[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 87 (Friday, June 18, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H4661-H4663]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THE DISASTROUS WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA

  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, fairly early on during the war in Yugoslavia 
I spoke on this floor and said it was obvious that Milosevic would cave 
and that President Clinton and his spin doctors would then try to 
declare a great victory. It was obvious that a country no bigger than 
Kentucky, with less than 4 percent of our population and an already 
weakened economy, and without any real ability even to fight back, 
could not hold out for long against the massive bombings and 
megabillions of the U.S. Defense Department.
  The only reason this stupid, one-sided cruel joke of a war lasted as 
long as it did was because it became, as one columnist said, and allied 
farce instead of an allied force, as the military called it.
  Jeffrey Gedmin, writing in the just published June 28 issue of the 
liberal New Republic Magazine, said this:

       If the deal between Yugoslavia and NATO over Kosovo sticks, 
     expect the Clinton administration to claim vindication and to 
     speak of a victory for American leadership via NATO. But 
     Europe's own early post-mortem suggests that our allies might 
     be drawing rather different conclusions.
       Privately, politically influential Europeans generally 
     consider the U.S.-led operation in Kosovo to have been a 
     fiasco. Calculations of an early victory proved disastrously 
     wrong. The Kosovars, whom we started the fighting to protect, 
     have been decimated. There were 90,000 refugees before the 
     bombing began. Estimates of the homeless now exceed 1 
     million.

  Mr. Gedmin ended his article by calling it a pyrrhic victory, meaning 
really no victory at all. Columnist Robert Novak said the same thing. 
He wrote,

       But the truly pyrrhic nature of NATO's victory lies in 
     longer-term implications. Serious students of foreign policy, 
     far from eager to join in a champagne bash, were melancholy. 
     U.S. relations with China have been undermined. The most 
     dangerous elements in the Russian military have been 
     emboldened. Most worrisome, the world now sees America with 
     different eyes.

  Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said, ``We looked like 
the big bully to a lot of people around the world.''
  Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson said that we are in danger of losing 
prestige and good will around the world. Under this administration, we 
have bombed people in Afghanistan, the Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, all 
apparently in an attempt to show that the President and the Secretary 
of State are great world leaders, and to make their mark in history.
  Paul Harvey called this war Monica's war, and many people believe all 
these bombings in Afghanistan, the Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, timed 
as they were, were at least in part done to try to make people forget 
things like the sordid Lewinsky affair and the President's sale of 
missile technology to the Chinese.
  Columnist Tony Snow said that this was the first war we have ever 
entered into in which we were the unambiguous aggressor and in which 
there was no vital U.S. interests at stake. In the process, the 
President turned NATO from a purely defensive force into an offensive 
one for the very first time, illegally many think, because it was 
against the NATO charter. He turned our Defense Department into a war 
department, as it was once called. He violated both our constitutional 
law and our statutory law, the War Powers Act. But then, some people do 
not care as long as the stock market remains high.
  Former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn said, however, ``I think we have 
to be more mature in handling these civil wars around the globe. We 
have got to develop other tools beyond military force to deal with what 
are nonvital interests, and I consider this,'' Senator Nunn said, ``to 
be a nonvital interest.''
  These bombings have turned people who want to be our friends into 
enemies. These actions have increased anti-Americanism all over the 
world. We will have problems years from now because of all of this when 
the problems will be blamed on whomever is president at the time.
  In addition, this has cost us many, many billions, which could have 
been spent on so many better things. Our military would have plenty of 
money and no shortages if this administration had not so totally 
misused our military in so many ridiculously costly ways.
  Columnist Carol Thomas wrote,

       Only a president who knows more about making love than war 
     would declare the puny and ineffective one-sided assault on 
     the former Yugoslavia to be a victory.

[[Page H4662]]

                Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair will remind Members to refrain 
from personal references towards the President.

                              {time}  1500

  Mr. DUNCAN. By any objective standard, the goals of Serbian leader 
Slobodan Milosevic, not of NATO and the United States, have been 
achieved. We have not defeated evil or hatred in the Balkans. It will 
come back, as it always has.
  William Ratliff and David Openheimer, writing in the Washington 
Times, said,

       NATO's bombing precipitated floods of refugees and other 
     disasters that have destabilized the region in political, 
     economic and other terms far beyond what Mr. Milosevic could 
     have ever done on his own.

  They added,

       Since for most people NATO is America, this war has 
     reignited anti-Americanism and suspicion of U.S. intentions 
     from Argentina to China. Most people do not believe this war 
     was to defend human rights, particularly since we harmed so 
     many innocent people in and far beyond the central Balkans. 
     Now people are already telling us we will have to spend $30 
     billion to $50 billion over the next few years to rebuild 
     what we have destroyed.
       This stupid, one-sided, cruel joke of a war was a foreign 
     policy disaster that American taxpayers will be paying for in 
     both military and economic terms for many years to come. It 
     certainly cannot be called a victory in any shape, form or 
     fashion.

               [From the Washington Times, June 14, 1999]

                      Perilous Precedent in Kosovo

               (By William Ratliff and David Oppenheimer)

       The resolution that passed United Nations Security Council 
     Thursday is a welcome if short-term escape from a catastrophe 
     NATO created in unintended cooperation with Yugoslav 
     President Slobodan Milosevic. Some of the settlement can 
     never be implemented and much of the collateral damage the 
     war has caused will be difficult or impossible to reverse.
       Mr. Milosevic undoubtedly is a war criminal whose crimes 
     have been widely reported. But NATO is seriously guilty as 
     well. Indeed, NATO's conduct precipitated or committed far 
     greater moral--not to mention political, economic, 
     international relations--damage than it prevented.
       But already there are smug intimations of victory from the 
     White House and nonsense like The Washington Post's editorial 
     saying the Kosovo war proves the West ``would not stand for 
     crimes against humanity.'' The hypocrisy of fighting a 
     ``moral'' war that causes so many civilian casualties and 
     global problems has not yet sunk in for Americans.
       Now NATO is dictating a political correct ``settlement''--
     what Mr. Clinton calls ``multi-ethnic democracy'' and Kosovo 
     autonomy within Yugoslavia--that is even more utopian than 
     three months ago and guarantees more bitter warfare in the 
     future.
       War critics are not ``isolationists'' or critical of the 
     American military; they simply say NATO could not achieve its 
     objective of stopping Mr. Milosevic at an acceptable cost to 
     ourselves and others. The proof:
       NATO's stated objective was to protect the Kosovar 
     Albanians, but it betrayed them. It gave Mr. Milosevic a 
     cover to exponentially accelerate his repression and then in 
     the June ``settlement'' fuzzed over the independence option 
     that was given in the Rambouillet ultimatum. It is silly to 
     suppose the Kosovo Liberation Army will agree to become a 
     police force in a province of Yugoslavia. The Serb and NATO 
     destruction of Kosovo left most of 1.5 million Kosovar 
     Albanian refugees nothing to return to. Those most eager to 
     return despite a terrible winter coming on are radicalized 
     youngsters who now far more than before want to join the KLA 
     to slaughter Serbs and seize the independence NATO now 
     refuses to offer them.
       If war had been the only option, it should not have been 
     led by yuppie politicians who understood nothing about 
     history, politics and warfare. There is a long list 
     of lessons on the fatally flawed military conduct of the 
     war, beginning with gradual escalation.
       NATO's will or even capability to rebuild Kosovo and 
     restore Kosovars to their destroyed homes will flag as 
     Americans and Europeans are overwhelmed by problems of 
     enforcement and as the billions of dollars add up at the 
     expense of Social Security and other domestic projects.
       For months NATO regularly (if apologetically) inflicted 
     casualties on all sorts of innocents, from Serbs and Kosovar 
     Albanians to Chinese, in part because it attacked from 15,000 
     feet in the air. While no military seeks casualties, to 
     refuse to risk even one person in order to drop flood to 
     hundreds of thousands of refugees in the mountains is to 
     undermine one's seriousness and moral credibility.
       Then there is the question, why Yugoslavia and not 
     somewhere else where the crimes are equal or greater, as in 
     Rwanda? Or the less remembered example of Cyprus, which next 
     month ``celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Turkish 
     invasion. Almost 200,000 Greek Cypriots were ``cleansed'' out 
     of their homes in Northern Cyprus in 1974 by the Turkish 
     army, but ``principled'' Washington for strategic reasons 
     still in effect winks at Turkish occupation of more than a 
     third of the island.
       Serbia has been devastated and will cost tens of billions 
     to rebuild, and Mr. Milosevic is still there.
       NATO's bombing precipitated floods of refugees and other 
     disasters that have destabilized the region in political, 
     economic and other terms far beyond what Mr. Milosevic could 
     ever have done on his own.
       The war has buttressed reactionaries from Russia and China 
     to the United States.
       Since for most people NATO is America, this war has re-
     ignited anti-Americanism and suspicion of U.S. intentions 
     from Argentina to China. Most people do not believe this war 
     was to defend human rights, particularly since we harmed so 
     many innocent people in and far beyond the Central Balkans.
       NATO's war will encourage arms (including nuclear) 
     proliferation around the world among nations who fear NATO 
     may invade them next. The Kosovo war may even encourage 
     development of defensive alliances to guard against NATO 
     attacks on those it considers ``moral deviants.''
       americans must see that long before its end this war was no 
     longer simply a campaign to eliminate the ``evil'' Mr. 
     Milosevic. It became a tragic fiasco with all kinds of 
     casualties from Pristina to Beijing.
       If Kosovo is seen as a ``victory,'' it will become a model 
     for what British Prime Minister Tony Blair calls ``moral 
     crusades'' to ``right wrongs'' around the world. The non-
     Western world--and many in the West as well--regard this as a 
     dangerous and unworkable arrogance that like the Crusades 
     centuries ago may have been at least partly moral in 
     inspiration but in practice became fanatical, intolerant and 
     massively destructive. If the moral crusades spread, the 21st 
     century may have an even uglier human face than the 20th.
                                  ____


                       [From the New York Times]

                   What Did NATO Win in Balkans War?

                          (By A.M. Rosenthal)

       But--why aren't we celebrating?
       After all, we won, didn't we? The Kosovars will get to 
     home, won't they?
       Well, yes, we did encourage Slobodan Milosevic to drive 
     them from those homes by giving him advance notice of when we 
     would attack and assuring him not to worry about our sending 
     in ground troops.
       All right, all right, those were mistakes; shut up about 
     them. At least now the million or so Kosovars we were 
     supposed to be helping can pick up lives in their broken 
     homes in smashed villages. Can't they?
       Somebody will put up the money to fix up the homes. Isn't 
     that so, perhaps?
       Then there will be real peace, won't there? Naturally, to 
     keep the Kosovars and Serbs from killing each other, we will 
     have to maintain enough troops there for--oh, for about a 
     generation.
       But we are already doing that in Bosnia, so what is the big 
     deal about sending off 7,000 or so more Americans--to start 
     with--to Yugoslavia? Let's not be pretty about that; we are 
     into the Balkan wars far too deep to quibble.
       Maybe it won't be dangerous duty. The Kosovar army of 
     Yugoslav citizens who count themselves Albanians won't take 
     advantage of the departure of Serbian forces to take revenge 
     on civilian Serbs. Will it?
       And the Serbs in Serbia--they won't harbor a grudge against 
     us, will they, for bombing their power plants, their 
     factories, homes, hospitals, bridges and of course relatives 
     with a destructiveness only the Germans had achieved against 
     the Serbs in World War II?
       Maybe they will forgive what the Germans did to them. About 
     that time, they and their children will forgive us too, isn't 
     that possible?
       And the upside! Look at what we win. We saved NATO's face 
     and President Clinton's and Madeleine Albright's. Her mouth 
     foretold a quickie war. Maybe actually not saved their 
     faces--but at least wiped them off a bit.
       So we will be able to walk tall in the world for bombing 
     Serbia into slivers. I mean, when the fear of America dies 
     down in some countries that one day we will fly over their 
     lands to bomb them into submission for not carrying out our 
     orders.
       You know, countries like India that are not about to 
     surrender Kashmir without all-out war or Israel, whose mind 
     it has crossed that, if NATO could bomb a neighbor that had 
     not attacked its members first, why shouldn't the Arab League 
     exercise the same privilege against Israel and eventually ask 
     the United Nations for approval?
       Remember--we have indicted Milosevic for war crimes. Yes, 
     the fact that we never indicted Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, 
     our own private dictators for driving 300,000 Serbs out is 
     embarrassing. But at least the Serbian killer will have to 
     spend his vacations at home or maybe someplace in Russia.
       Maybe all that is why we are not celebrating the great 
     victory. People like myself, who have spent years struggling 
     to get our country to use its political and economic power 
     for human rights, saw its leaders bumble into another Balkan 
     war using bombs instead of the brains God should have given 
     them.
       The Bosian frightfulness has wound up in the partition that 
     without foreign interference Muslims, Croates and Serbs could 
     have had a decade ago, without war.
       We have seen our country launch a war, first by futile 
     ultimatum, then by a slovenly planned war that from the 
     beginning brought more suffering to Kosovars and Serbian 
     civilian than to Milosevic and his troops. Far too

[[Page H4663]]

     many Americans wrote and talked of Serbs, our allies in 
     battles we should remember, as if they were bugs.
       To those Kosovars who will return or seek safe lives 
     elsewhere, for Serbs who will one day eliminate Milosevic, go 
     our embraces. To Clinton and his fellow leaders--our 
     contempts for their human and security values.
       While Clinton and his NATO comrades were busy bombing 
     Serbia and Kosovo, they were permitting the destruction of 
     the U.N. arms inspection of Iraq--the one barrier against 
     Saddam Hussein's path to nuclear, biological and chemical 
     weapons.
       That is a disaster for all nations, for all human rights 
     struggles. If America remembers the Clinton-Albright bungling 
     in Iraq, China and Yugoslavia and demands that any 
     presidential or senatorial candidate separate from them, 
     there may be reason for some satisfaction--for for champagne 
     and parades, none.

                          ____________________