1999 Ron Paul 47:1 Mr. PAUL.
Mr. Speaker, we will later
today vote on the conference report to
H.R. 1141, the bill to further fund
NATO’s aggression in Yugoslavia. The
President has requested $7.9 billion but
Congress has felt compelled to give
him $15 billion.
1999 Ron Paul 47:2 Congress does not endorse the war.
We voted overwhelmingly against declaring
war and yet we are giving the
President twice the amount he requested
to wage the war. It does not
make any sense.
1999 Ron Paul 47:3 We are asking the President to seek
reimbursement from NATO members
since we have assumed the financial
burden for fighting this war. This has
tremendous appeal but cannot compensate
for the shortsightedness of
spending so much in the first place.
The money may well never be recouped
from our allies, and even if some of it
is it only encourages a failed policy of
military adventurism. If this policy
works, the United States, at Congress’
urging, becomes a hired gun for the
international order, a modern day government
mercenary. This is not constitutional
and it is a bad precedent to
set.
1999 Ron Paul 47:4 Reimbursement for the Persian Gulf
War has helped to perpetuate that conflict
now going on for nearly a decade.
It is time to think about a more sensible
foreign policy.
1999 Ron Paul 47:5 We should not encourage the senseless
and immoral NATO aggression
against Serbia. The funding of this war
should not be approved, no matter
what special interest appropriations
have been attached to the initial request
to gain support for this special
spending measure.
1999 Ron Paul 47:6 Our bombing continues to complicate
the mess we helped create in Yugoslavia.
Just about everyone concedes
that the war cannot be won without
massive use of ground troops, which
fortunately no one is willing to commit.
So the senseless bombing continues
while civilian casualties mount.
And whom are we killing? It looks like
we are killing as many innocent Albanians
for whom we have gone to war as
innocent Serbs.
1999 Ron Paul 47:7 Why are we killing anybody? There
has been no aggression against the
United States and no war has been declared.
It is time to stop this senseless
bombing.
1999 Ron Paul 47:8 The U.S. has become the world’s
bully. In recent months we have
bombed Serbia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
Sudan, Iraq and China; and
in recent years, many others.
1999 Ron Paul 47:9 The fetish we have with bombing
anybody who looks cross-eyed at us has
preoccupied our leaders for several decades
regardless of which party has been
in power.
1999 Ron Paul 47:10 We may not be willing to admit it,
but it is hardly the way to win friends
and influence people. It is lousy diplomacy.
It must stop. The only reason we
get away with it is because we are the
military and economic superpower, but
that only leads to smoldering resentment
and an unsustainable financial
commitment that will in due time
come to an end. Our superiority is not
guaranteed to last.
1999 Ron Paul 47:11 NATO, through their daily briefings,
has been anxious to reassure us that its
cause is just. Yet NATO cannot refute
the charge that the refugee problem
was made much worse with the commencement
of the bombing.
1999 Ron Paul 47:12 Yesterday it was reported in the Los
Angeles Times by Paul Watson, in
stark contrast to NATO’s propaganda,
that in Svetlje, Yugoslavia, 15,000 Albanians
displaced by the bombing remain
near their homes in north Kosovo, including
hundreds of young military age
men, quote, strolling along the dirt
roads or lying on the grass on a sunny
day. There were no concentration
camps, no forced labor and no one serving
as human shields according to an
Albanian interviewed by the Los Angeles
Times. Many admitted they left
their homes because they were scared
after the bombing started. Some of the
Albanians said the only time they saw
the Serb police was when they came to
sell cigarettes to the Albanians.
1999 Ron Paul 47:13 We should not be in Yugoslavia for
obvious constitutional and moral reasons,
but the American people should
not believe the incessant propaganda
that is put out by NATO on a daily
basis. NATO’s motives are surely suspect.
I meet no one who can with a
straight face claim that it was NATO’s
concern for the suffering of the refugees
that prompted the bombing and
demands by some to escalate the war
with the introduction of ground troops.
1999 Ron Paul 47:14 Even with NATO’s effort to justify
its aggression, they rarely demonstrate
a hit on a military target. All this fine
star wars technology and we see reruns
of strikes with perfect accuracy hitting
infrastructures like bridges and buildings.
I have yet to see one picture of a
Serbian tank being hit, and I am sure
if they had some classy film like that
we would have seen it many times on
the nightly television.
1999 Ron Paul 47:15 NATO must admit its mistake in entering
this civil war. It violates the
NATO treaty and the U.N. Charter, as
well as the U.S. Constitution. The mission
has failed. The policy is flawed. Innocent
people are dying. It is costing a
lot of money. It is undermining our national
security and there are too many
accidents.
1999 Ron Paul 47:17 There’s nothing America can be proud of in
this effort and if we don’t quickly get out of it,
it could very well escalate and the getting out
made impossible. The surest and quickest
way to do this is for Congress today to reject
the funding for this war.
1999 Ron Paul 47:18 The only answer to senseless foreign intervention
is a pro-American constitutional policy
of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations;
a policy of friendship and trade with
those who are willing and neutrality with others
who are involved in conflict. This is the
only policy that makes sense and can give us
the peace and prosperity all Americans desire.
Note:
1999 Ron Paul 47:14
All this fine star wars technology probably should be capitalized and in quotation marks, as Star Wars is the name of a motion picture:
All this fine “Star Wars” technology.
