[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 69 (Thursday, May 13, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H3150-H3151]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 CONCERNS ABOUT THE ADMINISTRATION'S APPROACH TO THE WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA 
                               AND KOSOVO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, earlier this week I was discussing the war 
supplemental, and some of my concerns about this Administration's 
approach to the war in Yugoslavia and Kosovo. I found the most 
disturbing thing underneath the premise that the administration is 
pushing, and why I have such deep concerns about this entire effort.
  Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser, told our Republican 
conference during some questioning that, he said, we want to teach the 
world a new way to live in peace. They also said they wanted to show 
the world a new way to fight the war.
  My concern is that the undergirding of this entire foreign policy is 
a kind of a liberal, humanitarian, what would be, with quotes around 
it, a ``secular humanist'' approach that we can somehow teach people to 
live together, ironically, through bombing them; and I do not fully 
understand, but that was not our intent.
  But we look at the evils that were going on with Milosevic, much like 
the evils that were going on in Croatia and other ethnic cleansing 
efforts, not only in the Balkans but in Africa and other parts of the 
world, and we say, correctly, people should not live that way.
  But then we think, based on kind of our humanitarian tradition in the 
United States, that we can just walk in and say, you know, for 700 
years, for 1,000 years, for 2,000 years, you have been wrong. We want 
you to change. If you do not change, we are going to bomb you into 
change.
  Mr. Speaker, life does not work that way. If this is the supposition 
under our foreign policy, that somehow we can walk into Africa and say, 
change the way you have behaved for all these years; if we can walk 
into Haiti and say, we are going to put a government in, and now you 
are going to change; if we can walk into Bosnia and say, now we are 
going to do a Dayton line, and we want you all to behave; and if we are 
going to go into Serbia and say, this is terrible, we want you to live 
in peace together, it simply is not going to work.
  I was in the camp near Skopje, Montenegro, and talked to many of the

[[Page H3151]]

Kosovars. As one of the Senators asked them, they said, will you go 
back and live at peace in Yugoslavia under the Serbians? Absolutely 
not. We are going to get rid of Milosevic.
  Milosevic will not be there. They said, all Serbs are Milosevic. What 
do you mean, all Serbs? You lived with them before. Yes, but they slit 
my neighbor's throat. They burned my house. They raped my daughters. 
You heard all kinds of the variations of stories. They are not 
interested in living with peace.
  The idea that suddenly we are going to wave a wand, have a sitdown 
conference here, and everybody in the world is going to live in peace, 
is a very dangerous undergirding, pressure, for foreign policy.
  Just yesterday in the Washington Times, based on a Senate hearing, 
Secretary Cohen said, ``We have got to find a way to either increase 
the size of our forces, or decrease the number of our missions.'' Now, 
in the standard colloquial phrase right now in the United States, you 
would say, well, duh.
  I mean, we have to find a way to either increase the size of our 
forces, or decrease the number of our missions. Do we mean it is 
finally dawning on this administration that we cannot take a declining 
armed forces and send them all over the world to try to change people 
through exhortation when we are not willing to stand up, which it is 
not necessary that this would work, either, but it is the only way we 
would get peace, is that if we believe, as the Judeo-Christian 
principles teach, that man is born of sin and of self-interest, and 
unless there is a transforming power in their hearts they are not going 
to suddenly change, going in and saying, it is in your self-interest 
not to have war, that is not necessarily true.
  It is not necessarily good for Kosovars to let the Serbians have 
Pristina and the mineral rights in the north part of this country. It 
is not necessarily in the self-interest of the Serbians to let the 
Kosovars have the mineral rights and the seminaries in Pristina for 
their heritage. They both argue over that.
  You cannot just use the pleasure-pain principles or positivist 
principles or some kind of humanist principles. Furthermore, if we are 
going to get back to that, the renaissance did not occur in a lot of 
the parts of the world where we have our humanist traditions. Unless 
you have whatever religious tradition it is that reforms people's 
hearts and people's thinking that there is a higher power, we are not 
going to have a real peace.
  If we are not going to have a real peace, we certainly are not going 
to force it through bombing, and the danger of our current foreign 
policy is that we are going around the world threatening and trying to 
reform it when we do not have the traditional criteria of how and when 
we wage war: Was there a sovereign Nation invading another sovereign 
Nation? Was there a threat to the national interest of the United 
States? Was there a tie-in that we can actually deal with and win?
  These are deep religious and moral questions, and they are not going 
to be solved by the type of bombing we are doing.

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