Don’t Fall for it Mr. President: Landmine Ban is Seductive, But a Bad Policy and a Formula for Killing US Personnel

(Washington, D.C.): According to press
accounts, President Clinton has one more
“to do” item before he heads to
Martha’s Vineyard for vacation: He must
decide whether 1) to continue pursuing
what will be, by definition, lengthy
negotiations for an international ban on
anti-personnel landmines (APL) in the UN
Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva
or 2) to seek such an accord in a
Canadian-sponsored forum which is
guaranteed to produce a multilateral
accord by December 1997.

Clinton’s Choice

On the face of it, the heavy betting
would appear to be that the President
will choose the latter. After all, the
Clinton Administration has already agreed
to seek a negotiated ban on APLs and it
exhibits a certain generational
proclivity for the instant gratification
afforded by signing ceremonies, rather
than the painstaking, largely thankless
and always protracted business of getting
international agreements right (to say
nothing of walking away from the table if
that is not possible).

Another factor is the intense pressure
from certain quarters known to be highly
influential with the Clinton
Administration. The New York Times,
the Washington Post and other
leading papers editorialize endlessly
that nothing but an immediate ban on APLs
will do. A bipartisan group pushing
APL-banning legislation in the Senate
offers political cover. An aroused arms
control community, fresh from its victory
— with concerted help from the Clinton
team — in effecting a no-more-verifiable
or -effective international ban on
chemical weapons, is activating its
networks to create what is often
misconstrued in Washington as widespread
popular demand for its initiatives.

And a well-financed public relations
campaign — possibly financed, at
least in part, by American tax-dollars
supplied to the International Committee
on the Red Cross (ICRC) which now regards
lobbying the U.S. government to ban
various weapon systems to be one of its
priority “humanitarian”
missions — is flooding the airwaves and
newspapers with advertizing demanding
that President Clinton and/or the
Congress agree forthwith to end the use
of anti-personnel landmines by the United
States military. Princess Diana and
General Norman Schwarzkopf have lent
their high profile personas to the cause.

The U.S. Military
Respectfully Non-Concurs

The only problem is that General
Schwarzkopf does not speak for the
American military on this issue.
To the contrary, every one of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of the
regional Commanders-in-Chief
issued on 10 July an unprecedented joint
appeal to Senate Armed Services Committee
Chairman Strom Thurmond, urging him and
his colleagues to oppose schemes that
would effectively unilaterally ban U.S.
use of short-duration or self-destructing
anti-personnel landmines. They said, in
part:

“Until the United States has
a capable replacement for
self-destructing APLs, maximum
flexibility and warfighting
capability for American
commanders must be preserved. The
lives of our sons and daughters
should be given the highest
priority when deciding whether or
not to ban unilaterally the use
of self-destructing APL.”⁽¹⁾

This view has been echoed in slightly
different words in separate
correspondence to the Senate from one of
its former Republican members, Secretary
of Defense William Cohen.

Importantly,
as the Center for Security Policy has
previously noted,⁽²⁾
the opposition expressed by the
Pentagon’s top uniformed and civilian
leaders to efforts to ban U.S. use of
short-duration APLs⁽³⁾
under present circumstances has been
forcefully seconded by twenty-four
illustrious retired four-star generals,
now retired from the Army or Marine
Corps. Among the signatories of a letter
sent to President Clinton on 21 July
were: former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff John Vessey,
former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
(and Secretary of State) Alexander
Haig, six former Marine
Commandants (Generals Leonard
Chapman, Louis Wilson, Robert Barrow,
P.X. Kelley, Alfred Gray and Carl
Mundy) and two former Army
Chiefs of Staff (Generals William
Westmoreland and Gordon
Sullivan). Interestingly,
General Gray — a highly respected combat
veteran — has been repeatedly portrayed
by the APL abolitionists as supportive of
their position; this letter makes clear
that he is not.

Just how serious the stakes are for
the U.S. military is revealed in the
following quote from the retired general
officers’ letter:

“Pentagon studies suggest
that U.S./allied
casualties may be increased by as
much as 35% if self-destructing
mines are unavailable —
particularly in the ‘halting
phase’ of operations against
aggressors. Such a cost
is especially unsupportable since
the type of mines utilized by
U.S. forces and the manner in
which they are employed by those
forces do not contribute to the
humanitarian problem that impels
diplomatic and legislative
initiatives to ban APLs.”

Deciding Considerations

In short, were President Clinton to
opt for an immediate ban on all
anti-personnel landmines, he would be
crossing the battle-tested opinion of
many of the Nation’s most highly regarded
military professionals and all
of its current leadership. Even an
Administration that displayed little
regard for those in uniform during its
first term has been properly reluctant to
take such a step despite the demands of
the landmine banners that it
“exercise civilian control” by,
in the words of an editorial in
yesterday’s New York Times,
“look[ing] beyond the narrow and
mistaken advice of the Pentagon.”

The President must understand,
however, that even if he were to accede
to the pressure from the Times and
its fellow abolitionists to disregard the
views of those who have the unique status
of actually having their lives and those
of the troops they lead on the line, there
is virtually no chance that such a treaty
could receive the approval of the U.S.
Senate. To be sure, as is
regularly pointed out, 60 Senators are
co-sponsors of legislation proposed by
Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Chuck
Hagel (R-NE) that would unilaterally
prohibit virtually all use of U.S.
landmines by the year 2000. Virtually all
of these legislators were recruited before
the depth and intensity of the military’s
opposition were evident; it remains to be
seen how many Senators will actually be
willing to force such legislation down
the throats of America’s combat forces.

Even if all 60 are supportive,
however, that number is seven short
of the two-thirds majority required to
secure the Senate’s advice and consent
to a treaty. The Clinton Administration
knows how close a call it was to get the
Chemical Weapons Convention ratified with
the active support of the Pentagon brass.
It should be assumed that an arms
control treaty that does not enjoy such
support will be a dead letter in the
Senate.

If this prospect alone is not enough
to dissuade Mr. Clinton from embracing
the Canadian option, the following
considerations — in contrast to the
agitprop put out by abolitionist organs
like the New York Times —
should suffice:

• It does not matter that
  “nearly 100 nations have
  endorsed a draft treaty”
  banning landmines. A
  number of the nations that are
  the largest producers of such
  weapons — notably, Russia,
  China, India, Brazil and Vietnam
  — have not done so. And even if
  they were to be among the
  signatories, there is absolutely
  no reason to believe that they,
  or others for whom the rule of
  law means nothing, will not take
  advantage of the inherent
  unverifiability of such an accord
  to continue wholesale production
  of inexpensive and crude, but
  highly lethal, APLs.
• Short-duration landmines do
  offer an “advantage to the
  high-tech American
  military.” In fact,
  such weapons are themselves
  “high-tech,” enabling
  the U.S. armed forces to deny
  territory to the enemy for a
  finite period of time during
  combat operations, while
  minimizing the danger that
  non-combatants will be
  inadvertently harmed by them long
  after the conflict has ended.
  Such weapons are also a
  “high tech” response to
  the earlier problem, documented
  in Pentagon reports (and revealed
  two weeks ago by the APL
  abolitionists with much fanfare),
  of long-duration U.S. mines being
  used in whole or in part during
  the Korean and Vietnam wars to
  harm American personnel.
• As noted above, some
  producers of landmines will
  manufacture them whether the
  U.S. retains the right to use
  short-duration APLs or not.
  It is a pernicious canard to
  suggest, as the Times
  did yesterday that “allowing
  the United States to keep making
  [short-duration] landmines would
  close off any possibility that
  other nations would stop making
  theirs” since that
  possibility is already
  “closed off” — by
  dint of the character of
  landmines, the unverifiability of
  a ban and the indifference of
  many nations to their treaty
  obligations (to say nothing of
  the problem of states that chose
  not to participate in an APL ban
  in the first place).

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy is no
fan of the Conference on Disarmament —
particularly in the wake of the Clinton
Administration’s recklessly shortsighted
decision to violate that organization’s
traditional rule of consensus
decision-making in its determination to
get a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
approved over Indian objections.⁽⁴⁾
Neither is the Center sanguine that an
effective and verifiable treaty banning
anti-personnel landmines can be achieved
in any forum; some proposals,
like a constitutional amendment
prohibiting the production and
consumption of alcohol, are simply too
hard.

Having said that, the option
of pursuing the patient approach to such
a ban — one which, at a minimum affords
time to explore whether there are,
indeed, any practicable alternatives to
the use of short-duration landmines — is
clearly to be preferred over the
alternative now being pushed on President
Clinton. Those who respect the
uniformed military’s considered judgment,
and value the lives of those who offer
it, can only hope that the Clinton legacy
in this area will be sticking with the
Conference on Disarmament approach to
restricting the use of anti-personnel
landmines.

– 30 –

1. For the full
text of this letter, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled Celestial
Navigation: Pentagon’s Extraordinary
’64-Star’ Letter Shows Why The U.S.
Cannot Agree To Ban All Landmines
(No. 97-D 97,
14 July 1997).

2. The full list
of the twenty-four signatories and the
entire text of their letter are attached
to the Center’s Press Release
entitled Many of Nation’s
Most Respected Military Leaders Join
Forces To Oppose Bans On Use Of
Self-Destructing Landmines
(No. 97-P 101,
21 July 1997). In this connection, also
see the Decision Brief
entitled The Anti-Landmine
Campaign Begs the Question: How Much More
Arms Abolitionism Can The U.S. Military
Afford? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_108″>No. 97-D 108, 31
July 1997).

3. The only
perceived continuing requirement for U.S.
use of long-duration
anti-personnel landmines is in the Korean
demilitarized zone.

4. See the
Center’s Press Release
entitled What The World Does
Not Need Is Any More Of Clinton’s
Non-Proliferation Non-Achievements
(No. 96-P
81, 9 September 1996).