[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 75 (Monday, May 24, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5789-S5791]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       SUSPEND BOMBING IN KOSOVO

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise to call for a suspension of the 
bombing in Kosovo, not because of anything Milosevic has done, such as 
the release of three American servicemen; not because of differing 
opinions within NATO, such as those currently being expressed by the 
Italians and the Germans; not because of the inadvertent damage done to 
accidental targets, such as the Chinese Embassy; and not because of any 
personal animus or distrust of any individuals in this administration. 
No; I oppose continuation of the bombing in Kosovo because it has not 
worked. It is not working and shows no signs of working in the future.
  The bombing has been of no help to the Kosovars, hundreds of 
thousands of whom have lost their homes, their neighbors, their 
children and perhaps even their lives while the bombing has gone on. It 
has been of no help to the Albanians or the Macedonians who have seen 
hundreds of thousands of refugees flood cross the borders into their 
ill-equipped countries. It has been of no help to NATO, an alliance 
that has seen its military stocks drawn down to dangerously low levels 
with no effect on the atrocities going on in the killing fields. And 
the bombing has been of no help to our relationships with nations 
outside of NATO, particularly Russia and China, who have vigorously 
opposed our decision to proceed.
  Again, in short, the bombing has not worked, even though we have 
persisted for a longer time than we bombed in Desert Storm. My call for 
suspending the bombing comes from the modern wisdom that says: If at 
first you don't succeed, try something else.
  There are those, including my colleagues on the Senate floor, 
commentators and columnists for whom I have the utmost respect, who say 
we cannot even consider suspension of the bombing. We are at war, they 
say; we must press on to victory. Anything else would be dishonorable, 
and on a practical geopolitical level, would send the wrong signal to 
others who might choose to confront us in the future.
  Such language is often called Churchillian, echoing the electrifying 
rhetoric of the indomitable prime minister speaking in the darkest days 
of World War II.
  No one has a higher regard for the magnificent rhetoric and the deeds 
of Winston Churchill than I, but, to me, the mantra, ``Because we're 
in, we have to win,'' is more suitable for a bumper sticker than it is 
for Winston Churchill.
  Let me take you to a Churchillian episode that I think applies here, 
and it comes not from the darkest days of World War II but World War I.
  Those who remember their history will remember that Winston Churchill 
fell into great disregard during World War I as a result of his 
sponsorship of the Dardanelles operation. He was removed from any 
position of responsibility. But because he was still an officer in the 
British Army, he agreed, indeed sought for, the opportunity to go to 
the front in France. And so, as Major Churchill, he went to the front, 
and unlike most British officers of the time, he really went to the 
front. He went all the way to the front lines and saw for himself over 
a period of time the horrors and the futility of trench warfare. He saw 
it firsthand, and he came away convinced that it was not working.
  When he returned to England, he became Minister of Munitions and put 
his full support and strength behind searching for an alternative. If 
you will, he put aside the patriotic rhetoric of his time and sought 
for a policy that would work. William Manchester, in his biography of 
Churchill called the ``Last Line,'' refers to Churchill as the father 
of the tank. It was Winston Churchill who caught the vision of the fact 
that you could do something different and created the modern tank, or 
created the prototype of what became the modern tank, and 
revolutionized warfare, eliminating the failures of trench warfare.

  If at first you don't succeed, try something else. The legacy of 
Winston Churchill was that he was willing to try something else when he 
saw the reality of the failure on the ground. I think, frankly, that is 
the Churchillian example we should seek to follow now: Suspend the 
bombing and try something else.
  There are many suggestions on the table. The one, of course, we hear 
the most these days is send in the ground troops. To those who urge 
this, I ask, as I asked when the bombing was proposed in the first 
place: Will it work? Will it accomplish our goals? And with that 
question, we get the next obvious question: What are our goals?
  When Secretary Madeleine Albright made the case for the bombing to 
the Senators in the Capitol, she told us if we did not bomb, the 
following would happen: First, there would be brutal atrocities and 
ethnic cleansing throughout all of Kosovo with tens of thousands of 
people being slaughtered and hundreds of thousands driven from their 
homes.
  Second, she said there will be a flood of refugees across the borders 
into neighboring countries, swamping their already fragile economies.
  Third, she said there will be splits within NATO. This alliance will 
be torn apart by disagreements.
  And finally, she said Milosevic will strengthen his hand on his local 
political situation.
  That was 8 weeks ago. Now, 8 weeks later, the bombing has failed to 
prevent any of those results. All four of them have taken place--the 
ethnic cleansing and the brutality and the atrocities have gone on; the 
refugees have appeared across the borders; NATO is split with arguments 
going on among its top leaders; and Milosevic has been strengthened as 
the leader, martyr, hero, if you will, of the Yugoslavs. We have not 
achieved a single goal that the bombing set out to accomplish. I come 
back to the same question: What are our new goals?
  As best I can understand them, from the various statements that have 
been made, one list of the new goals would be as follows: No. 1, 
removal of all Serbian influence in Kosovo; No. 2, a return of the 
Kosovars physically to their land; No. 3, a rebuilding of their homes 
and villages; and No. 4, an international police force in there for an 
indefinitely long period of time to guarantee that their homes will 
always be protected.

[[Page S5790]]

  Let us accept those goals for just a moment. I ask the same 
fundamental question I asked in the beginning with respect to bombing. 
Will it work? Will continuation of the bombing achieve these four new 
goals when it did not achieve the four old ones? And what about ground 
troops? Will ground troops achieve these new goals?
  On the first question, as to whether the continuation of the bombing 
will achieve these new goals, there is disagreement from the experts. 
In this morning's Washington Post, General Short says: ``Yes, we will 
see the achievement of these goals within a matter of months.'' Last 
Friday, the Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon said, ``No, 
there was no indication that bombing would achieve the goals.''
  I ask this fundamental humanitarian question: Do we have to continue 
to destroy the economy of Yugoslavia, depriving the civilian population 
of power and water, as we did over the weekend, raising the specter of 
the epidemic spread of typhoid while we decide who is right, while we 
decide which opinion is the correct one? Can we not suspend the bombing 
while that debate goes on?
  With respect to ground troops, and those who say ground troops are 
the only answer, those who are calling for an invasion and an 
indefinitely long occupation of part of Serbia, that part known as 
Kosovo, to them I would refer the words of Daniel Ellsberg that 
appeared in the New York Times last Friday. I find them chilling. I 
would like to read them now at some length. I cannot paraphrase them 
and put them in any better form than Mr. Ellsberg himself. He says, 
referring to a ground invasion in Kosovo:

       . . . I believe, it would be a death sentence for most 
     Albanians remaining in Kosovo.
       By all accounts, it would take weeks to months to deploy an 
     invasion force to the region once the decision to do so was 
     made, and Slobodan Milosevic already has troops there 
     fortifying the borders. Wouldn't the prospect of an invasion 
     lead him to order his forces in Kosovo to kill all the 
     military-age male Albanians and hold the rest of the 
     population as hostages rather than continuing to deport them?

  A very, very important question.
  Daniel Ellsberg goes on:

       We don't know how many male Kosovars of military age--
     broadly, [those] from 15 to 60 years old--have been killed 
     already.

  He says:

       But even if the number is in the tens of thousands . . . 
     that would mean that most of the men were still alive. Facing 
     invasion, would Mr. Milosevic allow any more men to leave 
     Kosovo to be recruited by the K.L.A., or to live to support 
     the invasion? The Serbs could quickly slaughter 100,000 to 
     200,000 male Kosovars. (In Rwanda five years ago, an average 
     of 8,000 civilians a day were killed for 100 days, mostly 
     with machetes.)
       Obviously, Mr. Milosevic and his subordinates are brutal 
     enough to do that. If they haven't done it already (and there 
     is no testimony [to suggest] that they have on that scale) it 
     may well be because they fear that such an annihilation would 
     make an invasion inevitable. A commitment now to ground 
     invasion would remove that deterrent, just as the commitment 
     in March to begin bombing in support of an ultimatum and the 
     consequent withdrawal of international monitors removed an 
     implicit deterrent against sweeping ethnic cleansing and 
     expulsion.
       As for to the remaining civilians in Kosovo--
     women, children and old people--tens of thousands of them 
     could be used against the invasion as human shields, in a 
     way never before seen in warfare. Fighting in built-up 
     areas, NATO troops would probably be fired on from 
     buildings that were packed on every floor with Kosovar 
     women and children. Using the traditional means--
     explosives, artillery and rockets--to destroy those 
     buildings would make NATO forces the mass executioners of 
     the people we were fighting to protect.

  The column goes on. I shall not continue with it except to summarize 
the grim conclusion. Mr. Ellsberg says:

       . . . We bombed Vietnam for seven and a half years in 
     pursuit of goals we refused to compromise and never secured.

  I find that a chilling summary in terms of some of the language we 
are hearing now: We must never compromise until our goals are secured. 
The first goals laid out were not secured. We now have a new set of 
goals and we are determined once again not to give in.
  When I first went into the briefing room to hear Secretary Albright, 
Secretary Cohen, National Security Adviser Berger, and General Shelton 
give us the justification for proceeding in this area, I went in with 
no preconceptions one way or the other. Contrary to assumptions that 
have been made in the press about those of us who voted against the 
bombing, I did not carry any impeachment baggage into that briefing.
  I have a history of backing President Clinton when I think he is 
right. I supported him on the recognition of Vietnam, on most favored 
nation status for China, on the Mexican peso bailout, on NATO 
expansion, on NAFTA and GATT and fast track, all to the discomfort of 
some of my constituents. I did so because I thought the President was 
right. And I went into that briefing very much capable of being 
convinced.
  But during the briefing, as I became more and more uneasy about what 
I was hearing, when it came my turn to speak, I said to Secretary 
Albright: Let me give you a little bit of history.
  I did that because she had quoted history to us, talking about the 
Balkans being the beginning of World War I and the battleground of 
World War II.
  And she said: If we don't act quickly enough, this will be the spark 
that sets off World War III.
  I did not choose to argue with her history. World War I did not begin 
because of a fight over the Balkans. While there were battles in World 
War II which occurred there, to be sure, the pivotal points in World 
War II were in places like North Africa, Stalingrad, Normandy, and 
Bastogne, not to mention, of course, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Leyte 
Gulf.
  No. I said to her: Madam Secretary, let me give you a little piece of 
history. This comes out of the Eisenhower administration, presided over 
by a military general who had achieved international fame for his 
strategic vision. This is when he was President.
  I said, ``A group of his advisers came to him to describe an 
international situation and to recommend a military solution. They laid 
out all of the military actions they wanted to take and then said, Mr. 
President, it will achieve these results.''
  President Eisenhower listened very carefully and then asked: ``Are 
you willing to take the next step?'' They replied, ``What do you mean, 
Mr. President?''
  He said, ``If this doesn't work, this first step that you have 
outlined, are you willing to take the next step?''
  ``Oh, Mr. President,'' they said, ``the next step won't be necessary. 
There won't need to be any next steps. This first step will work.''
  President Eisenhower asked again, ``You have not answered my 
question. Are you willing to take the next step?''
  ``Well, let us explain to you, Mr. President, why the next----
  He said, ``I accept your analysis that this will probably work. I 
accept your analysis that people will probably react in the way you are 
suggesting they will react. But I am asking you this question: `Are you 
willing to take the next step if the first one does not work?' And if 
the answer is `No', then don't take the first step.'' I asked, ``Madam 
Secretary, my question to you is, `Are you willing to take the next 
step?' If this doesn't work, what do we do?''

  I got conversation, but I did not get an answer to my question. I 
came out of that briefing saying, unless I can get an answer to that 
question, I will vote against the bombing. I was not satisfied and I 
did vote against the bombing.
  I did not prevail in this Chamber. A majority of the Members voted in 
favor of the bombing, and so we have now had 8 weeks of it.
  That date has an interesting meaning for me, because in this 
conversation, in the briefing, they were asked, ``How long will it take 
for us to find out if this is going to work?'' We were told repeatedly, 
``We can't tell you that. We don't know.''
  Finally, in some frustration, I spoke out of turn and said to the 
briefer, ``How long would you be surprised if it were more than?''
  I got kind of a dirty look and then grumpily the fellow said: ``8 
weeks.''
  Well, it has now been 8 weeks, and it hasn't worked, which is why I 
am here saying let's suspend the bombing while we talk about something 
that might. Let us stop destroying the economy of Yugoslavia while we 
talk about what might work in Kosovo, because our destruction of water 
works and television stations and power-generating plants in Belgrade 
has had no effect on the

[[Page S5791]]

killing in Kosovo. Can't we stop killing civilians who are not involved 
in this while we talk about what our options might be?
  I think one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of what 
happened to this country in Vietnam was written by Barbara Tuchman in a 
book called ``The March of Folly.'' In that book she described how 
people persist in going after solutions that do not work, because they 
do not want to admit that it won't work, and they are sure that if we 
just keep bombing a little bit longer, somehow something will work out.
  Shortly after I had my exchange with Secretary Albright, the 
President, President Clinton, was asked, ``What will you do if the 
bombing does not work?'' He was asked by the Prime Minister of Italy. 
According to the Washington Post, he looked startled at the question, 
then turned to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger for an answer. 
Mr. Berger gave him the answer, ``We will continue bombing.''
  To me, that is folly. To me, that is not Churchillian. To me, that is 
not looking around to see what else might be there. I suggest, again, I 
call for a suspension of the bombing while we review our options, admit 
that the bombing hasn't worked and try to devise a new strategy that 
will. Perhaps there is none. After all of this analysis we may come to 
the conclusion there is nothing we can do now that the brutalities have 
taken place and the Kosovars have been driven from their homes. There 
may be nothing we can do effectively to restore them. For those who say 
how humiliating it would be for the United States to admit that, I ask 
this question, ``How humiliating will it be if we go forward and fail 
to achieve our goals? Wouldn't we have been better off in Vietnam if we 
had admitted that we were not getting it done long before the time came 
when that humiliating scene we all saw on our television screens of the 
helicopters above the Embassy in Saigon was broadcast throughout all 
the world?''
  I voted for the supplemental bill that provided the military funds 
with respect to the operation in Kosovo. I did so because I lost the 
first debate. The bombing went on. The funds were spent. The President 
has exhausted all of the funds of the Department of Defense through the 
balance of this year, and it would be irresponsible, in my view, not to 
replenish those funds so the Defense Department can function now. I 
voted to replenish the funds that have already been spent. But I call 
on us to stop spending those funds now, while we undertake a 
comprehensive review of our strategy and address, once again, the 
fundamental question that was not answered in the beginning, and has 
not been answered so far, which is still, ``Will it work?''

  I conclude by saying that the historic figure upon whom I called for 
the rationality of answering that question is Winston Churchill, the 
man who went to the front lines and saw that trench warfare was 
insanity and came back to become the father of the tank, who looked for 
another alternative. There must be something better than what is 
happening in Kosovo right now. Let us suspend the bombing and search 
for it.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. President, I have an additional 5 minutes under my control, which 
I yield to the Senator from Nebraska, Mr. Hagel.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, if the Senator from Nebraska will yield.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized.
  Mr. HAGEL. I am happy to yield to my colleague from North Dakota.

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