Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on April 22, 1999:
Pat BuchananThank you, Caroline.
As Caroline pointed out, in 1992 I ran against Mr. Bush and got defeated in the New Hampshire primary. In 1996 I ran against Mr. Dole and defeated him in the primary. Now, going back to New Hampshire, I find out I have to run against Bush and Dole. You know, people have asked me why I wanted to run for President of the United States a third time when it’s a grueling process and I have said there’s not much I would not do to get away from Eleanor Rodham Clift on the McLaughlin Group or Bill Press on Crossfire. The question I get most in a campaign is not about my policy positions or what it’s like to campaign. The one question I get more than any other is "Pat, how do you stand it sitting across from Bill Press on Crossfire and not reaching across the table and just bouncing him once?" And my answer is "You’d be astonished how much Ted Turner pays me not to do that."
I am glad to be away from Crossfire, even the McLaughlin Group, because for the last year it has been wall-to-wall Monica. I promise you today will be a Monica-free zone here at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, but before I go to my remarks someone asked me when we had to do this Monica issue every single night on television and there was nothing new and we’d talk about it and talk about it and, of course, I was on the side that the President had done wrong and should be punished. Finally, one Democrat said "Well, Pat, you’re on your high horse but you won New Hampshire and suppose you had beaten Dole for the nomination and you got into the White House and you had the Monica problem. What would you do?" and I said "Well, that’s very simple. If I had the Monica problem I would be flat on my back in a pool of blood and I would be looking up at my lovely wife, Shelly, who would be saying to me ‘Honey, how do I reload this thing?’" Speaking of Shelly, let me introduce to you the lady that I had hoped would replace Hillary Rodham Clinton: Shelly Buchanan. Shelly didn’t make it, so now she’s thinking of running for the Senate from New York.
Seriously, I had intended to devote my entire remarks to the immigration crisis in this country, and especially in the state of California. I intend to devote part of those remarks to a part of the issue of immigration with which you’re all familiar, but in addition, since the day that we announced my speech, I hear that the Congress of the United States is contemplating a declaration of war in Yugoslavia and the President of the United States and many are recommending an American ground army be sent into Kosovo and perhaps into Belgrade. I thought I would be derelict if I did not address that subject as well. So let me speak briefly on one proposal that I embraced and endorsed yesterday with regard to the issue of illegal immigration in California, which is a major, major issue out here. Let me introduce it with a story. Back in 1992 I came to California and I introduced this issue of illegal immigration at the national level and to dramatize it because then illegal immigrants were pouring into the country at the rate of 5,000 to 10,000 a weekend along the San Diego border and there simply was no impediment to it. I went down to the border with my Secret Service [escorts] and I went right up to the border where these fellows were lining up to run into the country, a hundred of them or so, just as soon as it got dark. With them behind me, and standing at a podium right on the border I started to speak about this problem. The press was there and the Secret Service was there, forming a good close pocket around me, and sure enough I hear from behind me this Mexican fellow saying in a loud voice to one of the reporters "Who is that hombre?" and he was talking about me. So the reporter said to him "Well, that’s Pat Buchanan. The fellow that’s running against President Bush for the Republican nomination and for president of the United States." And this Mexican fellow says, "Well, you tell him I’ll vote for him if he’ll give me a ride to Los Angeles."
So that is a little bit of what the situation is on the border, but the Buchanan fence as we described it in those days has been constructed. It’s now the Feinstein-Clinton fence and, as you know, it’s about 14 miles along that border and that helps with the problem of illegal
immigration, it does something. But this problem is still grave and I think it is a crisis in America. There’s something like 5 million illegal immigrants in the United States, folks who have broken our laws by breaking into the country. Last year we apprehended about 1.8 million; we apprehend about one of every three. So probably 3.8 million came into the countr, and there’s a flow back and forward across what is virtually an open border. Now the President that I admired and respected as much as any man in this century and worked for, Ronald Reagan, said "A country that can’t control its borders isn’t really a country any more." I think this is a serious problem that has to do not only with American economics but with America as a nation and as a country, because the melting pot in this country unfortunately is beginning to break down, and constant infusions of people who break the law and break into America, I think, are going to deepen that situation.
Let me take one aspect of it and one proposed solution: the issue of crime. Since 1980 the number of aliens, foreign-born folks, in our state and federal prisons has increased 725%. Thirty percent of all federal prisoners are now from abroad. So we have a serious crisis here when you have folks who come into the country and break the laws of the country breaking in and then come here to assault or abuse or harass or commit felonies against American citizens. I stood up with a young Mexican-American woman yesterday, a very proud American patriot. Her 13-year old boy was shot to death by a member of a gang who was an illegal alien here in the United States.
I believe the first business of government, the first duty of government, is really to protect the lives and safety of innocent people, that’s what we form governments for. So I have endorsed an idea to put on the ballot in the State of California in the year 2000. It’s another ballot proposition and its very, very simple, and I’ve talked it over with some lawyers and other folks and it’s something that I think should commend itself both to conservatives and liberals and moderates and Democrats and Republicans as well. Basically, it’s first to recognize that we have a serious problem with illegal immigration, especially in regard [to] crimes; and secondly, that the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is overwhelmed. It simply does not have the personnel to deal with this problem. The idea is rooted in federal law that Mr. Clinton signed in 1996 which allows local and state enforcement officials to perform the role basically of INS agents if they are trained to do so properly. And so this proposition would do three things: it would provide for training for every local law enforcement officer and every member of the sheriff’s departments in California and every state police officer in California in how to properly deal with illegal aliens in terms of arrest, in terms of detention, and in terms of transfer. Each of these officers, or some of them of each departmen,t would get this training and the department would get reimbursed by the State of California for the training. This would also empower these officers if they made an arrest to inquire about an individual’s status as a citizen.
When I was a kid we used to, frankly if we were in a bar in Washington, D.C. where you could serve beer at 18 and liquor at 21, if you were perhaps a bit younger than that, somebody would ask you for your draft card or a fellow or police officer, invariably, if he stopped you and they suspected something [asked] "Sir, can I see your license and registration?" This would empower potentially every single peace officer and law enforcement officer in the State of California to perform these minimal functions that INS agents do, and it would multiply by 1000% or 100% or even 50% the number of folks who could deal with this problem of illegal aliens who frankly are engaged in criminal activity. So I think we’re going to try to get it on the ballot and I’m not going to be an advertisement for my campaign here, but I would certainly urge folks like you who are influential to take a look at it and see if it is not a reasonable measure to deal with that problem.
Now let me turn to the issue of American’s Balkan war and why we are there and what this is about. It has been my view even before it began, and I urged this before it began, that this was not America’s war. This is a Balkan war and its roots go all the way back to 1919 when Yugoslavia was formed out of the northern sectors of the Ottoman Empire and the southern sectors of the Hapsburg Empire. We began with the kingdom of the south Slavs or the kingdom of the Slovenes and Croats and Serbs, which became quickly Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia held together up until World War II [when it] was overrun by Hitler’s legions, and we know that for something like 35 years after that it was ruled by Marshall Tito and his iron hand. Yugoslavia was held together, but then in 1989 the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet empire came apart and the Soviet Union fell apart into 15 countries. An identical thing happened in the Balkans to Yugoslavia. It began to break apart into its ethnic components just as Russia broke apart into the Ukraine and the Baltic republics. So Yugoslavia began to crumble and break apart.
Now, there is no vital interest, there never has been a vital interest in the United States, over whose flag should fly over Pristina or Sarajevo or even Belgrade. This never has been a vital interest of ours. Now, when Yugoslavia began to break down and break apart we felt, some of us, that it was in the interest of this country and obviously the interest of Europe, to try, as this was happening, this inevitable was taking place, that it be done as peacefully as possible. Now, of course, that’s quite a hope in the Balkan peninsula and it was not realized. So why did we intervene? What were the arguments that brought us to this point where Mr. Clinton launched a war? I think they’re based on faulty reasoning and gross hyperbole. We were told that Mr. Milosevic is the new Hitler. We were told that what is taking place in Kosovo is genocide. That it was another holocaust in the making, and with this kind of rhetoric and, excuse me, this kind of propaganda, you whipped up public emotion to support a war. Let me take you to these propositions.
Let’s take the Hitler and Milosevic one. Adolph Hitler, between September 1939 and about the fall of 1941, invaded and overran all of Western Europe to the Atlantic and the Channel. He incorporated into his empire Southern Europe and the Balkans. His legions had gone to Northern Norway and the Arctic, his armies were in the Sahara, he had marched all the way to the Caucasus and his armies were outside Moscow and Leningrad. This warlord, historic war lord, was in charge of all of Europe in two years, quite frankly an enormous accomplishment of the Third Reich which still awes peoples and we see it on television 50 years later. Now, let’s take Milosevic. In ten years what has he conquered? He has lost Slovenia, he has lost Croatia, he has lost Macedonia, he is losing Kosovo, he has lost Bosnia and he’s about to lose Montenegro. In other words, he has shrunk in ten years. It is an absurd comparison to say this is some monstrous threatening war lord like Hitler. Does anybody seriously think Milosevic will be at the English Channel soon? It’s an absurdity.
Let’s take the comparisons with massive genocide and the holocaust where it is said that six million, perhaps, Jewish folks were killed in a matter of three years and in a war in which 50 million died. In the year before we attacked Belgrade in Yugoslavia and Serbia, in the year before we attacked, 2,000 people died in an ugly, nasty civil war in Kosovo. That’s one in every 1,000 people in Kosovo died. One in a thousand. Two thousand out of two million. In about 1992 in Washington, D.C. one in a thousand Washingtonians died under Marion Barry in one year, murdered. That’s the murder rate in Washington, D.C. under Marion Barry; it’s the same as the death rate in a civil war in Kosovo last year. Now, I don’t think what went on in my home town of Washington is a good idea, but it is not the holocaust. In Kosovo what we are talking about is an ugly civil war where terrible things are done on one side and reprisals are terrible on the other side. So in other words, these comparisons were grossly invalid and exaggerated.
So let me go on now to the war itself. In my judgment, this war quite clearly was not thought through and the mistakes are two: one is this Rambouillet Agreement and second is the decision to attack. Now, what we have to look at, and we have to take a look at this situation, is look at these things from the point of view of your adversary or opposition. Look at Rambouillet from the point of view of the Serb people and the Serb nation and put Mr. Milosevic aside for a minute. What was Rambouillet demanding? It was telling the Serbs that you must get your army and get your militia out of your sacred province of Kosovo that you’ve held onto for generations and NATO will be allowed to march in and declare autonomy and in basically three years it will be turned over to the Kosovars, Albanians and the KLA whom you’ve been fighting. In other words, we were saying to them in effect, giving them an ultimatum, [that] we’re going to rip away your province whether you like it or not. Then Mrs. Albright is telling the KLA please sign, please sign, please sign, and we will attack the Serbs if they don’t sign. So we made the American Air Force, the U.S.Air Force, the mighiest in the world, and NATO the de facto allies of the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is supported by Osama Bin
Laden. Even the State Department says it contains terrorist elements.
Now, let’s back up and let me use an analogy. Suppose you had told the Israelis "you’re going to have to give up all of Jerusalem and get out of Jerusalem and we’re going to come in there and there’s going to [be a] vote among the Palestinians, who outnumber the Israelis, on who get ultimate control of the Jerusalem and if you don’t get out we’re going to bomb you." What would Ariel Sharon do? Would he let Jerusalem be taken away? I don’t think so. I think they would have said, "Let’s grab and hold Jerusalem and stand and fight and then let’s negotiate while we control it." Possession being 9/10th of the law. And so that is exactly what Mr. Milosevic did and the Serbs did and so we attacked and so they moved immediately to grab all of Kosovo and to start this "ethnic cleansing." Now, I don’t approve of it, no one approves of it. It is outrageous and to see those people suffering like that is terrible. But what in heavens’ name were they thinking of in Washington? How did they think people would respond? So what is the result? The result, in my opinion, is a strategic debacle for the United States. Let me describe its dimensions. First, you have a tiny country, Serbia, of a few million people who are successfully defying NATO. The credibility of NATO has clearly been diminished ,and you’ve exposed some embarrassments of the world’s last superpower, the United States. When I was a kid I went to all those movies like you did and the Apaches were great warriors. They got there immediately and then they took off. Our Apaches haven’t arrived in five weeks. These [are] helicopters and this is the greatest military power on earth. So, you’ve had an embarrassment and a humiliation for NATO no matter what happens.
Secondly, Mr. Milosevic has not been weakened. He’s been strengthened by these attacks because we’re not attacking Mr. Milosevic. We are attacking the Serb nation. We are attacking the Serb people. Those are their bridges we are dropping into the Danube River. Those are their power plants on which they depend that we’re destroying. Those are their sons who are in Kosovo. And so we are attacking the Serb nation and Serb nationalism is growing and it is focusing on whom? On the natural leader or the leader of the country which happens to be right now Mr. Milosevic. So all the small "d" democrats who oppose Milosevic are now rallying behind him and nobody stands up to him. And so he is stronger rather than weaker.
Third, we were going to stabilize the Balkans. That’s the objective, stability and peace in the Balkans. That is almost a contradiction in terms. But what has happene?. The Balkans are destablized. Macedonia is horribly destablized. Montenegro. The folks who were elected the last time, moderates, they’re in deep trouble right now. And the whole area has been destabilized, so that objective is receding from sight. Let’s take Russia. One of the great achievements, in my judgment, of Ronald Reagan’s presidency was to stand up to the evil empire and then, when it collapsed, to reach out and embrace the Russian people. In his final days, Ronald Reagan was walking through Red Square being applauded. The man who had called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire was being embraced by the Russian people because they knew he was right about the people who had been sitting on top of them. Now Russia is estranged and anti-Americanism is so rampant in Russia that everyone running for the presidency is an anti-American. That’s another achievement of this conflict.
Finally, we wanted to go in there and protect the Kosovar Albanians . The campaign was designed to relieve them and prevent any further violations of their human rights. What was a human rights crisis has become a human rights catastrophe. Can anybody say that the Kosovo Albanians are better off now than they were a month ago? Can anybody say that? So what is the fall-back position. Now it is said, and you can read in the press from some of my pundit colleagues, and they will tell you that NATO cannot lose this, we must win, we must do what is necessary to win even if it means 200,000 troops plunging down through the Balkans and capturing Milosevic and carting him off to The Hague and trying him as a war criminal. But win what? Kosovo doesn’t belong to us. Kosovo doesn’t belong to NATO. Kosovo belongs to Serbia. Kosovo belongs to Yugoslavia. That is their province as much as South Carolina was America’s province when Lincoln said we’re not losing it. We’re going to take it back even if we have to send 600,000 or a million soldiers to do it, which is exactly what he did. Second, we’re going to capture Mr. Milosevic as a war criminal it said. We’re going to take him and put him on trial and send 200,000 young Americans to do that? That’s quite an arrest unit. So you take him up to The Hague and put him on trial, there’s no death penalty in Europe, what do we give him? Life in prison with time off for good behavior? Why? In five years Milosevic will be a hero to the Serbs for having defied NATO, defied everyone to preserve the province and protect his country. We will make him a hero. In five years they’ll be demanding his return to Belgrade and knowing these folks who started this they’ll say "let’s let him go in the interest of peace."
If we destroy Yugoslavia, let me ask you, who do you think is going to rebuild it? Who’s going to rebuild it? Already President Clinton is talking about a Marshall Plan for the Balkans. All right, before we start the Marshall Plan to rebuild the bridges, why don’t we stop dropping the bridges into the Danube? We’re destroying the very country we say we’re going to rebuild. Now is this wise? Is this wise? I know this debate is coming up and it’s going to be very controversial in the Congress, but you know I just pray we do not make this decision to send those American army and tanks and all the rest of it either through Hungary or try to weave them up through Albania into Kosovo, because I don’t believe this is America’s war. The lesson of Vietnam, as General Powell once said, is before you commit the army commit the nation. In other words, the nation must say that this is a good and necessary thing before you send the sons and daughters of the armed forces into battle. Does anyone believe America the nation is committed to this war? I was down in Texas, 48% of Texans approved the bombing and 32% could not name who it was we were bombing. Is this a nation that’s committed to this war. I don’t think so.
There’s another reason I don’t think we ought to declare war. Serbia has not attacked America. Serbia has not threatened America. Serbia didn’t blow up our embassies. Serbia didn’t kill 270 Marines. Why are we going after the Serbs? What’s being done by Serbs in Kosovo, many of them, is awful and ugly. What was done to the Serbs in Krajina by the Croats was ugly and awful. And what was done to the Croats in Buhavar was bad and in Dubrovnic was bad and what was done at Jasinovic in 1940 was awful. So all kinds of evil things have been done by people there and to people there, but again this is not America’s war.
What I think we should do is cut our own losses and try to negotiate the best possible peace we can with the people of the Balkans, basically, who wish to rule and govern themselves and are allowed to rule and govern themselves so that the principle of self-determination for all the groups, Slovenes, Croatians, Muslims, Serbs in Bosnia as well as Serbs in Serbia, Yugoslavia, as well as Serbs in Kosovo, and Kosovo Albanians to the degree it’s possible that each of them can govern themselves. It’s not an ideal solution but Utopianism is the real enemy of foreign policy. As for the United States, I think this war puts the message very well - it is time for this country to stop trying to play policeman of the world on 3% of gross national product for defense. You can’t do it. America needs to retrench and rearm.
Thank you very much.