Ed Royce: “last week in the Committee on International Relations we listened to Secretary of State Albright explain the…”

“last week in the Committee on International Relations we listened to Secretary of State Albright explain the administration's policy. I expressed my concerns to the Secretary about the difficulty of our objectives, especially given the limited means we are committing. Looking back over time at our Nation's wars, and this is a war, we have been successful when we have had as an objective the destruction of a regime or when we have had clearly-defined territorial objectives such as expelling Iraq from Kuwait. In both of these scenarios, though, in order to accomplish our goals, we used rather massive force, including ground troops. But in Kosovo we are committing American resources and prestige and risking American lives, employing what must be called a very calibrated use of force in order to achieve a very complex objective: restructuring Kosovo's society. Given that, my question to the Secretary was: What precedent for success in our history are we looking at? Are we practicing a theory here in Kosovo without an historical basis for success? The response from her: no cases were cited from the real world. Instead, we heard that the air war is working, when most observers do not believe it to be the case, and that we need to be patient. Well, patience is what we had in Vietnam.…”