Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.
Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Fowler amendment with the greatest respect for the maker of this motion. I oppose the amendment on the grounds of its substance and find the timing of it most unfortunate.
In doing so, though, I want to praise the chairman of the Committee on International Relations, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), and the ranking member, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Gejdenson), for their participation on the floor today. I would say for their leadership in bringing this issue to the floor, but I do not think that this issue should be on the floor today. Having said that, I applaud them for their impressive presentation on why we should be supporting the President's policy in Kosovo and why we should be opposing the Fowler amendment here today.
I also want to commend my colleague the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Turner) for his very wise amendment to the Gejdenson amendment and hope that this House will give it its fullest consideration when the opportunity comes.
Mr. Chairman, other speakers this evening have said that Kosovo, is a very difficult decision. Well, Kosovo is a very difficult and dangerous place, and we are sent here, after all, to make the difficult decisions. I, for one, do not think that we, Congress, has a role in voting on whether the President should send peacekeepers into a region, so I do not think that this debate is a necessary one, and I think again that the timing of it is unfortunate.
What is happening in Kosovo is a challenge to the conscience of our country, what is happening in Kosovo is a challenge to the future of NATO. I would say to our colleague the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) that it is in our vital national interest, it is in our vital national interest to support NATO. Indeed the United States is so much a part of NATO that NATO is not effective without U.S. participation.
I would have hoped that we could have had the administration bring the negotiations to fruition. There can be no agreement without American troops on the ground. The Kosovars would never agree to any peacekeeping force that did not include American troops. There can be no agreement without NATO in Kosovo, and NATO will not go in without U.S. troops. So our involvement is fundamental to any agreement about keeping the peace in Kosovo.
I said earlier that Kosovo is a challenge to our conscience. Just a few years earlier Bosnia was, and over 200,000 people were killed there. I wondered when I was a child and first learned about the Holocaust and read `The Diary Of Anne Frank' as a teenager, I wondered how did this ever happen? Didn't anybody know? Why didn't anybody do anything about it? And when the Bosnian situation came along, I could see how it happened. People knew, people cared, but people did not want to get involved.
Before the 2,000 people who have been killed, 2,000 plus in Kosovo, grow to a greater number, I hope that we can be smart about this and support the reasonable negotiations that would involve U.S. troops on the ground. Two thousand people were killed there, many of whom are women and children. There have to be certain recognitions. As I have said before, there is no effective NATO without U.S. participation.
There is no effective peace agreement without U.S. participation of troops on the ground, and the other recognition is that Milosevic the ruthless president of Serbia, as we know, and is a ruthless killer. He has an endless appetite for killing people. So it is not a question of his conscience ever being challenged.
We cannot count on any balance, on any reason, on any humanitarianism springing from the other side. It must spring from NATO and, again, the U.S. is almost synonymous with NATO now.
I talked about the timing, and I want to return to that, Mr. Chairman, because I think that this is really unfortunate. The President of the United States is bringing a message of compassion and humanitarianism to Central America after the most disastrous natural disaster in this hemisphere. Over thousands of people killed, millions of people made homeless, thousands without jobs, economies wiped out.
The President is bringing the compassion of the American people there. That is an appropriate mission for the President. The Secretary of State is joining him. The Secretary of Defense is out of the country, and we bring up a resolution to undermine their efforts in Kosovo.
I urge my colleagues to oppose this ill-timed resolution.