When I was younger and wanted to kick back and relax, I would, of course, watch C-SPAN. What can I say? I was pretty cool.
There was still some political grandstanding 25 years ago, but in those days Congresspeople sometimes actually tried to convince each other of things. It wasn’t just canned talking points.
One day I saw Senator Joe Biden give a talk on the Senate floor. This was almost exactly 25 years ago. After I watched his talk, I had two thoughts:
- Why can’t a guy like this be President?
- He’s wearing his heart on his sleeve in this talk, and that kind of thing does not get you to the Presidency.
So.. what was he talking about?
This was after the fall of the Berlin wall and the disintegration of the USSR. The former country of Yugoslavia had essentially broken apart into smaller districts, and violence broke out along ethnic and religious lines. Biden had been to the area on a couple Congressional fact-finding missions, and he had submitted a report about the situation.
The US initially put an arms embargo on the entire area, but to some degree the result was that the Serbians had arms and the Bosnians did not. The Serbs carried out a policy they referred to as “ethnic cleansing”. The Serbian military targeted and killed Bosnian Muslims.
There are a couple moments in his talk that stuck in my memory, even these many years later. Biden had an intuition that if the Bosnians were Christian instead of Muslim, America would not have tolerated the killing. That angered him.
Biden says he knows that his speech is probably going to be used against him later on--but he still speaks with passion. “What I’m about to say is going to cause me great difficulty if I’m re-elected and come back here as the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, but Europe cannot stay united without the United States. There is no moral center in Europe. When in the last two centuries have [they] moved to... stand up to this kind of genocide? ...the only reason anything is happening now is because the United States of America is finally, finally understanding her role.”
Later, Biden paints a vivid picture of what life in Sarajevo was like for the people living there at the time. He takes you there with his description. “I visited, with Bob Dole, a hospital in Sarajevo. Do you know who was in that hospital? Seven children. You know why it was only seven children? Because the Serbs sit in those hills, and they have as a campaign of terror: the maiming of children. Walk with me through Sarajevo’s streets and see, draped across the roads, blankets and sheets. I thought it was the lower East Side in 1919 in New York. And I asked ‘Why?’. You know why [the blankets and sheets are] there? To take off the line of fire from Serbian snipers shooting children. ...we stood beside a beautiful raven-haired child who looked past us as we spoke, and the neurosurgeon said, ‘The reason she’s not turning is she has no sight’. [The neurosurgeon] turned her head, the bullet had gone in the back of her head, severed the optic nerve and came out the other side. There were seven children in that hospital. Nobody else!”
Here’s a link to that speech.
Dec 13th, 1995, on C-SPAN2
Joe Biden on the Bosnia Mission Resolution Debate
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