UNLUCKY NUMBER: CON JOB ON PDD-13 CAN’T CONCEAL UNACCEPTABILITY OF CLINTON PEACEKEEPING DOCTRINE

(Washington, D.C.): One of these days
— perhaps next Tuesday when President
Clinton holds his first “global town
meeting” via satellite — his
Administration is going formally to
unveil its blueprint for American
involvement in international peacekeeping
activities, Presidential Decision
Directive #13 (PDD-13). This event has
been repeatedly postponed for several
reasons:

• Congressional briefings about the
  thrust and contents of PDD-13
  produced a firestorm of criticism
  of successive drafts of the
  document.
• Controversy surrounding the
  nomination of one of PDD-13’s
  principal drafters — Morton
  Halperin — to be the Assistant
  Secretary of Defense for
  Democracy and Peacekeeping and
  the strong evidence of his
  influence on its policies
  complicated earlier release of
  this doctrine. Delay had the
  advantage of not rubbing the
  Senate’s nose in the fact that a
  man widely deemed unworthy of a
  senior Administration post was
  nonetheless given an influential
  position at the National Security
  Council.
• Most importantly, the
  institutional arrangements and
  peacekeeping policies endorsed by
  PDD-13 — which the Clinton
  Administration has been
  assiduously pursuing from its
  first days in office even in the
  absence of a formal presidential
  directive — have continued to
  come a cropper. In the face of
  irrefutable evidence of the fatal
  shortcomings of its
  “mindless
  multilateralism” in places
  like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, the
  so-called Russian “near
  abroad,” and Rwanda, the
  Administration has chosen to date
  to avoid presenting a focal point
  for criticism.

A recent, laudatory editorial about
PDD-13 in the New York Times
suggests, however, that the Clinton
Administration believes the moment for
announcing its Halperin doctrine on
peacekeeping has finally arrived. The
Center for Security Policy has been
advised by sources within the
Administration that the Times‘
25 April lead editorial entitled
“U.S. Troops in U.N.
Peacekeeping” is but the first in a
series of pro-PDD-13 publicity the NSC is
orchestrating to improve the climate for
the impending presidential announcement.

Disinformation

The choice of the New York Times
for this purpose is, as the Soviet
communists used to say, no accident. The
newspaper’s editorial board has long been
sympathetic to the world
government/multilateralist theories
advanced by Morton Halperin and his
colleagues. And second, the paper has
shown a tendency — particularly in
recent years — to take certain liberties
with the truth concerning U.S. national
security matters.⁽¹⁾

Both syndromes are in evidence in the
seemingly planted editorial and its
highly misleading characterization of
PDD-13. Consider the following specific
examples of disinformation served up by
the New York Times:

Item: “The
tough conditions that the
Clinton Administration has now set for
U.S. participation in U.N. operations
provide considerable protection against
involvements that misfire….The
Administration sets stringent conditions
on committing U.S. troops to U.N.
operations. The mission must advance
American interests at acceptable risk.
American participation must be necessary
for the operation to succeed. And there
must be a credible exit strategy.”
(Emphasis added.)

The Center for Security Policy
understands that Presidential Decision
Directive #13 does not, in fact,
establish these (or other)
“conditions.” Instead, in its
first Annex, the PDD announces “considerations“
that are “Factors to be Considered
in Voting for U.N. Peacekeeping and Peace
Enforcement Resolutions.” The same
can be said of Annex II which adumbrates
“Factors to be Considered for U.S.
Troop Participation in Peace Operations
Under Chapter VI or Chapter VII.”⁽²⁾
Even if this were a mere semantic
difference, the Administration has made
one thing perfectly clear: As evident in
recent U.S. decisions about U.N.
peacekeeping in Haiti, Somalia, Liberia
and Bosnia, the Clinton
Administration feels no obligation to
vote against resolutions if they fail to
satisfy its ostensible
“conditions.”

Item:
“When circumstances warrant, the
Administration would permit American
troops to serve under foreign commanders,
as they have in the past, not only in the
U.N. operation in Somalia but also in
NATO. But the troops would remain, as
always, under the control of the
President, who could withdraw them
from engagements that failed to serve
American interests, that violated U.S.
law or exceeded the mandate under which
they were committed or that were
militarily unsound.” (Emphasis
added.)

In point of fact, the final
draft of PDD-13 gives U.S. forces
subordinated to foreign operational
control little more than the right — as
Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) recently
put it — to “phone home”:

“Commanders of U.S. military
units participating in U.N.
peacekeeping forces will refer to
higher U.S. authorities orders
which are illegal under U.S. or
international law, or are outside the
mandate of the mission to which the
United States agreed with the U.N., if
they are unable to resolve the matter
with the U.N. commander.”
(Emphasis added.)

This paragraph replaced
language in an earlier draft of the PDD
inserted last August at the insistence of
then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Colin Powell:

“Commanders of U.S. military
units participating in U.N.
peacekeeping forces will be instructed
not to comply with orders which
they believe to be outside the
mandate of the mission to which the
United States agreed with the U.N. or
are illegal under U.S. or
international law or are
militarily imprudent or unsound.”
(Emphasis added.)

The difference between these two
approaches is as obvious as it is
material: Under the Powell formula,
American troops might just be able to
survive their subordination to foreign
command. By contrast, under the formula
the Clinton Administration has now
adopted — under pressure from Secretary
of State Warren Christopher and U.N.
Ambassador Madeleine Albright — many
of them could well be dead by
the time the President gets around, in
the words of the New York Times,
to “withdraw[ing] them from
engagements that fail to serve American
interests,” etc.

Item:
“The U.S. would also pay its fair
share — 25 percent — of U.N.
assessments for peacekeeping operations
that Washington supports.”

This statement is particularly
misleading. In the transition from the
Bush to Clinton Administrations, the U.N.
unilaterally decided to raise the U.S.
tithe for peacekeeping from 30.4 percent
to 31.7 percent. In the face of
widespread public and congressional
criticism of U.N. incompetence,
corruption and failures, the Clinton team
felt obliged to seek relief. PDD-13,
however, does no more than propose
to reduce the U.S. assessment for
peacekeeping to 25 percent (the ratio of
the U.N.’s general budget expenditures
borne by the United States).

Unless Washington is prepared to act
unilaterally — an idea the
Administration abhors — the U.S. share
cannot be reduced without obtaining the
United Nation’s approval. The prospects
are never very good for obtaining such a
consensus; they are made still worse by
virtue of the fact that several other
nations (notably, Russia and Ukraine) are
seeking to reduce their assessments, too.
So far, the Clinton team has been
unable to persuade a single nation
that the American tithe is unfair.

‘Smoke and Mirrors’

The foregoing illuminate the lengths
to which the Clinton Administration is
apparently willing to go (1) to advance
its ill-conceived, possibly dangerous and
surely expensive strategy of
subordinating U.S. foreign policy and
military operations to multilateral
institutions like the United Nations and
(2) to dissemble about its true agenda.
The reason for the latter is fairly
obvious: If honest and above-board about
its true purposes, the Administration’s
PDD-13 would be
“dead-on-arrival.”

Evidence of this reality can be found
in a letter sent to the President’s
National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake,
on 24 March by the Senate Minority
Leader, Robert Dole of Kansas, and eleven
other top Republican senators. They
included: the ranking members of the
Senate Foreign Relations, Armed Services,
Budget and Intelligence Committees and
the top Republicans on the Appropriations
Committee’s Defense and Foreign
Operations Subcommittees.⁽³⁾

The senators’ letter puts down
unmistakable markers on a number of
PDD-13’s serious shortcomings. The
following are among the more serious
objections to an earlier draft of the
presidential directive:

• Its failure to stipulate
  “American national
  interest” as a criterion
  “for determining whether to
  support a U.N. peacekeeping
  operation”;
• Its failure to state that the
  United States will try to
  “rein…in the power of the
  U.N. Secretary General”;
• Its failure to recognize
  “the waste, fraud and abuse
  that accompany United Nations
  operations”;
• Its failure to “recognize
  that the U.N. is not now, or for
  the foreseeable future, an
  organization that can conduct
  military combat operations —
  which are evidently part of [the
  Administration’s] peacekeeping
  definition”;
• Its failure to “recognize
  the unique risk to Americans
  serving in U.N. operations”;⁽⁴⁾
• Its inclusion of “some
  elements of the proposed efforts
  to ‘strengthen’ U.N.
  capabilities,” e.g., in the
  area of “U.S. support for
  U.N. public information, public
  affairs or propaganda
  efforts”;
• Its commitment to provide
  “support for U.N.
  intelligence capabilities.”
  The senators correctly observe
  that “Any intelligence
  provided to the U.N. must be
  assumed to be subject to nearly
  immediate compromise”;⁽⁵⁾
• Its failure “adequately [to]
  address the central issue of U.S.
  funding for peacekeeping
  operations — specifically the
  claimed shortfall of over $1
  billion by the end of Fiscal Year
  1994″; a “request of
  $300 million for FY95
  peacekeeping…[that seems
  clearly] insufficient to meet
  expected assessments”⁽⁶⁾;
  and the fact that
  “incremental costs of DoD
  participation in peacekeeping
  operations [are] also not
  included in the…section on U.S.
  costs”; and
• Its embrace of “the proposed
  ‘Shared Responsibility’
  concept.” This amounts to a
  division of labor whereby the
  responsibility for getting U.S.
  forces into “peace
  operations” would lie with
  the Department of State. It would
  be the Department of Defense’s
  budget though that would have to
  pay the tab for all but the
  smallest scale peacekeeping
  operations.

There is a considerable risk that
implementing legislation establishing
such arrangements could give rise to
open-ended, and potentially massive,
contingent liabilities. At a minimum,
this “shared responsibility”
will make it easier to conceal the costs
of peacekeeping from public scrutiny and
accountability.

Halperin Thumbs His Nose at
the Senate, Again

The Center for Security Policy has
been advised that none
of the senators’ concerns has been
substantively addressed in the final
draft of PDD-13. This is so
despite the fact that Tony Lake averred
in a response dated 19 April (and
received today) that “the
development of this policy has benefitted
greatly from comments provided by you and
your colleagues.” To the contrary,
it appears that the Clinton
Administration has simply been going
through the motions of consulting
with Congress about a policy whose
implementation has long since gone
forward — despite the absence of a
formally signed presidential directive
and notwithstanding congressional
objections like those noted above.

The Center strongly agrees with the
objections expressed by Senator Dole and
his distinguished colleagues. In
addition, at least one feature of PDD-13
they did not mention is of concern: The
commitment expressed in Section 4 to
support peace operations “to help
failed societies reconstitute
themselves.” This broad defining of
“peace operations” to include
“nation- building” is strongly
reminiscent of views advanced in the past
by Morton Halperin. It has clearly
contributed substantially to debacles for
U.S. policy arising from recent U.N.
overreaching in Somalia, Haiti and
elsewhere.

The Bottom Line

Unfortunately, all other things being
equal, the Congress may find it very
difficult to know precisely what it is
that President Clinton ultimately signs
off on. His Administration has developed
an unclassified “white paper”
to be distributed to legislators and the
public in lieu of the classified PDD and
its annexes. Known as “PDD
Lite” to involved officials, this
document omits sensitive and
controversial language in the actual
presidential directive — such as its
requirement that the Director of Central
Intelligence make intelligence available
to the U.N. — in order to finesse
congressional concerns.

Clearly, all other things must
not be “equal”: too
much is at stake for American interests,
national treasure and — most importantly
— lives for the Clinton team’s
mindless multilateralism, and its efforts
to dissemble about it, to be perpetuated
any further. Congress should: hold
urgent, open hearings on PDD-13; insist
that it be made publicly available in its
entirety (or minus only those provisions
that contain genuinely sensitive
national security information); and
insist that implementing legislation be
considered and approved, including
related funding bills, prior to its
formal adoption.

– 30 –

1. See for example
Center Decision Briefs entitled,
All the ‘News’ That Fits the
Times’ Political Agenda: Latest Assault
on SDI Unfounded, Indefensible,
(No.93-D 70,
18 August 1993) and There Tim
Weiner Goes Again: More New York Times’
Partisan Advocacy Masquerading as ‘News’
(9 November 1993, href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_98″>No. 93-D 98).

2. Chapter VI of
the U.N. Charter refers to peacekeeping
such as the interposition of U.N.
observers in Cyrus; Chapter VII refers to
peace-enforcement which can
involve the use of force to achieve
peace, such as in the case of Iraq. The
Clinton Administration has adopted the
euphemism “peace operations” to
cover the full spectrum of these
activities.

3. In addition to
Senator Dole, the signatories were Sens.
Pete Domenici, Ted Stevens, John Warner,
Mitch McConnell, Jesse Helms, Don
Nickles, Larry Pressler, Richard Lugar,
Paul Coverdell, Thad Cochran and Strom
Thurmond.

4. On this score,
Sen. Dole and his colleagues offered a
noteworthy case in point:

“In our view the tragic
experience of Lieutenant Colonel
William Higgins in Lebanon serves as
a reminder of both the risk to
American personnel, and the inability
of the U.N. to protect its
peacekeepers even in Chapter VI
operations.”

5. In fact, the
Center has learned that there have been
at least three very serious compromises
of U.S. intelligence sources and methods
capabilities since January 1993 as a
result of ill-advised sharing of the
Clinton Administration’s determined
effort to share sensitive intelligence
information with the U.N.

6. The senators
wryly observe that “the U.S.
currently estimates an assessment of
nearly $400 million for FY94 for just
one Chapter VII operation.”