[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 58 (Thursday, May 11, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3904-S3906]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       MULTILATERAL ORGANIZATIONS

  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I want to commend Senator Cleland and 
Senator Roberts for instituting this bipartisan dialogue relating to 
the global role of the United States. We normally only discuss these 
issues when a real-world contingency is looming and we do so under 
significant time constraints and within the dynamic of rapidly 
unfolding crises. This dialogue, which allows us to discuss these 
issues in a better setting, will hopefully contribute in a better 
understanding of the various perspectives on these issues and may bring 
us closer to a consensus on the fundamental issue of the global role of 
the United States.
  This week's subject--``Multilateral Organizations''--is a very broad 
area. I will confine my remarks to those multilateral organizations 
that have responsibilities relating to the maintenance of international 
peace and security. I have in mind organizations like the United 
Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, 
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the mutual 
defense treaties to which the United States is a party.
  I would like to briefly discuss several recent international crises 
and the role that the various multilateral organizations played in 
addressing those crises. I want to note, at the outset, that sometimes 
they were successful and sometimes they failed.
  Mr. President, I don't know how many of my colleagues have ever been 
to Dubrovnik. It is an ancient and breathtakingly beautiful seaside 
city on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. When the Yugoslav Army subjected 
Dubrovnik to indiscriminate shelling in October 1991, resulting in the 
systematic destruction in the old city and the loss of many civilian 
lives, the European Union or the Western European Union should have 
used force to end this barbarity in their own backyard. If they had, 
the ensuing damage and loss of life throughout the Balkans might have 
been avoided. Instead of acting with force, however, the European Union 
declined to take any forceful action. For its part, the UN Security 
Council imposed an international embargo on the supply of arms to the 
combatants, thus succeeding in locking in the advantage that the 
Yugoslav Army enjoyed. It doesn't appear that NATO even considered 
taking action at that stage of the Balkan conflict. This was an example 
of the inability or unwillingness of the United Nations, the European 
Union, NATO and other multilateral organizations to effectively deal 
with a real-world crisis that had the potential of spreading.
  It should be noted that NATO has substantial forces under its command 
but the United Nations does not have a standing UN army, nor, in my 
view, should it. The United Nations is dependent upon the political 
will of its members to supply the forces and the financial resources to 
take action. It is ironic that politicians of all nations feel free to 
criticize the United Nations for failing to successfully carry out its 
missions but the reality is that any failure of the United Nations is a 
failure of the UN member nations to provide the UN with the necessary 
means for its missions. We can't have it both ways--we can't refuse to 
provide the UN with the necessary means to do its job and then hammer 
the UN for its failings.
  UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in commenting upon a December 1999 
Report of an Independent Inquiry that he commissioned and that 
documented the UN failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda and on his own 
earlier report on the UN's failure to safeguard Srebrenica, stated that 
``Of all my aims as Secretary General, there is none to which I feel 
more deeply committed than that of enabling the United Nations never 
again to fail in protecting a civilian population from genocide or mass 
slaughter.''
  Mr. President, I welcome Secretary General Kofi Annan's statement, 
but I recognize the reality that the UN's ability to take effective 
action in the future--even to prevent genocide--remains dependent upon 
the political will of UN member nations to provide the UN with the 
forces and the financial resources it needs.
  Mr. President, just as the United Nations has learned some hard 
lessons in places like Rwanda and Srebrenica, so the United States 
learned a hard lesson in Somalia, where we lost 18 of our finest 
soldiers in a single engagement.
  In response to the need for an effective peacekeeping capability in 
Africa, the United States, Britain and France are embarked on parallel 
and coordinated programs to enhance the capabilities of African 
countries to carry out humanitarian and peacekeeping operations in 
Africa. The United States program, called the African Crisis Response 
Initiative or ACRI, has trained over 6,000 peacekeepers from the 
African nations of Benin, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Uganda, and Senegal. The 
ACRI program, whose program of instruction has been approved by the UN 
Department of Peacekeeping, also promotes professional apolitical 
militaries and reinforces respect for human rights and the proper role 
of a military in a democracy.
  Mr. President, while most people only associate the UN with 
peacekeeping or peace enforcement missions, there are other actions 
that it has undertaken. In December 1992, the UN Security Council, at 
the request of the Government of the Former Yugoslav Republic of 
Macedonia, established a preventive deployment mission in Macedonia in 
an effort to prevent the Balkan conflict from spreading into that 
nation. Originally composed of a Nordic battalion, it was augmented by 
a U.S. Army contingent in July 1993. The conflict did not spread to 
Macedonia, perhaps because of this mission. It was the first deployment 
of an international force prior to an initiation of hostilities.
  The crisis in Kosovo also produced unprecedented actions by several 
multilateral organizations. In 1998, amidst mounting repression of the 
ethnic Albanian population by the Yugoslav Army and special police, 
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic reached an agreement with U.S. 
envoy Dick Holbrooke to comply with UN demands for a cease-fire and to 
accept an intrusive verification regime of the Organization for 
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Involving approximately 
2,000 unarmed personnel, this was the largest, most complex and 
potentially most dangerous mission ever undertaken by the OSCE. 
Additionally, NATO deployed an Extraction Force to neighboring 
Macedonia that was poised to come to the assistance of the OSCE 
personnel if they came under attack. While the OSCE mission was not 
able to prevent all armed attacks, particularly the mass killing of 
ethnic Albanians in Racak in January 1999, it did enable international 
humanitarian relief organizations to provide direly needed assistance 
to the Kosovar population until forced to withdraw on March 20, 1999 in 
the face of an untenable situation, including additional large-scale 
deployments of Milosevic's military, special police and paramilitary 
forces into Kosovo.

  By the time of the OSCE's withdrawal from Kosovo, repression of the 
ethnic-Albanian population of Kosovo escalated to a full-scale attempt 
to ethnically cleanse Kosovo. Unfortunately, the UN Security Council 
was unable to act as both Russia and China signaled that they would 
veto any resolution authorizing the use of force against the security 
forces of Slobodan

[[Page S3905]]

Milosevic. Despite the lack of international legitimation that a UN 
Security Council authorization would have provided, NATO was resolute 
and launched a 78-day air campaign that forced Slobodan Milosevic to 
accede to NATO's demands. This was the first time in its fifty-year 
history that NATO had embarked on a large-scale combat operation. 
Following the air campaign, the UN Security Council established a UN 
mission to administer Kosovo and authorized an international armed 
force under NATO leadership to provide a secure environment. And for 
the first time in the 20th Century, ethnic cleansing in Europe was 
reversed. The United States bore the major burden in NATO's air 
campaign but the European Union pledged to bear the major share of the 
reconstruction effort and has provided most of the peacekeeping forces 
for Kosovo. I welcome the fact that the United States is playing a 
junior role in the peacekeeping effort with only about 15 percent of 
the troops, and I also welcome our European NATO allies' expressed 
determination to play a more substantial role in future conflicts in 
Europe, either as part of a NATO or a European Union-led effort.
  Additionally, in a departure from the normal UN practice, the UN 
Mission in Kosovo or UNMIK has been organized into four pillars, under 
the overall supervision of the UNMIK head, Dr. Kouchner. Those four 
pillars are: civil administration under the United Nations itself; 
humanitarian assistance, led by the Office of the UN High Commissioner 
for Refugees; democratization and institution-building, led by the 
OSCE; and economic reconstruction, managed by the EU.
  Despite the fact that our NATO allies would have borne the effects of 
a massive flow of ethnic-Albanian Kosovars, regional instability, and 
the potential involvement of two of its member nations--Greece and 
Turkey--on opposite sides of the conflict, no individual European 
nation had the military or political wherewithal to use force against 
Serbia to end its barbarous acts. I doubt that a coalition of European 
nations could have done so. Although the United States had the military 
capability to carry out such an operation, as Secretary Cohen and 
General Shelton noted in their joint statement to the Armed Services 
Committee, ``Operation Allied Force could not have been conducted 
without the NATO Alliance and without the infrastructure, transit and 
basing access, host-nation force contributions, and most importantly, 
political and diplomatic support provided by the allies and other 
members of the coalition.''
  Mr. President, much has been said and written about NATO's use of 
less than overwhelming, decisive force in the air campaign against the 
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO's capability was limited to what I 
call ``maximum achievable force,'' i.e., the maximum force that is 
politically achievable and sustainable. As General Wes Clark, NATO's 
Supreme Allied Commander during the air campaign, testified in response 
to my use of the concept ``maximum achievable force''.
  ``We knew we had to avoid collateral damage, keep the allies 
together, do the most we could against the targets on the ground, and 
avoid the loss of air crews. We had to keep it in balance. It was, as 
you put it, a maximum achievable force strategy.''
  An Alliance goes to war differently than an individual nation does. 
The United States clearly would have carried out the air campaign more 
robustly from the outset if we had been acting unilaterally.
  Overwhelming, decisive force undoubtedly is the first and most 
preferred option for the United States in any military operation. That 
is the lesson of Vietnam. But if it is not possible, as it will rarely 
be when a coalition is considering action, then the next option is to 
use the maximum achievable force in an alliance setting. The question 
then becomes whether the greater risks entailed in using less than 
overwhelming, decisive force are worth taking.
  If the participation of the whole NATO Alliance was both critical to 
the success of the military operation against Milosevic and the only 
politically achievable option, were we wise to proceed? If so, does 
this mean that we should automatically resign ourselves to using less 
than overwhelming, decisive force in any future conflict?
  The answer is we should not resign ourselves to the use of less than 
overwhelming divisive force. But there will be times when because we 
can achieve an alliance action with maximum achievable force that it 
will be worth the risk, and there will be times when it will not.
  An overwhelming, decisive force strategy is best when U.S. forces are 
involved in hostilities. In the case of Kosovo, our NATO allies were 
unwilling to adopt such a strategy. Our remaining options were to do 
nothing, to go it alone, or to use a maximum achievable force strategy, 
which meant a phased air campaign and no ground forces.
  In my view, while there were drawbacks to going to war in Kosovo as 
part of a coalition, the benefits of fighting as part of the NATO 
coalition, under all the circumstances, outweighed those drawbacks. 
Napoleon said it well: ``The only thing worse than fighting in a 
coalition is fighting against one.''
  If the use of overwhelming, decisive force is also not an option in 
some future conflict, we will once again have to make the judgment 
whether the risk involved in utilizing maximum achievable force, i.e. 
less than overwhelming, decisive force, outweighs the risk to U.S. 
interests of not proceeding.
  Meanwhile across the globe in East Timor, the international community 
reacted in horror at the death and destruction wrought by pro-
Indonesian militias in the aftermath of a referendum that 
overwhelmingly favored independence from Indonesia. The UN Security 
Council authorized a multinational force to restore peace and security 
in East Timor. Australia took the lead in this peace enforcement 
mission and the United States provided support but did not provide any 
ground combat forces. As Admiral Blair, Commander in Chief of the 
Pacific Command, put it in testimony before the Armed Services 
Committee, ``East Timor demonstrated the value of having the U.S. in a 
supporting role to a competent ally, providing unique and significant 
capabilities needed to ensure success without stretching the capability 
of U.S. forces and resources to conduct other operations worldwide.''
  Mr. President, the United States cannot be the world's policeman. But 
we also cannot withdraw to fortress America and seek to ignore what 
goes on in the rest of the world. The United States possesses 
unparalleled economic and military strength. But no nation--no matter 
how strong--can go it alone. Understanding this, our forebears formed 
alliances many years ago throughout the globe. Our collective defense 
treaties with the other 18 nations of the NATO Alliance and with 
countries like Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the Republic of 
Korea are major contributors to the protection of our national security 
interests. Our status as one of the five permanent members of the UN 
Security Council, with veto power, also enables us to ensure that the 
actions of the Security Council are consistent with our national 
security interests. Our Alliances and our participation in the United 
Nations and other multilateral organizations also help to ensure that 
there is a shared responsibility for maintaining international peace 
and security. The UN's authorization and approval of a mission adds 
great universal political support to the undertaking.
  None of these organizations I have described are perfect and none of 
them will succeed in maintaining the peace if their Member nations lack 
the political will to provide the military forces, the financial 
resources, and, increasingly, the police forces to carry out the 
missions that are undertaken.
  Mr. President, I realize that Senators Cleland, Roberts and others 
talked about the security interests of the United States in a prior 
week. I don't plan to comment at length on that subject today, but I do 
believe that it is necessary to touch on it with respect to 
multilateral organizations.
  The obvious point is that the extent to which the United States 
participates with its armed forces in a particular mission will be 
determined by the extent to which our national interests are involved 
and the degree of risk it entails, including, as noted above, the 
greater risks that may result from acting within a coalition.
  Accordingly, the United States has made clear that it will not 
provide

[[Page S3906]]

troops for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic 
Republic of Congo. In the same vein, the United States will not provide 
troops for the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor, the 
follow-on mission to the Australian-led intervention force, but will 
provide a few U.S. officers to serve as observers and will, as part of 
their normal exercises, periodically deploy U.S. personnel to perform 
activities such as the rebuilding of schools and the restoration of 
medical services.
  Mr. President, I believe that it is in the United States national 
interest to support the United Nations as it seeks to fulfill its 
primary responsibility to maintain international peace and stability. 
We also need to work to strengthen our alliances and to encourage our 
allies to strengthen their military capabilities so that they can share 
the common burden. We also need to utilize the various other 
multilateral organizations that can contribute to international peace 
and stability. Finally, we need to explore every opportunity to bring 
about actions that will serve to end conflict at the earliest possible 
time, as wasn't done in 1991 at the time of the initial shelling of 
Dubrovnik, and to prevent the spread of conflict, as was done by the UN 
preventive deployment mission to Macedonia in 1992.
  Finally, Mr. President, I want to end in the same way that I started; 
namely, by commending Senator Cleland and Senator Roberts for 
instituting this dialogue. I look forward to the continuation of this 
dialogue in the coming weeks and I hope to be able to participate again 
in the future.
  I again thank our good friends from Georgia and Kansas. I add my 
thanks also to the Senator from Indiana for his extraordinarily 
thoughtful remarks this afternoon. I was not able to hear all of it. I 
would like to have heard all of it. But I heard enough to know that, as 
usual, the Senator from Indiana adds an extremely thoughtful and 
thorough contribution to this debate.
  I commend our good friends from Georgia and Kansas for carrying on 
what I consider to be a very significant dialog. It takes a lot of 
effort and a lot of energy to do what they are doing. It is critical to 
this nation's security. Both of them have already made huge 
contributions to our Nation's security. Now, on the floor of the 
Senate, they are making an additional major contribution, and this 
country is again in their debt.
  I thank my friends.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennett). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  The Democratic leader is recognized.

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