What I learned from the War.

• Author: Kucinich, Dennis J.
• Position: NATO-Yugoslavia conflict, 1999

In my Congressional office, I read the latest reports concerning a recent Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in the Balkans for engineering a military coup in Serbia, for interrupting communications, for tampering with bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics, such as how to blow up buildings.

How this is intended to help establish a democracy in Serbia or Kosovo hasn't yet been explained. Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarize the KLA been explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by the KLA while NATO rules the provinces been explained.

But the extracurricular activity is consistent with NATO's policy of the ends justifying the means, of might makes right, of collective guilt, of retribution upon a civilian population.

It was hard to keep up with the war in the Balkans. The sheer velocity of events made analysis or commentary difficult. What was most objectionable one moment was quickly submerged into something else even more objectionable. Headlines became Haiku: MASSACRES. ETHNIC CLEANSING. MASSES MISSING. PEACE AGREEMENTS. BOMBS DROPPING. MISSILES FLYING. MASSES OF REFUGEES.

It became like a military sports event with tallies of sorties, bombs dropped, targets hit, damage estimates, casualties running up on a scoreboard where the fourth quarter or the last inning was not in sight.

Once a war begins, individual members of Congress are ill-equipped to manage the pace of events. Congress, like the public, is vulnerable to manipulation by war managers. Part of the story of this war is how the Administration and NATO used events and sentiment to suppress criticism of the war and shroud the multitude of violations of international law.

As the undeclared war moved forward, I wanted to slow things down, like a film editor inspecting the dailies frame by frame, to find where the shoot was going awry, and to do something to make it right. But the time sequences kept changing, a three day war became a seventy-eight day war.

Each new report of Serb attacks on Kosovo tugged at my heart and caused an anger to rise within me. I imagined how I'd feel if it was my family being attacked, my children routed from their homes, my brothers and sisters led to slaughter.

I sent letters and made a series of late night calls from my Washington office and from my home in Cleveland to the State Department and to the White House to ask for action to head off a wider catastrophe.

On January 19, I arrived in the chamber of the House of Representatives, hours before the State of the Union address, to get an aisle seat, hoping to have a chance to say a few words to the President about Kosovo before his speech. In the split second he passed by I urged him not to forget Kosovo. "I won't," he replied, "I am going to say something tonight." In a single sentence he did speak of ending repression, bringing responsible parties to justice, and establishing self-government for the province. On January 30, the North Atlantic Council permitted NATO Secretary General Javier Solana to authorize air strikes against Yugoslavia.

On February 6, talks began in Rambouillet, France. The Administration billed the talks as a promise to arrive at a peaceful resolution. Details that emerged weeks later about Appendix "B" to the agreement--which gave NATO the right to go anywhere in Yugoslavia--mark Rambouillet as the start of the war, not the beginning of a peace. Madeleine Albright issued a series of nonnegotiable demands to ensure that the only solution was to be bombing.

I did not anticipate that the U.S. and NATO, in the name of a humanitarian cause, would undertake the bombing of Serbia and thereby violate the U.N. Charter, the NATO Charter, the Congressional intent in approving the North Atlantic Treaty, the U.S. Constitution, and the War Powers Act. The U.N. Security Council was the...