1998 Ron Paul 17:1
Mr. PAUL.
I thank the gentleman. You made some very good
points. I would like to follow up on the
one point with regards to the military. That is one of the most essential function
of the Federal Government, is to
provide for a strong national defense. But if we intervene carelessly around
the world, that serves to weaken us.
1998 Ron Paul 17:2
I have always lamented the fact that
we so often are anxious to close down
our bases here within the United
States because we’re always looking
for the next monster to slay outside of
the country, so we build air bases in
places like Saudi Arabia. And then when
the time comes that our leaders think
that it’s necessary to pursue a war
policy in the region, they don’t even
allow us to use the bases. So I think that
is so often money down the drain. It’s
estimated now that we have probably
pumped in $7 billion into Bosnia and
that is continuing. Our President is
saying now that that is open-ended,
there’s no date to bring those troops
back. We have already spent probably a
half a billion additional dollars these
last several weeks just beefing up the
troops in the Persian Gulf.
1998 Ron Paul 17:3
So the funds will not be endless. I have
too many calls from so many in my
district who serve in the military, and
their complaint is that they do not
have enough funds to adequately train. So we’re wasting money in the wrong
places, getting ourselves into more
trouble than we need to. At the same
time we detract from spending the
money where we should in training our
personnel the way they should be. So I
think this is not so much a tactical decision
made by management as much
as it’s a policy decision on what our
foreign policy ought to be.
1998 Ron Paul 17:4
If we continue to believe that we can
police the whole world and provide security
and right every wrong, I think it
will lead us to our bankruptcy, and
just as was mentioned earlier, we receive
the same kind of grief when we
pretend that we can impose economic
conditions on other countries.
1998 Ron Paul 17:5
We, as a wealthy Nation, are expected
to bail out other countries who
have overextended themselves and they
get into trouble. At the same time, we
put economic rules and regulations on
them and resentments are turned back
toward us. The Arabs in the Middle
East do not understand our foreign policy
because there have been numerous
U.N. resolutions, but it’s only this one
particular resolution that we have felt
so compelled to enforce.
1998 Ron Paul 17:6
And the real irony of all this is that
first we use the United Nations as the
excuse to go in. Then, the United Nations
gets a little weak on their mandates,
and they themselves don’t want
to go in. So it’ a U.N. resolution that
we try to enforce, and then when it’s
shown that it is not a good resolution,
the U.N. then backs away from it. So
there is no unanimous opinion in the
U.N., I think further proving that this
is a poor way to do foreign policy.
1998 Ron Paul 17:7
And those who would like to do more
bombing and pursue this even more aggressively
tend to agree with that. They do not like the idea that we have
turned over our foreign policy making
to an international body like the
United Nations.
1998 Ron Paul 17:8
So this, to me, is a really good time
to make us stop and think should we
do this? I certainly think that our foreign
policy in the interests of the
United States should be determined by
us here in the Congress, and then some
will argue, well, it’s not up to Congress
to deal in foreign policy. That’s
up to a President. But that is not what
is in the Constitution.
1998 Ron Paul 17:9
Matter of fact, foreign policy,
those words do not even exist in the
Constitution, and the Congress has all
the responsibility of raising funds,
spending funds, raising an army, declaring
war, so the responsibilities are
on us.
1998 Ron Paul 17:10
And this is the reason why I have introduced
a resolution that would say
that we do have the authority to withdraw
the funds from pursuing this
bombing, and there is another resolution
that the gentleman from Maryland
will mention here shortly dealing
with that same subject, because we do
have the responsibility, and we, especially
in the House, are closest to the
people.
1998 Ron Paul 17:11
We have to be up for reelection every
2 years, and if we listen to the polls
that say that 70 percent of the American
people want this war, at the same
time if we fail to go home and talk to
our people and find out that most
Americans don’t want this war and
there is no good argument for it.
1998 Ron Paul 17:12
The whole idea that we can immediately
go over there and make sure
there are no weapons of mass destruction
when we helped build the weapons
up in the first place, and if we are really
concerned about weapons of mass destruction,
why aren’t we more concerned
about the 25,000 nuclear warheads
that have fallen into unknown
hands since the breakup of the Soviet
Union? Our allies in the Middle East
have nuclear weapons, and we have
China to worry about. What did we do
with China? We give them more foreign
aid.
1998 Ron Paul 17:13
So there’s no consistent argument
that we can put up that all of a sudden
Saddam Hussein is the only threat to
world peace and it is in our interest to
go in there and take him out. It just
doesn’t add up. If he really was a
threat, you would think his neighbors
would be the most frightened about
this, and yet the neighbors are urging
us not to do it. They’re urging us to
take our time, back off and wait and
see what happens.
1998 Ron Paul 17:14
We, in the United States, so often are
involved in conflicts around the world,
and one of the things that we urge so
many to do is sit down and talk to each
other. We ask the Catholics and the
Protestants in Ireland to talk, we ask
the Croats and the Serbs to talk, we
ask the Jews and the Arabs to talk;
why is it that we can’t do more talking
with Saddam Hussein? Instead, we
impose sanctions on him which does
nothing to him, solidifies his support,
rallies the Islamic fundamentalists
while we kill babies. There is now by a
U.N. report that shows that since the
sanctions were put on, well over a half a million
children died from starvation and lack
of medicines that we denied them.
1998 Ron Paul 17:15
So I think that there’s every reason
in the world for us to reassess this policy. There is a much more sensible policy.
1998 Ron Paul 17:16
What we need is more time right
now. There is no urgency about this. We did the bombing in the early 1990s,
and by the way, I can see this as a continuation
of that single war. But since
that time with inspections, even the
President claims that they have gotten
rid of more weapons since the war
ended than occurred with the war.
1998 Ron Paul 17:17
So if there is no military victory in
sight by bombing and only great danger,
what is the purpose? Why can’t we continue with more negotiations
and more inspections? And they say,
well, we can’t trust Hussein. Well,
that may be true. But looking at it objectively
when we finished in 1991 our
policy was to encourage the Kurds and
the Shiites to rebel, and we implied
that we would be there, and what happened? We weren’t there. Thousands
and thousands of Shiites and Kurds
were just wiped out because we misled
them, similar to our promises that we
made to the Cubans in the early 1960s.
1998 Ron Paul 17:18
So we do not gain the respect of the
world by, one, saying, well, we can’t
trust anything he says. Of course not,
we can’t trust it. But we have to be
realistic, and can they trust us, as
well, because our record is not perfectly
clean.
1998 Ron Paul 17:19
I now would like to yield to the gentleman from
Maryland.
Notes:
1998 Ron Paul 17:1 I thank the gentleman.
Here, Ron Paul thanks The Honorable John J. Duncan, Jr. of Tennessee, to whom Ron Paul yielded in
1998 Ron Paul 15:13.
1998 Ron Paul 17:19
Here, Ron Paul yields to Rep. Roscoe Gardner Bartlett of Maryland.
