HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE: DESPITE MILITARY FIG-LEAF, CLINTON’S LANDMINE BAN IS STILL A ‘UTOPIAN DELUSION’

(Washington, D.C.): An open letter to President Clinton
appeared as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times today
over the signatures of fifteen former U.S. flag officers. These
generals and an admiral endorse the idea of a “permanent and
total international ban on the production, stockpiling, sale and
use of landmines.” By so doing, they have offered a
patina of military respectability to a manifestly unworkable and
irresponsible idea.

As a result, it is predictable that the Clinton Administration
will bring redoubled pressure to bear on the serving
uniformed leadership to abandon its opposition to such a ban. In
fact, thanks to such pressure from U.N. Ambassador Madeleine
Albright and other civilian officials, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, has already directed a
JCS study to revisit the Chiefs’ position on the landmine issue.

The open letter’s authors make an increasingly common mistake:
They suggest that landmines are in “a category similar to
poison gas: they are hard to control and often have unintended
harmful consequences (sometimes even for those who use
them).” According to this logic, the United States should
treat landmines in the same manner as it is now treating chemical
weapons — namely, by signing up to an international convention
banning their production, stockpiling, sale and use.

In fact, as the attached Washington
Times column by the Center for Security Policy’s
director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., makes clear, two wrongs do not
make a right: Neither chemical weapons nor landmines can
be banned from the face of the earth by international agreements.
Even if future production could somehow be verifiably
prevented (and it cannot), no treaty could reliably reduce the
threat posed by existing, covert stockpiles of chemical arms or
that posed by the estimated 100 million deployed landmines. As
a practical matter, the only effect of U.S. support for
agreements that purport to accomplish such a feat will be to
eliminate these weapons from the American arsenal (and,
presumably those of its law-abiding allies).

It is instructive that, on the same day that the open letter
appeared, Secretary of Defense William Perry was in Egypt
decrying Libya’s vast, deeply buried chemical weapons production
plant. His objections are understandable. Thanks to the Clinton
Administration’s stance on the Chemical Weapons Convention now
awaiting Senate advice and consent, the United States
could well find itself obliged by treaty to liquidate all of its
chemical deterrent arsenal even though Libya remains in
business manufacturing vast quantities of “poison gas.”
Is it really in the U.S. interest to put American forces at risk
to a similarly undiminished threat from anti-personnel mines just
because the Nation is indulging in a utopian delusion with
respect to chemical weapons?

The Center for Security Policy urges those military leaders
who currently have the responsibility for safeguarding
American forces — and for ensuring that they are equipped to
fight the country’s wars successfully — to resist the siren’s
song of unilateral disarmament, whether sung by Clinton political
appointees or by their former comrades-in-arms.