(Via Milinet)
Let Peacekeeping Rest in Peace
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday , June 2, 2000 ; A33
Peacekeeping: the idea, often taken seriously, that the presence
of soldiers
wearing blue hats and under orders not to shoot will bring peace
to wars of
unusual ferocity; a specialty of the United Nations; a favorite
of the United
States. b. 1957, Sinai Peninsula; d. 2000, Sierra Leone.
Peacekeeping was invented in the 1950s by Lester Pearson, then
Canada's
foreign minister. It was a nice, theoretically interesting idea
at the time:
that the United Nations, acting on behalf of the world
community, could, by
interposing itself between belligerents, create cordons of peace
for the
separation and, ultimately, the pacification of the various
warring parties.
The idea's first test came in the Sinai Peninsula. It failed.
In 1957, Israel withdrew from the Sinai in return for promises
that the Sinai
would be demilitarized and its neighboring straits kept open to
Israeli
shipping. The United Nations put in the United Nations Emergency
Force to
guarantee those promises and keep the peace.
Ten years later, in May 1967, President Gamal Nasser of Egypt
decided it was
time to throw the Jews into the sea. On a gambit, he ordered the
U.N. troops
out of the Sinai. The U.N. secretary general complied
immediately. (What was
this lightly armed foreign presence to do? Resist?) Within
hours, the buffer
was gone. Within days, Egypt and Israel were at war.
Thirty-three years after this first demonstration of the
flimsiness and
almost fictional quality of "peacekeeping," the United Nations
was still at
it, this time in Sierra Leone. Mercifully, however, Sierra Leone
may finally
mark the end of the idea, an idea whose nobility is matched by
its emptiness.
When hundreds of helpless U.N. peacekeepers were captured and
taken hostage
by Sierra Leone's ragtag rebels, people finally began to wonder:
Under what
idiot theory were these underarmed, undertrained troops sent
there in the
first place? Who imagined that these pretend soldiers from such
places as
Kenya (where the government keeps the best troops home to
protect the
kleptocrats from the masses) would actually be able to stop a
civil war in
which the rebels specialize in cutting off the limbs of
civilians?
In the name of peacekeeping, the United States had brokered a
formal
cease-fire that freed the rebel commander and gave him control
of the
country's mines--the perfect fuel for a warlord in a place where
diamonds are
practically the only source of wealth. He was supposed to be
restrained by
his signature on a piece of paper and a Potemkin U.N. police
force. He
proceeded to go on a rampage and utterly humiliate the
blue-helmeted
peacekeepers. Surprise!
We will continue to be surprised until we face the fact that
there are three
kinds of armed intervention--peacekeeping, policing and
occupation--and
peacekeeping is the worst.
Policing is slightly better because the troops, generally not
U.N. but real
contingents of real national armies, are allowed to arrest and
shoot bad
guys. This is certainly an improvement--in Sierra Leone, the
peacekeepers
were under ridiculous orders to shoot only in self-defense. But
even policing
is not serious enough when the warlords are determined. We
learned that to
our chagrin in Somalia, when we went after the notorious
Mohammed Farah
Aideed, and lost 18 American soldiers in the attempt.
The only serious way to intervene is to occupy. Take over a
country, reorder
the society, establish new institutions and create the basis for
leaving one
day. We did that in Germany and Japan after World War II and it
worked. But
it required total commitment, a huge investment and much
patience.
Where we are not prepared for such a commitment, we should not
be venturing
in with half-measures, like the kind of middle-of-the-road
policing we are
engaged in now in the Balkans.
In Kosovo, we are certainly not paper tigers. But we are not
remaking Kosovo,
simply because Kosovo is of too little importance to us to
warrant the
resources and risks that would necessitate. But that means that
as soon as we
leave, things blow up again. And that means that we are not
leaving. We are
stuck.
Congressional critics are nonetheless wrong to demand an exit
day from
Kosovo. That is an open invitation to bad guys to gird their
loins and gather
their weapons for the resumption of fighting on the day we
leave--and for
harassing us as the deadline approaches. (See, for example,
Hezbollah's
harassment of the Israelis as they were leaving Lebanon on a
fixed timetable.)
Nevertheless, the open-ended policing of the Balkans and the
farcical show of
peacekeeping in Sierra Leone should be a lesson for the future:
If you want
to intervene, do it seriously. Occupy, or stay home.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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