[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 126 (Tuesday, October 1, 2002)]
[House]
[Page H6920]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           IS WAR THE ANSWER?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, as so many of my colleagues, I went home 
this weekend and talked to our constituents about the very serious and 
all-important subject of war, and I thought that I would put some of 
this on the record tonight, because my constituents are asking me, is 
war the answer? Is war the answer to meet the terrorist threat? Who is 
really the enemy, and what are the roots of the terrorism that America 
faces?
  I found a great ambivalence among the people, wanting to say, ``Well, 
we want to be united even though we do not understand the cause. We 
want to stand with the President. We may not agree with what is being 
done, but if we stand united, then we will win whatever we go into 
because we remember Vietnam, and the reason we lost in Vietnam is we 
were not united, and so this time united we stand.''
  I just wanted to say to those who may not have lived during the 
Vietnam period, America did not lose in Vietnam because she was not 
united. America did not carry the day because there was no way any 
Western power could have carried the day in a country that was 
undergoing regime change, fundamental, a fight we never should have 
been into in the first place, and we asked the impossible.

                              {time}  2320

  So we think about what is happening with the terrorist situation and 
some of the breeding grounds for those who hate the West in the Middle 
East and Central Asia, and it is important to ask ourselves whether war 
will solve the problem; will solve the problem of growing terrorism; 
will solve the problem of hatred expressed against the United States 
and other Western countries and installations.
  I have done quite a bit of research, and I want to put on the Record 
tonight what I call a terrorism chart that covers the entirety of the 
20th century and goes back actually to 1902 and to how the original 
countries in the Middle East and Central Asia were formed. But it 
reminds us also, it takes us through the Suez crisis back in 1956; and 
then when I came of political age, the assassination of Robert Kennedy 
as a Democratic candidate for President by a Jordanian Arab national 
who felt he had lost his homeland in east Jerusalem. And still 
remaining, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that remains unsolved and 
remains a lightning rod and source of discontent in that region of the 
world. Then, in 1968, the beginning of mass terrorism. One can go 
through 1979; we probably remember the Iranian hostage-takers, held 52 
Americans for 444 days.
  The point I wish to make is, with all of the turmoil, all of the 
assassinations, and the growing level of violence, did the Persian Gulf 
War really solve the growing level of terrorism and violence we see? 
Did the wars of the Middle East and Central Asia solve the terrorism 
that we now see springing up all the way from Malaysia to central and 
East Africa?
  I think it is important for us to understand the roots of the 
terrorism that have resulted in the loss now last year of 3,025 
additional lives here in our country. So I wish to place on the Record 
this summary. It also exists on our Web site.
  Mr. Speaker, I wanted to quote from a very, very prescient author, 
Robin Wright, ``Sacred Rage,'' written back during the 1980s and 
recently updated from the first chapter where she talks about the 
crusade, that, indeed, the challenge of terrorism is really the 
challenge of meeting a different point of view arising globally from 
many sources. She quotes the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Saeb 
Salam, who said, ``The growth of Islamic fundamentalism is an 
earthquake.''
  I can remember being elected in 1982, coming here in 1983, in the 
fall; and we saw the U.S. marine command center at Beirut's 
International Airport devastated by two car bombs and we lost 240 
Marines, and Navy personnel dead. I can remember at that time becoming 
brutally aware of a changing world and the shifting sands of the 
politics of that region of the world.
  In Robin Wright's book she talks about a wall in our State Department 
where if you walked in the door at that time, two greenish-black stone 
plaques listed in gold letters the names and dates of diplomats of the 
United States killed in the line of duty since the founding of our 
Republic. Over that period, from 1780 to 1967, over 187 years, we had 
lost 143 U.S. diplomats killed in the line of duty. But the second 
plaque that sits at the State Department was filled in equal number in 
almost 18 years. And, if one looks at the pace of terrorist attacks 
against the West, one sees that the pace is increasing in spite of 
wars, in spite of additional military actions. So one has to ask 
ourselves whether more wars lead to less terrorism or more terrorism, 
and whether war is really the answer to give at the root of what the 
problem is.
  I commend this book, ``Sacred Rage,'' to those who are listening 
among our colleagues here and only end with one of the sentences in the 
book that points out some of the mistakes, particularly by the West, 
that have only provoked the Muslim fundamentalists rather than cope 
realistically with what they represent: ``The stakes have never been so 
high, the potential for misunderstanding and further violence never so 
great.''
  Mr. Speaker, war may not be the answer to solving the terrorist 
threat.

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