[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 15 (Wednesday, February 25, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H620-H624]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page H620]]
                   THE FOLLY OF FOREIGN INTERVENTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is recognized for 
50 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, if I had a chance to pick a topic for my 
special order today, I would call it the folly of foreign intervention.
  We have heard very much in the last few weeks about the possibility 
of a war being started in the Persian Gulf. It looks like this has at 
least been delayed a bit. There is a temporary victory brought about by 
Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in agreement with 
the government of Iraq.
  This, I think, is beneficial. At least it gives both sides more time 
to stop and think and talk before more bombs are dropped.
  Before we left about 10 days ago from the Congress, I think many 
Members and much of the Nation thought that within a short period of 
time, within a week or so, there would be additional bombing by the 
Americans over Baghdad.

                              {time}  1645

  There were polls out at that time that said 70 percent of the 
American people endorsed this move, something that I questioned and of 
course I question the legitimacy of dealing with policy by measuring 
polls, anyway. I think we should do what is right, not try to decide 
what is right by the polls. But in this circumstance, I think the polls 
must have been very, very misleading.
  We heard a gentleman earlier this evening from North Dakota mention 
when he was at home essentially nobody was telling him that they were 
in favor of the war. I think most Members of Congress on this past week 
on visiting home had the same message. Certainly there was a very loud 
message in Columbus at a town hall meeting. It was written off by those 
who wanted to go to war and wanted to drop the bombs by saying, well, 
no, this was just a very noisy bunch of hippies who are opposed to the 
war. There are a lot of people in this country who are opposed to the 
war and they are not hippies. I think to discredit people who oppose 
going and participating in an act of war and try to discredit them by 
saying that they belong to a hippie generation, I think they are going 
to lose out in the credibility argument in this regards.
  This debate has been going on for quite a few months. It looks like 
it is not resolved. Although there has been an agreement, it is far 
from a victory for either side. It is somewhat ironic about how this 
has come about, because it seems that those of us who have been urging 
great caution have been satisfied with at least a temporary solution, 
yet we are not entirely satisfied at all with the dependency on the 
effort by the United States enforcing U.N. resolutions. In this case I 
think what we must do is reassess the entire policy because it is 
policy that gets us into trouble.
  It is in this one instance. We did not just invent foreign 
interventionism in foreign policy. This has been going on for a long 
time. The worst and the first egregious example, of course, was in 
Korea where we went to war under the U.N. banner and was the first war 
we did not win. Yet we continue with this same policy throughout the 
world. Hardly can we be proud of what happened in Vietnam. It seems 
like we are having a lot more success getting along with the Vietnamese 
people as we trade with them rather than fight with them.
  There is a lot of argument against this whole principle of foreign 
interventionism, involvement in the internal affairs of other nations, 
picking leaders of other countries. We were warned rather clearly by 
our first President, George Washington, that it would be best that we 
not get involved in entangling alliances and that we instead should 
talk with people and be friendly with people and trade with people. Of 
course the first reaction would be, yes, but the person that we are 
dealing with as leader of Iraq is a monster and therefore we cannot 
trust him and we should not talk to him. There have been a lot of 
monsters in the world and we have not treated them all the same way. 
Just think of the tremendous number of deaths to the tune of millions 
under Pol Pot. At that time we were even an ally of his. Even the 
inconsistency of our policy where in the 1980s we actually encouraged 
Saddam Hussein. We sold him weapons. We actually had participated in 
the delivery of biological weapons to Hussein. At that time we 
encouraged him to cross the border into Iran. We closed our eyes when 
poison gases were used.
  So all of a sudden it is hard to understand why our policy changes. 
But once we embark on a policy of intervention and it is arbitrary, we 
intervene when we please or when it seems to help, it seems then that 
we can be on either side of any issue anytime, and so often we are on 
both sides of many wars. This does not serve us well. A policy design 
that is said to be pro-American and in defense of this country where we 
follow the rules and follow the laws and we do not get involved in war 
without a declaration by the Congress, I think it would be very healthy 
not only for us as Americans but it would be very healthy for the world 
as a whole.
  I am very pleased that there has been at least a pause here, although 
our troops will be maintained there and they are waiting to see if 
there is some other excuse that we can go in there and resume the 
bombing. But the whole notion that we are going to bring Hussein to his 
knees without the cost of many American lives I think is naive, because 
nobody has proposed that we go in and invade the country. There have 
been proposals that we just assassinate Hussein, which is illegal. At 
least that is acknowledged that this is an illegal act, to go in and 
kill another leader, although we have been involved in that too. But 
many people have argued that this should be our policy now, and that is 
to topple Hussein.
  But we used the CIA in Cuba a few decades ago. Now it has just been 
revealed that our CIA botched the job. Also, those individuals who were 
trying to restore freedom to Cuba, we let them down by them assuming we 
would do more and then we did less. We were very much involved in 
overthrowing a leader in South Vietnam right before the rampant 
escalation of the war there. That did not serve us well. And then there 
is another example of our CIA putting a government in charge over in 
Iran. That is when we put the Shah in. But this did not bring peace and 
stability to the region. It brought us hostage takings and hostility 
and hatred and threats of terrorism in this country. So although many 
will make the moral cause for doing good around the world, there is no 
moral justification if we are going to follow the laws of this land and 
try to stick to the rules of providing a national defense for us and a 
strong foreign policy.
  I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan).
  Mr. DUNCAN. I wanted to take just a moment to say how much I 
appreciate many of the points that the gentleman is making, 
particularly in regard to the folly of much or many of our foreign 
interventions in recent years.
  I remember about 3 years ago reading on the front page of the 
Washington Post that we had our troops in Haiti picking up garbage and 
settling domestic disputes. Picking up garbage for Haitians and 
settling their domestic disputes should not be a mission of the 
American military. The Haitians should pick up their own garbage.
  Then a few weeks ago, I heard that we had our troops in Bosnia giving 
rabies shots to dogs. The Bosnians should give their own rabies shots 
to their dogs. That should not be a mission of the American military. 
This business of turning our American military into international 
social workers is something I think the overwhelming majority of 
Americans are strongly opposed to.
  The really sad thing is that we have spent many, many billions of 
hard-earned tax dollars in recent years in Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, 
Bosnia, now in Iraq, and I said on the floor of this House a couple of 
weeks ago, why the rush to war in Iraq, why the rush to war, why the 
eagerness to send young American men and women into harm's way. The 
American people were not clamoring for war then. They are even more so 
not clamoring for war now.

  Going to war should be the most reluctant decision that we make. We 
should go to war only when there is no

[[Page H621]]

other reasonable alternative. I saw George Stephanopoulos on television 
a few days ago and he said that even in World War II, we had some 
people who were opposed to World War II. But I can tell you the day 
after Pearl Harbor, the Senate voted 82-0 and the House voted 388-1 to 
go to war against Japan. But Japan had attacked us at that time. It was 
a totally different situation from the one we face in Iraq. You can say 
any bad thing that you want to about Saddam Hussein and I would agree 
with you. But I can also tell you that he was greatly weakened by the 
first Gulf War, he has been weakened even more by the sanctions since 
then. I heard one commentator say that even the Italian army could beat 
Saddam Hussein at this time. The threat is not there. For us to spend 
all these hundreds of millions of dollars deploying all our troops over 
there in the Middle East is a tremendous waste of money. It is not 
something that should be done. We should try to be friends with all 
nations in the world that will let us be friends. But that does not 
mean we need to keep sending billions and billions of dollars overseas. 
Much of this money and many of these interventions are creating great 
resentment toward us.
  I read recently that in regard to the International Monetary Fund 
that many of these countries, they feel like we are behind the 
International Monetary Fund interventions in Southeast Asia, and they 
are requiring some of these countries and peoples to do things that 
they do not want to do and really all they are doing is bailing out big 
banks and big multinational companies, and it is creating great 
resentment toward us.
  I will stop with just two other points. One is that Tony Snow said in 
a column a few days ago in regard to the situation in Iraq, we are 
about to achieve the worst of all possible worlds. We are about to 
alienate our European allies and our Arab allies and achieve nothing of 
military significance.
  President Kennedy in 1961 said: We must face the fact that the U.S. 
is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only 6 percent of the 
world's population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 
percent, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, 
and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world 
problem.
  That was President Kennedy in 1961. The only change is that now we 
are slightly less than 5 percent of the population of the world instead 
of the 6 percent that we were then. I think President Kennedy was 
exactly right. There cannot be an American solution to every world 
problem. Let us be friends with every country, but let us not try and 
impose our will and create great resentment toward this country. Let us 
have a foreign policy, a trade policy, an economic policy that puts 
this country and its taxpayers and its workers first, even if that is 
not politically correct or fashionable to say at any particular given 
time in history.
  Mr. PAUL. I would like to ask the gentleman one question. He was just 
home in his district, he traveled and talked to quite a few of his 
constituents. Did he get a sentiment from his district on what they 
want?
  Mr. DUNCAN. I spoke many places in my district. I represent east 
Tennessee, which is a very conservative, patriotic, pro-military 
district. I have said before that I think a strong national defense is 
one of the most legitimate functions of our national government. But we 
should not try to turn the Department of Defense into the department of 
offense and do things like that. When I spoke, and I told the people of 
my district what I had said on the floor just a few days before, that 
we should not rush into war, I told them some of the things that I had 
said on the floor that I have said here today, I got nothing but 
applause, nothing but support. All of my calls and letters that I have 
gotten have been totally against us attacking what Tom Aspell, the CNN 
correspondent, said now is a defenseless country.
  I am not trying to get any sympathy for Saddam Hussein. I will say 
once again, you can say bad things against him. He is a megalomaniac. 
But the truth is even if we put every single person in this country in 
a military uniform, we could not 100 percent guarantee that there would 
not be some kook do something with a chemical or biological weapon of 
some sort. But we need to be a little more thoughtful in the way we 
handle some of these situations in the future and I think not be so 
eager to show that we are a macho nation and be so eager to go around 
and attack other countries. I do not think that is what the American 
people want us to do. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.
  Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman for his remarks. He made some very 
good points. I would like to follow up on the one point with regards to 
the military. That is one of the most essential functions of the 
Federal Government, is to provide for a strong national defense. But if 
we intervene carelessly around the world, that serves to weaken us.
  I have always lamented the fact that we so often are anxious to close 
down our bases here within the United States because we are always 
looking for the next monster to slay outside of the country, so we 
build air bases in places like Saudi Arabia. Then when the time comes 
that our leaders think that it is necessary to pursue a war policy in 
the region, they do not even allow us to use the bases. I think that is 
so often money down the drain. It is estimated now that we have 
probably pumped in $7 billion into Bosnia and that is continuing. Our 
President is saying now that that is open-ended, there is no date to 
bring those troops back. We have already spent probably a half a 
billion additional dollars these last several weeks just beefing up the 
troops in the Persian Gulf.
  The funds will not be endless. I have too many calls from so many in 
my district who serve in the military, and their complaint is that they 
do not have enough funds to adequately train. We are wasting money in 
the wrong places, getting ourselves into more trouble than we need to. 
At the same time we detract from spending the money where we should in 
training our personnel the way they should be. I think this is not so 
much a tactical decision made by management as much as it is a policy 
decision on what our foreign policy ought to be.

                              {time}  1700

  If we continue to believe that we can police the whole world and 
provide security and right every wrong, I think it will lead us to our 
bankruptcy, and just as was mentioned earlier, we receive the same kind 
of grief when we pretend that we can impose economic conditions on 
other countries.
  We, as a wealthy Nation, are expected to bail out other countries who 
have overextended themselves and they get into trouble. At the same 
time, we put economic rules and regulations on them and resentments are 
turned back toward us. The Arabs in the Middle East do not understand 
our foreign policy because there have been numerous U.N. resolutions, 
but it is only this one particular resolution that we have felt so 
compelled to enforce.
  And the real irony of all this is that first we use the United 
Nations as the excuse to go in. Then, the United Nations gets a little 
weak on their mandates, and they themselves do not want to go in. So it 
is a U.N. resolution that we try to enforce, and then when it is shown 
that it is not a good resolution, the U.N. then backs away from it. So 
there is no unanimous opinion in the U.N., I think further proving that 
this is a poor way to do foreign policy.
  And those who would like to do more bombing and pursue this even more 
aggressively tend to agree with that. They do not like the idea that we 
have turned over our foreign policy making to an international body 
like the United Nations.
  So this, to me, is a really good time to make us stop and think 
should we do this? I certainly think that our foreign policy in the 
interests of the United States should be determined by us here in the 
Congress, and then some will argue, well, it is not up to Congress to 
deal in foreign policy. That is up to a President. But that is not what 
is in the Constitution.
  As a matter of fact, foreign policy, those words do not even exist in 
the Constitution, and the Congress has all the responsibility of 
raising funds, spending funds, raising an army, declaring war, so the 
responsibilities are on us.
  And this is the reason why I have introduced a resolution that would 
say that we do have the authority to withdraw the funds from pursuing 
this

[[Page H622]]

bombing, and there is another resolution that the gentleman from 
Maryland will mention here shortly dealing with that same subject, 
because we do have the responsibility, and we, especially in the House, 
are closest to the people.
  We have to be up for reelection every 2 years, and if we listen to 
the polls that say that 70 percent of the American people want this 
war, at the same time if we fail to go home and talk to our people and 
find out that most Americans do not want this war and there is no good 
argument for it.
  The whole idea that we can immediately go over there and make sure 
there are no weapons of mass destruction when we helped build the 
weapons up in the first place, and if we are really concerned about 
weapons of mass destruction, why are we not more concerned about the 
25,000 nuclear warheads that have fallen into unknown hands since the 
breakup of the Soviet Union? Our allies in the Middle East have nuclear 
weapons, and we have China to worry about. What did we do with China? 
We give them more foreign aid.
  So there is no consistent argument that we can put up that all of a 
sudden Saddam Hussein is the only threat to world peace and it is in 
our interest to go in there and take him out. It just does not add up. 
If he really was a threat, you would think his neighbors would be the 
most frightened about this, and yet the neighbors are urging us not to 
do it. They are urging us to take our time, back off and wait and see 
what happens.
  We, in the United States, so often are involved in conflicts around 
the world, and one of the things that we urge so many to do is sit down 
and talk to each other. We ask the Catholics and the Protestants in 
Ireland to talk, we ask the Croats and the Serbs to talk, we ask the 
Jews and the Arabs to talk; why is it that we cannot do more talking 
with Saddam Hussein? Instead, we impose sanctions on him which does 
nothing to him, solidifies his support, rallies the Islamic 
fundamentalists while we kill babies. There is now a U.N. report that 
shows that since the sanctions, well over a half a million children 
died from starvation and lack of medicines that we denied them.
  So I think that there is every reason in the world for us to reassess 
this policy. There is a much more sensible policy. What we need is more 
time right now. There is no urgency about this. We did the bombing in 
the early 1990s, and by the way, I can see this as a continuation of 
that single war. But since that time with inspections, even the 
President claims that they have gotten rid of more weapons since the 
war ended than occurred with the war.
  So if there is no military victory in sight by bombing and only great 
danger, what is the purpose? Why can we not continue with more 
negotiations and more inspections? And they say, well, we cannot trust 
Hussein. Well, that may be true. But looking at it objectively when we 
finished in 1991 our policy was to encourage the Kurds and the Shiites 
to rebel, and we implied that we would be there, and what happened? We 
were not there. Thousands and thousands of Shiites and Kurds were just 
wiped out because we misled them, similar to our promises that we made 
to the Cubans in the early 1960s.
  So we do not gain the respect of the world by, one, saying, well, we 
cannot trust anything he says. Of course not, we cannot trust it. But 
we have to be realistic, and can they trust us, as well, because our 
record is not perfectly clean.
  I now yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett).
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I am sorry I could not join 
the discussion before this, but I have just come from a Members-only 
briefing on Iraq, where we are now in the Iraq situation.
  I would like to start my discussion by referring to something that 
Congressman Paul has just referred to, and that is there really is not 
just one, but two constitutional issues involved here. The first of 
those constitutional issues is Article 1, section 8 of the 
Constitution, and it is a little document, a very important one; I 
carry it in my pocket.
  Article 1, section 8 says that one of the responsibilities of the 
Congress is to declare war. There is no hint of that in the 
responsibilities of the President, who is Commander in Chief, who 
commands the troops after they are committed by the Congress.
  Yeltsin said that if we bomb, that could start World War III. By our 
President's own admission we were going to take casualties. I think it 
is very difficult to argue that this bombing would not have been the 
equivalent of what our Forefathers were talking about when they 
mentioned declaration of war.
  And that is not the only part of the Constitution that would have 
been violated by this. Article 1, section 9 says that no moneys shall 
be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made 
by law. There has been no appropriation for this activity over in Iraq, 
so I think that clearly two parts of the Constitution are involved 
here, the part that says that the President, as you know, we do not 
elect in our democratic republic, we do not elect an emperor. We elect 
a President, and the President is bound by the Constitution. And the 
Constitution says that the Congress declares war; that he is the 
Commander in Chief after war has been declared.

  The Constitution also says that moneys cannot be taken from the 
Treasury except by appropriations. We have made no appropriation for 
this. So he clearly needs to come to the Congress.
  I have a resolution that Congressman Paul was on and a great many 
others, and by the way, this has wide support across the aisle. We have 
Members from the most conservative to the most liberal on this. It is a 
very simple resolution. All it says is that, Mr. President, if you want 
to bomb Iraq, you have got to come to the Congress first.
  We do not mention this resolution, the constitutional issues because 
one may debate those, but one cannot debate the common sense position 
that the President, if he is going to do this, has got to have the 
support of the American people.
  The way to get the support of the American people is to have the 
Congress debate it. I would hope that debate would be long enough that 
the American people would have a chance to weigh in on that debate 
because we cannot do this kind of thing without involving the American 
people.
  Let me just mention the two objectives of these strikes. The first 
was to destroy the weapons of mass destruction. This has to be the most 
telegraphed military strike in the history of mankind. If those weapons 
of mass destruction were where we thought they were when we said we 
were going to bomb him, you can bet that they are not there now, and we 
would have no way of knowing when you see some barrels moved on an ox 
cart or in the back of a truck whether they were barrels of molasses or 
chicken feed or anthrax. Our satellites are very good, but they cannot 
see inside the barrel.
  The other objective was to diminish significantly his capability to 
produce weapons. If you have a brewery, you can produce biological 
weapons. That is why we call them the poor man's atomic bomb because 
they are so easy to make.
  So we were not going to accomplish either one of those objectives. 
Let me tell you what we would have accomplished. We would have 
galvanized the Islamic world against us. We sit on 2 percent of the 
known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's energy. The 
Islamic world, the Middle East, controls 70 percent of the world's oil, 
and I cannot understand how it is in our vital national interest to 
alienate that part of the world, which controls 70 percent of the 
world's oil.
  Let me tell you something else it would have done. I can see it now. 
Peter Arnett is holding up on CNN the shredded body of a baby. It would 
have been an absolute P.R. disaster, killing innocent civilians over 
there, and they are innocent. This is a tyrannical regime that does not 
represent, I think, the Iraqi people. But, you know, what are we going 
to accomplish by killing these innocent citizens? And we call that 
collateral damage, and there was an admission trying to steel us so 
that we could endure those TV pictures that were going to come. We were 
told we are going to have significant collateral damage.

                              {time}  1715

  As a matter of fact, they were all pleased that there had been a 
level of

[[Page H623]]

constraint; and they were all raising their voices to President Clinton 
and to Madeleine Albright, saying let's keep talking. Let's keep 
negotiating. Let's continue to look and see if there is not a way to 
avert this crisis. That as long as there is a sliver of hope, let us 
find that hope and let us have the alternative and let us not put the 
American people in the predicament where we would have to know that 
because some innocent child lived down the road from Saddam Hussein, or 
some elderly citizen, who had no interest in moving towards war, had to 
be maimed, hurt or killed because of our inability to find a peaceful 
solution.
  I think people like yourself, who talk about peace and who talk about 
alternatives, we know it is difficult.
  Peace has never been easy. I grew up sort of in the traditional 
Christian experience, and we were led to believe that at one time there 
were only four people on the earth: Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. And 
it seems as though they had some difficulty. One thought that the other 
one had something that was his or that he ought to have. And only four 
people, yet some friction.
  I think if we try and live in movement towards peace, it can be 
obtained.
  I am reminded of something I believe John Kennedy was supposed to 
have said, that peace is not really found in treaties, covenants and 
charters but in the hearts and souls of men and women; and if we 
actually look for a way, if people all over the world can believe that 
there is the opportunity to peacefully coexist and if we can use our 
resources to find solutions to the major problems that plague our 
earth, rather than using those to create and develop weapons of war, 
then, perhaps, we can find a cure for cancer. Perhaps we can indeed 
find a way to eradicate hunger or we can find a way to make people 
healthy, to create the kind of quality of life that we are looking for.
  So, again, I commend the gentleman for taking out the time, for 
giving the rest of us an opportunity to share and participate; and I 
believe that if people continue to pursue, as the gentleman is doing, 
as difficult as it might be, we can ultimately find a peaceful solution 
to the world's problem.
  Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman very much for participating.
  Early on, I talked about a policy of nonintervention; and I would 
like to talk a little bit more about that. Because some might construe 
that if you have a policy of nonintervention, it means you do not care; 
and that is not the case. Because we can care a whole lot.
  There are two very important reasons why one who espouses the 
constitutional viewpoint of nonintervention, they do it. One, we 
believe in the rule of law and we should do it very cautiously, and 
that is what we are bound by here in the Congress. So that is very 
important.
  The other one is a practical reason, and that is that there is not 
very good evidence that our intervention does much good. We do not see 
that intervention in Somalia has really solved the problems there, and 
we left there in a hurry.
  We have spent a lot of money in Bosnia and the other places. So the 
evidence is not very good that intervention is involved, certainly the 
most abhorrent type of intervention, which is the eager and aggressive 
and not-well-thought-out military intervention. That is obviously the 
very worst.
  I would argue that even the policy of neutrality and friendship and 
trade with people, regardless of the enemy, would be the best.
  Of course, if you are involved in a war or there is an avowed enemy, 
declared enemy, that is a different story. For the most part, since 
World War II, we have not used those terms, we have not had declared 
words, we have only had ``police actions,'' and, therefore, we are 
working in a never-never limbo that nobody can well define.
  I think it is much better that we define the process and that 
everybody understands it.
  I would like to go ahead and close with a brief summary of what we 
have been trying to do here today.
  It was mentioned earlier, and I want to reemphasize it, something 
that has not been talked about a whole lot over this issue, has been 
the issue of oil. It is oil interests, money involved.
  As I stated earlier, we were allies with Hussein when we encouraged 
him to cross the border into Iran, and yet, at the same time, the 
taking over of the Kuwait oil fields was something that we could not 
stand, even though there has not been a full debate over that argument. 
We have heard only the one side of that, who drew the lines and for 
what reason the lines were drawn there and whose oil was being drilled. 
There is a major debate there that should be fully aired before we say 
that it is the fault of only one.
  But it is not so much that it was the crossing of borders. I do 
believe that oil interests and the huge very, very important oil fields 
of Iraq and what it might mean to the price of oil if they came on has 
a whole lot to do with this.
  We did not worry about the Hutus and the Tutus in Africa. A lot of 
killing was going on there; 1 million people were being killed. Where 
was our compassion? Where was our compassion in the killing fields of 
Cambodia? We did not express the same compassion that we seem to 
express as soon as oil is involved.
  We cannot let them get away with the repetition of ``we got to get 
the weapons of mass destruction.'' Of course. But are they mostly in 
Iraq? I would say we have done rather well getting rid of the weapons 
there. They are a much weaker nation militarily than they were 10 years 
ago, and those kind of weapons are around the world, so that, as far as 
I am concerned, is a weak argument.
  Another subject that is not mentioned very often, but the prime 
minister of Israel just recently implied that, hopefully, we will 
pursue this policy of going in there and trying to topple this regime. 
I can understand their concerns, but I also understand the concerns of 
the American taxpayers and the expense of the American lives that might 
be involved. So I can argue my case.
  But even taking it from an Israeli point of view, I do not know how 
they can be sure it is in their best interests to go over there and 
stir things up. They are more likely to be bombed with a terrorist bomb 
if we go in there and start bombing Iraq. If we do, Israel will not 
stand by as they did once before. They told us so.
  So if we bomb first and then the goal of Saddam Hussein is to expand 
the war, what does he do? He lobs one over into Israel, and Israel 
comes in, and then the whole procedure has been to solidify the Islamic 
fundamentalists. Then there is no reason not to expect maybe Iran and 
Syria coming in.
  Right now Iraq is on closer ties with Syria and Iran than they have 
been in 18 years. This is the achievement of our policy. We are driving 
the unity of those who really hate America, and will do 
almost anything. So we further expose ourselves to the threat of 
terrorism. So if they are attacked and they have no way to defend 
themselves against this great Nation of ours, they will strike out. 
Therefore, I think in the practical argument, we have very little to 
gain by pursuing this policy.

  It is not difficult for me to come down on the side of arguing for 
peace. Peace is what we should be for. That does not mean you give up 
your military, but you use your military more wisely than we have over 
the past 30 or 40 years. You use it for national defense.
  Today we have a powerful military force, but a lot of people do not 
think we are as strong in defense as we used to be. So, yes, we are 
stronger than others, but if we have a failed and a flawed policy and a 
military that has been weakened, then we are looking for trouble.
  So even the practical arguments call for restraint and a sensible 
approach, for debate and negotiations. It is for this reason I think 
for the moment we can be pleased that Mr. Annan went to Iraq and came 
back with something that is at least negotiable, and that the American 
people will think about and talk about. Hopefully this will lead not 
only to peace immediately in this area, but hopefully it will lead to a 
full discussion about the wisdom of a foreign policy of continued 
perpetual interventionism and involvement in the internal affairs of 
other nations.
  If we argue our case correctly, if we argue the more argument, the 
constitutional argument, and the argument for peace as well, I cannot 
see how the American people cannot endorse a policy like that, and I 
challenge those who think that we should

[[Page H624]]

go carelessly and rapidly into battle, killing those who are not 
responsible, further enhancing the power and the authority of those who 
would be the dictators. They do not get killed. Sanctions do not hurt 
them. The innocent people suffer. Just as the economic sanctions that 
will be put on Southeast Asia as we give them more money, who suffers 
from the devaluations? The American taxpayer, as well as the poor 
people, whether they are in Mexico or Southeast Asia, in order to prop 
up the very special interests. Whether it is the banking interests 
involved in the loans to the Southeast Asians, or our military-
industrial complex who tends to benefit from building more and more 
weapons so they can go off and test them in wars that are unnecessary.

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