[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 33 (Monday, August 23, 1999)]
[Pages 1635-1640]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States 100th 
National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri

August 16, 1999

    Thank you very much, Commander Pouliot; distinguished officers of 
the VFW; Congressman Skelton, Congressman Moore, Congresswoman Kaptur; 
Secretary West and Deputy Secretary Gober; ladies and gentlemen. It is a 
great honor for me to be here in Kansas City today to help to celebrate 
a hundred proud years for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. You should clap 
for yourselves. [Applause] That's good.
    I'd like to begin with just a few reflections of what these 100 
years mean for you and for the United States. We are less than 150 days 
now from the beginning of one century and the end of another, which many 
have called the American Century. Lately, there have been a number of 
looks back at the people and personalities and events that made this 
20th century: the leaders who led freedom's triumph over tyranny, like 
Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Marshall; inventors like the Wright brothers, 
whose ideas changed the way we lived; moral forces like Martin Luther 
King and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose ideas and examples changed the world; 
scientists like Dr. Jonas Salk, whose discoveries liberated a generation 
of parents from the mortal fear that their children would have polio and 
be crippled. But if you ask who has been most responsible for making 
this the American

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Century, one answer would be at the top of anyone's list after two World 
Wars and a long cold war. That answer would be America's service men and 
women.
    Today, as we celebrate your centennial anniversary, we must never 
forget that tens, even hundreds of millions of people, in the United 
States and all around the world sleep in peace because hundreds of 
thousands of Americans rest in peace in graves, marked and unmarked, all 
across the world, fallen veterans of foreign wars.
    It is no accident, therefore, that the American Century also marks 
the VFW century. For over the last 100 years, America's men and women 
have sacrificed whatever was necessary, not for territorial gain, nor 
for the domination of others, but to secure the rights and freedoms of 
others so that Americans might have their freedom secure. You have made 
our Nation proud.
    Thanks to you, we will begin a new century with a truly historic 
achievement, for in the last few years, for the first time in all of 
human history, more than half the world's people live under free 
governments freely elected. Still, you and I know this is not a world 
free from danger. There is the potential for major wars, rooted in 
ethnic and religious hatred. There is the chance that former adversaries 
will not succeed in their transition to democracy and could become 
adversaries again. There is the risk that nuclear, chemical, and 
biological weapons will fall into the wrong hands. There is the risk of 
terrorist groups with increasing access to money, to technology, to 
sophisticated weaponry. There is the possibility that global financial 
vulnerabilities could overwhelm free societies. Therefore, we cannot 
assume that, because we are today secure and at peace, we don't need 
military strength or alliances or that, because we are today prosperous, 
we are immune from turmoil half a world away.
    America must still be engaged in the world, working with others to 
advance peace and prosperity, freedom and security, and America must 
remain strong. That is what our most recent conflict in Kosovo was all 
about. I want to thank you profoundly for the support the VFW gave us 
during the conflict there. I know it wasn't easy for you to do. We were 
still in the early stages of the longest and most difficult military 
campaign in the 50-year history of NATO. Critics were convinced from the 
beginning that we could not succeed. But you stood with us, and more 
importantly, you stood with our men and women in uniform. NATO and the 
United States prevailed. We are all grateful for your support.
    Many of you in this room today fought in World War II against the 
tyrants who preached racial and religious superiority. In Kosovo, 
innocent men, women, and children were systematically targeted for 
killing and mass expulsion by their governments simply because of their 
ethnic heritage or the way they chose to worship God. After World
War II, after ending the 4-year war of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, NATO 
could not accept that kind of behavior on its own borders. It could not 
stand by, once again, and see people driven from their homes, loaded on 
railcars, having their history erased.
    So, instead, the century ends with a powerful statement by NATO's 19 
democracies, reaffirming human life and human dignity, giving us the 
chance after two World Wars, the cold war, and the Balkan conflicts, for 
the first time ever to have an undivided, democratic, and peaceful 
Europe. It shares our values, strengthens our economy, helps us meet our 
common aspirations, and will not call young Americans to go there to 
fight and die in the 21st century.
    We prevailed in Kosovo because our cause was just, our goals were 
clear, our Alliance were strong, and our strategy worked, thanks to the 
performance of our men and women in uniform. In 78 days, they flew more 
than 37,000 support and strike sorties in the face of constant danger, 
including surface-to-air missiles. Many times our pilots risked their 
lives because they would not fire back at the Serb gunners who were 
positioned in heavily populated areas and they didn't want to kill 
innocent civilians.
    In the end, thank God we had zero combat fatalities and only two 
planes shot down. That is an astonishing record and a tribute to the 
professionalism we see every day from our military forces the world 
over. They are good people. They are good people who are well-trained, 
well-led, and well-equipped. Rigorous training is critical and, as all 
of you

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know, dangerous in and of itself. Indeed, we must always remember our 
two Army airmen who died in training exercises in Albania during the 
Kosovo conflict. And we thank God there weren't more casualties in 
Kosovo, in part because the men and women trained so hard with the 
world's best equipment. As long as I am President, I intend to keep the 
commitment I made from the first day of our administration that our men 
and women in uniform will remain the best trained, the best equipped, 
the best prepared military in the entire world.
    All of you know we have challenges in keeping that commitment. 
Thanks to the strength of our economy, in part, we're having a harder 
time recruiting and keeping some of our best people. And we have a lot 
of tough decisions to make to maintain the readiness of our equipment 
and to keep ahead of the latest generation in military developments. I 
have asked Congress for the support necessary to deal with these 
challenges. I believe it will be forthcoming, and I ask for your support 
in making sure that it is.
    We also recognize another simple truth here, on your centennial: The 
troops of tomorrow will only be as good as our commitment to veterans 
today. Way back in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt said, ``A man who is good 
enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a 
square deal afterwards.''
    One of the great privileges I have had in being President is to work 
for and with our country's veterans and their organizations. The White 
House doors have been open to veterans, to help to shape policy 
affecting veterans, especially when it comes to critical matters like 
health care. Early in our administration, Hershel Gober recommended that 
we look for ways to bring health care closer to veterans who needed it. 
Since then we have opened more than 600 outpatient clinics all across 
America and have more planned over the next 2 years. We expect to treat 
400,000 more veterans this year than last year.
    We've also confronted some long-
neglected problems head on. We've reached out to more than 40,000 
veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, to tell them about the 
expanded benefits available to them. I pressed hard for answers to the 
Gulf war syndrome and proper care for those who suffer from it. We are 
in the process of building five new national cemeteries, the most since 
the Civil War. And we are making a special effort to end something I 
know is unacceptable to all of us here today, homeless veterans. They 
should be brought back into the society they did so much to defend.
    In all these efforts, I want to thank Secretary West, his 
predecessor, Secretary Brown, and Deputy Secretary Gober and all those 
at the Department of Veterans Affairs that have worked so hard to reach 
out to you and to work with you. We know there is more to do.
    As Vice President Gore announced last month, we will continue to 
work with the VFW and others to make sure that all veterans receive the 
high-quality care they deserve next year and every year, and we expect 
this year's budget to reflect that commitment.
    I would like to make another point today. Standing by our military 
and standing by our veterans means more than simply preparing people to 
fight wars and taking care of them after they wear our Nation's uniform. 
We must also work with equal determination to prevent wars. That means 
paying attention not only to military readiness, but to diplomatic 
readiness as well. We know that if diplomacy is not backed by real, 
credible threats of force, it can be empty, indeed, dangerous. But if we 
don't use diplomacy first to promote our interests, if we rely on our 
military as the only line of defense, it almost certainly will become 
our only line of defense.
    Of course, international engagement costs money, but the costliest 
peace is far cheaper than the cheapest war. Ever since I became 
President, I've been trying hard to convince Congress of that basic 
truth. It has been a considerable challenge. Our international affairs 
programs, which fund everything from resolving conflicts to 
strengthening young democracies, to combating terrorism, to fighting 
dangerous drugs, to promoting our exports, to maintaining our Embassies 
all around the world, amount to less than one percent of the Federal 
budget and less than

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one-fifteenth of our defense budget. But I regret to say that since 1985 
these programs have been cut significantly. This year the House and 
Senate have passed spending bills that would cut our request for 
international affairs by more than $2 billion. In other words, we're 
cutting the very programs designed to keep our soldiers out of war in 
the first place.
    Underfunding our arsenal of peace is as risky as underfunding our 
arsenal for war. For if we continue to underfund diplomacy, we will end 
up overusing our military. Problems we might have been able to resolve 
peacefully will turn into crises that we can only resolve at a cost of 
life and treasure. If this trend continues, there will be real 
consequences for important American interests.
    Let me mention just a few, beginning with our interest in peace and 
stability across the Atlantic. Today, after the victory in Kosovo and in 
Bosnia, we have an opportunity to invest in peace so that future wars do 
not occur there. The people of the Balkans have been crippled by 
conflict, really, since the end of the cold war. Today, we have a chance 
to integrate them with each other and into the mainstream of Europe, 
where they will have strong incentives to maintain democracy and good 
behavior and avoid conflicts.
    To do this, we don't need anything as ambitious as the Marshall 
plan. And whatever is done, we must insist that our European partners 
carry most of the load and that Balkan leaders themselves take 
responsibility for changing their policies. Still, the United States 
should be a part of this process. If we don't and the effort fails, make 
no mistake, there will be another bloody war that starts in the Balkans 
and spreads throughout southeastern Europe. And some day, more young 
Americans may be asked to risk their lives at far greater cost than our 
part of the rebuilding of the region.
    If we are to succeed in winning the peace, we may see a 21st 
century--I'll say again--in which we do not have to send the young 
people of America to fight in another European war. That is a worthy 
objective. We have seen enough wars in Europe, claiming the lives of 
their children and America's young people. Now we have a chance to avoid 
it, and we ought to take the chance.
    We also have a responsibility to protect American people from the 
dangers most likely to surface in the 21st century. The gravest of those 
may not be another country launching a nuclear weapon but that weapons 
of mass destruction will fall into the hands of terrorists and their 
rogue-state sponsors. We have worked to reduce that doomsday scenario. 
Since 1992, our support has helped to deactivate almost 5,000 nuclear 
warheads in the former Soviet Union; to eliminate nuclear weapons from 
three former Soviet republics; to strengthen the security of weapons and 
materials at over 100 sites; to tighten export controls in Russia and to 
purchase hundreds of tons, literally hundreds of tons, of highly 
enriched uranium that otherwise could be used for nuclear weapons that 
end up in the wrong hands.
    This effort has received strong bipartisan support in the Congress 
for which I am very grateful. Today, the Russian economy is struggling, 
as we all know. The average salary of a highly trained weapons scientist 
in Russia--listen to this--the average salary of a highly trained 
weapons scientist in Russia is less than $100 a month.
    Now, for a small investment, we can help them turn that expertise to 
peaceful projects that help the world and draw a living wage doing it. 
Or we can do nothing and pray that each and every one of those thousands 
of scientists will somehow resist the temptation to market their 
expertise to those who wish to do us and the cause of freedom harm. 
Common sense says to me that we ought to give them something useful and 
good to do and let them make a decent living.
    That's why, in my State of the Union Address, I proposed increasing 
funding for threat reduction by two-thirds over the next 5 years. I want 
to work with Congress to make these investments to make the world a 
safer place.
    Another challenge is to create a durable and comprehensive peace in 
the region that every President since Richard Nixon has considered among 
the most dangerous in the world, the Middle East. Today, we have a real 
opportunity to do that. The new Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, 
formerly the commander of all Israel's military forces, has

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set forth an ambitious agenda to reach agreement within the next 15 
months and to move the process beyond the setbacks of recent years.
    Both Israelis and Palestinians now are determined to move forward. 
But the enemies of peace stand ready to strike to undercut this path. 
That is why last fall, when the two sides made a commitment to peace at 
the Wye River talks, we made a commitment to them, as well. As the 
United States has done ever since the Camp David accords in the late 
1970's, we told the Israelis that we would help them minimize the risks 
of peace and lift the lives of the Palestinian people. We told the 
Jordanians that we would help promote their safety and their well-being.
    Now, I know that's a long way away. But you know if there's a full-
scale war in the Middle East, it will affect our interests and our 
values. The Middle East is home to all three of the world's great 
religions that hold we are created by one God. We have a chance to see 
it become a place of peace. If it becomes again a place of war, it will 
cost us far more than investing in a common, shared, peaceful future. 
The conflict has gone on for too long. We have a historic opportunity to 
end it. If the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians--ultimately, 
the Syrians and the Lebanese--if they all are willing to do their part, 
we must do ours, and we ought to begin by keeping our word to fund the 
Wye River peace process.
    We also have an opportunity, believe it or not, to move beyond a 
series of cruel conflicts in Africa. In the last 3 weeks, in efforts led 
not by the United States, although we supported them, but by the African 
countries themselves, we have seen signs for hope in the resolution of 
devastating conflicts, especially in the war between Ethiopia and 
Eritrea, which has claimed more than 70,000 lives already. We have seen 
the most populous country in Africa, Nigeria, hold a democratic election 
and bring to an end 15 years of misrule. All this is very good news. It 
means that the largest untapped market for our products in the world, a 
continent of over 700 million people, that provides nearly as much oil 
to us as we get from the Middle East, will now have a chance to develop 
in freedom and peace and shared prosperity with us and other freedom-
loving people.
    Now, the African countries don't want the United States to solve 
their problems or to deploy our military. All they've asked us to do, at 
a small cost, is to support their efforts to resolve conflicts on their 
own, to keep the peace, to build better lives for their people, and to 
develop competent militaries. These efforts don't make a lot of 
headlines. I'll bet most of you don't know much about them. That's good, 
because the point is to avoid headlines, headlines about famine and 
refugee crisis and genocide, and to replace them, instead, with stories 
of partnership and shared prosperity. These are the stories we can write 
now, again, if Congress will invest only a tiny portion of what we spend 
on defense on avoiding war in the first place.
    Finally, there is the question of the United Nations. One of the 
great legacies of our victory in World War II is an institution where 
nations seek to resolve differences with words instead of weapons. 
Paying our dues to that organization is a legal and a moral 
responsibility. It ought to be reason enough to do so. If we fail to do 
so soon, the United States will actually lose its vote in the General 
Assembly.
    But obligation is not the only reason for doing this, so is 
opportunity. The U.N. helps us to mobilize the support of other nations 
for goals Americans cherish, from keeping the peace to immunizing 
children, to caring for refugees, to combating the spread of deadly 
weapons. We've been working with growing success to make sure that the 
U.N. operates better, at lower cost.
    But we have to do our part. Unless we want America to pay all the 
costs and take all the risks to solve the world's big problems, we have 
to work with others, and that means paying our fair share of dues, like 
every other country does, to the United Nations.
    The bottom line is this: Today we have a unique opportunity and a 
real responsibility to advance the values in the world won in the 20th 
century over the last 100 years by America's veterans. But if we have 
only one arrow in our quiver, our military, we sacrifice the work of 
peace and increase the risk of war. We have to do our part to keep the 
world on a stable path toward democracy,

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the democracy that every single one of you put your lives on the line to 
defend.
    That's how President Truman felt. Fifty years ago this week he spoke 
to you at the VFW's Golden Jubilee Convention. Listen to what he said, 
and you can feel it here, because we're not very far from his hometown. 
Harry Truman said, ``Peace with freedom and justice cannot be bought 
cheaply. It can only be assured by the combined efforts of the 
multitudes of people throughout the world who want a secure peace. We 
must keep them our friends if the world is to be a decent place for our 
children and their grandchildren to live.'' Harry Truman was a pretty 
smart fellow.
    Just 2 months ago I visited a refugee camp full of Kosovar Albanians 
in Macedonia. I wish every one of you could have been there. As I walked 
through the camp, these young children started chanting spontaneously,
``U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.,'' thanking Americans for giving them a chance 
to reclaim their lives in their native land. They've all gone home now, 
by the way, over 90 percent of the refugees from Kosovo are home.
    But it reminded me of my trip to Normandy for the 50th anniversary 
of D-day, in 1994. In Normandy, we all heard stories, from our veterans, 
of French citizens who came up to them, took their hands, and told them 
that they were very young, 50 years ago, but they would always remember 
what Americans did for them and what it meant to them. I hope that in 50 
years, some of our veterans from the conflict in Kosovo will go back 
there, and the children from that refugee camp, who will then be in 
their middle years, will take their hands and say, ``50 years ago I was 
chanting, `U.S.A., U.S.A.,' with my voice, but I still chant with my 
heart.'' We are very grateful to you, all of you.
    So on this centennial anniversary, on behalf of a grateful nation 
and grateful people throughout the world, I say to every soldier, 
sailor, airman, marine, and coastguardsman, to every man and woman who 
fought bravely for our Nation and brought dignity to the world, thank 
you for a job well done. May we look forward to a century in which all 
your sacrifice and all your service is honored and redeemed with the 
greatest peace and prosperity the world has ever known.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:15 a.m. in
Hall E at the H. Roe Bartle Convention Center. In his remarks, he 
referred to Thomas A. Pouliot, commander in chief, Veterans of Foreign 
Wars of the United States; and former Secretary of Veterans Affairs 
Jesse Brown.