U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

65–701 CC WASHINGTON : 2000

S. HRG. 106–573

UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS AND

THEIR PROLIFERATION

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

APRIL 5, 2000

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

JESSE HELMS, North Carolina, Chairman

RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana

CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska

GORDON H. SMITH, Oregon

ROD GRAMS, Minnesota

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas

CRAIG THOMAS, Wyoming

JOHN ASHCROFT, Missouri

BILL FRIST, Tennessee

LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware

PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut

JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin

PAUL D. WELLSTONE, Minnesota

BARBARA BOXER, California

ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey

STEPHEN E. BIEGUN, Staff Director

EDWIN K. HALL, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

ROD GRAMS, Minnesota, Chairman

JESSE HELMS, North Carolina

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas

BILL FRIST, Tennessee

BARBARA BOXER, California

JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin

(II)

CONTENTS

Page

Allard, Kenneth, Ph,D., vice president, Stratfor.com, Alexandria, VA ............... 33

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 36

Bolton, Hon. John R., senior vice president, American Enterprise Institute

for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC ..................................................... 21

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 24

Table—Figure One: Pre-Clinton U.N. Peacekeeping Missions, 1948–1992 . 32

Table—Figure Two: Clinton U.N. Peacekeeping Missions 1993–March 31,

2000 ................................................................................................................ 33

Grams, Hon. Rod, U.S. Senator from Minnesota, prepared statement ............... 2

Hillen, John, Ph.D., U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century ........ 9

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 13

Chart—UN Peacekeepers: Size 1988–2001 .................................................... 19

Chart—UN Peacekeepers: Size & Cost 1988–2001 ....................................... 20

O’Hanlon, Michael, Ph.D., senior fellow, Brookings Institution, Washington,

DC .......................................................................................................................... 3

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 5

Table: KFOR Troops by Country as of April 1, 2000 ..................................... 8

(III)

(1)

UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS

AND THEIR PROLIFERATION

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 2000

U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:45 a.m. in room

SD–419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Rod Grams (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Senators Grams and Brownback.

Senator GRAMS. I would like to bring this hearing to order.

Thank you very much, gentlemen. I am sorry I am late. I had

about 140 Minnesota high school students in the Hart Atrium that

we had to meet with briefly, and of course with that many it took

just a little bit longer than what we planned. So I appreciate your

indulgence and I again apologize for being late.

First I want to thank the witnesses for taking time and participating in today’s hearing. As you have noticed, no administration

witness was invited to testify this morning, and that was on purpose. I want this to be a more free-flowing discussion on the evolution of peacekeeping than multiple panels would allow.

However, I agree with the minority that it is important to hear

from the administration and we will be scheduling a hearing soon

to hear from the administration regarding the United Nations and

of course the efforts on peacekeeping.

Last week during the roundtable discussion on peacekeeping that

we had with members of the U.N. Security Council I was particularly struck by the remarks of the representative from France.

After being admonished by the chairman of the Armed Services

Committee, who stated ‘‘Do not take on more than you can do and

do effectively,’’ the Ambassador from France, Mr. Levitte, replied

‘‘Is is morally’’—he said in a question: ‘‘Is it morally possible to say

no to populations which are already desperately in need of help?’’

That might as well have been our Ambassador to the U.N. responding to Chairman Warner, because assertive multilateralism is

really back with a vengeance.

I thought the tragedy in Somalia, where the administration sacrificed the lives of 18 brave American soldiers without regard to

whether such action advanced our vital national interests, marked

the end of U.S. support for such forays, but I was wrong. The only

difference is now, in U.N. peacekeeping missions, like the one in

the Democratic Republic of the Congo U.S. forces will not initially

be on the front lines.

2

The desire to make political statements of support for nations in

turmoil appears to be drowning out considerable and considered options and opinions as to whether the U.N. is able to carry out the

mandates it has been given. I am concerned that a fiasco may be

a result.

On March 23, Ambassador Holbrooke gave a speech to the Fifth

Committee where he stated that some of the defects of the U.N.

were so great that they threatened the achievement of our core

goals in peacekeeping and the institution itself. He talked then of

a train wreck, because neither the management structure nor the

financial system currently in place will support the projected expansion of peacekeeping in Africa.

Why did the U.S. support missions it knows the U.N. cannot effectively carry out? The French Ambassador asked whether it was

morally possible to say no to populations that are desperately in

need of help. Is it morally possible to say yes when you know you

cannot deliver?

Equally as important, these political statements are obscuring

the transformation of peacekeeping from the separation of belligerents into an exercise in nation-building that goes far beyond what

Congress may be prepared to accept. According to PDD–25, peacekeeping is a tool intended to provide a finite, stable window of opportunity for combatants to resolve their differences through diplomatic means. Under PDD–71, support for peacekeeping explicitly

embraces the infinite commitment to nation building. That is what

PDD–71 is all about.

In our desire to do something, the administration is agreeing to

endorse, what is in effect, an indefinite U.N. commitment to govern

distressed nations when we commit to supporting peacekeeping operations. In short, the pursuit of the United States’ national interest is once again being obscured by a proliferation of multilateral

action in the service of overly ambitious and vague aims.

In the Senate, many of us express concern that peacekeeping

missions lack an exit strategy, but more and more it seems there

is the lack of an entry strategy as well. I am looking forward to

our discussions today about U.N. peacekeeping, why we get in and

how we get out.

The U.N. was formed primarily as a mechanism for keeping the

peace. If it fails in these new missions, credibility could be irreparably undermined.

So with that, I thank you very much and I would like to hear

your opening statements or comments. We might as well start from

our left to right, so Mr. O’Hanlon, welcome.

[The prepared statement of Senator Grams follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROD GRAMS

First, I want to thank the witnesses for participating in this hearing today. As

you have noticed, no administration witness was invited to testify. And that was on

purpose. I want this to be a more free-flowing discussion on the evolution of peacekeeping than multiple panels would allow. However, I agree with the minority that

it is important to hear from the administration regarding the United Nations, and

will schedule a hearing soon for that purpose.

Last week, during the roundtable discussion on peacekeeping with members of the

UN Security Council, I was particularly struck by the remarks of the representative

from France. After being admonished by the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who stated ‘‘Don’t take on more than you can do, and do effectively,’’ AmbasVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00006 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
3

sador Levitte replied, ‘‘Is it morally possible to say ‘no’ to populations which are desperately in need of help?’’

That might as well have been our Ambassador to the UN responding to Chairman

Warner, because assertive multilateralism is back with a vengeance. I thought the

tragedy in Somalia, where the administration sacrificed the lives of 18 brave American soldiers without regard to whether such action advanced our vital national interests, marked the end of U.S. support for such forays. I was wrong. The only difference is that now, in UN peacekeeping missions like the one in the Democratic

Republic of the Congo, U.S. forces won’t initially be on the front lines.

The desire to make political statements of support for nations in turmoil appears

to be drowning out considered opinion as to whether the UN is able to carry out

the mandates it has been given. I am concerned that a fiasco may be the result.

On March 23, Ambassador Holbrooke gave a speech to the Fifth Committee where

he stated that some of the defects of the UN were so great they threaten the

achievement of our core goals in peacekeeping and the institution itself. He talked

of a train wreck, because neither the management structure nor the financial system currently in place will support the projected expansion of peacekeeping in Africa. Why did the U.S. support missions it knows the UN cannot effectively carry out?

The French Ambassador asked whether it was morally possible to say ‘‘no’’ to populations that are desperately in need of help. Is it morally possible to say ‘‘yes’’ when

you know you can’t deliver?

And equally as important, these political statements are obscuring the transformation of peacekeeping from the separation of belligerents into an exercise in nation building that goes far beyond what Congress may be prepared to accept. According to PDD–25, peacekeeping is a tool intended to provide a finite, stable window of opportunity for combatants to resolve their differences through diplomatic

means. Under PDD–71, support for peacekeeping explicitly embraces an infinite

commitment to nation building. That’s what PDD–71 is all about. In our desire to

do something, the administration is agreeing to endorse, what is in effect, an indefinite UN commitment to govern distressed nations when we commit to supporting

peacekeeping operations. In short, the pursuit of the United States’ national interests is once again being obscured by a proliferation of multilateral action in the

service of overly ambitious and vague aims.

In the Senate, many of us express concerns that peacekeeping missions lack an

exit strategy. But more and more it seems there is a lack of an entry strategy as

well. I’m looking forward to our discussion today about UN peacekeeping—why we

get in and how we get out. The UN was formed primarily as a mechanism for keeping the peace. If it fails in these new missions, its credibility could be irreparably

undermined.

STATEMENT OF MICHAEL O’HANLON, PH.D., SENIOR FELLOW,

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, DC

Dr. O’HANLON. Thank you, Senator. It is an honor to be here on

this very important subject. I just wanted to summarize briefly my

remarks from my written statement, if I could, and also to respond

to some of the issues you raise because I think they are very important. Even though I am a supporter of these two new missions in

Africa in particular that you alluded to, I would share your concern

and think that, even if the Congress supports them, as I hope it

will, that it watch very carefully.

Let me just make a couple of comments on why I think these

missions are worth trying in general and then a couple of specifics

about Sierra Leone and Congo and wrap it up there for my opening

remarks.

In general, I think that we have to take the French Ambassador’s emotion and moral view into account. It is not a prescription for policy, but he is right that we have to worry about the fact

that there are still half a million people in the world dying in civil

conflicts a year. Many of them are in Africa. We have not done a

great job this decade.

4

I think it has been poor policy in the way we have executed these

missions, in Somalia in particular, and also not getting involved in

Rwanda that are really the problems—poor execution. But I would

agree with his sentiment that we have to try to do something.

There are just too many lives at risk.

I would also make the broad point: In foreign policy terms, the

United States derives much of its legitimacy as a world leader from

the moral dimension of its foreign policy. I do not want to push this

point too far and suggest that we have the luxury of just doing

peacekeeping operations to try to look like we are the good guys

and that this is the way we can really define our role in the world.

That would be an overstatement.

But I do think it is noteworthy that the World War II and postWorld War II generations helped solidify democracy, helped solidify

market economies. This was a very moral foreign policy and I think

it is part of why we have legitimacy among our allies.

We are in a very unusual situation in world history. We lead an

alliance that has three-quarters of all the world economic power,

three-quarters of all world military power. That is remarkable.

Usually countries when they reach that level of dominance or leadership, they breed resentment and other countries tend to want to

balance them or fight against them or compete with them. To a

large extent we do not elicit that reaction, and part of it is because

of our broader effort to stand for principle.

Now, again I do not want to push this point too far. Certainly

going into a U.N. mission and failing does not advance in any way

this particular idea. But I do want to at least give some

geostrategic backup to the French Ambassador’s moral sentiment,

that it is true, I think, that moral foreign policy has been a part

of our country. Ronald Reagan stood for it, Roosevelt and Truman

stood for it. This has been a very important thing.

So the question becomes practical to my mind. It becomes how

you do this well and how do you make sure you do not overtax your

military in the process? How do you make sure you do not get into

missions that are likely to fail? That is the hard part. I would concede that point and share your concerns about Sierra Leone and

Congo. You alluded to Africa more generally, but I will focus a

minute on those two particular conflicts.

I believe that sending in observers or small peacekeeping forces

does make sense, but it is a gamble. We do not know, for example,

what Mr. Sankoh is really up to in Sierra Leone. A very good story

in the New York Times today summarizes the fact that we do not

really know if this guy is preparing to go back to war should he

lose an election, is he even going to allow the elections at all, is

the U.N. going to be able to establish itself within that country?

We do not know.

I think it is worth a chance for peace because I remember a year

ago when we were all reading in the newspapers of people’s arms

and hands being tragically amputated, cutoff, in brutal campaigns

of violence. So if that is the alternative I would at least like to try

to work with the peace process.

But I am nervous about it and I would not deny that even as a

supporter of the policy. So I think we have to from my point of view

try to go along with the peace process, but be cognizant that it may

5

fail. There is some small risk that, I think you are right, that the

United States could be drawn into this in one way or another.

If 100 peacekeepers were massacred, could the United States and

the world afford to stand by? I am not sure. So I agree with your

point, there is a risk, and it does make me nervous. It is one of

the things I want to follow most closely in the year in foreign policy

that is on its way, because this is a mission that is risky.

One quick comment on Congo and I will wrap up. There is reason to hope that the Congo peace mission could very well work. We

know that the Rwandans and Burundians and Ugandis are concerned about the Interahamwe, the Hutu extremists who massacred almost a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda in

1994, many of whom have been in the Congo ever since. So if they

can somehow have a peace agreement that manages to contain that

force, they may be willing to live with it.

Likewise, Kabila, the President of Congo, if he can have some

way to begin to consolidate control over this huge country—a country, by the way, which I served in as a Peace Corps volunteer, and

it is a remarkably difficult place to do anything in because the infrastructure is so poor, and we do have to be nervous about that.

But it is also a place that has great potential.

I think Mr. Kabila knows that he needs peace to begin some sort

of a process of consolidating his rule. I do not think he is a nice

guy, but I hope he can at least get beyond the war footing he has

been on. But to do that he needs this sort of a truce as well.

So both sides do have an incentive. On the other hand, I am

nervous about the Interahamwe, the Hutu extremists. They are

supposed to be demilitarized eventually in this Congo peace accord.

I am not sure what incentives they have to let themselves be demilitarized. So we can hope to cutoff their funding, to somehow

marginalize them and over time hope that they have no better alternative. But I am not sure it will work.

So let me conclude by saying I am supportive of these missions,

but I share your nervousness. I hope the Congress will support

them in the end, but also keep a very close eye on how they develop, because even if we go ahead, as you have correctly pointed

out, victory and success is by no means preordained.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. O’Hanlon follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. MICHAEL O’HANLON

It is an honor to appear before the committee today to discuss this important

topic. Peace operations have the potential to save many lives at modest cost, if conducted wisely and judiciously.

That is not the only benefit of peace operations. To the extent the United States

supports and in some cases participates in them, they also lend a moral character

to U.S. foreign policy that helps legitimize this country’s leadership role in the

world. U.S. foreign policy has never been strictly realist, in the sense of only protecting the country’s core military and economic interests; it has usually been influenced by American values and principles as well, including the notion that innocent

people, wherever they live, should not be wantonly killed or otherwise severely oppressed. This is an element of U.S. foreign policy for which the party of Lincoln and

Reagan, as well as the party of Roosevelt and Truman, can both take credit and

be proud.

Traditional great powers, focused only on advancing their own interests, generally

have bred resentment and competition. By contrast, the United States while not

universally popular around the world, continues to lead a western alliance system

6

accounting for at least 75 percent of world GDP and military spending that shows:

no signs of dissolving. U.S. willingness to support peace operations and protect innocent lives around the world is not, of course, the main reason for this desirable geopolitical state of affairs. But it is a contributing element.

If conducted well, peace operations are worth doing. But it is admittedly hard to

do them well. Different types of missions have different difficulties, costs, and limitations, and these must always be kept in mind.

In the rest of this testimony, I offer a number of observations on several broad

issues. First, why conduct peace operations? Second, what are the main attributes

of U.N. peacekeeping missions, and of U.S. contributions to them? Finally, what effects do peace operations and humanitarian interventions tend to have on U.S. military forces?

Why Conduct Peace Operations?

• Nearly half a million people a year die in civil conflicts around the world, a figure that is relatively unchanged since the end of the Cold War.

• Humanitarian missions and peace operations have saved an uncertain number

of people over this period, but possibly as many as several hundred thousand.

• There are dozens of conflicts in the world at a time, but only a few are truly

serious. In fact, about 10 conflicts in the 1990s accounted for 3/4 of the decade’s

entire conflict-related deaths.

• By focusing on acute conflicts, the international community can thus help make

a meaningful difference in reducing the overall scale of global violence.

• The majority of severe conflicts in the 1990s were in Africa; specifically, civil

wars in Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and

Congo have been extremely bloody (the first five have been the worst, to date

at least). So has the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, though in a small mercy it has

involved a lower percentage of civilian deaths.

• For a country like the United States that bases much of its role in the world

on its support for democracy and human rights, these facts simply cannot and

should not be ignored, even if they admittedly must be secondary missions for

U.S. armed forces.

• In some cases, peacekeeping missions can help along peace processes in these

types of conflicts—though there is admittedly no guarantee of peace, unless a

coalition led by the United States or one of a small number of capable countries

is willing to use combat force to sustain or impose a peace.

What Are the Main Attributes of U.N. Peacekeeping Missions?

• In most such cases, U.S. troop contributions are very small.

• For example, since 1995 U.S. participation globally in U.N. peacekeeping missions has generally numbered 500 to 1,000 troops, less than 5% of the total, and

the today’s total includes primarily U.S. civilians (not soldiers) at that.

• U.S. financial contributions are considerable; they have generally ranged between $250 million and $1 billion a year in the last decade.

• Given all the United States does around the world militarily, benefiting not

only itself but allies and indeed the international system as a whole, the Congress’ belief that U.S. assessments for U.N. peacekeeping should be reduced to

25% of the world total seems quite reasonable.

• However, given the stakes, and the lives involved, these costs are not egregious,

and the United States should certainly not resist paying its fair share. After all,

the United States gives $5 billion in foreign aid per year (ten times as much,

roughly) simply to foster and sustain the Mideast peace process, and it spends

anywhere from $30 billion to $60 billion a year by my estimate to defend an

ally, South Korea, that is of limited economic importance to the United States

(there are admittedly other reasons for that military commitment, but there is

still some value to the comparison).

• As the Clinton Administration rightly argues, the United Nations cannot generally conduct peace enforcement. Regional organizations, or coalitions led by

one of the world’s strongest military powers, are needed for that purpose now,

and will be for the foreseeable future. The U.N. can monitor peace accords and

ceasefire lines, protect citizens from bands of criminals or small militia elements, and carry out similar functions. It should not generally be asked to fight

the main parties to a peace accord who might later violate that accord, however.

• That means U.N. peacekeeping missions can fail. Running the risk they will do

so is generally acceptable, given that the alternative is often to tolerate ongoing

and very lethal violence.

• However, there are other costs of failure: the prestige of the United States, the

lives of peacekeepers, and in an extreme case demands on U.S. military forces

7

who might be needed to extricate peacekeepers. U.N. peacekeeping missions

that are highly likely to fail catastrophically should probably not be undertaken.

• But there is a dilemma: it is usually quite hard to assess the risks of failure.

• Sierra Leone and Congo are difficult cases, but in my judgment they both merit

a U.N.-assisted attempt at peace at this point. (By way of comparison, it may

be worth noting that Angola, alas, may not—given what we know about

Savimbi.)

How Do Peace Operations and Related Missions Affect the U.S. Armed Forces?

• It is true that U.S. forces sometimes ‘‘backstop’’ U.N. peacekeeping missions,

representing in effect the 911 rescue squad in case peacekeepers get into trouble. However, this is not always the case by any means.

• It is also true that U.S. military forces and those of allies have run a number

of humanitarian missions authorized by the United Nations in the 1990s.

• All told, these efforts have cost about $3 billion a year in the 1990s, about 1%

of U.S. defense spending.

• They have also placed serious strains on the men and women of the U.S. armed

forces, on American military equipment, and on policymakers.

• Specifically, the United States military has spent about $10 billion in Bosnia,

$8 billion in Iraq, $5 billion in Kosovo, $2 billion in Somalia, $1 billion in Central Africa, and $1 billion in Haiti, according to CBO and Pentagon data. It has

also spent money on unanticipated deployments to Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere.

• About one-third of these costs, most notably most of those for Iraq as well as

those for Korea and Taiwan, were not for humanitarian missions as the term

is generally used. They were for traditional military missions such as deterrence

or containing Saddam Hussein. They may have had some humanitarian benefits

(e.g., no-fly-zones may have reduced Saddam’s ability to suppress indigenous

populations somewhat), but they were not principally humanitarian or peace operations.

• It is also worth noting that, on the ground at least, our allies have contributed

substantially to peace operations. Attached is recent data from NATO headquarters showing that the United States is providing about 13 percent of all

troops, and 16 percent of all NATO troops, to the KFOR operation in Kosovo

today. Likewise it is providing just under 25 percent of all troops, and 27 percent of all NATO troops, in Bosnia. This is as it should be, given our contribution during the Kosovo war, and given U.S. military commitments from the Persian Gulf to Korea. But it is still worth noting. Our allies do not yet do their

fair share, but they do contribute substantially. And Australia did much more

than its fair share in East Timor last year.

• The allies’ sacrifices are also measured in blood. For example, Britain lost as

many troops killed in Bosnia during the misguided UNPROFOR operation there

(prior to the NATO-led mission beginning in late 1995) as the United States lost

in the fateful Mogadishu firefight of 1993 in Somalia. Since World War II, more

than 1,000 U.N. peacekeepers have died during their service.

• Peace operations are hard on the U.S. military, but not beyond its capacities.

Despite the strains from peace operations and other missions, today’s U.S. military readiness remains good, even if it is admittedly no longer excellent. In particular, education and experience levels for troops, training hours, proficiency at

test ranges, and mission capable rates for most equipment are comparable to

typical 1980s levels (if not as good as early 1990s levels); safety metrics are the

best they have ever been; and the performance of troops in missions remains

outstanding.

• This is not an argument for complacency about readiness, and it is true that

high operations tempo in the 1990s has degraded military readiness to some extent. But the claim that it has led to a ‘‘hollowing out’’ of the force, or returned

U.S. military preparedness to the mediocre levels of the 1970s, is not substantiated by the evidence.

• Although retention and recruitment are problems for the military, and are exacerbated in many cases by high operations tempo, it is also true some units deployed to places such as the Balkans have enjoyed reenlistment rates greater

than those for the force as a whole. In addition, many retention and recruitment

trends have started to recover.

• The strain of peace operations can be mitigated by the Pentagon through wise

policy moves. Recently, the Pentagon has made some such moves—reducing

some training demands of marginal utility, so that people can spend more time

at home base and with their families; making deployments more predictable; inVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
8

creasing certain types of specialized military units that have received particularly heavy use; and so on.

• More can and should be done in these regards. For example, the Army might

consider reducing the size of its main combat units somewhat further, so that

it can man them at 100% strength. That way, deploying units would not need

to rob personnel from other units to be at full strength.

• In short, while peace operations and related missions have been tough on the

U.S. armed forces, they are not beyond its capacities, particularly if missions

do not grow further in number.

KFOR Troops by Country as

of April 1, 2000

NATO Members:

Belgium .............................................................. 1,170

Canada ............................................................... 1,370

Czech Republic ................................................... 180

Denmark ............................................................. 850

France ................................................................. 5,300

Germany ............................................................. 5,650

Greece ................................................................. 1,180

Hungary .............................................................. 300

Iceland ................................................................ 1

Italy .................................................................... 6,550

Luxembourg ........................................................ 2

Netherlands ........................................................ 1,550

Norway ................................................................ 1,240

Poland ................................................................ 750

Portugal .............................................................. 340

Spain .................................................................. 1,230

Turkey ................................................................. 1,130

United Kingdom .................................................. 3,420

United States ..................................................... 6,150

NATO Total ..................................................... 38,363

Non NATO:

Argentina ............................................................ 110

Austria ................................................................ 420

Azerbaijan ........................................................... 34

Bulgaria .............................................................. 40

Estonia ............................................................... 10

Finland ............................................................... 800

Georgia ............................................................... 40

Ireland ................................................................ 100

Jordan ................................................................. 100

Latvia ................................................................. 10

Lithuania ............................................................ 30

Morocco .............................................................. 340

Russia ................................................................ 3,200

Slovakia .............................................................. 70

Slovenia .............................................................. 6

Sweden ............................................................... 840

Switzerland ......................................................... 150

Ukraine ............................................................... 250

United Arab Emirates ......................................... 1,060

Non-NATO Total .............................................. 7,610

KFOR Headquarters (including rear elements in

the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,

in Albania, and Greece) ................................ 1,160

KFOR Total ................................................. 47,133

Note: KFOR is the NATO-led force in Kosovo.

9

1The charts referred to during Dr. Hillen’s testimony are included at the end of his prepared

statement on pages 19-20.

Senator GRAMS. Thank you very much.

I inadvertently forgot to introduce our panel. I apologize for that.

Dr. Michael O’Hanlon, who is a senior fellow at Brookings Institute

here in Washington, thank you very much. Also Dr. John Hillen,

U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Doctor, thank

you very much for being with us. Also the Honorable John Bolton,

vice president of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research here in Washington. Dr. Bolton, thank you. And also

Dr. Kenneth Allard, vice president, Stratfor.com—is that correct?

Dr. ALLARD. Yes, sir.

Senator GRAMS. From Alexandria, Virginia.

So again I want to thank the panel for taking your time to join

us here today.

Dr. Hillen, we will hear your opening comments. By the way, Dr.

O’Hanlon, your full testimony as written will be entered into the

record. Dr. Hillen.

STATEMENT OF JOHN HILLEN, PH.D., U.S. COMMISSION ON

NATIONAL SECURITY/21ST CENTURY

Dr. HILLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would also ask that—

I will make a short opening statement, but I would like for my full

testimony to be submitted for the record.

Senator GRAMS. Without objection, it will be entered.

Dr. HILLEN. Thank you, and thank you again for the opportunity

to testify on this important subject.

I want to talk a little bit about the strategic level of U.N. military operations. This is the level at which the political and the

military meet, an important level that gives us some good ideas

about not only what the U.N. is institutionally capable or not capable of, but also gives us some ideas about the unique challenges

and peculiarities of peacekeeping missions in the post-cold war

world.

This is a subject on which I have done some study and I studied

over 50 U.N. and other multinational peacekeeping type missions

that have occurred over the last half century and come to some

conclusions. U.N. peacekeeping goes in cycles. I passed out a chart 1

you will have up there which sort of alludes to one of the more recent cycles.

You will see it sort of goes up and down, and it appears as

though now we are on an up swing in the cycles again. Since last

fall, as you know, the U.N. has approved pretty substantial peacekeeping missions to East Timor, which the U.N. has now taken

over from the Australian-led coalition, Sierra Leone and Congo we

have heard about, and also Kosovo. Of course, the caveat there is

that NATO is handling the military part of that and the U.N. is

tucking in behind it with police, administrative, governmental support type duties. But it still can be thought of in the peacekeeping

vein.

So what is happening now and what we have seen over the last

6, 7 months is consistent with a recurring pattern really since the

inception of the United Nations, and I will talk about that chart

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and these cycles. The cycle that we have seen since 1948–49 goes

something like this. In the first cycle the U.N. experiments with

small peacekeeping missions in supportive environments.

We should note that these are not something the U.N. was set

up to do, even small peacekeeping. In fact, the Secretary General

that really originated this concept called them ‘‘chapter six and a

half’’ because they really do not fall in chapter 6 and they really

do not fall in chapter 7. So we should note that even for the small

traditional stuff it has always been improvised. It is not something

the organization was set up to do. But nonetheless they have improvised, and they have improved with some success on the small

missions.

So in the second part of the cycle, this initial success emboldens

the international community to go ahead and give the U.N. a little

bit more, and it gives the U.N. bigger and more complex and more

ambitious and more coercive military missions to do, and these

often take place in a more belligerent environment, one that is not

quite so supportive.

In the third part of the cycle, the challenges of managing these

big missions in dangerous environments tend to overwhelm the

U.N. and it fails. We have seen that a couple times. So the U.N.

tries to improvise, but ultimately it cannot really overcome its inherent lack of the institutional structures and the authoritative

management systems or the legitimacy for commanding and controlling significant military forces.

In the fourth part of the cycle, the U.N. is discredited by these

failures and it retreats and it retreats back to a more traditional

role in peacekeeping and observation missions.

Then the fifth part of the cycle, which I think we may be entering again into now, is some time later, sometimes years, sometimes

decades, armed with short memories and with the wounds healed,

we sort of gear back up again for another foray into the U.N. playing a much more central role in being the strategic manager of ambitious and large and complex military operations.

I call this the sort of ‘‘Groundhog Day’’ effect, because it seems

to happen over and over. The lessons learned are the same really

each time, but we tend not to take them into account when we are

on the upswing. I will just briefly talk about some of the lessons

learned.

The chief one is that the U.N. is really not structured in any way

to manage complex military operations in dangerous environments.

I go into this over the course of 300 pages in a book, but the bottom

line is that the organization is uniquely unsuited for those sorts of

military tasks, and I am talking about tens of thousands of troops,

well armed, performing coercive military operations of the warfighting type.

Now, conversely the strengths of the U.N.—its neutrality, the

fact that it is the world’s most representative body, the fact that

it is generally considered a passive honest broker—these strengths

make the U.N. ideally suited for tasks such as to sponsor and manage small peacekeeping operations in supportive military environments, and it has been able to do well when this formula is applicable. Even then, the U.N. has trouble actually managing these

11

military forces, as small and innocuous as they may be, but it succeeds at times.

The U.N.’s inability to manage these complex military operations

is inherent because it is rooted in its character, it is rooted in its

laws, it is rooted in the charter and the very structure. In other

words, it is immutable. It does not change and it cannot go away

with some administrative tinkering.

I will give you one example. In 1994 I was up at the U.N. working on this book and Rwanda came about. At the time, under a new

initiative there were 19 nations signed up, contractually obligated

to the U.N. to provide standby forces. If an emergency happened,

the U.N. could just pick up the phone and call these nations. And

these were nations that could provide very well-trained deployable

forces, Great Britain and others.

Well, the Canadian general in charge picked up the phone and

called all 19 nations and got a dial tone at the other end of the line,

because ultimately it is a voluntary exercise and, with Rwanda

coming crashing down, every single nation contractually obligated

to participate in the standby force arrangement just opted out.

So in other words, you cannot tinker around your fundamental

character and structure. It is rooted in the laws and the Charter

of the U.N.

The fourth point I will make on lessons learned is the organization cannot authoritatively recruit, train, equip, organize, or command and control significant military forces doing dangerous

things because it does not have the legitimacy needed to do complex military operations in belligerent environments.

The general lessons learned from operations like Somalia and

Bosnia is: When the going gets tough in U.N. mission, the tough

tend to go in different directions. So for instance, if the shooting

really starts—when it really started in Somalia and people started

getting killed, the Italian peacekeepers did not call New York, they

called Rome. The French did not take their directions from the

United Nations, they took their directions from Paris.

People fall back onto more legitimate forms of command and control, ones that have the legal and administrative structure set up

to handle these sorts of things. So that is an important point in

those sorts of missions.

On the other hand, these missions can be done, and I think that

East Timor and Kosovo and perhaps the very beginning of the Somalia mission, where the U.S. led an international coalition, shows

that alliances or coalitions of the willing that are led by a major

military power that does have this legitimacy, they can provide the

structure for multinational military operations.

The U.N. itself I think is good at small, neutral, and passive operations in supportive political environments. But even then, as the

U.N. recognizes over and over again, even then the blue helmets

are hostage to the whimsy of their belligerents. So U.N. peacekeeping is a supporting act, it is not a lead role. It cannot force

anybody into a course of action. It can only help those willing to

help themselves. For this reason, many U.N. officials call it a selfhelp technique.

So if we are thinking about in the U.S. asking the U.N. to do

something in a situation like the Congo or Sierra Leone, we have

12

to ask: Are the belligerents willing to take those steps? Are they

prepared for self-help?

I will just briefly go over some of these historical cycles and then

conclude, so you can see where this is actually manifested and how

it has really evolved. In 1948–49, the U.N. started with peacekeeping, two missions, one to Palestine and one to India-Pakistan.

Ironically, both of these are still in operation. And it worked, it

worked OK.

So in 1960 the U.N. stood up a much larger, much more ambitious, much more militarily complex mission to the Congo, ultimately over 20,000 blue helmets. This mission turned out to be a

real disaster. Over 234 peacekeepers were killed. The Secretary

General was killed in the mission. And it ended up being what the

U.N. calls its Vietnam.

So, a little chastened by the experience, the U.N. retreated back

into a more traditional formula, had some missions that worked

well in the Sinai in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and some others.

By 1988, as you can see on the chart, U.N. peacekeeping—this

is the year the blue helmets won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was a

pretty innocuous enterprise—5 missions, about 10,000 blue helmets, a $230 million budget, as you know of which the U.S. then,

as now, is obligated to pay about a third.

But with the end of the cold war there were lots of new ideas.

A lot of people said now, freed of the suffocating cold war dynamic,

the U.N. could take on a much more central role in being an actual

manager of serious military operations. And we tried it. We tried

it in Bosnia, we tried it in Somalia, we tried it in Cambodia and

some other places.

But these were very different environments than something like

military observers in Palestine. So as you can see on the chart, by

1993 we had some 80,000 blue helmets in 18 different missions,

many of which were very complex missions, with a budget of $3.6

billion.

Well, the story is well known. We were burned in Bosnia and Somalia and Rwanda and elsewhere, and by 1997 to 1999 the U.N.

had retreated back to a little less than 15,000 blue helmets and the

budget actually fell to under a billion in 1999.

In 2001, I put some estimates on there, but if the U.N. does go

to the authorized strength the Security Council has authorized in

these new missions, this will add another 25,000 or so blue helmets, to bring it up to above 40,000. It will bring the budget in my

estimation to well up over $2 billion a year. And importantly, many

of these missions will operate in unsupportive political environments, the exact kind of environments in which the U.N. rarely

succeeds. So I think we need to go very carefully into this.

I will conclude with a question which we always need to come

back to: Whose hand is really on the throttle here? It is popular

in the U.S. to think the U.N. is its own actor and decides where

it wants to go and what it wants to do. But I think the irony really

over the last episode, in 1993 to 1997, is that the U.S. and the U.N.

Security Council really pushed the U.N. into a lot of these missions, and in many cases the U.N. was reluctant.

In 1994 Boutros-Ghali was basically telling the Security Council:

Do not give me anything more to do in Bosnia because we are

13

doing it lousy as it is, do not add onto the plate. Boutros-Ghali also,

as Ambassador Robert Oakley’s memoirs showed, did not want the

Somalia mission. He was an Egyptian, he knew the troubles in Somalia and he knew what it would take, and he really resisted the

Somalia mission.

So it was ironic that when President Clinton gave a speech in

1993 at the U.N. saying the U.N. needed to know when to say no,

that it was the U.S. that kept saying yes for the U.N. and the administration kept adding onto it. The U.S. voted for or sponsored

every single Russian resolution expanding the Bosnia mission for

the U.N.

So it really is U.S. policy that will drive what the U.N. is going

to get involved in. The U.N. itself, I found in my studies, is not all

that ambitious. In 1997, one of the peacekeeping officials said to

me: ‘‘We are in a bear market and we are happy about it,’’ because

they know what they cannot handle.

But I think the Security Council and the U.S., being the most

powerful member of the Security Council, sometimes tend to use

the U.N. as an excuse rather than a strategy and shovel off onto

it missions that the U.S. and its allies might not otherwise want

to do, but that the U.N. is uniquely unsuited for. So I think we

need to keep that in mind and in your dealings with the administration to discourage them from just dumping things on the U.N.’s

plate and then blaming it when it fails, because there is just some

things, especially those very complex military operations conducted

in dangerous environments, which the U.N. should not be involved

in managing.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Hillen follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN HILLEN

Mr. Chairman, Senator Boxer, distinguished members of the sub-committee, I

thank you for the opportunity to testify today on a matter of great importance to

the United States and the entire international community. I would ask that my full

testimony is submitted for the record but I will make some short remarks here on

the strategy of UN military operations—that is, the level at which the political and

military dimensions of peacekeeping meet. In the course of my work I studied some

50 UN and other multinational peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations. The

lessons learned from those missions give us a fairly good idea of the challenges of

these missions and the institutional competence and capabilities of the UN itself.

As the sub-committee is well aware, today we sit on the cusp of a periodic upswing in the size, character, and ambitions of UN peacekeeping operations. Since

last fall the UN has mandated three large and complex peacekeeping operations—

in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—in which

the UN itself will direct significant military forces operating in some difficult environments. In addition, of course, there is the fairly new UN mission to Kosovo, but

in that mission NATO is handling the military tasks while the UN restricts itself

to policing, administrative, and other basic governmental functions.

I say periodic upswing because a survey of the 52-year history of UN peacekeeping shows that it goes in cycles. I’d like briefly to discuss these cycles in order

better to understand where we might be headed now. My study shows that UN

peacekeeping goes through recurrent phases—and the pattern has been repeated

several times in the past half-century. In the first phase small peacekeeping successes lead an emboldened international community to give the UN larger, more

complex, and ambitious military operations in more belligerent environments. In the

second phase these sorts of operations quickly overwhelm the capabilities of the UN

itself, which tries unsuccessfully to improvise in operations for which it has no institutional structure, authoritative management systems, or military competency. In

the third phase, burned and discredited, the UN pulls back to a more traditional

peacekeeping role that suits the institution. Finally, with time healing some of these

14

wounds and challenges to the international community continuing to mount, short

memories compel the international community to thrust the UN back onto the international security stage in a more ambitious and central role than before.

The lessons of each of these cycles are clear. The UN itself has never had, nor

was it ever intended to have, the authority, institutions, and procedures needed to

successfully manage complex military operations in dangerous environments. Conversely, the UN—the world’s most accepted honest broker—has exactly the characteristics needed to manage some peacekeeping operations undertaken in supportive

political environments. Even then, the UN has struggled to competently direct even

small and innocuous operations. But the real problems for all involved have come

when the international community puts the UN in a military role for which is neither politically suited nor strategically structured. My book goes into great detail

on exactly why the UN has shown—in almost 50 missions—that there are strict limits to its military role. Quite simply, the UN should not be in the business of running serious military operations—it has neither the legitimacy, authority, nor systems of accountability needed to build the means necessary to direct significant military forces.

Authoritative, specifically structured, and well-rehearsed military alliances or coalitions of the willing better manage multinational military operations of the sort

we’ve recently seen in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Africa led by a major

military power. These sorts of organizations are specifically structured—legally, politically, and organizationally—to direct complex and coercive military operations in

uncertain environments. The model we’ve seen in Kosovo and East Timor recently

may work best. An alliance like NATO or a multinational coalition such as that

Australia led in East Timor can do the heavy lifting before turning it over to the

UN.

Mr. Chairman, let me briefly summarize how these cycles have occurred and in

particular the U.S. and UN role in them. In my full testimony I have the complete

story of the most recent cycle—that of Somalia and Bosnia—and perhaps in questioning we can discern from those episodes lessons for these new missions on the

horizon.

In 1948/49, UN peacekeeping started with relatively innocuous missions to Palestine and India-Pakistan—missions which, we should note, are still in existence

today. A largely successful peacekeeping mission in the Sinai in the 1950’s encouraged the UN to mount a very ambitious mission to the Congo in 1960. That mission

ended very badly, taking the life of some 234 Blue Helmets and the Secretary-General. It is still referred to by many as ‘‘the UN’s Vietnam.’’

Chastened, the international community returned to what was emerging as a

more tried and true formula for UN peacekeeping. Small, lightly armed, and relatively unambitious missions deployed after a peace was concluded. These Blue Helmets did best when they followed the so-called principles of peacekeeping: strict

neutrality, passive military operations, and the use of force only in self-defense. Importantly, the UN recognized that the Blue Helmets were only supporting players,

there to help belligerents that had agreed to the UN presence. UN peacekeeping

was never intended to be a coercive military instrument—one that could force a solution on one side or another to a conflict. This role for the UN, which is not specifically referred to in the Charter (nor envisaged by the UN’s founders) evolved over

time—the nature of the technique (peacekeeping) uniquely suiting the character and

management abilities of the institution (the UN).

By late 1980’s, the UN’s ability to manage a small number of peacekeeping operations was not in doubt. In fact, in 1988 the Blue Helmets were awarded the Nobel

Peace Prize. We should remember that in 1988 UN peacekeeping represented a

rather small and unambitious enterprise in the grand scheme of global security. In

January of 1988 the UN was managing less than 10,000 troops in five long-running

peacekeeping missions and on an annual peacekeeping budget of some $230 million.

The U.S. then, as now, picked up about 1/3rd the cost of those missions.

Things changed quickly though after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The thawing of

the Cold War and the unprecedented cooperation shown by the Security Council

during the Persian Gulf War presaged a new era of UN-sponsored collective security. The enthusiasm for more and newer forms of UN peacekeeping was quickly

manifested in a series of ambitious, expensive, dangerous, and militarily complex

missions. By 1993, the UN was managing almost 80,000 peacekeepers in eighteen

different operations, including large and heavily armed missions to Cambodia, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. The annual peacekeeping budget grew to $3.6 billion.

Less than two years on from that peak however, UN peacekeeping had been thoroughly discredited. The Blue Helmets’ failure to halt political violence in Somalia,

Rwanda, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia was reinforced by images of peacekeepers

15

held hostage in Bosnia, gunned down in Mogadishu, or butchered along with thousands in Kigali. The UN quickly retreated—turning a nascent peacekeeping mission

in Haiti over to a U.S.-led coalition, passing Bosnia off to NATO, and leaving Somalia to slip back into chaos. By 1997, UN peacekeeping was down to a more manageable level of some 15,000 Blue Helmets operating in more mundane environments

and on a budget of around $1.2 billion. All has been relatively quiet on the UN front

until this past fall, when Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Congo sprang

onto the scene. If those missions go forward as planned, they will add over 25,000

Blue Helmets and some $700 million—$1 billion in costs to the UN’s plate. More

important, several of these new missions, especially Sierra Leone and the Congo,

look certain to take place in very uncertain and belligerent environments—the sort

in which the UN rarely if ever succeeds.

Mr. Chairman, a word on the U.S. role in this latest cycle—the rise and fall of

UN peacekeeping in the six years after the end of the Cold War. This message I

believe is critical for the U.S. policy community because our own actions drive these

episodes as much as anything else. More coherence in U.S. policy could have prevented many of the recent disasters in places such as Somalia and Bosnia. While

a broad range of observers drew the same basic conclusion from peacekeeping’s recent past—that the UN should not be in the business of managing complex, dangerous, and ambitious military operations—most are split on how it happened and

whom to blame. Conservatives in the United States charge the UN itself and especially a fiendishly ambitious Boutros Boutros-Ghali who tried openly to accrue more

and more military legitimacy and power for the UN itself. Liberal internationalists

blame a parochial U.S. Congress that pulled the U.S. out of Somalia at the first sign

of trouble, and is now holding America’s UN dues hostage to its provincial agenda.

Both views are off base. Ironically, those who put UN peacekeeping through the

wringer and hung the organization and its last Secretary-General out to dry were

those American internationalists most likely to promote a larger collective security

role for the United Nations. Over the past seven years, American officials sought

for the UN a much greater role in international security affairs. But even though

they were philosophically amenable to that goal, they choose to propel the UN into

uncharted waters more out of political expediency rather than as a carefully crafted

manifestation of their predisposition towards collective security. In many cases a

new role for the UN was not so much a matter of policy, but a way of avoiding hard

policy decisions such as those concerning the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. In essence, we used the UN as an excuse, not a strategy.

Either way, American officials, especially in the first Clinton administration,

pushed a reluctant UN into much greater military roles than it could hope to handle. Once its failures were manifest, the same officials joined in the conventional

wisdom that the UN itself ‘‘tried to do too much.’’ Because of this, any post-Cold

War ‘‘advances’’ in collective security were negated by those very internationalists

who were so keen to champion the UN. As Paul Kennedy and Bruce Russett

warned, UN operations such as those to Bosnia and Somalia ‘‘far exceed the capabilities of the system as it is now constituted, and they threaten to overwhelm the

United Nations and discredit it, perhaps forever, even in the eyes of its warmest

supporters.’’ What they did not consider was that some of the UN’s ‘‘warmest supporters’’ were those who were most responsible for putting it in desperate straits

in the first place.

PATTERNS OF ABUSE

Advocates of collective security were almost giddy in the months immediately following the Gulf War. As David Henrickson noted, the end of the Cold War and the

Security Council’s role in the Gulf War ‘‘have produced an unprecedented situation

in international society. They have persuaded many observers that we stand today

at a critical juncture, one at which the promise of collective security, working

through the mechanism of the United Nations, might at last be realized.’’ Think

tanks, conferences, workshops, and task-force reports trumpeting a proactive military role for the UN proliferated. In January 1992, the first every Security Council

summit declared that ‘‘the world now has the best chance of achieving international

peace and security since the foundation of the UN.’’ The heads-of-state asked Secretary General Boutros-Ghali to prepare a report on steps the UN could take to fulfill their expectations of a more active military role.

In Boutros-Ghali’s subsequent ‘‘An Agenda for Peace,’’ he outlined a series of proposals that could take the UN well beyond its traditional military role of classic

peacekeeping. The Secretary-General called not only for combat units constituted

under the long moribund Article 43 of the UN Charter, but for ‘‘peace-enforcement’’

units ‘‘warranted as a provisional measure under Article 40 of the Charter.’’ AlVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00019 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
16

though these were largely theoretical and untested ideas, by the time they were

published in July 1992, the Security Council had already implemented a similar

agenda. A few months prior to ‘‘An Agenda for Peace,’’ large and ambitious UN missions to the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia were already approved and underway.

This initial episode reflected a pattern that would develop over the next several

years. The UN, many times reluctantly so, would be thrust into an ambitious and

dangerous series of missions and operations by a Security Council that was enthusiastic about new and enlarged mandates for UN peacekeepers—but not so keen on

providing the support necessary to make them a success. In 1992, while the Secretary-General was (at the request of the world’s most powerful leaders) preparing

a draft report on possible new departures in peacekeeping, a series of international

crises plunged the organization into what UN official Shashi Tharoor called ‘‘a dizzying series of peacekeeping operations that bore little or no resemblance in size,

complexity, and function to those that had borne the peacekeeping label in the

past.’’

In the former Yugoslavia, it soon became painfully obvious that despite the deployment of almost 40,000 combat troops, the UN was in over its head. Among

American leaders, it was fashionable in both political parties to bemoan the ineffectiveness of the UN peacekeepers. This America was as responsible for what the UN

was attempting to do in the former Yugoslavia as any other state or the organization itself. Between September 1991 and January 1996, the Security Council passed

89 resolutions relating to the situation in the former Yugoslavia, of which the

United States sponsored one-third. While Russia vetoed one resolution and joined

China in abstaining on many others, the United States voted for all 89 to include

those twenty resolutions that expanded the mandate or size of the UN peacekeeping

mission in the Balkans.

Far from the notion that the UN was pulling the international community into

Bosnia, the U.S.-led Security Council was pushing a reluctant UN even further into

a series of missions and mandates it could not hope to accomplish. Boutros-Ghali

warned the members of the Security Council that ‘‘the steady accretion of mandates

from the Security Council has transformed the nature of UNPROFOR’s mission to

Bosnia-Herzegovina and highlighted certain implicit contradictions. . . . The proliferation of resolutions and mandates has complicated the role of the Force.’’ His

Under Secretary-General for peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, was more direct. Attempts

to further expand the challenging series of missions being given to the UN were

‘‘building on sand.’’

This did not seem to deter the U.S.-led Security Council however, which was

happy to expand the mission further while volunteering few additional resources to

the force in Bosnia. A June 1993 episode demonstrating this pattern is instructive.

Then, the UN field commander estimated he would need some 34,000 more peacekeepers to protect both humanitarian aid convoys and safe areas in Bosnia. The Security Council, having given him these missions in previous resolutions, instead approved a ‘‘light option’’ of 7,600 troops, of whom only 5,000 had deployed to Bosnia

some nine months later. Quitting his post in disgust, the Belgian general in command remarked ‘‘I don’t read the Security Council resolutions anymore because they

don’t help me.’’

The Clinton administration, which had shown unbounded enthusiasm for UN

peacekeeping in the first months of the administration, began to sour slightly on

its utility by September 1993. By then Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s doctrine

of ‘‘assertive multilateralism’’ had given way to President Clinton beseeching the

UN General Assembly to know ‘‘when to say no.’’ But it was the United States and

its allies on the Security Council who kept saying yes for the United Nations. Even

after that speech, Mrs. Albright voted for all five subsequent resolutions (and sponsored two) that again expanded the size or mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission

to the former Yugoslavia. All the while, until the fall of 1995, the U.S. steadfastly

resisted participating in the UN mission or intervening itself with military forces

through some other forum.

In Somalia, there was an even more direct pattern. There the United States

pushed an unwilling UN into a hugely ambitious nation-building mission. In its

waning days the Bush administration had put together a U.S.-led coalition that intervened to ameliorate the man-made famine in Somalia. From the very beginning

of the mission it had been the intention of the U.S. to turn the operation over to

a UN peacekeeping force. Conversely, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian well acquainted with the challenge of nation-building in Somalia, wanted no part of the

mission for the UN. Ambassador Robert Oakley, the U.S. envoy to Somalia, noted

that in a meeting with the Secretary-General and his assistants on 1 December

1992, ‘‘the top UN officials rejected the idea that the U.S. initiative should eventually become a UN peacekeeping operation.’’

17

The U.S. kept up the pressure on the Secretary-General, who was powerless to

resist the idea if it gained momentum in the Security Council. The debate resembled

what Chester Crocker called ‘‘bargaining in a bazaar’’ and ‘‘raged out of public view’’

while the U.S. and the UN negotiated over the follow-on mission. For his part,

Boutros-Ghali wanted the U.S.-led coalition to accomplish a series of ambitious

tasks before the UN would take over. These included the establishment of a reliable

cease-fire, the control of all heavy weapons, the disarming of lawless factions, and

the establishment of a new Somali police force. For its part, the United States just

wanted to leave Somalia as soon as possible. It was now time to put assertive

multilateralism to the test. Madeline Albright shrugged off the challenge to the

world body and wrote that the difficulties that the UN was bound to encounter in

Somalia were ‘‘symptomatic of the complexity of mounting international nationbuilding operations that included a military component.’’

The debate, with Boutros-Ghali resisting up to the last, effectively ended on 26

March 1993 with the passage of Security Council resolution 814 establishing a new

UN operation in Somalia. The resolution authorized, for the first time, Chapter VII

enforcement authority for a UN-managed force. More importantly, the resolution

greatly expanded the mandate of the UN to well beyond what the American force

had accomplished. Former Ambassador T. Frank Crigler called the UN mandate a

‘‘bolder and broader operation intended to tackle underlying social, political, and

economic problems and to put Somalia back on its feet as a nation.’’ In the meantime, the U.S. withdrew its heavily armed 25,000 troop force and turned the baton

over to a lightly armed and still arriving UN force. The transition, set for early May

1993, was so rushed that on the day the UN took command its staff was at only

30 percent of its intended strength. The undermanned and underequipped UN force

was left holding a bag not even of its own making.

The travails of the UN mission in Somalia need no further elucidation here. Suffice it to say that the U.S., although no longer a direct player in Somalia, continued

to lead the Security Council in piling new mandates on the UN mission there. The

most consequential of these was the mandate to apprehend those Somali’s responsible for the June 1993 killing of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers. The U.S. further complicated this explosive new mission with an aggressive campaign of disarmament

capped by the deployment of a special operations task force that was to lead the

manhunt for Mohammed Farah Aideed. This task force was not under UN command

in any way and when it became engaged in the tragic Mogadishu street battle of

3 October 1993 the UN commanders knew nothing of it until the shooting started.

Even MG Thomas Montgomery, the American commander and deputy UN commander, was told of the operation only 40 minutes before its launch. A U.S. military

report afterward noted that the principal command problems of the UN mission in

Somalia were ‘‘imposed on the U.S. by itself.’’

This fact, that the UN was not involved in the deaths of eighteen American soldiers in Mogadishu, was buried by the administration. Even more cynically, several

top-level administration officials charged in 1995 with selling the Dayton Peace Accords to a skeptical U.S. public constantly noted that U.S. soldiers in the NATO

mission to Bosnia would not be in danger because the UN would not be in command, as it was in Somalia. Few single events have been as damaging to the UN’s

reputation with the Congress and American public as the continued perception that

it was the United Nations that was responsible for the disaster in Somalia. Not only

has this myth been left to fester, it was indirectly used, along with the UN’s many

other U.S.-initiated problems, to call for Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s head during the

1996 Presidential campaign. Then, for the first time in several years, the U.S. used

its veto to stand alone against the Security Council and bring down the SecretaryGeneral who had resisted the U.S.-led events that so discredited him and his organization.

CONCLUSION—FRIENDS LIKE THESE

After those particular episodes, UN peacekeeping is now happy to be, as a UN

official recently told me, in ‘‘a bear market.’’ Congress and the administration are

happy as well with a low profile for UN military operations—especially as Clinton

officials try to get Congress to pay America’s share of the unprecedented peacekeeping debt. Fittingly, Madeleine Albright, as Secretary of State, is now chiefly responsible for convincing Congress to pay the bill that she is tacitly accountable for

because of her votes during that busy time on the Security Council.

Albright also played a central role as the official, more than any other in the Bush

and Clinton administrations, who epitomized the keen hopes of liberal internationalists advocating a greater security role for the UN. In early 1993, her speeches were

laced with talk of ‘‘a renaissance for the United Nations’’ and ensuring that ‘‘the UN

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is equipped with a robust capacity to plan, organize, lead, and service peacekeeping

activities.’’ By 1994, however, after it because obvious that the inherent limitations

of a large multinational organization would not allow it effectively to manage complex military operations, Albright stated that ‘‘the UN has not yet demonstrated the

ability to respond effectively when the risk of combat is high and the level of local

cooperation is low.’’ Left unsaid was that the U.S., more than any other member

state, was responsible for giving the UN much to do in Somalia and Bosnia and little to do it with. It appeared, as Harvey Sicherman has written, that ‘‘the assertive

multilateralists of 1992–3 placed more weight upon the UN than it could bear, while

ignoring NATO and other regional coalitions.’’

Regional coalitions or more narrowly focused military alliances were ignored both

for reasons of philosophy and political expediency. Philosophically, legitimacy could

be gained for collective security in general and the UN in particular by having it

directly manage the more dynamic military operations of the post-Cold War era.

Thomas Weiss typified this school of thought and wrote, ‘‘the UN is the logical

convenor of future international military operations. Rhetoric about regional organizations risks slowing down or even making impossible more timely and vigorous action by the UN, the one organization most likely to fulfill adequately the role of regional conflict manager.’’ This appealed in particular to the officials of the Clinton

administration who had developed and published many similar thoughts while in

academia or the think-tank world.

But for the most part the U.S. promoted unprecedented UN missions to conflicts

such as Bosnia and Somalia because they did not want the U.S. or its alliances to

be principally responsible for difficult and protracted military operations in areas

of limited interest. As Shashi Tharoor wrote, ‘‘it is sometimes argued that the peacekeeping deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina reflected not so much a policy as the absence of policy; that [UN] peacekeeping responds to the need to ‘do something’ when

policy makers are not prepared to expend the political, military, and financial resources required to achieve the outcome that the press and opinion leaders are

clamoring for.’’

The final irony is that the UN’s adventurous new role in 1993–1995 and

peacekeeping’s subsequent demise came about not necessarily by the well intentioned but unsupported design of collective security’s most ardent proponents. Instead, it came about by default as these same supporters thrust upon the UN difficult missions they would rather not have addressed more directly. Given the recent

and renewed enthusiasm for more missions of the sort that will greatly challenge

the UN, the international community would do well to keep this lesson in mind.

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20

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Senator GRAMS. Thank you very much, Mr. Hillen.

Mr. Bolton, good morning.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN BOLTON, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH, WASHINGTON, DC

Ambassador BOLTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is

a pleasure to be here today. This is an important subject and I am

very grateful to you for scheduling a hearing on it.

I think the subject of U.N. peacekeeping in policy terms is actually pretty simple from the American point of view and would not

be terribly debatable but for what has happened over the last 7

years. I think American policy on U.N. peacekeeping should be

based on deciding when peacekeeping is in America’s national interest. We should have a coherent policy of deciding, on a case by

case basis, what those circumstances are and then formulating

U.N. peacekeeping strategies that protect our interests.

This is really nothing more than recognizing that the United Nations can be a useful instrument for American foreign policy. In

some cases it may not be. It depends. It is simply an instrument.

It is certainly not anything to approach with theological devotion,

which is the way some people do it.

I think that the administration’s peacekeeping policy, despite its

rhetoric at times, has never deviated in substance from where it

was at the very beginning, when the administration asserted that

what it called ‘‘assertive multilateralism’’ was going to guide its foreign policy. I think PDD–71 is really the policy they wish they had

written when PDD–25 came out.

The reason there are no ‘‘entry strategies,’’ as you term it, in this

administration is that they do not feel they need any. And the recent spike in peacekeeping activities, which GAO now estimates for

the 2000–2001 biennium will total about $3.6 billion—or about

$900 million for a U.S. share of 25 percent—just shows that, consistent with John Hillen’s chart, that this is once again a growth

industry.

Now, it seems to me that traditional U.N. peacekeeping, where

it has been successful, has rested on three fundamental principles:

First, that all of the parties to the particular dispute agree to a

U.N. role and agree on what that role will be; second, that in performing its responsibilities the United Nations is neutral as among

the parties; and third, that any U.N.’s resort to force comes only

in the very limited circumstance of self-defense.

Now, in pre-1990 U.N. peacekeeping activities where the U.N.

has been successful, those are the conditions they have obtained.

Some would say that that really gives the U.N. a very circumscribed, very limited role, and in a sense that is correct. But

what those principles recognize is that, fundamentally, a successful

peacekeeping operations depends on political factors. It depends

fundamentally on the agreement of the parties to the dispute on an

interim or ultimate conclusion to their dispute.

It may well be that the U.N. is only a political fig leaf for a disengagement or a truce, but it can be an important fig leaf when

it recognizes the limitations.

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I think what happened—after, particularly after the Persian Gulf

War, coinciding with the end of the cold war—was that there was

a massive misreading of what those two events meant for the

United Nations. It created a wave of euphoria about the potential

for the United Nations that at least some people did not think was

justified at the time, and in hindsight I think it clearly was not justified.

Just as one example, I am off tomorrow to rendezvous with

former Secretary of State Baker as we travel to the Western Sahara to make yet another effort to have a referendum so that the

people of the Western Sahara can decide whether they want independence or union with Morocco. We set up that peacekeeping operation, frankly, as part of the post-Gulf War euphoria in 1991. It

is 9 years later. We still do not have a referendum. It is a classic

case where we really do not have consent of the parties.

In addition to misreading the post-Gulf War context, the United

Nations has found itself increasingly inserted in intra-national conflicts, conflicts which in my view do not pose a real threat to, in

the words of the Charter, ‘‘international peace and security.’’ I

think this is very important.

‘‘International peace and security,’’ as it is written in articles 24

and 39 and chapter 7, generally is a jurisdictional limit on the

United Nations. The framers of the Charter, principally Americans,

wanted that jurisdictional limit. And although we have been in the

past 7 or 8 years, probably more responsible than anybody in

breaching those jurisdictional limits, it is a mistake.

Just as in any broad quasi-constitutional interpretation, once you

begin to breach the jurisdictional limits in circumstances that you

find beneficial to you, you find it nearly impossible not to see them

breached elsewhere.

I think these difficulties that I have described have shown up in

several contexts, including Somalia, where I think we have been

over the ground in several hearings. I think Somalia is the textbook demonstration of assertive multilateralism at work. It was the

first and best or worst, depending on your perspective, example of

nation-building.

The reason that political support for Somalia collapsed, as members of the Senate will well remember, came after the tragedy in

Mogadishu: the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense

came and addressed an unprecedented joint meeting of the House

and the Senate in the room under the steps and they were asked

to justify why those young Americans had lost their lives. I have

heard members of this committee who were present say publicly

and privately that there was no justification; Congress saw that

and support collapsed, not because of a tragic but relatively small

number of casualties, but because the administration could not defend its policy.

Partly, I think the lesson they learned from that was the limits

of the United Nations, and that is one reason why in the Dayton

Agreement and post-Dayton Bosnia the U.N.’s role has been so limited and one reason why the Security Council did not receive any

visitors in the run-up to the air campaign over Yugoslavia.

But now, even after these lessons, the U.N. has a predominant

role in a kind of quasi-peacekeeping operation in Kosovo that has

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all the earmarks of complete disaster. Senior U.N. official Jiri

Dienstbier, former Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia and now the

U.N.’s senior Human Rights Representative for Kosovo, said just a

couple of weeks ago: ‘‘The present situation in Kosovo just confirms

the total failure to achieve the goals of the operation.’’

That is one of the most remarkably candid statements I have

ever heard from a U.N. official. But it represents that when you

do not have consent of the parties, as you manifestly do not in

Kosovo, the U.N. is not likely to succeed.

Recently, we have seen in the case of the observer force approved

for the Congo all of the earmarks of another failure. Forty years

after the first failure of a U.N. peacekeeping operation in Congo,

I believe, sadly, that we are about to see another. We do not have

consent of the parties or anything like it. Bernard Miyet, U.N.

Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping, briefed the Security

Council last week, principally on President Kabila’s total lack of cooperation. The U.N. mediator, Sir Katumi Mazeri, who was in

Congo at about the same time, could not get freedom of access to

travel around.

I think that what we are going to find is that the photo op diplomacy of Security Council meetings in January have led the United

Nations into another potentially disastrous failure. Really, the

Congo is an example of this idea that is loose in the Security Council that it cannot be a real crisis unless there is a peacekeeping

force. That has the cart before the horse. The political reality has

to be suitable first before the U.N. peacekeepers can be deployed

successfully, whether military or civilian.

I think the same thing is true in the Sierra Leone operation. Michael O’Hanlon said we do not really know very much about the

situation on the ground. That is exactly the kind of circumstance

where you do not put a force in place, because in fact the force can

become part of the problem, can become a target, as indeed we did

in Somalia or as Colonel Higgins, who was detailed to UNTSO, the

U.N. Truce Supervisory Organization in Jerusalem, became a target.

The key here is that, instead of rushing willy nilly toward the

creation of peacekeeping operations, we have to have the political

dynamics set first.

Now, I have identified in the testimony and I will not go over

here a number of direct consequences for the United States and its

interests in peacekeeping issues—budget questions, very much of

concern to the Congress; command and control issues, very much

of concern for Americans when we are involved—that go to what

I think is a central misconception about peacekeeping today in this

administration. That is that actually peacekeeping, U.N. peacekeeping, is a cheap way for the United States to move toward foreign policy goals. Under the rubric of burden-sharing, it is said that

actually this requires less from the United States than if we did

it ourselves, which of course begs the question whether we ought

to do it ourselves to begin with.

It goes to the fundamental point that when we decide on peacekeeping operations we have not become platonic guardians to the

world. We are still attempting to discern and implement a foreign

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policy, through the United Nations to be sure, but a foreign policy

that is in fundamentally in America’s national interest.

I think that leads to the lessons and conclusions I would draw

from our recent experience, that the administration has too often

endorsed peacekeeping operations that do not impinge on legitimate American national interests. It does not therefore actually reduce burdens on the United States; it increases them and gets us

further extended in situations than we would have been had the

peacekeeping operation not been authorized.

It also demonstrates why we need firmness, decisiveness, and

consistency in foreign policy decisionmaking, particularly in defining this entry strategy. It is foolhardly to believe that other nations

are going to do it for us. We have to do it.

Finally, and I will conclude here, it is very clear that our rhetoric

should not exceed our intentions and our capabilities. Contrary to

the Secretary of State’s comment, we are not the indispensable nation. We do not have to be involved everywhere. The whole world

is not waiting for us to solve its problems or, if it is, it is not an

invitation we should take up.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to

be here. I look forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Ambassador Bolton follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN R. BOLTON

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, it is a pleasure to appear today

to testify on American policy toward United Nations peacekeeping. I have a written

statement for the record that I will summarize, and I would be happy to answer

any questions the Committee may have.

I would like to address particularly the issue of when and where peacekeeping

through the United Nations is actually in the national interests of the United

States, how we decide on a case-by-case basis what those circumstances are, and,

once that threshold question is answered, how we formulate a U.N. peacekeeping

strategy that protects American interests. First, I will examine briefly the principles

underlying traditional U.N. peacekeeping. Second, I describe the rationale for the

expansion of ‘‘peacekeeping’’ into new and non-traditional fields after the end of the

Cold War, and third summarize three case studies to show the consequences.

Fourth, I turn to the operational question of American interests directly implicated

by U.N. peacekeeping, and discuss some lessons that can be drawn both from the

historical record and from our contemporary experience.

I. TRADITIONAL U.N. PEACEKEEPING

‘‘Traditional’’ U.N. peacekeeping operations evolved when it became clear that the

broad intention of the Framers of the U.N. Charter were rendered largely meaningless by the onset of the Cold War. U.N. involvement in international crises, far from

being the central dispute-resolution mechanism envisioned by the Framers in Chapters VI and VII, became episodic and incidental to the main global confrontation between East and West. In part because of the extraordinarily limited dimensions

within which U.N. peacekeeping was feasible, clear principles evolved to describe

the elements necessary for successful U.N. operations.

First and by far the most important criterion was that all of the relevant parties

to a dispute had to agree to the participation of U.N. peacekeepers in monitoring,

observing or policing a truce, cease fire, or disengagement of combatants. This

agreement had to encompass not only the fact of U.N. involvement, but also the

scope of its mission and the operational requirements for cariying out that mission.

Moreover, any party could withdraw its consent at any time, at which point the

U.N. force would withdraw. The classic example of revoking consent occurred in

May, 1967, when Egypt insisted on the withdrawal of the U.N. Expeditionary Force

(established after the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956) from its territory along the border

with Israel. The Six Day War followed.

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Flowing from the principle of consent was the related notion that U.N. peacekeepers were neutral as among the parties to a conflict, not favoring one or another

of them. It was understood to be elemental that the United Nations could not ‘‘take

sides’’ in a conflict without itself becoming involved in the very situation it was trying to stabilize or resolve. Thus, U.N. peacekeepers had no right of enforcement, and

their missions were deliberately non-coercive, not intended to compel any party to

accept a particular settlement. U.N. rules of engagement, through long-established

practice, provided for the use of force essentially only in self-defense. Because of the

foregoing principles, and because they were never intended to serve as combat

forces, U.N. peacekeepers were almost always only lightly armed, or unarmed, and

they frequently depended on the cooperation of the parties to a dispute for logistical

support or cooperation.

One can agree or disagree about the relative successes of United Nations peacekeeping during the Cold War period, but on one point there can be no serious dispute: U.N. peacekeeping had evolved over the years as a highly stylized international device, adhering to the guidelines set out above, and was considered neither adventurous nor experimental by the five Permanent Members of the Security

Council or the U.N. Secretariat.

Successful implementation of United States policy objectives through the United

Nations in areas as disparate as Namibia, Afghanistan, Central America and most

notably the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990-91 led many observers to believe that, by

1992, the U.N. was fully mature and capable of handling almost any assignment

handed to it. Unfortunately, this reputation was not deserved, emerging as it did

from a misreading of the lessons of the very successes which the U.N.’s strongest

proponents urged in support of larger, more complex and more dangerous roles beyond traditional peacekeeping. Recent U.N. successes had in fact been derived from

the exercise of firm, decisive American leadership within the Security Council, combined with the development of ‘‘new thinking’’ in Soviet foreign policy, in areas

where there was a mutual advantage to cooperate.

II. BEYOND TRADITIONAL U.N. PEACEKEEPING

Buoyed by the successes mentioned above, proponents of a larger dependence of

American foreign policy on the United Nations, and of a larger role in world affairs

generally for the U.N., urged expansion both in the frequency of U.N. military operations and in the dramatic transformation of these missions. ‘‘Peace enforcement’’

was the new watchword, embodying the idea that the U.N. could impose its designs

on conflicting parties, using force as appropriate. Such missions were deemed not

only feasible, but virtually required of the United Nations in what was once briefly

described as the ‘‘New World Order.’’ ‘‘Peace enforcement’’ constituted a radical departure from traditional U.N. peacekeeping, but was often not recognized as such,

or the differences were deliberately obscured. Indeed, in the most rarified of its

versions, peace enforcement seemed almost like the vision of 1945 San Francisco recreated, as if the intervening forty-five-plus years simply had not happened.

United Nations peace enforcement in any particular international crisis thus assumes that there is essentially no real ‘‘peace’’ to ‘‘keep.’’ As such, it assumes that

the parties do not necessarily consent to the deployment of U.N. forces, that the

U.N. troops may well have to ‘‘take sides’’ militarily to accomplish their mission,

that the rules of engagement will be suitably written for such eventualities, and

that manpower, armament and other preparations will be made with the prospect—

indeed, the likelihood—of combat in mind. It should also have been assumed that

national forces contributed to U.N. peace enforcement operations would be trained

and ready for such a role, but this key point was never actually realized.

A further corollary of a peace enforcement mission is the realization that, once

launched, and having taken sides, the U.N. may not be able to assume thereafter

a neutral, peacekeeping mode at some future point. Indeed, Secretary General

Boutros Boutros-Ghali recognized this point in his January, 1995, supplement to An

Agenda for Peace, when he said ‘‘Peace-keeping and the use of force (other than in

self-defence) should be seen as alternative techniques and not as adjacent points on

a continuum, permitting easy transition from one to the other.’’

When described bluntly, it becomes readily apparent that, until the Clinton Administration, the United Nations has never really engaged in a peace enforcement

operation. Prior Security Council authorizations for the use of military force in

Korea (1950) and the Persian Gulf (1990) were wholly unrelated to this concept, involving as they did the repelling of international aggression by coalitions of forces

operationally under American—not U.N.—command. Thus, all of the confident predictions about the success of U.N. peace enforcement operations, and all of the willVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00029 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6621 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
26

ingness to insert U.N.-led troops into peace enforcement situations were based on

no real-world experience whatever.

Moreover, both traditional peacekeeping and the authorizations to use force in

Korea and the Persian Gulf were pursuant to the Security Council’s core mandate

to preserve and protect international peace and security. Increasingly, the proponents of what the Clinton Administration called ‘‘assertive multilateralism’’ were

projecting the United Nations into intranational, domestic disputes, not conflicts

that truly threatened international peace and security. These internal controversies,

often ethnic and religious in nature, frequently involving antipathies hundreds of

years in the making, were undertaken by parties without the attributes of nationstates that could be members of the United Nations. Thus, in addition to the countless other complexities of peace enforcement operations, U.N. advocates were proposing to insert the U.N. into conflicts with which the organization had little or no

real exposure.

III. CASE STUDIES OF RECENT U.N. PEACE OPERATIONS

For purposes of illustration, I would like to highlight three ‘‘peace operations’’ that

have been turning points in America’s understanding of the capabilities and limits

of the U.N. These cases highlight dramatically: (1) the fallacy of the

‘‘burdensharing’’ argument that the role and risks of the United States are reduced

by U.N. involvement; and (2) the difficulties and dangers of embroiling the United

States in peacekeeping operations that lack clear national interests.

A. Somalia

In contemporary thinking about U.N. peacekeeping, no operation is more important in American eyes than Somalia. I have previously written about the Clinton

Administration’s dramatic transformation of President Bush’s original humanitarian

mission into an ill-defined effort at ‘‘nation building’’ (‘‘Wrong Turn in Somalia,’’ Foreign Affairs, January/February, 1994), and I will not repeat that analysis here. The

critical points, however, are that: (1) the U.N. operation did not constitute

‘‘burdensharing’’ for the United States to any meaningful degree, as the enthusiasts

of ever-greater U.N. peacekeeping assert; and (2) the problem with Somalia was not

so much the ‘‘exit strategy’’ as it was the Clinton Administration’s ‘‘entry strategy.’’

Comments since the Foreign Affairs article have supported its analysis. Former

Senator Bill Bradley (D., N.J.), for example, said:

‘‘This is not a problem of execution of policy. This is a problem of formulation of policy. And the policy formulation was ill-conceived, and it was openended and it was poorly planned. And that is why we are in this fix now

. . . in this case, through a series of ad hoc decisions, we find ourselves in

this predicament.’’

Former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D., Ind.) correctly observed that: ‘‘[t]he Somali

experience will have a tremendous impact on a whole range of future problems. .

. . In Congress, no one now wants to put troops in a dangerous area if they are

not under United States’ command. In any case, Congress will be very wary of approving this kind of operation.’’

Moreover, serious conceptual and command-and-control problems were associated

with the Somalia operation, both politically and militarily. After the effective transition of responsibility from the U.S.-led Unified Task Force (‘‘UNITAF’’) to the second

U.N. Operation in Somalia (‘‘UNOSOM II’’), there were really separate chains of

command between the U.N. forces to New York, and from the American forces to

Washington. Moreover, the mission of the U.S. forces (and the U.N. force generally)

was not well defined, positioning them somewhere between being traditional peacekeepers and peace enforcers. The parties did not fully consent to the former role,

and the U.S. forces’ ability to assume the latter role was repeatedly curtailed by decisions made in Washington, such as restrictions on the amount and use of heavy

weapons and armored vehicles.

There is no question that differing command-and-control structures contributed to

the confusion that led to the October 3, 1993, Mogadishu tragedy. American commanders were understandably reluctant to entrust their troops to foreign commanders with whom they shared little or no training, doctrine or experience. They

correctly perceived that a U.N. command is not the same as a NATO command with

a different membership. Nonetheless, American forces were in the same geographic

space as United Nations forces at the same time, with unclear, overlapping and perhaps contradictory mandates from their political leadership. Whether better communications or clearer lines of authority could have averted the disaster can never be

known, but, in any event, such concerns beg the larger question whether U.S. forces

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should have been permitted to be in such an ambiguous circumstance in the first

place.

U.N. forces were completely withdrawn from Somalia under the protection of

heavily armed American troops. This finale is surely ironic, since it meant that the

U.N. could neither effectively enter nor leave Somalia without critical U.S. assistance. Moreover, intelligence documents and classified U.S. files in Somalia may

have been compromised before the U.N. withdrawal was completed. Although it is

difficult to tell from a distance if real damage was done to the United States, the

incident raises questions about the larger issue of intelligence sharing, either specifically military information or more general political information, with the UN.

B. Bosnia

Events in Bosnia and Kosovo have been as disappointing to the international community, and as frustrating for defining the role of the United Nations in conflict resolution as any in the world. Much of the U.N.’s problem stems, ironically, from the

decision of the Bush Administration to defer to Europe’s desire to handle the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the first instance. When the situation began to uuravel

in mid-1991, Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, said flatly: ‘‘We do not interfere in American affairs. We hope they will have enough respect

not to interfere in ours.’’ It may well be that American acquiescence in Europe’s demand sealed the fate of Bosnia beyond the possibility of subsequent diplomatic or

military repair, so ineffectual and counterproductive were subsequent E.U. efforts.

One important aspect of the decision to allow the Europeans to take the lead, although little understood at the time, was the elimination of NATO as a meaningful

decision-making forum until well into the crisis.

One result of early European failures, although by no means the last, was their

desire to have the Security Council play a major role. The U.N.’s military involvement in former Yugoslavia began in March, 1992, with Resolution 743’s creation of

the U.N. Protection Force (‘‘UNPROFOR’’), originally intended to help stabilize

areas of conflict in heavily Serb-populated portions of Croatia where Serbian ‘‘ethnic

cleansing’’ had first been launched. Neither side, at least initially, was terribly scrupulous about observing the agreement they had entered into, and the result was

largely a traditional U.N. peacekeeping force that had no choice but to stand by

while the violence continued. Despite complaints about UNPROFOR’s ineffectiveness in Croatia, there were no significant calls, especially from the Europeans, to

transform UNPROFOR into a peace enforcement operation. Nor did the Europeans

suggest a non-U.N. force (from NATO or the Western European Union, for example)

to prevent continued hostilities in Croatia.

UNPROFOR’s mandate was later extended to protect the distribution of humanitarian assistance in Bosnia, as the Serbian campaign to create a ‘‘Greater Serbia’’

continued unabated. The lightly armed U.N. peacekeepers could themselves hardly

engage in combat, and, indeed, the Europeans vigorously rejected several efforts by

President Bush to take a more muscular role. In part, the European reluctance

stemmed from continuing internal differences within the European Community as

to the proper political and military policies to pursue. When the Security Council,

in Resolutions 770 and 776, finally authorized the use of force to assist the delivery

of humanitarian assistance in Bosnia, European concerns for the safety of

UNPROFOR troops rendered these Resolutions ineffective. Indeed, the central issue,

for many, was whether a peacekeeping operation could effectively exist in the same

space and at the same time with a military force whose mission was essentially

‘‘peace enforcement.’’

Almost from the beginning of the humanitarian relief effort in Bosnia, American

logistical, communications and other support was critical. Working with the U.N.

High Commissioner for Refugees and other U.N. agencies, non-governmental organizations, and local civilian authorities, the involvement of U.S. personnel has undoubtedly saved numerous lives throughout former Yugoslavia. Direct American

military participation in UNPROFOR in Bosnia, as such, however, was rejected very

early on by the Bosnian Serbs. Pursuant to standard U.N. peacekeeping procedures,

because the consent of all of the parties for U.S. participation was lacking, the Secretariat declined to ask for a contribution of U.S. forces to UNPROFOR. The close

working relationship of U.S. and U.N. personnel in the humanitarian effort, however, shows that the distinction can readily be blurred, and could cause operational

or political difficulties in the future.

One early Clinton Administration military plan, known as ‘‘lift and strike,’’ would

have ended the weapons embargo (originally adopted in Resolution 713 in September, 1991) as applied against the Bosnian government, and authorized the use

of air strikes against threatening Serbian deployments and positions. The Administration’s ‘‘lift and strike’’ option was rejected by the NATO allies, especially Great

28

Britain and France, in large measure because they feared the consequences for their

soldiers participating in UNPROFOR in Bosnia.

Ironically, in early 1994, it was the Europeans, led by France, who pushed for

NATO involvement in support of yet another E.U. peace plan, and for NATO military enforcement of Security Council resolutions. This time, it was Secretary of

State Warren Christopher who argued that military intervention was ‘‘a decision

with heavy consequences,’’ that could interfere with ongoing humanitarian operations. In yet another reversal, however, the Administration joined other NATO

members at the January NATO summit to endorse air strikes to ‘‘prevent the strangulation of Sarajevo’’ and other Bosnian enclaves. Even then, however, Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada remained publicly skeptical that air strikes were

needed.

At the same time, the U.N. chain of command on the ground in former Yugoslavia

seemed to be coming unstuck. Press reports indicated that the top U.N. commander,

General Jean Cot of France (the largest troop contributor to UNPROFOR), was

defying civilian Secretariat officials in New York. Cot had apparently requested that

he be delegated authority to call in NATO air strikes, which request had been refused by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who wanted to make such decisions himself. Cot reportedly intended to open his own channel of communications

directly to the Security Council. Subsequently, Boutros-Ghali demanded that France

recall Cot, which it did, and informed the Security Council on January 19, 1994,

that he was opposed to NATO air strikes, on the strong advice of Yasushi Akashi,

his representative in the Balkan region. Cot’s views on air strikes were also supported by Belgian Lieutenant General Francois Briquemont, commander of

UNPROFOR troops in Bosnia, who said ‘‘[w]hat we are doing here is incredible, for

us coming from NATO.’’

In what seemed to be a dizzying series of reversals of positions, the U.S., the E.U.

and the U.N. Secretary General shifted positions several times more both on air

strikes and enforcement of no-fly restrictions against the Serbs, who had authority

to authorize military actions, and under what circumstances they should be requested. Even when partially successful, such as the February 9, 1994, decision to

compel the Bosnian Serbs to remove their heavy artillery from around Sarajevo,

NATO efforts were complicated by Russian opposition. Deputy Foreign Minister

Anatoly Adamisbin was said to the press ‘‘[t]his is not NATO’s business. It is the

job of the U.N.’’

The downing, on February 28, 1994, of four Bosnian Serb planes, while historic

as NATO’s first actual use of force, did nothing to deter the Serbs from continuing

their sieges of cities such as Gorazde. In another historical milestone (first use of

NATO force against ground troops), two minor air strikes against Serb positions

around Goradze were launched. The Serbs were again undeterred, overrunning all

but the very center of the city before finally agreeing to a cease-fire. Accounts of

similar confusion of political goals, tactics, leaders could go on and on. Here, it is

important to stress that continuing confusion at the political level made military

planning, and especially coordination between ‘‘NATO’’ forces and ‘‘U.N.’’ forces in

Bosnia especially difficult. This confusion must have been especially frustrating to

NATO forces in UNPROFOR, since the British and the French had tried since 1992

to impose something like NATO command-and-control structures at least in their

own respective aspects of UNPROFOR’s mission.

The Bosnia experience was so unsettling even to the Clinton Administration that

it contributed to the deliberate minimization of the U.N. role during the post-Dayton

phase of the Bosnia conflict, and to the overall handling of the Kosovo crisis. And

yet, despite the lessons of Somalia and pre-Dayton Bosnia, the United Nations was

given a leading role in the post-war occupation and attempted reconstruction and

reconciliation of both Kosovo that ignored virtually everything that was learned earlier. Efforts at reconciliation between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians appear to be

progressing no further with the United Nations presence than without it, and, indeed, Bosnia is still portioned de facto, and may well become so de jure with the

passage of time.

U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has repeatedly declared—and has so testified before this Committee—that the U.N.’s performance in Kosovo is potentially

dispositive of how the United States views the United Nations as a whole for years

to come. No one can be encouraged by the record to date.

In fact, only last month, the U.N. official responsible for human rights in the

former Yugoslavia, Jiri Dienstbier, said unambiguously: ‘‘The present situation in

Kosovo just confirms the total failure to achieve the goals of the operation.’’

Dienstbier, former Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic, was described by Agence

France-Presse in Belgrade as saying that ‘‘the main problem for the U.N. administration in the disputed province and the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force was

29

that their mission had no clearly defined aims, adding that no one on the international scene seemed ready to provide one.’’ Rarely have U.N. officials spoken so

candidly in public about the organization’s failures in an ongoing operation. One is

struck by how corroborative Mr. Dienstbier’s observations are to the basic problem

of inadequate ‘‘entry strategies’’ in the creation of U.N. ‘‘peacekeeping’’ operations

generally.

C. The Congo

The prospect of deploying another United Nations peacekeeping force in the

Congo, forty years from the first ill-fated operation there, should have given the Security Council substantial pause. Following eighteen months of confused and irregular warfare throughout the ‘‘Democratic Republic of Congo,’’ leaders of seven African nations met in New York in late January to discuss how to bring peace to this

endlessly troubled region.

Rebels in eastern Congo, who in May, 1997, helped overthrow former Congo (then

Zaire) President Mobutu Sese Seko and install current President Laurent Kabila,

turned against him shortly thereafter, initiating the renewed conflict. Hutu

Interahamwe fighters, driven into the Congo by Rwandan and Burundian Tutsi

forces (representing the victims of earlier mass-killings by Hutus), are still armed

and active, largely in support of Kabila. Although national leaders signed a July,

1999, agreement in Lusaka, Zambia, none of the rebel factions (supported politically

and militarily by several neighboring countries) agreed. Moreover, the promised

cease-fire has been routinely ignored.

The Congo is unquestionably a conflict that crosses national borders and, in the

U.N. Charter’s words, ‘‘endangers the maintenance of international peace and security.’’ Thus, Council involvement is legitimate, and may ultimately prove helpful.

Unfortunately, however, pushed by certain of the African leaders, and pulled by

their own confusion about workable U.N. peacekeeping, Council members may have

made a bad situation worse. By deploying prematurely into a decidedly confused

and unstable military and political context, the Security Council could well have impeded its ability to act effectively down the road. As in cases like Cyprus, the U.N.

presence may simply freeze existing divisions and actually ossify political negotiations.

And that would be the good news. The other possibility is that by deploying lightly-armed observers into the eastern Congo, the Security Council risks making them

hostage to the warring parties, or even becoming combatants themselves (as happened in Somalia and Bosnia). A really muscular force that could impose peace is

not on the table, nor should it be in this multi-sided, highly ambiguous context,

where what appear to be innocent civilians in need of protection at one point become

marauding guerrillas the next. Inserting U.N. troops before the parties are truly

reconciled, at least in the short term, is never a purely neutral act, as most combatants fully understand, and which the Council needs to understand as well.

Loose in the Security Council, however, is the idea that ‘‘it can’t be a real conflict

unless the U.N. has inserted a peacekeeping force.’’ This is exactly backwards. First

must come the essential political meeting of the minds of the parties to the conflict,

then, and only then should there be consideration of instrumentalities, such as a

U.N. peacekeeping force, to implement the agreement. Here, we can see that even

the Lusaka Agreement is not being honored by the states that signed it, let alone

the rebel and other forces in the Congo that did not. Apparently in recognition of

these concerns, proponents of a U.N. force have scaled back their initial proposals

to a 5,500-person observation force. But their stated expectation is that this deployment is just the precursor to a much larger force, of 15,000 or more, apparently

based on the not-irrational idea that once the U.N. is sucked in on the ground, the

logic of expanding its presence will become irreversible. One can only suppose what

the American role will become once the U.N. presence starts to expand.

IV. U.N. PEACEKEEPING’S DIRECT CONSEQUENCES FOR THE UNITED STATES

Although U.N. peacekeeping had received considerable international attention

during the Cold War, actual deployments of U.N. forces were relatively rare prior

to the late 1980’s. Missions were limited in scope, if not always in duration, and

the financial costs to the United States were relatively insubstantial. In 1989 and

early 1990, peacekeeping still remained a relatively small part of the U.N.’s overall

budget. In just the last decade, however, all of that changed dramatically, as the

attached chart indicates:

Budget. The most important budgetary implication of greatly expanded peacekeeping activities is caused by the difference in the level of assessments that the

United States faces. For some time, the U.S. share of the U.N. regular budget has

been limited to twenty-five percent (25%). Indeed, from the inception of peaceVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00033 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6621 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
30

keeping in 1940, until 1973, the U.S. assessment had been equal to its regular budget assessment, which gradually declined form the U.N.’s founding to the present

twenty-five percent level. In 1973, however, the United States felt it important to

move quickly to create the Second U.N. Expeditionary Force in the Sinai (‘‘UNEF

II’’) to implement the provisions of Security Council Resolution 338. As a consequence, and because of the general weakness of the United States internationally,

we were forced to accept a scale of assessments for peacekeeping in which we and

the other Permanent Members of the Security Council paid more than their regular

budget assessments in General Assembly Resolution 3101 (XXVIII, December 11,

1973).

Under Resolution 3101, the membership of the United Nations was divided into

four groups: (A) the five Permanent Members of the Security Council; (B) specifically-named, economically developed member states (other than the Perm Five); (C)

economically less developed member states; and (D) specifically-named less developed states (typically those whose percentage shares of the regular assessed budget

were .01 of the total). Resolution 3101 specified that members of Group D were to

pay ten percent (10%) of their assessment rates for the regular budget; members

of Group C were to pay twenty percent (20%); members of Group B were to pay one

hundred percent (100%); and members of Group A were to pay one hundred percent

(100%) plus the amounts not otherwise apportioned. Finally, Resolution 3101 required that, within each group, the total amount apportioned was to be distributed

among the group’s members on the basis of the relative weight of each group members regular budget assessment, in relation to the total weight of the group.

Although UNEF II’s scale was supposed to be a one-time exception to the practice

of funding peacekeeping operations consistently with the regular budget scale, every

subsequent peacekeeping mission has adhered to the formula adopted for UNEF II.

(While the formula itself has not changed, the composition of the four groups specified in Resolution 3101 has changed because of the admission of new member governments to the U.N., and several minor modifications to the groups contained in

subsequent General Assembly resolutions.

Since, under the provisions of Resolution 3101 and its successors, the overwhelming majority of the members of the General Assembly pay much less for

peacekeeping than they would if the regular budget scale of assessments were followed, reverting to the pre-UNEF II practice did not seem possible for many years.

Because total peacekeeping budgets were relatively low until approximately 1988,

however, the differential in the scale of assessments did not have a major budgetary

impact for the United States.

By contrast, as peacekeeping began to expand rapidly, the financial impact of the

higher peacekeeping scale of assessments began to be felt increasingly more strongly

in U.S. budgets. Accordingly, the Bush Administration decided to seek to return to

the regular budget scale of assessments as soon as possible. Many in the State Department, however, opposed—and effectively blocked any efforts to implement—the

Administration’s policy. They complained that the policy would be too hard to accomplish politically, too costly diplomatically, and generally not worth the effort.

The consequence, of course, was that American taxpayers were charged with paying

the difference between the regular and peacekeeping scale of assessments. Instead,

it was left to Congress to take action, which has now been accepted by the Clinton

Administration. Whether the Administration will succeed in persuading other U.N.

members to reduce both the U.S. regular and peacekeeping assessments remains to

be seen.

In a very real sense, this approach is similar to what Congress did in the 1980’s,

by refusing to appropriate the full amount of the U.S. assessed contribution

throughout the U.N. system because of outrage over the anti-Western and specifically anti-American bias of so much of the organization. That approach had a very

sobering effect on the U.N., and attempting to change the U.S. assessment may

have a similar impact today. In any event, it should be a bipartisan foreign policy

of high priority to convince the other member governments in the U.N. to align the

regular and peacekeeping scale of assessments and to reduce the U.S. level as soon

as possible.

That said, one is impelled to ask why the United States, almost alone among the

184 member governments of the U.N., must bear not only the largest assessed share

for peacekeeping, but also must expend apparently quite extensive Department of

Defense resources at a time when all resources are constrained by tight budgets.

If the Clinton Administration’s own figures and calculations are correct, one can

only conclude that the United States seems to be paying early and often for U.N.

peacekeeping activities, once in assessed contributions appropriated by then relevant Committees, and once in in-kind amounts appropriated in one or more other

31

Committees. Surely, this imposes an unfair burden on our government and taxpayers, who may not even be aware of this ‘‘double billing’’ for U.N. peacekeeping.

Command and control. Another critical underlying issue is whether U.S. forces

should ever be placed under U.N. command, not just what the command structures

might be. During the Cold War, a major element of the uneasy agreement among

the Five Permanent Members of the Security Council known as the ‘‘Perm Five Convention’’ provided that armed forces of the Perm Five were not to be deployed in

peacekeeping operations. Although there were a few minor exceptions to the Perm

Five Convention over the years, it was generally adhered to quite closely. The Perm

Five Convention was first developed by Dag Hammarskjold in preparing the first

U.N. Expeditionary Force (‘‘UNEF I’’) in 1956. The U.N.’s own unofficial history of

peacekeeping, ‘‘The Blue Helmets,’’ notes that, in forming UNEF I, ‘‘[t]roops from

the permanent members of the Security Council or from any country which, for geographical and other reasons, might have a special interest in the conflict would be

excluded.’’

There were numerous reasons for this aspect of the Convention, stemming largely

from mutual distrust as to what forces from one or another of the Perm Five might

actually be doing in addition to their assigned ‘‘peacekeeping’’ responsibilities. There

was, in addition, however, the continuing reason that not deploying their own troops

gave the Perm Five a certain objectivity and detachment in leading Security Council

governance of peacekeeping activities. This distance provided a perspective that inserting troops into a dangerous crisis situation would not afford. The wisdom of the

Perm Five Convention is daily displayed in Bosnia, where British and French policy

seems more determined by their (legitimate) concern for the safety of their troop

contingents stationed with UNPROFOR than by larger geopolitical issues.

Therefore, the real policy question is whether we should not seek a revival of the

Perm Five Convention that would preclude any major deployment of U.S. and other

Permanent Member troops in U.N. peacekeeping, especially for those involving

‘‘peace enforcement.’’ In endorsing this approach, the New York Times editorialized

in 1995 that ‘‘[e]nforcement missions require the kind of firepower that only major

powers can supply, but these powers do not easily subordinate their armies to U.N.

command.’’ Indeed, the Times argues for a general scaling back to traditional U.N.

peacekeeping operations like monitoring cease fires, using troops from smaller and

neutral states. The command-and-control problem is thus solved for real enforcement missions by assigning them ‘‘to the armies of major military powers, under Security Council mandate but national combat command.’’ I believe that this is a

sound approach.

V. LESSONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Several broad lessons emerge vividly from the foregoing. First, one can only conclude that for the past seven years, the Clinton Administration—contrary to what

is supposedly its own declared policy—has been experimenting with U.N. peace operations and the lives of the forces involved. Especially with American soldiers at

risk, the cost of that casual experimentation has been far too high. The key point

is to identify those American interests that might be advanced by U.N. peacekeeping. We are not the World’s Platonic guardians, and it is a mistake to believe

the ‘‘burdensharing’’ argument that we have substantially less at stake when endorsing U.N. peacekeeping than if we undertook the same operation unilaterally.

Given the importance of the United States, politically and militarily, we are inevitably looked to, especially when something goes badly wrong in a U.N. operation.

It is simply ignoring reality not to take this fact into account at the outset of Security Council consideration of a proposed new peacekeeping operation.

One important test in defining American interests can, ironically, be found in the

U.N. Charter itself. The Charter limits the Security Council’s jurisdiction to situations adversely affecting ‘‘international peace and security.’’ In too many of the past

decade’s U.N. peacekeeping both the U.S. and the U.N. have found themselves in

intranational disputes that cannot legitimately be said to threaten ‘‘international

peace and security.’’ Simply limiting the Security Council to its actual jurisdiction

alone would be a substantial policy advance, and a major protection against the

United States becoming embroiled in conflicts where it has no discernable national

interest.

Second, this analysis also demonstrates the centrality of firmness, decisiveness

and consistency in American foreign policy decision-making. Where such important

political qualities are lacking, only confusion follows, especially when policy is directed through multilateral bodies like the U.N. Political confusion leads inevitably

to military confusion in the field, with potentially tragic results, such as in

Mogadishu. Even where the result is not as immediately and visibly disastrous, the

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longer-term consequences might be even more negative. Moreover, it is foolhardy to

think that any other governments can define an ‘‘entry’’ strategy for us. It is up to

America’s leadership to decide whether and when to support U.N. peacekeeping, not

the U.N. Secretariat, not other Security Council members and most certainly not

‘‘international public opinion.’’ We must know our own objectives, and if we cannot

articulate them clearly, we should not hesitate to oppose new proposed peacekeeping

activities, and to veto them in the Council if necessary.

Third, American rhetoric must not exceed American intentions and capabilities.

Whether in the Congo or former Yugoslavia, ‘‘talking tough’’ is of little avail when

the political will to follow it up is lacking. Rhetoric, either unilateral or multilateral,

is not a substitute for a coherent foreign policy. Indeed, the opposite is more likely

to be true: excessive U.S. rhetoric may well plunge us deeper and deeper into U.N.

peacekeeping operations where there is no or only insignificant American interests,

and where the actual prospects for successful dispute resolution are equally minimal. Some long-standing tribal, ethnic, and religious struggles are simply not susceptible to external political fixes, and it is not only feckless but politically dangerous to pretend otherwise. This is not to say that the U.S. or the U.N. might not

have a useful diplomatic role to play, but this limited involvement in no way implies

any need for U.N. peacekeeping.

Figure One: Pre-Clinton U.N. Peacekeeping Missions, 1948–1992

Start/End Dates Authorized Size

Total Cost

($ millions)

UNMOGIP (India-Pakistan) ........................................... 1948–present 45 $119

UNTSO (Palestine) ........................................................ 1948–present 152 560

UNEF I(Sinai/Gaza Strip) .............................................. 1956–1967 6,073 214

UNOGIL (Lebanon) ........................................................ 1958 591 4

ONUC (Congo) .............................................................. 1960–1964 19,828 400

UNSF (W. New Guinea) ................................................ 1962–1963 1,576 (1)

UNYOM (Yemen) ........................................................... 1963–1964 189 2

UNFICYP (Cyprus) ......................................................... 1964–present 1,257 884

UNIPOM (India-Pakistan) ............................................. 1965–1966 96 2

UNEF II (Sinai/Suez) ..................................................... 1973–1979 6,973 446

UNDOF (Golan Heights) ................................................ 1974–present 1,049 697

UNIFIL (Lebanon) .......................................................... 1978–present 5,200 2,810

UNIIMOG (Iran/Iraq) ..................................................... 1988–1991 399 190

UNGOMAP (Afghanistan/Pakistan) ............................... 1988–1990 50 14

UNTAG (Namibia) ......................................................... 1989–1990 7,500 400

UNAVEM I (Angola) ...................................................... 1989–1991 70 16

ONUCA (Central America) ............................................ 1989–1991 1,098 89

ONUSAL (El Salvador) .................................................. 1991–1995 300 107

MINURSO (W. Sahara) .................................................. 1991–present 310 330

UNIKOM (Iraq-Kuwait) .................................................. 1991–present 1,082 2 450

UNAVEM II (Angola) ..................................................... 1991–1995 655 175

UNAMIC (Cambodia) .................................................... 1991–1992 1,504 (3)

UNTAC (Cambodia) ...................................................... 1992–1993 22,000 1,600

UNPROFOR (Yugoslavia) .............................................. 1992–1995 45,000 4,600

UNOSOM I (Somalia) .................................................... 1992–1993 4,270 43

ONUMOZ (Mozambique) ............................................... 1992–1995 7,100 520

Total: 26 Missions .............................................. 134,367 troops $14.6 billion

1 Full costs were borne by Netherlands and Indonesia.

2 Since 1993, Kuwait has paid two-thirds of the costs of this mission.

3 Costs of this mission were incorporated into UNTAC.

Source: The American Enterprise Institute, March 31, 2000.

33

Figure Two: Clinton U.N. Peacekeeping Missions 1993–March 31, 2000

Start/End Dates Authorized Size

Total Cost

($ millions)

UNOSOM II (Somalia) ................................................... 1993–1995 28,000 $1,643

UNOMUR (Rwanda) ...................................................... 1993–1994 81 15

UNOMIG (Georgia) ........................................................ 1993–present 122 200

MICIVIH (Haiti) (UN/OAS mission) ............................... 1993–3/00 100 (?)

UNOMIL (Liberia) .......................................................... 1993–1997 300 85

UNMIH (Haiti) ............................................................... 1993–1996 1,500 316

UNAMIR (Rwanda) ........................................................ 1993–1996 5,500 437

UNMLT (Cambodia) ...................................................... 1993–1994 20 5

UNASOG (Libya/Chad) .................................................. 1994 9 67

MINUGUA (Guatemala) ................................................. 1/97–5/97 132 50

UNMOT (Tajikistan) ...................................................... 1994–present 79 30

UNAVEM III (Angola) .................................................... 1995–6/97 4,220 890

UNPREDEP (Macedonia) ............................................... 1995–2/99 1,106 570

UNCRO (Croatia) .......................................................... 1995–1996 7,000 300

UNMIBH (Bosnia) ......................................................... 1995–present 1,746 700

UNTAES (Croatia) ......................................................... 1996–1/98 5,177 350

UNMOP (Coratia) .......................................................... 1996–present 28 12

UNSMIH (Haiti) ............................................................. 1996–7/97 1,500 56

MINUGUA (Guatemala) ................................................. 1/97–5/97 155 5

MONUA (Angola) ........................................................... 7/97–2/99 1,326 210

UNTMIH (Haiti) ............................................................. 8/97–11/97 250 20

MONUA (Angola) ........................................................... 7/97–2/99 220 95

MIPONUH (Haiti) ........................................................... 12/97–3/00 300 40

UNPSG (Croatia) ........................................................... 1/98–10/98 233 70

MINURCA (Central African Republic) ........................... 4/98–2/00 1,360 73

UNOMSIL (Sierra Leone) ............................................... 7/98–10/99 50 40

UNMIL (Kosovo) ............................................................ 6/99–present 3,900 1 300

UNAMSIL (Sierra Leone) ............................................... 10/99–present 11,100 1 800

UNTAEY (East Timor) ................................................... 10/99–present 10,600 1 800

MONUC (Congo) ........................................................... 11/99–present 5,537 1 400

MICAH (Haiti) ............................................................... 3/00–present 100 1 9

Total: 31 Missions .............................................. 91,751 $8.58 billion

1 Estimated annual cost when fully deployed.

Source: The American Enterprise Institute, March 31, 2000.

Senator GRAMS. Thank you very much, Mr. Bolton.

Dr. Allard.

STATEMENT OF KENNETH ALLARD, PH.D., VICE PRESIDENT,

STRATFOR.COM, ALEXANDRIA, VA

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, thank you very much. I would also say that

we owe the committee our thanks for the invitation. I particularly

am honored to be here because I am a former APSA congressional

fellow, so it is a great pleasure for a change to be on this side of

the rostrum.

Senator GRAMS. We will make it tough on you if we can.

Dr. ALLARD. Indeed, sir. Thank you.

I basically have only three points to make. When we look at the

panoply of these operations that we have been engaged in since

1993, you can make three statements about them. We have done

too many; that in addition to the too many, we have done too many

things within them; and that because of these over-commitments

we are approaching very rapidly a crisis not only in the readiness

of our military forces, but also a crisis in their leadership.

One cautionary note, if I may. In addition to my other affiliations, I am also a retired Army officer. On my last assignment on

34

active duty, I had the great privilege of serving with the U.S. military forces in Bosnia.

I will never forget that first day in Sarajevo. We were standing

there at a little street corner called Sniper Alley, a very interesting

place. I know that some of you have visited it. Standing there several months before would have invited sudden death. All of a sudden I felt someone touch my shoulder. I looked down and an old

Bosnian man was standing there. He just reached up and touched

that American flag combat patch on my right shoulder and just

said: ‘‘Thank you.’’

At that moment I had never felt prouder to be an American soldier. So please keep that in mind as sort of backdrop for what I

am about to say next.

You have to look at peacekeeping in the context of everything

else that we have been doing internationally. We say peacekeeping,

but to the target country it is simply an intervention. For some of

the reasons the Ambassador mentioned, these things can go very,

very wrong very, very quickly.

I was astounded in getting ready for a presentation last fall to

have access to a Congressional Research Service report which indicated that since 1993 there have been 53 separate occasions in

which the President had notified the Congress under the provisions

of the War Powers Act that he had deployed American soldiers in

harm’s way. Now, that to me is a record of promiscuous intervention, and it is important that we see peacekeeping as part of that

larger pattern.

Sir, I associate myself completely with what you said about exit

strategies, although as a former military officer I can only imagine

General Patton talking about an exit strategy. He probably would

have told us that the idea of warfare is to cause the other guy to

have the exit strategy, and indeed if you have to worry so much

about your exit strategy, you should probably re-think your entrance strategy.

This larger pattern of interventions worries me a great deal.

Over this last decade, from Iraq all the way up through Kosovo, we

seem to have accepted the pernicious notion that endless troop

commitments are much to be preferred to decisive military or political outcomes.

The corollary to that is very simple: The less decisive the outcome, the longer we can expect the troops to be hanging around.

That is what I think we need most to understand about peacekeeping.

My second point is what happens within those missions that we

find ourselves in. What you have to remember, is what that wisest

of all philosophers, Anonymous, wrote. I had occasion to quote him

in the book that I wrote about Somalia, in which he said: ‘‘The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius understands

limits.’’

What I find remarkable about so many of these operations is that

we tend to ignore those limits. Clearly we ignored that limit in Somalia when we got involved so unwisely in nation-building.

The thing that I saw in Bosnia was that we had learned that lesson. We learned that when you go in to disarm a populace that is

an act of war. Consequently, in Bosnia what we did under the DayVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00038 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
35

ton Accords was simply to police the cantonment of the arms, the

ammunition, and the training areas. That worked fairly well.

So when I now see in Kosovo that we are beginning to get our

soldiers more involved in police operations, beginning to do the

raids, searches and seizures of arms and ammunition caches, that

to me, Senator, is mission creep.

Part of the reason why missions creep into these environments

has an awful lot to do with the professionalism of our military. I

watched brigade commanders in Bosnia routinely outperform their

counterparts, not only from the U.N., but also from our State Department and also from the humanitarian relief agencies. Why?

They had better training, motivation, equipment, and professionalism. Consequently, there is an enormous tendency for them

to take on these missions.

We need to do something about that, because we are over-compensating for the deficiencies of the international system. We can

talk about the need for more effective regional security organizations. But article 47 of the U.N. Charter originally envisioned a

military staff committee precisely to coordinate and perform these

missions. But modern peacekeeping operations undertaken by the

U.N. are not run by the Security Council as envisioned by article

47, but by the Secretariat. A fundamental flaw.

Because we have been doing so many of these operations, Army

deployments are up 300 percent since the cold war. Meanwhile, we

have reduced those forces by 30 percent. Basically what you have

then, Senator, is a force that has been ‘‘rode hard and put away

wet.’’

I saw soldiers in Bosnia who were veterans of what they called

‘‘the grand slam,’’ that is Somalia, Haiti, and now Bosnia. In a lot

of cases they were in U.S. Army Europe as part of a ‘‘get-well tour’’

to recover from those two previous deployments. But because they

had crossed the Sava River into Bosnia on New Year’s Eve 1995,

they had not seen their families in 6 or 7 months.

One of the best NCO’s that I served with over there said: ‘‘Sir,

I am really good at what I do. But you guys are forcing me to make

a choice between this Army that I love and the family that I have

to love even more, and that is not a choice.’’

Consequently, it does not take a genius to look at these declining

readiness rates right straight across the forces and to say that they

result from what we have been doing with them.

But as much as I worry about the readiness issue, Senator, I get

a lot more concerned about the leadership issue. If you examine our

track record in peacekeeping operations there have been three especially perverse leadership issues: zero casualties, zero defects,

and micromanagement.

Zero casualties is an idea resulting from the failure to learn the

right lessons from what happened in Somalia. I wrote a book on

that and my conclusion was very simple: It was not the sacrifice

of those 18 heroic Rangers; it was the fact that the reason for their

deployment, let alone their sacrifice, was never adequately explained and justified to the American people.

Unfortunately, the lesson that was learned by this administration was simply to avoid all other casualties. In Bosnia, that was

a very dysfunctional policy. We emphasized force protection almost

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to the level of dysfunctionality. Wherever we went, we went in full

‘‘battle rattle,’’ regardless of our perception of the local threat.

I think it was Mahatma Gandhi who said that you could have

neither politics without principle nor religion without sacrifice. I

would respectfully add you cannot have war without casualties.

That goes as well for things that look like wars.

Casualty aversion also begets a zero defects syndrome. If I cannot have casualties than I cannot have anything that looks like

even a defect, because my opportunities for advancement and promotion will be thereby threatened.

Consequently, there is this third factor that I mentioned: a tremendous and frightening degree of micromanagement. In Bosnia

we had every evening a thing called the battle update briefing

promptly at 1800 hours, 6 p.m., and it was not at all unusual for

us to have 120-plus powerpoint slides presented to the assembled

staff, with kibitzing generals all the way up the line.

Now, this is the military that we say is going to out-fight and

out-think its opponents. I’m skeptical, given our bureaucractic,

risk-aversion performance in recent years. Maybe you can argue

that Bosnia worked very well because we had virtually no casualties. But in Kosovo, it seems to me that we are getting into a style

of warfare that has taken the wrong lessons from our peacekeeping

experience and mis-applied them to the real business of the American military, which is war.

One of the things that I came to understand in the course of a

26-year military career, Senator, was that military forces are extremely expensive, extremely difficult, and they really only do one

thing for you: They buy you time, always at the cost of some significant degree of the national treasure that you people provide,

but also in some cases with blood.

So I think it is terribly important for us to remember that when

we put forces on a peacekeeping operation they are basically buying time. That time and that sacrifice will be in vain unless accompanied by a great degree of wisdom in choosing our interventions.

Sir, thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Allard follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. KENNETH ALLARD

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: Thank you for the honor of being

invited to testify before this distinguished committee of the United States Senate.

And as a former Congressional Fellow and humble Senate staffer, let me add that

it is a particular pleasure to appear on this side of the rostrum.

You have chosen a most appropriate moment to assess the issue of peacekeeping.

This is a difficult and emotional topic, where one of the customary pitfalls is the

loss of perspective and where partisanship often substitutes for clear thinking. So

in suggesting several things about our recent experience with peacekeeping, let me

try to keep faith with the lessons learned here as a Congressional Fellow with mentors like Senator John Warner and the late Congressman Bill Nichols. Among other

things, they taught me that defense and foreign policies are best addressed by putting the nation’s interest ahead of party and position—quaint though that idea often

sounds these days.

That point was brought home to me rather poignantly just hours after arriving

in Sarajevo in early 1996 as part of the U.S. peacekeeping contingent for IFOR, the

first of our troop commitments to Bosnia under the Dayton Accords. I was standing

in a part of that city known as ‘‘Sniper Alley’’—a street corner where only months

before death was one of the few certainties. Something touched my shoulder and I

turned to see an old man smiling up at me. He reached out again, touched the

American flag combat patch on my right shoulder and simply said, ‘‘Thank you.’’ I

37

had never felt prouder to be an American soldier than at that moment. And most

of us who saw not only the devastation of that beautiful country but also the hope

in the eyes of its children were convinced that our presence there was an appropriate use of American power.

That said, let me be clear about my position on the important question you are

examining here this morning. I believe there are three basic flaws in our approach

to peacekeeping:

• We have committed ourselves to too many of these operations, especially given

the reductions in the size of our forces throughout the last decade. • We have made these over-commitments worse by attempting to do too much

with our limited forces once we have been committed to what are at best difficult and ambiguous missions. • We have carried out those missions in ways that are rapidly producing not only

a crisis of readiness in our forces, but an even more alarming crisis of military

leadership.

In looking back across the last decade, most of these flaws could have been foreseen. Indeed one has to be impressed at the naivete with which we approached what

almost everyone said at the start was a ‘‘new mission.’’ In fact, there is nothing really new about peacekeeping at all. The American army was nothing if not a constabulary force for most of the nineteenth century, keeping the peace of the frontier

under the rubric of Manifest Destiny. And as American interests became more global toward the end of that century, the defense of such new responsibilities in the

Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines and even Central America became accepted

parts of what the Army and the Marines were asked to do. But there are some sobering lessons in that history about the impact of modern military forces on traditional societies. Basically, a great deal of effort is required, ‘‘progress’’ must be carefully defined in terms of the local culture, and what progress there is seems extraordinarily slow by the standards of our own pluralistic democratic culture.

All the more reason then to be careful of the first sin of over-commitment. What

is seen by us as a peacekeeping mission is inevitably perceived as an intervention

by the inhabitants of the country where we are deploying. Because global politics

are local too, caution is required. And yet, according to the Congressional Research

Service, on no fewer than 53 occasions between 1993–1999, American forces were

sent to countries where they were in imminent danger of hostilities under the reporting provisions of the War Powers Act. Most of these situations were the stuff

of headlines: Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. But there were also lesser-known deployments to Macedonia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Cambodia, among a host

of others.

By any standards, this is a record of promiscuous intervention, underlining the

truism about good intentions paving the roads to hell. Instead we hear a good deal

about ‘‘exit strategies.’’ I have always wondered if General George S. Patton might

not have observed that the whole point of warfare is to cause the other guy to have

an exit strategy! But perhaps the serious point here is that if you have to worry

so much about an exit strategy, then maybe, it’s time to re-think the entrance strategy. Especially in the cases of Iraq, Bosnia and Yugoslavia/Kosovo, we also seem to

have accepted the pernicious idea that endless troop commitments are preferable to

decisive military or political outcomes. The corollary is of course that the less decisive the outcome, the longer the troops can expect to stay.

One of the points that I raised in my book on Somalia addresses the second sin

of doing too much. That wisest of all philosophers, Anonymous, put it this way: The

difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. In attempting to

have our forces engaged in nation-building in Somalia, we clearly had forgotten

those limits. As we saw there as well, committing the peacekeeping force to the forcible disarmament of a civilian populace is committing them to combat. We learned

that lesson in Bosnia and merely monitored the cantonment of arms and ammunition caches held by the former warring factions. But I note with some trepidation

that our forces in Kosovo are now performing police functions while conducting

weapons searches and seizures as that mission creeps ever closer to outright hostilities.

In some ways, the very professionalism of our military tends to bring on such expansions of their missions. I saw Army brigade commanders in Bosnia routinely performing prodigies of civil-military relations—outperforming their counterparts from

the diplomatic and humanitarian communities because of superior training, organization, equipment and motivation. That situation reflects a basic flaw of the international system. As I also pointed out in my book on Somalia, ‘‘If it looks like war,

it doesn’t look like the U.N.’’ Clearly the U.N. should attend more to mandates and

less to the direct management of peacekeeping operations. But we also need a better

38

organizational infrastructure and international capability for managing regional security problems, especially peacekeeping.

My final point is that we have conducted our peacekeeping operations in ways

that are rapidly producing a crisis of readiness as well as leadership. Many experts

have traced the first problem to the reported 300% rise in Army deployments since

the Cold War—even as its strength levels have been cut by over thirty percent. My

purpose today is not to argue those figures but instead to personalize them. Virtually every day of my service in Bosnia I saw evidence of soldiers who had been

over-deployed to the areas in harm’s way mentioned earlier. Many had endured

what they referred to as the ‘‘the grand slam:’’ Somalia, Haiti and now Bosnia. Indeed, I met a number of soldiers who had been sent to Germany on ‘‘get well tours,’’

where they could once again be on a first-name basis with their families. Deployed

across the Sava River on New Year’s Day, 1995, most had not seen those families

in six months.

Many of you will have watched in some horror as the readiness rates of Army

divisions and their counterparts in other services decay to reflect the inevitable result of our soldiers ‘‘voting with their feet’’ as they are forced to choose between

their military careers and their families. And yet I will confess that what keeps me

up at night is not the issue of readiness but leadership. This pattern of over-deployments has been accompanied by an even more perverse aberration in the way we

conduct our operations. Three closely linked culprits are at the heart of this new

leadership issue: ‘‘zero casualties,’’ ‘‘zero defects’’ and micromanagement.

The first, ‘‘zero casualties,’’ is based on a misreading of what went wrong in Somalia. There the issue was not so much the tragic deaths of our soldiers but rather

the failure to explain adequately to the American people why they were there and

why that deployment represented a critical American interest. It is but a short step

to the second, ‘‘zero defects,’’ in which a force that is being rapidly reduced produces

ever narrower career paths in an already Darwinian process of career advancement

and promotion. The result inevitably is micro-management, in which too much rank

chases too few responsibilities and no detail is too small to be scrutinized by ever

higher headquarters.

More worrying is how these things work in practice. In Bosnia, the zero casualties

requirement resulted in ‘‘force protection’’ guidelines that were out of all proportion

to any notion of threat—to the point that our coalition partners routinely if covertly

snickered at the sight of our soldiers going everywhere dressed in full ‘‘battle rattle.’’

The zero defects and micro-management tendencies produced nightly ‘‘battle update

briefings,’’ with scores of Powerpoint charts eagerly monitored by the covey of generals who were always in attendance or kibitzing from higher headquarters. Since

the Bosnia mission has largely been successful (if endless), it might be argued that

these practices do no harm.

But in Kosovo, the zero casualties edict led to a disturbing new style of warfare

that ruled out the all-important synergy of land, sea and air combat. Worse yet, we

were able to hit targets but not always to see what they were. Civilians and refugees on the ground bore the brunt of this policy with the inevitable accidents attending war by operator-safe standoff munitions. For all the easy talk of ‘‘transformation,’’ the Army must come to grips with its own bureaucratic failures in the

tardy deployment of Task Force Hawk into Albania. There is much to do to make

these things right and that careful process of introspection and analysis has barely

begun. My suggestion is therefore that the Congress ask some tough questions of

our military about this leadership crisis before signing the checks for the new generation of information-based weaponry that is being urged upon you.

These are just a few of the disturbing long-term consequences resulting from the

experiences of peacekeeping over the last several years. In closing, I would suggest

that we remember that military forces, either in combat or peacekeeping, primarily

buy time, with the price paid always in national treasure and sometimes in blood.

As we look to the future, we must insure that we use this time and those sacrifices

only for the most critical interests of our nation.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and I look forward to your questions.

Senator GRAMS. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. You

have provided an awful lot of information already in your statements. I would like to ask some questions and I will maybe direct

them at certain individuals, but please feel free to jump in and answer any time if you have something you would like to add as well.

Dr. Bolton, I would like to start with you talking about national

interest. As I mentioned, and others have also said, in my opening

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statement, I am concerned that the U.S. has moved away from a

national interest test in deciding whether to support U.N. peacekeeping missions. Dr. Bolton, I think you mentioned something

about the peacekeeping should be in our national interest if we get

involved.

But has there been a conscious effort by the administration to

determine whether peacekeeping missions are in the national interest since PDD–25 was promulgated?

Ambassador BOLTON. I think, Senator, to the extent I understand the administration’s decisionmaking practices, what they

have done is taken the phrase ‘‘national interest’’ and expanded it

almost to the point where everything is a national interest.

Senator GRAMS. So there has been a shift in what is national interest? I mean, a stretching?

Ambassador BOLTON. Exactly. A humanitarian tragedy becomes

in our national interest. A human rights violation becomes in our

national interest. There are certainly legitimate grounds for debate

about national interest. I would not pretend to deny that. But to

take Kosovo as an example, not as a U.N. operation but as kind

of a paradigm of the administration’s thinking, it seems to me that

by defining gross abuses of human rights in Kosovo to be a sufficient trigger to utilize American military force, there has been a

separation from what we call ‘‘traditional national interest thinking’’ that means there is almost nothing that cannot justify the use

of American military force. Once you get to that point, it is a small

step, if any, to say that it justifies the presence of a U.N. peacekeeping force.

The thing that I think is important, in the U.N. context or any

multilateral peacekeeping context, to keep in account is that other

nations are pursuing their national interests. They are not

ashamed to say it and they are not ambiguous about what they do.

And we should not feel defensive or constrained about pursuing our

national interests as well. If we do not feel that there is a sufficient

interest for a U.N. operation, it is a legitimate ground to oppose it.

Quite apart from all of the prudential considerations that I think

we have all talked about up here about when peacekeeping succeeds and when it does not, I think most importantly of all, we cannot want peace more than the parties themselves. I think our tendency to forget that over time has been one of the principal causes

of U.N. peacekeeping failures and failures when the United States

has been involved directly.

Senator GRAMS. Mr. O’Hanlon.

Dr. O’HANLON. If I could just add, Senator Grams. I think it is

important to recognize this is not a Clinton administration development. It is a point worthy of debate, what our national interest is.

But it was the Bush administration which issued the Christmas

warning in 1992 telling Milosevic gross human rights abuses in

Kosovo against the ethnic Albanian population could not and would

not be tolerated by the United States. At that point it became not

just a humanitarian issue, but also a test of credibility for NATO.

So I would simply submit, I agree with those, in the Bush administration, but I would underline that this is not something that developed in the Clinton administration. By the same token, we all

know Somalia was an intervention begun by the Bush administraVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00043 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
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tion. I would, even though I am a Democrat and the Democratic

witness here, I would say the Bush administration handled the

mission much better than the Clinton administration. But there

was not a disagreement about the idea of trying to use some level

of intervention to save lives. That was seen as a valid goal.

I would simply criticize the administration for having mismanaged the use of force, rather than for the basic idea of trying

to do something in the first place. So I would just want to change

the debate slightly in those terms or make that additional point.

Ambassador BOLTON. Senator, could I just respond to that as

well? On Somalia, just to take one point, since I was there when

the Bush administration fashioned its policy in Somalia, the intervention that was undertaken there, for well or ill, was for a limited, defined humanitarian purpose. The administration was fully

prepared to withdraw all American forces by January 20 if that

had been necessary.

What happened in Somalia in 1993 reflects a fundamental shift

in the mission from a limited, defined humanitarian objective to

the broad, undefined, I think in fact undefinable, goal of nationbuilding through the policy of assertive multilateralism.

I think, tempted as I am to go point by point about these differences, I certainly am willing to agree as well that mistakes were

made in the Bush administration on some of these things and then

carried forward in the Clinton administration. It is not a split between parties or between administrations. It is a split, an important philosophical split in how you see America’s role in the world.

Senator GRAMS. Dr. Hillen, did you have something to add?

Dr. HILLEN. Mr. Chairman, on the question of national interest,

I think a lot of these missions into which we have thrust the U.N.

over the past decade or so sit on the cusp of national interest. We

are not quite sure——

Senator GRAMS. Just ours or any country’s national interest?

Dr. HILLEN. Just ours, really, because we think, well, they are

things in which the U.S. should have an interest, but it is not such

an interest that we should take the lead in deploying our national

treasure to attend to them. So what we tended to do, and more so

in the past 7 years, is as a form of therapy for us rather than good

policy, we get the U.N. to do it, because if it is a problem that

needs to be attended to, but not so serious that we think we should

do the attending, have somebody else throw their troops at the

problem.

So in both Bosnia and Somalia and Cambodia, we have used the

United Nations, as I said in my testimony, as an excuse and not

a strategy. The idea was, as John Bolton said, that this was a

freebie, this was a cop-out. You could show you are an assertive

multilateralist and you do not have to pay any costs yourself just

by giving it to the U.N.

But there are costs when we make this decision. I will just go

down some. I talked a little bit about how ultimately you discredit

the United Nations, which can be a useful instrument for foreign

policy. Plus as you well know, the U.S. ends up paying the bill,

which is, the significant portion of the bill, which is adding up exponentially the more complex these missions get.

41

Then third and most importantly, and as Dr. Allard knows well

from his military experience and his studies, there is a law of unintended consequences which not only dominates military operations,

but can often rule them. So an attempt to foist off a mission onto

the U.N. because it is on the margin of our national interest can

get the U.S. involved militarily.

I will give you one example. In 1994 President Clinton, as Richard Holbrooke’s memoirs recount, without really knowing, sort of

backed into a pledge to rescue the U.N. peacekeepers from Bosnia

if that mission failed. So that by the summer of 1995, as you remember, the decisionmaking dynamic was: Well, we have got to get

involved in Bosnia in some way because basically we have got to

send in NATO troops to rescue the U.N. peacekeepers, who at that

time were being chained to bridges and chained to radio towers by

the Serbs, or we have got to go in and take over the mission, full

stop.

So I would caution against, because these things sit on the cusp

of the national interest, of the U.S. thinking that it can get its cake

and eat it too by tending to a national interest but not sacrificing

anything. I agree with John Bolton, we need to make a much clearer demarcation of what is in our national interest or not, because

if we do not do that we do not know what is worth sacrificing for.

Senator GRAMS. Dr. Allard.

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, I think it is very important to remember

that there were three very distinct phases in Somalia. One was the

humanitarian relief operation conceived from the beginning as

something that the United States would land as a chapter 7 operation. But it was specially created with the idea that there would

be the handoff to this U.N. peacekeeping force, to kick off phase

two.

That second phase has been called ‘‘aggravated peacekeeping’’ although I prefer General Montgomery’s phrase. He said: ‘‘If this is

not combat, I am sure having a nightmare.’’ We went from humanitarian relief to nation-building, and along the way decided to take

out Mohammed Farad Aideed. In short: welcome to the wonderful

world of combat.

All the more reason, before you go in, to recognize the fact that

you are on a slippery slope. You have got to have a fairly exact concept of what your national interest is and what you hope to accomplish by the introduction of military forces. Clausewitz said that

very, very well. If you cannot do that, do not go.

Senator GRAMS. If we are going to be expanding the term, as we

have said maybe stretching ‘‘national interest,’’ can or should the

U.S. be considered the policeman of the world? Can we afford to do

that? Should we be doing it? Maybe Dr. O’Hanlon?

Dr. O’HANLON. No, Senator, I would not go along with that term.

I would not encourage the United States to aspire to that role. I

am actually more interested in helping push other countries to get

better at these peace and humanitarian operations. On the one

hand, if there is a tragedy like Rwanda, I feel whoever can do it

has to do something.

Congo and Sierra Leone are more on the edge of debatability.

Even I would acknowledge that. I support the missions, but I think

42

they are on the edge. I do not expect them to involve U.S. troops

even if they fail, but there is some chance. I do not deny that.

But the real question for me is how do we keep encouraging the

Europeans to get their militaries more deployable, how do we expand perhaps the Africa Crisis Response Initiative to help the Africans get better? I really think we have to have more of a sense of

global burden-sharing. I have been pushing for the Japanese in my

writings on East Asia to actually get beyond World War II a little

bit and, even if it makes Chinese and Koreans unhappy, to have

a small military force that could be used in some of these missions,

because we cannot do it all. We just do not have the luxury of having a military that has been downsized quite a bit and doing even

as much as we have been doing, certainly not more.

I do think we can handle about the current level if we manage

the force somewhat differently. Colonel Allard made the point that

we have overtaxed some units. That is partly because the military

has not gotten organized for these sorts of missions very well and

they have sometimes sent the same unit to several missions in a

row. That is partly a problem of force management at the Pentagon.

But I do agree that we have reached about the limit of what we

can be expected to do and others have to be able to do more. And

U.S. policy can help push them in that direction. I would encourage

that as much as possible.

Senator GRAMS. Does any of the—go ahead, Dr. Hillen.

Dr. HILLEN. Mr. Chairman, if I could make a remark, the U.S.

has the unique and decisive role in the world’s security affairs and

it is ever more unique and decisive because increasingly we are the

only country that can do it. I mean, even mechanically. We are the

only country in the world that has large aircraft carriers, stealth

military power, long-range power projection, long-range air power,

satellite-based command and control, you name it.

We are the only show in town when it comes to first class longrange power projection war fighting. We have got a lot of burdens

in that area. We have told five separate areas of the world through

military alliances that we will guarantee their security against

threats from major powers. We have got troops on the DMZ in

Korea, we have got troops in Iraq, we guarantee the security of Europe, we guarantee the security of the Western Hemisphere.

That is very taxing and we are the only country in the world that

can do that. No other country can gin up half a million people and

send them to the Gulf in the event of an unexpected invasion of

Kuwait, as we did almost a decade ago.

To the extent that we decide to get involved on the periphery of

our national interest in peacekeeping operations, I think both mechanically and strategically we fritter away that power, that

unique and decisive power that nobody else can provide. We are

not just a bigger Canada, we are not just a bigger Sweden—nations

that do peacekeeping well because they have trained for it and rehearsed it and, conversely, they do not do the sorts of things we

do militarily well.

I think we need to be very clear about a division of labor and,

since we are always in alliances and we are always members of a

43

team, like any good team, we need to assign roles and responsibilities to team members that match their interests and capabilities.

Increasingly, the U.S., because we have spent so much time in

peacekeeping—I agree with Colonel Allard—we have got three crises in our military. We have got a readiness crisis, which you know

much about, we have heard about; we have got a crisis on preparedness. We are not preparing for the future. The wheels come

off all our military systems about 2010, and we have got to transform our military and change it for the future. We have to create

some strategic space to do that.

Third, we have got a crisis in morale, I believe. A lot of it comes

from the numerous deployments on top of each other. And peacekeeping in and of itself also has an effect on the war-fighting morale and spirit of our armed forces.

I think we need to attend to those, because there are certain missions that only the U.S. can do and they are the ones at which we

cannot afford to fail. You can muddle through, mess up, and generally figure out a way to mess through a lot of peacekeeping missions that will have very little impact on the international security

environment in the grand sense. But if the U.S. fails at one Desert

Storm or Korea there is pretty big consequences for the international environment.

So I think we really need to keep our eye on the ball in the U.S.

military establishment and keep our focus. So I would say we definitely need to not only not be the policeman of the world, we need

to think about what we do best in focusing on that.

Senator GRAMS. But being the biggest and most powerful and the

one able to respond, we get kind of drug in and through the back

door becoming the policeman of the world.

Dr. HILLEN. Absolutely, and that is why, as John Bolton said, we

need discipline and coherence in our policy. We got involved in a

lot of these missions because of a syllogism, not a strategy. It went

something like this: Something must be done, the U.S. is something; therefore the U.S. must do it. That is not strategic thinking.

Senator GRAMS. Mr. Ambassador.

Ambassador BOLTON I think it is important to make the larger

political point as well that is complementary to what John just

said. That is that it is precisely because of the United States’ role

in the world that we have to keep our attention focused on where

the major strategic threats are. And by getting diverted into the

capillaries of world crises, I think we lose sight of the bigger things

that only we can deal with.

There is not just a kind of military fatigue, there is a sort of

leadership fatigue as well. Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins

has talked about the dangers of foreign policy as international social work. He really has hit on something quite important. I hope

that is something that the next administration, of whichever party,

is really going to focus on and reconcentrate our efforts on defining

what our core interests are in a place, for example, like the Taiwan

Strait, where there is an enormous risk of conflict because one side

of the Strait does not accept that democracy works on the other

side of the Strait. That is not going to be handled in the United

Nations, you can bet on that.

44

Senator GRAMS. What about genocide? I mean, is that drawing

the line if it is not in U.S. interests, or is it in the U.S. interest

to end genocide, say like in Rwanda, that we never responded to

that? Is that a borderline?

Ambassador BOLTON. I think that this is a situation where emotionalism and good intent can override what are legitimate moral

calculations for a President of the United States as well. Nobody

can justify what happened in Rwanda and in the surrounding countries. I thought it was fascinating that it was the French Ambassador who said that we cannot resist the moral imperative when

indeed it was French actions in Rwanda and elsewhere that materially contributed to the work of the genocidaires.

But it is certainly not only appropriate, it is necessary, for an

American President to make the justification to the people when

American blood is lost and to say and to be able to say, ‘‘I consider

it justifiable to put Americans at risk,’’ and to be able to say to the

parents of the soldiers who may not come back that they did sacrifice for a legitimate American interest.

I think it is wrong to be casual with American blood, and the

moral imperative alone about the concern about genocide is not the

only moral imperative at stake. The President has a moral duty to

the American people as well, and I think that needs to be factored

into any calculation of that kind.

Senator GRAMS. Colonel.

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, I know what it is like to look into a mass

grave. I saw them in Bosnia and once you see them you never forget. All the more reason to remember what the purpose of strategy

is: to relate ends and means. And if you are intervening 53 times

in 6 years, or every couple of months, then are you going to be

ready when the Nation’s interest really is at stake?

There is another critical distinction that I would draw and that

is that it is an article of faith in the military that amateurs talk

strategy, while pros talk logistics. We are very, very good at logistics. We do that, better than anybody else in the world. I think that

one of the things that we have to ask ourselves is: At what point

should we contribute to a peacekeeping operation in terms of its logistics, or in terms of its command and control. We should distinguish those instances from when we consider contributing ground

forces, because when you commit American ground forces you have

by definition committed the Nation. There is a qualitative difference between ground forces and other kinds of forces.

But quite frankly, if your declared strategy is called engagement

and enlargement, then those strategic distinctions are going to be

very, very tough ones to make.

Dr. HILLEN. Senator, I am sorry to jump in. I want to make a

quick point on this. It is important. I will give you a quick story.

I was traveling around the world with the commission, a couple of

your former colleagues, Senators Rudman and Hart, in May last

year. It was right after as the Kosovo bombing was winding down.

Everywhere we went—Azerbaijan, Egypt; we were all over the

place, Turkey—people were holding the U.S. in awe because of the

accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which of

course most people thought was completely intentional because it

turns out we ended up killing three Chinese intelligence agents.

45

The Turks gave us a nudge and a wink and said: Oh, you know,

that is quite something, because you put a 27 year old in an airplane in Missouri and you flew him around the world and you

managed to bomb three Chinese intelligence agents in the Embassy

in Belgrade. And they held our military power in awe.

I think we frittered away that capital the day that the 82d Airborne Division, a unit with which I have served, got chased out of

Mitrovica by a bunch of snowball-throwing Serbs. That is why I do

not think you want the U.S. military, its ground troops, doing

peacekeeping, because only the U.S. can really deter and hold people in awe of its power. And when you get down on the ground and

are trying to decide whose goose belongs to whom in a little village

in Kosovo, you lose that respect, that capital, you built up expensively with American lives. I think we really need to think about

that point as well.

Senator GRAMS. What we are talking about here is we have a

vote on right now. There are two votes. They will be back to back.

And we are hoping that Senator Brownback, who is on his way to

vote now, will come in between, let me run back, do two votes,

come back, and then he can go vote. So we are working out the

strategy, talking about strategy. It is just something we have to do.

Talking about entry strategy, we mentioned this, you have mentioned this. Is the U.N. Security Council with its emphasis on consensus able to construct mandates which are neither too vague nor

too sweeping? But then at the same time, what can the United

States do to make the mission of peacekeeping missions well-defined from the outset?

We always ask, you know, we want a defined mission when we

are talking here. We always talk about the exit strategy. What can

we do to help make these missions more definable, I guess to lend

credence to whatever our strategy is? Dr. O’Hanlon, we will start

with you.

Dr. O’HANLON. Great question, Senator. Let me take Congo as an

example. Even though again I support the mission and you may

not, what I would encourage you to do and hope you will do is to

ask the administration what its political theory is behind the mission. In other words, why will Mr. Kabila ultimately go along, even

though, as Ambassador Bolton has pointed out, he has not been

quite sure if he wants to go along?

I can see an incentive, that he wants control of his country, he

wants to consolidate his political sovereignty over it. But I would

like to hear the administration explain why they think he will go

along, and not just invoke the Lusaka Accords, which are promising, but they are not really a political strategy. I would like to

hear them say why they think that Rwanda and Uganda and Burundi will really be supportive of this in the end.

Finally, I am really nervous, as I said before, about the

Interahamwe. I do not know why these Hutu extremists would

want to go along with the accord. I am hoping that we can

marginalize them over time and weaken them. But again, I would

like to hear the strategy.

So that would be an entrance strategy that focused on the core

political calculations of the parties at issue, because I would like

to really have a theory in mind for why they are going to keep coVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00049 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
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operating. I think they might, but it is a gamble and I want to

think through all the pros and cons before I even invest U.N.

peacekeeping troops in this because, as John has pointed out, John

Hillen, there are risks to doing that for us as well and costs.

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, I said this about those mandates in my

book on Somalia: ‘‘Clear U.N. mandates are critical to the planning

of the mission because they shape the basic political guidance given

to U.S. forces by our political leadership. A clear mandate shapes

not only the mission, the what that we perform, but the way that

we carry it out, the how.’’

I think the right way to do this is to make sure that there is a

tight political dialog between the military and the political leadership that will have to carry out an operation. I learned very early

in my career that one of the first things that I had to do was to

ensure that first of all I understood the order, if nothing else to ensure that it was legal.

We always think about civil-military relationships in the context

of a given country. One of the things we have seen over the last

10 years is that the civil-military relationship now needs to be defined in the international context as well. At every stage when the

Security Council is shaping a political mandate it needs to consider

some specific military advice.

That is one of the things that is missing in the U.N. structure

itself, despite the clear wording of the Charter. That military advice was contemplated by the founders as being one of the major

functions of the Military Staff Committee. That function simply is

not there in the Security Council.

Senator GRAMS. Mr. Bolton.

Ambassador BOLTON. You have asked a critical question about

the dynamic of the decisionmaking in the Security Council, and you

have had a chance to observe it when you have been up in New

York yourself. It is really something that is very hard to describe

if you have not seen it in operation. But with 15 governments, each

with a particular point of view, determined to have their input into

a Security Council resolution that creates peacekeeping mandates

or other resolutions, it is very hard to keep it coherent.

I think the best way to go about it is to follow through on what

the framers of the Charter really intended, that the five permanent

members would be the major decisionmakers in these kinds of

highly sensitive political matters. It is not just a happy group of

15 countries sitting around exchanging views and trading ideas.

The Perm Five pay the bulk of the costs on these sorts of things,

particularly the United States, and in fact it is ultimately the

United States that has to lead the Perm Five.

There is just no substitute for American leadership, and where

mandates have been successfully crafted it has been because there

has been firm and decisive American leadership. When there has

not been, problems have started right from the get-go and everything else has flowed from that.

I think one thing that has happened over the past several years

is that the cooperation among the five permanent members has deteriorated. There are a number of reasons for this. One is the increased assertiveness of the Europeans and the way the British

and the French have become part of the European Union’s decisionVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00050 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
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making structure, not acting so independently on their own, as

they did even a decade ago.

I think we have lost many, many opportunities on a range of

things with the Russian Federation. I think that is reflected in the

decisionmaking in the Security Council. And China is just as much

of a problem today as it was 10 years ago or before.

But the lack of cohesion, the breakdown of decisionmaking cohesion among the five permanent members, has been a principal factor in the loss of overall cohesion within the Council.

Senator GRAMS. John.

Dr. HILLEN. A quick point, Mr. Chairman. The Security Council

is for the most part incapable of making a strategically sound decision, part of the reason being, as Ken Allard suggested, that a military dialog, a dialog with the forces that will actually carry out a

plan, never happens in the planning process, but also because it is

a political body that mostly makes its decisions based upon political

expediency.

I will just give you one example from over 50 missions. In 1978,

when Israel invaded Lebanon, the Security Council met hurriedly,

and agreed something needed to be done. The U.S. was especially

pushing for a quick decision because we were concerned about this

whole development endangering the upcoming Camp David Peace

Accords in 1978. So the Security Council decided within a matter

of 24 hours to send a peacekeeping mission to southern Lebanon,

to do missions undefined in an area of missions yet to be determined.

And it asked for the planning staff, which consisted of about a

dozen civilian staffers at the time, to submit an operational plan

within another 24 hours. So within 2 days they whipped together

a mission and just threw it into this maelstrom, and it is still

there, having significant problems, as it always has since 1978, 21

years later.

So because this sort of body will always choose political expediency over a more deliberative strategic process in which some strategic considerations are actually weighed, I think the Security

Council will continue to make decisions where it essentially is acting before thinking in the military sense.

Senator GRAMS. Dr. Allard, I think it was you that mentioned

that not the General Assembly authorizing, but the Secretary General? Did you say that, or did you mean the Security Council?

Dr. ALLARD. Sir, the Security Council is the agency to whom the

military staff committee under article 47 of the Charter was to report. So again, you see the consistency of the wisdom of the founding fathers, which was that the use of military force was to be the

monopoly of the Security Council. Unfortunately, that article has

become a dead letter. It was one of the features that became inoperative by virtue of cold war rivalries.

What has sprung up instead is the DPKO, a Department of

Peacekeeping Operations, but centered within the Secretariat. This

is what John is referring to when he talks about the fact that all

of a sudden you would put in the 911 call to these guys in the middle of the night and nothing would happen. It is the difference between what a bureaucracy will set up and what a staff structure

will set up.

48

Senator GRAMS. How do we go away from that and back to the

original intent? Dr. Hillen?

Dr. HILLEN. Mr. Chairman, one thing that is interesting is, we

have come to think of the Secretary General as the first citizen of

the world, the wielder of a lot of power both political and strategic

and moral. The Secretary General is a rather mundane figure in

the Charter, not even mentioned until I think article 99 or something. And he is mentioned in a sort of matter of fact way: Ah,

there is going to be this administrative officer, chief administrative

officer of the United Nations, the Secretary General.

As Ken Allard referred to, the ‘‘United’’ in ‘‘United Nations,’’ the

title, actually referred to nations united in war, not in peace. It was

envisioned that any military action the United Nations would take

would be a continuation of the World War II wartime alliance, and

that is where this military staff committee came in.

Well, as soon as the cold war broke out that proved not to be an

operable system. But it was never foreseen that the U.N. itself and

the Secretariat, which is the bureaucrats to arrange for the administration, would actually be the strategic managers of military

forces. If any force was to be used under the aegis of the United

Nations, it would be a continuation of the Perm Five cooperating

militarily and working under the Security Council, and then

through their own military systems. And the military staff committee is supposed to be the chief military officer of each of the

Perm Five, meeting regularly, talking through things.

So this whole notion of peacekeeping, the whole notion of peace

enforcement, the whole notion of blue helmets managed by the

U.N. proper, is an improvisation not in the Charter. I think coherence and discipline on the Security Council, in which the U.S. is

the 800-pound gorilla, so the onus is really on us, will really make

a difference in not putting the organization in situations that it

just cannot handle.

Senator GRAMS. Gentlemen, I have to put us in recess here for

just a few minutes. Senator Brownback cannot make it right now,

but it should only take me about 20 minutes to go down and wait

through the votes and then to be back. So if you could just be patient, because I just have a couple more questions, but I think it

is important that we get those in before the hearing is over. So

thanks.

I will just put this into a brief recess. Thank you.

[Recess from 11:01 a.m. to 11:21 a.m.]

Senator GRAMS. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your patience and for waiting.

Let us see here. I would like to bring this hearing back to order,

by the way, and again thank you for your patience.

I wanted to move into the area of the gratis personnel. What has

been the impact on U.N. peacekeeping capacities of the removal of

military gratis personnel, including those from the United States,

on the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to provide the planning, the logistics, and other military expertise? So has the loss of

these gratis personnel had any kind of an impact, do you think, on

the planning, the logistics, or other expertise required for some of

these peacekeeping operations?

Dr. Hillen.

49

Dr. HILLEN. Mr. Chairman, I can say a word about that having

been up there and observed it in action. You can follow the sort of

growth in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which was

only created in 1993–94, and the number of gratis personnel. It

pretty much tracks along the lines of what is shown here.

As I said, in 1988 less than a dozen civilians doing peacekeeping.

Then by 1993, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations has not

only been stood up, but it had grown to almost 400 people, and

mostly military personnel who were seconded to the U.N. staff by

their nations.

Well, as peacekeeping correspondingly goes back down and becomes less militarily complex and sophisticated and expensive, I

think you need a lot less planners because the planners up there

essentially become superfluous. And what you do not want is—and

I forget the name of the bureaucratic phenomenon, but you do not

want the fact that because you have a big and seemingly capable

planning staff, that therefore you should ramp up operations to

meet the staff capabilities. You do not want that phenomenon to

happen.

So I think, necessarily because I think the U.N.’s military role

in these bigger operations should be kept to a minimum, so too I

think the staff involved in planning those should be kept to a minimum. I think they would do much better if they had experts up

there on civil governance, on policing, and on traditional peacekeeping, rather than a full-fledged joint staff-looking military planning group. I think that will just lead the U.N. to be even more

tempted and the Security Council to be more tempted to push the

U.N. into operations which they should not undertake.

Dr. O’HANLON. I will add one point if I could, Senator. I agree

with John, but I would also like to have a few of our people up

there. I will use the example of—and I am sure you would, too,

John. I will use the example of disarmament that Ken Allard mentioned as a dangerous activity. It is a term we often talk about,

‘‘disarming factions.’’ It is a very dicey thing to get into.

I think we understand that better than some in the U.N. system

who use that term very casually, disarming militias, as if that is

a very natural and easy thing that everybody will agree to and the

militias themselves will happily accept. I am nervous—if there is

one part of the Congo mission I am nervous about, it is the word

‘‘disarmament’’ as it is written in.

It is not something we plan to try right away in this current

phase, but it is still in the language. And if we get into that at all,

we want to do it very carefully. So I would like to see U.S. personnel and other Western planners involved in that U.N. discussion at all levels about just how hard do we pursue the idea of disarmament.

Senator GRAMS. Let us continue with the Congo and that question. The Security Council recently approved an expanded peacekeeping mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or

DROC. As Ambassador Holbrooke stated during our field hearing

in New York: ‘‘A failure of this mission would ultimately represent

strike three for U.N. peacekeeping.’’

50

Dr. O’Hanlon, if the DROC mission fails will there be a retrenchment to traditional peacekeeping operations, or how much hinges

on DROC?

Dr. O’HANLON. Well, I do feel this is a traditional mission, but

it is a risky traditional mission. It does not run the risk, I do not

believe, of doing the same sort of thing that John has criticized us

for doing in Bosnia and Somalia and Cambodia. It is a much more

modest operation. Most of the people there are going to protect the

monitors. They are not going to try to separate the combatants

physically. They are going to protect the monitors.

So I think the mission is defined in a relatively modest way. But

it still could fail, and if it does then it will, as you pointed out in

your opening remarks, harm U.N. credibility. There is a risk and

there are costs to failure. Again, I support the mission because

there are also costs to inaction, and there are a lot of people who

have lost their lives in that civil war. If we have a chance of just

giving a little assistance to the peace process, I am in favor of trying it. But I am cognizant of the risks and we really do not want

to fail.

Senator GRAMS. Let me just ask a quick question. Is it a welldefined mission? Is the strategy there? There are many that believe

that it is set up to fail or that it is going to take many, many more

troops in order to be successful than what the original plan is. So

is this another poorly planned operation or do you think that it is

well planned and strategically sound?

Dr. O’HANLON. I think it is reasonably well planned, but I think

it is risky, because we are not putting in enough people, and we

do not have the U.N. operation or capability to do so, to separate

these combatants physically. So we are counting on them.

Now, I am not sure it is even knowable if this will work. We do

not know how the Hutu extremists are going to behave, for example. We do not know how Kabila is going to behave. We cannot dictate to them their actions, of course. All we can do is try to assess

the risks and the probabilities.

I would rate this one as a relatively risky mission and with only

modest chances of success. I would not deny that fact, even though

I support it. But I just do not think it is necessarily—it does not

necessarily mean it is a bad mission. But it is a very risky one.

Senator GRAMS. Mr. Bolton.

Ambassador BOLTON. I would like to dissent from the proposition

that this is a traditional U.N. peacekeeping operation. I do think

it passes the jurisdictional test. I do think this is a case, because

of the several nations that are involved supporting one side or the

other—in fact it is a multi-sided operation—I do think that the

international peace and security part of the test is satisfied.

But if you look at last summer’s cease-fire agreement and the

multiple breaches of it that have occurred; if you look at the statements that the seven national leaders made at the Security Council

in January, where it was apparent from their own public remarks

there was no true meeting of the minds among them about how the

peace process would unfold; if you look at events on the ground

since January, some of which I mentioned in my testimony—

Kabila’s frustration with the political efforts by the United Nations,

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poses of disengagement, and the small size of the mission—what

you are talking about is inserting the U.N. force into a politically

unstable and uncertain context.

That is precisely the kind of situation where the U.N. has failed

before. What it shows is a desire on the part of those concerned

about the Congo and the Great Lakes region as a whole to be able

to say that we are doing something. But I do not think anybody

has much confidence in how much this is going to be able to do.

The next stage people are talking about is a 15,000-person deployment. I am sure there are other plans or other contingencies

where it would get larger and larger and larger. This is getting the

peacekeeping force deployed before there is a political resolution

and that violates the fundamental rule of peacekeeping: consent of

all the parties.

We need far more diplomatic activity and a little application of

pressure in those cases where it can be applied behind the scenes.

We should have had that before we agreed to this peacekeeping

force in the first place.

I do think Michael O’Hanlon made the point, and I just want to

underline it: a failure here would—as Ambassador Holbrooke said

in a remarkably candid statement—make it very hard to have support for subsequent U.N. peacekeeping operations. It is one reason

why you have to pick your spots carefully.

Senator GRAMS. Colonel Allard, we are talking about the Congo

being—but Sierra Leone. The current peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone is unable basically to protect itself, let alone enforce the

mandate that it has. This situation was predicted by some before

the mandate was approved. Yet the Security Council rushed to embrace an expanded mission which includes peace enforcement action.

Now, the reality on the ground is that peacekeepers do not have

the freedom of movement and are subject to the will of the RUF

and the AFRC rebels. For example, it was a month and a half ago

that RUF rebels forced the disarmament of the peacekeepers and

the total taking from the peacekeepers, I guess, included around

500 AK–47’s, a truckload of ammunition, 3 armored personnel carriers armed with large-caliber machine guns, and the pay box. Arguably, I guess you could say that the U.N. peacekeepers have contributed more toward the fighting ability of the rebels than they

have contributed to peace in the region.

Now, given that U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone have proved

to be unable to ensure their own security, let alone the more difficult aspects of their complex mandate, do you think, Colonel Allard, that the U.N. has learned anything from past failures such

as Somalia?

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, when I hear tales like that I am inclined,

frankly, to be quite cynical. I would emphasize my previous point

about the absence of an effective means to channel these areas of

military advice to the decisionmakers at the United Nations, which

by definition are the Security Council permanent members.

There are a couple of reasons why you have a staff. I absolutely

agree with John about the fact that the last thing you want the

United Nations doing is planning operations. They have one funcVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00055 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
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tion as far as I am concerned and that is to ensure that there is

a precise mandate.

One of the other things that a military staff will give you is a

degree of institutional memory whereby those lessons that you

have learned affect your current perceptions and your future operations. That is one of the main reasons why you have a staff. So

when I hear these horror stories about making the same mistakes

time after time, I am reminded of Senator Thurmond’s statement

that his favorite definition of futility is people who keep doing the

same thing time after time while expecting different results. It

seems to me we are very close to that, given what you just talked

about.

Senator GRAMS. Should U.N. peacekeepers ill-prepared to face

the reality of nonpermissive environments such as Sierra Leone or

in the Congo—then I go back to the question, I guess, Mr.

O’Hanlon—should they be deployed at all if they do not have this

clear mandate or the capability of carrying out the mission?

Dr. O’HANLON. It is an important question. I think that you have

to ask what are they being asked to do themselves. I do not want

peacekeepers who are poorly trained going in and trying to disarm

people in Congo. At least that is my instinct. I need to be convinced

that makes sense. So where the mission may go makes me nervous

and wary. It does not make me opposed at this point, but it makes

me nervous, and I would have to be convinced.

On the other hand, to go in as observers to observe a separation

of the parties, which is contingent on their agreement—as Ambassador Bolton has pointed out, this agreement is a little tenuous

right now. But we are not going to deploy this force, as I understand it, and not going to stay there unless they do cooperate. That

much I think peacekeepers can do.

However, as you pointed out, that may not be enough to ensure

peace. So it is a risky proposition, I acknowledge that. At the end

of the day I am in favor of it, but it is risky and we had better not

let these people try to do more than they are capable of, either.

These peacekeepers are not going to be capable of disarming combatants.

Senator GRAMS. Colonel Allard.

Dr. ALLARD. Then, Senator, my rejoinder would be: Why are they

there? Again, when I hear a phrase like ‘‘peacekeeping in a nonpermissive environment’’ I get that itchy feeling between my shoulder blades, because that to me is indistinguishable from combat.

And to me combat precedes peacekeeping. If basically what you

have got to go do is to force people to go in and put down their

weapons, that to me is an act of war.

Because I have a very binary mind, I understand combat and

non-combat. What you just described is combat.

Senator GRAMS. I would like to move just one step further. The

logical followup question would be then: If not the U.N. peacekeepers, who could do the job? I mean, what are our options say

in the Congo or other parts of Africa if not the U.N.? Mr. Bolton?

Ambassador BOLTON. I think we have to be mature enough to

recognize that in some cases there just are not any solutions in the

short term. I certainly support the notion that regional organizations should do more, but that is a highly abstract and empirically

53

not supportable proposition, to be unkind and blunt about it. If we

had waited for the Organization of American States to take action

in multiple situation from Grenada to Panama, we would still be

waiting.

If you look at some of the things that have been trumpeted as

successes for regional peacekeeping organizations—Sierra Leone,

Liberia, actions taken by the ECOWAS states through the

ECOMOG group—part of the problem in Sierra Leone today is precisely the failure of the regional peacekeeping organization, even

after its troops have been deployed, to bring the situation under

control.

So I think it would be naive not to realize that in the regional

context, sometimes the politics and the national interests that are

being pushed are much more likely to cause an exacerbation of the

conflict because of conflicting loyalties than if a real outside operation like the U.N. were to be involved.

But I do not think we should blink at the reality that there are

some conflicts, from the U.S. perspective, where we do not have a

national interest and where there is not anybody who can step in.

I regret that. But I think it is far better to face that prospect

unhesitatingly than to say kind of wistfully, ‘‘well, I guess we ought

to do something,’’ and put the United Nations in in a context where

it cannot succeed and where there is substantial risk that the U.S.

itself will be drawn in further.

Senator GRAMS. According to the French Ambassador again to

the United Nations, moral responsibility. Does that melt or define

national security?

Ambassador BOLTON. Never underestimate European cynicism. I

know that Ambassador. He is a fine man, but it is easy to talk to

us about morality. Asking what they are prepared to do on the

ground is a very different thing.

Senator GRAMS. Mr. O’Hanlon.

Dr. O’HANLON. Senator, I would simply submit that morality

obliges us to have this debate. It does not oblige us to do any specific thing. We have to combine our concern for the people of the

Congo with our military limitations, with the political prospects for

a successful intervention, and come up with a policy that is well

thought through.

So I would agree with the Ambassador only insofar as commending you for having this hearing and being concerned about

this issue. I do not think morality obliges you to support the Congo

mission, even though I myself do support it. It just suggests we

have to think about what we can do to save lives around the world.

That is a national interest at some level, but it is not the top

level national interest of protecting our own territory or even protecting our traditional allies.

Senator GRAMS. So just not to throw peacekeepers at it if it is

too small a group and too ill prepared. I mean, that is a disaster

as well.

Ambassador BOLTON It can make the situation worse, in fact.

Dr. HILLEN. In fact, Senator, all your questions build upon a response. You come down to—at the end you say: Well, gosh, that is

an awfully frustrating mix of things; I guess we still have to do

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nesses, there is an escalatory dynamic in these things. If you start

off bad, you are going to throw a lot of good money after bad.

Senator GRAMS. Mission creep.

Dr. HILLEN. Exactly. We talked about it in Somalia. In Bosnia

it was the same thing. It started off as a relatively innocuous mission, a few peacekeepers, just going to deliver some food. Then we

added on safe areas, then we added on a NATO air enforcement

layer, and then all of a sudden we were at 40,000 heavily armed

troops literally at war, Danish tanks firing for the first time in 50

years, having tank battles with Serbians.

There is an escalatory dynamic where you keep reinforcing the

mission precisely because the previous steps have failed and you

keep digging yourself into a hole. So we have to think very carefully. The old Clausewitzian dictum has been brought up, but he

said never get involved in a war unless you first know what you

might get out of it. We do not often answer that question.

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, I agree with that. That is why I made the

point earlier that it is apparently a lot easier for us to accept the

idea of endless troop commitments than it is to insist on a decisive

military or political outcome. Now, there are lots of ways to cause

a decisive military or political outcome. I came across the bridge

from Virginia today. There was a decisive political outcome there

back in 1865 at a place called Appomattox that settled somethings

for all time.

By contrast one has to be impressed with the fact that there are

relatively few comparable tools out there in the international environment. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I still think that what we have got to

be prepared to do is to demand a political or a military solution

prior to the injection of a peacekeeping force.

The classic example of that is the Dayton Accords. In Bosnia, despite our insistance on a multi-ethnic state, it in fact is a partitioned state. It will endure in that condition for so long as you have

people there in the role of peacekeepers. It will not endure for 20

minutes once they are removed.

So if that precarious situation encourages you, by all means do

more of them worldwide.

Senator GRAMS. Senator Sam Brownback has joined us. I have

just one more question that I would like to ask and then I have

to leave for another meeting, and if Sam would like to just wrap

up the hearing from there, if you would.

The one question I would like to wrap up on is my concern over

PDD–71, which is expanding or moving away from the PDD–25 of

what peacekeeping normally is referred to or thought of. But PDD–

71 appears to move us from using peacekeeping as a tool for settling disputes to using it as a tool for restructuring societies. It is

going another step, making many more commitments, I think, than

previously we have been prepared to do or have been asked to do

or expected to do.

Any opinion on where this new directive or what we know of it

could lead us in the future?

Ambassador BOLTON. Well, most of us on this panel, I think, are

probably not best equipped to discern what was in the administration’s mind when they came up with it. But I do believe that——

55

Senator GRAMS. What was the genesis behind it, maybe?

Ambassador BOLTON. I think that it really does reflect where the

administration has been all along. I have not actually seen the document myself, but from what I have heard of it, it is almost like

the first draft of PDD–25 before it went through the inter-agency

process and was made substantially more realistic.

I think it may be attributable simply, in the waning days of the

administration, to them saying what they actually thought back in

1993 but were unprepared, for their own internal reasons, to put

on paper then. If there is a different reason, I would be happy to

stand corrected. But I think that is an extremely important subject

for you and the committee to pursue in your hearing with an administration witness.

Senator GRAMS. Colonel Allard.

Dr. ALLARD. Sir, I strongly concur with what the Ambassador

just said. It would seem to me that, if anything, the administration

should have been chastened by experience. But then I return to the

point that we just raised on lessons learned. I am simply not sure

that this reality has crept through yet.

Senator GRAMS. Dr. Hillen.

Dr. HILLEN. It could be further evidence of this ‘‘Groundhog Day’’

effect I talked about. PDD–25 in its original drafting, as was alluded to, was a document much like this current document. But not

only the inter-agency process, but what actually happened in Somalia, severely chastened the ambitions of that document. And it

turned out to be I think quite a good one. PDD–25 sets out many

of the realistic considerations we have talked about in this hearing

that you need to go through, rather than just jumping into a situation without thinking it through.

On the other hand, I do think you need to pursue this document

because the ramifications for U.S. policy are huge. If this does indeed become a Presidential decision directive that is used to really

guide and shape the executive branch in the execution of policy, it

is going to reach across a lot of different agencies and departments

and it is going to harness them to a set of goals heretofore that we

have not done well in accomplishing, whether it is in Somalia or

Haiti, which we have not talked about yet today. But Haiti is right

back to being the same predatory political culture that it was before we invaded.

So there are some very significant ramifications if that document

is adopted across the inter-agency process and it will take us in a

very different direction than all the lessons learned that we have

talked about here today.

Senator GRAMS. Much more exposure.

Dr. O’HANLON. Senator.

Senator GRAMS. Dr. O’Hanlon.

Dr. O’HANLON. I think and hope that they are savvier than they

were in 1993. I am just frustrated it took this long. I like the document, but to me it is a shame it is so late. I think now they are

going to be savvier about using the U.N. to go on big missions. I

do not expect the administration to blithely and naively go into a

big expansion of the Congo mission. I may disagree with my fellow

panelists on that point. I think they are savvier about what the

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U.N. can do. They are not going to do peace enforcement through

the U.N.

But to me it is just regrettable it took them this period of overambition and then overcorrection to wind up at a place that I think

doctrinally is about right. But even if they got the doctrine right

now, it does not mean they are going to get every mission right.

Every mission has to be judged on its own terms.

So I fully applaud the discussion we have had on, and your raising specific concerns about Congo, Sierra Leone, because even if

you get the doctrine right you have got to get the specifics right

as well. I remain worried. I support the missions, but I remain

worried that they could fail. These are tough missions.

Senator GRAMS. Mr. Bolton, I will just end on you. You said

where the administration was all along with PDD–71. Is there any

clarification on that?

Ambassador BOLTON. Well, their declared policy at the outset

was that they wanted to pursue something they called ‘‘assertive

multilateralism.’’ I never quite understood what they meant by ‘‘assertive multilateralism.’’ I am not sure in certain respects they

were ever very clear about it. The rhetoric largely disappeared

after the tragedy in Mogadishu, but it has been my belief that the

underlying policy thrust has never really disappeared.

I think that is something that the administration, at its senior

foreign policy levels and in some cases on the national security

side, has been committed to from the outset. I think it is reflected

not just in things like U.N. peacekeeping, but in a whole range of

other activities covering the full panoply of national policy decisions we make, whether on human rights, the environment, or a

whole range of other things. I think ‘‘assertive multilateralism’’ is

the way they see playing out America’s role in the world.

I happen to find the way that they are pursuing it very troubling. But I think in this PDD they are simply coming back to

where they already were.

I might say just very briefly that we are now in the middle of

a 2-day conference at AEI called ‘‘Trends in Global Governance: Do

They Threaten American Sovereignty?’’ I brought up some of the

papers for you and for the minority as well. These are issues that

I think that this committee has looked at extensively before, and

I certainly hope you will continue to do it, because the policy reflected in the PDD, in the draft, goes well beyond U.N. peacekeeping. It really is a way of looking at America’s place among the

nations that I think deserves serious debate.

Senator GRAMS. Senator Brownback.

Senator BROWNBACK. Thank you, Senator Grams, and thanks for

holding the hearing. I think this is a good colloquy. I am sorry I

just caught the tail end of it here, and I apologize to the witnesses

that I did not catch your testimony, so the questions I ask may

cover ground you have already covered and I apologize for that.

But I am frustrated about our tactics, given what our objectives

are. Haiti you have mentioned, I guess you have not talked about

here, but as I understand this is the third time we have been in

Haiti. During the last century we were there three times, if I am

correct, in various missions to try to establish order and create a

civil society, and it still has not happened.

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I look and I start to study Africa, and I am not well versed at

all on Africa. But yet I look at it and I feel the moral obligation.

The United States has the ability, has the capacity to step in and

try to create some sort of order that hopefully a civil society and

economy can build around. And yet I am troubled that it does not

appear as if the way and the tactics we tried in the past are likely

to be any more successful now than they were in the past.

If you were to design how would we go about helping create a

civil society in some of these areas in Africa in particular that have

had difficulty stabilizing for lengthy periods of time, how would you

do it then with the full range and complement of tools at your

availability that the United States has?

Ambassador BOLTON. If I may take a shot at that, I am not sure

that we can do that. I am not sure that nation-building as a policy

that we do to others is realistic. I would argue in a very real sense,

after 224 years we are still nation-building in the United States

and the idea we are going to kind of go to Somalia or Haiti and

square the place away I think is just as unrealistic as the idea we

are going to go to the inner city or Appalachia or anywhere else

in America and square that away.

I think the main thing that the United States can do is not proceed from the admittedly idealistic but fundamentally erroneous

notion that we can do things that societies have to do for themselves. I think our most substantial influence is not participating

in multilateral nation-building exercises, but in the kinds of opportunities of educational exchange, trade, investment, and long-term

development that give access to our economy and allow nations to

make these fundamental choices themselves.

We cannot make civil society in Haiti or in Somalia. The people

themselves have to do that. That is a hard and unpleasant statement to have to make, but I believe it is accurate.

Senator BROWNBACK [presiding]. Doctor.

Dr. O’HANLON. Senator, focusing on the issue of what we can do

with the peacekeeping missions that we may be able to undertake,

I see two choices. One is muscular, impose the peace, as we are

doing in the Balkans. There we are relatively able to do so even

if the parties resist at some level.

The second approach, which we usually apply in Africa, is count

on cooperation, and if you do not get it the mission will fail. I

would say that that is what we are now doing in Sierra Leone and

Congo. I will give two examples of where we tried that before, Angola and Mozambique. In Angola it failed, in Mozambique it

worked. In both cases we sent in a few thousand people under U.N.

auspices and in both cases we depended on the local actors, and we

had no choice because the size of the mission and the mandate

were not ambitious enough to stop Savimbi from going back to war

in Angola, for example.

So I think in Congo and Sierra Leone we are rolling the dice. We

are giving the local parties a better chance than they would have

otherwise, but all we are doing is improving the percentages, and

the percentages are still not that great. For me that is probably

still a worthwhile mission as long as we are very careful to watch

for mission creep and very careful to make sure this does not get

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out of hand and pull out if we need to. But I think it is worth the

50–50 chance of improving the chance for peace.

Dr. HILLEN. Senator, I would like to make three quick points. I

think we need to rely on much less the military component. We

tend to thrust the military into the lead role in all these sorts of

missions simply because—and we had talked about this earlier in

the hearing—it is the most well-resourced. It has all the stuff that

can get you there and do things. It has got that famous can-do attitude. They get up early, they go to bed late, they work all day. And

thus it always tends to get thrust into the lead role, and I have

found myself in that role a couple of times as a former military officer, doing things that some other agency of the U.S. Government

should probably do, but I had the tools and the resources, so I was

doing them.

Most of these missions, I think the key to success is not militarily. Certainly there is a security component to them, but I think

diplomacy and other tools, economics, informational, cultural, need

to work harder to create that self-help environment in the security

realm, because an imposed military solution is usually counterproductive, as we found out in Somalia and which could bite us in

Kosovo.

Second, I think you need to work from the inside out on these

things. In other words, democracy is by nature a home-grown enterprise and it being foisted or imposed on somebody by an outside,

somewhat disinterested power, or interested only for the time being

for whatever reason, tends not to work and it certainly does not

last. As we have talked about, Bosnia is not going to last if the

peacekeepers pull out because the solution in many ways was imposed upon the belligerents.

So I think we need to work from the inside out, and the principal

actors should be local, then regional, and only then perhaps large

manifestations of the international community.

Third in that vein, I think we need to develop more regional capabilities. I support the African Crisis Response Initiative that the

U.S. is helping train because I think it is going to be a more organized and structured way than something like ECOMOG for Africans to start taking responsibility for some of the security dilemmas that are affecting only Africa and where an imposed solution

by outside powers, be it the EU or the U.S. or the United Nations,

does not seem to always work.

In some places we have good regional capabilities, like Europe

and in parts of Asia. I thought the East Timor operation with Australia taking the lead, creating a supportive political environment,

and only then handing off to the United Nations, looks like it

might work. In some places we do not have those regional capabilities, we do not have a 400-pound gorilla on the block who is in the

region that can lead those. I think we need to work on developing

those.

But what we certainly should not do, and of which I am assured

after all my study, is send all these responsibilities up to a large

international body like the U.N. and ask it to handle everything.

That way I think lies ruin. I think we need to work at lower levels

and only go back up. It is very akin to the principle of federalism

we have here in the U.S., where some decisions, the most imporVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:42 Jul 27, 2000 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00062 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 65701 SFRELA1 PsN: SFRELA1
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tant decisions, should be left at lower levels and only some should

be moved up the chain to the high levels.

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, you mentioned the point that we had intervened in Haiti on a number of occasions. In my statement I mentioned the fact that just in the last 6 years we have intervened

some 53 times in areas of the world in which the threat was sufficiently serious that there was a notification of the Congress under

the War Powers Act, and those are CRS figures.

If you are willing to be guided by history, then you have to be

impressed at the difficulty of moving traditional societies much beyond their ability or their willingness to be moved. Their time

scales are radically different from ours. Culture has to be defined

very much in local terms and their culture is different from our

pluralistic democracy.

So I think that what that caution would suggest to us is the fact

that when you want to do some good, recognize two facts: No. 1,

military forces buy time and that is all they do. I would argue that

in Bosnia we are not using that time very wisely. All we are doing

is essentially guaranteeing the status quo right now, but not status

quo ante, nor are we even moving toward any kind of future goal.

No. 2, the real peacekeepers are not those of us who are in uniform. The real peacekeepers are the humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations that are over there, that can help get some

of these things done.

As I said in my statement, the difference between genius and

stupidity is that genius understands limits. And in this international environment we are operating and will be operating under

some very severe limits.

Senator BROWNBACK. Do all of you agree that in Mozambique our

formula worked? Dr. O’Hanlon, you suggested that in Mozambique

this one worked.

Ambassador BOLTON. I think I would agree that Mozambique

was a success, largely because in fact the parties to the dispute,

RENAMO and FRELIMO, had reached a real meeting of the

minds. They had decided that the civil war had exhausted both

sides, basically destroyed the country’s economy, and, at least up

until the recent flooding, seemed to be doing a pretty good job on

an equitable basis of sharing power and taking care of their different constitutents. They are regionally based in different parts of

the country. This is unlike Angola, where overly hasty efforts, contributed to by the United States in many cases, to get the different

warring factions together, produced agreements that diplomats

could hail as successes, but that did not reflect the true meeting

of the minds.

I do not think that in either of the two UNAVEM operations, the

two U.N. peacekeeping forces in Angola, that the collapse of the

agreements reflected adversely on the performance of the United

Nations. I think it reflected adversely on the performance of the

diplomats who put the deals together that ultimately were not successfully implemented. That to me is one of the concerns we discussed a few moments ago about the Congo, the kind of compulsion

among leading nations in the Security Council to say, ‘‘We have

brought peace to the Congo and to implement it we are going to

send out a peacekeeping force,’’ gives them the best of both worlds.

60

They get the photo opportunity of everybody signing up to a peace

agreement and then they can blame the later failure on some inadequacy in the peacekeeping force, when in fact the real failure is

at the political level.

Dr. HILLEN. Peacekeeping, Senator, whether managed by the

U.N. or otherwise, is just not a tool for all seasons and it really

needs to be carefully applied.

Senator BROWNBACK. Let me focus you on Mozambique. Do you

think Mozambique worked?

Dr. HILLEN. I think the U.N. peacekeeping mission there is generally considered a success by almost everybody involved.

Senator BROWNBACK. What do you think, Dr. Allard?

Dr. ALLARD. Sir, I think you would have to say that it did, simply

because of the fact that if there is an intent to peace on the part

of parties that formerly were at war, well, then you can have

peacekeeping. Then it makes sense.

Senator BROWNBACK. That is the old saying that there is a time

for shooting and there is a time for talking.

Dr. ALLARD. Senator, in international politics, much as domestic,

timing is everything. Every time that I think about these operations, I am constantly reminded of the fact that it is like what

happens if you break your leg. The physician does two things. First

of all, he brings the body back into alignment to allow healing.

Only after that does he put the cast on.

Think of military forces as that cast. But unless the alignment

has been taken care of in political settlement, you are wasting your

time.

Senator BROWNBACK. Or it is maybe like Solomon in

Ecclesiastes——

Dr. ALLARD. Precisely.

Senator BROWNBACK [continuing]. There is a time for planting

and a time for harvesting.

If I could, I was just wondering, then do I hear really all of you

advocating saying we have just got to be a lot more sophisticated

about when and how you can use peacekeepers? I do not hear any

of you saying, if I am correct, you are not for using these. It is just

using them in aggressive multilateralism or as—I have seen it

seems like we have almost used them like a Peace Corps. Just to

send them in kind of almost an aggressive Peace Corps with guns

to try to stabilize some situations just is not going to work on a

frequent basis, unless the environment is correct and ready.

Ambassador BOLTON. I think there are historic lessons we have

all talked about that are there and really not very seriously in dispute. The question is whether you have the discipline to resist the

calls that many people make, and again in complete good faith, to

do something when in fact to do something might actually make

the situation worse.

Senator BROWNBACK. Resist the nightly news.

Thank you very much, panel. I think this is a very important

topic. I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, that there are not more members

or there is not more coverage on it, because the number of things

that we have been involved in like this, the billions of dollars, the

lives that have been at stake—this is of huge importance. I would

hope we would think a lot more about it.

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Senator GRAMS [presiding]. Thank you very much, Senator.

I want to thank the panel very much for being here and for your

candid answers. I would like to leave the hearing formally open for

about 3 days in case any other Senators would like to submit any

questions in writing. And if they do I would appreciate a quick response if you could. But again, thank you very much, gentlemen,

and I appreciate your time.

The hearing is complete. Thank you.

[Whereupon, at 12 o’clock noon, the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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