Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I agree with the Senator from Connecticut that, if you really do in your heart oppose the deployment of troops over there in that hostile area, this is the strongest message that we can send; that is, voting in favor of H.R. 2606 at 12:30 today. I yield the floor. Mr. ROTH addressed the Chair.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, in recent weeks I have spent a great deal of time thinking about Bosnia. I have been to hearings and briefings. I have consulted with experts. I have had many discussions with my colleagues and my constituents. One month ago, I even went to Sarajevo and Tuzla myself to see the conditions our soldiers would face there. Since my return, I have taken to the floor of the Senate many times, and used every public opportunity, to state my opposition to the President's imminent deployment of ground troops to Bosnia. In the days since the conclusion of the Proximity Peace Talks in Dayton, I have also spoken out against any conditional support of this deployment coming from the Congress. The decision to intervene on the ground in Bosnia is a bad idea, Mr. President, and while I will always support our soldiers wherever they are sent, I want no part of this decision. My conviction that the administration's intention to put troops in harm's way in Bosnia is a huge mistake rests on three broad arguments. First, and above all, the conflict in Bosnia poses no real threat to vital American interests--simply put, there is nothing in Bosnia that Americans should die for. Second, the Dayton talks have produced a false peace that is inherently unstable and politically doomed. Finally, the implementation force [I-For] plan is self-contradictory and hopelessly optimistic, and will expose our soldiers to unreasonable risks even as they diligently pursue its unrealistic objectives. What interests are threatened? The administration has repeatedly argued that two vital interests are at stake in the conflict in Bosnia. If we don't intervene now, they say, the war will widen to a point where it threatens all of Europe. If the U.S. does not lead NATO in intervention, they say, both the NATO alliance and U.S. leadership of it will be at risk. The President is correct when he says that preserving security in Europe, and maintaining American leadership of NATO, are vital American interests. But it is one thing to refer to vital interests, and another to claim that they are really threatened by the conflict in Bosnia. I do not think they are. The administration asserts that the war in Bosnia will spread throughout Central Europe. But where is the evidence that this conflict threatens Bosnia's neighbors? Local countries like Italy, Hungary, and Austria do not seem concerned. The President has often referred to previous European wars in this century. But comparing this war to either of the world wars--and likening those of us who oppose United States involvement in Bosnia to 1930's-style isolationists--is absurd. It shows a profound misunderstanding of history, and of the roots of those conflicts. World War I began in the Balkans because the world powers took sides in a Balkan war, not because they kept at a safe distance. What the Clinton administration is doing looks a lot more like taking sides. As for World War II, neither Serbia, Bosnia, nor Croatia are anything like Nazi Germany, in terms of ambition, population, industrial strength, military power, or anything else. They are focused on each other, not on external aggression. The Balkan war has not spread in the past 4 years, and it shows no signs of spreading. So when the President states that stability in Europe is a vital American interest, he is right. But when he says that European security is threatened in Bosnia, he is wrong. The only other vital interest the administration refers to is that of preserving our leadership of the NATO alliance. Mr. President, I believe in NATO. It has served us well, and because there are still potential threats to European security, we must enhance and even expand it. But right now, the American people are divided on the question of NATO's importance. Many wonder if the alliance has outlived its usefulness. How does the administration expect Americans to feel about NATO when we get bogged down in a NATO mission in Bosnia? They will view every body bag as one more reason to get out of the alliance once and for all. They will ask: ``This is why we are a part of NATO?'' And they will be much less willing to act when a real threat to Europe comes along. There are still real threats to Europe out there, Mr. President. Dragging--or being dragged by--the alliance into a conflict for which it was not designed and for which it is not suited is not leadership. NATO still has a viable mission, but not one of intervening in a nasty Balkan civil war that poses no demonstrable threat to European security. Why should we risk the inevitable conflicts with our NATO partners that will result when we all start taking casualties in a place where no one really wanted to be in the first place? And why, if this is so important to NATO, should Russia--whose unpredictable future is one of the principal reasons for NATO's continued existence--be included so completely? Why would we go out of our way to include Russian forces with our own, when their natural sympathies lie with the Serbs that we will be trying to disarm, the Serbs we were bombing just a few weeks ago? We have been told by the administration that we would be evenhanded in our actions in Bosnia, but I was told by an administration official not long ago that the Bosnians were our first priority. But Russia's first priority will certainly be the Serbs. Not only will this forced alliance with Russia bring Russian troops into Central Europe for the first time since World War II; it will create the potential for misunderstandings and conflict with Russian forces that we have not seen since the Berlin Wall came down--all in the name of preserving European security. Mr. President, I repeat--I support NATO. If and when this conflict truly threatens Greece and Turkey, or any of our other NATO allies, I will support action to contain it. But the administration proposes not to contain the conflict, but to jump right into the middle of it. If NATO is to become a rationale for America intervening in civil wars in states that are not even members of the alliance, then I say we should disband the alliance tomorrow. What kind of ``peace'' are we trying to implement? Mr. President, in all the discussion of the implementation force, many people have lost sight of how shaky the agreement reached in Dayton is itself. Regardless of our interests in Bosnia, or our concern for the victims of the war there, the NATO force is being sent to Bosnia to implement what I believe is a fatally flawed agreement, one not likely to survive without the continued presence of large numbers of NATO troops. Let me quote at length from a study by John Hillen of The Heritage Foundation, dated November 30, 1995, and titled ``Questioning The Bosnia Peace Plan'': Is a bifurcated Bosnian state a realistic and sustainable political entity? The Bosnian peace accord proposes a Bosnia- Herzegovina that has the appearance of a single state, but is in fact based on two very separate political entities--The Bosnian Muslim/Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic. In order for the central organs of Bosnia to actually function as intended, the two separate entities of Bosnia will have to show the most extraordinary goodwill and cooperation towards each other, qualities that have never before been in evidence in Bosnia. Many experienced diplomats have expressed skepticism about the political viability of this Bosnian state and the realistic chances of its survival as a centrally governed and coherent nation. * * * Stephen Cambone of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that ``any agreement reached in 20 days over issues that have been fiercely fought over for more than four years is fraught with compromises and internal flaws.'' Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution noted that the accord has ``a lot of loose ends'' and ``many ways in which it could unravel.'' In short, the accord is diplomatically enchanting but realistically impractical. Much of this skepticism over the accord is rooted in the fact that the accord does not address fundamental issues of sovereignty and ethnic self-determination. Instead, it freezes those unresolved issues in place and offers up an elaborate power sharing agreement for a Bosnian central government. However, it will be difficult for a contrived central government to replace the bonds of loyalty, authority, and legitimacy that currently exist between Bosnian Croats and Croatia and Bosnian Serbs and Serbia. Those existing bonds are rooted in centuries of political, ethnic, and cultural identity and are sure to prove stronger than bonds to a hastily fabricated central government. * * * If history is any guide, this agreement does not stand much chance of lasting. In Cyprus in 1964, international negotiators reached a similar agreement between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Much like the Bosnian agreement, the doomed Cyprus accord attempted to replace bonds to the ``parent entities'' for both sides (Greece and Turkey) with an unworkable central executive and ethnically aligned parliamentary blocs. This ensured continued intractability except in the event of the most extraordinary goodwill. This structure never worked because it never addressed the fundamental fears and aspirations of the warring factions and was completely predicated on a diplomatic fantasy: the hopes for a degree of cooperation that had never been present in Cyprus. After 10 years of sporadic fighting and instability under this makeshift arrangement, Turkey invaded the island, partitioned Cyprus, and put an end to the ephemeral peace; an imposed peace that was never locally supported. UN peacekeepers have been in Cyprus for over 30 years. The same pattern can be expected in Bosnia. How can an imposed peace that does not reflect political realities or the basic concerns of the warring factions hope to survive except by the continued enforcement of thousands of NATO and American troops? The hastily concluded Bosnian peace accord is, by necessity, a weak plan. The weakness is inherent because the accord does not address the fundamental issues that caused the parties to go to war in the first place. It is, at best, a cease-fire that can only work under the continued stewardship of 60,000 heavily armed NATO combat troops. Mr. President, it is my view that, in addition to finding threats to vital interests in the Balkans where there are none, the President is putting U.S. prestige on the line to implement a peace plan that has very little chance of succeeding in the long run even if everything goes well for a year. The real risks to American troops Maybe the most troubling thing about the Administration's approach to the Balkans is its confidence that it will be able to control the conflict after it jumps in with both feet. The President speaks of a ``limited, focused'' mission; he tells us that we are ``not fighting a war.'' Then why are we sending more than 60,000 troops, reinforced with tanks, artillery, and airpower? What of this talk of ``overwhelming force'' and ``robust rules of engagement?'' Just what is ``overwhelming force'' when you are fighting against landmines? What are ``robust rules of engagement'' when you are fighting snipers --an airstrike on the village where you think the shot came from? Mr. President, I remind my colleagues that we had robust rules of engagement and overwhelming force in Vietnam, and they did not work in the end. I think that it is utter nonsense to apply these concepts to Bosnia. Regardless of any paper agreement signed in Dayton, there are those in Bosnia for whom continued fighting is a better deal. There are those who are profiting from the war as bandits or on the black market. There are those who are used to getting their way with guns; for them this war is about money, not ethnicity; one NATO commander told me that they had found cases where Serbs were selling black market ammunition to Muslims! What about those who will be displaced from their homes by the Dayton agreement, who will not willingly leave? What about those who have been displaced--there are up to three million refugees in Bosnia- Herzegovina--for whom peace means ``going home,'' but who will not be allowed to return as the result of the agreement? What about fighters who are demobilized as a result of the treaty, but cannot find jobs because the economy has been ruined? And those who just miss the power of a rifle? While I was in Tuzla last month, the commanding general of UN Sector Northeast, General Haukland, told me that there will be criminality and gangsterism when troops are demobilized. Mr. President, what about those who have a score to settle after four years of brutal war? One thing is certain, Mr. President--there are a lot of people in Bosnia who may be tempted to shoot at Americans, regardless of our ``overwhelming force'' and ``robust rules of engagement.'' A long-term commitment On October 17, 1995, Secretary of Defense Perry told the Senate Armed Services Committee: ``The U.S. has vital political, economic, and security interests in Europe. The war in Bosnia threatens those interests, and the U.S. vital security interest is served by stopping this war.'' At the same hearing, Secretary Perry states the administration's commitment to bringing our troops home in approximately one year. But the Administration cannot have it both ways. President Clinton cannot say that our vital interests are threatened in Bosnia, and at the same time pledge that we will be out of Bosnia in about a year. If two vital interests--European security and the NATO alliance--are truly threatened in Bosnia, how can there be a one-year statute of limitations on our response? Since when are American vital interests only worth one year's commitment? The Administration has also said that United States troops will leave Bosnia if the peace agreement is violated and conflict resumes. In short, their plan claims to be defending a vital interest, but promises that we will leave if enough people shoot at us, or when the 12-month clock runs out. But if conflict in Bosnia really threatens a vital U.S. interest, are they not committed to ending that conflict no matter what it takes, or how long it takes? Is that not what ``vital interest'' means? Mr. President, if the administration can tell us that IFOR will leave in about a year, no matter what, then there must not be much of a threat or much of a vital interest. If there are vital interests at stake, the Administration should be honest and tell the American people that we are committed to Bosnia for the long haul. If I were sending one of my sons to Bosnia, I would want to know that his life was being put on the line to accomplish something important, something worth doing at any cost, and something that the American people stood firmly behind. But at best, the Dayton plan and IFOR will bring a few months' respite to the people of Bosnia. When the war resumes after we leave, or if ``systemic violations'' force us out, then the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans who died trying to impose a token peace in an artificial country will truly have been wasted. Vital interests are the only thing we should ask our soldiers to die for. When U.S. vital interests at stake, the American people and our troops alike will tolerate things going badly for a while. They will stay the course. If there were vital interests at stake in Bosnia, the President would not be giving us all of these details about rules of engagement, exit strategies, and time limits--he would not have to. Mr. President, administration officials in Washington seem to be the only people who think we can finish this operation in a year. Not one military or diplomatic person I spoke with on my trip, not a single U.S., NATO, or U.N. commander, thought that peace in Bosnia could be achieved in anything close to 12 months. Given the forbidding geography, harsh winter climate, and wholesale destruction in Bosnia, it will be months before even modest degree of stability could be restored, even if everyone cooperates fully. The UN commander in Tuzla, General Haukland of Norway, described a one-year presence as a hand in water--when you take it out, nothing has changed. In Balkan history, a year is no time at all. The simple truth, Mr. President, is that the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is about to become America's pet country. The United States of America is going to own Bosnia and all of her problems just as soon as the 1st Armored Division sets up in Tuzla. Does anyone really believe that we will leave Bosnia in a year if the threat to her stability remains? Does anyone really believe, after arming, training, and equipping the Bosnian Army for a year, that we will stand by and watch if our pet army is on the verge of defeat? Of course not; if Bosnia is as important as the Administration says it is, we will stay in Bosnia as long as we have to. We have already employed airstrikes against the Serbs; we will do so again if Bosnia is threatened again. I say to my colleagues--we are on the verge of what may be a very long commitment. So Mr. President, I have said that I will resist this plan with all of my power, and I will do so down to the wire. I think the peace is false, the plan is naive, and the risk to our troops unrealistically high. There is only one way to express these conclusions: I urge my colleagues to oppose the Dole-McCain Resolution of conditional support, and to support the Hutchison-Inhofe Resolution opposing the deployment of ground troops to Bosnia. Mr. President, I want to make a couple of observations about the debate that is taking place tonight. There seems to be a lot of people who are going to vote, perhaps, for the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution, then turn around and vote also for the Dole-McCain resolution. I suggest, Mr. President, that would be a little inconsistent. After looking at a final copy--and we only received a copy of the Dole-McCain resolution a matter of a couple of hours ago in its final version--I cannot see that it narrows the mission at all. It starts off by saying, ``Before acting, pursuant to the resolution, the President shall make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination. . .''--and then they cover a number of things that they want the President to certify. For example, the Dole-McCain resolution says: ``The mission will be limited to the implementation of the military provisions of the Dayton agreement.'' But the administration has already, in effect, certified this: Secretary Christopher said, on December 1: ``Let me assure you that IFOR's mission is well-defined and limited. Our troops will enforce the military aspects of the agreement. They will not be asked to guarantee the success of democracy or reconstruction.'' Secretary Perry said the same thing: ``The mission of IFOR is to oversee and enforce the implementation of the military aspects of the peace agreement.'' That is exactly the same as we find in the Dole- McCain amendment. Second, Dole-McCain says: ``An integral part of the successful accomplishment of the objective is the establishment of military balance.'' This is what the administration has been saying all along. For example, Secretary Christopher has said: ``We are committed to achieve the stable military balance with Bosnia and among the states of the former Yugoslavia.'' In another part of the Dole-McCain resolution, it says: ``The United States will lead an immediate international effort to provide equipment, arms, training, and related logistics assistance of the highest possible quality to ensure that the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina can provide for its own defense.'' Again, on December 1, Secretary Christopher said: ``The Armed Forces in the Federation will need to obtain some equipment and training in order to establish an effective self-defense capability. As for our part, the United States will ensure that the Federation Armed Forces receive the necessary assistance.'' What I am saying, Mr. President, is I think it is inconsistent for someone to vote for Hutchison-Inhofe and turn around and vote for Dole- McCain. Dole-McCain simply requires the President to say what he has been saying all along. Is that supposed to narrow the mission? Is that supposed to reassure us? Second, Mr. President, I was listening very attentively to the very knowledgeable and scholarly Senator from West Virginia, Senator Byrd, talking about the constitutional rights of the President and the responsibilities of the President and also the constitutional rights of Congress. I thought, all the way through, that he was coming to the conclusion that the President cannot do what he has already done. At least that is what I was inferring from his remarks. But I gather he will support the President by voting for Dole-McCain. I did hear several other valuable arguments during the course of the day. Senator Feingold came out with some very strong constitutional arguments that would lead one to believe that the President has indeed overstepped his powers. He referred to an article by Louis Fisher, which I later made a part of this Record. He says: ``The framers knew that the British King could use military force against other countries without legislative involvement. They gave to Congress the responsibility for deciding matters of war and peace. The President, as Commander in Chief, was left with the power to repel sudden attacks.'' So that qualifies what the President is able to do within his constitutional rights. We made that a part of the Record. In sitting and listening to the debate today--and I stayed in the Chamber the entire day, as I feel this is the most critical vote we will have, probably, at least in the last year or 2, and I wanted to hear everyone's viewpoint. I think the distinguished Senator from Alabama, Senator Heflin, talked at some length about how this should be a European mission. I have said over and over again that maybe we have a responsibility--and I am not going to debate that because everybody is assuming that we have a responsibility to protect the integrity of NATO, to respond in some way to the atrocities that have taken place. I have suggested that there are atrocities taking place all over the world. Where do you draw the line? Do you draw it here? Or are we, in fact, doing this because the President, in February 1993, made a statement that he was going to send ground troops in? But the Senator from Alabama, Senator Heflin, talked about the fact that this should be a European mission. Nobody will deny that it is more a responsibility of Europe than it is the United States. Yet, we talk about the contribution that our NATO partners are making to this. Germany, who is in the backyard of the Balkans, is sending a total of 4,000 troops, and they debated it in their legislative body before agreeing to do that. We did not have time to debate it before we did it. Yet, we are talking about sending five times the troops that Germany is sending. I listened very carefully while several people on the floor made points. I want to briefly respond to a couple of them. First of all, as far as our troops being supported, I think we all have made it abundantly clear that we in this body, as well as the other body, are supporting our troops, not just here, but all around the world. What greater support could there be for our troops than by not sending them into this hostile area to start with? That is real support of the troops. That is what we are trying to do with the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution--make it abundantly clear that our troops should not have to be over there. When they are over there--if, in fact, they end up in a mass deployment--yes, we will support our troops all the way. I think that has been said over and over again. I do not think anybody is going to deny that. The Senator from New Mexico, Senator Domenici, made a very good point. What we are trying to do is state our opposition to this before it gets started. You see, the troops are not deployed yet. Yes, there are some there. We will support those. Those are the advance troops, logistic troops, but the mass deployment that the President has promised immediately after the signing of this agreement in Paris has not yet taken place. So this debate is taking place now, before the mass deployment has taken place. The junior Senator from California commented in her remarks that this deployment was acceptable ``as long as it remains a peacekeeping mission.'' I suggest to the junior Senator from California it is not a peacekeeping mission now. We keep hearing about peacekeeping as if there is currently peace to keep. There is a cease-fire in effect. But I have been in parts of Bosnia during this cease-fire when the gunfire was going off; in some parts of the northeast sector, near Tuzla, they do not even know there is a cease-fire. The title that we are giving ourselves now, giving to I-FoR, is ``peace implementation.'' There is a big difference between peacekeeping and peace implementation. Peace implementation means we do not have peace now but we will implement it. That is a totally different mission. Mission creep has already crept into this, Mr. President. The exit strategy seems to be to keep peace for a year, and then leave. As the junior Senator from California said, all we have to do is keep peace for a year and we are out of there. She is saying exactly what Secretary Christopher said, exactly what General Shalikashvili said as recently as last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying it is inconceivable we will not be out of there in a year. During my visit with the Norwegian general who commands the U.N.'s northeast sector, in the Tuzla area, I mentioned ``12 months,'' he smiled and said, ``You mean 12 years.'' And when we talked about 12 months he said, ``Apparently the American people do not understand the way the people in that region think, the Serbs, the Croats, and the Moslems. Their conception of time is totally different.'' He used an analogy I have used on the floor. It is like putting your hand in water for 12 months, you look and take your hand out and nothing has happened. When we leave the war will start again. If they know we will be gone in a year, which we have said we will be--the President has reaffirmed that as recently as last week, and it was reaffirmed a week ago by Secretary of Defense Perry--what will they do? Lay low for a year and then come back out swinging. By the way, Mr. President, the combatants in this conflict have a habit of laying low every winter. I do not think I have ever in my life--and I did serve in the Armed Forces--I do not ever remember a time in our Nation's history or in the history of warfare where we went into a hostile area and then our exit strategy was geared to time, instead of being geared to events. But that is exactly what we are proposing to do here. The senior Senator from California was talking about ``A far greater risk in doing nothing than in sending our troops.'' I suggest that it is not quite that easy. It would be easy if we were able to pass the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution and the President would look at this and say clearly we do not have Congress behind sending ground troops in but we have a responsibility to NATO, we have a responsibility to Bosnia. If he felt that way he could do it and we could do it through air power. We have already been there with airstrikes. We know that works. We could lift the arms embargo. Sure, our European partners do not want us to do that. They want us on the ground there. People talk about how well received our President was over in Europe. I think if I lived in Europe I would be receiving him well, too. He is coming over and proposing that we fight their battle for them. I suggest that there are other alternatives. Senator Ashcroft from Missouri was talking about the speech that the President made in 1993 and suggested something I had not thought about. Maybe the President made the commitment of United States ground troops back in February 1993 without having been really apprised of the situation in Bosnia, the deep hostility, the history of that area, the history of World War I, World War II, the 500-year-old civil war, and what has been going on over there for many years. The Senator from Delaware, Senator Biden, was articulate and outspoken when he talked about the different parties there. I think he referred to Milosevic as someone who was perhaps a war criminal, and certainly he talked about the others who had actually been indicted for war crimes. Lastly, it was Senator Kohl who said that we either support peace or we do not. I think there are many ways where we can offer our support without doing it on the ground. I will mention one other thing that the Senator from North Carolina mentioned when he talked about the fact that the bridges and the roads in that sector--from Hungary down south through Tuzla, down toward Sarajevo, in the area that goes from the Posavina corridor down to Tuzla--that the roads would not accommodate an M-1 tank. We found out when we were over there that there is only one bridge in that entire area that they say can handle it structurally. The Americans will have to come in and rebuild the bridges, rebuild the roads, and if they do not they will start a civil war because the people are upset for us coming in and messing up the existing roads with our tanks. This came from the people now in command, the U.N. people in the northeast sector. The most profound thing I have heard on the floor of the Senate today came from the very distinguished Senator from Indiana, Senator Coats. He asked the question, ``Have we so squandered American leadership that we must buy it back with American lives?'' I think this puts it in perspective. If we are wanting to prove to someone that we have this leadership, that we must lead and whatever NATO decides to do is in the best interest of the allies and that we must blindly go along with them, do we do this at the risk of lives? On October 17 we asked the question of Secretary Christopher and Secretary Perry. This was after Gen. Michael Rose made the statement if the Americans get into this war they will sustain more losses than they did during the Persian Gulf war, where we lost a total of 390 lives. I asked the question, is your mission here worth 400 or more lives? Secretary Christopher said yes; Secretary Perry said yes; General Shalikashvili said yes. I think that is a defining difference between the administration's view and my own. I think that we need to at least acknowledge this body is already on record opposing what President Clinton is about to do. So it is not a matter of waiting until the last minute, until the last hour. Over a month ago we passed a sense-of-the-Congress amendment in both the House and Senate, attached to the Defense appropriations bill by Senator Gregg: ``It is the sense of Congress that none of the funds available for the Department of Defense should be obligated or exploited for the deployment or participation of the United States Armed Forces in any peacekeeping operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina * * *.'' This opposition is not something we are coming up with today for the first time. The Senate is already on record. Lastly, let me go over some of the things that were talked about on the floor today in terms of danger. I think we are kind of trying to soften this thing, trying to gloss over the dangers. Some say we will go over and everyone will be kissing the American flag and everyone will love us because we brought peace into the Balkans. If you stop and look, and this came out of the Defense News, of the various elements over there, the Croats have 80,000 soldiers; the Croatian Serbs 50,000; Serbia, 125,000; Bosnia, 110,000; Bosnian Serbs, 80,000; Bosnian Croats, 50,000. That is not even talking about the rogue elements, and there are some nine rogue elements that are over there. It is so convoluted it reminds me of the letter that came back from one of our warriors who lost his life in Somalia. It was the son of Captain James Smith, who read me the letter of his son. His son was Cpl. Jim Smith who lost his life. Capt. Jim Smith lost his leg in Vietnam and his son lost his life in Somalia. His was one of those corpses dragged through the street in Mogadishu. His last letter said: Dad, we cannot tell who our friends are and who they are not. We cannot tell the difference. I suggest that is exactly the situation that we have here. Many people have talked about the fact that we are going to have just 20,000 or 25,000 troops over there. I hope no one is kidding themselves, deluding themselves thinking that is all we are going to have. There was an article in the Defense News that gave a very persuasive argument that we would end up with a total NATO force of 240,000 troops. Keeping our ratio, that would be 80,000 Americans who will be involved over there. Go back and read your history. British Prime Minister Disraeli, over 100 years ago, who had been observing the battles over there, said, ``It will take a half-million troops to bring peace to the Balkans.'' I think, when we look at the timeframe of 12 months--that is fictitious. It is not going to happen. The 20,000 troops, that is not going to happen. The mission is peacekeeping--that already is not happening, it is now peace implementation. We are kidding ourselves. We have already had a vote on H.R. 2606. That was a very strong vote, even though there were just 22 who voted in favor of it. Those are the people who really feel the strongest about not sending troops into that area. But we are going to have another record vote. That record vote is going to take place this evening. We are going to have two record votes. When you have the first vote on the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution, think very carefully. Because if you vote for that, as I said when I opened these remarks, you cannot turn around and vote for the Dole-McCain resolution because they are inconsistent with each other. This is the last opportunity that the Senators who are here and will be voting tonight will have to get on record. This is their last shot, the last chance they have to say no, we should not send ground troops into Bosnia. I do not think it is possible for anyone to understand the hostility of the area if he or she has not been up there to Tuzla where our troops will go. To the best of my knowledge, only two Members of Congress have been up there, Senator Hank Brown from Colorado and myself. When we had a meeting the other day in the Senate Armed Services Committee, I discovered that even Secretary Perry had not been up there, Secretary Christopher had not been up there, General Shalikashvili had not been up there, and certainly President Clinton has not been up there. I cannot imagine that they would be willing to take chances in a hostile area without going up and looking at it. I can tell you firsthand, and I went over much of that area in a helicopter not more than 100 feet off the treetops with Gen. Rupert Smith, a British general. We looked down and for the first time we could realize how Marshal Tito was able to hold off the very best that Hitler had on a ratio of 1 to 8, because of the unique environment, the very hostile and forbidding environment. Mr. President, this is going to be probably the most significant vote that many Members of this body will cast. It is going to be tonight. I would like to have them think long and hard. Because if you vote for-- if you vote against the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution and vote for the Dole-McCain resolution, you are saying we agree with the basic policy of sending ground troops. You see, I think everybody knows now, we can support our troops and not support the policy. That is an easy thing to do. We all support our troops. The greatest support we could give our troops is to not to deploy them into that warring area. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I wholeheartedly agree with all the comments made by the Senator from Arizona [Mr. Kyl]. He and I have talked about this long and hard, and for many, many hours here on the floor of this body, and it is something that has concerned us. We expressed the concern in the past when we both served in the other body and served at that time on the House Armed Services Committee about the problem that we have and are confronted with when the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, is able to send troops into areas with a total disregard of Congress, of either House of Congress. It is as if we are totally irrelevant. We are the expression of the American people. We are the ones who are expressing the sentiments, I think, very clearly that shows up certainly in Oklahoma, and I suspect all over the country. The problem that we have is very simple, that the President sends the troops over on these humanitarian missions that do not relate to our Nation's security, and then he comes back to us and says he wants an emergency supplemental appropriation to pay for it when in fact we would not have incurred that cost if we could have been consulted or been made a part of the decision. I do not mean this to sound at all partisan because when the decision was made to go to Somalia, it was made in December 1992, which was right after President Bush--he was still in office, but he had been defeated. It was supposed to be for 45 days. In other words, in December, the troops are going to go over and in January they are going to come back. It was to open a roadway for the delivery of humanitarian goods to the people of Somalia who did not want us over there to begin with. I disagreed with President Bush, who was a Republican, like I am, at that time. Then, of course, right after that, in January, we reminded President Clinton that in fact we should bring our troops home because the intent originally was to send them over for 45 days. And so, each month thereafter, approximately each month, we sent resolutions to President Clinton saying, bring our troops home from Somalia. And he did not do it and did not do it, and months went by, until finally there was the brutal murder of 18 of our Rangers and their mutilated bodies, corpses were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Of course, then it was too late and then the American people rose up, and this was enough pressure that we indeed brought our troops back from Somalia. We sent troops down to Haiti. We were not part of that decision. Haiti was supposed to be considered as the crown jewel of President Clinton's foreign policy. He said he was going to send the troops down there for 12 months. Then we sent them down in September, and 12 months later--this was this past September--they are still not back. Now 3 more months have gone by and things are getting worse down there, not better. We realize we made a mistake in Haiti. That was not anything that related to our Nation's security. Indeed, it was to go down there--at least it was reported by the President that we were going to go down and get someone who was duly elected back in office. We have been watching in recent weeks, in recent days of the turmoil that exists there, and we still to this day have troops in Haiti. Just a few weeks ago, we were asked to vote for an emergency supplemental to pay for Somalia and Haiti and some of these humanitarian gestures. I guess Rwanda was in there, too. It was a $1.4 billion appropriation. So this procedure the Senator from Arizona, Senator Kyl, was talking about is what is really wrong because we do not have any voice in it, and yet we have to turn around and vote for a supplemental appropriations to appropriate money that has already been spent on a mission that we did not agree with. What happens if we do not make that appropriation? The President merely then just goes to the military budget and pulls it out of the operating budget which is already cut down to the bone, down to a level that we cannot defend our Nation on two regional fronts, as it is today. And then we are deleting those very scarce resources and assets, military assets, by these humanitarian gestures. So I am rising today during this time really to speak on two of the three votes that will be before us tomorrow. The first one, as I understand the order, from the leader is going to be H.R. 2606. Congressman Joel Hefley from Colorado, who incidentally spent the last weekend with me in the State of Oklahoma going around and explaining to the people and participating on nationwide radio talk shows to let people know just what is happening, that the President made a commitment more than 2 years ago to send 25,000 troops in on the ground in Bosnia, and we are now almost out of time. I am not sure there is anything we can do now to stop the President from doing this. But just on the possibility, remote possibility, as it is, that the President may, since he made that statement, have realized what he is doing in sending our troops over there into that incredibly hostile area, that maybe we can give him an out. So we have two efforts to do that. The first effort is H.R. 2606, as was passed by Congressman Hefley in the House of Representatives. I will read just the preamble to this. To prohibit the use of funds appropriated to the Department of Defense from being used for the deployment on the ground of United States Armed Forces in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a part of any peacekeeping operation, or as part of any implementation force, unless funds for such deployment are specifically appropriated by law. It is a very simple and straightforward two-page bill. That is all it says. It just says we in Congress are relevant. We in Congress should be heard. After all, we are the ones that appropriate money for our military operations. We are the ones who make the fiscal decisions in this country. The President submits his budget, but we are the ones who get down to the detail of passing budgets that are consistent with the desires of the American people. And so I strongly support H.R. 2606. I do not think it is going to pass. But I am going the tell you, it is a defining vote. Come the elections in the future, there are going to be people looking back and saying, we had an opportunity, not just intent of Congress. We already passed one of those. Senator Gregg put that on as an amendment. It was voice voted. And, of course, Senator Hutchison and myself and some others have a resolution of disapproval that we are going to be trying to pass tomorrow. That is important, too. But this particular bill has the meaning of law, has the force of law. It says that we are not going to appropriate the funds that are necessary for the mass deployment of troops into Bosnia unless it comes to Congress or Congress approves it. Now, this does not take away any of the powers of the President. It merely says that the President should not do it unless he has the Congress and the American people behind him. I can tell you right now, Mr. President, he does not have the support of Congress behind him, and he does not have the support of the American people behind him. He does not have the support of the vast majority of the people in this country; I think they are offended--unless Oklahoma is a lot different than any of the other States. I was all over Oklahoma this past weekend, and I can share the frustration that people all the way from Lawton, to Anadarko, to Tulsa, that they are offended that this has been railroaded through and that we have not had a chance to have the American people be heard. You might ask, is it really that hostile of an area there? The Senator from Arizona talked about such things as mission creep. You know, we have already had mission creep in this case. This was going to be peacekeeping. Now it is going to be peace implementation. There is a big difference between peacekeeping and peace implementation, because peacekeeping assumes that there is peace today, when there is not peace today. Peace implementation means we must implement peace. There is a big difference. That has seemingly gone unnoticed. This thing about mission creep is that it starts out simple and sounds good to the American people, just like, I suppose, Somalia sounded back in December 1992. It sounded like it was very reasonable. Yet, who could argue at that time against opening up a road in order to send humanitarian goods up to the people who were having all kinds of social problems? So we did it. But that kept creeping and creeping until we lost many American lives. There are quite a few people in Congress who have been to Sarajevo. Sarajevo is the area people talk about and think about when they think about Bosnia. But that is not the area where our troops are going to be. Our troops are going to be, according to the map that has been drawn out, to the north of that, from the north of Sarajevo, all the way up, almost to Hungary. That is where we are going to have our troops. That is the hostile area. I had occasion to prevail upon a British general, Rupert Smith, who was kind enough to take me up, since none of the Americans had been up there. I found out later that even the two fine generals that were training the 1st Armored Division in Germany to go up, General Yates and General Nash, had not personally been in that area at that time, and they are training our troops to go into that area. Then I found out subsequently, the other day--last week, or a week ago today--when we had a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, that neither General Shalikashvili or Secretary of Defense Perry had been in that area. I know the President has not been in that area. So I have to come to the conclusion that those individuals have not been there to see how hostile it was. Let me just tell you why, how they happened to discover this. Secretary Perry was talking about how peaceful it is up in the Tuzla area. I said, ``Mr. Secretary, I was up in the Tuzla area. There was firepower going around up there, and it has not ceased since the cease- fire took place. When was the last time you were?'' He said he had never been there. General Shalikashvili said, ``We are training them in an area and an environment that very nearly represents the environment up in Tuzla.'' I said, ``I have been to Tuzla and to the training area in Germany, and it is not really analogous to the training area. When was the last time you were there?'' He had not been there. So here we have a hostile area, and we are guessing that there are more than 6 million mines in that area. This is not like it was in the Persian Gulf where you could go in and deactivate mines, because it is not a desert. This is ground that is frozen, and the only way to find out is if you drive an M-l or an armored vehicle on it and activate it. This is the type of hostility that is there. We hear a lot about the peace talks that took place in Dayton, OH. I say that maybe the wrong people were there. Sure, Milosevic was there, but it was my experience in the time I spent in Bosnia that he is not the one calling the shots. It is Karadzic occasionally and, of course, many factions have broken away from him. We are dealing with three major factions there--the Croats, the Serbs, and the Bosnian Serbs, and we have the Moslems. In addition to that, you have the Arkan Tigers, a throwoff of the Serbs; the Black Swans, which is related and was at one time a group of Moslems; the mujaheddin is still active; the Iranians are there. We have identified nine subfactions, or rogue elements, that are up in that area where we are talking about having our troops walking around. These elements have been known to fire upon their own troops, murder their own flesh and blood, just to blame it on one of the other elements. I suggest, Mr. President, if you are dealing with that kind of mentality, what would preclude them from firing on our troops to blame somebody else? The administration says, no, we have a couple of ways we can get out of Bosnia. One is at the end of 12 months. It was interesting that the President started out presenting this program and saying, ``We are going to send troops into Bosnia for 12 months.'' Well, on October 17, during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, I said to General Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ``I do not understand how you can have an exit strategy that is tied to time.'' I asked him, ``How do you know what is going to happen 12 months from today? Exit strategies are tied to events and our success in the various efforts there, and whatever we are enduring.'' He said, ``No, it is going to go 12 months. On the 365th day they are coming back.'' That did not sound realistic, and I think a lot of people further down in the bureaucracy were trying to withdraw from that 12-month commitment, until a week ago today when they reaffirmed their commitment. General Shalikashvili said, ``It is inconceivable that we will be there after 12 months.'' Well, then the President, over the weekend, reaffirmed that. They are talking about an exit strategy of 12 months. What if we go over there and we have something--which I do not think we have--but something that relates to our Nation's security interests, or our vital interests, so we engage in combat. We go over there to do whatever we are supposed to be doing there, to contain the civil war, to protect the integrity of NATO, or whatever they say is worth the cost of hundreds of American lives, at the end of the 12th month, they are saying, no matter what, we come home anyway. What if we are almost there? No, we are going to come home. I had occasion to talk to people who are very familiar with the Bosnians, the former Yugoslavia, the various cults and ethnic groups and the rogue elements that are up there, and they said one thing people do not understand in the United States is that those people do not think like we do. Their conception of time is not what ours is. General Hoagland, who was the general from Norway, up in the Tuzla area where we are talking about sending our troops--and we are as we speak-- he said 12 months is absurd; it is like putting your hand in water and leaving it there for 12 months, and when you pull it out, nothing has changed, it is just like it was. And then when I commented to some of the soldiers up there who are familiar with that area, I said, ``What about the 12 months and being out in that time?'' They said, ``Are you sure you are not talking about 12 years?'' So these are the unknowns that we are dealing with. These are the rogue elements. This is the hostility, and these are the chances we are willing to take. If you do not believe what I am saying, Mr. President, I suggest that you go back to that meeting of October 17, when we had Secretary Christopher, Secretary Perry both there at the meeting. That was shortly after Gen. Michael Rose from Great Britain, who was the commanding general in charge of United States forces in Bosnia, certainly there was no greater authority at that time on the conditions in Bosnia than Gen. Michael Rose. He said, if Americans go into Bosnia, they will sustain more loss of lives than they did in the Persian Gulf war. Well, that was 390. I specifically asked the question, I said, ``Secretary of Defense Perry, let us assume that all these experts are right and we are going to lose at least 400 lives over there. Is the mission as you have described it, that is to contain a civil war and to protect integrity of NATO, is that worth 400 American lives?'' He said, ``Yes.'' Secretary Christopher said yes. I say no. That is the defining issue here. We will have an opportunity to get people on record. I hope the Senators that are preparing to vote on these very significant things understand the seriousness of it. We have an opportunity to do something to stop it. It is remote. As I said when I began a few minutes ago, maybe we cannot pull it off. If we do, maybe the President, in the case of H.R. 2606, which I strongly support, maybe he would veto it or he would let it sit on his desk until we have the troops over there and then it is too late. As Senator Kyl and others have said, we are in full support of our troops. That is, everyone in this Chamber is in support of our troops. The best way to support our troops is not send them over there in the first place. Those who are over there, a handful, bring them back. That is essentially what we are attempting to do with H.R. 2606. We are saying we will not appropriate the money to send the troops over unless you come to Congress, present your case to the American people, and sell your case. It is as simple as that. There is a defining vote. People who vote against H.R. 2606 are saying ``No, Mr. President, you go ahead. You don't have to come to Congress. We will go ahead and appropriate the money. We are serving notice we will appropriate the emergency supplemental.'' The same thing with the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution. That is a defining vote. People are going to have to answer to that in years to come--I am talking about U.S. Senators--as to whether or not they were supporting the troops being sent to Bosnia. We all support the troops. Mr. President, this is probably the most significant vote--these two votes will be the most significant votes we will be voting on. I know a lot of people, the families of the thousands of American troops that are going to be sent over there. This is the most defining vote. I could not find anyone yesterday in the streets of Anadarko, OK, who thought the mission as described to them is worth the loss of one American life, let alone 400 or 1,000 or whatever it ends up being. I think the American people are solidly behind our effort to stop the deployment, even though it is almost too late now. The President says this is only going to cost $2 billion. They gave a figure of what Somalia would cost, what Rwanda would cost, what Haiti would cost, and they are off by a few billion and had to come back for supplemental appropriations. Mr. President, we are going to have an opportunity to vote on three issues tomorrow. Two are resolutions without the force of law; one has the force of law. I think the toughest vote will be the vote on H.R. 2606. Those who really feel so strongly that the American people and Congress should have to give permission before the President sends the mass deployment of troops into Bosnia, this is the opportunity for them to cast that vote. I had a phone call last week from Capt. Jim Smith, who I believe is from New Jersey. He is an American hero. He was a career military officer. He lost his leg in Vietnam. He lost his son in Mogadishu. He said to me, ``You know, I had two letters from my son. The first one was concerning the rules of engagement that we were using in Somalia. They said we would have robust rules of engagement,'' and he characterized those the same way that Captain Smith today is characterizing the rules of engagement that we have. The last letter he got, his son made the statement to his dad in this letter right before he was one of the 18 Rangers who lost his life over in Somalia and his corpse was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and he said, ``Dad, over here we cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys.'' I suggest that is exactly the situation in Bosnia. I know people who are trying to make that into something that is really relating to our Nation's security. I do not think we can tell the good guys from the bad guys. Take a snapshot in the history of that area in the last 500 years and one is that the Serbs are the bad guys and the next is that the Croats are the bad guys. We saw what happened in the First World War; we saw what happened when Marshal Tito put together a coalition because he was in the unique position of being a Croat and yet was also a Communist, so he was able to break away from Hitler's operation where a lot of the Croats went, and held this very fragile country together against Hitler's onslaught on a ratio, for a 2-year-period, of 1 to 8. What I am saying is, this hostile area we went into, he was able to hold off the very best Hitler had to send in on a ratio of one soldier to eight soldiers. Until you fly over 100 feet off the ground and look down and see the environment and the cliffs and the cave, you cannot really appreciate this. Unfortunately, the five people who are in charge, the architects of this thing, the various Secretaries and the President himself, none of them at the time the decision was made had ever been in that part of the world. It is understandable why they might not understand the serious danger that lurks up there for our troops. I stopped by the training area a few weeks ago and talked to a lot of the troops. I went into the mess hall. I have not been in a mess hall since I was in the U.S. Army, and I enjoyed visiting with all of them. It was very difficult for me to answer the question when they asked me: What is the mission? What is so important over there? I try my best because I am in full support of the troops. I said, if you go over there, you will have a mission. We will have the American people behind you. But I could not answer the question about the mission. I talked to one James Terry, a young man who would be in the first group. He may be over there now. He is probably part of the logistics team over there. When I came home, I talked to his mother, Estella Terry, in Oklahoma, and I got to thinking that the test that Congressmen heavily used over in the other body was, what do you tell-- I guess it is called the mother's test--what do you tell somebody who has lost a son or a daughter or a husband or a wife? What can you tell them they died for? This is the test that the President has failed to meet. I am hoping that with the two opportunities that we have on voting in the Hutchison-Inhofe resolution of opposition to the deployment of troops and H.R. 2606 to actually stop--this is the litmus test. We will stop the appropriations so they cannot be sent there in the first place, this mass deployment, and bring those who are there back. This is very, very significant and probably the most significant vote that we will vote on. There is a third vote, and that is the vote that will come up tomorrow that is trying to be conciliatory to the President's plan. I have looked at his plan. I think it is so flawed that it cannot be fixed. I do not think we can fix it. I plan to vote against the resolution that would, for all practical purposes, approve what the President is doing. Lastly, I will conclude by saying we are behind the troops and the troops are behind us. We are the ones--it says to stand up here and say we support the troops. How can you say we support troops and send them into the environment I just described? I do not think we can do it, and I do not think people are supporting the troops when we do that. We have an opportunity, a last-ditch effort, and after that the opportunity is behind us, and we will have to start watching what is going on, giving full support. If there is anyone here, Mr. President, who disagrees that the troops are behind what we are trying to do, I suggest you look at the veterans groups. A week ago we had a news conference. Every veterans group I am aware of in America was present. We had the American Legion, the DAV. We had the veterans of the Korean war. We had the veterans of Vietnam. We had the Jewish veterans. They were all there and they all stood up and said, we are for the troops, and the best thing you can do for the troops is keep us out of this fight over there that is not our civil war, because we could very well have some causes that would come up where we need to send troops. We cannot be depleting our resources. Certainly, people like Saddam Hussein and others around the world are looking at our weakened condition now and the fact we are further weakening our military assets by sending them out on the humanitarian gestures. Mr. President, I suggest we will have an opportunity tomorrow to cast three votes. I think the votes, the right votes, are to vote against the resolution of support for the President and vote for the resolution and the bill that supports our troops and stops the deployment of troops into Bosnia. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. INHOFE. The question I had was, is it my understanding there will not be debate time tomorrow before the vote will be taken?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I appreciate the Senator yielding to me. I think it is very symbolic and appropriate, the pen that the President used to sign the veto message yesterday was, indeed, the pen that had been used during the Great Society days that started this shift in attitude in Government, so that Government has a greater responsibility for all of us, beginning back in the 1960's. I think the fact that he is using that pen to veto the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 is a very interesting occasion, because that is the date that all of this started. [[Page S 18123]] I remember it so well because I was serving at that time in the State legislature in Oklahoma. We were so concerned at that time because the year that I am thinking of our total debt was $200 billion. I remember on a TV ad they were trying to impress upon the people of America how much money that was so they had $100 bills they were stacking up until it got to the height of the Empire State building. That is what our debt was. Of course, now that is what our annual deficit is, has been, and what our annual deficit would continue to be under any budget that the President has come forth with. I am going to keep an open mind. I am hoping the President will come forth with something that will keep his commitment that he made during the vote on the continuing resolution a couple weeks ago when he said that he agreed to come up using real numbers, CBO numbers, with a balanced budget by the year 2002. And I agree with the Senator from Idaho that it is so incredibly significant that we do this and do this now. I have said several times on the floor, I do not believe if we pass up this opportunity there will be another opportunity in my lifetime to have a balanced budget or to seek a balanced budget so we can then start working on reducing the debt that we have piled up in this country. Again, I do not look at this as a fiscal issue. It should not be looked at as a fiscal issue. And every time the liberals, holding on with white knuckles to the past, to the 1960's, to the programs where Government has the responsibility--an entitlement--to take care of people from the cradle to the grave, that Government cannot afford to do it. I look at it as a moral issue when I look at my three grandchildren and realize that statistically--and this can all be documented--if we do not do something to change the course that we have set upon, that any child, including my three grandchildren, who is born in this particular time, will have to spent 82 percent of his or her lifetime income just to service and support Government. This is morally wrong. For all those people, including the President, trying to hold on to the past, we will win this. When the Senator from Idaho said, and I heard the Senator from Wyoming earlier say, this was a mandate and the elections of 1994--it is clearly a mandate. All the postelection surveys show very clearly of all the mandates that came with that election, that totally transformed the makeup of the House and the Senate, it was a mandate to balance the budget. We are committed to doing that. We will do everything within our being to see that it happens. Mr. President, I only have one comment on another subject because I think it is critical that the Senators are all aware that there is going to be a vote prior to the 14th having to do with the President's program to deploy troops on the ground in Bosnia. Yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee some very revealing things occurred. We had Secretary Perry and General Shalikashvili, the two top people representing the President and his programs to send troops into Bosnia on the ground. They testified. During their testimony, Secretary Perry was talking about all the peace that has existed in the Tuzla area, that northeast sector of Bosnia; General Shalikashvili was talking about how similar and what a fine job they have done in the training of our troops in the very famous 6- by 12- mile box in Germany and how that so nearly equated to the actual environment in Bosnia. When it came time to cross-examine, I asked General Shalikashvili, ``Are you aware that the conditions in which you are training these people do not even resemble the conditions in the northeast sector?'' He said, ``No.'' I said, ``Tell me when the last time you were there was.'' At that we discovered, Mr. President, that the man who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the architect of the program to send Americans in on the ground in Bosnia, had never been to that part of Bosnia where he is proposing to send our troops. When Secretary Perry talked about the peace that had been in effect there I asked him a question. I said, ``I was in the Tuzla area. I wore a shrapnel jacket. I wore a helmet. We could hear the automatic weapons going off. This is supposedly during a cease-fire. Where is this peace you are talking about, and when is the last time you, Secretary Perry, were in Bosnia?'' He said he had never been there, either. For the first time I realized why there is such a disregard for the hostility of the area that we are talking about sending our troops in. It is because they have not even been there. I just want to serve notice and make sure that all Senators can be thinking about how they will vote on a very simple straight-up resolution that merely says we disapprove of the President's program to send ground troops into Bosnia. Of course that does not mean we are disapproving support of the troops. We support our troops wherever they might be. I think we can certainly perform air operations that would be of support to that exercise, without endangering the lives of our Americans. Back on the budget, I am convinced that this is our last time in my lifetime that we will have to correct a problem that began in the 1960's, that those individuals--the liberals here in this body and the other body and the President of the United States--are trying to hold on to, as I said before, with white knuckles. I commend the Senator from Idaho for all the efforts he has made and the leadership he has shown in this effort.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. INHOFE. Are we in morning business, Mr. President?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I, like many people, have been distressed over the weekend listening to a lot of the comments as to what is going on in Bosnia, and this seems to be--and it is portrayed by this administration that it is--a done deal. Many Republicans and many Democrats are also saying that it is a done deal; that the troops are going to go; the President has made up his mind. The President, back in February 1993, made a commitment of 25,000 American troops on the ground in Bosnia, and he has decided they are going to go. So I guess the easy thing is to say, well, the President made the decision; I may not agree with it or I may agree with it but nonetheless the decision is made, and we want to support our troops that are over there. I am really getting tired of the demagoging that is going on about supporting the troops that are over there, as if this thing is a done deal. I grant you, Mr. President, I agree that the President of the United States does have the constitutional right to deploy troops. I think it is wrong, and historically it has not been done. The Presidents have come to the American people and have come through Congress for resolutions of approval, and this President has chosen not to do this. Of course, I will remind all America that the House of Representatives, the other body, has already on two occasions expressed itself in a very, very strong vote in opposition to the deployment of ground troops to Bosnia. So we turn on the talk radio shows and we look at the news accounts, and they say, well, it is already a done deal and Congress has no role; Congress is not relevant in this debate. I just do not buy that. I think this is still America, and the American people can be heard, and the best way for the American people to be heard is through their elected representatives. I think we have just a few hours to stop this thing. I am talking now about the mass deployment. Yes, the President has already sent several hundred troops into the area of Tuzla, which is the northeastern sector, in which I had occasion to spend quite a bit of time, and I see an environment which is the most hostile environment that perhaps we have ever had the occasion to deploy any American troop into in the history of this country. We talk about and can identify that there are more than 6 million mines of all shapes and sizes that are out there, and you cannot do anything about rendering those mines harmless because the ground is now frozen and they will not appear really until a heavy vehicle gets on top of them. Of course, we are talking about the deployment of 130 M1 tanks and several other armored vehicles, so it is a very frightening thing. It is a frightening thing to think it is not just a matter of three factions that do not like each other in the former Yugoslavia. It is not just the Serbs and the Croats and the Moslems, because in addition to that you have the Bosnian Serbs, you have the Bosnian Moslems, you have the Arkan Tigers, you have the Black Swans, you have the Afghanistans, you have the Iranians. You have all of these, what we call rogue factions over there. And yet they say it is a done deal. I think it is too easy to say that. I hope that everyone in America will demand that their Senator get on record on this issue. Mr. President, we are going to give them the opportunity to get on record on this issue. Last week, I served notice that there is going to be an up-or-down vote on the sending of troops into Bosnia. It is not a matter of supporting our troops that are there. You bet we support them. I know something about being a troop. I used to be in a troop, and I wanted the support of the American people and got it. I think every Member of this Senate, every Member of the other body, is going to support our troops wherever they are. That is not the issue. That is a copout. The issue is, should they be over there to begin with? I can remember so well when Michael Rose, who was the commanding general of the troops, the U.N. troops, in Bosnia said, if America sends troops over there, they will have more casualties than they had in the Persian Gulf. That was 390. In the Senate Armed Services Committee, when I asked Secretary Perry and Secretary Christopher and General Shalikashvili--I said, ``Is that mission to contain a civil war and to protect the integrity of NATO worth more than 400 American lives?'' And Secretary Perry said yes; Secretary Christopher said yes; General Shalikashvili said yes. But I say no, because, you see, Mr. President, they were speaking on behalf of the President of the United States, the top people, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and, of course, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So now we say it is a done deal and that Congress is not relevant. But I say we are going to have a vote on this, and people are going to have to be responsible for it. I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, that at this point an editorial be printed in the Record, a December 1 editorial by Abraham Sofaer.

Mr. INHOFE. This is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who took the time to read the some 12 annexes that we have to this agreement that has been initialed and all that was said. We realize the responsibility that we have in the United States for this so-called peacekeeping effort. But stop and think. This is not peacekeeping; this is peace implementation. There is a little thing called mission creep. We saw it in Vietnam. We saw it in Somalia. It is a thing where you go in and tell the American people, ``We are just keeping peace. There is no war on over there.'' Mr. President, I was in the northeast sector of Bosnia. There is a war going on over there. The firing did not stop. The firepower is going on right now. You can hear it. You are walking around with a shrapnel jacket and helmet. You are not doing that to keep warm even though you are doing anything you can to keep warm in that area. There was a blizzard 3 weeks ago when I was there. Nonetheless, when this scholar read the accords, not only are we responsible for implementing, that is, making peace; but we also are responsible for rebuilding the infrastructure. This $2 billion they bandy around is not even a drop in the bucket of what we are going to have to spend if the President has his way and has a mass deployment into Bosnia. I had a telephone conversation not more than just 10 minutes ago with a retired captain, Jim Smith, who lost his leg in Vietnam and lost his son in Somalia. His son was one of those soldiers, one of those 18 Rangers that were sent over there originally for some type of a humanitarian mission that was supposed to open up the roads so we could send humanitarian goods in to some of the Somalian people. Yes, that seemed to be a good idea. It was a 45-day mission to start with. Then President Clinton was elected. I was serving in the other body at the time, and every month we sent a resolution that said, ``Mr. President, bring our troops home from Somalia. We do not have anything at stake there in terms of our Nation's security.'' He did not do it and did not do it and did not do it until finally 18 of our Rangers were murdered in cold blood, their corpses were mutilated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. And one of those corpses was Cpl. Jim Smith, the son of Capt. Jim Smith. I talked to Capt. Jim Smith, who spent a career in the military and knows a lot more about it than I do. Captain Smith said there are so many parallels between what happened to his [[Page S 17880]] son and what is going to happen to many other sons and daughters if we allow the mass deployment of troops into Bosnia. He said one of the things that stuck in his mind was the last letter that he got from his son, Cpl. Jim Smith, who said, ``Dad, the biggest problem we have is we don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are.'' This was in Somalia. This was one of the last letters, maybe the last letter, written by Cpl. Jim Smith before his body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. He said, ``We don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are.'' That is exactly what happened 2\1/2\ years ago when President Clinton made the first decision for airdrops. I asked the person--and I cannot use his name in this public forum because it was a restricted meeting-- I said, ``How do you know when we drop the stuff whether it's going to get to the good guys or the bad guys?'' He scratched his head and said, ``You know, I don't think we know that. Come to think of it, I'm not sure we know who the good guys and the bad guys are.'' That is because if you take a snapshot of any time in the history of Bosnia or the former Yugoslavia, you will find that at one time the Croats are the bad guys and the Serbs are the good guys; another time the Moslems have just finished butchering several thousand people, they are the bad guys, the Croats are the good guys. Most recently we assume the Serbs are the bad guys, so we, under the direction of President Clinton, chose sides in that civil war. At that time, many of us said, as soon as they do airdrops, then there will be airstrikes, and then they will want to send troops in. And that is exactly what has happened. So this not over. It is not a done deal. I know the President right now is on a wave. His numbers look good. Mr. President, I can understand that, because you are an excellent politician. You just came back from Europe. You were talking about how everyone was cheering you over there. No wonder they are cheering over in Europe. You are saying we are committing 70 percent of the cost for this, and we are committing 30 percent of our troops to fight with your other troops, to fight your battles for you. That is not our battle over there. That is relative to the security interests of Western Europe and Eastern Europe, not the United States. I saw the accounts on television when President Clinton was talking to the troops over there. I can remember when I was a troop, so I know how a troop thinks. When I was over there talking to those same troops just a few days before the President was there, they had one question. They said, ``What is our mission? Why are we going to this hostile area? Why is the President obsessed in sending us into Bosnia?'' I only say this today. I know we are out of time, Mr. President. I just want to say that it is not over yet. I reemphasize there will be no free rides. There is going to be a vote. Most likely it will be Wednesday, not the vote that the leader has that is going to be a watered-down version of conciliatory remarks about what has gone on over there and about protecting our troops. We all know we are going to support our troops. But this is going to be a vote on, Are we going to have a mass deployment of troops into Bosnia? Yes or no. And every Senator on this floor is going to have to make a record and stand up and say how he feels so that the people at home will know. I do not know, Mr. President, how your calls are coming in in your office back in Tennessee. But I can tell you what mine are in Oklahoma. They are about 100 to 1 against it. That is because there is an infinite wisdom of the people of this country once left alone to make up their mind and make that judgment. It is not a beltway decision. It is not a Washington, DC, decision. It is not the kind of wisdom you get in the White House or within the beltway. It is back in real America where real people, real fathers and mothers are, sons and daughters who are going to be over there, shipped over to this endless war in Bosnia. It is not going to be 12 months, Mr. President. When we were up in the area of Tuzla where our troops are going to be deployed, I said something about 12 months, and they all laughed. They said, ``You mean 12 years.'' This is the time for it to be stopped. If Somalia had been stopped before the murder of the 18 Rangers over there and their mutilated bodies were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, that would not have happened. This is the time to stop this before the mutilated bodies of Americans are dragged through the streets of Tuzla. I yield the floor. Mr. DeWINE addressed the Chair.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. The Senator from Wyoming, since he was in the Sarajevo area, I am sure observed the same thing I did. Keep in mind, this is the area where there has been fighting only in the last week, since this accord, if that is what it is, has been initialed. The problem that I see over there is that there is no way to define who the other side is in Sarajevo. In Sarajevo, we have a convolution of parties that have come in and taken up the vacuum that has been left by the pounding of the various dwellings--the single-family dwellings and apartment buildings--in Sarajevo. The true inhabitants of those dwellings, those wonderful people who were there during the winter Olympics, are not there anymore, and the ones who are in there now are refugees. We do not know where they came from. We do not know if they are Serbs, Croatians, or any other, perhaps rogue, element. So it makes it that much more difficult. Before yielding to the Senator from Georgia, let me just make one other comment about something that the Senator from Wyoming said. He used the term ``peacekeeping.'' I suggest to you now that they are not using peacekeeping. If there is ever a classic area for mission creep, this is it, because we have already crept from peacekeeping to peace implementation. There is a big difference between peacekeeping and peace implementation. Peacekeeping is an assumption that there is peace to keep. We know there is not peace to keep. The President stood and he said the war is over, we are in a cease-fire. I stood in Tuzla and heard areas where the war is not over. There is firing up there. The President has not been there so perhaps he does not know and perhaps his advisers are not adequately advising. Before we go back to a budget discussion, I want to state again what I stated yesterday. I may be one last Senator standing alone, but I am going to fight with every fiber of my being to stop the President from this obsession he has been living with for a year and a half, and that is to send American troops on the ground in Bosnia. Conclusion I am very concerned with the discussion we were having earlier about what is happening in our budget battle. I guess I will sign off by stating at least my position. We passed a good bill, the Balanced Budget Act of 1995, through this body and through the other body. It is one that is consistent with the mandates of the election of 1994, and I do believe that we have done a good job. I certainly encourage the President to use the guidelines he committed to during the last CR--that is, a balanced budget in 7 years using real numbers--and come up with something that is acceptable. At this point, I yield the floor. Mr. COVERDELL addressed the Chair.

Mr. INHOFE. Yes.

Mr. INHOFE. I will yield.

Mr. INHOFE. That is exactly what is happening, I would respond to the Senator from Wyoming. I am particularly sensitive to this because I serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Let us take this out of a partisan realm, because I opposed--it was George Bush, not Bill Clinton, who originally sent troops into Somalia. I was opposed to it at that time. It was supposed to be, as I recall, a 45-day humanitarian mission to open up the routes so we could send humanitarian goods in. Then, of course, he went out of office. President Clinton came in. And each month--and the Senator from Wyoming will remember this because he and I were both serving in the other body when this happened--each month we sent a resolution to the President saying, bring back our troops from Somalia. We did not have any strategic interest there that related to our Nation's security. And he did not do it. And he did not do it. And he did not do it. It was not until 18 of our Rangers were brutally murdered in Somalia and their corpses dragged through the streets of Mogadishu that the people finally stood up and said, ``We have had enough,'' and we brought them home. I do not want that to happen in Bosnia. But the Senator is exactly right, the President sends these troops all over the world. Then he comes back for an emergency supplemental. That puts us in the position that, if we do not vote for the emergency supplemental which might violate everything we are trying to do with our budget balancing effort, he will take the amount of money out of the existing military budget, which is already down to the bare bones anyway. We went through this in this Chamber just a few weeks a ago, a $1.4 billion emergency supplemental to take care of all these Haiti and Somalia episodes. Now there is some talk about the cost of this war in Bosnia. They are trying to say it is between $1.5 and $2 billion. The cost figures that I get are far greater than that. There have been many people who have evaluated that and come up with figures from $4.5 to $6 billion. So there is a dollar consideration here as well as a human life consideration. The Senator is exactly right, we are being put in a situation where the people of this Nation cannot be heard in decisions as critical as risking American lives in a war-infested place like Bosnia. We are irrelevant. It does not matter what we say or do. This is what the President apparently is telling us. But I was going to go back in history to 1991 just for a moment to read some of the arguments that I heard from the other side of the aisle. I repeat again, there are not going to be any free rides on this thing because we are going to have recorded votes. I will not mention the names of all of them because I do not think doing so would serve any useful purpose, but these are mostly in the leadership of the Democrat side, those who I understand are going to be supporting the President in his effort to send 25,000 or more troops into that war- infested area. ``Some argue that we must go''--this is 1991. This is when we had security interests in the Persian Gulf. ``Some argue that we must go to prevent a coalition from falling apart. I disagree. The use of American military should not be a substitute for the weakness of any coalition. America is not 911 for every problem.'' I would say there is no more accurate statement that could describe what has been happening up in Dayton, OH, for the last several weeks. Here is one here. It says, ``The worst-case scenario''--again 1991, Democrats arguing against sending troops into the Persian Gulf. ``The worst-case scenario could have us losing thousands and thousands of young Americans. The worst-case scenario could have us bogged down for months and months and maybe years. This is not an easy war to be fought. And this is not a war that ought to be fought.'' If there is any war that should not be fought, it is the war in the Balkans. We do not even know who the good guys and the bad guys are. If this were a snapshot in history, 50 years ago it would be the Croats, not the Serbs, that would be the bad guys. And you could go to any other time in history and find that to be true. This is another prominent Democrat who made this statement on the floor of this body. ``I cannot back a policy I believe is ill-advised, when Americans' lives hang in the balance, just for the sake of displaying a united front.'' Is that not the argument we have been hearing? We have to have this united front, we have to protect the integrity of NATO at any cost, particularly American lives, at any financial cost. We heard yesterday the distinguished Senator from Alaska talking about that so far we have funded 70 percent of the cost of the efforts over there in the Balkans, and yet we are farther away than anybody else in the alliance. Here is one that I think is one of the best. It says, ``But do these goals''--1991--``qualify as a sufficient reason to suffer the tragic loss of American life, especially before we have exhausted every available alternative? My deep conviction is no, no they do not. I cannot look my 17-year-old son and my 19-year-old daughter in the eye and say, `Moving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, obtaining the necessary oil from the Persian Gulf, protecting our allies or saving jobs is worth your life.' I cannot say that. If at this time I cannot say that to them, how in good conscience can I say it to a mother or a father? How can I say it to a sister or brother?'' I came back from that northeast sector of Bosnia, around the Tuzla area, and I stopped on the way back at the 1st Armored Division training area in Germany, where I think the Senator from Wyoming has been. And he probably talked to some of the troops, as I did. I went by and had breakfast in the mess hall with these guys and gals who were being trained in that 12-by-6 mile box that they said is supposed to emulate the terrain of Bosnia. It did not look anymore like the terrain of Bosnia than the hill around Washington, DC does. But they are out there training. They are getting good training. They are preparing themselves mentally to be deployed, but they are saying: ``We haven't been told yet why we're going.'' I think in all fairness to the officials and those officers who are in charge over there--and I have the utmost respect for General Yates and General Nash--that they themselves do not have a clear understanding of what their mission is. The President, in his very eloquent, persuasive speech 3 days ago, said we have a clear and concise mission, but he never told us what that mission was. He never told us what the rules of engagement were. I do not think--I suspect--our own troops, the ones over there today, do not really have a well-defined understanding of what our rules of engagement are. We hear about the conditions under which we can withdraw, like 12 months, a time condition, systemic violations. What is a systemic violation to a corporal out in the field who gets fired upon? Does that firepower come from a Serb element or from a Croatian element, or maybe from one of these rogue elements or a Moslem element? He will not have any way of knowing, and yet that could, in fact, be a systemic violation, because a systemic violation--which they have not yet defined--I have to assume it is something systemic, meaning the entire element is acting as a group--whether it be the Croats, Serbs, or Moslems--and are breaking the peace accord. Well, I do not think there is any way of determining how that could be enforced.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I wholeheartedly agree with the Senator from Wyoming. I have to say also that the people of Oklahoma, a lot of times--say you are reading these polls, and people are saying, well, we really do not want to balance the budget yet; let us wait until the President gets back; we do not want to be too harsh. There is a myth that is floating around that we are going to be cutting Medicare when in fact we are saving Medicare, and without our doing that, according to his own board of trustees, Medicare would go under. I believe that when I go back, as I do every weekend, to Oklahoma and I talk to what I refer to--and it has offended several people in this Chamber--as real people, they tell me that they do not want us to back down. They say that this is our opportunity to have a balanced budget. I can stand on the floor of this Senate and say in my honest opinion this is the last opportunity probably in my lifetime that we will have to have a balanced budget. And if we cave in now, we are not going to be able to have it. I do not think we will have another chance. And I think the President has every intention of having us cave in because he has a lot of discretionary programs he wants to keep funding. He is holding on to the past with white knuckles, to the last 30 years of reckless spending that has brought us where we are today, and he is trying to use the very sensitive argument that we cannot do this to all these people, that there are all these programs that are going to be cut, which are not going to be cut. I would say that if you want to make a moral issue out of this, the moral issue is to go ahead with this, with the Balanced Budget Act of 1995, which passed in this Chamber and they passed in the House of Representatives, and get this passed because if we do not do it, we know what we are subjecting our future generations to. Many Members in this body are much younger than I am, and they have young families. I have grandchildren coming up now. One is due any minute now. If we do not change the trend that we established in the 1960's and that has continued until today, a person born today is going to have to pay 82 percent of his or her lifetime income just to service the Government. I do not think that is what we want. I know that is not what the American people want. But some people just do not want to change. Some people refuse to look at the elections and the postelection analyses and polls that said very distinctly that the American people in November 1994 voted for a change, a change from the Great Society programs of the 1960's that have been perpetuating themselves and growing ever since then. So I think this is the last chance we have. This is our last stand. I encourage the negotiators to keep that in mind. I am talking about Republicans and Democrats. It is too important to future generations. U.S. Troops in Bosnia It is ironic now that we have two things that are going on that are very, very critical to all of America, not just this budget matter that we have been talking about--and the distinguished Senator from Wyoming is right when he draws the attention to the significance of what is going on--but something else is happening, too. My frustration, which I have expressed in the Chamber every day for the last several days, is that while the President is out rejoicing in his new posture of being the international peacemaker in Belfast and other places, time is going by and American troops as we speak are being sent to Bosnia. It goes all the way back to 2\1/2\ years ago when this President made a decision to do airdrops into Bosnia. I can remember serving in the other body at that time and asking the question: You are doing airdrops. How do you know that the stuff you are dropping is going to the good guys instead of the bad guys? And the response in that committee meeting was: ``Well, we do not know.'' There was a hesitation. This was the military talking: ``I am not sure that we know who the good guys and the bad guys are.'' I think if you take any snapshot in the history of Bosnia over the last 500 years, you could come to the conclusion legitimately that the Serbs are the bad guys or the Croats are the bad guys or even the Moslems are the bad guys. If you look at what has happened in the last week over there, people have been killed, tortured; there have been uprisings. I read from several articles yesterday of the hostile area and what is happening over there. The mayor of a town not far from where the Senator was when he was over there said, speaking in behalf of the people--we hear a lot of the military, of the three known factions and of the rogue groups that are over there but these are civilians--he says, ``We will still fight, and if the multinational force tries to drive us from our homes or take away our right to defend ourselves, there will be no authority on Earth, including the Serbian authorities, that can stop us. We will not leave, we will not withdraw, and we will not live under Moslem rule.'' This is coming from an area that is going to be under Moslem rule if this initial peace accord would take place. And you have another big group, too, not just those who have found happy homes and feel that they ought to be able to stay in those homes. You also have what I have been stating as 3 million, but I know the conservative figure is 2 million, refugees that we can identify in those areas, and they are scattered throughout Bosnia. We have heard from all of the sources--our Embassy people, the military people, U.N. people, Gen. Rupert Smith, the British general who is in charge of the U.N. forces in Bosnia, as we speak--that more than 50 percent of these 2 million refugees, under the plan that we have here, will not be able to return to their homes. What does a refugee want to do? If you have peace, it means you get to go home. More than half of these will not get to go home. So you are going to have new rogue elements rising up. Just this morning in the newspapers--I will just read one part of an article here that said, ``The worst problem though is likely''--keep in mind this is an article that showed this morning 10 more American soldiers showed up. There are only 10. I understand that is not a very large number. But tomorrow it will be 10 more, the next day 10 more; then larger and larger numbers will be coming because that is the President's plan, as he hides over in Europe and allows more and more of our soldiers to go over to put us in a position where we have to support him to send ground troops in. The worst problem though is likely to be minefields. There are believed to be millions of mines of all shapes and sizes in the Tuzla region. There are mines everywhere. And neither side has maps. We have to move one centimeter at a time. This is a quote from the lieutenant colonel who works directly under General Haukland, the Norwegian general that I talked to in Tuzla. He also said that in the past 3 weeks his men have demined nearly 300 yards of road. Heavy snowfall will only complicate the problem. This is the very ground that I stood on 3 weeks ago in the Tuzla area. There are only two Members of Congress who went up into that area, Senator Hank Brown from Colorado and myself. We stood there. And I can tell you that there are mines there. These reports are accurate. That is where we are going to be having some 25,000 Americans up in that region. Yesterday we showed a map--and I said, I do not know who did the negotiating for the United States of America--where we ended up with the northeast sector, the most hostile area. But that is where we are. And we are there very clearly today. So, that is what we are faced with. And I think it is time to draw some other lines, too. I know that the President is over in Europe right now, believing that we are going to end up being able to vote to support his program. Let me just serve notice to the U.S. Senate at this time, there are not going to be any free rides on this deal. A lot of people are saying, well, let us have a weak resolution or wait until we have so many troops over there and say we are going to support our troops. Sure we are going to support our troops. But now is when we can make a decision and say, ``Mr. President, you are wrong. We do not want you to send ground troops into Bosnia.'' There is going to be a recorded vote. We might as well know it. By the way, I went back and did some research just this morning. If you remember back in 1991, when George Bush was President of the United States, George Bush wanted to send troops into the Persian Gulf. We all recognized that we did have strategic interests in the Persian Gulf. Our ability to fight a war was dependent upon our protecting those interests in the Persian Gulf. There are no strategic interests in Bosnia. But I would like to read some things. I am reading this for one reason; that is, that there was a lunch that took place just a couple days ago where the President talked to the Democrats of this Senate. And the word I got is they are all going to line up, that they all agreed that they would support the President in sending ground troops in.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to speak in morning business.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I have been listening to the Senator from Wyoming. He hit upon something here I do not think people are fully aware of or sensitive to, and that is the effect what we are doing here is having on the markets. We keep hearing if something happens, that there is an impasse, it is going to have a deteriorating effect. The markets have been very good. Interest rates are low. Things are going very well right now mostly because of the anticipation of the fact we are going to have a balanced budget. I can remember so well, as the Senator can remember, when we had the discussion on the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and we lost it by one or two votes and what happened to the markets after that and the devaluation of the dollar against the yen and the mark. The deterioration was unprecedented. And so I would suggest that what the Senator from Wyoming says is true. There is nothing we could do that would enhance the optimistic future of the economy than to go ahead and take this Balanced Budget Act of 1995 and pass it. I do not think most people are aware, Mr. President, that we have passed a Balanced Budget Act of 1995 which essentially does what the President committed to do during the last continuing resolution. It does provide for a balanced budget, and it uses real numbers, CBO numbers, those numbers that come from the Congressional Budget Office, which the President stood before a joint session of the legislature and said is the most reliable source that we can use, so we can end smoke and mirrors and we can handle what is out there. The thing that concerns me more than anything else, and I ask the Senator from Wyoming if he agrees, is that we have passed a budget. It does what the American people asked us to do in November of 1994. And the President does not have a budget. So while I am not in on the negotiations, how do you negotiate when you have a budget and the other side does not have one? I wondered if the Senator had figured that out yet.

Mr. INHOFE. I thank the Senator for yielding.

Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I think what has happened today, in my own view, as tragic as it might be, is refreshing to some of the American people, the people who feel this is a partisan place up here, where there is nothing but partisan politics, that the Republicans stand for something and the Democrats stand for something. But what we witnessed a short while ago should defuse that because we now have the majority leader of the United States Senate supporting the President in his effort in sending American troops into Bosnia on the ground. I listened briefly to the Senator from Texas, Senator Hutchison, and I concur in her remarks. There certainly are no two people I have higher regard for, in terms of their war record and patriotism, than the Senator from Arizona, Senator McCain, and the Senator from Kansas, the majority leader, Senator Dole. However, I think there is an honest difference of opinion here. I think what the President has been attempting to do seems to be working. But what the President has been doing is staying out of the fray until troops can be deployed long enough and far enough into Bosnia that it puts us in the position of where we are going to have to support the effort because we are supporting the troops. I do not buy that. I think you can support the troops--and I will always support the American troops, wherever they are, anywhere in the world. But if we have the option right now of stopping the deployment of troops into Bosnia, it is our moral responsibility to do that. And I believe that option is still there. I said this morning on this floor that there are not going to be any free rides on this one. We are going to have a vote, not a vote on a soft resolution saying, well, we oppose the effort but we support the troops, we are going to have a vote on whether or not we send our troops into Bosnia. The environment in Bosnia is not one the likes of which we have seen in any of the wars that we have been involved in because we have always been able to identify the enemy. You cannot identify the enemy. Sure, we have chosen sides. We have been supplying the Croatians and the Bosnian Moslems against the Serbs now for quite some time. I think perhaps that was not the right thing to do, but nonetheless we have taken sides. We have taken sides through our air attacks. Now it looks as if we are going to deploy troops over there to take sides. But who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? In this case we do not know. You might say, well, this year--any snapshot in history would give you a different answer to that question. There was a time when clearly the Croatians would have been the bad guys and a time when clearly the Serbs would have been the bad guys. But here we have more than just three major factions. We have many, many elements. We have rogue elements. And some of these elements are Serb elements, some are Moslem elements, such as the Black Swans. That is a rogue element. Nonetheless, they are there. We are sending troops into an environment where only in this morning's newspaper we see a quote from the guy who is working directly for the general with whom I have spoken in the very sector where we are proposing to send our troops, General Haukland from Norway, where they say that there are literally millions of mines all throughout that area--millions. Not 10, not 100, not 1,000--millions of mines of all sizes, all shapes. And we do not know where they are. They are now in a position where, even though they have been going centimeter by centimeter trying to defuse these mines, we are now in a position where the winter is setting in, the ground is frozen, the snows are coming, and there is not any way in the world that we are going to be able to protect our troops that are going over there from stepping on these mines. Remember, just a short while ago we were faced with a similar situation down in Nicaragua. And what were most of the losses? They were from mines. And the amputees were the result of what was happening. Now, that is what we are faced with again. Only in today's newspaper, this is happening right now. We have already sent troops over there. I know that the President is hiding out in Europe. He is going to stay there until we have more troops. Then he will come back and say, ``Now you have to go with me because we have to protect our troops that are over there.'' Madam President, our troops are not there yet. We only have a few there. But a lot are on their way. I went to the training area in Germany of the 1st Armored Division. I know they are training them to go. They are going to go up through Hungary and then come down south through the Posavina corridor and into the Tuzla area. When you look at that area, there has never been an area anywhere in the world that is so conducive to guerrilla warfare. There has never been an area in the world that has more guerrillas in it that are not identifiable. We have identified nine rogue elements that are there that are not even related in any way to anyone who was around the table in Dayton, OH. So, Madam President, I just wanted to be sure that it is crystal clear that I do not stand alone. There are many others who feel just as strongly as I do that we are going to do everything we can to stop this mass deployment of troops into Bosnia. It was a bad idea 2\1/2\ years ago when the President first started talking about it, when he took sides and started airdrops. It was a bad idea 1\1/2\ years ago when the President decided he was going to have airstrikes. And it is a bad idea today. And I will continue to do anything within my power to stop the deployment of troops into Bosnia. I yield the floor. Mr. NICKLES addressed the Chair.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, yesterday when I was on the floor I made some comments which I do not think were very clearly understood because I was assuming some people were aware of some of the problems that have existed since the initialing of the peace agreement in Bosnia. It has been very disturbing to me, after having been over there, to feel that most people are laboring under the misconception that there is in fact a peace. The President himself in his message to the Nation said, ``Now the war is over.'' I just wish the President would go over there and see that the war is not over. But since that time, there have been some articles which I would like to read, and then submit into the Record. One is from the Los Angeles Times of November 25, just a few days ago. ``On Friday, November 24, approximately 200 Bosnian Government troops looted a U.N. base in the Bihac''--that is right over here, Mr. President, on the Croatian border--``manned by a Bangladeshi battalion. They fired machine guns over the heads of the peacekeepers and carried off food, fuel, and equipment including nine armored vehicles. The 80 peacekeepers returned fire''--keep in mind that while all of this is happening they are firing and returning fire--``but were forced to retreat. The Bosnians were taking advantage of the imminent withdrawal of U.N. forces to make way for NATO troops''--which gives you an indication as to what would happen even if we were able to stop this obsession that the President of the United States has in sending troops into Bosnia and were able to try to get them withdrawn. Also, a Reuters publication on the same day, on Friday, the 24th, says, ``Also on Friday the 24th, U.N. officials reported that Croat forces burned and looted houses''--these are Croat forces--``in areas located in central and northwest Bosnia. Houses were burned and looted in the city of Gornji Vakuf''--which is this area right in here--``in central Bosnia and also in the cities of Mrkonjic Grad, and Sipovo''-- which is this area right in here. If you look, the major part of the activity is taking place in this section right of Bosnia. This is the section in which the United States would have forces. I have often wondered, and have not been able to get an answer from anyone, as to who drew these lots for us; why we have the French over here and the British over here, but we would be right here--virtually everything north of Sarajevo up to and including Tuzla, and a corridor that would go through here, which is one of the most contentious areas. This comes from the New York Times article of the 27th: ``On Sunday, November 26, angry groups of men stoned and flipped over U.N. vehicles passing through Serbian sections of Sarajevo.'' Sarajevo is an area that is divided up between Croats, Serbs, and Moslem forces, each with their own checkpoints. Also according to the New York Times: ``As of November 26, a total of 210 peacekeepers have been killed in the 4 years of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.'' Mr. President, these are identified as peacekeepers. If you will remember, one of the major concerns that we have is that the President is putting our forces into a situation that is ideal for what we call ``mission creep.'' That is, you go in with one idea. Say you are going to go in, as we are going in, to keep the peace. Obviously, there is no peace to keep. But still they call them ``peacekeepers.'' When the President made his speech he was very careful to use the word ``implementation.'' So it has already crept from peacekeeping to peace ``implementation.'' The Times article goes on: ``In Bosnia itself, 107 have been killed, most by the former Serbs but some by the Muslims. Serbs have repeatedly used peacekeepers as hostages to secure their aims.'' Further, in the same article: ``In the past NATO has been able to respond to attacks on peacekeepers with air strikes on Serbian artillery and other positions. Now this is less of an option because the multinational troops will be mingled with the civilian population especially in places like Sarajevo, where about 10,000 troops are to be deployed.'' ``The NATO operation is billed as one where superior Western firepower will obliterate any obstacles. But the NATO led force will not be threatened mainly by organized resistance, but by angry women and children, lone snipers and renegade bands of armed men determined to thwart a plan that would drive them from their homes and negate all they have fought to achieve.'' We are talking about people who have fought each other for nearly 4 years. And I stood on the streets of Sarajevo and saw those areas where they have pounded the residential areas and have obliterated them. Many of the people who are there now are not the people who lived in Sarajevo before. They were not there back during the Winter Olympics that we remember so fondly in such a beautiful thriving city as Sarajevo then was. They are people who came in there as refugees. Once the people were driven from their homes, they were no longer livable for individuals who had those homes, and now refugees have come in. So we are dealing now with two groups of people that are going to be problems--assuming that we are successful in going in there to achieve some type of peace. Col. Thierry Cambournac of NATO, deputy sector commander of Sarajevo, said he feared that the soldiers could get drawn into conflicts in urban areas [[Page S 17759]] they will patrol. A quote from the colonel: ``Our biggest concern is the population in these areas will revolt.'' Their concern is not whether one of the organized factions, whether it is Croats or Serbs or the Moslems, are going to be a problem. It is instead the people who have been driven from their homes. In fact, the mayor of this suburb said, and this is a direct quote, ``We will still fight, and if the multinational force tries to drive us from our homes, or take away our right to defend ourselves, there will be no authority on Earth''--no authority on Earth--``including the Serbian authorities, that can stop us. We will not leave, we will not withdraw, and we will not live under Muslim rule.'' Now, we get back to the two groups of people, the groups of people that have fought for homes. And what does that mean when they have a peace? They assume they can continue to live in their homes. But, no, that is not the way this works because if they happen to be a Serbian family in a home that is now designated by this group that met in Ohio as a Croatian area, then they will be driven from their homes. I used to be the mayor of a major city in America, Tulsa, OK. You do not make statements like this unless you mean it. He says we will not leave. So we now have a new faction, rogue faction if you will, that will develop from people who are living in homes, fought for homes they feel are theirs now, and now we come along and say, ``You have to move.'' What is the other group? We hear about 2 million refugees that are scattered all throughout this region. I think it is closer to 3 million. When I was over there, they were identifying close to 3 million refugees, but let us be conservative and say 2 million refugees. These are people who have been driven from their homes--a second group of people. These people were driven from their homes. When they hear there is a peace accord, what does that mean to a refugee? It means he can go home. So what happens to those people? Are they Serbs? Are they Bosnian Serbs? Are they Moslems? Are they Croats? We do not know. And it does not really matter what they are because they are going to become rogue elements. Our intelligence community has already identified nine rogue elements. We have the Iranians; the mujaheddin; we know they are in there right now; we have the Black Swans which are mostly Moslems; we have the Arkan Tigers; we have special forces. So, Mr. President, we are not dealing with three people sitting around a table in Dayton, OH, agreeing about what they are going to do. I seriously doubt that the star of that show, the one who was supposed to be the most difficult to swing into a peace posture, Milosevic, is really speaking on behalf of those Serbs in Bosnia because those people are considered Bosnian Serbs, and they consider themselves to be independent. When I was in Sarajevo, there is a little town located right here called Pale. This is the town where they supposedly had the Christian Science Monitor journalist who had been held hostage for a period of time, and we were getting ready to go over there to help bring him back when we found out in fact he was not there. But one thing we did learn is that when you close those checkpoints, you are in another world, and those people do not have their allegiance to Milosevic. They do not have their allegiance to Tudjman or in many cases even Karadzic because they are people who are now holding themselves out to be independent. So I would just repeat to the President, who in his speech said the words ``the war isn't over,'' I have yet to find--there are only two Members of Congress, to my knowledge, who have been up into this northeast sector, the sector where the President is proposing to send-- and as we are speaking today is sending--American troops on the ground. They are Senator Hank Brown from Colorado and myself. Yesterday, we had a chance to address the Senate about what has really happened up there. It is not very pretty. In fact, we went via British helicopter, at very low attitude, never getting over 1000 feet, in a blizzard, all the way from Sarajevo up to the Tuzla area, going back and forth, and really being able to look very carefully at all of this land. Everything between Sarajevo and Tuzla is not like the Rocky Mountains, not like we think of mountainous regions. It is straight up and down. There is no way you could have even any kind of a light armored vehicle penetrate and travel through those roads, leave alone 120 M1 tanks they are talking about bringing from Hungary, down across the Posavina corridor and into the Tuzla area. Once they go into the Tuzla area, the terrain will not allow them to go any further. We have seen articles, many of which I have here, published recently about the mines, about the roads. They talk about the roads coming down from Hungary into the Tuzla area where 120 M1 tanks--there is only one bridge in the entire area that is going to be able to hold up an M1 tank. Up in Tuzla, General Haukland, a Norwegian general who was in charge up there, said that another element that you are going to have hostile are the very people we are supposedly trying to protect and trying to achieve peace for. Those are the individuals who will be mad because we have torn the roads up, the same roads they need for commerce and freedom of movement. I have never seen a proposed mission as doomed for failure as this one. We do not know who the enemy is. We are dealing with the mentality of people who fire on their own troops, murder their own people so they can blame somebody else. I do not know why anyone would not come to the conclusion that, if you are going to fire on your own troops so you can blame some other faction, you would certainly fire on American troops trying to remove you from your home. It is my understanding--from the sketchy information we get from the agreement that has been initialed--that there are two conditions under which we will withdraw our troops. One is at the end of 12 months. Now, since I have not heard anything to the contrary since the Senate Armed Services Committee met, when we had Secretary Christopher and Secretary Perry and General Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all said that in 12 months we will be out of there. And I asked the question, you mean we are going to be out of there regardless? If we are in the middle of a huge war, if we have entrenched ourselves within the civil war that has been going on for 500 years, we are about to win it, and that 12 months is over, we withdraw? Absolutely, they said, we are going to withdraw in 12 months, and it is over. I do not think there is anyone who has studied military history who can point to a time when we have had a time deadline as to when a withdrawal will take place. It is supposed to be event-oriented: After this happens and this happens and we are successful, then we will withdraw. That is not what we are saying. We are saying we will withdraw in 12 months. The other condition is withdrawal in the event of ``systemic violations.'' Mr. President, I have asked for many times a definition of ``systemic violation.'' What is a systemic violation? The administration speaks in vague terms about this. They say if you take the Croats or take the Serbs or take the Moslems as the three major factions, and if it is obvious that one faction is going to break the peace accord that we assume is going to be signed and is going to be acknowledged, then that would constitute a systemic violation. Well, we already know that there are nine or perhaps more rogue elements out there. How is our soldier, who has been trained over in Germany to fight in this type of terrain, how is this soldier who is fired upon going to know whether that firepower is coming from the Croats, the Serbs, the Moslems or is coming from some irate families who do not want to leave their homes or from some refugees who want to go home or the Black Swans or the Arkan Tigers or the mujaheddin? This is the problem we have here. Nobody can answer these questions. And yet systemic violation means we pick up our toys and go home. And what is going to happen on the road home? The same thing that you are seeing over here as we are making a transformation from a U.N. peacekeeping operation to a NATO operation that has not been well- defined. They are firing on so-called ``peacekeeping'' troops. And we are not really sure who will be firing on our troops. Now, if it [[Page S 17760]] could happen now during a cease-fire, it certainly can happen later. I have been disturbed for 2 years about this because 2 years ago--and I do not think it served any useful purpose--when I was serving in the other body, serving on the House Armed Services Committee, one of the top individuals came in and said that one of the first things that President Clinton said when he came into office was that he wanted to do airdrops into Bosnia. And I asked the question, in this closed meeting at that time--it is all right to talk about it now--I said, ``Well, let me ask you a question. They have been fighting over there with all these rogue elements, with all these factions. How do you know, if we are dropping our stuff in there, if it will be in the hands of the good guys instead of the bad guys?'' The answer of this official was, ``Well, we don't know.'' Then he hesitated and looked over and said, ``You know, I'm not sure we know who the good guys and the bad guys are.'' We have clearly taken sides. We are now saying that we are in a peace implementation posture where we are supposed to be neutral. We are going in with a NATO force that is declared to be neutral, yet we have taken sides clearly against the Serbs. That is where our air attacks have gone. I think it would be very difficult for us to go in and say we are truly neutral in this case. I guess the reason that I am going to continue talking about this for as long as we are in session is that each hour that goes by, Mr. President, we become more in peril. More of our American lives are endangered because, as we are speaking today, they are taking the troops--the troops that have been trained and the advanced troops who are going in for logistics purposes--and they have already been deployed from Germany up to Hungary, down south toward the Tuzla area that has been assigned to us, having to go through such hostile areas as this part of Croatia, this part of Serbia and, of course, the Posavina corridor which we already talked about. That means that if it is an hour after this or a day after this, there are going to be several more--how many are there right now? I am embarrassed to tell you, Mr. President, I do not know. I am a Member of the U.S. Senate. I am a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I am a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and yet I do not know. And it is a highly guarded secret. We read different articles in the newspapers about how many are over there. We hear calls from people at home that say that they have heard from their son or daughter who is being deployed or was deployed 2 or 3 days ago. And there is no way of knowing. But we do know this: That the clear strategy of the President of the United States is to get as many American troops over there as possible before there is any vote that takes place in this Senate so that he will put us in a position of voting against our troops that are on the ground, which he knows we do not want to do. And so he is holding us hostage in Congress. One thing we have not talked about is the cost of all of this. Talk about being held hostage. We have gone through these humanitarian gestures in Sarajevo and Haiti and all the rest of the things that are part of President Clinton's foreign policy. And while we do not authorize them, they come around later and say now we have to have an emergency supplemental appropriation. We passed one out of this body a few weeks ago for $1.4 billion. And that was for the things that were taking place in Haiti and Somalia. And those were exercises that we opposed in a bipartisan way in both the House and the Senate. So I anticipate that if the President is successful, as it appears he is going to be--it may be a fait accompli. Maybe it has already happened. Maybe we cannot stop it. So our troops are going to be sent out over there, not 20,000, not 25,000; we know it will be closer to 40,000 or 50,000, at least. Then we will be faced one of these days with a supplemental appropriation request for not $1.5 billion but for, according to the Heritage Foundation and some other groups, somewhere between $3 billion and $6 billion. It means if we do not then appropriate that in an emergency supplemental appropriation, it is going to come out of the military budget. And we are already operating our military on a budget that is of the level of 1980, when we could not afford spare parts. So, Mr. President, I want to impress upon this body that the war is not over over there, that they are killing people today as we speak, that all this hostility is taking place in these areas, along with all we know about in the sector referred to as the northeast U.N. sector where we will have our troops. I have been up there. I do not think there is one person so far who has been north of Sarajevo and up through Tuzla who says that we should send young American lives into that area. I have never personally seen any more hostile area in my life. I have never seen anything that looks like that. There is no way we can use the armored vehicles. And it is very easy to understand now, in studying our history of World War II, how the former Yugoslavia was able to, at a ratio of 1 to 8, hold off the very finest that Hitler had because of this very unique area of cliffs and caves, this hostile environment, where the President of the United States is sending our young soldiers. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I am very much concerned about it, and I know we are using up more time than we should. Let me just conclude and speak only for myself. I have listened to the President. I thought the President would come out with something new that has not already been part of the debate. There was not one new argument or element introduced into the debate in the President's statement last night. In the absence of that, knowing that each hour that goes by the President is deploying more Americans into that hostile area, I have to get on record right here in this body, Mr. President, as saying I will fight with every fiber of my being to stop the President from sending troops in on the ground into Bosnia.