Give the Military a Voice — and heed it — on Landmine Policy

(Washington, D.C.): During its consideration of the FY 1999, Foreign Operations
Appropriations
bill, the Senate will be asked to consider an amendment that could prove decisive in protecting
U.S. forces against an ill-considered, dangerous ban on anti-personnel landmines (APLs).

The amendment is to be offered this afternoon by Senator Jim Inhofe
(R-OK), Chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee. It would modify language
included in the bill at the behest of Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT). Senator Leahy
wants the Senate
to make it the policy of the U.S. government to enter “as soon as possible” into the unverifiable,
inequitable and ineffective treaty signed in Ottawa last December that purports to be a world-wide
ban on APLs.

Importantly, in September 1997, President Clinton publicly refused to take such a
step. He
told the Nation and its military that, “There is a line that I simply cannot cross, and that
line
is the safety and security of our men and women in uniform.” In so saying, he appeared
to
understand that the Ottawa landmine ban would clearly have jeopardized not only the
safety of the
armed forces but also potentially impaired their ability to prevail on future battlefields.

Last May, however, Mr. Clinton quietly agreed with Sen. Leahy to cross this
line. He has
issued a Presidential Decision Directive that requires the Defense Department to halt the use of all
anti-personnel landmines between now and 2006, by which time he intends to have the U.S. sign
up to the landmine ban. Sen. Leahy hopes effectively to enshrine this extraordinary policy
reversal in law.

The Inhofe amendment, however, would predicate any such legal shift in policy upon
written
certification by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the unified combatant commanders that “the
signing of the [Ottawa] Convention is consistent with the combat requirements and safety
of the armed forces of the United States.” This seems the bare minimum that can be
done to
ensure that the views of those who will be asked to bear the costs, perhaps with their
lives, of the
Leahy initiative are fully and properly weighed — something that has clearly not been done in the
course of the Clinton Administration’s reversal of its previous stance on the Ottawa treaty.

The Bottom Line

In successive letters to the Congress and the President, href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ the present and retired leaders of the
U.S. military have overwhelmingly urged rejection of prohibitions on responsible U.S. use of
anti-personnel landmines. Unless and until they change their counsel, the
United States should not and
must not “cross the line that…would imperil the safety and security of our men and women
in
uniform.”

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1. See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
Celestial Navigation: Pentagon’s Extraordinary
’64-Star’ Letter Shows Why the U.S. Cannot Agree to Ban All Landmines ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_97″>No. 97-D 97, 14
July 1997), 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) and Fourteen of America’s
Most Respected Military Figures Urge Senate to Protect U.S. Troops From Dangerous
Landmine Ban (No. 98-D 111, 16 June 1998)