[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9195-9201]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                           A NECESSARY EVIL?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on the previous set of 
speakers and talk about the Kosovo burden, the Kosovo burden and 
decision-making in the 106th Congress, how it impacts and will impact 
on everything we do in the rest of this Congress.
  I might begin by stating that I previously stated already that Kosovo 
is, in my opinion, a campaign of compassion. I think that it was 
important to confront Slobodan Milosevic. He gave the civilized nations 
no choice. I think this war is a necessary evil.
  All wars are evil, necessary evils, but the word ``necessary'' 
becomes very important. ``Necessary'' is a vital word that many of my 
constituents are questioning, and like the gentlemen before me, I have 
gotten many letters and many comments, and I welcome those comments and 
those letters, both those that agree with me and those that do not 
agree with me. It is important that we discuss and have a dialogue 
about whether or not this war, like all other wars, it is an evil, but 
is it a necessary evil?
  I think it very important to note that I, too, have had a series of 
town meetings, and in three or four town meetings, the first three, 
unanimous agreement when I asked do they support the present actions in 
Kosovo. Ninety-five percent of the people in the audience raised their 
hands. One meeting I had 200 people. I was shocked to see that kind of 
percentage. When I got to the fourth meeting already, less than half of 
the people raised their hands. That was on April 27. So it is obvious 
that the conduct of the war, the implementation of the war, has a great 
deal to do with the opinions that people now have of the action, and I 
would like to separate the blundering conduct of the war from the 
cause, the fact that we are confronting what I call a sovereign 
predator.
  Slobodan Milosevic is a sovereign predator who has given us no 
choice, if you want to accept a new kind of morality in the world. The 
old morality was you never, you never interfered with the internal 
affairs of a country. If they want to do things within their 
boundaries, then you do not get involved. You let them destroy their 
people if they want to. I suppose, as my colleagues know, following 
that reasoning, Adolf Hitler, as long as he was murdering Jews in 
Germany, the world had no basis for condemning him or no basis for 
challenging him. As my colleagues know, as long as you do things within 
your borders, the sovereign Nation can do whatever it wants to do. That 
is the old morality, international morality.
  I like to believe that in the Kosovo action that is now underway we 
have challenged that old morality and said you cannot do whatever you 
want to do to people within your borders and not have the condemnation 
of the international community, and beyond the condemnation they may 
take some action in some cases and have taken action in this case. So I 
welcome and applaud the actions of my colleagues who are questioning 
how we can get out of this mess.
  I support what the President is doing. I support the initial action. 
I certainly do not support all the blunders that have taken place. But 
despite my support for the action, I also welcome and applaud the 
actions of many of my colleagues in Congress, those who have taken upon 
themselves to initiate their own kinds of diplomatic initiatives. This 
is an unprecedented action, and so I think the dialogue and the debate 
and the methods ought to also be unprecedented.
  I think that the journey that the Members of Congress took to Vienna 
was a remarkable initiative, especially since it was led by the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and the gentleman from Hawaii 
(Mr. Abercrombie). As my colleagues know, they are two Members of 
Congress which everybody generally would acknowledge are different ends 
of the spectrum with respect to ideology, if you can still put old 
labels on people in terms of who is conservative, who is liberal, who 
is progressive, and who is militaristic, and who is a dove and who is a 
hawk. The joint delegation led by Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Weldon 
certainly defy all of those descriptions.
  I think it was a great initiative. I do not know the details of it. I 
have heard the reports that were made on the floor, and I applaud what 
they did.
  I think we should always bear in mind what Robert McNamara has been 
saying for the last decade. Robert McNamara was the Secretary of 
Defense under President Johnson during most of the time of the Vietnam 
War, and McNamara has come out with some revelations and confessions 
that are really astounding. We ought to pay close attention to the 
unfortunate experience and the grieving of Mr. McNamara, who has now 
spent a lot of time in Vietnam, of all places, talking to the 
Vietnamese who were in charge of the war in Vietnam and, through that 
dialogue, trying to leave a legacy for mankind so that we will not make 
the same kinds of mistakes in the future.
  In this particular war, in this particular situation involving 
Kosovo, it would be good if we were to take many of those things into 
consideration. One of the things Mr. McNamara said was that both sides 
greatly misjudged the intensity of the others in terms of their 
conviction and what they were willing to do in order to prevail, and I 
think that it is important, if we are going to get out of this present 
situation, that that be remembered by both

[[Page 9196]]

sides. We should not have any more slaughter, any more deaths than are 
necessary, and maybe we have already had too many and more than are 
necessary, but we still have a situation that there is a basic moral 
problem here, and, unlike the behavior of nations in the past, the NATO 
nations have chosen to take a moral action.
  Agreement with the basic moral thrust does not mandate that we 
blindly obey the total policy, although we blindly submit to the total 
policy or to the implementation and execution of a policy, but I think 
it is important to discuss thoroughly the basic moral thrust of what we 
are doing in Kosovo.
  All the NATO nations, and, as my colleagues know, we are talking 
about very mature nations who have citizens who have elected their 
leadership in a democracy, and, as my colleagues know, they are not 
taking reckless actions, they are not the kind of nation that would 
trivialize what they are doing; as my colleagues know France, Britain, 
Germany, the Netherlands, you know the NATO nations, are civilized 
nations with histories of seeking justice, they are democracies, and 
they have to answer to their people. So, if they are taking an action 
with these dimensions, then we ought to stop and seriously consider 
what they are doing, why they are doing it before we proceed any 
further and discuss the unfortunate execution of the war, establish 
whether or not we really think it is necessary.
  I have been disappointed by the fact that certain kinds of things, 
actions that I assumed would take place or had taken place have not, 
did not take place before the bombing began. I was shocked to learn 
that economic sanctions and the oil embargo were not thoroughly 
considered before we started the bombing, that that came after the 
bombing. As my colleagues know, I would expect that that would be the 
kind of actions that would have been put in place and we would have 
tested whether that would have an impact on the actions of Mr. 
Milosevic and his warlords or not.
  I had the experience of being the chairman of the Congressional Black 
Caucus Task Force on Haiti during the time when we were trying to 
return the democratically-elected President of Haiti to Haiti, and you 
had at the head of the Haitian government two sovereign predators of 
the type of Milosevic, as my colleagues know, and they were not budging 
at all. These were Army men who had taken over the government with 
tanks and guns after Mr. Aristide, Bertram Aristide, won by an 
overwhelming landslide in a democratic election. They took over the 
government, and with guns and tanks they were intending to stay there 
forever.
  Now we did try sanctions, we tried an oil embargo, we tried a number 
of things. Over a 3-year period we tried a number of things that did 
not work because these sovereign predators did not understand anything 
except the language of force, and only when the troops were in the 
airplanes and on the way to Haiti did they agree to sign an agreement 
to step down and return Haiti to democratic rule. But we had tried 
every possible diplomatic maneuver. They had agreed several times to do 
things and then reneged on those agreements.
  I assumed when we started the bombing in Yugoslavia that all 
diplomatic maneuvers had been exhausted. It is unfortunate that that 
was not the case, and I felt a bit betrayed to find that only 
afterwards did they consider an oil embargo and economic sanctions.

                              {time}  2115

  I thought we had done that already.
  I am also baffled by the failure of the NATO powers and the U.S. to 
charge Mr. Milosevic as a war criminal. Why are we going to war, taking 
such extraordinary measures, bombing a nation, running the risk of 
killing large numbers of civilians, as we are doing, a very serious 
matter? War is hell.
  There is no way to avoid the hell of war. Once one gets into it, 
things go wrong. Most modern wars have found that it is the civilians, 
innocent civilians, who die in the largest numbers. In most modern 
wars, the innocent civilians die in the largest numbers, and it is the 
most unfortunate. It is one of the other reasons why we should at all 
cost try to avoid war.
  Here we are, in a war action, and the head of the nation, Mr. 
Slobodan Milosevic, who was there 10 years ago when the breakup of 
Yugoslavia started, the ethnic cleansing started, the massacres 
started, the rape, the pillage, all of the things that they are doing 
in Kosovo they have done it before already in Bosnia.
  Sarajevo, one of the great metropolitan cities of the world, was 
almost destroyed. We saw on television the bombardments. Then after we 
finally got some kind of peace agreement and outside forces went into 
the territory, all of the charges that had been made before about 
massacres and rapes and so forth was confirmed. It happened. We were 
not the victims of propaganda, as Mr. Milosevic would have us believe 
now that it is really not his forces that are driving the people of 
Kosovo out of the country but it is our bombing that is doing that; 
that they were quite content to stay before.
  All of it is a little ridiculous, but a lot of people are believing 
it, so we must address it. We have already heard from this same man and 
his regime in Yugoslavia the same tales which he tried to paper over 
and camouflage barbarity on a mass scale, modern barbarity backed up by 
tanks and machine guns. Milosevic has done it already. Why did not we 
go ahead, as a nation, this Nation and the other members of NATO, and 
call him a war criminal, brand him as a war criminal and begin to move 
in the world as if, no matter what he does in the future, he will be 
punished in some way? Certainly, locked out of any kind of recognition 
and unable to travel in any other nation in the world and try it in The 
Hague.
  Whether we are going to fight our way into Belgrade or not, certainly 
let the whole world know what we are dealing with.
  I think it is unfortunate that NATO and the U.S. have sort of taken a 
fuzzy-minded approach to the menace of a sovereign predator. He is a 
sovereign predator, a killer, a murderer, with the authority of a 
nation behind him, and there ought to be a new way to deal with these 
people, at least label them clearly as to what they are. If we are 
going to take a drastic and extreme step like bombing the nation, then 
we ought to clearly let our people understand why we are doing it, and 
one of those ways to communicate the necessity of war is to clearly 
describe who the instigators are.
  I think that there is room for creative intervention by the Members 
of Congress as a result of some of these unfortunate gaps and lapses in 
our own foreign policymaking and even though there are very experienced 
people involved in the diplomacy, there are the diplomats of France, 
the diplomats of Great Britain, the diplomats of all the European 
nations, as well as we have the diplomats here.
  I do not think the kind of criticisms that have been leveled at 
Madeleine Albright are justified. They are right there in the middle of 
a very difficult situation. The question is, are we going to stand by 
and allow the massacres to take place so that in the future we can tell 
our children, well, it did happen, it was most unfortunate but never 
again? Do we want to be able to boast never again when now we have the 
opportunity to make certain that it does not happen right now? The 
challenges, why do we not make certain that it does not happen now? Let 
us not be in a position of repeating the slogan, never again.
  We sat by and allowed 6 million or more Jews and other people to be 
massacred by the Nazi powers and now we say that is most unfortunate. 
We build museums, we have films made, and we write books, and we look 
at the horror that was perpetuated while civilized nations stood by. 
Some of it could have been prevented. Finally, the civilized nations, 
of course, united; and the Hitler regime was defeated in order to stop 
what was going on.
  Even then, it took some actions which if we had CNN on the scene, if 
we had the kind of press coverage now that we have of wars, where the 
enemy,

[[Page 9197]]

that is propaganda-wise, allows one behind the scenes, I do not know 
whether we would have prosecuted the war that defeated Hitler in 
Germany the same way and it would have come to the same conclusion. We 
might have negotiated a peace with Hitler and he might still be around 
if we had CNN filming the cities of Hamburg and Cologne and a number of 
other places in Germany that were bombed to rubble because Hitler 
refused to surrender. The bombing of Germany was one of the ways that 
was undertaken to break the back of the resistance of the people who 
followed Hitler. That was most unfortunate.
  War is barbaric, but if we had been able to see the large numbers of 
civilians die then, would we have decided, no, let us make peace with 
Hitler at any price to end the carnage?
  There is room for creative intervention here, and I think we ought to 
understand that the intervention ought to be creative, that when we 
interject ourselves and try to influence the foreign policy of our 
Nation we ought to be thorough about it, we ought to think deeply about 
what we are doing.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and the gentleman from 
Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) were very serious, the discussions that they 
had with the Russians in Vienna. I hope the White House takes it into 
consideration. I think that perhaps some things behind the scene are 
moving now, and the diplomatic initiatives that are going on now with 
the Russians certainly may be helped by what our Members of Congress 
have done.
  We should not stop, but we should reflect deeply on what we are 
doing. We should remember that it is up to us to try to interpret to 
our constituents whether or not this war is necessary. When is it 
necessary? What kind of new morality are we willing to undertake in the 
definition of necessary?
  I welcome the initiative of Jessie Jackson; and I think it is great 
that three men, three soldiers who were captured illegally to begin 
with, are now back home. No amount of technicalities and diplomatic 
protocol violations should be accepted as an excuse for not doing 
everything possible to get those soldiers back. We got them back, and I 
congratulate Jessie Jackson and that initiative, the ministers who went 
with him and the whole delegation.
  I do not think that we should allow that kind of action to let us 
minimize or trivialize the evil of the Milosevic regime. I do not think 
we should let Milosevic score a propaganda victory because he releases 
three soldiers who should not have been kidnapped in the first place. I 
do not think we should let Milosevic appear to be a reasonable, 
peaceful guy, willing to talk, when he has been on the rampage for all 
of this time and continues to be the guiding force behind a brutal war 
machine, killing and pillaging and destroying whole villages and 
driving people out of cities.
  Ethnic cleansing is not exactly as bad perhaps as the gas chambers of 
Hitler. Many people are allowed to get out with their lives in the case 
of ethnic cleansing. They are not systematically destroyed, but large 
numbers are destroyed, and it is systematic, and it has the authority 
of the government behind it, and Milosevic is the government.
  In other words, what I am saying is that diplomacy should not be 
business as usual. This is a situation which is very difficult. It is 
like a snake pit in the midst of quicksand in a mine field. Everything 
complicated and dangerous that one can imagine is involved in this 
situation.
  The fact that the implementation of the war has gone so badly 
certainly has destroyed a lot of support for it in areas where there 
should be support.
  I do not want to be in a position of making excuses for the blunders 
of the military. I do not think we should drop bombs in areas where 
there is a danger that there is going to be a tremendous amount of 
civilian collateral. I do not think we should take those chances.
  I certainly do not think we should trust the CIA to do our targeting 
for us if they do not have maps and cannot discern an embassy building 
that has been there for some time. They say they had people on the 
ground who double-checked that site as well as whatever we are using in 
terms of satellite guidance of our bombing attacks. There is no excuse 
for that.
  I have been on this floor many times during the reauthorization and 
the appropriations process for the CIA, and I have criticized the CIA 
for its waste of a $30 billion budget. They have Aldrich Ames who was 
in charge of the counteroffensive against the Russian spy agency, and 
we found that Aldrich Ames was on the payroll of the Russians, and at 
least 10 of our agents were executed as a result of Aldrich Ames 
sitting there as the head of the CIA counterspy operation against 
Russia.
  We had other people who defected from various positions who showed 
that the CIA is quite a shabby organization. Why the President has not 
dismantled the present CIA and reorganized it totally, I do not know. 
There is certainly a good basis for it, even before the bombing of the 
Chinese embassy by using the wrong maps.
  It is a ridiculous explanation to have to offer to the world. The CIA 
is a multibillion dollar agency. Their budget is probably more than $30 
billion. Surely they can find a building on the map and pinpoint it 
properly if they had any kind of integrity.
  The CIA in Haiti was my first close-up experience with the CIA and 
why I moved from the position of questioning the CIA's existence on the 
basis of the fact that it could not tell that the Soviet Union was 
collapsing.
  Senator Moynihan once made a speech and I thought it was very 
interesting because he was on the Intelligence Committee, and he should 
know. He said that the CIA never informed them. They had no idea that 
the economy of the Soviet Union was collapsing. With all of the agents, 
the money and analysis, et cetera, the CIA was caught by surprise when 
the economy of the Soviet Union collapsed. The whole government of the 
Soviet Union sort of collapsed, and we were caught by surprise. I 
thought that was startling.
  Then up close, as the chairman of the task force, Congressional Black 
Caucus Task Force on Haiti, I saw how the CIA worked against the policy 
of its own government. During the course of our negotiations with 
Haiti, we reached the point where we thought we had an agreement where 
the military junta in charge of Haiti would allow us to begin to take 
some steps toward normalizing the situation by allowing the delegation 
to come into Haiti. One part of the delegation would be a group of 
Canadian policemen who would help work with the law enforcement agency 
in Haiti and some other people who were going to do some other things, 
and they were all on a ship going to dock in Haiti.

                              {time}  2130

  And on the day they were supposed to disembark from the ship, there 
was a huge demonstration on the dock in Haiti, and guns were fired. The 
American embassy personnel were threatened, and a number of things 
happened that caught us by surprise. It made the President withdraw the 
people who were supposed to be part of that contingent.
  It turned out later that the people who organized that demonstration 
against the delegation sent by the President of the United States to 
begin to normalize the situation in Haiti, those people were on the 
payroll of the CIA.
  Emanuel Constant was the head of the organization funded by the CIA. 
He was on the payroll of the CIA. We do not know the full story yet 
because they refuse to release all the documents and papers connected 
with Emanuel Constant. They refused to allow him to be tried by the 
present government of Haiti.
  So the CIA is an animal that we ought to take a close look at. It may 
be obsolete, extinct, and begging for retirement. It ought to be done 
away with and something new should be organized using somebody 
different, because the blunders continue. They become more and more 
dangerous.
  I think that our government and the NATO alliance is now in an almost 
untenable position, having bombed the

[[Page 9198]]

Chinese embassy and giving the Chinese, who opposed the action in 
Yugoslavia all along, giving them an excellent excuse to take us to the 
United Nations and to raise the actions of NATO up for the whole world 
and indignantly protest the fact that they were victimized. It is 
totally unnecessary. A CIA that would do that needs to be certainly 
examined closely. Some heads ought to roll. I agree with the Chinese, 
somebody ought to be severely punished for what has happened.
  But the CIA, of course, is a very political animal. It is an agency 
of government which professes it has nothing to do with politics, of 
course. They are there for the national security. They report to the 
President. But during my sojourn on the task force for Haiti, I learned 
different.
  There are people in Washington who belong to something called the 
intelligence community. The intelligence community protects the CIA. 
There are a number of characters in the CIA who can almost do anything 
they want. We saw some of them do almost anything they wanted to do in 
Haiti, and there was no accountability.
  There were CIA reports that were total lies. They had the duly 
elected president of Haiti, Mr. Aristide, almost a drug addict, a 
psychopath. All kind of things were charged. When we examined the basis 
for their charges, there was nothing there. He was placed in hospitals 
for psychiatric treatment that did not even exist, and all kinds of 
fabrications we found that had been accepted by the CIA.
  The prosecution of this war just brings to light the fact that we 
have some serious problems in a very expensive governmental operation. 
The gentleman who preceded me was talking about waste in government and 
the expenditures, and how so much of our tax money goes into wasteful 
government. I assure Members, there are many places where there is 
waste, but I never hear the majority party talking about the real 
waste.
  In fact, we saw last week that when we had a bill on the floor 
presented by the President calling for $6 billion to conduct the 
activities related to the war in Kosovo, the majority party added to 
that and the $6 billion price tag was raised to $13 billion.
  We saw before our very eyes in bold relief an example of how the 
waste gets accumulated. Most of what they were doing was going to go 
into weapons systems and activities that are not related to the Kosovo 
war, but they do make for very high profits in terms of the productions 
of certain weapons systems, some of which are questionable.
  One of the things that the Kosovo war maybe brings into bold relief, 
again, is the fact that our high-tech weaponry has a lot of 
shortcomings. The precision bombing, precision bombing turns out not to 
be so precise.
  Strange things are happening with our helicopters. The Apache 
helicopters were coming, and the way the press played up the 
helicopters, they did them a great injustice, because they kept hyping, 
the Apaches are coming, the Apaches are coming.
  One got the impression from hearing over the news day after day that 
the Apaches are coming that the Apaches were going to turn the 
situation around and win the war. I do not think that the Army had 
asked for that kind of publicity, but for some reason, there it was. 
Even Ted Koppel on several shows had people dealing with the way the 
Apache functions and how the pilots think. It was all this hype about 
the Apaches, the Apaches.
  Now two Apaches have crashed in training sessions. It is just one 
more reason why the public, the voters, the American citizens have real 
doubts about this war, when we have blunders of that kind which are 
placed under a magnifying glass and raised to a level of visibility 
that destroys the effectiveness of whatever we are going to do 
afterwards.
  The Apaches are there now. It looks as if the Apaches are going to 
work no miracles and make no great differences, but they are high-tech 
weapons. We have learned these high-tech weapons are so loaded down 
that they cannot fly over the mountains. They have so much on them 
until they have difficulty flying over the mountain ranges, and 
Yugoslavia has mountain ranges. Every night that I listened to the 
discussion of the Apaches I was appalled at the kind of facts we pick 
up in terms of why our high-tech weaponry fails.
  Now is the time for every Member of Congress, and indeed, every 
American citizen, to think seriously and deeply and thoroughly about 
the activities that are going on. Kosovo and the burden of the war in 
Kosovo will impact on all the decisions we make in Congress for this 
106th session of Congress.
  We are going to be saddled with discussions about the fact that $13 
billion was appropriated when only $6 billion was requested by the 
President, and many of the same people on the majority side who 
advocated and voted for those appropriations are going to tell us now 
that we have no money for education, we have no money to deal with 
prescription drug benefits for people on Medicare. They are going to 
tell us we have to have tremendous across-the-board cuts in any program 
that is a domestic program that is nondefense.
  We should expect all of this and get ready for it because of Kosovo 
becoming an excuse for certain people who have always wanted to cut 
back drastically on the spending by the Federal Government to help the 
people in America who need help the most.
  Mr. Speaker, I have tried to think deeply and thoroughly about all of 
it. I greatly regret that now, in my pursuit of greater funding for 
education, of greater funding for school construction, that I am going 
to have to deal with the Kosovo burden. I deeply regret that. I think 
all American citizens regret that, in a situation where we have a tight 
budget already, we have to also now deal with additional expenditures 
for Kosovo.
  I have thought deeply about this. I understand all the implications. 
I would like to invite my constituents who disagree with me about why, 
despite all this, I still support the actions of the President and the 
NATO alliance, I would like for them to follow my thought processes for 
a moment, those among my constituents who disagree.
  The first consideration is my experience with Haiti, the experience 
with Haiti. At least 3 years of negotiations brought me face-to-face 
with an example of a sovereign predator. There were two of them, Raoul 
Cedras and Michel Francoise.
  We looked at their faces in negotiation after negotiation and they 
seemed like rational, reasonable people at the time, when you were 
negotiating, but they went back on agreement after agreement. They 
broke agreements. They were determined to squeeze from their country as 
much as they could for themselves.
  Haiti had a thriving drug-running business. Drug transshipments were 
feeding the coffers of the same men we were negotiating with. They did 
not mind the deteriorating conditions of the economy, the misery. They 
did not mind that. They added to the misery by killing large numbers of 
people every night. The total went up to about 5,000 people killed 
during that 3-year period.
  Negotiations, discussions, diplomacy, sanctions, embargo of oil, none 
of it worked. It was not until a determination was made to pursue a 
course of military intervention in Haiti that we got some real action.
  As we know, we did not have to fire a shot. There was just the threat 
of the troops, the understanding that they were on the way, that led 
Raoul Cedras to step down. Force, however, had to be the threat to do 
that. We had to be willing to do it.
  In the case of Saddam Hussein, I was against the Gulf War, I was 
against bombing, I was against the ground war, and I watched as Saddam 
Hussein allowed his own people to be pulverized, his own armies to be 
destroyed, and he stubbornly held on.
  The bombing did have a great effect in the desert. It was a place 
where you could impact greatly upon the armed forces. His forces were 
ravished. They were destroyed long before the ground war began, but he 
was a sovereign predator who did not care about his own people, and not 
until the ground war

[[Page 9199]]

started and the tanks were rolling did we see Saddam Hussein willing to 
yield.
  He played some tricks, and at one point there was an announcement 
that he was trying to seek asylum in another Nation. For that reason I 
think the calculations of the Bush administration were thrown off and 
they did not pursue Saddam Hussein's army to the point of destroying 
the army. That is most unfortunate. This sovereign predator still sits 
there, like the sovereign predator in Yugoslavia.
  We had an encounter with him, but we did not go any further. We did 
not go far enough to destroy him and his powers; not the Nation, but a 
single person surrounded by his own cronies, who becomes the 
perpetrator of large-scale dislocation and death in the world.
  Stop to think of it for a moment. When we add up all the people in 
the last 50 years, and let us take the last 100 years, because World 
War I was in the last 100 years, World War II, all the hurricanes, 
tornadoes, the earthquakes, if we add up all the people who have died 
in all the natural disasters in the last 100 years, yet it will come 
nowhere close to the people who have died in wars perpetrated by the 
Adolph Hitlers and Saddam Husseins of the world.
  Millions died in World War II as a result of Adolph Hitler and his 
Nazi regime, millions died. The authoritarian totalitarian regime in 
Tokyo, millions died; in China, millions died. They were ready for more 
millions to die if we had to invade Japan. They were going to hold on 
at all costs. Too many died in Okinawa, too many died in Iwo Jima.
  The sovereign predators do not yield, and they are the cause of more 
death than nature or God has ever caused. It is a serious 
consideration. It is a serious thing to think about. Should they be 
allowed to wreak havoc?
  In Rwanda, the Hutus who were in charge of government went on the 
radio and used all the methods of communication to raise their own 
population, the Hutus, who were the vast majority of the population, to 
a high level of anger, and they went out and savagely slaughtered at 
least a half a million people. Some say it approaches a million. We saw 
the bodies on television. We saw the churches full of people hacked to 
death. We saw the people, bodies floating in the river.
  The sovereign predators of Rwanda were demagogues who wanted power. 
It is all about a demagogue who wants power, becomes a sovereign 
predator, because the best way to achieve that power is to use the 
tribal, ethnic, or racial card against his own people to throw them 
into turmoil.
  Maybe there are some ancient instincts that make us all distrustful 
of each other, but people do not attack each other in large groups. We 
do not have ethnic wars, tribal wars, automatically. They are 
instigated by somebody. The demagogues instigate the wars for the 
purpose of their own power.
  Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister or president, I 
am sorry, of Israel right now. His father wrote a book about anti-
Semitism and the ancient origins of anti-Semitism, the history of anti-
Semitism. And in the discussion of anti-Semitism in Egypt, he talked 
about the fact that for so long there was a peaceful existence there. 
Jews existed along with everybody else, and there was no problem.

                              {time}  2145

  Antisemitism arose. And studying the origins of that antisemitism and 
using his ancient sources and analyzing it, he came to the conclusion 
that that antisemitism that arose out of Egypt and led to the Exodus 
and the kinds of cruel things that preceded the Exodus is similar to a 
pattern that takes place in the world whenever these things happen. 
That is that a minority is always at risk because a minority by simply 
being a minority is in a position to be victimized if a demagogue finds 
it convenient to use the fact that that minority is there to incite the 
majority and get the majority into a mode of thinking which supports 
the demagogue.
  So demagoguery by sovereign predators has caused more death and 
destruction of the world than any natural calamities, all the natural 
calamities put together. Think about it.
  Here we have a demagogue, Slobodan Milosovic, like the demagogues in 
Haiti, the sovereign predators, demagogues that become sovereign 
predators. They become sovereign predators because they have the 
authority of the government and they can command the guns and the 
tanks. Although the majority of the people may be against them, they 
have no way to counterattack against modern weapons so the demagogues 
prevail.
  It may be that sometimes they have the majority of people on their 
side after they have captured all of the propaganda machinery and they 
are in the control of the mass communications. They brainwash people to 
the point where they do sometimes, maybe many times, command the 
majority. But the sovereign predators are in charge, and something has 
to be done to counteract them.
  My framework for thinking was shaped by this development that I saw 
up close in Haiti. When one is dealing with a sovereign predator, force 
is the only thing that they understand. War, force becomes the 
necessary evil. It is necessary. I want to get back to the point. It is 
a necessary evil. The burdens we bear as a result of the war in Kosovo 
are a necessary evil.
  The framework for thinking of all of us are also being influenced by 
giving due recognition to World War II and the phenomena of World War 
II. One man was the driving force behind World War II; Adolf Hitler and 
his ambitions. Of course he had a German war machine that he made good 
use of, and it bowed to his will.
  It is a complicated situation. People who argue that one man did it 
all are in danger of oversimplifying, but if Hitler had not been there, 
you know, like Alexander the Great, would Alexander the Great have died 
as generals began to fight among themselves. The great war machine that 
Alexander the Great had created fell apart.
  Without Hitler I imagine the great war machine and all that went with 
that war machine, the propaganda machine, the organization of the whole 
nation, it would not have been the same without Adolf Hitler.
  So the sovereign predator of Hitler and I think that the Hitler 
syndrome we can see in Slobodan Milosovic, like we can see the Hitler 
syndrome in Saddam Hussein, as I saw the Hitler syndrome in Raoul 
Cedras and Michel Francois in Haiti.
  There is a Hitler syndrome where they do not care, they reach the 
point where they have some kind of sense where they are the most 
important creatures in the world, and they have the power to make the 
world bow to their desires and their will, and nothing can stop them 
but force.
  So in World War II, we saw it happen right before our very eyes. We 
later on got a lot of documentation. It was not propaganda that 
millions of Jews were being put to death. We now have the 
documentation. We saw the bodies. We saw the gas chambers. We have the 
files. We have a museum here in Washington which if one does not 
believe it, one can go look at the documentation and the evidence with 
one's own eyes. It all happened. It all happened.
  Do we respond to that lesson in history by saying that Yugoslavia is 
a sovereign nation and therefore we should not meddle? Do we respond to 
that by saying we should not break international law and international 
tradition by intervening in Yugoslavia. We did that.
  In the case of Hitler, of course, he was challenged when he went 
across borders and started war. When he attacked the nations in Europe 
surrounding him, he had already annexed a couple of nations before that 
and some territory. We took it as long as we could, and finally Hitler 
was challenged.
  Slobodan Milosovic does not represent a threat to the United States 
as Hitler did. He had world ambitions. He moved in a way where, as he 
destroyed the nations of Europe and brought them under subjugation, he 
was building a foundation which certainly could

[[Page 9200]]

have been the basis for challenging any part of the world.
  He had his counterpart in Japan. For a while, he had his allies in 
Italy. It was a movement that threatened all parts of the world. 
Certainly it was a situation different from the one we see now.
  We are not threatened by Yugoslavia in that same way. They will never 
attack America. They will not send missiles here. We are not in a 
situation where our national interests are at stake. I think that 
previous speakers who made that point over and over again were correct. 
I agree. Our national interests are not at stake in Yugoslavia. We are 
in no way threatened by Slobodan Milosovic in terms of our own national 
security. There will be no military threats, no military problems as 
far as this Nation is concerned.
  That makes it even more important, even more noble the fact that we 
have gone into a conflict where we do not have a vital interest, we do 
not have our national interest threatened. This is a moral crusade. 
This is raising morality to a new level, as I said before, a new level 
of morality when one engages one's troops, one's resources, one's 
political destiny. Because anybody who starts a war in America runs a 
risk of paying a high price politically. Any party that is a part of 
starting and executing a war will pay a high price, will teeter on a 
precipice.
  The politically expedient thing to do in the case of Kosovo would be 
to stay away from any conflict that might place the Democrats in a 
difficult position in the year 2000 as we go into those elections. The 
politically expedient thing to do would be to negotiate forever, even 
negotiate away principles, but do not do anything which jeopardizes 
one's power.
  Criticism I hear of the President, criticisms of this administration, 
but the gamble they are taking is a noble gamble. The risks being taken 
here are noble risks for noble reasons.
  The fact is that our interests are not being threatened. There is no 
oil. We went to war in the Gulf. The Gulf War, I think there was some 
principles were involved. One nation was invaded by another, but I do 
not think that is why we went to war in the desert. We went to war in 
the desert because the price of gasoline was threatened. The supplies 
of oil in the whole world were threatened. There was a clear vital 
national interest.
  Is that the only reason we should ever go to war? I think this action 
taken by this administration by the NATO alliance is saying there ought 
to be another reason to go to war, especially in a situation where one 
has been dealing for 8 years, one has been negotiating for 8 years with 
the sovereign predator, one has been trying to resolve the situation 
for 8 years, especially a situation where the European nations all 
agree. They reached agreement about the horrors of what is happening in 
Yugoslavia. Is it not time to take some action?
  My framework of thinking is shaped by what I understand of what 
happened in World War II with Hitler. My framework of thinking is 
shaped also by my experiences with Haiti up close. My framework of 
understanding of what is going on here is shaped also by my 
preoccupation and concern and understanding of the war to end slavery 
in America, the Civil War, the War Between the States, whatever you 
might want to call it.
  If ever there was a war that was fought as a moral crusade, then that 
was a moral crusade war. The war to end slavery was a campaign of 
compassion. The large numbers of men who fought and died in that war, 
and more Americans died in that war than have died in all the wars 
combined. Certainly I speak for the Union soldiers who fought to end 
slavery.
  Some people say it was not a war about slavery. But if ever there was 
a war that had a clear purpose, then this war had a clear purpose. The 
war to end slavery was a war for a high moral principle.
  If Abraham Lincoln had been a better politician, he would have done 
what James Buchanan did in his latter part of administration, avoided a 
confrontation at all cost with his confederates. The war to end slavery 
would not have taken place if there had not been a principled 
politician who was willing to take risks in support of that principle.
  Yes, there were abolitionist forces in the North who had a great 
role, and I do not like to see the abolitionists portrayed as fanatics. 
The abolitionists were people who wanted to end slavery. The 
abolitionists were people who thought slavery was unjust and that one 
had to take steps to rid the Nation of that great abominable crime.
  There were forces at work that certainly wanted to confront the 
people who were trying to extend slavery forever. The Confederates 
wanted to create two Americas. If they had succeeded, we would have had 
two Americas; one built on slave labor, probably a formidable economic 
power.
  When one has free labor, certainly during that period where the 
agriculture needed free labor, but when the first industries were 
formed, if free labor had been available for industries on one-half of 
the North American continent, and the other half did not have free 
labor, probably the part of the continent that had free labor would 
have become the economic power over the part of the continent that did 
not have free labor through slaves.
  So I mean there were many, many possible ramifications of a situation 
where slavery was allowed to continue because the political powers in 
charge chose to negotiate and to compromise.
  Many of my close, young friends who talk about slavery and the state 
of African Americans now in America are often unaware of how close we 
came to a situation where there were two Americas instead of one. The 
entire strategy at one point of the Confederacy was to prolong the war 
in order to force a compromise, a negotiated settlement.
  The pursuit of the war, the Civil War, required a great deal of 
serious consideration of the cost. The cost in lives, as I said before, 
was tremendous. More Americans died in the Civil War than all the wars 
together. General Ulysses Grant was called a butcher because of his 
tactics and the number of men that he delivered up in order to win.
  If we had CNN covering the Civil War, they would have filmed the 
burning of Atlanta and some of the other things that were done by 
General Sherman as he marched across the South and called it barbarity 
and maybe label Sherman as a war criminal. But, again, it was similar 
to what happened in Germany. They had to bomb the cities of Germany in 
order to break the back of the Hitler war machine and the people's 
resistance, their support for a demagogue who refused to surrender.

                              {time}  2200

  In the case of the South, the prolonging of the war was the strategy. 
And the terrible things that happened as a result of that, the large 
numbers of civilians, who, if they did not die in those days from the 
firepower of modern weapons, they died from hunger, deprivation, et 
cetera. It was a nasty war, a war for a moral purpose.
  There would have been no Emancipation Proclamation. There would have 
been no 13th amendment, no 14th amendment, or no 15th amendment if the 
bloody war had not been won.
  So I say to my constituents who insist that this is a terrible thing 
we are doing because civilians are dying, it is a terrible thing when 
we have to bomb cities, it is a terrible thing that we are using our 
military might to try to get a solution to a problem, but the choice is 
not ours. The demagogue who is a sovereign predator has determined what 
the situation should be.
  We have been given no choice in the matter, if we care about moral 
principles, if we are going to lay aside the conventional morality 
which says that whatever a nation does within its borders, it is their 
business; that whatever a nation does, no matter how horrible it may 
be, it is not the concern of the rest of the world. We broke that 
tradition when we went into Yugoslavia in the first place.
  We have been in Yugoslavia a number of years. More than $7 billion 
have been spent there by this country alone in helping to maintain a 
peacekeeping

[[Page 9201]]

force. We are involved. So, therefore, the moral crusade that we are 
mounting in Kosovo is a continuation of a new kind of morality that we 
have established. We are saying that never again will the civilized 
world stand by and allow people to be destroyed by sovereign predators 
without intervention.
  Sometimes that intervention, most of the time, it will be diplomatic 
condemnation. Diplomatic condemnation of genocide will always be a 
certainty, I hope, from now on when that happens. But sometimes 
military confrontation will also be possible, and it will happen in 
protection of a principle.
  I hope that all the other sovereign predators of the world will take 
heed that they will not be allowed to exist without being labeled war 
criminals. General Pinochet, who is now sort of trapped in England, I 
hope we have seen the last of those people who think they can kill and 
maim and destroy people and then rise up and travel around the world as 
ordinary citizens and enjoy their old age. There ought to be a 
condemnation of the sovereign predators, if we cannot go to war with 
them, do whatever is necessary to make certain they never live among 
men again as normal people.
  So I appeal to my constituents, I appeal to people everywhere to do a 
thorough analysis and remember the Hitler syndrome. Never again, the 
phrase we used in connection with the millions of Jews who died, must 
not be an abstract slogan. It must not be a slogan that our generation 
uses in the future because we sat by and let things happen and we feel 
bad about it and say we will not let it happen next time. This is the 
time. This is the time to stop it.
  Each one of us has a duty to take a forceful position, to be thorough 
in our thinking and to support the most intelligent effort possible to 
end this war as fast as possible. But we should, in the meantime, be 
proud of the fact that this indispensable Nation of ours has both the 
will and the power to reinforce the foundations of a compassionate 
civilization.
  The Roman Empire only dispatched their allegiance to achieve greater 
conquests and to bring home the booty. This American indispensable 
Nation has deployed its armies in an unprecedented campaign of 
compassion.

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