[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 52 (Thursday, April 15, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H2113-H2114]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 SENDING GROUND TROOPS TO KOSOVO WOULD COMPOUND A HUGE FOREIGN POLICY 
                                 ERROR

  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 night on the CNN national news the 
anchor woman said that Congress did not question the costs of the 
Kosovo-Serbia bombings, implying total support. That very morning, 
however, the Congressional Quarterly had a headline that said, 
``Congress Eyes Cost of U.S. Role in Kosovo.''
  There probably is no question that this money will be approved. 
However, it is simply wrong to imply that no Members of Congress 
question these costs.
  We are now being told that we will soon be asked to approve $4 
billion for the costs of our air war. One estimate is that ground 
troops and reconstruction costs could soon total $10 billion. This is 
money that will have to be taken from other programs and from American 
taxpayers, and if we have to stay in there to preserve the peace for 
many years to come, the costs could just become unbelievable. Many 
Members of Congress feel it was a horrible mistake to get into this 
mess in the first place and that our bombings have made a bad situation 
many times worse than if we had simply offered humanitarian aid.
  CNN and much of our liberal national media may want a much bigger 
role. The American people want out of there, the sooner the better.
  Yesterday a Democratic Member of the House sat down next to me and 
said, ``I don't know who these people are polling. Everyone in my 
district is strongly opposed to this war.''
  In just the past couple of days, Mr. Speaker, I have had similar 
comments made to me from both Democratic and Republican Members of the 
House from Missouri, Virginia, New York, Kentucky, Arizona, Maryland, 
Alabama, California, North Carolina and Florida. I have not been 
seeking these comments. I have been taking no formal survey. But 
Members of the House have been telling me that their constituents are 
almost totally opposed to this war in Serbia and Kosovo.
  Our colleague, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Ganske) was on the C-Span 
Washington Journal yesterday morning. He said he had had over 1,000 
people in town meetings over the recess and that when he asked how many 
favored ground troops in Kosovo, only 10 people raised their hands.
  Last Thursday morning this same question was asked on the leading 
talk radio show in Knoxville. Only one call came in in favor of ground 
troops, yet the national media has this drumbeat going for a bigger, 
longer, more expensive war. Heaven help us if part of this is about 
ratings, or so some of our leaders can prove how powerful they are, or 
to leave some great legacy as world statesman.
  I believe this is going to go down as one of the great 
miscalculations in American history and certainly one of the most 
expensive. We have turned NATO from a purely defensive organization 
into an aggressor force for the first time in history, and one that has 
attacked a sovereign nation for the first time in history.
  With our bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sudan and now Serbia and 
Kosovo, we are bombing nations which have not threatened us in any way, 
which have not jeopardized our national security and where we have no 
vital U.S. interests, and we are quickly turning people who would like 
to be our friends into bitter enemies of the United States. We have 
taken a bad situation and made it many times worse by our bombings and 
have created a huge refugee crisis in the process, and all of this was 
done by the President apparently against the advice of his top military 
advisers and against the advice of the head of the CIA.
  The Christian Science Monitor, the National Journal and many other 
leading publications and columnists have pointed out that there are at 
least 30 or 40 other conflicts, small wars, going on all over this 
world right now, several far worse than Kosovo before we started 
bombing. Our policy should have been, Mr. Speaker, and should be now: 
humanitarian aid, yes; bombings and ground troops, no.
  The U.S. was doing 68 percent of the bombing before General Clark 
requested 300 more planes. If the majority in Congress wants to send 
ground troops in and, I think, ignore their constituents in the 
process, then let the Europeans lead for once. We do not have to carry 
the entire burden. Those who wanted to expand NATO membership a few 
months ago to bring in Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary should 
call on those countries to supply troops. They have done nothing so 
far, and it is obvious that NATO would not be doing all of this or any 
of this were it not for U.S. insistence.
  One of our leading columnists, Mr. Speaker, wrote a couple of days 
ago these words:
  ``Three weeks into Bill Clinton's Balkan adventure, and America risks 
a debacle. The human rights crisis in Kosovo has exploded into a 
catastrophe. Slobodan Milosevic is being rallied around like some 
Serbian Churchill, Montenegro and Macedonia

[[Page H2114]]

are destabilized, Russia is being swept by anti-American jingoism, and 
U.S. troops may have to go marching into the big muddy. Such are the 
fruits of Utopian crusades for global democracy.''
  Mr. Speaker, several times over the last few days I have heard 
reports on national networks saying that Members of Congress were 
getting ``antsy'' about not committing ground troops to Kosovo. The 
implication is that all of the Members of Congress want ground troops 
in there immediately.
  I believe it was a terrible mistake to start bombing in the first 
place, and it certainly would be compounding a huge error to place many 
thousands of ground troops in there now.
  As many columnists have pointed out, the NATO bombings have made this 
situation much worse than it ever would have been if we had simply 
stayed out. The very liberal Washington Post Columnist, Richard Cohen, 
wrote, ``I believe, though, that the NATO bombings have escalated and 
accelerated the process. For some Kosovars, NATO has made things 
worse.''
  Pat M. Holt, a foreign affairs expert writing in the Christian 
Science Monitor, wrote, ``The first few days of bombing have led to 
more atrocities and to more refugees. It will be increasing the 
instability which the bombing was supposed to prevent.''
  Philip Gourevitch, writing in the April 12 New Yorker Magazine, said: 
``Yet so far the air war against Yugoslavia has accomplished exactly 
what the American-led alliance flew into combat to prevent: Our bombs 
unified the Serbs in Yugoslavia, as never before, behind the defiance 
of Milosevic; they spurred to a frenzy the `cleansing' of Kosovo's 
ethnic Albanians by Milosevic's forces; they increased the likelihood 
of the conflict's spilling over into Yugoslavia's south-Balkan 
neighbors; and they hardened the hearts of much of the non-Western 
World against us--not least in Russia, where passionate anti-
Americanism is increasing the prospects for the right-wing nationalists 
of the Communist Party to win control of the Kremlin and its nuclear 
arsenal in coming elections.''
  Many conservative analysts have been very critical. Thomas Sowell 
wrote: ``Already our military actions are being justified by the 
argument that we are in there now and cannot pull out without a 
devastating loss of credibility and influence in NATO and around the 
world. In other words, we cannot get out because we have gotten in. 
That kind of argument will be heard more and more if we get in deeper.
  ``Is the Vietnam War so long ago that no one remembers? We eventually 
pulled out of Vietnam,'' Mr. Sowell wrote, ``under humiliating 
conditions with a tarnished reputation around the world and with 
internal divisiveness and bitterness that took years to heal. Bad as 
this was, we could have pulled out earlier with no worse consequences 
and with thousands more Americans coming back alive.''
  Mr. Sowell asks, ``Why are we in the Balkans in the first place? 
There seems to be no clear-cut answer.''
  William Hyland, a former editor of Foreign Affairs Magazine, writing 
in the Washington Post said, ``The President has put the country in a 
virtually impossible position. We cannot escalate without grave risks. 
If the President and NATO truly want to halt ethnic cleansing, then the 
alliance will have to put in a large ground force or, at a minimum, 
mount a credible threat to do so. A conventional war in the mountains 
of Albania and Kosovo will quickly degenerate into a quagmire. On the 
other hand, the United States and NATO cannot retreat without suffering 
a national and international humiliation. * * * the only alternative is 
to revive international diplomacy.''
  Mr. Hyland is correct, but unfortunately I am afraid that ground 
troops in Kosovo would be much worse than a quagmire. Former Secretary 
of State Lawrence Eagleberger was quoted on a national network last 
week as saying that the Bush administration had closely analyzed the 
situation in the Balkans in the early 1990s and had decided it was a 
``swamp'' into which we should not go.
  NATO was established as a purely defensive organization, not an 
aggressor force. With the decreased threat from the former Soviet 
Union, was NATO simply searching for a mission? Were some national 
officials simply trying to prove that they are world statesmen or 
trying to leave a legacy?
  The United States has done 68 percent of the bombing thus far. This 
whole episode, counting reconstruction and resettlement costs after we 
bring Milosevic down, will cost us many billions.
  IIf there have to be ground troops, let the Europeans take the lead. 
Do not commit United States ground troops. Let the Europeans do 
something. The U.S. has done too much already. Humanitarian aid, yes; 
bombs and ground troops, no.

               [From the Washington Post, Feb. 13, 1999]

                         The Mess They've Made

                        (By Patrick J. Buchanan)

       Three weeks into Bill Clinton's Balkan adventure and 
     America risks a debacle. The human rights crisis in Kosovo 
     has exploded into a catastrophe. Slobodan Milosevic is being 
     rallied around like some Serbian Churchill. Montenegro and 
     Macedonia are destabilized; Russia is being swept by anti-
     American jingoism; and U.S. troops may have to go marching 
     into the Big Muddy.
       Such are the fruits of Utopian crusades for global 
     democracy.
       The great lesson of Vietnam was: Before you commit the 
     army, commit the nation. Clinton and Madeleine Albright 
     launched a war against Yugoslavia with the support of 
     neither.
       Yet this debacle is not their doing alone. It is a product 
     of the hubris of a foreign policy elite that has for too long 
     imbibed of its own moonshine about America being the 
     ``world's last superpower'' and ``indispensable nation.'' 
     Even as we slashed our defenses to the smallest fraction of 
     GDP since before Pearl Harbor, the rhetoric has remained 
     triumphalist, and the commitments have kept on coming.
       Responsibility must be shared by Congress, for Clinton's 
     intent to launch this Balkan war was long apparent. Yet 
     Congress failed either to authorize war or deny the president 
     the right to attack.
       With Milosevic still defying NATO, we are admonished that 
     ``failure is not an option.'' the United States must do 
     ``whatever is necessary to win.'' Otherwise, NATO's 
     credibility will be destroyed.
       But this is mindlessness. If the war was a folly to begin 
     with, surely, the answer is to cut our losses and let the 
     idiot-adventurers who urged the attack resign to write their 
     memoirs, rather than send 100,000 U.S. troops crashing into 
     the Balkans to save the faces and careers of our blundering 
     strategists. Only a fanatic redoubles his energy when he has 
     lost sight of his goal.
       After the Gallipolli disaster, Churchill went; after Suez, 
     Eden went; after the Bay of Pigs, Allen Dulles departed the 
     CIA. Surely, this is a wiser, more honorable, course than a 
     ground war in Kosovo.
       Moreover, Americans will not support ``whatever is 
     necessary to win.'' We are not going to turn Belgrade into 
     Hamburg. As one recalls the horror at Nixon's ``Christmas 
     Bombing'' that freed our POWs at a cost of 1,400 dead in 
     Hanoi, all but surgical bombing is out.
       And if we send in the troops, what do we ``win''? The right 
     to say that NATO defeated Serbia? The right to occupy Kosovo?
       If, after we take Kosovo, the Serbs conduct a guerrilla war 
     against our troops, and the KLA begins a war of liberation to 
     kick NATO out, annex western Macedonia and unite with Tirana, 
     our ``victory'' will have produced the very disaster we wish 
     to avoid.
       ``It is unworthy of a great state to dispute over something 
     that does not concern its own interests,'' and Bismarck, who 
     called the entire Balkans ``not worth the bones of a single 
     Pomeranian grenadier.'' When did that peninsula become so 
     critical to the United States that we would go to war over 
     whose flag flew over Pristina?
       ``Arm the Kosovars!'' urge other armchair strategists. But 
     do we really want another Afghanistan--in the underbelly of 
     Europe?
       What a mess the interventionists have made of it. Because 
     the NATO expansionists could not keep their hands off the 
     alliance, they have shattered the myth of its invincibility 
     and may have called into being a Moscow-Minsk-Beijing-
     Belgrade-Baghdad axis.
       But maybe the foreign policy establishment needed a second 
     Cold War, as anything is preferable to irrelevance.
       Out of this disaster, what lessons may be learned?
       First, America cannot police the planet on a defense budget 
     of 3 percent of GDP. Our dearth of air-launched cruise 
     missiles, the need to shift carriers from the gulf, the delay 
     in deploying the Apaches, the calling up of the reserves--all 
     point to a military that is dangerously inadequate to the 
     global tasks we have added since the Cold War.
       Unless America is prepared to restore Ronald Reagan's Army, 
     Navy and Air Force, we cannot stop a rearmed Russia in East 
     Europe, police the Balkans, roll back a second Iraqi attack 
     on Kuwait, contain North Korea and prevent another of 
     Beijing's bullying assaults on Taipei. Should one or two of 
     these emergencies occur at once, we will be suddenly face to 
     face with foreign policy bankruptcy.
       America must retrench and rearm.
       What the United States needs today in the Balkans is a 
     least-bad peace, patrolled by Europeans, where Serbs rule 
     Serbs, Croats Croats and Albanians Albanians. And if, in the 
     negotiations to end this tragedy, Belgrade cries, ``No 
     American troops in Kosovo!'' let us insist upon it, and bring 
     our soldiers home from Europe, as Ike told JFK to do nearly 
     40 years ago.

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