[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13859-13860]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



     AMERICANS ARE NOT CELEBRATING SO-CALLED VICTORY IN YUGOSLAVIA

  (Mr. DUNCAN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous 
material.)
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, our ``victory'' in Yugoslavia has given us 
the right to spend $30 to $50 billion over the next several years to 
rebuild what our bombs destroyed. And, of course, our troops will get 
to stay there for years, at tremendous expense to our taxpayers. 
Already General Clarke is saying he needs thousands more of our 
soldiers.
  And what did we achieve? Columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe 
said, ``The Yugoslav war, fought so as to minimize NATO's casualties, 
maximized the suffering of the people it was meant to help.''
  Columnist Linda Bowles said, ``Almost all the ethnic cleansing 
occurred after the effort to rescue them began. More than 1 million 
refugees were driven from their homes. Perhaps the greatest price we 
will pay is to live in a world in which more nations and people hate, 
fear, and distrust America than at any other time in our history.''
  Columnist Charles Krauthammer said by the President's own standard, 
``The war was lost, irretrievably, catastrophically lost, in the first 
week.''
  Mr. Speaker, the President is on a victory tour, but I do not see 
many Americans celebrating.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the complete article I referred 
to above by Charles Krauthammer:

                 [From the Boston Globe, June 11, 1999]

                         Defining Victory Down

                        (By Charles Krauthammer)

       The papers are signed. The troops are moving in. Victory.
       Victory? On the eve of the Kosovo war, the president of the 
     United States declares the objective: ``To protect thousands 
     of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military 
     offensive.'' This would be done in one of two ways. We would 
     deter Serbia from ``ethnically cleansing'' Kosovo or, failing 
     that, we would physically--militarily--destroy Serbia's 
     ability to do so.
       By Clinton's own standard, the war was lost--irretrievably, 
     catastrophically lost--in the first week. NATO launched a 
     campaign at once anemic and tentative, a campaign of bombing 
     empty buildings. Slobodan Milosevic responded with the most 
     massive ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.
       Now 11 weeks and a million refugees later, there is an 
     agreement that permits a return to the status quo ante. Well, 
     not quite: It will be a partial and imperfect return, given 
     that many Kosovars are dead and many will not want to return. 
     Moreover, what they are returning to is not Kosovo, but a 
     wasteland that was Kosovo.
       This is not victory. This is defining victory down.
       It did not have to be this way. After all, Milosevic 
     finally agreed to a partial undoing of his ethnic cleansing 
     only when NATO attacks on his civilian infrastructure became 
     intolerable. Why, then, did we not turn out the lights in 
     Belgrade on Day One? Two weeks into the war, I wrote, noting 
     the obvious, that ``the only possible way out of this war 
     short of abject defeat'' was an air campaign of 
     ``seriousness''--hitting ``power plants, fuel depots, 
     bridges,'' the kind of war that actually kills combatants and 
     inevitably civilians but that so debilitates the enemy nation 
     as to bring it to a halt--and to the negotiating table.
       Historians will puzzle over why Clinton and Blair and 
     Schroeder and the rest did not do this until after Kosovo had 
     been wiped nearly clean of Albanians. But it is no puzzle: 
     Clinton thought that military minimalism--so congenial to the 
     ex- and current pacifists in his coalition--was a win-win 
     proposition for him.
       Either Milosevic would fold in the face of a demonstration 
     war or, if he did not, Clinton could do exactly what he had 
     done after his little pre-impeachment three-day war on Iraq: 
     take to TV, offer a gaudy list of targets hit, declare 
     victory and go home.
       What he had not counted on was Milosevic's public exposure 
     of such a fraud. In Iraq, Clinton could pinprick and declare 
     victory because there were no cameras to record his failure--
     nuclear and chemical weapons are being developed by Saddam 
     unmolested, but for now unseen. In Kosovo, on the other hand, 
     a million refugees parade before the cameras of the world. 
     Not even Clinton could spin his way out of that defeat by 
     calling it victory.
       So the air war went on, finally got serious, and now we 
     have something that is being called victory. But the supposed 
     instrument of Serb surrender, the U.N. Security Council 
     resolution codifying the cease-fire conditions, is riddled 
     with ambiguities.

[[Page 13860]]

       The central point throughout the conflict has always been 
     who will run Kosovo after Serb forces leave. The governing 
     Security Council resolution authorizes an international 
     security presence with ``substantial'' NATO participation. 
     The command structure is not spelled out, and the Russians 
     insist that their troops will not be under NATO command. If 
     they are not, will they have their own occupation zone that 
     will effectively partition Kosovo?
       More muddle: Serbia is allowed a presence at the re-entry 
     points for the refugees. Will that scare away the refugees? 
     We don't know. And who is going to ``demilitarize'' the 
     Kosovo Liberation Army?
       I am not objecting to these compromises--they are the 
     necessary accommodations to end an extraordinarily ill-
     conceived war. What I do object to is spinning it into a 
     triumph. If this is such a triumph, does anyone imagine that 
     we will ever repeat such an adventure?
       And the final irony: Even if all the ambiguities are 
     answered in NATO's favor, even if the Yugoslavs comply with 
     every detail of the military agreement signed with NATO on 
     Wednesday, what are we left with? The prize for victory: The 
     United States and its allies are permitted to interpose their 
     soldiers between mortal enemies in a continuing Balkan 
     guerrilla war. For years.

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