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“WHAT IS GOING RIGHT WITH YOUNG PEOPLE OF AMERICA” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3072-H3079 on May 12, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WHAT IS GOING RIGHT WITH YOUNG PEOPLE OF AMERICA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. McInnis. Mr. Speaker, this evening I would like to address two different areas.
The first area I would like to talk a little bit about is, I have been back to my district, which is the State of Colorado. I go back to my district every weekend. But, obviously, with the tragic situation that took place there a couple weeks ago, that is a large topic of discussion; and, of course, it should be. So this evening I would like to talk a little bit about our young people, our young men and women, of that generation, that age group, the situation out there in Colorado.
Then I would like to shift focus and cover a second area that I think should be of keen interest to all of us, an area in which we have a lot of interest right now, whether by choice or not, we do have a lot of interest, and that is in Kosovo, and talk in some detail about what do we do now in Kosovo.
Let me say that, in regards to the situation at the Columbine High School in Colorado and parents and teenagers and adult relationships with their children, there are a few areas that I would like to cover.
First of all, I want to stress about what is going right. Obviously, what has gone wrong has been the front news story in all of our national newspapers and our national publications and our topics of discussions; and sometimes we seem to focus a little more on what is going wrong than what is going right. So I want to talk a little bit about that this evening.
I want to move from that to talk about the TV shows, Jenny Jones, some of these other people in the talk shows. I will move from that to talk a little on moments of silence in schools. We will talk a little about video violence. We will talk a little bit about what the responsibilities are of Hollywood, of the Internet and, finally, what the responsibility should be of our law enforcement and, of course, things like gun shows and so on.
Let me, first of all, start out with, and I think it is very important that I precede the extent of my comments with what is going right with these young people.
I have for years since I have been in the United States Congress had the privilege of going to a variety of schools throughout my district. Now, my colleagues have got to picture the Third Congressional District. It is a very interesting district in the State of Colorado.
First of all, geographically, it is larger than the State of Florida. Second of all, there are lots of economic diversity within that congressional district. For example, some of the wealthiest communities in the United States are in the congressional district that I represent, Aspen, Colorado; Vail, Colorado; Beaver Creek, Steamboat, Telluride, Durango, Crested Butte, a number of communities like that that have a great deal of wealth.
But at the same time, down in the southern part of the district that I represent, we have the poorest area of the State of Colorado: the San Luis Valley community, San Luis Castilla, Conejos, and so on. So there is a lot of diversity.
But I teach in schools regardless of the economic diversity. I teach in schools throughout the district. And I wanted to relate to my colleagues a few of the things that I find when I go out there and talk to these young people and listen to these young people and visit with these young people.
Let me say this, and I want to make it very, very clear: Despite what has happened in the last couple of weeks, we all should remember that, with this generation, these young men and women, that there is a lot more going right with that generation than there is going wrong.
This situation that we had in Colorado is much like a horrible plane crash. The morning after, we get up; and we are suspicious of all airplanes; we are suspicious of the industry. And the same thing happens here, and we focus on the disaster that took place.
Clearly, it is appropriate that we focus on that so we can hope to avoid that in the future. But do not let it darken the cloud about how many good kids we have out there, good young men and women, and good parents, by the way.
It is amazing when I go to these classes, class after class after class, they are not a bunch of rotten kids out there. Sure, we came up with a couple rotten apples down there at Columbine. They did a horrible thing. These are bad kids. And I am not one of these people reluctant to say that these two young men that shot and murdered all those people were bad kids.
But, in my opinion, that is not reflective of that generation. That generation has some of the brightest and most capable individuals of any generation this country has ever had. There is a lot that we can look forward to in this country. There is a lot that that generation can look forward to with our country.
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First of all, obviously the United States of America has more freedoms than any other country in the world. We have more to offer this generation than any other country has to offer their similar generations. We also have a lot of other things going. We do have the strongest educational system in the world in this country.
I have had the privilege and the good fortune to travel the world throughout my years in political office and so on, and I can tell you that having been in contact with the leaders, what you would call in some countries the upper echelon of those particular countries, it is interesting that these families who can pretty well choose to send their children anywhere in the world they would like to send them, when it comes to education, a lot of them send their kids, their young people, to this country for their education.
In fact, when it comes to health issues, if one of their young people or anybody in their family gets sick, they send them to the United States for their health care, because this country has some of the best health care if not the best health care throughout the entire world. This country does more for its young people than any other country in the world in my opinion.
Now, that is not to discount at all, it is not to discount in any regards the situation that occurred at Columbine. But it is to highlight, in fact, what is going right with these young men and women. I have now been in Congress long enough to have one of the highlights of any congressional person's service in the United States Congress, and that is to witness and get to see some of the young people that you have nominated to go to our service academies, the Air Force Academy, West Point, the Naval Academy, the Merchant Marine Academy, to watch these young people graduate. I have been in Congress 7 years, so I have now gotten to see some of these young people graduate. Every year I get involved in the nomination process of this generation that is applying to go to our military academies. It is amazing to me, because every year it appears to me that these young people are brighter and more capable than even just the year before, and the year before was the cream of the crop. You have got a lot to be proud of with this generation.
Let me talk about parents for a minute. I have talked about how fortunate I think we are in this country to have this young generation. I have lots of confidence in them. And I think that the reflection of this last 2 weeks is unfortunate because I think by far, by far that generation of young men and women, the same generation that lost their lives in Littleton and those people, they have got so much to offer and contribute to this country, but as I said, I want to talk about parents for a minute. I do not think that we need to go on an apology mission. There are a lot of good parents in this country. There are a lot of parents who have done a good job, have done a terrific job, have shown a lot of love, have shared a lot of time, have been very proud of their children. There are a lot of good parents in this country. There are a lot of good parents at the Columbine High School. There are a lot of good parents at any school in this country.
I have seen some talk shows and some news articles and some people talking about how parents do not care about their children anymore and about this disaster in Colorado is a result of parents not paying enough attention to their children and parents dropping the ball. In some cases that might be true. I guess in every generation in the history of the world we will find parents who did not give appropriate attention to their children. But our focus cannot be entirely on that and we should not beat ourselves on our back because some parents drop the ball. Clearly we want to figure out how we can improve that. How can we take parents who are not close to their children, who are not spending the appropriate time with their children, how can we bring them closer and mold that together, how can we stress the importance of that?
This evening a previous speaker talked about the importance of single parenthood, about the problems that it has caused, about the importance of stressing to our young people that single parenthood is not the way to go. So we can figure out ways to bring that together. But at the same time I am standing here tonight to thank my colleagues here and to thank parents throughout this country and to commend you.
A lot of you are good parents. In fact, probably a lot of you have been able to spend more time with your children than maybe your parents or grandparents were able to spend with you. We have made a lot of progress. I do not want that progress to be hidden by this horrific tragedy that we had in Colorado.
I would like to mention a couple of other facts that I think are important. Last year in this country about 2,300,000 young people graduated from our high schools. Between 1979 and 1997, here are a few statistics that we can be darn proud of. As parents, as educators, as lawmakers, as citizens, we can be proud of these statistics. The percentage of students completing high school, getting their high school degree went up from 78 percent to 87 percent, a 10 percent jump. Remember, you are at the very high end of the scale. So that 10 percent is a huge jump. It is not like you are way down here and you jump 10 percent. It is you are up here and you jump that final 10 percent. Actually the final 22 percent that remained that were not getting high school diplomas, we cut that in half. In this period of time, we took half of the students that were not getting their high school degrees and were not completing high school, we have gotten them now to go through high school, to get that high school degree.
The percentage of high school graduates with some college, that went up almost 20 percentage points, from 44 to 65 percent. You can be proud of that. That is a good statistic. That means something. That means these young people are getting the opportunity to go on to college. The percentage of high school students who got 4 or more years in college, that rose 10 percent, from 22 percent to 32 percent. These are good jumps. These are fairly dramatic jumps. And in 1996, 50 percent of the students in grades 6 through 12, half of the students out there in junior high and high school participated in community service. I think in the last few years, to a large extent and in many different ways, our communities have been strengthened.
Now, remember the dynamics have changed in the last 25 to 30 or 40 years. We do have more families where both parents have to work outside the home, driven by economic necessity, some driven by choice. We have different factors. Instead of having one TV per home, we have several TVs. We used to be critical of watching too much TV. Now we are not even watching TV as a family because there are two or three different TVs in the house. Those kind of dynamics have changed. But on the whole take a look at the positive aspects. The positive aspects are, parents, there are a lot of you out there that ought to be very proud of the mission that you have accomplished. For that generation, that young generation in high school right now and the one behind them and the ones that have just graduated, I want you to know, we are darn proud of you.
By far, as I said earlier, most of you are going to go on and you are going to make something of yourselves. Most of you have the dedication and the focus to know that there is personal responsibility, there is discipline and that if you exercise a little knowledge and you exercise a little energy, you are going to find out that in this country, it is not so bad. There are a lot of great things that you can do.
Let me move on to a couple of areas where I think we do need to focus a little more, where society needs to say, all right, we acknowledge what the Congressman says, we acknowledge that a lot of things are going right. But let us focus on that little part of it where things are going wrong. There are some areas in our society where we can accept more responsibility or those parts of our society can accept more responsibility?
I am not a plaintiff's lawyer. I do not get too excited about plaintiff's lawyers. I think in fact our society, there is a statement I saw the other day where in Japan they have this many lawyers and this many engineers. In our country it is just the reverse. We have this many lawyers and this many engineers. But I was pleased last week to see a case handed down by a jury where they awarded $25 million in damages against the talk show, the TV by ambush Jenny Jones. That show is simply entertainment by humiliation and that is exactly what the lawsuit was about. Do you have the right to entertain to the extent that it could cause physical harm by humiliation? Is that what entertainment is about? Have the talk shows gotten out of hand? Well, Jenny Jones did.
What was interesting to me is I read some newspaper articles about this that said it puts a chilling effect out there on the first amendment. Number one, it does not take away the rights of the first amendment. But sometimes society needs to speak out and sometimes society says, we need to douse this with a little cold water. We need to put a chilling effect on this. Should we have TV talk shows based on humiliation? Should we have TV based on ambush? What does it do to a society? So as you hear and as you read in the periodicals, the weekly periodicals that will come out next week, take a look at what happened in the Jenny Jones case and see if you do not feel pretty comfortable with the way our courts are going in some regards.
Some courts get a little out of line. We had a court this week that awarded $581 million in punitive damages for a satellite worth $1800, a satellite disc that was sold to somebody. I am not talking about the extremes. I do not want to talk about the extremes. But I do want to talk about situations like the Jenny Jones. I think society, and I think in the light if there is anything that could come out of the Columbine school situation that might be good is, one, I think we will spend even more time with our children and that cannot hurt things, but I think society as a whole is also going to look at things like the Jenny Jones talk show.
I think they are going to take a look at the Internet. I think they are going to take a look at Hollywood, and I think they are going to take a look at gun shows and laws that are being broken. Let me for a moment talk about something that I cannot figure out. It has confused me. I have studied history. I have been around the bend a couple of times. I cannot figure out for the life of me why we have such a strict prohibition against moments of silence in our schools. Do you know that in our schools you can go into the hallway of a school, you can do what Jenny Jones did, you can tease other students, you can talk about Hitler, you can do a lot of things that I would say are on the verge of misconduct, and you can get away with it under freedom of speech or other issues. But the minute you pull out a Bible, the minute you hold another one of your student's hands and say a prayer on school property, boy, does everything come loose. And I think we have got to take a look at that.
I am not a religious zealot. I am not a part of any kind of organization that is advocating, a one issue person that is thinking about prayer in school or things like that. But I do think that our society has to say, have we come too far in prohibiting even moments of silence between two students? If the students want to get together on the football field and hold their hands and say a prayer in common, what is wrong with that? What do we accomplish by trying to break up the one peaceful and loving situation that may have been the only one that occurred that day between a group that large?
I will give you an idea of the extremes. We have got a case in New York City, we have a schoolteacher there. One of the students in the class drowned, that morning had drowned. Tragic, tragic death. Needless to say, the deceased students, the deceased person's fellow students were all beside themselves. They were horrified, they were crying, they were sad, depressed, and their schoolteacher got them all together in the classroom and said, let's say a prayer for Annie or whatever the small child's name was that drowned. So they said a prayer. The teacher did not lead them in prayer. They said let's just get together and hold hands, let's give some thought in prayer. You pick your own prayer, but let's say something. And what happened? They fired the teacher. One of the quotes was, look, we pay this teacher to teach, not preach.
Come on. One factor that would help our society as much as anything that I can think of is a little common sense, a little common sense in your gut right here. What does common sense tell you about that kind of situation? Should you fire the teacher that allows the students to hold hands and have a moment of silence when they have just lost one of their fellow students in a tragic accident? Is that so appalling to our society that we should fire the teacher? Is it so appalling to our society, is it so counter to common sense that we should go to a baccalaureate ceremony or we should go into the hallways of a school or we should go onto the sports field and say to the student athletes who voluntarily hold hands and have their own moment of silence that they cannot do that, that it is somehow a prohibition against the freedom, or separation between church and state? That is something we ought to assess. That is something we ought to think about. Have we gone too far?
There are other areas we ought to think about. I think Columbine demonstrates it, the Columbine disaster. Let us take a serious look at Hollywood. There were two tremendous individuals last year, they were honest, they had lots of integrity, they were wholesome, they delivered a message to America that was really wholesome. It was down to earth.
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They were in their times some of the most popular people in the United States, and we lost them last year. They passed away. What happened to some of those days? Hollywood did not have to do what it does today. I will give my colleagues examples:
Jimmy Stewart and Gene Autry.
Jimmy Stewart; remember Jimmy Stewart? How often did Jimmy Steward have to say a four-letter word on the film? How often did Jimmy Stewart have to do some of the things that we see demonstrated, use some of the vulgar tactics, just as soon the language, to sell that movie? Jimmy Stewart did not have to do that.
And how about Gene Autry's music? How often did the lyrics of his music have to be vulgar, or talk about shooting cops or doing other things that common sense tells us, look, we do not need that; we do not need that out there for entertainment; it is not necessary.
Take a look at what these two tremendous entertainers offered to our society.
I think Hollywood has a responsibility to look out there and say:
Look, constitutionally we may be protected, constitutionally we have the right to put out something like the movie Basketball Diaries where, by the way, somebody walks into a classroom in a trench coat, shoots people with sawed-off shotguns, just like the Columbine school; constitutionally, we should fight for this, we have the right of freedom of speech to do these kind of things.
Granted, I will give it to you; let us not argue the Constitution, let us argue common sense. Let us argue what is good for this country. My colleagues do not need to test the Constitution with these movies. It is not necessary. Let us do the Jimmy Stewart kind of thing. Let us try and send a message out to America. Let us send out a good, loving message to America.
Those films I saw, my colleagues, do not need to go to that extent. I really truly believe some of these films are produced just to see how vulgar they can get, to see how horrible they can make the movie, to see whether or not it can be pushed to the edge or the boundary of the Constitution.
Well, in my opinion there are not a lot of people that want to debate us on that issue. Hollywood, but they are saying: Hollywood, give us some good movies, and you have got a lot of them, a lot of great movies out there that you have produced.
Let us take those few movies; and, by the way, I think most of the movies produced by Hollywood are good movies; and I think most of the people involved in Hollywood really would agree with me that common sense ought to dictate how close to that boundary of vulgarity and tragedy and so on we ought to make these movies. So Hollywood, I think, will also.
And I think we will also reassess, and I think a lot of the reassessment will be self-reassessment. I do not think the government is going to need to come down on Hollywood. I think there are enough professionals in Hollywood, enough family people in Hollywood, enough people that know the difference between right and wrong in Hollywood, enough people that can accept personal responsibility in Hollywood. I think they are going to self-enforce. I think we are going to see the movies like The Basketball Diaries and some of these songs that have been put out by the music industry, I think we are going to find they are in disfavor.
It was interesting the other day. I saw that the poll numbers, or the rating numbers I guess is the appropriate way to describe it, on these talk shows are dropping. People are going to be getting to realize that common sense tells us it is not the way to go in the future, it is not what we need to do to a movie, it is not what we need to do to music to sell it. In other words, they can have good, heart-filled music or a movie with a good theme to it, and it is going to sell.
Let us talk about the Internet. That is a whole new responsibility, and there is a lot of responsibility on the Internet that falls on the individuals who use the Internet. Those of us who use the Internet should not patronize those Internet web sites that do things like tell people how to make bombs.
In fact, every time one of us who uses the Internet spots a web site that is offensive in its nature or does something like tell us how to make a bomb or how to machine gun somebody or how to make a legal weapon illegal, we ought to complain about it. My colleagues and I have a responsibility to write or to contact the provider of those Internet services and say: Here is a web site we object to. This web site should not be on your service. Do something about it.
We ought to boycott some of those things. We boycott it simply by a letter of one. Even one letter sometimes makes the difference. And I can say to the providers of Internet services out there: You, too, as a provider, you, too, have a responsibility, a personal responsibility, a professional responsibility to take off your Internet services web sites that might provide people with information of how to make bombs or web sites that have some kind of fantasy involved in killing people and so on and so forth.
Granted, like with the movies, like with music, they have a constitutional right, perhaps freedom of speech, to put this on the provider service. But I do not think they need to do it. We do not need to do it.
My colleagues think that bomb site on the web service that these two young murderers out there at the Columbine school, my colleagues think those two young murderers, think that web site to make a bomb was necessary for the profit for that Internet provider? My colleagues think it was necessary for that Internet provider to grow, for that Internet provider to become more popular, that that bomb site be put on there? No, it was not. It is not. Common sense tells us that. And the Internet providers, a lot of them do exercise common sense, but it is going to take more self- enforcement within their own industry.
So the Internet cannot escape this either.
I do want to mention, because I am a strong, and I know this is controversial out there, I am a strong believer in the second amendment. I am a strong believer in the right to possess firearms. But I also believe that there are a lot of people out there or some people out there who are not exercising responsibility, and as a result they are putting a very dark cloud over those of us who enjoy the right to bear arms, who enjoy hunting, who enjoy the right to protect ourselves.
And let me say I just saw in the news today, they showed some people at a gun show, some gun show here in the country where they went in and they broke up the gun show, and they found some illegal weapons. The portrayal of that gun show, frankly, was that anybody that is at a gun show is there illegally, that all they do at these gun shows are sell illegal weapons. That is unfortunate. What they should have said, made it very clear, the people that were at that gun show who were selling these weapons illegally should not have been there, they were breaking the law, and they should have arrested them immediately.
I think I advocate the position of a lot of people who believe in these rights, and that is if one has got somebody breaking the law, prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. We do not want people out there breaking those laws. We do not want people like these young murderers at Columbine walking around with sawed-off shotguns. We do not want them making bombs. We do not want them breaking the laws. If we got somebody breaking the law, let us go after it.
On the other hand, let us respect the rights of the people who obey the laws. Let us not penalize the possession, let us penalize the misuse. And let us do not automatically say that the misuse equates to simple possession.
But I think that we are going to have, maybe we will have an opportunity to close some loopholes. If there are some loopholes that exist out there, I think even those in the gun business, the feeling or the protectors of the second amendment right, they also have a responsibility. If we have got a loophole, let us close it up because we want to retain a right, a constitutional right. But, once again, as I said about the Internet and Hollywood and so on, we have got to use some common sense.
But let me wrap up this subject before I move on to the next one, because I think the next one is going to be very important for all of us. Let me just summarize it by saying this.
In the last 20 minutes or so I have spoken about the tragedy in Colorado, about some of the things I think we can do as a society to help bring families closer together to help avoid these disasters. But I hope that colleagues saw that the primary focus on my comments regarding that tragedy in Colorado were to say that this should not overshadow the good things in our society that are going on, the right things that our parents are doing, the amount of involvement that parents have today in this country, the amount of involvement that parents have with their children prior to this tragedy, the fact that it is just a very, very minute percentage of these young people that went out and would go out and do what these two young murderers did.
So the focus here is remember in this country what that generation, what that young generation, those fine young men and women, that there is a lot more that goes right with that generation than there is that goes wrong, and we have a lot of reasons to be proud of that generation.
Let me shift gears. I want to spend the next or the balance of my time talking about Kosovo and the situation in Yugoslavia.
Let me start out by saying I noticed recently in a local newspaper in my district there was a letter to the editor. It was not directed at me, but it was directed to Congress, and it questioned whether or not the votes or the debate back here on the policy, it did not question. It really implied that anybody who would dare stand up and question the policy or vote on the question of whether we put ground troops in or to what extent we give the President authority to conduct whatever kind of military operations he wants to, that the simple expression of that would somehow signify a lack of support for our American ground troops.
At the very beginning of my comments, let me dash that very quickly, let me strike that down, and the easiest way to do it is to tell my colleagues that on March 24, on March 24 there was a vote, there was a resolution, and let me read the bill or the resolution.
This bill expressed support, expressed support from the House of Representatives for the members of the United States Armed Forces engaged in military operations against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This resolution was to show our support for those military troops. Do my colleagues know what that vote was? I do; 424 in favor of the resolution; one vote against it; one vote against it.
I need to make it very clear to my colleagues here that when you stand up and disagree with the policy, that should not be interpreted as a lack of support for the troops that are over there serving us so well. As indicated by this vote, 424 of us on this floor, 424 of us voted to support the troops. One person in the facility voted against it.
There is strong, unified, bipartisan support for our military troops, frankly, wherever they are in the world. We want them to have the best equipment. We want them to have the best conditions we can give them. We want them to be safe. They have a mission to carry out.
But do not let anybody put a guilt feeling on any of us because we support the troops that, therefore, we should blindly follow a policy as set forth by an administration or set forth by some other purpose. We need to question those policies. That is the checks and balances that our forefathers put into our Constitution and our originating documents in this country. We need checks and balances. We want debate on whether or not the policy is the right policy to follow especially, especially in the time of war.
I want to visit a little on Kosovo here. We are going to talk about the results, what kind of results we are getting as a result, because of this action. The refugee problem, the destruction that is going on out there, the cost to rebuild, what is our clear-cut mission? What is our national interest in this regard? And who is picking up the load?
Let me begin by pointing out something that I think is very, very important on Kosovo, this sentence:
Do not measure by intentions, measure by results.
The intentions here, the intentions, I think, were good. There were some tragedies, there were some atrocities going on over in Yugoslavia, so the intentions were good. I have not heard anybody who really questioned the intentions of going over there and trying to save some lives, but we cannot measure by intention. We have to measure by results.
What are the results? What are those results as a result of us being over there in Kosovo? In Yugoslavia? We know, for example, we have had hundreds of thousands of refugees who have now left their homes. They are in countries that are not their home country. We know that we have caused massive destruction in Kosovo as a result of NATO bombing, and we are not the only ones. Do not forget on the other side; I am not. This Milosevic is a murderer, but the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is a side we seem to have taken, was listed by our own State Department as terrorist a year ago.
This incident started about the latest flare-up over in Yugoslavia, which, by the way, is a sovereign country, but the dispute with its citizens within their own boundaries arose when some members of what is called the Kosovo Liberation Army started shooting and assassinating Serbian citizens, and then Milosevic took his troops and went in there to settle the score and started shooting innocent Kosovo people. But they are all Yugoslavian citizens.
What are the results that we have to measure by? Everyone of us in these Chambers have a responsibility and obligation to sit down and take a look at what has happened in the last 3 weeks or so of bombing and ask ourselves a couple things.
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Number one, what is the national interest? What really is the national interest that we have here? Is it a security threat to the United States of America? No, it is not. Is it an economic threat? No. Is it really truly a threat to the European continent? I say no, but if someone else says yes then why are not the Europeans carrying the biggest share of the load here?
Who is carrying the biggest share of the load? The United States of America. Who has the heaviest backpack on their back? The United States of America. Whose taxpayers are going to end up paying, in my belief, in excess of $100 billion to rebuild everything that has been bombed? The United States of America.
Whose problem is it? I think the United States of America has a problem. I think it is called a humanitarian problem. Our country was made great because we were able to go out and help people in need of assistance, and I think in this particular situation the question we ought to ask is should not the United States be focused on humanitarian aid and let the Europeans shoulder the responsibility of the military aid?
Furthermore, when we ask about the last three or four weeks, question what is the legal right. We went to war with Iraq because Iraq invaded Kuwait. We went to war because they invaded the sovereign boundaries of another country. Now NATO, for the first time in its history, has gone across the sovereign boundaries of another country to resolve a dispute by the citizens within the boundaries of that country, in other words, a civil war. We need to ask those kind of questions.
Then we need to ask the question, how do we get out of it? I will say an article that I read, and I want to recommend it, I am going to put it in the Record, this is Newsweek, May 17, so it is the most recent Newsweek. In fact, it has Star Wars on the front so it is one that probably would be pretty popular to purchase. Take a look at page 36. There is an article by a gentleman named Fareed Zakaria, I think is the correct pronunciation. The article is titled, What Do We Do Now? What Do We Do Now?
There are several things in this article. I hope everyone has an opportunity to go out and buy this. I think this article is one of the finest articles that I have read. It is bipartisan. I think it is a very fair article. It is one of the best articles I have read about the situation we now have in Yugoslavia. Go out and buy this. If not, I want to read just a couple of things.
First of all, I will start with the very last sentence, the very last sentence of the article. The author says, why should we be involved in this crisis? Why should we be involved in this crisis? Because we made it worse. That is what the author says, why should we be involved in this crisis? Because we made it worse. That sentence says a lot.
Let us visit for a minute here. Let me read this, the start of the end game, how do you start the end game? How do you get out of Yugoslavia? How are we going to resolve this thing? First of all, we risk a lot of human lives. We have diluted our military. I talked about that at some length last week. And what is the end game? The start of the end game would, however, and I am quoting from the article, bring several unpleasant questions back to the forefront.
For 7 weeks, NATO and the media have been obsessed with how the Yugoslavia war has been going, how many targets were being hit, what planes were being used and so on. Now they must ask again, why exactly we went to war, why exactly we went to war. Only if we are clear about our interests and our goals can we know whether we have achieved them. Otherwise, we have stumbled into an ill-considered war and will preside over an unworkable peace.
That is exactly on point. Until we can define exactly what our interests were, we have taken this country, the administration has taken this country, into an ill-considered war. If we reach some kind of resolution, we are about to, as this article says, preside over an unworkable peace.
We talked about ground troops. There is a lot of discussion out there about it and it is covered in this article. There is discussion about ground troops. I want to quote on the ground troops because I think that is important, too.
If only we would use ground troops, some hawks now respond, none of this would have happened and certainly the decision to go to war carelessly and in haste before amassing ground troops in Albania and Macedonia was a historic blunder. Ground troops would have proved a potent threat but even with the troops the war would have begun with days of air strikes and it would have been near impossible to invade Kosovo while hundred of thousands of refugees were swarming across its roads, bridges and mountain passes.
Those today who still advocate the use of ground troops speak of its military benefits which are real. They do not, however, mention its costs, which are political. A ground invasion would fracture NATO. Germany, Italy and Greece are strongly opposed to the use of ground troops. A majority of Italians and more than 95 percent of the Greeks are opposed to even air strikes. An invasion would probably split Germany's governing coalition. Russia and China would both actively oppose it and veto any U.N. involvement with Kosovo.
So when people talk about ground troops, think of the reality of being able to put ground troops in there. Number one, we do not have them amassed on the border. Number two is a logistical challenge and it takes a lot of time. It would take weeks, at best, months more likely, to move the kind of ground force which by the way would not be a European ground force in majority, it would be United States troops under the auspices of NATO, it would take a great deal of effort to be able to put those in location. Then we have to find a country that would allow us to stage our ground troops in that country. Albania probably would be willing to do that, one of the few countries over there that would be, but Albania is so poor they do not even have cranes at their harbor capable of taking a tank off a ship. My understanding is their airport does not even have radar.
Ground troops simply are not a feasible alternative at this point. We should have amassed the ground troops, as this article I think accurately points out, prior to the air strikes but now to amass them and move them over there would be somewhat of a real stretch for us to do that.
Even more than that, take a look at the ramifications to NATO as a whole. It would fracture NATO. It could perhaps throw the coalition government in Germany into chaos. So ground troops, for all practical purposes, are not any kind of an immediate answer to force peace.
Some people argue, and I think this article does a good job of addressing it, what about American credibility? What America has at risk in Yugoslavia is its credibility. I think this article addresses that better in two or three paragraphs, which I will quote in just a moment. I think this article does the best job of addressing that of any editorial or any type of assessment that I have read.
Let me read it and then think about the words as I talk. What about American credibility? Concerns about American reputation and resolve are serious, which is why we must end this intervention with some measure of success, but credibility is often the last refuge of bad foreign policy. When policy is no longer justifiable on its merits, people shift gears and say, well, if we do not win at all costs we will lose face. But what about the loss of face in continuing a failing mission?
A variant of credibility logic holds that dictators around the world would be emboldened if America does not win decisively. But would they?
America won a spectacular victory in the Gulf War, televised live across the globe. It did not seem to deter the Serbs, the Croats, the Somalians, the Sudanese, among others. Whether America wins or loses a particular contest, the world will keep turning, bringing forth new dictators and new crises.
Global deterrence against instability is a foolish and futile goal. It sets America up for failure. Those two paragraphs accurately address that situation, or that question, what about America's credibility?
Let me reemphasize one point that I think is important for us to consider, and that is what about our partners? If any of us had a business partnership, or even their own personal partnership which would be their marriage, we do not see a lot of successful marriages where one spouse carries out 90 percent of the obligation and the other spouse kicks in about 10 percent, and we are not going to have a successful business partnership, generally speaking, when one partner carries almost all of the load and the other partner does not, the other partner almost skates.
Why are not the Europeans carrying a fairer load? Well, some would say because the United States has the military capability to carry out the air strikes; we are the ones with the airplanes, we are the ones with the carriers, we are the ones with the technical expertise. I grant that that is probably true, but at some point this administration has to come forward and say, all right, America has done its share. Now America is going to shift from a military mission to a humanitarian mission. That is what we do pretty darn well.
We know how to take care of people. We can move a lot of supplies, medicine, food, clothing. In fact, throughout a lot of grocery stores in this country we will see boxes today asking for food contributions for the refugees, for food contributions to the people that are oppressed over in Yugoslavia. So at some point, especially as I think this thing, I hope, heads towards some type of resolution, America needs to step forward and say to our European partners, hey, you are good partners and you are going to have to carry your fair share and your fair share starts today. America shifts from military to humanitarian aid and the Europeans shift from minimal involvement to oversight of the resolution of this and carrying forth the military mission from that point forward.
In my opinion, it should be a European force that goes into Kosovo to enforce any kind of peace accord that is made.
Let me stress once again, because I think it is so excellent, for those and for our students out there, for our college students, anybody really that wants to learn or is learning all they can about the situation in Yugoslavia, pick up this week's Newsweek. Again, it is the May 17. It is an easy one to figure out. It has Star Wars on the front, and take a look at that article in there about what we are doing in Yugoslavia. I think it addresses the situation very well.
Let me talk about a couple of other issues that I think are important for us to consider in Yugoslavia, and that is I want people out there to understand that we have not entered into a fight between a good guy and a bad guy. We have entered into a domestic dispute contained within the boundaries of a sovereign country, and if we study the history of what has gone on here, and history is so, so important for us because it reflects a very accurate picture of what we are really facing over in Yugoslavia, what we are facing over there, in my opinion, from the leadership point of view, not from the people, not from the average citizen, the average citizen over there on both sides of this battle are innocent citizens, but the leadership and their military hierarchies and the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Yugoslavia Army under Milosevic, both of those characters, I mean, in my opinion, they are criminals.
In our country, as I said earlier in my comments, last year alone for the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is the ones that we are now talking about arming, which are the ones we are giving shield and food to and we are allowing supplies to go to them, we listed them as terrorists a year ago. What we are beginning to see in this country is a spin. Instead of being labeled as terrorists, as I think the Milosevic people are as well, they are now starting to call the Kosovo Liberation Army freedom fighters, or rebels. We are beginning to see this evolution here in our country.
The same thing is going to happen, I think, once this thing heads towards a peaceful resolution, which I hope it does in the not too distant future. We are going to see the same thing happening as far as trying to commit the United States to rebuild all the destruction that has taken place over in Yugoslavia, some of which we caused, a good deal of which we caused, through NATO bombing.
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Remember that prior to the NATO bombing, there were about 40,000 refugees in Albania and Macedonia and the surrounding countries. Today there are hundreds of thousands. Their economy was not a great economy, but they had an economy before NATO began its action.
Today there is no economy. It will require a massive commitment from somebody in this world to take those refugees back to rebuild their economy, rebuild their bridges, rebuild their roads, rebuild their buildings, put drinking water back in, heating facilities back in place.
What we have to be careful of is that the spin does not end up on the backs of the American taxpayers. I am afraid it will. That is why my prediction is that the American taxpayers will pay over $100 billion by the time this is all over.
I know here in Congress in the last couple of weeks we have been debating among ourselves whether we should do a $6 billion supplemental or a $13 billion supplemental. I am advising my colleagues, in my opinion, and I have some background in this area, in my opinion the $13 billion, which is the higher of the two figures that we debated, is simply a down payment, is simply a down payment that the taxpayers of this country will end up, as I just mentioned, paying somewhere close to $100 billion.
We also need to talk about the continuing test. I think as elected officials in this country, every day we are involved in this military action we need to ask ourselves if the national interest of this country, as elected officials, can provide us with the justification to look at a set of parents whose child, young child, young man or woman, are serving in the military forces, or the spouses of some man or woman that is serving in our military forces, if our national interest gives us the justification to look these people right in the eye and say, the loss of your son or your daughter or your spouse's life was necessary for the best interests of this country.
The day that Members do not think they can look them right in the eye and meet the standards of that test is the day that Members ought to stand with me at this podium and say, Mr. President, Mr. NATO, we need to bring this thing to a close. We need to find a resolution. We need to do it as quickly as we can.
Unfortunately, this mission was begun, I think, with not the kind of preparation, not with the kind of anticipation, not the kind of planning that was necessary. But it is time to bring it to a closure if we can do it. It is time for the United States to say to its partners, you, too, have a responsibility. You, too, are going to have to carry your fair load.
Let me wrap this up and summarize it by reminding all of my colleagues here on the House floor, when we talk about Yugoslavia or when we talk about any action that we take, we cannot measure by our intentions. Do not measure by intentions. It is kind of like Federal programs. We see a lot of Federal programs that have become boondoggles in our system back here, in our government. They all started out or almost all of them started out with good intentions.
But we do not measure those programs by the good intentions. We cannot. We need to measure them by the results. That is what we ought to be doing in Yugoslavia. Let us measure by the results. What are the results we have today of 4 weeks of bombing, of human lives being expended, of bombing the Chinese embassy and creating an international flak, pulling Russia and China even more into this very complicated web? What are the results we should be measuring, and what do those measurements tell us, and do those measurements support the continuation of this type of policy, or should NATO come to some kind of resolution that can give us the kind of results we feel comfortable with when we read the measurements?
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article from the May 17, 1999, issue of Newsweek.
The article referred to is as follows:
What Do We Do Now?
(By Fareed Zakaria)
NATO was having a bad day. Friday morning a stray cluster bomb hit a hospital and market in the southern Yugoslav city of Nis. Serb officials said 15 civilians had died. Then, just before midnight, three bombs slammed into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing four and wounding at least 20 others. As smoke poured out of the embassy, Zelijko Raznjatovic, the indicted war criminal known as Arkan, bounded in front of the TV cameras assembled at the embassy. The Hotel Jugoslavia, which sits about 300 yards away from the embassy, is said to house his infamous paramilitary henchmen, the Tigers. The hotel was also hit, but an outraged Arkan told reporters,
``Luckily we didn't have any casualties.''
The alliance of nations fighting Slobodan Milosevic could use some of that luck. In the hours that followed the embassy attack, NATO officials confessed that it had mistakenly targeted the building and scored a direct hit. Newsweek has learned that targeters believed the embassy building was the Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, an arms-trading company known by the initials SDPR. The SDPR, part of the military-industrial complex the bombing campaign has been seeking to destroy, is about 250 yards from the Chinese Embassy.
Friday's accidents are tragic reminders of the hollowness of NATO's policy in Yugoslavia--its desire to wage a war whose cardinal strategic objective is the safety of its own pilots. From the start of this campaign, Western leaders have hoped that they could get the benefits of war without its costs. They have delighted in standing tall, speaking in Churchillian tones and issuing demands to Milosevic. But leaving aside ground troops, they have been reluctant even to order the military to fly low, risky missions against Serb forces in Kosovo. This combination of lofty goals and puny means will have to change to bring a decent end to our Balkan misadventure. At last week's meeting of G-8 foreign ministers, the yawning gap between NATO's rhetoric and reality began inching smaller. Western leaders stopped insisting that after the war Kosovo could be policed only by NATO forces and agreed to an international ``civil and military presence,'' involving Russia, neutral countries and the United Nations. (The latter will be possible only with Chinese support.) At the same time, NATO is waging a more intense bombing campaign--Friday's raids were the heaviest so far.
The start of an endgame would, however, bring several unpleasant questions back to the fore. For seven weeks NATO and the media have been obsessed with how the Yugosla war has been going--how many targets were being hit, what planes were being used and so on. Now they must ask again why exactly we went to war. Only if we are clear about our interests and goals can be know whether we have achieved them. Otherwise, having stumbled into an ill-considered war, we will preside over an unworkable peace.
The debate over whether America has interests in the Balkans is now somewhat irrelevant. Our commitments have created interests, even though in foreign policy it should usually be the other way around. We have two sets of concerns relating to Kosovo, humanitarian and strategic. Sadly, in both our goals will end up being to undo the consequences of the war. The humanitarian goal is to reverse the flow of refugees out of Kosovo. The strategic goal is to stabilize the region--particularly Macedonia and Albania--which is straining under the weight of the refugees and the war.
NATO began bombing, let us remember, not for the refugees but to get Yugoslavia to sign the Rambouillet accords. And once the war began, several Western leaders, most prominently Britain's Tony Blair, suggested that their war aims had expanded to include Milosevic's head. Milosevic has been strengthened at home and even abroad, where most countries see him as the victim of an arbitrary exercise of Western power. The Rambouillet accords are dead. The Kosovo Liberation Army announced last Friday that it rejects them because they do not provide for an independent state. For their part, the Serbs are unlikely to agree to a referendum on independence in three years, and NATO is no longer even demanding that they do so. The requirement that NATO disarm the KLA seems increasingly farfetched. Providing Kosovars with some protection and autonomy is now the best NATO can hope for.
The Clinton administration's overriding objective is to stop the exodus of refugees and have them return to Kosovo in safety. This does not figure in any of the original statements on the war, and for a simple reason. There was no refugee exodus until the bombings began. NATO angrily denies the connection, but the facts are clear. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there were 45,000 Kosovars in Albania and Macedonia the week before the bombing. Today they number about 640,000.
As the Serbian sweep through Kosovo began and tens of thousands of refugees poured into Albania and Macedoma, Secretary of Defense William Cohen asserted, ``We are not surprised,'' making one wonder why NATO was so utterly unprepared for something it had expected. In fact, a high-ranking administration official admits frankly, ``Anyone who says that we expected the kinds of refugee flows that we saw is smoking something.
What Milosevic planned was a campaign called Operation Horseshoe. It was to be a larger version of a brutal offensive in 1998 that attacked and destroyed KLA strongholds and killed, terrorized and expelled civilians in areas that supported the group. Most Western observers--including the CIA and the United Nations--estimated that this ugly action would result in an outflow of a maximum of 100,000 refugees abroad.
The decision to wage an air war against Milosevic involved a fateful preliminary move. The 1,375 international observers posted in Kosovo had to abandon the province, as did all Western journalists and diplomats. Brussels and Washington may not have recognized what this meant, but people on the ground did. As one Kosovar said to a departing British journalist: ``From now on it's going to be a catastrophe for us, because the [observers] have gone.''
The human tragedy that resulted should teach a sobering lesson to all those who goaded the administration to stop planning and start bombing, who urge that force be used as a first resort in such crises and who want military might used as an expression of moral outrage. Being righteous, it turns out, does not absolve one of the need to set clear and attainable political goals, relate your means to them and make backup plans. The philosopher Max Weber once noted that a statesman is judged not by his intentions but by the consequences of his actions. It is well and good to clamor for a blood-and-guts foreign policy, but until now it has been Western guts and Kosovar blood.
If only we would use ground troops, some hawks now respond, none of this would have happened. And certainly the decision to go to war carelessly and in haste, before massing ground troops in Albania and Macedonia, was a historic blunder. Ground troops would have proved a potent threat. But even with troops, the war would have begun with days of airstrikes. And it would have been near impossible to invade Kosovo while hundreds of thousands of refugees were swarming across its roads, bridges and mountain paths.
Those who still advocate the use of ground troops today speak of its military benefits, which are real. They do not, however, mention its costs, which are political. A ground invasion would fracture NATO. Germany, Italy and Greece are strongly opposed to the use of ground troops. A majority of Italians and more than 95 percent of Greeks are opposed even to the airstrikes. An invasion would probably split Germany's governing coalition. Russia and China would both actively oppose it and veto any U.N. involvement with Kosovo.
These are staggering obstacles, and not because Washington should pander to Chinese or Russian prerogatives. The eventual settlement in Kosovo--even after an invasion--will have to be a political one, involving Yugoslavia, its neighbors and other major powers. (Remember the strategic goal was to bring stability to the region.) It will be a more durable, lasting settlement if it is not a unilateral American fiat. Even in the gulf war, even in World War II, the endgame was as much political as it was military.
Of course, Washington could just go ahead and do whatever it wanted. It is certainly powerful enough. But it would mean not just as American invasion of Yugoslavia itself, but also its occupation--it used to be called colonialism. The problem, of course, is that as America gets sucked deeper and deeper into the Balkans, one has to ask, is it worth it? Even if we have ``self-created'' interests in the Balkans, are they of a magnitude to justify a full-scale war, massive reconstruction and perpetual peacekeeping? Sen. John McCain urges that we fight the war ``as if everything were at stake.'' But everything is not at stake. One cannot simply manufacture a national emergency. For seven weeks now the war has been going badly, during which time the stock market has hit record highs, a powerful indication that most Americans do not connect even a faltering war in the Balkans with their security. (By contrast, markets everywhere reeled last July when Russia announced merely that it was defaulting on its debts.)
What about American credibility? Concerns about America's reputation and resolve are serious--which is why we must end this intervention with some measure of success. But credibility is often the last refuge of bad foreign policy. When policy is no longer justifiable on its merits, people shift gears and say, well, if we don't win at all costs we will lose face. But what about the loss of face in continuing a failing mission? A variant of the credibility logic holds that dictators around the world will be emboldened if America does not win decisively. But would they? America won a spectacular victory in the gulf war, televised live across the globe. It didn't seem to deter the Serbs, the Croats, the Somalis, the Sudanese, the Azerbaijanis, among others. Whether America wins or loses a particular contest, the world will keep turning, bringing forth new dictators and new crises. Global deterrence against instability is a foolish and futile goal. It sets America up for failure.
In the weeks ahead, despite the Chinese disaster, NATO must intensify the air war--and hit tanks and troops. It must also intensify its negotiations. The careful use of diplomacy might well resolve what the careless use of force has not.
(If the Senate acts speedily on his nomination as U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke's considerable skills could prove invaluable.) During this intervention, many have made analogies to the Vietnam War. Some are more appropriate than others. What is most relevant, however, is not how we entered that war but rather how we left it. After four presidents had made commitments to the people of South Vietnam, in 1973 Washington abruptly abandoned them to a terrible fate. This time let us be clear; our obligations now are not to vague notions of credibility and deterrence. We have a specific commitment to the people of Kosovo to negotiate a decent settlement for them and help rebuild their country. Western nations will have to provide assistance to the southern Balkans as a whole (minus Serbia for now). America having paid for most of the war, Europe should pay for most of the peace, but it must happen in any case. It is not a commitment that requires that we send in ground troops or pay any price, but it is one we cannot walk away from. There is an answer to the legitimate question: why should we be involved in this crisis? Because we made it worse.
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