Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau
Published: 6/20/99 Author: Jodi Enda
While he and his aides were still struggling to end the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, President Clinton was agonizing over America's failure to halt an even greater tragedy five years ago. Last month, the president directed his top foreign-policy advisers to study the genocide that took hundreds of thousands of lives in Rwanda to see if the United States could have intervened effectively.
Now, as American forces settle in to the job of policing part of Kosovo, Clinton is re-examining the massacres in central Africa, as well as ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, in an effort to create a ''Clinton Doctrine'' to govern when and how America should intervene in foreign conflicts. Adopting such a doctrine, even a flexible one, could have far-reaching effects on U.S. foreign policy and military posture.
It would have to grapple, for example, with commitments to such hot spots as Taiwan and Korea, with how Washington would respond to violence in breakaway regions of Russia or China, and with the proper response to tragedies in places such as Rwanda that have never been central to America's interests. An ambitious Clinton Doctrine also could force the administration, the Pentagon and Congress to rethink the size and especially the shape of America's military, increasing the demand for light, mobile forces, air power and naval and air transportation.
According to the doctrine that is taking shape, the United States is prepared to use its military might or economic and political power not merely to protect its own interests, but also to prevent genocide, according to administration officials. But this will not apply everywhere. ''Where we have a compelling national interest and where there is a moral imperative and where we have a capacity to act, then we have an obligation to act,'' national security adviser Samuel Berger said in an interview. ''One has to be careful about committing American forces where there's not a national interest.''
The Clinton Doctrine, which the president could unveil in a speech this summer, would represent a notable shift from the so-called ''Powell Doctrine,'' which has set the standard for military intervention since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Influenced by the Vietnam War in which he fought, Gen. Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that the United States should go to war only if victory is assured, if it is willing to use overwhelming force and if the fight has broad public support.
''What we're talking about here is Powell-plus,'' said Berger, here with Clinton for a summit of leading industrial nations and Russia. ''What Colin said was if you're going to put yourself in harm's way, do it overwhelmingly. Own the place. And I think he's absolutely right.'' But, Berger said, ''if you take that doctrine to mean that you cannot use military power except in circumstances where you're going to destroy the enemy completely and totally, it leaves you a choice of everything or nothing. I think there are situations in which there are choices between everything and nothing.''
In the case of Kosovo, Berger said NATO used ''overwhelming power'' to compel Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to halt ethnic cleansing in the province. He said the Powell Doctrine would have meant also invading Belgrade to remove Milosevic from office. Clinton has openly and frequently aired his disgust for people who systematically kill others because of racial, ethnic, tribal or religious differences. Close friends and advisers say the depth of his emotions stems in large part from his upbringing in the segregated South.
Now, Clinton is poised to incorporate his distaste for ethnic divisions and distress over the persistence of genocide into a doctrine that would reshape America's foreign policy, administration officials said. But, they cautioned, the president is not prepared to promise military intervention in places where the United States does not have a strategic interest or the ability to win.
''I think you have to start with national interest,'' Berger said. ''The notion of a humanitarian purpose that is linked to a national interest is something that the United States has been testing since Somalia. ''Somalia was the first purely humanitarian intervention,'' he said. ''It was probably not in our national interest.''
The intervention in Somalia, sanctioned by President Bush under the auspices of the United Nations, not only failed to stop the killing and starvation there, it set off a firestorm of public reaction when American soldiers died on the streets of Mogadishu. Although Clinton has publicly lamented his failure to act amid reports of genocide in Rwanda, a ''Clinton Doctrine'' might not make such action more likely in the future. ''You also have to have a capacity to act,'' Berger said.
''The question he wants to answer is, is there more that we could have done?'' said one senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''I'm not sure the answer to that is 'yes,' by the way. . . . More likely the answer will be 'no.' I think as horrible as it was, I think that we probably did not have a capacity to act in that situation.'' The question the administration will struggle to answer sometime this summer is how to decide where to intervene and where to do nothing. ''There is a distinction. Because obviously the lesson here can't be NATO's going to Chechnya or Tibet,'' the senior official said.
While the administration clearly does not want to intervene in Russia or China, officials justify the reluctance by saying America has no national interest in doing so. Further, said one aide, the White House considers the strife in both regions -- as well as in the African nations of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sierra Leone -- to center on issues of land and autonomy, not ethnic cleansing.
''A doctrine isn't a bumper sticker that applies to every incident in the world,'' one administration official said. ''We're not trying to define an era or a magical formula. A doctrine is a policy statement that would make clear what U.S. interests would be and what it's prepared to do.''
|
