CENTER’S GAFFNEY WARNS HERITAGE FOUNDATION AUDIENCE ABOUT BILL CLINTON, ‘COUNTERCULTURALIST-IN-CHIEF’

(Washington, D.C.): In an address to the Heritage
Foundation today, Center for Security Policy director
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. expressed grave concerns about
steps being taken by the Clinton Administration designed
to “mutate the U.S. armed forces from
first-class war- fighting machines and instruments of
national power-projection into something altogether
different — a sort of armed AmeriCorps.“
Gaffney suggested that “this sort of mutation fits
the ‘counterculture’ mindset of the 1960s that proved
such a profound influence on the outlook of this
President and many in his Administration.”

Gaffney’s remarks (excerpts of
which are attached) were offered as part of a panel
discussion of “War-Making and Peace-Keeping:
Presidential and Congressional Authority in Foreign
Policy.” The other panelists were Michael Uhlmann,
former Counsel to President Reagan for Policy and C.
Boyden Gray, former Counsel to President Bush.

Gaffney argued that when President Clinton
characterized the U.S. troops he was visiting in Bosnia
as “warriors for peace,” he actually put into
sharp relief his agenda for the American military:
Transforming the military — through changing its
mission, diminishing its assets and other constraints —
so as to prevent future abuses of U.S. power of the sort
critics believe occurred in the Vietnam war.

According to Gaffney, the diversion of resources,
personnel and American sovereignty involved in U.S.
participation in multilateral peacekeeping operations is
but one of the means being used by the Clinton
Administration to accomplish this radical counterculture
objective. Other techniques now mutating the American
military include: promoting officers on the basis of
peacekeeping experience; giving priority to training for
peacekeeping over warfighting operations;
intelligence-sharing with notoriously insecure agencies
like the United Nations; and marginalizing the Congress
in decisions concerning the deployment of U.S. forces
while promoting the influence and authority of the UN
over such decisions.

Gaffney, Gray and Uhlmann all argued for Congress to
become more assertive in playing its constitutional role
as a check-and-balance concerning the uses made of
American military personnel. Gaffney warned that
Congress’ recent, unsatisfactory experience with
President Clinton’s Haiti and Bosnia operations — and
the likelihood that it will shortly face a similar
problem with his commitment to deploy U.S. troops on the
Golan Heights — argues for specific corrective action: a
stipulation that the President may not commit U.S.
forces to deployments overseas in non-emergency
situations in the absence of a specific appropriation to
pay for such deployments.

A copy of Frank Gaffney’s
prepared remarks may be obtained by contacting the
Center.