[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 70 (Monday, May 1, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S5929]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        PEACEKEEPING SAVES LIVES

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in catching up on my reading, I came 
across an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Brian Urquhart, who has 
contributed to U.N. peacekeeping efforts throughout the world in a 
significant way, until his retirement from the United Nations.
  In his op-ed piece, he makes the point that John Foster Dulles said 
that a peacekeeping force was desirable and that compared to what we do 
in general, expenditure on arms is an economically way to bring 
stability to the world.
  How right he is.
  If we were to even suggest that we spend 1 percent of our defense 
budget on U.N. peacekeeping, it would be a significant and helpful 
shift for the United States, as well as for the world.
  At this point, I ask that the op-ed piece by Brian Urquhart be 
printed in the Record.
  The opinion piece follows:
               [From the Washington Post, Feb. 16, 1995]

                       Peace-Keeping Saves Lives

                          (By Brian Urquhart)

       ``As you know the United States . . . has a strong interest 
     in the early establishment of standby arrangements for a 
     United Nations Peace Force. The interest of the American 
     people in this concept is further demonstrated by the fact 
     that during the past year resolutions were adopted by both 
     the House of Representatives and the Senate calling for the 
     establishment of a United Nations force.''
       These words, written by an American secretary of state, 
     John Foster Dulles, to a U.N. secretary general, Dag 
     Hammarskjold, are a good measure of how different the climate 
     in Washington is these days toward the idea of U.N. 
     peacekeeping operations.
       ``I want to assure you that the United States is prepared 
     to assist you in every feasible manner in strengthening the 
     capacity of the United Nations to discharge its 
     responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and 
     security, a task to which you have already contributed so 
     much,'' Dulles wrote in that 1958 letter.
       Hammarskjold responded cautiously. At that high point in 
     the Cold War he feared that a standing U.N. force, actively 
     opposed by the Soviet Union, would become a political 
     football between East and West, destroying the fragile 
     innovation of peace-keeping which he had pioneered during the 
     Suez crisis of 1956 and the Lebanon crisis of 1958.
       President Eisenhower and Dulles, on the other hand, 
     evidently saw a standby U.N. peace-keeping capacity as being 
     greatly in the interest of the United States. In fact, just 
     18 months later Eisenhower, pressed by the new prime minister 
     of the Congo for U.S. intervention there, adroitly referred 
     him to the United Nations. The resulting peacekeeping 
     operation was widely regarded
      as an extraordinary success in dealing with the chaos there.
       Since that time the United Nations has undertaken some 25 
     such assignments of varying sizes in different parts of the 
     world. Given the desperate origins of most of these 
     operations, it is scarcely surprising that not all have 
     achieved all their objectives. But it is worth noting that in 
     the present controversy over peace-keeping, the successful 
     operations--which constitute the majority--are seldom 
     mentioned.
       In recent months, for example, there has been much 
     discussion of placing U.S. troops in the Golan Heights as 
     part of the Middle East peace process, but little mention of 
     the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, which has successfully 
     presided over peace on the Golan Heights since 1974. Somalia 
     and Bosnia are constantly invoked, but the Nobel Peace Price 
     of 1988 and later successes in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador 
     and Mozambique are routinely forgotten.
       The prevailing attitude in Washington toward U.N. peace-
     keeping these days seems to be a radical reversal of the 
     earlier U.S. attitude. The impression is often given now that 
     past U.S. support of these efforts was an aberration, a 
     charitable--and largely unwise--gesture of condescension. But 
     in fact, from Suez in 1956 to the present time, U.N. peace-
     keeping has far more often been a vital element of U.N. 
     foreign policy.
       During the Cold War, it was vital to maintaining 
     international peace and security, because, among other 
     things, it kept regional conflicts out of the U.S.-Soviet 
     orbit and lessened the potential of such conflicts for 
     provoking nuclear East-West confrontation.
       In the post-Cold War world, that motivation for supporting 
     peace-keeping no longer exists. The United Nations' new 
     involvements are for the most part in massive civil and 
     ethnic conflicts where human, not international, security is 
     involved, although such disasters often cause major 
     destabilization in neighboring states as well as strong 
     emotional
      reactions worldwide. It is this change in the basic 
     character of conflict that has led the more vocal 
     opponents of U.N. peace-keeping to argue that there is 
     little or no U.S. national interest in it.
       But as Charles William Maynes has pointed out in testimony 
     before the House International Relations Committee, today's 
     great powers are ``like the most successful members of any 
     community. They have a stake in the general health of the 
     community. They cannot and should not be the world's 
     policeman.''
       Great powers have major economic and other interests in 
     global stability, but they find it increasingly unwise to 
     intervene on their own in regional conflicts. It was 
     considerations such as these that underlay the enthusiasm of 
     Dulles and Eisenhower for building up the peace-keeping 
     capacity of the United Nations. Even the United Nations' most 
     criticized operations such as UNPROFOR in ex-Yugoslavia often 
     serve as a useful pretext for avoiding more intensive U.S. 
     involvement and a screen for differences with allies. 
     Imperfect though they are, they also save thousands of lives.
       U.N. peace-keeping can be, and will continue to be, an 
     invaluable--even an indispensable--instrument of peace. Its 
     capacity and effectiveness need to be strengthened, not 
     diminished. To be sure, new forms, rules and methods, 
     including a training system, need to be developed. But the 
     cost of peace-keeping--contrary to widespread belief--is 
     small by comparison with the cost of massive military 
     involvement, which timely peace-keeping often succeeds in 
     making unnecessary. John Foster Dulles got it right.
     

                          ____________________