[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 47 (Wednesday, March 24, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H1673]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     U.S. IS EMBARKING ON VERY DANGEROUS AND WRONG COURSE IN KOSOVO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, last August we bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, 
in bombing raids that most Americans have already forgotten. We rushed 
into that bombing without informing even the full Joint Chiefs of Staff 
and without congressional approval, and later found we had even bombed 
a medicine factory.
  Last December we started bombing Iraq, once again bombing people that 
our own leaders tell us are not our enemies. Many press reports since 
then have confirmed that the White House rigged the UNSCOM report in a 
lame attempt to justify the Iraqi bombing.
  Now we are going to drop bombs on Kosovo. We are spending billions 
and billions of hard-earned tax dollars in all these bombing campaigns. 
Yesterday I had a group of people in my office requesting $100 million 
more for Alzheimer's research. I told those people to just try to get 
the President to stop bombing for part of one day.
  We are dropping bombs and making enemies out of people who want to be 
our friends. And we are doing all this in places where there is 
absolutely no threat to our national security and no vital U.S. 
interest at stake.
  The Christian Science Monitor said a few weeks ago that there are 
wars or military conflicts going on right now in 46 different places 
around the world. Many of these situations are just as bad or worse 
than Kosovo right now. There have been 2,000 people killed in Kosovo in 
the last year. As bad as this is, columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed 
out on television Sunday that more people were killed recently in 
Ethiopia in just one day.
  If we intervene in every place where there are human rights 
violations, we will have to go into even more places than the 46 where 
the Christian Science Monitor found military conflicts. We seem to be 
following a CNN foreign policy, going heavily into whatever situation 
is being emphasized on the national news at the moment.
  We should try to be friends with all nations. But we do not have the 
resources to become the world's policeman, and we will make more 
enemies than friends if we become the world's bully.
  And we cannot hide behind NATO. Everyone knows that this bombing in 
Kosovo would not be done if the U.S. did not insist on it. NATO was set 
up as a defensive organization. Now it is being turned into an 
offensive one, attacking a non-member nation that has not threatened us 
or any other country.
  We are intervening in a civil war. It is as if one of our own States 
was attempting to secede and our military attempted to keep it in and 
some other country started bombing us. The Kosovo bombings have been 
attempted to be justified on the basis that the fighting will spread. 
This is ridiculous. Milosevic may be a tyrant, but he is not attempting 
to nor does he have the resources to spread worldwide. It is ridiculous 
to try to equate this situation to when we were fighting world 
communism. There is no similarity to Russia under Khruschev or China 
under Mao Tse-Tung.
  Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote a few days ago that 
U.S. intervention in Kosovo is a mistake. He said, ``The proposed 
deployment in Kosovo does not deal with any threat to U.S. security as 
this concept has been traditionally conceived.'' He pointed out that 
``ethnic conflict has been endemic in the Balkans for centuries.''
  David Broder wrote in the Washington Post last week, ``Sending in the 
military to impose a peace on people who have not settled ancient 
quarrels has to be the last resort, not the standard way of doing 
business.''
  This is a religious or ethnic conflict that we cannot resolve unless 
we stay for a very long time at a cost of many, many billions. The 
President promised we would be out of Bosnia by the end of 1996. This 
is now March of 1999, and we are still there. I was told by another 
Member of the House recently that we have now spent $20 billion in 
Bosnia.
  We are about to get into a very dangerous situation. This is an 
European problem. It is not something that we should risk American 
lives over. Young Americans may be killed. We should not be so eager or 
willing to send our troops into this situation. We cannot afford to 
spend all these billions just to show that the President is a great 
world statesman or to make sure that he goes down in history as a great 
world leader.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, Thomas Friedman wrote recently in the New York 
Times these words:

       Stop. Before we dive into sending American troops to sort 
     out the Serbian-Albanian civil war in Kosovo, could we talk 
     about this for a second? If ever there was a time for an 
     honest reassessment of U.S. policy towards Bosnia and Kosovo, 
     it is now. And what that reassessment would conclude is that 
     we should redo the Dayton Accords, otherwise we are going to 
     end up with U.S. troops in Bosnia and Kosovo forever, without 
     solving either problem.

  Mr. Friedman is right. We are embarking on a very dangerous and very 
wrong course.

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