement that came out of that was H. Resolution 247, 
which expressed the sense of the House that there should be no 
presumption by the parties to any peace negotiation that the 
enforcement of any peace agreement will involve the deployment of U.S. 
forces and emphasized that no 

[[Page H 13993]]
U.S. troops should be deployed to the region without prior 
congressional approval. This passed by 315 to 103; that is, no troops 
should be deployed to the region without prior congressional approval. 
Clearly, this has been ignored.
  H.R. 2606 prohibited the use of funds appropriated to the Department 
of Defense to be used for the deployment or implementation of United 
States ground forces to the Balkans as part of a peacekeeping operation 
unless such funds have been specifically appropriated by Congress for 
that purpose. That passed by a vote of 243 to 171.

                              {time}  2045

  We have made our will known. We are not being heeded.
  Hoosiers in northeast Indiana do not support sending the ground 
troops to Bosnia, either. Ninety-four percent of those contacting my 
offices have expressed strong opposition to the President's plan. We 
have hundreds of calls, up to three times as many as we normally get. 
We have letters.
  In the last week I was on three different talk shows where 80 percent 
of the calls were on Bosnia. Outrage is being expressed by the people 
in Indiana that this President could ignore the will of the American 
people and to send our boys at risk of a potential war.
  I also wanted to show, I know that Congressman Dornan showed this map 
earlier, of a couple of noteworthy geographical points that have 
probably been made a number of times but I want to make them again.
  First of all, the so-called Dayton line named after Dayton, OH--talk 
about interjecting ourselves in international foreign policy, we now 
have the line between the nations being named after an American city--
snakes around making Vietnam look clearly defined. It goes for over a 
thousand miles. We are not quite sure because they are still sorting 
out these borders how many miles exactly, but it snakes around all over 
the place.
  Then I asked in one of our briefings, I am on the oversight 
subcommittee over the Defense and State and CIA, chaired by the 
gentleman from New Hampshire [Mr. Zeliff]. This is Croatia around in a 
U.
  Is there anywhere else in the world where you have a nation with a U 
around another nation? The answer is no. You have Pakistan, it has been 
divided, it and Bangladesh, and you have other situations but no U 
situation like this.
  Another core question is, since this part is tied with the Serbs, 
which is over on this side, what would have happened if we had not gone 
in? We were told that most likely Croatia would have drawn a line 
somewhere like this. Well, these yellow pockets are where Croatia had 
already advanced, that clearly the Serbs were vulnerable in this area, 
and that if this was what would have logically happened and if Croatia 
is in a situation like this U, what exactly do we feel is going to keep 
Croatia from doing a fairly logical geographical move over time?
  Well, there are supposedly a couple of different arguments. One is 
that these areas are Moslem and that while they are working with the 
Croatians, although they were just fighting them, now they are working 
with them apparently again, that there was more concern by Croatia that 
this area would be taken over by the Moslems than the Serbs.

  This is what you call to some degree hopefulness, because these areas 
have been fighting all between themselves and partly what we are 
banking on is that Croatia will not do the logical geographical close 
because all of a sudden they are going to decide, well, maybe we don't 
want to fight the Moslems anymore or the Serbians anymore even though 
we have been doing so for hundreds of years and we view them as 
occupying our nation's land.
  It is a little bit hopeful thinking to think that when one army 
probably was going to win, when one army still has that incentive 
through history of many years of war, to suddenly say, ``Oh, we think 
now they're going to be good'' and maintain this kind of unusual 
geographical layout. Anybody who looks at this goes and say, ``Why 
exactly are we putting our troops in here?''
  One other thing that is kind of interesting. We were told, and this 
map may be slightly different because there were two things still being 
negotiated. As is apparent, there is a very narrow part in here between 
the two parts of the areas controlled by the Serbian Bosnians, and the 
two areas that were still being debated and which are going to be the 
most difficult are this area right in here and Sarajevo. So the two 
places they have not defined are the two most difficult and the two 
most strife-ridden.
  The Russian troops are going to be somewhere in here and the American 
troops are up here. This is a very difficult region to monitor. It is 
where the Germans were when they came down and lost so many troops, 
70,000, trying to subdue this region. They came down through this area. 
We are putting ourselves right across from the Russian troops in an 
area where we are still negotiating the borders, where the narrow strip 
is, very narrow connecting, and you look at this and say, if you 
already have not established a compelling national interest and you 
already have a bunch of difficulties with this, would just logic not 
tell you in looking at this map that you are walking into an 
unbelievable potential nightmare of a situation for the U.S. Armed 
Forces?
  In the briefings that we have had, a number of other things have been 
interesting talking about the mines that are there and the question of 
why are Americans going to be involved in taking out these mines?
  Well, partly apparently we are going to ask all those who had been 
combatants in this to take out the mines first, but there are a couple 
of problems. One is that they do not exactly know where the mines are. 
Second, they do not have the equipment to detect the mines.
  So since we have the equipment and since our troops are going to have 
to go through these areas as well as France and Britain, we are going 
to wind up having to go through the mines, and that is probably what 
the President was warning us, that we are going to lose lives trying to 
locate these mines that we do not know where they are and we do not 
exactly know how to find them, although, quote, they are in logical 
places. In other words, it is not as though they are randomly sorted. 
They are at where the front lines were, but since the front line has 
moved all over the place on this map, it is very difficult for us to 
know where the mines are. So we are going to have deaths related to the 
mines. There is no question of that.
  Another question is whether or not the American troops will be 
targets After all, it was the American Air Force that bombed many of 
these cities.
  One of the things that was kind of enlightening to me was, is that 
one of the reasons the administration is apparently arguing that our 
American troops may not be targets is very simple. We are going to 
rebuild their country. And so if they think that we are going to 
rebuild the buildings that we bombed out and helped build their nation 
again, then maybe we will not be targets because the Americans are nice 
guys and if they shoot us, we will not give them money.
  We have heard $60 million, then we have heard $600 million. Estimates 
have certainly been floating around on the floor of the House as high 
as $6 billion. At a time when we are trying to figure out how not to 
cut the budget, to respond to the earlier Speaker, but how to slow the 
growth of the budget, it is pretty tough to go back to Indiana and say, 
``Oh, by the way, we're having to slow down a little bit of the growth 
in these different programs, we're having to do this, we're having to 
do this but we're going to rebuild everything we just bombed over in 
Bosnia.'' It is a very tough sell on one hand to say we are tight on 
the budget, and on the other hand where there is not a clear compelling 
national interest that we are spending all this money rebuilding it.

  Plus I just thought this quote was kind of interesting. It was in the 
New York Times, Friday, December 1. This was a young lady, when asked 
what she thought about the troops coming in, when asked what she 
thought of the Americans arrival, she said, ``It's cool. It's great. 
All the Bosnian boys are going to be very jealous. We don't date them 
anymore. We met some Swedish soldiers but these American soldiers will 
have everything. Cars and money.''
  This ought to do great relations. We have already bombed their 
country. We 

[[Page H 13994]]
are coming in there rebuilding it, and now their young soldiers who are 
coming back and having to supposedly lay down their arms are finding 
that their girlfriends are all interested in the American soldiers, 
which is certainly going to lead to extra peace. It is not a major 
item, but it is just every single thing you hear is not working in our 
direction.
  I read the book ``Balkan Ghosts,'' which I recommend to others to 
read. It is very interestingly written about this whole region. What 
strikes you is the violence that has occurred here over many, many 
centuries between the different nations, the different backgrounds, and 
the deep-seated hatred.
  I think what struck me most is that so many times, in one case, I 
cannot remember what century or what war, one of the nations in 
overpowering the other basically slaughtered all the young children 
below 2 years old, much like King Herod did in Biblical times. In other 
cases they took groups into slaughterhouses, an actual butcher place, 
and butchered them, cutting off their legs and arms and heads and hung 
up the severed limbs like it was a meat locker.
  Well, those memories are in these different nations. And often when 
they go to battle, they will go into their churches, whether it is a 
Catholic church or an Orthodox church or a Moslem church or some blend 
thereof because this is a holy war. The enemy that they are fighting 
has murdered their children, has murdered their grandfathers, it has 
been in a brutal way, and it is not going to all of a sudden be solved 
by a 1-year cease-fire if indeed it ever turns into a cease-fire 
completely, but it is not going to be solved because underneath it 
there are centuries of very emotional religious and ethnic conflict.

  Another thing that I never really fully understood until I read that 
book and got some briefings is why do all of these countries fight over 
some of these areas?
  Croatia at its peak went way down this way. Serbia at its peak came 
way over this way. Hungary came down, Bulgaria at its peak, Romania at 
its peak, Greek at its peak, the Ottoman Empire at its peak, all at one 
time or another claimed a bunch of this territory. When they would 
expand in, they would plant people from their nations to plant seeding 
in those different areas, so you have mixed nationalities in there to 
boot.
  Basically to summarize the battlegrounds, every country merely wants 
back what they once had. It is impossible to meet that goal. It is much 
like the Russians saying when they were Communists that they only 
wanted the land next to theirs. Each of these countries want to go back 
to maps that overlap and which are not going to be resolved by some 
kind of miraculous agreement in Dayton, OH.
  One other thing. In hoping to go over to Bosnia, which we instead got 
to stay here in Congress over the weekend which was about as bad as 
going over to Bosnia, that we had a luncheon where the Speaker was at 
as well, with the President of Montenegro and a representative from 
Croatia as the Speaker, Mr. Taylor of North Carolina asked, because we 
heard that it was critical, that we put backing behind this or there 
would be no peace agreement. You asked whether or not we could do this 
with air and naval power, and he basically said yes, probably could.
  I asked the question in one of our briefings why we could not just do 
that. They first said, and I do not believe they were supposed to say 
this, retreated, I do not think it is classified or anything, ``Well, 
it's because this was an American agreement, and the European forces 
said since this was an American agreement that, therefore, we had to 
put ground troops in.''
  ``Wait a minute. What do you mean this is an American agreement?''
  ``Well, this was made in Dayton, OH. This was the American 
President's agreement.''
  They do not think, for example, we should be rearming the Bosnian 
Serbs. So we are having to put ground troops in because our President 
brought the peace treaty process to America, it is called the Dayton 
line, it is an American agreement, that made us put ground troops in, 
not because they are essential to the peace there but they are 
essential to the American version of the peace because we may have 
needed to have some firepower behind it, which is still debatable, but 
we would not have necessarily had ground troops.

  There is one other thing that I had learned and kind of reinforced 
what I had been hearing was we heard a very compelling story from 
people from Montenegro and it was very impressive how they were getting 
along and how they had taken things. Then it came around to the 
representative from Croatia who absolutely ripped into Montenegro how 
they had pillaged their museums and raped their women and so on.
  And the response was, ``Yeah, but this happened before 1992,'' which 
showed me the intensity here even though that apparently was, if I 
recall correctly, a 1991 incident, that the intensity between these 
countries is not just going to go away because we wished it to go away 
and temporarily put some troops there.
  I also wanted to insert a couple of articles for the Record and I 
want to read a couple of quotes from this.
  I was very impressed by an op-ed article on Tuesday, November 28, by 
James Webb, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan 
and Secretary of Navy in the Reagan administration.
  He reiterates a couple of points out of the Nixon doctrine that we 
have apparently drifted away from not only quite frankly under this 
President but under our last one, that we honor all treaty commitments 
in responding to those who invade the lands of our allies. That is one 
reason that we would put our own troops in.
  Second, that we provide a nuclear umbrella to the world against the 
threats of other nuclear powers.
  The third reason would be, finally, provide weapons and technical 
assistance to other countries where warranted, but do not commit 
American forces to local conflicts.
  Bosnia fits none of these. There is no NATO treaty agreement. They 
are not part of NATO. There is no threat of nuclear war in this 
situation.
  Finally, it is indeed a local conflict, so maybe we provide technical 
assistance but we certainly do not provide ground troops.
  Another point in this article, it says that we are told, and this is 
what I alluded to earlier in another context,

       We are told that other NATO countries will decline to send 
     their own military forces to Bosnia unless the United States 
     assumes a dominant role, which includes sizable combat 
     support and naval forces backing it up. This calls to mind 
     the decades of over-reliance by NATO members on American 
     resources, and President Eisenhower's warning in October 1963 
     that the size and permanence of our military presence in 
     Europe would, quote, continue to discourage the development 
     of the necessary military strength Western European countries 
     should provide for themselves.

  NATO has substantially changed since there was a direct Communist 
threat. We have to always be on guard. Russia could be immediately 
another Communist power and we would be back in the Cold War. But 
things have changed and other nations around the world need to take 
more responsibility. We cannot be a policeman everywhere.
  I also wanted to read a couple of quotes from Friday, December 1, 
Washington Times article by Thomas Sowell referring to the lapse of 
historic savvy by our President.
  He takes a couple of quotes. For example, the President said, 
``Bosnia lies at the very heart of Europe.'' Not if you know any 
geography. It is basically on the fringes of Europe. It is not primary 
in either importance or geography. It has been a place where there have 
been battles where other powers have chosen to get themselves involved 
as we are but it is hardly central to Europe in either geography or 
politics.
  I was very disturbed, for example, when the President at the tail end 
of his speech made a quote that I have no doubt is accurate from the 
Pope which was that this century started with a war in this area and we 
do not want it to end with a war in this area.

                              {time}  2100

  The question is what is the best way to keep us from not having a 
war? I do not have a lot of confidence that quote was used in context.
  If these countries are fighting among themselves, it could get very 
messy; for example, if Serbia loses control of 

[[Page H 13995]]
this area and moves over to here, there may be centuries of conflict 
between Serbia and Croatia over where this line could be, and lot of 
lives unnecessarily lost. If the Moslems are overrun in these areas, in 
a sense persecuted by either Croatia or by Serbia and flee to other 
nations, they could be at risk of what they could do. They could be 
much like the Palestinians and be wandering, searching for a place to 
land. It is a messy area.
  But if you put Russian troops right here and American troops right 
here and you have a change of power in Russia and you have a conflict 
where this group are allies of Russia and this group, with their more 
Catholic tradition, are allies of the United States, you are looking at 
the potential for war. That is how you get into world wars, not by 
letting these countries fight over their battles and the terrible 
things that may happen to those countries but by putting two major 
nuclear powers right across from each other in a very tense situation 
in defending potential client states. That is how you get a war, and 
the way to avoid ending this century with a nuclear war is not by us 
going in there, it is by us staying out.
  As Thomas Sowell points out, that first off, Yeltsin is at best 
lukewarm with this. Furthermore, anybody who watches the news realizes 
the government in Russia is not necessarily stable. Part of their 
challenge is they are not being aggressive enough and nationalistic 
enough in approaching relations with our country, that any notion that 
all of a sudden we are going into Bosnia because there was this peace 
accord is belied, as Thomas Sowell points out, that Mr. Clinton 
advocated such action years before the Yugoslav leaders even set foot 
in Dayton and even before he became President.
  He is depending on us to forget what he said before. Obviously, he 
depends on that many weeks out of the year. In this particular case, he 
has advocated this policy. He has now made it come to fruition and 
dragging all of America along with him under the guise of something 
totally different. Our claim that our mission is clear and limited, to 
quote Thomas Sowell again, as Mr. Clinton put it, is true only if 
everything goes according to plan. The same would have been true in 
Vietnam if everything had been according to plan. We would have simply 
defended the existing government until they got on their feet and then 
pulled out.
  You know, many of us and a lot of the media have asked why are so 
many of the freshman conservative Republicans so upset about this war. 
Many of us who came through the Vietnam era reacted in different ways. 
I was a conservative during that period, as were many others, but we 
did not really like how the war was being fought either. We saw a lot 
of our friends being killed over something where we basically abandoned 
later on and learned some lessons there. That is pick you fights, have 
a clear mission, back up your troops, do not get in situations where 
you are the sitting ducks, and some people say, and this is a core 
question and I am going to touch on this for a minute, is this like 
Vietnam or is this like Afghanistan or is this like Lebanon or is this 
like Korea?
  Let me suggest, first of all, on Korea, the line in Korea does not 
wander around in different angles, coming back like an odd-shaped ``U'' 
or a ``V.'' And the reason the line in Korea held is because we went 
all the way up to the Chinese border. The Chinese and the North Koreans 
were afraid that at any time the American military might again invade 
North Korea or into China, therefore, they dug in behind the line to 
keep us from advancing. It was not an arbitrary line put on by our 
Government in peace negotiations.
  In Vietnam, when we tried to do that, it failed.
  The case, and some Marines have compared this to Lebanon, more like 
we are supposed peacekeeping troops, sitting down basically in valleys 
and mountainous regions where our guys are sitting ducks for land 
mines, occasional snipers and random people who have not disarmed, 
maybe like Lebanon. There can be a case like Afghanistan; Russia went 
in trying to subdue a rebellion. The rebellion had been going on 
between different forces for many years. Some of the troops fighting in 
Afghanistan are now in this area, as we learned by the CBS, I believe, 
TV commentator captured by some of them the other day, almost shot, 
that there are roaming bands in this same area of Afghanistan fighters. 
You see many of the logistics.
  For me, since I most relate to Vietnam, it sure seems a lot like 
Vietnam.
  I heard the President say the other night, ``My fellow Americans.'' A 
chill goes up my spine because many of us heard ``My fellow Americans'' 
once too many times already. I now, for the first time, understand how 
some of those liberal Democrats who I did not like at the time felt 
when they felt they were pulled into Vietnam under votes in their 
protest, and all of a sudden their patriotism was challenged because 
they were questioning a war they did not want to get in in the first 
place. We in Congress have voted three times we did not want this war.
  At what point do you say, ``Look, we are elected by the American 
people as well; at what point is there a joint government?'' You do not 
have an immediate threat to the security of United States. It is not as 
though we have troops already in combat in threat of being killed and 
the President has to go in. You can argue Nixon went into Cambodia 
because he was protecting troops on the ground. You can do a number of 
arguments the President has to have flexibility. Does he have to have 
flexibility to start us into a potential Vietnam?
  One of the things he said, partly, I think, to shore up his 
conservative base, if any of our people get killed, we are going to go 
after them with everything we have. He said that to the troops the 
other day as he was launching them on their mission. The question is: 
Is that not what happened in Vietnam? We were their to support 
Vietnamization, help stabilize the southern, pretty soon, 20,000 troops 
are not going to be able to stabilize this area, maybe we will need 
38,000; someone gets killed, we will have to go up in the mountains. 
The guys in the mountains, particularly, Afghan Moslems and others who 
are going to flee into the mountains, Hitler took tons of troops until 
he finally gave up trying to subdue them. Pretty soon, we are up to 
75,000, 100,000 not because we are trying to start a war, but because 
we are chasing people who killed American soldiers, and we are 
demanding retribution. This leads to bigger battles. This is how wars 
start. It is not how wars are avoided, because we are in an extremely 
vulnerable situation in an area that has had conflict for hundreds and 
hundreds of years.

  I also really resented the President's comments about the Olympics in 
Sarajevo, talking about how peaceful it used to be. It used to be a 
Communist country. It was hammered together by Tito. None of us voted 
to elect President Clinton the new Tito. It is not his job to hammer 
this nation back together through the force of gunpower, which is how 
this nation was put together in the first place. You can have different 
views on Tito. Clearly, one advantage of Tito was he provided 
stability. That is not the mission of this U.S. Congress, this House, 
this Senate, or this President, to be the new Tito, and I urge our 
President to lose his Tito complex.
  I also listened to his tortured logic to try to address why we are 
getting into this war. Roughly, it went like this: Europe is essential 
to our stability, NATO is essential to Europe, we are essential to 
NATO; therefore, we have to put ground troops in. First off, it does 
not establish the Balkans are essential to Europe. Second, he did not 
make a very good case that at this time Europe is essential or that 
Europe is threatened. Third, he did not establish that we have to have 
ground troops as part of NATO to be supportive of NATO.
  Maybe because of the peace agreement he agreed to, there is pressure 
now for us to put ground troops in, but maybe we should have let the 
Europeans negotiate the agreement that is in Europe. Let them figure 
out how to do it, and we back them up rather than us being the world 
policeman who brings them to Dayton OH, and then has all the 
obligations to be the policeman of Europe. I do not think his logic 
worked in any way.
  I also want to read a little bit of a letter that I got from Ralph 
Garcia. He is the chairman of my veterans' affairs advisory panel. He 
is president of the Vietnam Veterans' Chapter 698 in 

[[Page H 13996]]
northeast Indiana and on the State council of Vietnam veterans. He said 
to me that the entire group adamantly agrees that we should not send 
U.S. troops into Bosnia. He also said that he described, as a Vietnam 
veteran, as a former CIA employee, that this looks like Vietnam all 
over again. ``We all agree that is no clearly defined national 
interest. Bosnia is a European problem. Nor is there a clear, 
quantifiable objective or mission statement. We will have casualties. 
The slowing of the Bosnian war process is not worth the cost of U.S. 
lives or scarce fiscal resources, because peace cannot be enforced.''
  I hear this most intensely from veterans in my district. As I look at 
what happened in Vietnam and as I look now at our young American men 
and women going into a war-torn land in the middle of winter, feeling 
doubt about going in, it has to be discouraging to them to hear us 
fighting among ourselves, of questioning their mission, and that is not 
what we are trying to do here. I honestly believe we need in this House 
to cut off funding now before there lives are lost.
  I believe I am defending those American men and women by pushing 
before any of them are killed. Once the gunshots start, we have got to 
rally behind our troops. I understand that. I am going to fight every 
day up until gunshots start. Even if it is embarrassing for us to 
withdraw, better to have the embarrassment than to get caught in a long 
war with many American lives, and I believe that is defending our 
troops.
  But what we need to remember is, just like in Vietnam where our 
leaders messed up and where our leaders are tripping over themselves 
apologizing for this and apologizing for that, it should take nothing 
away from those troops who go in to defend American honor, who do what 
they are asked to do in service of their country. We need to be 
supportive of them. Our leadership maybe should hang their head, but 
our soldiers should hold there heads up high and know they are doing 
what they are being asked to do and they are doing their best jobs.
  When I was a student in high school at the little high school of Leo 
High School, and my high school class had 68 members, that shows how 
little the school was, we did a chain letter to those who graduated 
from our little school who were over in Vietnam. One of the commitments 
I made in my district, I hope other Members will as well, anybody who 
can get me the address of anybody from our region of, for that matter, 
Indiana, who is in Bosnia. I want to write them a personal note of 
support to them individually. I hope others will.
  If I cannot get the Armed Services to give me who is there, I need 
people to let me know who is there.
  Another thing we will do is we will collect letters, particularly 
over the Christmas season, particularly from people from northeast 
Indiana, to send them. If nothing else, we will give them to the Armed 
Forces so they can send them to the troops there. This is not a 
question of supporting our men and women who are serving our Nation 
with courage, bravery, at high risk, separated from their families. 
This is a question of trying to protect them, protecting our national 
interest, to keep us from bogging down in another war where literally 
there is terrible tragedy all over the world. We can go into almost 
every country any time. We can go into our American cities that have 
terrible tragedies. The question is: What is the role of our Armed 
Forces of the United States?

  It is a travesty of justice, an embarrassment to our country, to see 
this President use it like it is the Arkansas State Police trying to 
put down rebellions all over the world. I am very disappointed at our 
inability in the House to bring this up to another tough vote now. We 
have got to cut this money. We are the last line of defense for our 
troops where their lives are being put at stake during this tough 
season. Unless we can chop off the money here in the House and try and 
get the Senate to go along, unless the American people will rise up and 
speak out and tell their Representatives they do not want their 
supposed peace mission to turn into a major war, it is very difficult. 
As I used to sit home before I ran for Congress and then I also was 
growing up, I used to say, ``Boy, you know, it is really frustrating 
being out here in Indiana, not being able to influence things and not 
being able to change.'' Then you come to Washington. You get in there 
and you see us bail out in Mexico and not be able to stop it. You hear 
all of this baloney about cuts and how we are gutting Medicare and 
gutting social security and gutting student loans, all of which are not 
true, and you think how can I combat this. Then you see our troops 
going into what I believe will be a war, and we are not able to stop 
it.
  I do not feel a whole lot different than I did back in Indiana. Only 
now I am a Member of Congress. That is really a sad commentary on our 
political system.
  I remember in reading Barry Goldwater's memoirs, talking about a 
conversation he had with Richard Nixon, who said he thought, after 
having been a House Member and a Senate Member, finally became 
President of the United States, he could ultimately make these 
decisions. What he found was he could not even get the type of pencil 
he wanted. Haldeman would go to the staff and say he would forget about 
it next week. He could not get the pencils he wanted. It is very 
frustrating being here, trying to change this, knowing the American 
people are outraged. They want a change. We are your elected 
Representatives. There are many of us here who are going to continue to 
battle, not because of any disrespect to our Armed Forces but because 
of great respect of our Armed Forces, because we want them to be served 
in the most important things, which are to defend our Nation, defend 
our national interests, and when it is unnecessary, to be able to spend 
their time with their families and have their full lives to look 
forward to.

                        Lapse of Historic Savvy

                           (By Thomas Sowell)

       Bill Clinton's speech on Bosnia was an insult to the 
     intelligence of the American people. Virtually every point 
     made in that speech depended on being able to take advantage 
     of ignorance, amnesia, or an inability to deal with simple 
     logic.
       ``Bosnia lies at the very heart of Europe,'' said the 
     president. That claim can be taken seriously only by those 
     ignorant of geography. The Balkans are on the fringes of 
     Europe, geographically and otherwise.
       Sarajevo is less than 600 miles from the Bosphorous, where 
     Asia begins. It is farther than that from Berlin or Paris, 
     and more than a thousand miles from London.
       Mr. Clinton's geographical fraud was not incidental. It was 
     part of a whole false picture he painted, in which we must 
     intervene in order to prevent the war in Bosnia from spilling 
     over in the rest of Europe around it. Not only is Bosnia not 
     in the heart of Europe, its many wars over many centuries 
     have not spilled over into other countries.
       On the contrary, it was the intervention of other countries 
     in the Balkans that turned a local assassination in Sarajevo 
     in 1914 into the First World War. Today, it is our 
     intervention that risks creating another international 
     confrontation, if Russia resumes its historic role as an ally 
     of the Serbs.
       The fact that Russian president Boris Yeltsin has gone 
     along grudgingly with Western policy in the Balkans thus far 
     is no guarantee that he will continue to do so, as events 
     unfold next year--which is an election year in Russia, as 
     well as in the United States. Moreover, either another 
     candidate or another heart attack can take Mr. Yeltsin 
     completely out of the picture.
       There are far more belligerent Russian politicians waiting 
     in the wings, eager to restore Russia's power and its 
     historic role as a force backing the Serbs in the Balkans. 
     What would we do then, with 20,000 young American soldiers as 
     sitting ducks in Russia's backyard?
       We have a huge national interest in avoiding any such 
     situation.
       We have no other national interest in that part of the 
     world. Not one American's safety will be endangered if we 
     stay out. Not one American's livelihood will be jeopardized.
       The notion that we are going into Bosnia because of a 
     ``peace'' accord reached recently in Dayton is falsified by 
     the simple fact that Mr. Clinton was urging such action years 
     before any Yugoslav leaders ever set foot in Dayton, and even 
     before he became president. Again, Mr. Clinton is depending 
     on our forgetfulness.
       Other gambits in the president's speech include picturing 
     the Dayton accords as some kind of achievement ``as a result 
     of our efforts.'' Nothing has been easier than to get 
     agreements in the Balkans--and nothing harder than getting 
     the parties to live up to them. Calling this latest accord 
     ``a commitment to peace'' is another reliance on amnesia.
       One of the few claims with any semblance of fact or logic 
     behind it is that, if the United States pulls out of its own 
     commitments, this will make our word less reliable in the 
     future. The larger question, however, is: Reliable for what 
     purpose?
       Do we want people to rely on us to run around the world 
     engaging in these military adventures?

[[Page H 13997]]

       The need to back up the president's words with American 
     troops cuts two ways. We can either sacrifice young lives for 
     the sake of presidential rhetoric or the president can learn 
     to keep his big mouth shut, in order to spare those lives 
     until they need to be risked for something that truly 
     threatens the American people.
       If this president can't keep his mouth shut, then we need 
     one who can.
       There is a far greater danger to the people of this country 
     from terrorists from the Balkans striking in the United 
     States, as a result of our intervention, than from the war in 
     that region spilling over the Atlantic Ocean. Thinly-veiled 
     threats of this sort have already been made.
       The claim that ``our mission is clear and limited,'' as Mr. 
     Clinton put it, is true only if everything goes according to 
     plan. The same would have been true in Vietnam if everything 
     had gone according to plan: We would have simply defended the 
     existing government until they got on their feet and then 
     pulled out.
       But wars that go strictly according to plan are the rare 
     exceptions. The big question is: What is our Plan B? What if 
     we can't put the genie back in the bottle and just get caught 
     in the crossfire?
       The haste with which the Clinton administration is getting 
     ready to put its troops in place suggests that they will deal 
     with that question by relying on the American tradition of 
     supporting our soldiers, once they have been committed. In 
     other words, Plan B is to present us with a fait accompli, so 
     that it will be considered unpatriotic to fail to back up the 
     president as he flounders in another quagmire.
                                                                    ____


                [From the New York Times, Nov. 28, 1995]

                      Remember the Nixon Doctrine

                            (By James Webb)

       Arlington, VA.--The Clinton Administration's insistence on 
     putting 20,000 American troops into Bosnia should be seized 
     on by national leaders, particularly those running for 
     President, to force a long-overdue debate on the worldwide 
     obligations of our military.
       While the Balkan factions may be immersed in their 
     struggle, and Europeans may feel threatened by it, for 
     Americans it represents only one of many conflicts, real and 
     potential, whose seriousness must be weighed, often against 
     one another, before allowing a commitment of lives, resources 
     and national energy.
       Today, despite a few half-hearted attempts such as Gen. 
     Colin Powell's ``superior force doctrine,'' no clear set of 
     principles exists as a touchstone for debate on these 
     tradeoffs. Nor have any leaders of either party offered terms 
     which provide an understandable global logic as to when our 
     military should be committed to action. In short, we still 
     lack a national security strategy that fits the post-cold war 
     era.
       More than ever before, the United States has become the 
     nation of choice when crises occur, large and small. At the 
     same time, the size and location of our military forces are 
     in flux. It is important to make our interests known to our 
     citizens, our allies and even our potential adversaries, not 
     just in Bosnia but around the world, so that commitments can 
     be measured by something other than the pressures of interest 
     groups and manipulation by the press. Furthermore, with 
     alliances increasingly justified by power relationships 
     similar to those that dominated before World War I, our 
     military must be assured that the stakes of its missions are 
     worth dying for.
       Failing to provide these assurances is to continue the 
     unremitting case-by-case debates, hampering our foreign 
     policy on the one hand and on the other treating our military 
     forces in some cases as mere bargaining chips. As the past 
     few years demonstrate, this also causes us to fritter away 
     our national resolve while arguing about military backwaters 
     like Somalia and Haiti.
       Given the President's proposal and the failure to this 
     point of defining American stakes in Bosnia as immediate or 
     nation-threatening, the coming weeks will offer a new round 
     of such debates. The President appears tempted to follow the 
     constitutionally questionable (albeit effective) approach 
     used by the Bush Administration in the Persian Gulf war: 
     putting troops in an area where no American forces have been 
     threatened and no treaties demand their presence, then 
     gaining international agreement before placing the issue 
     before Congress.
       Mr. Clinton said their mission would be ``to supervise the 
     separation of forces and to give them confidence that each 
     side will live up to their agreements.'' This rationale 
     reminds one of the ill-fated mission of the international 
     force sent to Beirut in 1983. He has characterized the 
     Bosnian mission as diplomatic in purpose, but promised, in 
     his speech last night, to ``fight fire with fire and then 
     some'' if American troops are threatened. This is a formula 
     for confusion once a combat unit sent on a distinctly 
     noncombat mission comes under repeated attack.
       We are told that other NATO countries will decline to send 
     their own military forces to Bosnia unless the United States 
     assumes a dominant role, which includes sizable combat 
     support and naval forces backing it up. This calls to mind 
     the decades of over-reliance by NATO members on American 
     resources, and President Eisenhower's warning in October 1963 
     that the size and permanence of our military presence in 
     Europe would ``continue to discourage the development of the 
     necessary military strength Western European countries should 
     provide themselves.''
       The Administration speaks of a ``reasonable time for 
     withdrawal,'' which if too short might tempt the parties to 
     wait out the so-called peacekeepers and if too long might 
     tempt certain elements to drive them out with attacks causing 
     high casualties.
       Sorting out the Administration's answer to such hesitations 
     will take a great deal of time, attention and emotion. And 
     doing so in the absence of a clearly stated global policy 
     will encourage other nations, particularly the new power 
     centers in Asia, to view the United States as becoming less 
     committed to addressing their own security concerns. Many of 
     these concerns are far more serious to long-term 
     international stability and American interests. These include 
     the continued threat of war on the Korean peninsula, the 
     importance of the United States as a powerbroker where 
     historical Chinese, Japanese and Russian interests collide, 
     and the need for military security to accompany trade and 
     diplomacy in a dramatically changing region.
       Asian cynicism gained further grist in the wake of the 
     Administration's recent snubs of Japan: the President's 
     cancellation of his summit meeting because of the budget 
     crisis, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher's early 
     return from a Japanese visit to watch over the Bosnian peace 
     talks.
       Asian leaders are becoming uneasy over an economically and 
     militarily resurgent China that in recent years has become 
     increasingly more aggressive. A perception that the United 
     States is not paying attention to or is not worried about 
     such long-term threats could in itself cause a major 
     realignment in Asia. One cannot exclude even Japan, whose 
     strong bilateral relationship with the United States has been 
     severely tested of late, from this possibility.
       Those who aspire to the Presidency in 1996 should use the 
     coming debate to articulate a world view that would 
     demonstrate to the world, as well as to Americans, an 
     understanding of the uses and limitations--in a sense the 
     human budgeting of our military assets.
       Richard Nixon was the last President to clearly define how 
     and when the United States would commit forces overseas. In 
     1969, he declared that our military policy should follow 
     three basic tenets:
       Honor all treaty commitments in responding to those who 
     invade the lands of our allies.
       Provide a nuclear umbrella to the world against the threats 
     of other nuclear powers.
       Finally, provide weapons and technical assistance to other 
     countries where warranted, but do not commit American forces 
     to local conflicts.
       These tenets, with some modification, are still the best 
     foundation of our world leadership. They remove the United 
     States from local conflicts and civil wars. The use of the 
     American military to fulfill treaty obligations requires 
     ratification by Congress, providing a hedge against the 
     kind of President discretion that might send forces into 
     conflicts not in the national interest. Yet they provide 
     clear authority for immediate action required to carry out 
     policies that have been agreed upon by the government as a 
     whole.
       Given the changes in the world, an additional tenet would 
     also be desirable: The United States should respond 
     vigorously against cases of nuclear proliferation and state-
     sponsored terrorism.
       These tenets would prevent the use of United States forces 
     on commitments more appropriate to lesser powers while 
     preserving our unique capabilities. Only the United States 
     among the world's democracies can field large-scale maneuver 
     forces, replete with strategic airlift, carrier battle groups 
     and amphibious power projection.
       Our military has no equal in countering conventional 
     attacks on extremely short notice wherever the national 
     interest dictates. Our bases in Japan give American forces 
     the ability to react almost anywhere in the Pacific and 
     Indian Oceans, just as the continued presence in Europe 
     allows American units to react in Europe and the Middle East.
       In proper form, this capability provides reassurance to 
     potentially threatened nations everywhere. But despite the 
     ease with which the American military seemingly operates on a 
     daily basis, its assets are limited, as is the national 
     willingness to put them at risk.
       As the world moves toward new power centers and different 
     security needs, it is more vital than ever that we state 
     clearly the conditions under which American forces will be 
     sent into harm's way. And we should be ever more chary of 
     commitments, like the looming one in Bosnia, where combat 
     units invite attack but are by the very nature of their 
     mission not supposed to fight.

                          ____________________