‘FORKED TONGUES’: CLINTON TEAM OPPOSES ARMS FOR BOSNIANS BUT HAPPILY CORRUPTS OTHER SANCTION REGIMES

(Washington, D.C.): On Thursday, 28
April the U.S. Senate is scheduled to
hold a major debate on the question of
lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia. The
Clinton Administration has expressed
sympathy for the objective of ending what
is, in effect, a one-sided sanction that
denies the Bosnian government the means
to defend its people against Serbian
aggression. The Administration has
nonetheless opposed this bipartisan
initiative (S. 2041), sponsored by Senate
Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-KA) and 27
other senators, on the grounds that it
would undermine a multilateral sanctions
regime — with adverse implications for
other embargoes the U.S. supports.

This position on Bosnia would
be coherent, if
reprehensible, were
the Clinton team systematically working
to maintain the integrity and
effectiveness of sanctions elsewhere.
It is, instead, absurd — as well as
odious — in light of the
Administration’s behavior on a number of
other embargoes and sanctions around the
world. Consider the following
illustrative examples:

• Eroding the embargo on
  Iraq: Yesterday,
  Secretary of State Warren
  Christopher announced that the
  United States, France and the
  United Kingdom would end their
  enforcement of a naval blockade
  against the Jordanian port of
  Aqaba. While Secretary
  Christopher maintained that this
  would represent no weakening of
  the sanctions against Saddam
  Hussein’s Iraq, the reality is
  altogether different.

Aqaba is a major transshipment
point for Jordanian smuggling
operations that have helped keep
Saddam in business. Ending the
blockade not only eliminates the
easiest and most effective means
available of enforcing the
internationally imposed
sanctions; it also signals an
evaporating Western will to
sustain the embargo. This is
especially true given that the
alternative means Secretary
Christopher proposes to use of to
monitor Jordanian traffic with
Iraq — i.e., land-based
inspectors — are nowhere in
sight.⁽¹⁾

The truth — as noted in the
Wall Street Journal last week by
Laurie Mylroie, a distinguished
member of the Center for Security
Policy’s Board of Advisors (see
the attached
op.ed. article entitled,
“Unfinished Business with
Iraq” href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾)
— is that America’s allies have
no interest in enhancing the
effectiveness of the embargo
against Iraq: “France has
bolted from the anti-Iraq
coalition and is working
hand-in-glove with Baghdad to get
sanctions lifted.” It is
dishonest to suggest otherwise.
It is despicable to do so while
claiming that the West’s success
in maintaining the embargo on
Iraq justifies the continuing
embargo on arms to Bosnia.

• Coddling Greece on its
  sanction-busting help to Serbia,
  its crippling sanctions against
  Macedonia: Last week,
  President Clinton met with Greek
  Prime Minister Andreas
  Papandreou. The meeting appears
  to have perpetuated the U.S.
  government’s rank appeasement of
  Greece over its ongoing
  violations of the United Nations
  embargo (by exporting oil and
  other goods to Serbia) and its
  devastating unilateral embargo
  against the neighboring former
  Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

In an op.ed. in the New York
Times of 21 April 1994
entitled “Athenian
Games,” Robert Kaplan makes
the following important
observation:

“If Mr. Clinton hopes
to retain any shred of
credibility he may have left
in the Balkans, he must get
Mr. Papandreou to stop
strangling Macedonia and
aiding Serbia. Otherwise, if
war erupts in the next few
years in Macedonia and
neighboring Kosovo, the
Clinton-Papandreou meeting
will appear in hindsight much
like the 1990 meeting between
Saddam Hussein and the U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq, April
Glaspie, that inadvertently
gave Iraq a green light to
invade Kuwait.”

• Looking the other way on
  economic aid to North Korea: As
  noted in several recent Center
  for Security Policy Decision
  Briefs, href=”#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾
  Japan, China and other nations
  are continuing to provide
  invaluable economic life support
  to North Korea. In the case of
  Tokyo, this aid has taken the
  form of: remittances from Korean
  expatriates in Japan;
  rescheduling of Iranian debt
  (along with other European
  nations), allowing Tehran to
  continue using its oil to secure
  arms from Pyongyang instead of
  having to sell it on the world
  market; and technology transfers
  to North Korea.

By ignoring these activities,
Washington signals its lack of
seriousness about North Korea’s
nuclear weapons program. It
certainly undermines any case for
imposing new economic sanctions
against Pyongyang in response to
that country’s violation of its
obligations under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty.

• Morton Halperin pursues
  his own sanctions-busting agenda:
  The Center for Security Policy
  has learned that the National
  Security Council’s Senior
  Director for Democracy, Morton
  Halperin, has played an active
  role in recent days in shaping
  legislation that would
  significantly circumscribe the
  president’s authority to impose
  and enforce embargoes. The
  vehicle for this initiative is
  the conference report on the
  State Department authorization
  bill, H.R. 2333. Its language
  closely conforms to that of the
  “Free Trade in Ideas
  Act,” legislation Halperin
  as Washington Director of the
  ACLU promoted to the bill’s
  principal sponsor, Rep. Howard
  Berman (D-CA).

Halperin personally reviewed and
approved the language adopted by
the conference committee,
colluding with his former deputy
at the ACLU, Amit Pandya, now
working for Rep. Berman — over
State Department objections. It
features statutory language that
denies the President the
authority to:

“regulate or
prohibit, directly or
indirectly, the importation
from any country or
exportation to any country of
any information or
informational materials,
including but not limited to
publications, films, posters,
phonograph records,
photographs, microfilms,
microfiche, tapes, compact
disks, CD ROMs, art works,
new wire feeds…”

This legislation would
also deny the President the
authority to regulate or prohibit
travel to or from any country.
It would, in short, create
important statutory loopholes in
existing or future sanctions
regimes — to the benefit for
example of nations like Serbia,
Libya, Iran and Iraq — all in
the name ostensibly of furthering
“Free Trade in Ideas.”
Its sponsors’ true and much less
benign objectives were evident,
however, when Rep. Berman
threatened to halt funding for
Radio Marti — an
important instrument for bringing
freedom of ideas to Castro’s Cuba
— unless Cuban-American critics
of his initiative dropped their
opposition to his
initiative. href=”#N_5_”>⁽⁵⁾

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy calls
on the U.S. Senate — as it considers the
question of arming the Bosnians — to
give no greater weight to
concerns about the sanctity of
international embargoes than the Clinton
Administration appears to be giving to
other embargoes elsewhere around the
world. If the Administration is
disposed, as a practical matter, to ease
sanctions against the world’s bad actors,
the least it can do is to stop opposing
the long-overdue termination of an
obscene embargo on some of the world’s
sorriest victims: the Bosnian Muslims and
others currently defenseless in the face
of Serbian aggression.

– 30 –

1. This flim-flam
is reminiscent of the Clinton
Administration’s assurance that a new
technology transfer regime would replace
the Coordinating Committee for
Multilateral Export Controls, COCOM. The
latter was dismantled on 1 April; the
former is but a gleam in the eye.

2. The Center has
long believed that the removal of Saddam
Hussein is an essential prerequisite to
completing the United States’
“unfinished business” with
Iraq. In this connection, the Center
urged in June 1991 that “a bounty
should be placed on Saddam Hussein — a
sizeable cash reward for anyone who can
end the reign of terror he and his ruling
clique are evidently determined to
perpetuate indefinitely. See Wanted:
Saddam Hussein, Dead
or Alive, ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-P_49″>No. 91-P 49,
12 June 1991). Interestingly, the
Associated Press reported on 6 April 1994
that State Department spokesman Michael
McCurry recently acknowledged that Iraq
has offered a bounty for anyone
who murders U.N. and other international
relief workers. Turn-about surely is now
fair play.

3. This U.S. policy
is evidently much influenced by the rank
parochialism of President Clinton’s
senior policy advisor, Greek-American
George Stephanopoulos. It is positively
bizarre, however, in light of the risk
the Administration has assumed on behalf
of Macedonia’s independence and
territorial integrity by deploying
hundreds of American servicemen as human
“trip-wires” there.

4. See, for example
Look Who’s Helping Underwrite the
‘Radical Entente’: Why Are Tokyo, Bonn
Bailing Out Teheran, Pyongyang?
(No. 94-D 8, 26
January 1994).

5. In the end, Rep.
Berman agreed to “grandfather”
Cuba and North Korea, keeping present
restraints on travel and the
import/export of “information”
in place for the time being with respect
to these two nations. This should be
seen, however, as nothing more than a
tactical retreat; Morton Halperin and his
friends on Capitol Hill are clearly
intent on further eroding what remains of
the President’s nominal support for the
embargo on Cuba and will clearly seek
other opportunities to advance this
agenda. See in this regard, First
Hanoi, Now Havana? Spare Us Morton
Halperin’s Prescriptions for Potemkin
Democracy in Cuba ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_33″>No. 94-D 33, 8
April 1994).