An aging flower child’s crusade

By Frank Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times, 15 October 1997

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s dubious decision to award its 1997 Peace Prize to Jody Williams of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines could prove the adage that many a dark cloud has a silver lining.

After all, in focusing the international spotlight on the leader of this campaign, the committee has put into sharp relief the true character of this campaign: an aging Flower Child’s crusade that is approximately as out of touch with reality as that mounted by actual children bent on liberating the Holy Land some eight centuries ago.

While the self-righteousness and contempt for authority common among unreconstructed hippies were evident in many of the interviews Ms. Williams gave following the award’s announcement, the truly radical nature of her views really came through when she was challenged on some particulars. I had a chance to participate on CNN’s “Crossfire” last Friday night in one of the few times since her instant enrichment when she faced aggressive questioning.

In short order, host Pat Buchanan established that the Laureate was indifferent to the safety of American forces protecting South Korea. Neither did Ms. Williams evince much concern about the possibility that the elimination of the U.S. mine fields presently in the Demilitarized Zone could give rise to war on the Korean Peninsula -and the attendant loss of perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents.

When pressed, Ms. Williams actually declared that “A soldier is only one part of larger society.” Read, American soldiers’ lives are not worth any more than anybody else’s. This statement, so redolent of the anti-military sentiments of the counterculture, neglects a crucial fact: Our troops are asked to go into harm’s way so that a great many other peoples’ lives, and the nation’s interests, will not be put at risk.

Worse yet, implicit in her position is an even more odious proposition. What Ms. Williams may actually have meant is that the lives of American soldiers — which every one of today’s senior military leaders believe depend in part on the continued U.S. ability to use anti-personnel landmines (APLs) — are actually worth less than those of civilians.

Clearly, in Ms. Williams’ view, the needs of our troops to survive and prevail on the battlefield must be subordinated to the rights of innocent civilians not to be exposed to landmines.

On this point, the Peace Prize-winner’s thinking seems particularly divorced from reality. Although Ms. Williams endlessly repeats the mantra that the “whole world” has agreed to ban landmines, this is simply not true. In point of fact, the most populous nations on Earth have not signed onto her treaty — not China, not India, not Russia (Boris Yeltsin’s statement that he might do so has been subsequently “clarified” to mean maybe yes, maybe no).

Even if these countries, and others like Iraq, North Korea and Iran were to do so, however, they would simply be moved from the one problem category to another; instead of being nations that are not bound by the treaty, they would become nations that are, but who can be counted upon to exploit its utter unverifiability and unenforceability by cheating at will.

But Ms. Williams and her cohorts are untroubled by the fact that their treaty cannot be verified. Few of them worried about verification or totalitarians’ non-compliance in connection with the treaties of the Cold War era. Now that it is supposed to be safely behind us, they believe simply “stigmatizing” weapons is sufficient. Make them “illegal,” they say, create an “international norm,” and the problem will somehow go away.

The truth is, of course, that any weapon as capable of being universally and cheaply made as long-duration landmines, and as useful for terrorizing or laying waste to civilian populations, will never be abolished. To think otherwise is to believe that the relatively rudimentary technology involved can be disinvented by international fiat. It can’t and won’t.

When all else fails, Williams and Co. fall back on that tried and true technique of Flower Power — peer pressure. She claims that the militaries of most U.S. allies have agreed they can give up anti-personnel landmines. President Clinton should, therefore, ignore his own commanders and “lead” by joining the parade of nations heading toward Ottawa to sign her landmine ban.

Such statements ignore several critical facts: First, the militaries in a number of allied nations were all but ignored by their political authorities; Mr. Clinton deserves credit for refusing to do so here. Second, a number of allied armed forces will be able to retain short-duration anti-personnel landmines that happen to be packaged together with their anti-tank weapons. Their opposition to Ms. Williams’ ban was tempered by the fact that it does not prohibit such so-called “anti-handling devices” — just America’s free-standing “smart” APLs.

Finally, two of the Western nations obliged by geography to remain realistic about abiding dangers to their security – Finland and South Korea — refused to agree to the Williams treaty. Their civilian as well as military authorities recognize that landmines remain essential to national defense. In fact, Finland actually denounced some of its neighbors to the west who appeared, in smugly signing up to the Ottawa ban, to view Finland as their landmine barrier to the east.

This is hardly the first time that the Nobel Committee has bestowed unwarranted praise and resources — and highly publicized credibility — on characters whose contribution to real international peace is, at best, debatable. Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat and anti-nuclear activists like the Pugwash Conference and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War come to mind.

In this case, though, the Nobel Committee may have made a significant, if altogether unintended, contribution to the cause of peace if its spotlight on Jody Williams and her Flower Child crusade encourages sensible legislators to join President Clinton in heeding instead the sound advice of the U.S. military on banning landmines. The true test of leadership is in resisting Ms. Williams’ radical nostrums, not supinely embracing them.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the director of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.