John W. Olver: “I come to the floor with an overwhelming sense of sadness that we be debating constraints on America's ability to lead…”

“I come to the floor with an overwhelming sense of sadness that we be debating constraints on America's ability to lead in this world on a most profound issue of human rights. We are a people and a Nation whose very creation was to protect life and liberty against imperial sovereignty. In my view, whatever constrains the 19 nations that comprise NATO from successfully prosecuting this war and successfully degrading the military capacity of the Milosevic regime to conduct ethnic cleansing and successfully returning ethnic Albanian citizens of Kosova to the homes they've lived in for generations is bad policy. It is tough enough to achieve consensus among those 19 nations, from France, Britain, and Italy to Hungary, Luxemburg and Iceland. But a broad consensus exists, a remarkable agreement, that the consummate evil in Europe today is represented by the Milosevic regime's execution of his belief that it has every right to repress, to terrorize, to intimidate, to expel, and, if those fail, to massacre whoever is left, of nearly 2 million citizens of Kosovo, whose only crime is that their religion is Islam.”