BosNet Document:Senator Lugar on the McCain Motion Part 1
Steve Albert
B o s N e t -May 5, 1999
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Editor's Note; The following is a speech by Senator Richard Lugar in favor
of the McCain Motion authorising the President to use all necessary means
to acheive NATO's objectives in the war against Milosevic. The Republican
and Democratic leaderships, as well the President ,worked to have the
motion tabled The Senate voted 88-22 to table it.
The vote allowed the Senate to make no statement whatsoever on the ongoing
war. In the following speech, Senator Lugar argues that the United States
is fighting a just war to reverse the effects of Milosevic's genocidal
campaign against the people of Kosova.He maintained that this is America's
war,not President Clinton's- a war it can't afford to lose:
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DEPLOYMENT OF U.S. ARMED FORCES TO THE KOSOVO REGION IN YUGOSLAVIA (Senate -
May 03, 1999)
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Mr. LUGAR. Madam President, I thank the distinguished sponsor of this
legislation, Senator McCain, for yielding to me. I congratulate him on the
resolution. I will advocate that the Senate should affirm the McCain
resolution. Certainly, we should not table the resolution.
Madam President, a week after the war began, I wrote in the Washington Post:
We are losing the war in Kosovo. President Slobodan Milosevic and his
Serbian Armed Forces are killing Kosovar political leaders, expelling
Kosovars from their homes, and causing a flow of refugees into countries
with few resources to care for them. The United States and NATO have the
capacity to reverse this situation, but this will require presidential
leadership and a commitment to taking the hard steps necessary to win.
I wrote, additionally, in the same column:
President Clinton still has the chance, as our Commander in Chief, to
produce victory, even if what he advocated was based on a hopelessly
incomplete vision of the end game and a dubious strategy to reach even
severely limited aims.
Madam President, I wrote that on April 1--a month ago--and the situation is
identical to that which I described then. We have an opportunity to win the
war. We have an opportunity to come to the limited objective the President
has listed, but this will require very, very substantial Presidential
leadership, hard decisions on the part of our President, and support of
those decisions by the American people, as represented by this Congress.
I come today not to argue procedure. I regret, as others do, that we are in
a predicament of a 4-hour debate, and a tabling motion was announced in the
national press. The leadership of both parties will advocate tabling and
disposing of this resolution, thus ending the chapter until, presumably, a
more appropriate time to discuss Kosovo. But I come not to lament that fact.
It is part of our circumstances, and we shall have the vote in due course
and I will vote `no' on the motion to table.
I come today not to argue whether we should specifically authorize the
President to use air power, as they have done in the House by a 213-213
vote, to temporize on that issue, not on the issue of ground forces, nor
whether we have to be consulted before there are ground forces, or any other
forces.
We are presently talking about a situation in which the President has set
forth some very limited objectives. In my
judgment, we have very little hope of meeting those limited objectives, and
that translates into defeat for the United States of America, and for NATO.
People talk about whether this is the right war, the war we were preparing
for, whoever that may have been. We are in a war. It is a big war. It is the
only war NATO ever had. It is an occasion for the North Atlantic treaty
alliance to work, or for it to fail.
While we can fault our President and others while putting NATO at stake, and
we can fault the President for failing to have the resources prepared; for a
faulty diplomacy that produced one threat after another, which required some
follow-through for credibility; for failure to say from the beginning we
have to plan for every potential use of our resources, and we are doing so
because we are intent upon coming to the right result.
All of that might have occurred. But, it did not. As I pointed out on April
1, it had not happened then, and it hasn't occurred since. But what has
occurred is a very clear statement of objectives, and they are: the retreat,
the withdrawal, the end of Serbian forces in Kosovo--out, all 43,000 of
them, whether they are police, special police, regular armed forces, or
paramilitary forces--these are the people, these particular Serbians, who,
in fact, are killing people in Kosovo and expelling those they do not kill
from their homes and their country. So, the first objective is all of these
forces must leave Kosovo.
The second objective is the Kosovars must be allowed back in. There must be
a condition in which people who have lost their loved ones, who have watched
atrocities, who have suffered grievously and lost their identities, their
bank accounts, their houses, to go back into their country where there has
to be an international security force in which they believe--not in which we
believe or that we temporize with others, and say a little bit of this or
that country, a little balance here and there. The question will be: Do the
Kosovars believe in it? Will they go back? If they do not, they are going to
be in Macedonia, Albania, and increasingly in Italy, Germany, everywhere,
spilling out all over Europe, hundreds of thousands of souls who require
support--expensive people, people who could destabilize the economies and
the governments of the host countries that have been so generous.
We have barely a month of humanitarian relief, and we understand how tragic
it is for those people, how expensive and dangerous it is for the countries
in the surrounding area. That has already happened. You cannot walk away
from that. We can take a resolution today and say this wasn't our war and we
are tired of it or that we are bored with it or, as a matter of fact, we
don't even want to participate anymore. But for the suffering people that
are a consequence of this conflict, there is no walking away, and the
consequences for us, for Europe, for NATO, for our Armed Forces morale, for
civilian leadership intersecting with the Armed Forces, are very great.
So I am saying that you have to have an international force that gives
confidence enough to the people who have lost almost everything to go back.
There has to be money to pay for the houses they go back to, for the lights
and the water, and the possibilities of making a living, and of some safety
net of economic support while all that is happening.
Who will pay for that? Congressional leaders asked the President. He said
the Europeans will take the preponderant share of that. I hope that is true.
I hope the President has worked that out, or has broached that, or at least
has some assurance of exactly how burdensharing will go--for humanitarian
purposes or military purposes. This is terribly important and very
expensive, and lying directly ahead, either in Kosovo, in Macedonia,
Albania, or other countries.
Madam President, after these expelled people get back and the money is
spent--and we hope to do much of this before the cold weather comes--as the
President has pointed out with regard to the bombing raids in September and
October--then at this point, negotiations proceed on the tortuous path on
what kind of democracy in Kosovo, within the constraints of an autonomous
province of Serbia but protected by an international force sufficiently
strong, armed, and credible to the Kosovars so that they will come back and
try to rebuild their country. That will be a very difficult negotiation.
If you were a Kosovar who had gone through all of this--and there are people
advocating independence--the siren song of independence is pretty strong.
Yet European countries all around are advocating no independence; that is
not on the table. As the President has outlined our objective, independence
is not on the table. It is autonomy, where people think about
self-government within constraints.
Those are the objectives, narrow as they may be. Madam President, we had all
better be giving a lot of thought as to how they might be met.
I believe that the McCain resolution is important because it says to the
President, `Mr. President, take all necessary ways and means to win, to find
your objective, the objectives now shared by 18 other NATO allies.' It is
important that the President do that.
Normally, there might be a situation in which the President had planned for
several months before the war in Kosovo to preposition equipment, to
consider ground troops in Europe in addition to air resources, and other
provisions, including provisions for humanitarian fallout that might occur.
Ideally, all of that might have happened. But it didn't happen. As a matter
of fact, the nation's attention was not on Kosovo, except from time to time
throughout this period of time. And certainly there were no Presidential
messages to the American people indicating the gravity of the situation, and
very little debate here on the floor of the Senate. So that planning might
have happened. But it did not.
We are now in a predicament where we are in a very large war, where the
consequences are very great. We have limited objectives, but, in my
judgment--I have expressed this candidly and personally to the President--we
do not have the means to achieve those objectives. We have not had the means
from the very beginning of the operation.
In his defense, the President stoutly affirms that the bombing campaign will
do it, that you can get to those objectives with the bombing campaign alone.
He would also add, some helpful information getting into a Serbia--some
better control of that situation will be helpful. So would help by the
Russians--and help by anybody, for that matter. But, nevertheless, the
President from the beginning said no ground forces. He has followed up and
said, `I am not even planning for ground forces.' He has almost taken pride
in saying there will be no planning for ground forces; it is the bombing
campaign.
To follow Part 2: The Need for a Plan
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