Picking Up U.N. Peacekeeping's Pieces: Knowing When to Say When
Article Summary
Two new books recognize that the United Nations cannot handle the burdens recently thrust upon it, but only one sees the need to set more realistic goals.
John Hillen is the Olin Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and author of Blue Helmets: The Strategy of U.N. Military Operations.
The United Nations was not pulling the international community into Bosnia; the West used the Security Council to push a reluctant U.N. bureaucracy even further into a series of missions and mandates it could not hope to accomplish. Boutros-Ghali warned the members of the Security Council in March 1994 that "the steady accretion of mandates from the Security Council has transformed the nature of UNPROFOR's mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina and highlighted certain implicit contradictions . . . The proliferation of resolutions and mandates has complicated the role of the Force." His under secretary-general for peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, was more blunt, in January 1995 calling attempts to further expand U.N. missions "building on sand."
The Clinton administration, which had shown unbounded enthusiasm for U.N. peacekeeping in its first months, began to sour slightly by September 1993. By then U.N. Ambassador Albright's doctrine of "assertive multilateralism" had given way to President Clinton's beseeching the General Assembly to know "when to say no." But it was the United States and its allies on the Security Council who kept saying yes for the United Nations. Even after Clinton's speech, Albright voted for all five subsequent resolutions (and sponsored two) that again expanded UNPROFOR's size or mandate.
In Somalia, the pattern was even more direct. The United States pushed an unwilling United Nations into a hugely ambitious nation-building mission. In its waning days the Bush administration assembled a U.S.-led coalition that intervened to ameliorate the man-made famine in Somalia. From the very beginning, the United States intended to turn the mission over to a U.N. peacekeeping force. Conversely, Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian well acquainted with the complexities of nation-building in Somalia, wanted no part of the mission. Robert B. Oakley, the U.S. envoy to Somalia, noted in his 1995 book coauthored with John L. Hirsch, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, that in a meeting with the secretary-general and his assistants on December 1, 1992, "the top U.N. officials rejected the idea that the U.S. initiative should eventually become a U.N. peacekeeping operation."
The debate, with Boutros-Ghali resisting up to the last, effectively ended on March 26, 1993, when the passage of Security Council Resolution 814 established a new U.N. Operation in Somalia. The resolution authorized the use of force and greatly expanded the blue helmets' mandate well beyond that of the more muscular American force. The United States withdrew its heavily armed troops and turned the baton over to a lightly armed and still-arriving U.N. force. The transition, set for early May 1993, was so rushed that on the day the United Nations took command its headquarters staff was at only 30 percent of its intended strength. The United States further complicated the new mission by leading an aggressive campaign of disarmament capped by the deployment of a special operations task force to lead a manhunt for the Somali faction leader General Mohammed Farah Aidid. That task force, not under U.N. command, came to disaster on October 3 in the fateful street battles of Mogadishu. A U.S. military report afterward noted that the principal command problems of the mission were "imposed on the U.S. by itself."
THE MIDDLE POWER MODEL
By 1995, fingers had been badly burned in the Security Council and the U.N. Secretariat. It appeared, writes Harvey Sicherman, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in the Winter 1997 Orbis, that "the assertive multilateralists of 1992-3 placed more weight upon the United Nations than it could bear, while ignoring NATO and other regional coalitions." Nonetheless, as Kosovo shows, ethnic conflicts are most likely to become more frequent, not less. What role should the United Nations now have in multilateral peace interventions, if any?
In general, the academically oriented Peacekeeping and Peacemaking splits its time between a postmortem of the New World Order's first seven years and some prescriptions built on what it calls "the middle power model . . . in which states come to the realization that their interests can most fully be realized through international cooperation and that it is to their advantage to strengthen the capacity of organizations of cooperation to be effective." This is then a plan for small but committed international leaders such as Australia, Sweden, Canada, and Norway to use the United Nations to box above their weight. Unfortunately, much of the book was completed before many observers realized just how much a few great powers can knock around "organizations of cooperation" like the United Nations and why they might do so.
