Some Memorial Day: Clinton Forgets The Military in Embracing Landmine Ban That Will Put Them at Risk

(Washington, D.C.): As evidence accumulates that the Clinton Administration has been
recklessly
transferring militarily-relevant technology to a potential adversary, the People’s Republic of
China, word comes that it has betrayed national security interests on another front: The
Administration has decided to ignore concerns repeatedly expressed by America’s armed
forces⁽¹⁾ and to endorse the international ban on
landmines signed last December in Ottawa. In
other words, on the eve of Memorial Day, President Clinton has once again
demonstrated
his willingness to disregard the best interests of the U.S. military — and to put its men and
women needlessly at risk.

The Faustian Clinton-Leahy Deal

This extraordinary development was conveyed in a letter dated 15 May from
National Security
Advisor Samuel Berger to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Sen.
Leahy was the principal
sponsor of an amendment to the 1996 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which would
unilaterally impose on the U.S. military a one-year moratorium on the use of anti-personnel
landmines (APLs). The Pentagon fiercely opposes this moratorium href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾ and urged that Congress act
to spare it what Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen.
Henry Shelton called as recently as 1 May “an unacceptable risk to our troops [that] threatens
mission accomplishment.”

As Secretary Cohen and Gen. Shelton pointed out in their letter of that date to Senate Armed
Services Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-SC):

increased risk to our men and women and potential mission failure.”

href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

An Appalling Bill of Particulars

In exchange for Sen. Leahy’s consent to give the President the right to waive such a
pernicious
APL moratorium, Sandy Berger made several extraordinary promises. Specifically, he pledged —
in President Clinton’s name — that:

“The United States will destroy by 1999 all of its non-self-destructing
APLs, except those
needed for Korea.”

While the U.S. military no longer uses non-self-destructing APLs (except in the
no-man’s land between the North and South Koreas), this Clinton commitment to
completely destroy all stocks of these weapons by an early, arbitrary date denies the
armed forces an emergency capability it may yet require — for example, if self-destructing APL
stocks are exhausted and the alternative to having American forces
overrun would be the responsible use of such mines (i.e., in clearly marked minefields
from which the mines are removed after their employment is no longer required to
defend exposed American forces).

“The United States will end the use of all APLs outside Korea by 2003,
including those
that self-destruct.”

In other words, whether the U.S. military has identified replacements for its
remaining, self-destructing APLs or not, President Clinton has determined that the
armed forces will be denied weapons his own military leaders have described just three
weeks ago to be critical to “our abilities to fight and win the battle while keeping risk
to U.S. forces to a minimum.”

This commitment is all the more astounding since short-duration,
self-destructing (or self-deactivating) APLs pose negligible, if any, humanitarian
problem. Indeed, but for the zealotry of the landmine dis-inventors, who insisted that
the Ottawa Treaty ban all APLs as a matter of ideological purity, these so-called
“smart” mines would be seen for what they are: a responsible alternative to the sorts of
long-duration or “dumb” anti-personnel landmines, whose low-cost and high lethality
has made them the weapon of choice for those bent on terrifying civilian populations,
“ethnic cleansing,” etc. Unfortunately, no matter what the U.S. does, these
characteristics assure that the indiscriminate use of such weapons by others will
continue, the treaty notwithstanding.

Of course, since 2003 is — mercifully — beyond the tenure of this Administration,
the President’s edict may well be overturned, should a successor be elected who is
more supportive of the American armed forces’ legitimate needs and less willing to
increase the risks they run in serving their country. By their nature, however, the
uniformed services will be obliged to begin taking long lead-time steps today, even if
doing so compromises the security and effectiveness of the combat arms, against the
possibility that the present order will stand five years hence.

“The United States will aggressively pursue the objective of having APL
alternatives
ready for Korea by 2006, including those that self-destruct.”

With this pronunciamento, the Clinton Administration pledges to take
steps that
may or may not be achievable by the date arbitrarily selected (or, for that matter, by
any other). When combined with the commitments that follow, the President is
effectively saying: “We will be out of the landmine business even on the perilous
Korean Peninsula by 2006, no matter what.”

This is the height of irresponsibility since there is no basis for believing
that
there will be any method that is as effective and low-cost as APLs to assure the
deterrence of North Korean attack and, therefore the stability of one of the most
volatile regions on the planet. There is, moreover, no evidence, that the Administration
is budgeting the funds that will be required to undertake the massive effort required to
remove, destroy and, in some unknown fashion, replace the long-duration APLs now
deployed in large numbers in Korea.

“The United States will search aggressively for alternatives to our
mixed anti-tank
systems by (a) actively exploring the use of APL alternatives in place of the
self-destructing
anti-personnel submunitions currently used in our mixed systems and (b) exploring the
development of other techniques and/or operational concepts that
result in alternatives that
would enable us to eliminate our mixed systems entirely.”

This commitment to Senator Leahy is perhaps the most appalling of all. For it lays
bare the essence of the Clinton approach to the landmine issue, and the magnitude of
its betrayal of America’s fighting men and women. On the one hand, it establishes that
the United States will, at the very least, be getting rid of its present inventory of
“mixed” systems. These are mines that are designed to be detonated only by vehicles,
that can as a result be readily cleared by deminers and that are, therefore used together
with some anti-personnel system to hinder such clearance. No one has identified the
source of funds (by some estimates $300 million) to effect such a change-out —
assuming the Clinton Administration does not decide, down the road, simply to
eliminate these weapons altogether.

On the other hand, the Administration has introduced an ominous notion: Perhaps
new “operational concepts” might be adopted that would permit such an elimination.
Since “mixed” systems are widely understood by the U.S. military to be indispensable
to protecting its forces and assuring their success on the battlefield, the new
“operational concept” can only mean one thing: Accept more
casualties.

“The United States will sign the Ottawa Convention by 2006 if we
succeed in identifying
and fielding suitable alternatives to our anti-personnel landmines and mixed anti-tank systems
by then.”

The caveat is less comforting than it appears at first blush. Since, under the
Clinton-Leahy plan, the United States will already have eliminated all its non-self-destructing
APLs (except for those in Korea), ceased the use of all self-destructing
APLs except in Korea, and effectively compelled the military to come up with new
techniques and/or learn to live with more casualties to defend the Korean Peninsula, it
is hard to imagine what grounds will remain for further resisting a treaty whose utter
unverifiability and ineffectiveness do not trouble the President.

More to the point, as landmine activists welcoming the latest erosion in the U.S.
position on landmines have made clear, they can now concentrate on moving up the
date by which America accedes to the Ottawa Treaty. As Sen. Leahy put it on 21
May, “Now, it becomes a question not of if we’ll sign it, but when” and, according to
the New York Times, Bobby Muller of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation
believes “pressure [will] grow on the United States to sign the Ottawa Treaty sooner
than 2006.”⁽⁴⁾

The Bottom Line

On 17 September 1997, President Clinton declared:

“As Commander-in-Chief, I will not send our soldiers to defend the
freedom
of our people and the freedom of others without doing everything we can to make
them as secure as possible …. There is a line that I simply cannot cross, and that line
is the safety and security of our men and women in uniform.”

President Clinton has now crossed the line that assures the “safety
and security of our
men and women in uniform.” The ignominiousness of this action is in no way diminished by the
pretense that he had to do so to secure Sen. Leahy’s cooperation on waiving the existing,
intolerable moratorium on APL use. The fact is that — with the steadfast opposition of the U.S.
military and that of the Clinton Administration — Sen. Leahy would have been rolled in
the
Senate, just as the House approved an outright repeal in its action on the
FY99 Defense
Authorization bill.

If allowed to stand, President Clinton’s decision to ignore the advice of his senior
military
commanders, and to align himself with those who are clearly indifferent to the unnecessary
combat losses sure to ensue from this action, will feature prominently in his
Administration’s appalling legacy of diminishing the national security and putting
needlessly at
risk those who have volunteered to safeguard it. It now falls to those who refuse to be party to
the avoidable sacrifice of men and women in the armed forces — whose losses will be mourned on
future Memorial Days — to reject the Faustian Clinton-Leahy pact on anti-personnel landmines.
An early occasion to express this opposition may occur if, as the Washington Times
reports, Sen.
Leahy “has drafted an amendment he intends to add to the fiscal 1999 defense authorization bill
[expected to be considered shortly after the Memorial Day recess ends] that would codify in law
the new policy of joining the Ottawa Convention.”

– 30 –

1. See, for example: The Battle is Joined: Defense
Department, Congressional Opposition
Mounts to Fatuous Landmine Ban (No. 97-D 94, 9
July 1997); 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); and
New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Draws Line in the Sand: No Exceptions, No Military ‘Chop’ on Landmine Ban
(No. 97-D
136, 16 September 1997).

2. In addition to the opposition to banning anti-personnel landmines
expressed last year by every
single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and every one of the Combatant
Commanders,
twenty-four of the nation’s most respected and distinguished retired four-star
generals
wrote President Clinton last July urging him “to resist all efforts to impose a moratorium on the
future use of self-destructing anti-personnel landmine (APLs) by combat forces of the United
States.”

The signatories on the latter missive included: a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(Gen. John W. Vessey), a former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe — and
Secretary of State
(Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr.); six former Commandants of the Marine Corps
(Gens. Leonard
F. Chapman, Jr., Louis H. Wilson, Robert H. Barrow, P.X. Kelley, Alfred M. Gray and
Carl E. Mundy), two former Chiefs of Staff of the Army (Gen.
William C. Westmoreland and
Gordon R. Sullivan); two recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor
(Gen. Wilson and
Gen. Raymond G. Davis, former Assistant Marine Corps Commandant); four
service Vice Chiefs
of Staff (the Army’s Gen. Robert W. RisCassi and the Marines’
Generals Davis, Walter E.
Boomer and Joseph J. Went); and ten generals who retired from posts as the
Commanders-in-Chief of major regional or Army commands (Generals George B. Crist,
Michael S. Davison, John W. Foss, Frederick J. Kroesen, Gary E. Luck, David M. Maddox,
Glenn K. Otis, Crosbie E. Saint, Donn A. Starry and Louis C. Wagner,
Jr.). See Many of
the Nation’s Most Respected Military Leaders Join Forces to Oppose Bans of Use of
Self-Destructing Landmines (No. 97- P 101,
21 July 1997).

3. At a press briefing on 6 May, Pentagon spokesman
Kenneth Bacon said the Pentagon
estimates that if forced to employ alternatives to anti-personnel landmines (APLs), it would have
“to use greater forces, to deploy more forces very quickly in the early stages of battle — [in
Korea, for example, some] 17,000 additional troops, 350 additional tanks, 410 additional Bradley
Fighting Vehicles, 24 additional helicopters, and 144 other aircraft.”

4. This situation is all the more appalling because even some leading
anti-landmine activists
understand that U.S. participation will not appreciably affect the value of the Ottawa Treaty. For
example, according to the New York Times of 17 September 1997,
Stephen Goose of Human
Rights Watch said: “The absence of the Americans from the treaty did not seriously undermine the
primary objective, which is to reduce civilian casualties. ‘We want to bring them in, of course,
but I don’t think they are going to create a humanitarian disaster.’ The United States has not
exported land mines for five years and is not likely to begin doing so.”