Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

First Blood On C.T. B.: Bush, Schlesinger, Barker Make Compelling Case For Continued Nuclear Testing

(Washington, D.C.): In the opening
salvo of the fight over the Comprehensive
Test Ban (CTB) Treaty, the Senate
yesterday learned that the effect
of such a permanent ban on nuclear
testing would be unacceptably to erode
confidence in the safety, reliability and
effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear
deterrent.

Another Contribution to the
National Interest by the Cochran
Subcommittee href=”97-D160.html#N_1_”>(1)

A highlight of the hearing conducted
by the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee
on International Security, Proliferation
and Federal Services chaired by Sen.
Thad Cochran (R-MS) — one
which suggests that the CTB may face fatal
opposition in the Senate —
came when Dr. Robert Barker
read an unclassified passage from a
classified report submitted to the
Congress by President George Bush
on his Administration’s last full day in
office. This report was written to
explain why the Bush Administration found
a statute mandating an end to all U.S.
nuclear testing, following a final series
of underground tests, to be incompatible
with the national security. President
Bush said in part:

“…The Administration has
concluded that it is not possible
to develop a test program within
the constraints of Public Law
102-377 that would be fiscally,
militarily and technically
responsible. The
requirement to maintain and
improve the safety of U.S. forces
necessitates continued nuclear
testing for those purposes,
albeit at a modest level, for the
foreseeable future. The
Administration strongly urges the
Congress to modify this
legislation urgently, in order to
permit the minimum number and
kind of underground nuclear tests
that the United States requires
— regardless of the action
of other states — to retain
safe and reliable, although
dramatically reduced, nuclear
deterrent forces.”

The political significance of such a
categorical — and correct — statement
by President Bush on 19 January 1993 is
that it may portend that
Republican Senators will not be subjected
to the same pressures they experienced in
the course of debate over the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC) earlier this
year. Since the CWC was
negotiated and signed by the Bush
Administration, individuals who otherwise
would surely have rejected that
unverifiable, unenforceable and
ineffective arms control agreement href=”97-D160.html#N_2_”>(2)
responded to appeals by Mr. Bush and his
colleagues not to repudiate their
handiwork.

In this case, the
Comprehensive Test Ban is Bill Clinton’s
treaty, through and through.
Previous Republican Presidents and even
President Carter refused to sign up
to a permanent ban on all
nuclear tests. In particular, the idea at
the core of the Clinton CTB — i.e.,
banning even very low-yield tests that
cannot be monitored, or perhaps even detected,
with confidence — has been understood by
previous administrations of both parties
to be impractical and/or unacceptable. href=”97-D160.html#N_3_”>(3)

When Dr. Schlesinger
Speaks, Senators Listen

A man intimately involved in such
previous debates also contributed to the
Cochran Subcommittee’s appreciation of
the serious problems the Clinton CTB
would pose for the U.S. nuclear
deterrent. Dr. James Schlesinger
brings unparalleled expertise to this
subject by dint of his previous service
as Chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy
Commission, Secretary of Defense,
Director of Central Intelligence and
Secretary of Energy. In the latter
capacity, he was personally responsible
for persuading President Carter that the
U.S. nuclear arsenal could not be
maintained at required levels of safety,
reliability and military effectiveness if
subjected to a zero-yield Comprehensive
Test Ban.

Dr. Schlesinger warned about “one
dominant, ineluctable result of [the
CTB’s] ratification: over the decades
ahead, confidence in the
reliability of our nuclear weapons and in
the U.S. deterrent would inevitably
decline….Over the decades, the erosion
of confidence will be substantial.”
Among the highlights of his important
testimony were the following:

“As a nuclear weapon ages,
its individual components are
subject to the effects of aging
— corrosion, deterioration,
unexpected as well as expected
failure. The shelf-life of U.S.
nuclear weapons was expected to
be some twenty years. In the
past, the constant process of
replacement and testing of new
designs gave some assurance that
weapons would not be subjected to
the effects of aging. But in the
future, we shall be
vulnerable to the effects of
aging because we shall not be
able to replace or to test
weapons. In a decade or so, we
will be beyond the expected
shelf-life of the weapons in the
stockpile.

“A 1978 report to the
[Senate] Armed Services Committee
stated: ‘The reliability of our
nuclear weapons….has been
assured by the continuous
introduction of recently tested
new designs and by a constant
turnover of the stockpile made
possible by the retirement of
older weapons before they have
begun to deteriorate.’ It may
also be noted that for Soviet —
and now Russian — weapons, the
expected shelf-life has been ten
years. Unlike ourselves, the
Russians continue to produce some
thousands of weapons each year to
replace aging weapons in their
inventory. By contrast, despite
an explicit policy commitment,
the United States at this time
lacks the capability either to
fabricate or certify new
warheads.

“I trust that the
[Stockpile] Stewardship Program
will be vigorously pursued and
will be vigorously supported by
the Congress. Nonetheless, it
will be many years before the new
facilities and new capabilities
are put in place. It
will be more years before the
projected experiments can be
completed and assessed. If the
treaty is ratified, the
Stewardship Program would be
subjected to the usual budget
pressures and to the possible
erosion of support by the
Administration or by the
Congress. It will be
many, many years before we can
assess adequately the degree of
success of the Stewardship
Program and the degree to which
it may mitigate the decline of
confidence in the reliability of
the stockpile.

“We should bear in mind that
Department of Energy and
laboratory personnel were never
asked: ‘What should we do
to sustain or to maximize
confidence in the reliability of
our weapons? To that question the
answer remains obvious: periodic
testing at least at very
low-yield remains desirable.
Instead they have been asked a
question: given an international
commitment to eliminate nuclear
testing, how can you best seek to
sustain confidence in weapon
reliability? To that rather
different question the system has
responded with a vigorous program
for stewardship.

“But no one now has either the
experience or the knowledge to
judge the degree of success of
the Stewardship Program….In
assuring weapon reliability,
there is no substitute for
nuclear testing. How
imperfect a substitute the
Stewardship Program will prove to
be remains to be seen.

“For many years, the
Congress has received repeated
and persistent testimony from
officials at the DOE and its
predecessor agencies, from
laboratory directors and
scientists, from the Chiefs, and
from the relevant
Commanders-in-Chief that nuclear
testing was essential. Suddenly
that testimony has changed, and
now we have a somewhat ambiguous
response. Senators will,
no doubt, want to satisfy
themselves to what extent
things have really changed.”
(Emphasis added throughout.)

Dr. Barker’s Damning
Assessment of the CTB

In addition to providing the
Subcommittee with President Bush’s
recommendation that nuclear testing be
continued, Dr. Barker — a nuclear
physicist and weapons designer who held
senior positions in the Department of
Defense (i.e., Assistant to the Secretary
of Defense for Atomic Energy), at the
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and
as an arms control negotiator — provided
a detailed summary of the serious risks
associated with a permanent, zero-yield
ban on such testing. These included,
notably, dangers for the
reliability and safety of the U.S.
stockpile arising from “stockpile
defects, accepting less than the best in
nuclear weapon safety, the inability to
respond effectively to new threats and
requirements and betting on the Stockpile
Stewardship Program before it has shown
what it can do.”

Dr. Barker’s conclusion: “I
see no benefits to U.S. ratification of
the CTBT, and terrible costs.
But even with no CTBT we pay the costs
unless we are ready, able and willing to
conduct the nuclear tests that will
maintain the nuclear deterrent component
of our national security posture.”

Small Comfort

Interestingly, the Administration’s
spokesman at the Cochran Subcommittee’s
hearing — Dr. Victor Reis, Assistant
Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs
— made two points that did much to belie
his repeated assertion that the United
States could live with a permanent ban on
nuclear testing and that, in particular,
the reliability and safety of the
stockpile could be retained indefinitely.

First, in response to a question posed
by the Subcommittee’s Ranking Minority
Member, Senator Carl Levin
(D-MI) that he has “as much or more
confidence now [in the stockpile] than he
did in 1993″ when he assumed his
present responsibilities. As one
prominent scientist with long experience
in the nuclear weapons business remarked
in response, the proposition that
one has greater confidence today after
five years without testing than one did
immediately after testing stopped may
simply reflect a diminishing
awareness of the stockpile’s problems.
If so, it seems reasonable to expect that
five years from now — a point still
further removed from the last
indisputable proof of the effects of
aging on the stockpile, proof that comes
from actual testing alone — Dr.
Reis’ confidence (or that of his
successors and counterparts at the
nuclear weapons laboratories) will be higher
yet.

Second, Dr. Reis acknowledged that
“just about all the parts [in the
U.S. nuclear weapons left in the
stockpile] are going to have to be
remade.” It strains
credulity that such a complete
remanufacture of the Nation’s nuclear
arsenal can be achieved without either
nuclear tests to confirm that the newly
built devices work properly or an heroic
degradation in confidence in the
stockpile.

After all, some of the ingredients can
no longer be utilized (e.g., glue used in
manufacturing older nuclear weapons has
subsequently been judged by the
Environmental Protection Agency to be
carcinogenic). Some of the extremely
precise tooling used to fabricate weapons
no longer exists; suppliers have gone out
of business. Personnel familiar with the
creation and validation of the original
design — who may be critical to
troubleshooting a remanufactured version
— no longer are available. These are
non-trivial problems that will go to the
heart of the deterrent value of the
weapons upon which U.S. security
ultimately will rely for the foreseeable
future.

With regard to the “difficulty in
recreating a piece of hardware with the
same performance as the original,”
Dr. Barker offered an illustrative
example from the Navy’s experience with a
piece of equipment that is far less
complex than a modern nuclear
weapon:

“When production was
interrupted on the rocket motor
of the Navy’s Polaris
sea-launched ballistic missile
and then restarted, even with the
same design specifications, it
could not be reproduced. The fix
required redesign and recalling
retired people to provide data on
how the original motors were
made. Missile motor testing was
available to the Navy to help
them understand their problem and
to be confident that they had
found a solution. Nuclear
testing needs to play the same
vital role when nuclear weapons
must be rebuilt.”

The Bottom Line

This first congressional hearing addressing
the Clinton Comprehensive Test Ban sets
the stage for those that will follow. The
important counsel from President Bush,
Secretary Schlesinger and Dr. Barker
received yesterday by the Cochran
Subcommittee makes clear that nothing
less than the future reliability, safety
and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear
deterrent is riding on the outcome of the
Senate’s deliberations on this treaty.
The Center looks forward to playing an
active role in educating legislators and
the public about the unacceptability of
these risks and, indeed, those associated
with the rest of the Clinton
Administration’s self-declared
“denuclearization” agenda. href=”97-D160.html#N_4_”>(4)

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled What’s Good For
Silicon Graphics Is Not Necessarily Good
For America: Some Supercomputer Sales
Imperil U.S. Security ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_102″>No. 97-D 102, 21
July 1997) and Profile In
Courage: Peter Leitner Blows The Whistle
On Clinton’s Dangerous Export Decontrol
Policies ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-P_82″>No. 97-P 82, 19
June 1997).

2. For more on the
CWC’s serious shortcomings, see the
Chemical Weapons section of the Center’s
Web site.

3. The wisdom of
this rejection has been evident in the
wake of a “seismic event” in
the vicinity of Russia’s Novaya Zemlya
test site. As the Center has pointed out
previously, this event — which may have
been caused by a covert
“decoupled” Russian nuclear
test, a possibility the Clinton
Administration cannot preclude — is a
foretaste of the ambiguities and
uncertainties certain to arise from an
inherently unverifiable
“zero-yield” test ban. See the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled Wake-Up Call From
Novaya Zemlya: Zero-Yield Nuclear Test
Ban is Unverifiable, Russians will Cheat,
U.S. will Suffer ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_119″>No. 97-D 119, 28
August 1997) and Nuclear Spin
Control: Clinton See-No-Evil Response to
Apparent Russian Test Offers Bitter
Foretaste of C.T.B. ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_156″>No. 97-D 156, 20
October 1997).

4. See the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled Clinton’s Reckless
Nuclear Agenda Revealed? Study
Co-Authored by Candidate for Top Pentagon
Job is Alarming ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_96″>No. 97-D 96, 12
July 1997), The Real Scandal
at the O’Leary Energy Department: The
Secretary’s Shakedown of the Nuclear Labs
Over C.T.B. ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_121″>No. 97-D 121, 2
September 1997) and Inviting
Life to Imitate Art: Will A ‘Peacemaker’
Exploit Deficient Security At U.S.
Nuclear Facilities? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_158″>No. 97-D 158, 24
October 1997).

New Republic shows historical fallacy, future dangers of Globalization as security policy

In an extraordinarily thoughtful cover article in this week’s edition of the New Republic, Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s favorite magazine has eviscerated the theory that passes for a security policy in the Clinton-Gore Administration: the notion that "globalization" is making the world safe for American interests in the absence of a credible U.S. capability to defend them.

The article’s author, Peter Beinart, describes this theory as follows:

"…[I]t isn’t the security system that keeps the peace, but rather the global market. And while military power waxes and wanes, the expansion of the global market — as [New York Times’ columnist] Thomas Friedman and Bill Clinton never tire of saying — is unstoppable. American foreign policy can content itself with helping globalization along, and with reminding other countries of the restraints it imposes."

 

Globaloney’s Pedigree

Beinart notes that this theory is not simply the product of the present day end-of-history crowd. Its roots lie in an earlier era — Victorian England — when the international economy was actually even more integrated than it is today,(1) a fact documented by a number of statistical measures cited in his New Republic article entitled, "Globalization: An Illusion for our Time." At that time, the intellectual and ruling elite of the sole global superpower (Great Britain) indulged in notions indistinguishable from those routinely embraced by the likes of Clinton, Gore, Friedman and Strobe Talbott, among others. Consider the passage cited by Beinart from the runaway 1910 best-seller by Norman Angell entitled The Great Illusion:

 

"International finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that … political and military power can in reality do nothing…. These little recognized facts, mainly the outcome of purely modern conditions (rapidity of communication creating a greater complexity and delicacy of the credit system), have rendered the problems of modern international politics profoundly and essentially different from the ancient."

 

The dangers inherent in embracing such rot should be clear from Beinart’s description of its application in the Clinton-Gore team’s largely passive (or, at best, reactive) foreign policies. In Beinart’s words:

 

"The new doctrine…does not require the United States to levy sanctions and create diplomatic rows. Globalization — powered by the inexorable march of technology and trade — will do democratization’s work more effectively than State Department pressure ever could. America need simply warn renegades that if they menace neighbors or torture dissidents, they will be disciplined by the all-powerful global market. Foreign policy becomes an exercise not in coercion, but in education.

 

"This is globalization’s appeal to a country both obligated to keep the world safe and increasingly reluctant to do so. It allows American elites to imagine that the security won for this country in struggle is now protected by a force both unstoppable and benign. And it allows them to imagine that rising and aggrieved powers will embrace a world governed by free trade as well, even though it locks them into a position of political and military subservience.

 

"Globalization is the narcissism of a superpower in a one superpower world. It allows America to look at the world and see its own contentment and its own fatigue. And it has provided the same false comfort to lone superpowers in the past. That’s where Norman Angell comes in." (Emphasis added throughout.)

 

The Bottom Line

Under the Clinton Administration, Angellian globaloney is being translated into institutions, treaties and international obligations that will greatly complicate future U.S. governments’ efforts to exercise sovereign power.(2) This may, in fact, prove to be one of Mr. Clinton’s most regrettable legacies in the foreign and defense policy arena.

What is particularly worrisome is that the Clinton team is pursuing globalization through the creation or empowering of supra-national organizations that generally constrain only the law-abiding (e.g., an enlarged UN Security Council, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the new emissions-trading mechanism envisioned for the Global Climate Change Treaty) at the same time that it is dramatically reducing America’s capacity to act independently. Whether by design, incompetence or coincidence, the combined effect of these policies is likely to be to create, via the United States’ eclipse, a vacuum of power that will be filled — not by benign trade arrangements and friendly economic competitors — but at America’s expense by emerging, hostile powers like China.(3)

– 30 –

1. For example, Beinart observes: "It is obvious to any casual observer of international affairs that today’s world is far more interdependent than ever before. But it is not true.Yet after four decades of growing interdependence, the world is just now becoming as economically integrated as it was when Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion." (Emphasis added.) International trade and investment have indeed been increasing since the 1950s.

2. For example, see the Perspective by the Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy entitled As Clinton Pushes for Radical Approach to Global Warming, Will Impacts on U.S. National Security Be Frozen Out? (No. 97-C 147, 2 October 1997).

3. In this connection, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Clinton Legacy Watch #5: Welcome to the New Inter-War Era (No. 97-D 129, 8 September 1997) and the Casey Institute’s Press Release entitled Casey Symposium on Asia Illuminates High Stakes in Debate on Renewal of M.F.N. for China (No. 97-R 86, 23 June 1997).

Clinton Legacy Watch # 4: Meltdown of Dayton Accords is But The Latest Proof That ‘Peace Processes’ Produce No Peace

(Washington, D.C.): Events of the past
week suggest that President Clinton’s
favorite general — Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
(SHAPE) General Wesley Clark
— has become the latest Administration
figure to turn Teddy Roosevelt’s famous
dictum on its head. Instead of speaking
softly and carrying a big stick, Gen.
Clark orally threatened some of the thugs
that pass for leaders of the Bosnian
Serbs at virtually the same moment he was
emboldening them by ordering his troops
to retreat from physical confrontations
with their followers.

On 3 September, he told reporters at
the Pentagon: “…We’re going to be
effective in accomplishing the missions
that we’ve been assigned in Bosnia….And
so that’s why I want to make it very
clear that NATO forces are not going to
be deterred or intimidated.” He
added:

“Whether there’s
confrontation or not is entirely
up to those who might seek to
produce it. We’re staying
strictly within our mandate.
We’re moving forward to assist
civil implementation. We’re
working to avoid conditions which
might go against NATO’s
requirements of creating a secure
environment. And that’s the
story.”

‘Mission Creep’ or Creepy
Mission?

While General
Clark did not specify precisely what are
“the missions that we’ve been
assigned” to “assist civilian
implementation” and to
“avoid…creating [an insecure]
environment”, it appears that they
have, in recent days, included at least
two critical objectives:

  1. denying the followers of
    Radovan Karadzik access to and
    control over broadcasting
    facilities     that have
    been used with devastating effect
    for years to propagandize and
    otherwise fan the racist impulses
    that produced Serbian
    “ethnic cleansing”;
    and

  2. holding a bridge
    in the contested and highly
    strategic town of Brcko — a
    bridge made accessible to the
    public just three months ago for
    the first time in years. As the Wall
    Street Journal     noted in its
    lead editorial today: “The
    bridge had been reopened in June
    in the presence of U.S. Secretary
    of State Madeleine Albright, who
    announced at the time that the
    act symbolized a turning point
    away from ethnic violence.”

As it happens, on General Clark’s orders,
troops under his command abandoned both
of these assets this week to Karadzic
partisans. Implausible rationalizations
notwithstanding, the reality is that, as
the Journal points out, nothing
but grief can come from this
latest example of the international
community’s penchant for belligerent
rhetoric towards the Serbs coupled
with deeds that accommodate them —
a pattern that has characterized the
West’s conduct throughout the crisis in
the former Yugoslavia:

The withdrawals sent a dangerous
signal to Mr. Karadzic’s senior
loyalists. “They are calling
it ‘the Bay of Pigs,'”
says Colin Soloway, a
correspondent based in Sarajevo. “They
think they faced down the
international community and
won.” He adds,
‘They are planning to consolidate
their position in the east and
are predicting that they will
begin to win back towns under
[Bosnian Serb President, Biljana]
Plavsic’s control in the
west.'”

‘I Remember Ratko’

Among Gen. Clark’s words at his
Pentagon press conference that rang most
hollow were those implying that part of
SFOR’s mission will be to fulfill NATO
Secretary General Solana’s expectation
that “…All the war
criminals suspects [will] be in the Hague
for trial by June of 1998.” Such a
feat is made all the more unlikely by the
camaraderie Gen. Clark exhibited not so
long ago with one of the premier Serbian
war criminals, General Ratko Mladic. As
the Center noted in September 1994:

“[On 27 August
1994]…General Wesley
Clark…consorted with one of the
most despicable war criminals on
the planet: the Bosnian Serb
commander, General Ratko Mladic.
The visit occurred in the Serbian
enclave of Banja Luka, scene of
horrific and continuing
ethnic cleansing; it was
captured on film by Serb
propagandists delighted at being
able to portray Gen. Clark
jovially exchanging military caps
with the man responsible for many
of those atrocities and accepting
gifts of brandy and an inscribed
pistol. An unnamed, but
clearly disgusted U.S. official
is quoted in today’s Washington
Post as saying that this
episode ‘is like cavorting with
Hermann Goering.’ Actually, it is
more like palling around with Adolf
Eichmann, Hitler’s chief
executioner.”

Even more odious is the fact that General
Clark — while serving as the military
aide to the principal architect of the
Dayton agreement, Ambassador Richard
Holbrooke — helped seal that deal with
Mladic’s boss and one of the most
odious war criminals of all: Serbian
dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
In so doing, they awarded Milosevic the
diplomatic equivalent of the Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval as an
international statesman and pillar of the
Bosnian “peace process.” As a
result, neither Secretary General Solana
nor anyone else expects to see him in the
dock in The Hague — to say nothing of
trying to use NATO forces to put him
there.

To Make the
Punishment Fit The Crime

Were so many American lives — and so
much national treasure and prestige —
not on the line, it would be delicious
poetic justice that the chickens
associated with the Dayton Accords Gen.
Clark helped craft are coming home to
roost on his watch as SACEUR. As a
practical matter, in his present
capacity as NATO’s top military officer,
General Clark is now the spear-catcher
for the policies he helped set in train.
These policies — which are now
compelling the United States and its
forces under NATO command to play their
present, increasingly risky role — were
thoughtfully analyzed in an essay
released on 22 August by the Foreign
Policy Research Institute’s Adam
Garfinkle. Among its highlights were the
following:

“The [Clinton
Administration’s] hope,
presumably, is that Karadzic will
take the hint and disappear from
political life, allowing the full
implementation of the Dayton
Accords to move ahead. But we
have to assume that NATO forces
are ready for the next stage if
he doesn’t disappear — if he
either tries to outwait us or, as
likely, takes aim against NATO
soldiers instead with the hope of
‘doing another Somalia,’ i.e.,
driving a risk- averse American
public to demand the withdrawal
of U.S. forces.

“To pressure Karadzic
further, NATO has also put itself
firmly on the weakest side of the
Bosnian Serbs’ domestic disputes,
specifically in support of
Biljana Plavsic, whose only
attractive feature is that she is
not Karadzic. By doing
so–and by splitting the Republic
Srpska into two geographically
detached areas–NATO is now
committed to the micro-management
of a devil’s den of murderers,
racists, and pathological liars.

‘Policy Vice’:
“U.S. officials speak of all
this as a risk, and hint at the
possibility of violence. Foreign
diplomats on the scene are more
blunt; they speak of war, and
body-bags. If Washington
chose to avoid such risks since
U.S. troops first came to Bosnia
in December 1995, why is the
Clinton administration taking
such risks now? The answer is
because the Clinton
Administration has got its head
stuck in a policy vice.
On the one side is the fear that
the non-implementation of Dayton
will drive Congress to refuse an
extension of [the] Bosnia force
beyond its expiry in June, and on
the other is the fear that
failure in Bosnia will sour
efforts to get NATO expansion
ratified come spring.

“It’s the combination that
is really worrisome: If come
April it looks like Congress will
not pay for an extension, and the
local parties begin acting like
war is inevitable without the
NATO force present, then
persuading the Senate that NATO
expansion makes sense will be far
more difficult. It will seem
churlish indeed for NATO to be
promising security to some while
it abandons others right next
door to another round of
savagery.

“Hence the sudden resolve to
implement Dayton now: Do it right
and, with any luck at all, the
administration will achieve both
an IFOR extension and
ratification of NATO expansion.
Congress will be more inclined to
continue a mission that is
showing signs of progress, and a
sense of success in Bosnia will
build confidence that NATO can
succeed elsewhere, too, thus
inclining undecided votes in
favor of NATO expansion.

Uh Oh: “There
is only one problem with this
rosy scenario: It won’t work.
It won’t work because Dayton is
itself unrealistic in the
extreme; it can’t be fully
implemented. Dayton is a de
facto partition whose
stability rests either on a
foreign force presence or on a
local balance of fear. It is not,
and cannot be, a formula for the
creation of a multiethnic,
democratic, stable, and fully
independent Bosnian state. To try
to force into being the symbols
of such a fantasy state –Bosnian
refugees returning to live
peaceably in Serb- or
Croat-dominated areas, a
multiethnic Bosnian diplomatic
service, ethnic leaderships
turning over their own people to
war crimes tribunals in any but
token, low-level ways — is to
engage in unnatural acts. And
that, in turn, creates a
lose-lose situation for the
United States.

“If [SFOR] fails to force
such unnatural acts, then it
loses straight out. But if it
succeeds, it only creates a
greater need for a foreign
presence to keep those acts from
coming undone. In other words, as
long as the goal remains the
impossible goal of the Dayton
accord, there is no way to
extract NATO forces under benign
circumstances. Either they leave
under duress (just substitute
Radovan Karadzic for Mohammah
Farah Aideed), they leave and war
recommences, or they stay to
await whatever unknown fate local
Balkan intrigues have in store
for them.”

The Bottom Line

In Bosnia, as elsewhere, the United States
has been badly served by the Clinton
Administration’s penchant — as
exemplified by General Clark’s conduct
both this week and in the years that
preceded it — to pursue phony
“peace processes” and other
expediency-driven, narcissistic exercises
in “conflict resolution” and
“conflict management.” The
phenomena and a sense of its long-term
costs to the Nation, costs likely to
prove one of Mr. Clinton’s most durable
legacies, are brilliantly dissected in an
op.ed. in today’s Wall Street Journal
by Irving Kristol ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_127at”>see the attached).

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Fraternizing With the Enemy
Should Be the Last Mischief Perpetrated
By Bill Clinton’s Favorite General
(No. 94-D
91, 1 September 1994).

2. The Center has
long believed that the failure of the
United States government to appreciate
the importance of such broadcasts and to
counter them with alternative sources of
information like those available through
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty
(RFE/RL) has been a scandal. It applauds
Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) — who has
appreciated for years the indispensable
contribution the Freedom Radios make to
U.S. interests and who has, upon his
recent return from Bosnia, called on
President Clinton to help establish a
free press there by, among other things,
“reinvigorating Radio Free Europe
.” In an article that appeared in
the Wilmington News Journal on
29 August, Sen. Biden was quoted as
saying: ” Radio Free Europe was cut
back after the end of the Cold War….It
is needed again, not only by the
Bosnians, but to help democratic
interests throughout Eastern
Europe.”

Clinton Legacy Watch # 4: Meltdown of Dayton Accords is But The Latest Proof That ‘Peace Processes’ Produce No Peace

(Washington, D.C.): Events of the past
week suggest that President Clinton’s
favorite general(1)
— Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
(SHAPE) General Wesley Clark
— has become the latest Administration
figure to turn Teddy Roosevelt’s famous
dictum on its head. Instead of speaking
softly and carrying a big stick, Gen.
Clark orally threatened some of the thugs
that pass for leaders of the Bosnian
Serbs at virtually the same moment he was
emboldening them by ordering his troops
to retreat from physical confrontations
with their followers.

On 3 September, he told reporters at
the Pentagon: “…We’re going to be
effective in accomplishing the missions
that we’ve been assigned in Bosnia….And
so that’s why I want to make it very
clear that NATO forces are not going to
be deterred or intimidated.” He
added:

“Whether there’s
confrontation or not is entirely
up to those who might seek to
produce it. We’re staying
strictly within our mandate.
We’re moving forward to assist
civil implementation. We’re
working to avoid conditions which
might go against NATO’s
requirements of creating a secure
environment. And that’s the
story.”

‘Mission Creep’ or Creepy
Mission?

While General
Clark did not specify precisely what are
“the missions that we’ve been
assigned” to “assist civilian
implementation” and to
“avoid…creating [an insecure]
environment”, it appears that they
have, in recent days, included at least
two critical objectives:

  1. denying the followers of
    Radovan Karadzik access to and
    control over broadcasting
    facilities     that have
    been used with devastating effect
    for years to propagandize and
    otherwise fan the racist impulses
    that produced Serbian
    “ethnic cleansing”(2);
    and

  2. holding a bridge
    in the contested and highly
    strategic town of Brcko — a
    bridge made accessible to the
    public just three months ago for
    the first time in years. As the Wall
    Street Journal     noted in its
    lead editorial today: “The
    bridge had been reopened in June
    in the presence of U.S. Secretary
    of State Madeleine Albright, who
    announced at the time that the
    act symbolized a turning point
    away from ethnic violence.”

As it happens, on General Clark’s orders,
troops under his command abandoned both
of these assets this week to Karadzic
partisans. Implausible rationalizations
notwithstanding, the reality is that, as
the Journal points out, nothing
but grief can come from this
latest example of the international
community’s penchant for belligerent
rhetoric towards the Serbs coupled
with deeds that accommodate them —
a pattern that has characterized the
West’s conduct throughout the crisis in
the former Yugoslavia:

The withdrawals sent a dangerous
signal to Mr. Karadzic’s senior
loyalists. “They are calling
it ‘the Bay of Pigs,'”
says Colin Soloway, a
correspondent based in Sarajevo. “They
think they faced down the
international community and
won.” He adds,
‘They are planning to consolidate
their position in the east and
are predicting that they will
begin to win back towns under
[Bosnian Serb President, Biljana]
Plavsic’s control in the
west.'”

‘I Remember Ratko’

Among Gen. Clark’s words at his
Pentagon press conference that rang most
hollow were those implying that part of
SFOR’s mission will be to fulfill NATO
Secretary General Solana’s expectation
that “…All the war
criminals suspects [will] be in the Hague
for trial by June of 1998.” Such a
feat is made all the more unlikely by the
camaraderie Gen. Clark exhibited not so
long ago with one of the premier Serbian
war criminals, General Ratko Mladic. As
the Center noted in September 1994:

“[On 27 August
1994]…General Wesley
Clark…consorted with one of the
most despicable war criminals on
the planet: the Bosnian Serb
commander, General Ratko Mladic.
The visit occurred in the Serbian
enclave of Banja Luka, scene of
horrific and continuing
ethnic cleansing; it was
captured on film by Serb
propagandists delighted at being
able to portray Gen. Clark
jovially exchanging military caps
with the man responsible for many
of those atrocities and accepting
gifts of brandy and an inscribed
pistol. An unnamed, but
clearly disgusted U.S. official
is quoted in today’s Washington
Post as saying that this
episode ‘is like cavorting with
Hermann Goering.’ Actually, it is
more like palling around with Adolf
Eichmann, Hitler’s chief
executioner.”

Even more odious is the fact that General
Clark — while serving as the military
aide to the principal architect of the
Dayton agreement, Ambassador Richard
Holbrooke — helped seal that deal with
Mladic’s boss and one of the most
odious war criminals of all: Serbian
dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
In so doing, they awarded Milosevic the
diplomatic equivalent of the Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval as an
international statesman and pillar of the
Bosnian “peace process.” As a
result, neither Secretary General Solana
nor anyone else expects to see him in the
dock in The Hague — to say nothing of
trying to use NATO forces to put him
there.

To Make the
Punishment Fit The Crime

Were so many American lives — and so
much national treasure and prestige —
not on the line, it would be delicious
poetic justice that the chickens
associated with the Dayton Accords Gen.
Clark helped craft are coming home to
roost on his watch as SACEUR. As a
practical matter, in his present
capacity as NATO’s top military officer,
General Clark is now the spear-catcher
for the policies he helped set in train.
These policies — which are now
compelling the United States and its
forces under NATO command to play their
present, increasingly risky role — were
thoughtfully analyzed in an essay
released on 22 August by the Foreign
Policy Research Institute’s Adam
Garfinkle. Among its highlights were the
following:

“The [Clinton
Administration’s] hope,
presumably, is that Karadzic will
take the hint and disappear from
political life, allowing the full
implementation of the Dayton
Accords to move ahead. But we
have to assume that NATO forces
are ready for the next stage if
he doesn’t disappear — if he
either tries to outwait us or, as
likely, takes aim against NATO
soldiers instead with the hope of
‘doing another Somalia,’ i.e.,
driving a risk- averse American
public to demand the withdrawal
of U.S. forces.

“To pressure Karadzic
further, NATO has also put itself
firmly on the weakest side of the
Bosnian Serbs’ domestic disputes,
specifically in support of
Biljana Plavsic, whose only
attractive feature is that she is
not Karadzic. By doing
so–and by splitting the Republic
Srpska into two geographically
detached areas–NATO is now
committed to the micro-management
of a devil’s den of murderers,
racists, and pathological liars.

‘Policy Vice’:
“U.S. officials speak of all
this as a risk, and hint at the
possibility of violence. Foreign
diplomats on the scene are more
blunt; they speak of war, and
body-bags. If Washington
chose to avoid such risks since
U.S. troops first came to Bosnia
in December 1995, why is the
Clinton administration taking
such risks now? The answer is
because the Clinton
Administration has got its head
stuck in a policy vice.
On the one side is the fear that
the non-implementation of Dayton
will drive Congress to refuse an
extension of [the] Bosnia force
beyond its expiry in June, and on
the other is the fear that
failure in Bosnia will sour
efforts to get NATO expansion
ratified come spring.

“It’s the combination that
is really worrisome: If come
April it looks like Congress will
not pay for an extension, and the
local parties begin acting like
war is inevitable without the
NATO force present, then
persuading the Senate that NATO
expansion makes sense will be far
more difficult. It will seem
churlish indeed for NATO to be
promising security to some while
it abandons others right next
door to another round of
savagery.

“Hence the sudden resolve to
implement Dayton now: Do it right
and, with any luck at all, the
administration will achieve both
an IFOR extension and
ratification of NATO expansion.
Congress will be more inclined to
continue a mission that is
showing signs of progress, and a
sense of success in Bosnia will
build confidence that NATO can
succeed elsewhere, too, thus
inclining undecided votes in
favor of NATO expansion.

Uh Oh: “There
is only one problem with this
rosy scenario: It won’t work.
It won’t work because Dayton is
itself unrealistic in the
extreme; it can’t be fully
implemented. Dayton is a de
facto partition whose
stability rests either on a
foreign force presence or on a
local balance of fear. It is not,
and cannot be, a formula for the
creation of a multiethnic,
democratic, stable, and fully
independent Bosnian state. To try
to force into being the symbols
of such a fantasy state –Bosnian
refugees returning to live
peaceably in Serb- or
Croat-dominated areas, a
multiethnic Bosnian diplomatic
service, ethnic leaderships
turning over their own people to
war crimes tribunals in any but
token, low-level ways — is to
engage in unnatural acts. And
that, in turn, creates a
lose-lose situation for the
United States.

“If [SFOR] fails to force
such unnatural acts, then it
loses straight out. But if it
succeeds, it only creates a
greater need for a foreign
presence to keep those acts from
coming undone. In other words, as
long as the goal remains the
impossible goal of the Dayton
accord, there is no way to
extract NATO forces under benign
circumstances. Either they leave
under duress (just substitute
Radovan Karadzic for Mohammah
Farah Aideed), they leave and war
recommences, or they stay to
await whatever unknown fate local
Balkan intrigues have in store
for them.”

The Bottom Line

In Bosnia, as elsewhere, the United States
has been badly served by the Clinton
Administration’s penchant — as
exemplified by General Clark’s conduct
both this week and in the years that
preceded it — to pursue phony
“peace processes” and other
expediency-driven, narcissistic exercises
in “conflict resolution” and
“conflict management.” The
phenomena and a sense of its long-term
costs to the Nation, costs likely to
prove one of Mr. Clinton’s most durable
legacies, are brilliantly dissected in an
op.ed. in today’s Wall Street Journal
by Irving Kristol ( href=”97-D_127at.html”>see the attached).

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Fraternizing With the Enemy
Should Be the Last Mischief Perpetrated
By Bill Clinton’s Favorite General
(No. 94-D
91, 1 September 1994).

2. The Center has
long believed that the failure of the
United States government to appreciate
the importance of such broadcasts and to
counter them with alternative sources of
information like those available through
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty
(RFE/RL) has been a scandal. It applauds
Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) — who has
appreciated for years the indispensable
contribution the Freedom Radios make to
U.S. interests and who has, upon his
recent return from Bosnia, called on
President Clinton to help establish a
free press there by, among other things,
“reinvigorating Radio Free Europe
.” In an article that appeared in
the Wilmington News Journal on
29 August, Sen. Biden was quoted as
saying: ” Radio Free Europe was cut
back after the end of the Cold War….It
is needed again, not only by the
Bosnians, but to help democratic
interests throughout Eastern
Europe.”

Bill Clinton’s ‘Changes’ To The C.W.C. Are Not ‘Good-Enough-For-Government-Work’

(Washington, D.C.): The surprise
announcement yesterday that Senator Bob
Dole now supports the Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC) is all the more
surprising because of the grounds he gave
for doing so: He asserted that the
changes that have been agreed to by the
Clinton Administration after protracted
negotiations with Senate critics of the
treaty have addressed the concerns he
expressed last fall. Nothing
could be farther from the truth.

Mr. Dole’s Stated Concerns

As Republican Senators from Majority
Leader Trent Lott on down consider
whether they too should declare that the
28 agreed “conditions” should
be deemed
good-enough-for-government-work, it is
worth recalling precisely what Senator
Dole’s concerns were in September 1996.
In a letter to his successor dated 11
September 1996, Mr. Dole wrote:

“…The United States needs
and wants a treaty which
effectively banishes chemical
weapons from every point on
earth. To achieve this
goal, a treaty must be
effectively verifiable and
genuinely global — encompassing
all countries that possess, or
could possess, chemical weapons.
If the Chemical Weapons
Convention now before you
achieves this goal, I will
support it. If it
does not, I believe we
should pass up illusory arms
control measures. As
President, I would work to
achieve a treaty which really
does the job instead of making
promises of enhanced security
which will not be achieved.

“I supported the START I,
START II, INF, and CFE Treaties
because these agreements met
three simple criteria established
by President Reagan: effective
verification, real reductions and
stability. In evaluating
the Chemical Weapons Convention,
I suggest you apply these same
criteria, adapted to these
particular weapons and to the
post-Cold War multi-polar world.

“Thus, I have three
concerns. First, effective
verification: do we have high
confidence that our intelligence
will detect violations?
Second, real reductions,
in this case down to zero: will
the treaty eliminate chemical
weapons? Third,
stability: will the treaty be
truly global or will countries
like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and
North Korea still be able
to destabilize others with the
threat of chemical weapons?

“Furthermore, I believe it
is important that the Senate
insures that the implementation
of this treaty recognize and
safeguard American Constitutional
protections against unwarranted
searches.”

“It is my understanding that
the Senate will have the
opportunity to address these
matters in debate and, perhaps,
in amending the Resolution of
Ratification. It is my hope that
President Clinton will assist you
in resolving them. If we can work
together, we can achieve a treaty
which truly enhances American
security.” (Emphasis added.)

The Changes Dole Wanted Are in
the Unagreed Conditions

As the Center for Security Policy
noted in a recent analysis of the various
conditions agreed to by the Clinton
Administration as part of its frantic
campaign to secure Senate approval of the
CWC,(1)
they do not address the key
concerns Senator Dole expressed last year.
Even the action on Sen. Dole’s
“search and seizure” issue — which
treaty proponents long claimed was not a
problem and now take credit for
correcting by requiring criminal search
warrants for any involuntary challenge
inspections — is inadequate. The
aforementioned Center analysis notes:

“Important as this
affirmation of the Constitution
is…since there is no
requirement in the treaty for the
new UN-style inspection
bureaucracy to offer probable
cause, it seems likely that
searches will not be possible unless
U.S. businesses ‘volunteer’ to
submit to them. Since the
Clinton Administration’s view
will surely be that failure to
permit such inspections will
ensure that other countries opt
out as well, it is a safe bet
that the Feds will find ways to
make companies ‘volunteer.’

“The CWC’s draft
implementing legislation — which
the Senate has agreed to act on,
if the treaty is ratified, before
the Memorial Day recess and after
no more than four hours of
debate — provides clues as
to how the government will make
American businesses ‘offers they
can’t refuse.’ This
legislation would make it
possible to assess uncooperative
companies the costs of securing a
search warrant and to deny such
companies the opportunity to do
business with the federal
government in the future. Unsaid,
but always an option, are other
coercive techniques like the
prospect of harassment from
agencies like the EPA, OSHA, INS
or IRS.”

The Senate will Decide Today
on the Real Dole Concerns

All of Sen. Dole’s other, stated
concerns will only be addressed in action
today on the five conditions that are
described by the Clinton Administration
and its surrogates as “killer
amendments.”

  • Effective verification:
    The President would be required
    by one condition to certify that
    the treaty is effectively
    verifiable, using sensible
    criteria derived from testimony
    before the Senate — i.e., the
    U.S. Intelligence Community has
    high confidence that militarily
    significant quantities (according
    to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman
    General John Shalikashvili,
    “one
    agent-ton”) could be
    detected in a timely fashion (within
    one year    ).

  • Real reductions:
    The U.S. would not become a party
    to the CWC until Russia, China
    and a number of other,
    potentially hostile chemical
    weapons states do so. This step
    would at least eliminate the
    absurd — but entirely plausible
    — prospect that the United
    States would be the only
    declared chemical weapons state
    inside the treaty regime, and
    therefore be disproportionately
    burdened by the reporting,
    regulatory and inspection
    requirements imposed on
    “declared” facilities.
    To the extent that treaty
    membership actually translates
    into “real reductions”
    and the ultimate elimination of
    chemical weapons in totalitarian
    states like China, Cuba and Iran,
    it would be entirely consistent
    with Sen. Dole’s admonition of
    last fall to require their
    participation as a precondition
    for our own.

  • Stability: The
    Chemical Weapons Convention will
    not increase stability if it
    actually winds up exacerbating
    the spread of chemical
    warfare-relevant technologies and
    facilitates espionage against
    U.S. companies and government
    facilities. The conditions
    requiring the renegotiation of
    the treaty’s highly controversial
    “Poisons for Peace”
    Articles (X and XI) and barring
    inspectors from China and rogue
    states would go some way toward
    preventing this accord from
    contributing to instability.

The Bottom Line

Like many other prominent figures who
have lent their good names and authority
to this seriously defective treaty — and
the Clinton Administration’s efforts to
ram it through the Senate, Sen.
Dole has been had.
Unfortunately, the fine print belies his
statements and undercuts his credibility.

It is to be hoped that other members
of the Senate, starting with Majority
Leader Trent Lott, will not fall prey to
a similar bait-and-switch operation — or
become party to any effort to impose upon
the American people a treaty that clearly
remains fatally flawed and inconsistent
with U.S. sovereignty, constitutional
rights and national security interests.

– 30 –

1. See Truth
or Consequences #11: Clinton’s ‘Changes’
to the CWC Are Necessary, But Clearly Not
Sufficient ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_55″>No. 97-D 55, 21
April 1997).

Integrity of The Institutions

Perhaps the real legacy of the Clinton Presidency will be that it forced all of us to think hard about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate in the running of a modern political system.


The story of late has been mainly about the role of money in politics. Our sense, though, is that something larger came to the surface this week with the failure of Anthony Lake’s nomination to be CIA director and the related tales of a National Security Council staff and CIA struggling to weigh their duties against the demands of Democratic political operatives.


Now before we all get too high-minded about this subject, let’s recognize some realities. Anyone who has read Presidential memoirs knows–because the Presidents themselves frankly admit–that even the most sensitive policy decisions are often measured against political effect. And as well, the career staff in sensitive agencies such as the CIA or FBI assuredly do not operate in some fog oblivious to these realities; they know when elections are held.


That said, anyone who has served in a position of responsibility in Washington stretching back through the postwar years has understood that some line exists between proper and improper political pressure on the national security and law enforcement bureaucracies. We now learn that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee called NSC staffer Sheila Heslin to insist that she drop objections to Roger Tamraz, the pipeline entrepreneur and contributor with connections to some of the BCCI crowd, getting in to “see” the President. And, even more breathtaking, that this Clinton campaign pol ordered up an intelligence file for her from the CIA. Surely this is way beyond any recognizable norm.


But the Clinton White House had made it routine.


This has to be one of the most troubling aspects of the Clinton tenure, its across-the-board willingness to subvert national agencies charged with law enforcement and security concerns. Specifically, the FBI, the Secret Service, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and most likely the Internal Revenue Service. Again, the reality is that all these agencies have experienced serious runs at their integrity by past Presidents. The Clinton innovation is to have made it banal.


Early in the first term, assistant White House Counsel William Kennedy called the FBI, demanding to know “within 15 minutes” what the agency would do about accusations that had been made against the Travel Office by Clinton friends and travel-agency entrepreneurs Catherine Cornelius and Harry Thomason. And if the answer was nothing, Mr. Kennedy was prepared to bring in the IRS. The IRS shortly began a two-year audit of the Travel Office airline, UltrAir.


In the Filegate scandal an irresponsible White House aide, Craig Livingstone, asked the FBI for, and got, files on several hundred former Bush aides. When the Filegate issue emerged, White House aide Tony Marceca, a Democratic activist, falsely said the Secret Service provided outdated lists. Earlier, in 1993, when the Secret Service withheld passes from about 12 White House employees because of drug-use concerns, it dropped the holds after the Administration set up a twice-a-year testing program for the aides.


Now, within a week, we have the FBI, the NSC and the CIA all embroiled with this White House over their proper functions. In an incredible display of recrimination, the FBI and White House accused each other of misrepresenting the agency’s warnings to the NSC about Chinese contributors. Then in the middle of this spitting match came leaks last week that the government’s most sensitive monitoring operation, the National Security Agency, had passed along communications intercepts early last year to the FBI regarding possible Chinese interest in making campaign contributions. In this wake, a senior FBI agent serving as liaison to the NSC “retired.”


Then on Monday came this paper’s front page story about the Democratic Party chairman seeking to enlist both the CIA and NSC staffer Sheila Heslin in the effort to place $177,000-giver Roger Tamraz in front of . . . of what? The President, or the candidate?


As widely reported, the Bill Clinton story is one of a “permanent campaign,” a career in which no discernible line exists between public service, as commonly understood, and political gamesmanship. And all who come within this orbit are understood to be on call for political jobwork–a heads up, a free pass, an I-don’t-remember. That is why Tony Lake’s nomination arrived with a taint that couldn’t be rubbed out. It is why Janet Reno’s thoughts on independent counsel produce suspicion.


We have a flexible and resilient system. But when it becomes evident that the prevailing mores now allow the routine compromise of the system’s institutions and those who work within them, then perhaps the time has arrived for a lot of people to start reframing, publicly, the right boundaries of political behavior in Washington.

Why Tony Lake Is In Trouble In The Senate

(Washington, D.C.): As President
Clinton and his allies on Capitol Hill
turn up the heat on behalf of his
controversial choice to become the next
Director of Central Intelligence (DCI),
it is useful to review why Anthony Lake’s
nomination is in such trouble in the
Senate.

Poster Child for the
Clinton Follies

On one level, Mr. Lake’s
problem is that he personifies — indeed,
he could be the poster child for — much
of what is seen to be ailing the Clinton
Administration at the moment.
For example, there is the question of a lack
of personal accountability.
“Mistakes were made” is the
President’s refrain about campaign
financing “irregularities”;
Tony Lake declares “it was a
mistake” not to tell Congress that
the United States was facilitating
radical Islamic Iran’s penetration of
Europe via secret arms shipments to
Bosnia.

Then there is the business of sharp
practices when it comes to the law.
The Clinton team evidently will contend
that the law permits renting the Lincoln
Bedroom, seats on Air Force One, tables
at the White House Mess, etc. to campaign
contributors as long as the settling of
accounts does not occur on government
property. Tony Lake’s defenders claim
that his National Security Council did
not “mislead” Congress about
the Iran-Bosnia scandal; it simply
refused to inform Members until two years
after the fact, which amounts — as Sen.
Jesse Helms correctly wrote in opposing
the Lake nomination on 25 February(1)
— to the same thing.

Insult is added to injury that such
behavior is brought to us by an
administration whose leader sees fit
publicly to denounce cynicism.
Certainly, such behavior does not inspire
confidence that a candidate for Director
of Central Intelligence will be fully
transparent and forthcoming toward the
legislative branch — for whom he also
works.

The Clinton team also appears to
believe that improper, if not
illegal, financial activities
can be absolved as long as the money is
given back when one gets caught.
Interestingly though, in the case of the
Democratic National Committee, the rule
is to give it all back (at least
eventually). In Mr. Lake’s case, he only
had to pay out $5,000 in fines for the
roughly $250,000 he made by holding onto
energy stocks — despite being formally
directed not once, but twice, to dispose
of them.

Can He Tell A Failure When
He Sees It?

Even those who may be inclined to
overlook these problems with the Lake
candidacy — there is, after all, the
Clinton Administration’s favored
exculpatory line “everybody does
it” — cannot ignore two other,
troubling aspects of this nomination:

First, as Jim Hoagland observed in a
scathing Washington Post column
last month, Anthony Lake seems
ill-suited to the task of conducting
“intelligence assessments and
operations with absolute integrity, even
if they cost Bill Clinton politically and
the CIA bureaucratically.”
After noting the credit the President has
given Lake as “the architect of U.S.
Bosnia policy” and “relaxing
opposition to China” — among other
dubious policies — Hoagland declares:
“I doubt King Solomon would have the
detachment and perspective needed to
disentangle such past advocacy from the
demands of an unbiased analysis.”

In this regard, it is particularly
ominous that Tony Lake has been party to
the sacking of the first two Clinton DCIs
on the grounds, at least in part, that
they dared to speak truth to power.
Hoagland mulls the implications of the
anger Lake reportedly felt toward the
second of these Directors, John Deutch,
for acknowledging that Saddam’s incursion
last fall into northern Iraq was not the
“U.S. success” Clinton had
declared it to be:

“Iraq is the scene of the CIA’s
greatest covert fiasco of this decade.
The agency’s failures in northern Iraq
and its continuing inability to organize
an effective program against Saddam
should be the focus of the questions that
matter in judging whether Lake will have
the detachment and perspective needed to
rebuild a wounded organization….If
Lake cannot get Iraq right, he is not the
man for the job of rescuing an
organization that has not only lost its
mission but, in Iraq, lost its way.”

Will He Know Foreign Agents
When He Sees Them?

Second, since an important part of the
DCI’s job is overseeing U.S.
counterintelligence operations, it is
alarming that Tony Lake presided
as National Security Advisor over what
appears to be the most successful
penetration of the White House by an
unfriendly foreign government since the
British took the place in the War of
1812. As Michael Kelly, the
editor of the New Republic,
recently observed, various documents
supplied in response to congressional
questions about China’s influence
operations in the Executive Office of the
President point up a “profoundly
troubling fact”: “In Bill
Clinton’s White House, the idea that
agents of the People’s Republic of China
were Democratic National Committee donors
who should be granted face-time with the
president was treated [by Lake’s NSC] as
very nearly business as usual.”
Face-time with the President is, of
course, the least of the problems that
have been discovered in the
still-unfolding drama of what the
Communist Chinese got through their
“strategic access” to the
senior-most reaches of the Clinton
Administration.(2)

The Bottom Line

Anthony Lake’s FBI file may or may not
shed light on the questions of policy
judgment, contempt for Congress,
independence and integrity that are at
the core of the controversy over his
nomination. As long as the raw data in
that file might do so, however, it seems
only prudent for the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence to insist that
its chairman and ranking member be
afforded an opportunity and sufficient
time to review that data, not just the
highly abbreviated — and reportedly
uninformative — summary produced in
support of the Lake nomination. Once such
a review is accomplished, the Committee
and the full Senate will be in a position
to weigh all the evidence supporting the
conclusion that Tony Lake is the wrong
man at the wrong time for the CIA.

– 30 –

1. See the href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_36at”> attached excerpts
of Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
Helms’ letter about the Lake nomination
which was sent last week to his
Intelligence Committee counterpart,
Senator Richard Shelby.

2. For more on the
security implications of the China
Connection, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled The
China Card: Evidence of Beijing’s
Involvement in Democratic Fund-Raising
Raises Anew Security Concerns
(No. 97-D 26,
13 February 1997).

The China Card: Evidence of Beijing’s Involvement in Democratic Fund-raising Raises Anew Security Concerns

(Washington, D.C.): For some time, the
Center for Security Policy has been
concerned that the activities of John
Huang — the Chinese-born former
Taiwanese fighter pilot, Indonesian
businessman and Democratic fundraiser who
served as a Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary for International Economic
Policy in the Bill Clinton/Ron Brown
Commerce Department — might entail much
more than breaches of campaign finance
law. In fact, as the Center noted on 1
November 1996,(1)
Huang’s actions may have
constituted a serious breach of “the
most fundamental measures for protecting
sensitive information bearing on the
national security” that could
“translate into vulnerabilities that
would be exploited by America’s enemies
and/or its commercial competitors.”

Do All Roads Lead to
Beijing?

A front page story in today’s Washington
Post provides fresh and
disturbing evidence that such
concerns may justified. According to the
article, written by Bob Woodward and
Brian Duffy:

“A Justice Department
investigation into improper
political fund-raising activities
has uncovered evidence that representatives
of the People’s Republic of China
sought to direct contributions
from foreign sources to the
Democratic National Committee
before the 1996 presidential
campaign, officials
familiar with the inquiry
said….The information
gives the Justice Department
inquiry what is known as a foreign
counterintelligence component,
elevating the seriousness of the
fund-raising controversy…”
(Emphasis added.)

In light of this information, it is worth
revisiting observations made by the
Center in its 1 November Decision
Brief. These include the
following points concerning John Huang’s
access to classified information and his
suspicious connections, including those
derived from his pre-Commerce employment
with the Indonesia-based Lippo Group and
several of its subsidiary companies and
banks. One of Lippo’s enterprises is the Hong
Kong Chinese Bank, Ltd. Mr.
Huang’s biography indicates that he was
the bank’s Vice President for
International Banking between March 1985
and September 1986.

The
China Connection?

  • On 7 November 1992, four days
    after Bill Clinton’s election in
    1992, the Lippo Group sold 15% of
    its interest in the Hong Kong
    Chinese Bank to China
    Resources (Holdings) Company Ltd.
    — the commercial arm of
    Communist China’s Ministry of
    Foreign Trade and Economic
    Cooperation. China Resources is
    used by Beijing to control its
    investments and trade abroad. It
    has been called one of the PRC’s
    largest and most influential
    enterprises in Hong Kong.

  • The Hong Kong Chinese Bank
    transaction was reportedly
    structured in such a way as to
    avoid the requirement to obtain
    approval from the Hong Kong Stock
    Exchange. On 17 July 1993, China
    Resources increased its holdings
    from 15% to 50% —
    paying a 50% premium over the net
    asset value and realizing a cool
    $164.8 million profit for Mr.
    Huang’s employer at the time,
    Mochtar Riady, chairman of Lippo
    Group.

A Connection to Chinese
Intelligence?

  • As noted by William Safire in his
    28 October 1996 column in the New
    York Times    , China
    Resources also has another
    important function: providing a
    cover for Chinese espionage.
    In 1994, Nicholas Eftimiades, a
    former naval and State Department
    intelligence officer now employed
    as a Defense Intelligence Agency
    analyst, authored a book entitled
    Chinese Intelligence
    Operations    . In it, Mr.
    Eftimiades wrote:

    • “[Chinese
    intelligence] case
    officers make extensive
    use of commercial covers.
    For example, a
    vice president of the
    China Resources
    (Holdings) Company Hua
    Ren Jituan     in Hong
    Kong is traditionally a
    military case officer
    from Guangzhou.
    This officer coordinates
    the collection activities
    of other intelligence
    personnel operating under
    Hua Ren
    cover.”

  • Mr. Safire called attention to an
    alarming op.ed. article that
    appeared in the Toronto Globe
    and Mail     on 5 September
    1995. Entitled “Beware the
    Threat of Chinese Spy Games”
    and authored by David
    Harris    , a former chief
    of strategic planning with the
    Canadian Security Intelligence
    Service, this article describes
    the multifaceted effort being
    made by Chinese agents to: divert
    Western high technology, acquire
    other militarily relevant and
    commercial secrets, cultivate
    agents of influence and coerce
    overseas Chinese students to
    serve as “sleeper
    agents.”

  • While aimed at a Canadian
    audience, the following excerpt
    from the Harris op.ed. just
    as easily applies to the United
    States     — and is of
    particular interest in the
    present context:

    • “In dealings with
    Chinese officials,
    Canadians should
    understand that PRC
    diplomatic, cultural and
    intelligence activity is
    a seamless
    web….Canadians of
    Chinese ancestry must be
    warned of the
    PRC’s strong preference
    for recruiting ethnic
    Chinese using leverage
    and ‘help China’ appeals    .
    China’s use of guanxi
    networks — social
    relationships built on
    favors — is the bedrock
    of Chinese intelligence
    collection. The approach
    reflects [Beijing’s]
    tendency to rely on a
    great many sources, each
    collecting small — and
    not very incriminating —
    amounts of
    information.”

  • Mr. Harris also made a point of
    spotlighting China Resources
    (Holdings) Company as a front for
    Chinese intelligence. “U.S.
    intelligence even says Hong
    Kong’s China Resources Holding
    Company traditionally reserves
    one vice-presidential position
    for a Military Intelligence
    Department (MID) intelligence
    officer.” Mr. Harris
    has described the China Resources
    involvement with the Hong Kong
    Chinese Bank as a “textbook
    Communist Chinese influence
    operation.”

What Background Check?

  • Given U.S. intelligence’s
    knowledge of the nature and
    activities of China Resources,
    one would have thought that a
    Commerce Department request to
    grant a Top Secret security
    clearance to an ethnic Chinese
    who, although a naturalized
    American citizen, was formerly
    employed by organization in
    partnership with China Resources
    (Holdings) Company would have
    triggered red flags. In fact, it
    appears that no foreign
    background check was conducted on
    Mr. Huang at all before he was
    issued an “interim Top
    Secret clearance    .

  • Instead, on 31 January
    1994, Mr. Huang received a
    “waiver of background
    investigation prior to
    appointment”     from
    the Commerce Department’s
    security office. This was done on
    the grounds that “there
    was a critical need for his
    expertise in the new [sic]
    Administration for Secretary
    Brown.    “

  • Although “final
    clearance” was “held in
    abeyance pending the results of
    Huang’s background
    investigation,” according to
    congressional experts, it appears
    that no overseas checks
    were ever conducted     of
    Mr. Huang’s extensive
    international travel, his
    extended stays abroad, his family
    overseas or his foreign employers
    either during the five-months
    between his waiver and his first
    day on the job (18 July 1994) or
    in the subsequent three months
    until his final clearance was
    adjudicated (18 October 1994).

Business As Usual in the
Clinton Administration?

  • The Washington Times on
    31 October 1996 quoted Commerce
    spokeswoman Anne Luzzatto as
    saying that a “foreign
    background check was not required
    under security rules because Mr.
    Huang did not reside abroad in
    the previous five years before he
    took the Commerce Department
    position.” This appears to
    be inconsistent with a 1991
    directive signed by
    then-President George Bush
    requiring foreign background
    checks on anyone who has lived
    overseas within the previous ten
    years — which Mr. Huang
    certainly did. After the Huang
    Affair burst into public view,
    then-House Intelligence Committee
    Chairman Larry Combest (R-TX),
    wrote Secretary Brown’s
    successor, Mickey Kantor, saying
    “[The approach taken to
    streamline Mr. Huang’s clearance]
    was contrary to standard
    procedures    .” (Emphasis
    added.)

  • Commerce and Office of Personnel
    Management representatives
    nonetheless told the Baltimore
    Sun     on 30 October 1996 that
    Mr. Huang’s “background
    investigation was as thorough as
    it was required to be.” The Sun
    said Ms. Luzzatto claimed
    “investigators were able to
    gain the needed information
    without interviews
    overseas.”

  • David Harris, however,
    has described the placement of a
    person with Mr. Huang’s
    background in a position of
    Deputy Assistant Secretary of
    Commerce without an FBI security
    clearance as
    “horrendous” and
    something that “sends
    shudders through any intelligence
    officer’s body.”

  • Interestingly, according to the
    31 October 1996 Wall Street
    Journal    , the Commerce
    spokeswoman also averred that
    “Mr. Huang couldn’t have
    used     his security clearance
    before he officially joined the
    agency as a top international
    trade policy official in July
    1994.” (Emphasis added.) In
    view of the “critical
    need” Secretary Brown
    apparently had for Mr. Huang’s
    expertise, it stands to
    reason that he may have been
    involved in meetings,
    conversations, briefings, etc. in
    which he was exposed to
    classified information while
    still on the Lippo Group’s
    payroll.

  • There is no dispute,
    however, that Mr. Huang was
    exposed to highly sensitive
    intelligence data and competition
    sensitive trade information once
    he collected his “golden
    handshake” severance package
    from Lippo and joined the
    Commerce Department     —
    becoming what Mr. Riady called
    “my man in the Clinton
    Administration.”

Who Was John Huang Working
For?

Today’s Washington Post sheds
new light on the extent of the contact
Huang had with Chinese officials while he
had access to classified information at
the Commerce Department:

“During Huang’s 18 months at
Commerce, Huang was scheduled to
attend 37 intelligence briefings,
including briefings on China, and
saw more than two dozen
intelligence reports. From his
Commerce department office, Huang
made more than 70 phone calls to
a Lippo-controlled bank in Los
Angeles….Huang’s message slips
from the Commerce Department also
show a call from one Chinese
Embassy official in February 1995
and three calls from the
embassy’s commercial minister in
June and August of that year.
According to Huang’s Commerce
Department desk calendar
entries…he had three meetings
scheduled with Chinese government
officials. He was slated to go on
a U.S. government-sponsored trip
to China in June 1995 that was
canceled. He attended a policy
breakfast at the Chinese Embassy
in October 1995 and a dinner
there the same month.

“One of the many
unexplained records from Huang’s
files shows an unusual travel
pattern in the fall of 1995.
His expense account records show
he left his Commerce Department
office to visit the Indonesian
Embassy…claiming a $5
reimbursement for taxicab fare.
The expense records indicate
Huang did not return to his
office at Commerce until the
following day — when he took
another $5 cab ride, not from the
Indonesian Embassy, but,
according to his records, from
the ‘residence of the Chinese
ambassador.'”

The Bottom Line

Today’s revelations in the Washington Post
only intensify the Center for Security
Policy’s longstanding fears that the
Clinton Administration’s insouciance
about personnel and information security
are an invitation to foreign penetration
and suborning.(2)
Perhaps the most important insights that
will emerge from the ongoing Department
of Justice investigation of the
Clinton/Democratic National Committee
fund-raising operation — and the
congressional inquiries that will shortly
get underway — may be the dangers posed
by such practices and the urgent need to
hold those responsible fully accountable
and to implement at once the necessary
corrective actions.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled ‘High Crimes and
Misdemeanors’? The Huang Caper Reinforces
Concerns About Clinton Malfeasance on
Security Matters ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_109″>No. 96-D 109,
1 November 1996).

2. See, for
example, the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled The
Clinton Security Clearance Melt-Down:
‘No-Gate’ Demonstrates ‘It’s the People,
Stupid’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_32″>No. 94-D 32,
25 March 1994).

‘Coming Home to Roost’: Proliferating Crises In Southern Europe Eviscerate the Illusion of Post-Cold War ‘Stability’

(Washington, D.C.): It is becoming
ever more evident that the Balkans are
poised once again to ignite in spasms of
civil disorder and ethnic conflicts,
possibly setting off a broader
conflagration in Southern Europe and
exposing profound divisions in the
Atlantic alliance.

The Unraveling Dayton
Accords

In recent days, the Contact Group on
Bosnia pulled the plug on the scheduled
hand-off of the Brcko Corridor — the
narrow strip that connects the so-called
Republic of Srpska with Serbia proper —
to the Muslim-dominated Bosnian
government. This action was justified by
its advocates as a necessity, at least
temporarily, if the Bosnian Serbs are to
be prevented from resuming hostilities.
Unfortunately, this breach of
faith with the Bosnian Muslims is an
almost certain invitation to renewed
violence on their part.
Worse still, alliance discord over the
ultimate disposition of Brcko now places
U.S. forces in the cross-hairs as
arbitrators of the future of this
strategic corridor.

As it happens, Croat efforts to expel
Serbs from East Slavonia is driving some
of these refugees toward Brcko
— further exacerbating the situation at
the very moment that a announcement of
the problematic “resolution” of
this issue is imminent (15 February).

At the same time, the divided city of
Mostar is once again becoming a
flashpoint for Bosnian Muslim and
Croatian bloodletting. A series of
bombings in Mostar and, most recently, a
cold-blooded attack by armed Croats
against Muslim civilians participating in
a funeral ceremony there have lit the
fuse for a renewal of the highly
destructive fighting in this
once-beautiful city. These episodes have
also given lie to claims of a
Muslim-Croat federation upon which U.S.
policy has been largely predicated in
recent years.

The Croat attacks against
Muslims will probably resurface the
Iranian/mujahedeen involvement in Bosnia,
despite the Clinton Administration’s
systematic efforts to paper over this
natty strategic problem. In
fact, Iranian and proxy forces continue
to exercise considerable influence in the
Bosnian government — a direct
by-product, in part at least, of the
Clinton Administration’s secret decision
to allow Tehran to arm its Bosnian
co-religionists — despite official U.S.
pronouncements that such Iranian
involvement has been terminated. This
ongoing penetration of Sarajevo’s
security and other institutions by such
elements all but assures that the
conflict that will accompany the imminent
breakdown of the Clinton Administration’s
vaunted Dayton Accords will be a
dangerous one for targeted American
personnel in Bosnia.


Collapsing Pyramids in
Albania May Shake Others’ Foundations

The Albanian government is still
reeling from the effects of an escalating
scandal associated with a failed pyramid
scheme that has deprived a majority of
Albanian families of a part or all of
their life savings. The Center for
Security Policy has learned that other
confidence rackets are about to
exacerbate the social turmoil in Albania.
Should this upheaval intensify further,
that country’s desperate poverty and
rampant inflation may fuel an explosion
that crosses national boundaries.

Of particular concern is the
ever-volatile situation in the near-by
ethnic Albanian enclave of Kosovo in
Serbia. Albanian President Berisha is
responding to his domestic woes by
becoming more reckless in his conduct of
foreign affairs — notably with respect
to the Albanian population of Serbia’s
Kosovo province, a well-honed technique
for diverting attention from difficulties
at home. The Milosevic government has
found it difficult to resist the
temptation to brutalize the people of
Kosovo; fears that turmoil in Albania
could incite unrest among Serbia’s
Albanian minority could provide a pretext
for a new and bloody crack-down in
Kosovo.

Meltdown in Macedonia?

Like Albania, Macedonia has recently
been racked by its own pyramid schemes
and the resulting public protests. With
an already fragile economy, the country’s
finances could worsen quickly — possibly
leading to mass demonstrations and
political instability involving, among
others, the large ethnic Albanian
population in Macedonia. Between
Pan-Islamic pressures from Albania and
Pan-Orthodox pressures from Bulgaria,
Serbia and Greece, Macedonia is between
the proverbial rock and a hard place.

This could be particularly problematic
for the United States since the U.S. has
contributed a reinforced battalion to the
UNPREDEP deployment in Macedonia. Since
Russia is currently attempting to block
an extension of this mandate (which
expires in May), the Clinton
Administration seems inclined to offer
security assurances to the Macedonians on
a unilateral basis, if necessary,
notwithstanding the complete absence of a
plan for assuring stability there or for
extracting U.S. personnel.

Despoiled Bulgaria

Bulgaria’s economy, infrastructure and
resources have been subjected to a
systematic looting by its former
nomenklatura that is extreme even by the
standard of other kleptocracies of the
former Soviet empire. As with the
foregoing nations, these conditions make
Bulgaria ripe to join those in Europe’s
southern tier that are poised to
experience potentially violent
instability.

The Aegean Crisis

Finally, tensions between
Greece and Turkey are intensifying,
fanned by deliberately provocative
Russian arms sales to the Greek Cypriots
(in all likelihood, accompanied by
Russian “technical advisors”)
and to Greece, itself. As a
result, simmering antagonisms between
Athens and Ankara over territorial rights
in the Aegean and the Islamic-Orthodox
confrontations throughout the Balkans are
primed to produce conflict. Such an event
would have profound, if highly
unpredictable, implications for NATO (not
least, for any prospect of its expansion)
and the future course of “the Great
Game” now underway in the Caspian
Basin and Transcaucasus.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton Administration has
contributed to the potential for new
calamities now brewing in Southeastern
Europe by, to varying degrees: allowing
the aforementioned, incendiary conditions
to fester; missing numerous opportunities
for prophylactic action; encouraging
ill-advised initiatives (notably, the
Iran-Bosnia scandal); and squandering
U.S. prestige and influence on feckless
multilateral responses. Against the
backdrop of a serious succession crisis
in Zagreb, an as-yet-unresolved political
struggle in Belgrade and the increasingly
worrisome character of the Sarajevo
government — to say nothing of the
uncertainties surrounding Boris Yeltsin’s
hold on power — no one can be
sure how the dynamic developments
described above will play out.

Two things should be clear,
however: First, Bill Clinton’s
Rube Goldberg, gerry-built approach to
security policy is beginning to come
apart at the seams — with a
considerable, and growing, potential to
imperil U.S. forces and interests. A
comprehensive and urgent review must,
accordingly, be undertaken to reassess
the policies and deployments that will do
nothing to prevent the looming
catastrophes but may well implicate
the United States in them — if not
cause it to be held responsible for
creating them.

Second, a principal architect
of these deeply flawed policies has been
tapped by President Clinton to be the man
responsible for monitoring their success
or failure. It is deeply
disturbing, for example, that Anthony
Lake is making the point in courtesy
calls with Senators who will shortly
consider his nomination to become
Director of Central Intelligence that he
believes the policy of facilitating
Iranian penetration of Bosnia was a
correct one. So is his
continuing assertion that the Dayton
Accords have been successful and, indeed,
a model for post-Cold War management of
regional crises elsewhere.

Senators must satisfy
themselves that Mr. Lake can be relied
upon to provide honest, objective
documentation — even where so doing will
demonstrate the bankruptcy of policies he
was intimately involved in formulating.
In the absence of persuasive evidence to
that effect, and in the face of much
evidence to the contrary, Mr. Lake
is clearly the wrong man for the job.

FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

BY: Jacob Heilbrunn
New Republic , 2 DECEMBER 1996

Forget school uniforms. Bill Clinton’s greatest campaign accomplishment was not co-opting the
Republicans on values. It was putting them on the defensive on foreign policy. If Clinton pilfered
social issues from the Republicans, he engaged in grand larceny on the foreign front.

The election ended up as a reprise of 1992: while Bush waffled on Bosnia, candidate Clinton
called for military action; where Dole and Kemp called for diplomacy toward Iraq, President
Clinton launched missiles. Toward the campaign’s end, with Dole reduced to spluttering about
Vietnam and Clinton delivering statesmanlike speeches, Republican strategists William Kristol and
Robert Kagan fretted in an October 14 New York Times op-ed that the “parties have now
reversed roles.”

The GOP should relax. It’s no accident that the Clinton administration is witnessing an exodus,
particularly from its foreign policy team. Clinton’s first term was a success; the second one may be
a disaster–and, paradoxically, the two are intimately connected. Clinton’s critics have always said
he really had no foreign policy–that he found the subject boring and so let his administration
wander, reacting to crises as they exploded. This was not precisely right. In fact, the
administration did have a policy, or at least a nostrum. The notion, as outlined by Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in the November-December Foreign Affairs, goes by the grand
but vague name “democratic engagement.” What this means is that, rather than focusing on their
particular foreign and trade policies, the Clintonites have tried to influence the general character
of foreign regimes.

This was a noble impulse. By basing policy not on grim realities but on the vague aspiration that
democracy will take hold, indeed is taking hold, the first Clinton administration opted for a policy
of wish fulfillment. It wished China to respect the rights of its people, Bosnia to be whole and at
peace, Saddam Hussein to be cowed, North Korea to be denuded of nuclear weapons, Haiti to be
a model of Jeffersonian politics, and a Palestinian entity to flourish in the midst of Israel.
Rhetorically, at least, these things came to pass.

The practical effect was not to bring disasters upon the head of the first Clinton administration
but, rather, to defer them–to put them out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes deferral is the
smart option, and sometimes the first Clinton administration did not defer. Episodically, and more
or less at random, it engaged some real threats with real force, and with some success–
particularly in the case of Haiti and Taiwan. But, far more often, the ethos of deferral ruled. There
was, after all, a logic to it. For a president by no means sure of re-election, problems deferred
could well have been problems denied–left to mushroom and to plague some hapless successor to
Bill Clinton.

Now Clinton is succeeding himself. The fundamental problems facing the United States in
Bosnia, Russia, Iraq and China can no longer be put off. Dealing with them does not require an
overarching grand strategy. It requires a readiness to identify and confront discrete, festering
problems. And so, in his second term, Clinton may become what he spent his first term refusing to
be: a foreign policy president.

The most immediate issue confronting the administration is the one that confronted it in 1992:
Bosnia. The Dayton accord was not without merit: it stopped the slaughter of innocents, at least
for a time. But, fundamentally, the accord was hope triumphing over reality. It was the Clinton
administration’s wish that Bosnia be safe, united and democratic. So it was, on paper. That fiction
can be maintained, barely, while American troops remain. When they leave, as they were initially
scheduled to next month, it will collapse.

Bosnia’s tripartite division, which the accords ratified, is far along. Haris Siladzic, the leader of
the Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the only political leader who believed in a multiethnic
democracy, was beaten in June 1996 by an Islamist mob for his pluck. Bosnia’s Dayton-conceived
constitution is fundamentally unworkable; if two-thirds of the delegates of any one ethnicity
protest they can bring the recently inaugurated legislative assembly grinding to a halt.

Human rights are in no better shape. Under Dayton, refugees have the right to return to their
original homes. But barely anyone has returned. To make sure they don’t in the future, Serbs have
also been blowing up Muslim homes; in the past two months more than 200 have been destroyed.
And it took American and Russian troops to quell fighting in Koraj last month when Muslims who
returned to the area were attacked by Bosnian Serbs.

The best-case scenario in Bosnia is that U.S. forces manage to prevent a new upsurge in ethnic
violence even as partition goes ahead. After a few years, American efforts to shore up the Bosnian
military would ultimately permit it to move against a potential Serb incursion without the aid of
the U. S. But it is precisely such a buildup that may lead to the worst-case scenario: a renewed
conflict between the armies of the Bosnian-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska in which
the U.S. is caught in the middle. An arms race looms. Already the Bosnians are smuggling in
heavy weaponry with the connivance of Turkey and Iran. The unofficial policy of National
Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of Defense William Perry has been to wink at these
arms transfers. They may discover, as a result, that states such as Iran have supplanted the U.S. in
the Balkans. Their influence is already being felt; President Alija Izetbegovic has purged the
officer corps of the Bosnian army of its non-Muslims. The Dayton accord may prove no more
than an interlude between rounds of fighting. A renewed war, plus a long-term Iranian beachhead
in the Balkans, could be in the offing.

Then there is the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. Just as the Dayton accord was supposed to
solve the Bosnian problem, so the Oslo accord was to create a
negotiating process that ineluctably pushed a democratic Palestine under Yasir Arafat toward
peaceful coexistence with Israel. Instead, Arafat has built not a fledgling democracy but a police
state, and an incompetent, corrupt police state at that. And the holes in the agreement presided
over by Clinton at the Handshake on the Lawn have been exposed. How, precisely, would Israeli
settlers on the West Bank live safely in a Palestinian mini-state? How was Arafat going to assure
the security for which the Israelis traded sovereignty? How was Jerusalem’s future to be resolved?
The answers to those questions are now in, and they are less than cheering. The recent rioting
over the Israeli government’s opening of the Hasmonean tunnel in Jerusalem shows that Arafat
will not hesitate to incite violence as a means of pressuring Benjamin Netanyahu and maintaining
his popularity with the Palestinian people. It is clear, as well, that there now exists no agreement
that protects the Israelis who live among Palestinians on the West Bank. When, during the tunnel
riots, Palestinian soldiers fired on Israelis, the entire structure for ensuring that protection–a
system of joint Israeli-Palestinian military patrols–collapsed. The Clinton administration cannot
put the peace process together again, and because it has milked the region for its political value, it
will be implicated in the chaotic and deeply embittering civil violence that will greatly undermine
Oslo’s promise over the next four years.

Nowhere has the Clinton administration engaged in more Pollyannish thinking than in Russia. In
an October 29 address at the Harriman Institute, Strobe Talbott declared it was essential to
recognize “how far Russia has come … in an extraordinarily short period of time–in what is
essentially the right direction.” But the signs in the three spheres Talbott cited are essentially
ominous: politics, the Russian economy and Russia’s relations with its former republics. The
danger in Russia is the emergence not of a new Soviet empire, but of a gangster state that foments
anti-American mischief around the globe. To call the Yeltsin regime democratic distorts the term;
it is a fusion of industrialists and politicians exploiting Russia for their own purposes. What is
taking place is a classic conflict between state and society, a unity of interest versus the Russian
people’s diversity of interests. Small wonder the Russian economy remains in a parlous state, with
the business paper Kommersant Daily recently noting that Yeltsin had declared “total war” on
taxpayers. In foreign policy, the Yeltsin camarilla has revived traditional great power imperialism
toward central Asia and begun exporting weaponry to Iran and other Third World states hostile to
the U.S. Were Russia to move closer to China, as Yeltsin’s visit there this summer suggests may
be possible, the U.S. would be faced with a Beijing-Moscow axis bent on shipping nuclear
materials around the globe.

The one power that could conceivably challenge U.S. preeminence is China. Unlike Russia,
which is in no position to retake Eastern Europe, China has the potential to exercise suzerainty
over East Asia, that is, to force the states in the region to defer to its preferences and wishes.
China has become a major exporter of nuclear weapons technology to the Third World and
continues to transfer weaponry to North Korea. In addition, Beijing has engaged in saber rattling
over Taiwan; a new study by the U.S. Navy’s intelligence office concludes that Beijing maneuvers
last March were not a discrete set of exercises, but a rehearsal for a future full-scale invasion.
China’s ultimate aim is to control the South China Sea, a vital waterway for oil shipments to Japan
and other countries in the area. Though China enjoys a massive trade imbalance with the U.S., the
Clinton administration caved on Most Favored Nation status, and in June 1995 Assistant
Secretary of State Winston Lord told Congress that “our policy is engagement, not containment.”
So far, the engaging has been one-sided, as China relentlessly builds up its military power and
spurns democratization and human rights.

Is Clinton II prepared to deal with the international crises that Clinton I pretended could be
solved by a general outbreak of democratic niceness? The clearest sign will come when he
chooses his next secretary of state. George Mitchell, the leading contender, would replace Warren
Christopher as Clinton’s father figure, and would follow his policy lead as well. As an adviser to
Madeleine Albright puts it, “Mitchell would be Christopher plus. He’s a lawyer and a negotiator,
but a better performer on television.” His forays into foreign affairs have been confined to serving
as American mediator to the failed talks in northern Ireland and, as Senate majority leader during
the Gulf war, vowing that sanctions were about to send Saddam scurrying from Kuwait. The only
thing he might threaten as secretary of state would be Christopher’s mileage record.

Madeleine Albright is another story. As U.N. ambassador she has performed brilliantly, insisting
that the administration act in Bosnia. Most recently, she warned the administration about growing
threats by Saddam to the Kurds. Albright’s strength is precisely that she is not a visionary. She
dispenses with diplomatic bromides and demands action. These are not qualities one associates
with Christopher, Lake or, for that matter, Bill Clinton himself. For four years, this administration
has muddled through without them, pretending that it need not truly confront the forces spawning
disorder in the world because those forces were bound to change their fundamental natures. Now
it is clear they will not. In his second term, Bill Clinton must act in a way he rarely did in his first,
and in a fashion that appears contrary to his nature. If he does not, America’s foreign policy woes
could soon grow far worse.