The Politics of Peacekeeping

...and troops often confront each other from the opposite sides of narrow streets and alleyways...

...and (6) there must be a definite time frame to prevent an open-ended commitment...

...A strong, clear-headed policy whose criteria unflinchingly serve the interests of peace would generate its own support...

...After the 1956 Sinai campaign, for instance, the Security Council created the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to administer the Israeli, British and French withdrawals from occupied Egyptian territory, to create a UN buffer between Israeli and Egyptian forces, and to monitor the ceasefire...

...Examples are Namibia, El Salvador and, most impressively, Cambodia, where the UN presence fostered a national unity that largely isolated the genocidal Khmer Rouge...

...With the deaths of American soldiers under the UN's command in Somalia, and the on-again-off-again plans to send a large force into former Yugoslavia, Congressional ire toward the World Organization boiled over...

...In 1992 when Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (untta), refused to accept the results of UN-sponsored elections, the endeavor in that war-torn country collapsed...

...Had the President produced a realistic guide to peace enforcement that focused on the basic issues determining a mission's fate on the ground, he would be in a better position with the public and Congress...

...Close inspection, though, suggests that Presidential Decision Directive 25 has more to do with domestic politics than foreign policy...

...interests...

...If one or both [sides] are bent on war, the peacekeeping body will not offer a serious obstruction, having neither the mandate nor the resources to do so," writes Alan James, a scholar on the subject...

...Why, then, this Presidential policy paper...

...Whether blue-helmeted troops will promote American interests in a given conflict has no bearing on how helpful their presence might be...

...While Cyprus is one of peacekeeping's triumphs, James notes that 80 per cent of the numerous cease-fire violations there occur in Nicosia, "where each side maintains heavily fortified positions...

...Timetables do serve a purpose in some situations...

...Moreover, even though the current UN operation in Bosnia does not meet any of the Clinton criteria, the Administration has not threatened to stop supporting it...

...For despite its ruling out open-ended missions, the U.S...

...What United Nations forces cannot do is impose a settlement where none is desired...

...The 11-year presence of unef troops in the Sinai did not stop Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from going to war against Israel in 1967—he simply evicted them...

...captured the prevailing sentiment with characteristic bluster: "I do not see in the front of this chamber the UN flag...

...Blue helmets have kept a lid on border tensions in such places as Cyprus, the Golan Heights and the Western Sahara...

...The defiance of peacekeepers in Bosnia is the most recent painful illustration of the need for local cooperation and distinct goals...

...Past experience also has at least two other lessons to teach...

...5) the necessary money and personnel must be available...

...I have never saluted the UN flag...

...It's a political problem...

...But Bosnia is not primarily a humanitarian problem...

...4) a cease-fire must already be in place, and the UN must have the consent of the warring parties...

...The threat posed to international security is likewise of little significance...

...In addition to specifying the conditions under which this country's soldiers may serve in United Nations forces, it codifies a set of strict criteria intended to govern American participation even in UN undertakings that do not involve U.S...

...to provide a context for diplomacy...

...As for the President's insistence on "a specified time frame tied to intermediate or final objectives," if actually followed it would rule out U.S...

...The third and fourth stipulations are essential to counteracting the UN's over-eagerness to deploy peacekeepers...

...First, lightly-armed multinational troops operating under restrictive rules of engagement have upheld truces in several wars once the combatants themselves agreed to stop fighting...

...I salute Old Glory, the American flag...

...The Cyprus cease-fire line runs directly through Nicosia, the island's largest city...

...troops...

...3) the mission must have clear, attainable objectives...

...Second, peacekeepers have lately shown a capacity to implement armistices and supervise elections after civil wars have spent themselves...

...Benjamin Wittes, a new contributor to The New Leader, is a Washington-based freelance writer and assistant managing editor of the Responsive Community...

...He adds, "There were many technical violations of the ceasefire agreement...

...As Richard Haass insists, "The purpose of peacekeeping forces is not to resolve conflicts but...

...No UN force was stationed between Israeli and Arab troops in the Sinai or on the Golan Heights between the 1967 and 1973 wars...

...Ami Argaman, an Israeli soldier who served on the Golan, recalls the situation before the 1973 disengagement pacts deployed blue helmets as a buffer: "My unit was stationed within sniper's range of the Syrian front lines...

...In fact, he apparently never intended to observe Decision Directive 25 very closely...

...The slightest movement of forces on the Syrian side prompted an alert on ours and sometimes even led to an unnecessary engagement...

...The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (unifil) lost 190 troops between 1978 and 1993, and accomplished nothing...

...As a humanitarian operation," observes American Enterprise Institute scholar Patrick Glynn, "the UN effort was partly successful...

...A reconsideration of its operations became a political necessity...

...yet these violations were minor and did not prompt any dramatic responses from the parties...

...In cities without functioning cease-fires (say, Beirut in 1982 or Sarajevo until a short time ago), this problem is magnified many times...

...Yet the UN's most effective interventions often have succeeded precisely because they alleviated tensions between the combatants over a long period and gave diplomacy a chance to work...

...By issuing a directive stressing UN reform and cost-sharing, Clinton sought to reassure critics that his Administration will exercise maximum restraint before supporting peacekeeping missions with troops or in other ways...

...The answer would seem to be that it reflects what Clinton believes the American people and the Congress want to hear...

...Historically, only two types of UN conflict management have proved effective...

...Last August Senator Robert Byrd (D-W Va...

...The other is that peacekeeping units have difficulty functioning in urban areas...

...President Clinton knows all this...

...The American-led Multinational Force in Beirut suffered almost 350 casualties between 1982 and 1984, including the 241 Marines killed by the infamous suicide truck bomber...

...backing of many valuable UN initiatives...

...Without clear objectives, a pre-existing ceasefire and the combatants' consent, a peacekeeping mission has virtually no chance of success...

...Peacekeepers are doing their job as long as the fronts they supervise do not degenerate into deadly flashpoints that could obstruct political progress or cause an unwanted war...

...One is that in contrast to a simple bilateral front, like the Golan, a long, twisting and constantly shifting multilateral front is almost impossible for the UN to monitor...

...They have been, as former National Security Council official Richard Haass has pointed out, "open-ended, but not expensive in any way—not financially or in the human sense...

...The rest of Clinton's criteria are almost totally irrelevant to any valid judgment of a peacekeeping mission's usefulness...

...Unfortunately, the document's drafters did not seize the occasion to educate the public—to explain when peacekeeping does or does not work...

...According to the new document, half a dozen conditions have to exist for the United States to cast its Security Council vote in favor of deploying peacekeepers: (1) The proposed operation must advance U.S...

...Further political fodder has been made of UN disorganization and the high percentage of peacekeeping budgets American taxpayers shoulder...

...In that case diplomacy didn't work...

...Presidential Decision Directive 25 is a sadly inadequate document that is primarily concerned with defusing domestic political pressure, rather than identifying the circumstances required for successful peacekeeping...

...Paul F. Diehl, author of a recent assessment of international peacekeeping, calls the 11 years of unef's deployment "relatively quiet...

...Perspectives THE POLITICS OF PEACEKEEPING BY BENJAMIN WITTES ON MAY 5 President Bill Clinton took a step toward defining his foreign policy when he signed a directive on international peacekeeping...

...Indeed, the most spectacular failures have occurred where those crucial elements were missing...

...And although the United States may pay more than its fair share of peacekeeping bills, the directive's financial concern is a red herring: Traditional peacekeeping happens to be quite cheap...

...2) the conflict involved must pose a serious threat to international security (specifically, an act of international aggression, the sudden interruption of an established democracy, an urgent humanitarian disaster, or a gross violation of human rights...

...Byrd and other lawmakers called on the Administration to grant Congress a say in any policy that would "allow American soldiers to serve under foreign commanders on a regular basis...

...has promised to participate in such a force on the Golan to bolster a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement...