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Subject: Idea of a Potent U.N. Army Receives a Mixed Response; Pentagon, Third World
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 04:29:59 EST
Message-ID: <34.1992Oct29.042959@AmeriCast.com>

Idea of a Potent U.N. Army Receives a Mixed Response; Pentagon,
Third World Wary; Logistical Questions Abound<By John M. Goshko
and Barton Gellman<Washington Post Staff Writers=

A proposal to give the United Nations a permanent international
army empowered to intervene around the world is receiving a mixed
response from foreign governments and stirring controversy in the
U.S. government.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali proposed such a mil-
itary force in June and has been joined by advocates from some of
the major powers. Behind the idea is concern that the world now
needs an international policeman to ensure stability and hold in
check the nationalist and ethnic tensions let loose by the Cold
War's end in places like Yugoslavia, Somalia and the Persian
Gulf.

But the proposal has run into resistance from many small Third
World countries fearful that what Boutros-Ghali calls "peace en-
forcement units" would be an international version of the French
Foreign Legion, enforcing not peace but the status quo as defined
by the big industrial powers.

Within the U.S. government, too, diplomats and generals are di-
vided over whether the United Nations should have military forces
with greatly increased capability to engage in warfare and wheth-
er U.S. troops should serve in them. While the State Department
has favored taking an experimental first step toward creating an
international army by designating U.S. military units for U.N.
peacekeeping purposes, the Pentagon is opposed to putting U.S.
personnel under command of foreign officers and afraid of getting
bogged down in protracted conflicts where U.S.  soldiers could
become special targets.

President Bush and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton
have endorsed an expanded U.N. military role. But they have not
pledged U.S. cooperation, keeping their remarks general.

According to State Department officials and a senior general,
Pentagon officials persuaded Bush to avoid concrete commitments
when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 21. Rejecting a
State Department suggestion that he use the speech to commit U.S.
units to a U.N. force, Bush spoke only in general terms about
U.S. cooperation in training, logistics and communications.

A Clinton adviser on U.N. affairs, Richard N. Gardner, a profes-
sor of international law at Columbia University, is perhaps the
country's principal advocate of a permanent U.N. force and has a
plan to create a 30,000-strong international army.

His plan envisions the five permanent members of the U.N. Securi-
ty Council - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China
- contributing about 2,000 men each, with roughly 30 other
members committing smaller units up to 700 men. Where necessary,
they would be augmented by air and naval forces.

In Gardner's view, such a force could perform a number of mis-
sions. It could be stationed in advance on the border of a coun-
try threatened by aggression; it could intervene to stop an inva-
sion; it could halt mass repressions against civilian populations
that constituted a threat to international peace and security; it
could open and defend humanitarian relief corridors in domestic
civil wars; it could counter acts of international terrorism.

An even more ambitious plan that has attracted the interest of
such influential Democratic senators as David L.  Boren (Okla.)
and Joseph R. Biden (Del.) was unveiled Oct. 19 by the United Na-
tions Association of the United States. The plan was drawn up by
a task force of diplomats, academics and military officers in
consultation with association members. The project was headed by
R. James Woolsey, a former ambassador and Pentagon official.

It proposes a three-tier U.N. force. The first tier would involve
a small, ready-reaction force of a few units under permanent U.N.
command; the second, a rapid deployment force of "several tens of
thousands of troops" that could be transferred from national ar-
mies to U.N.  command on short notice; the third, large-scale
forces under a unified U.N.  command capable of mounting a major
military operation like last year's Desert Storm campaign against
Iraq.<

Such proposals represent a radical departure from traditional
U.N. peacekeeping activities, which have been confined to sending
lightly armed, "blue beret" soldiers from neutral countries into
areas of conflict to oversee truce agreements, as in Lebanon and
Cyprus, or supervise transitions to democracy, as in Namibia and
Cambodia.

The U.N.  Charter permits the United Nations to take more force-
ful military action to deal with "threats to international peace
and security." The charter even calls for a military staff com-
mittee that was supposed to be composed of the top-ranking mili-
tary commanders of the five permanent Security Council members.
The committee was to oversee execution of the council's orders
when the United Nations became involved in a military emergency.

Such notions were stymied during the Cold War by superpower
rivalries. The end of the Cold War has enabled world leaders to
look for new ways to deal with previously contained nationalist
and ethnic conflicts. Last January, the 15 Security Council
members instructed Boutros-Ghali to propose ways to expand the
United Nations' military role. In June, he asked member states to
make armed forces available on a permanent, on-call basis.

At the opening of the U.N. General Assembly last month, virtually
every national leader who spoke either endorsed the idea in prin-
ciple or spoke of the need to give it serious consideration.
French President Francois Mitterrand has offered to put 1,000
French combat troops at the U.N.'s disposal within 48 hours of an
emergency request and to double that number in a week.

"From Cyprus and Lebanon to Cambodia and Croatia, the blue beret
has become a symbol of hope amid all that hostility," Bush said
in his Sept. 21 speech. "But, as much as the United Nations has
done, it can do more . . .I welcome the secretary general's call
for a new agenda to strengthen the U.N.'s ability to prevent,
contain and resolve conflict around the globe. And I call upon
all members to join me in taking bold steps to advance that agen-
da."

Clinton addressed the idea in a message last month to the U.N.
Association of the United States. "The key is to give the U.N.
the tools to move in quickly to defuse tensions before they es-
calate," he said. "We should explore the possibility of creating
a standby, voluntary U.N. rapid deployment force to deter aggres-
sion against small states and to protect humanitarian relief
shipments."<

In the United States, support for a greater U.N. military role
grows out of an evolving consensus among political leaders and
foreign policy specialists that U.S. involvment in overseas con-
flicts should be less automatic, and in roles less dominant and
less costly than in the past.

"The American people are not enthusiastic about having the United
States stand alone as the policeman of the world," said Boren,
perhaps the most outspoken congressional proponent of a greater
U.N. military role.

U.S. policymakers have discovered that the United States, despite
being the world's only remaining superpower, is limited in abili-
ty to affect the kind of ethnic feuds that shattered the Yugoslav
federation and threaten the breakup of Iraq, Somalia and Ethiopia
- what some have called "wars of conscience" as opposed to "wars
of interest" like the allies' effort to expel Iraq from the oil
fields of Kuwait.

These disputes have led to massive bloodshed, created terrible
new refugee problems and, in the case of Yugoslavia, have
reshaped borders that stood for generations. But they have not
given the United States or other big powers clear-cut, compelling
reasons to intervene decisively as they did, for example, in
Kuwait in 1990.

The problem that these situations pose for policymakers is inten-
sified by what some academics call "the CNN curve" in recognition
of how the Cable News Network and other television broadcasts are
able to flood TV screens around the world with horrifyingly
graphic, around-the-clock images of the carnage.

"The power of these pictures to influence policy is immense,"
said Rozanne L. Ridgway, president of the Atlantic Council and a
former assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

The result, she noted, is a rising curve of actions - diplomatic
protests, offers to mediate, imposition of sanctions - aimed at
ending the crisis in a relatively cost-free manner.  But, Ridgway
added, if these measures fail, the pressure to do something
mounts to the point where military intervention must be con-
sidered as a serious option.

"Then you encounter the falling side of the curve," she said.
"Those who yelled for action begin to realize the potential cost.
American or British or French public opinion sees that their boys
might be killed, and the reaction changes to 'Get this over with,
and keep our boys out of harm's way.' "

The notion of intervention by a multinational force under a U.N.
flag and command sounds like a politically attractive way of
spreading the risk among several or more countries.<

But the idea has given rise to a lot of questions. "What would
the force do?" asked Marrack Goulding, U.N.  undersecretary gen-
eral in charge of peacekeeping activities. "What would be its
mandate and size? Where would the troops come from? Who would be
responsible for their logistics and transport? How would they be
trained to work together? How would the command structure work?"

No one, Goulding said, "has advanced any widely acceptable ideas
about how to move from traditional peacekeeping at one end of the
scale and peace enforcement at the other." Lately, U.N. forces in
Bosnia-Hercegovina and Somalia have found some of the parties in
each conflict - Serb irregular militias in Bosnia and local war-
lords in Somalia - seeking to thwart U.N. relief activities by
attacking the peacekeepers.

"In these places, particularly in Bosnia, we are undertaking for
the first time the use of armed U.N. personnel to protect convoys
delivering humanitarian supplies while a war actually is in pro-
gress," Goulding said. "We found that with the troops escorting
convoys through Bosnia, the traditional rules don't apply. You
can't observe impartiality if one side is shooting at you; you
have to make provision for self-defense." But while that is a
substantial step forward in the U.N.'s use of force, it still
falls considerably short of proposals that the world body be
given resources to engage an aggressor militarily.

The secretary general's call for a standing U.N. army is "some-
thing that has never been done before," Goulding said. "It rings
on the ears of Third World members with overtly colonial over-
tones; it makes all the members skittish about sending their boys
into combat where deaths are certain to result, and, unless it
gets a powerful push, any hope of realizing the idea seems a ways
down the road."

"There are a lot of U.N. members with big skeletons rattling in
their closets in terms of their human rights records and treat-
ment of minorities," said Sir Brian Uhrquart, retired long-time
head of U.N. peacekeeping activities. "They would be very suspi-
cious of such a force because of its potential as a wedge for the
United Nations to pry into what they regard as their internal af-
fairs."

The Pentagon's objections to U.S. participation in a standing
U.N. army are several. Defense Department officials regard provi-
sions in the U.N. Charter for joint military commands as too
unwieldy and they are skeptical of the military competence of
U.N. peacekeeping authorities.

Pentagon officials also question the likelihood that U.S. in-
terests would coincide with those of a multinational military
command, particularly one in which Russia and China will likely
have central roles.

U.S. military planners believe that Americans would be "special
targets" in many Third World conflicts because of fear and
resentment of superpower domination. "If the U.S. goes in, we're
bullet catchers," said an Air Force officer.

Army Col. Richard Haney, a National War College professor and
formerly the peacekeeping expert of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
noted that such operations inherently involve very restrictive
rules of engagement about the on use of weapons. While such rules
as requiring ammunition magazines to be carried separately from
rifles are intended to avert unnecessary clashes with combatants,
these restrictions also can leave soldiers vulnerable to attack.

Many military experts agree that expanded U.N. military activi-
ties would require an overhaul of the current military structure.
In a recent study for the United States Institute of Peace, Indar
Jit Rkhye, a retired Indian army major general who was military
adviser to two secretaries general, proposed that the military
adviser be elevated to the level of the secretary general's pol-
itical adviser and chief of staff and be given the equivalent of
a general staff that could handle the training, operations,
logistics and intelligence of future U.N. forces.

"It would be a mixed command with a fairly equitable distribution
of the important posts but also with the understanding that the
country that contributes the most . . . would be in charge," Ri-
khye said.

"Almost all armies outside the former communist world have many
senior officers who have gone to the military academies or taken
advanced courses in the United States or Britain or France," he
added. "That has created an old-boy net whose members know the
abilities of the others and are prone to trust each other. By re-
cruiting the command and staff for a joint force from this pool,
you can start the confidence-building process that someday will
have officers and men from several different armies able to work
together interchangeably."

Whether a U.N. force can be transformed from an idea to a reality
ultimately will depend in part on whether long-dormant regional
tensions continue to erupt into conflict. If the killing in the
former republics of Yugoslavia gets worse, or if new slaughters
begin elsewhere, the United States and other governments might
decide that their desire to spread the risk of intervention
leaves them little choice except to pool forces under the U.N.
flag.<02:26 10-29C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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