Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (21 page)

But that will take time. In the meantime the problem is getting worse. Some action aimed at abatement and buying time seems wise as a kind of insurance policy. The only question then is the cost and effectiveness of the policy. A very expensive policy that will result in little abatement and buy little time is not attractive unless it is a step toward a less expensive policy or more abatement or both. The original Kyoto deal was certainly an expensive policy for the United States and one that aimed at little abatement. Whether it was a step along the way is another question. But the more important point is that Kyoto
a la
Marrakesh is very different and much less expensive. The United States can easily afford it and should have signed up at Marrakesh. It would have made economic sense and would have avoided enormous international ill will. Since we missed the opportunity at Marrakesh, it would have been a brilliant move if we had, in the wake of September 11, signed the treaty as a sign of U.S. solidarity with the friends who were dramatically expressing their support for us at the time. We missed that opportunity also, but it is still not too late.

6

In Arms We Trust

‘
America always preaches rule of law, but in the end it always places itself above the law.
’

—A British ambassador

T
he United States is quintessentially the country of law. Lawyers thrive here as nowhere else, and we have several times as many lawyers per thousand people as any other country. It has truly been said, for example, that there are more lawyers in any medium-sized American city than in all of Japan. Anyone who has engaged in business internationally knows that considerations of the legal aspects of any commercial deal are far more extensive in the United States than anywhere else and the documentation several orders of magnitude more voluminous. Only in America are most legislators and top government officials lawyers and only in America is law routinely the way to the top of major corporations. In the diplomatic arena too, the United States is a champion of the rule of law, particularly preaching it as the
sine qua non
for free trade and economic development. (I know, having often been the preacher.) And, of course, the expansion and protection of human rights internationally is part of the foundation of American foreign policy. From the time of Woodrow Wilson, America has been the leader in initiating negotiation of international treaties.

Yet, in an April 2002 report entitled ‘Rule of Power or Rule of Law’ that reviewed the U.S. reponses to eight major international agreements, the editor Nicole Deller noted that the United States had ‘compromised or acted to undermine in some crucial way every treaty that we have studied in detail.’ Of course, America is party to thousands of international agreements, and it would be wrong to say it never keeps its end of a deal. But in recent years, America has rejected or weakened several landmark treaties, including the ban on use of landmines, the ban on trade in small arms, the comprehensive test ban treaty, the ABM treaty, the chemical warfare treaty, the biological warfare treaty, the non-proliferation treaty, the International Criminal Court, and others. As one of the major factors causing alienation from America in the world today, we need to examine both our resistance to international limitation of a variety of weaponry as well as what our dependence on the military means for the U.S. economy.

SOWING THE FIELDS WITH MINES

I
t burrows into the ground and sits, sometimes for years, waiting for an innocent child at play, a mother seeking the child, young men playing football, or farmers plowing new fields. Always it waits for someone who is unaware. Then, when the unsuspecting are at last in just the right spot, it explodes without warning, eviscerating the victims’ bodies or tearing off arms and legs.

Though first developed during the American Civil War, the landmine was little used until the end of World War I, when it blossomed as the antidote to the newly invented tank, which was upsetting the long stalemate of trench warfare. The antagonists in World War II deployed more than 300 million antitank landmines. Early in the war, however, they revealed a dangerous weakness: They could be dug up and redeployed by the enemy. To counter that, a new kind of landmine was quickly developed – the antipersonnel mine. It was typically placed around the antitank mines to prevent their removal. Perhaps the most effective of these was the German ‘Bouncing Betty,’ which could jump to hip-height when activated and spew thousands of deadly steel fragments into any soldiers within a wide arc around it. So effective were landmines that they soon began to be used for offensive as well as defensive purposes.

After World War II, weapons technology advanced rapidly. In the 1960
s
, so-called scatterable landmines were developed that could be dropped from airplanes and automatically activated as they hit the ground. Rather than laboriously planting each mine by hand, an air force could quickly deploy large numbers of mines. Scatterables were first introduced by the United States during the Vietnam War, and they became a major weapon driving wedges between the opposing forces and their bases and channeling them into adverse terrain. They were also used by both sides to displace villages, make fertile land unusable, and destroy roads, bridges, and water sources. They sometimes had perverse consequences. U.S. troops often found themselves retreating through their own mine fields, and it is estimated that nearly one-third of all U.S. casualties during the war were caused by friendly landmines.
 l 

As low-intensity wars spread throughout the 1960
s
and 1970
s
, landmines were widely used not only by government troops but by paramilitaries, police, and guerillas.

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with a new, improved scatterable, called a butterfly mine, that it dropped pretty much all over the country. Although in World War II mine fields had been rigorously marked and mapped so that they could be avoided and eventually removed, the advent of scatterables and their increasingly indiscriminate use made adequate mapping and marking impossible. Nowhere was this more true than in Afghanistan. For, although the Soviets were eventually driven out in 1989 by the Mujahedin, the mines stayed.

This fact became painfully clear to a former British army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Colin ‘Mad Mitch’ Mitchell, in the 1980
s
when he was sent to Afghanistan to help the Afghanis recover their agricultural production. He found so many mines that it was impossible to do any serious farming until they were cleared, an extremely dangerous undertaking in view of the fact that no maps or markings of the mine fields existed. Mitchell persevered, nevertheless, and launched the Halo Trust with the mission of carrying out a humanitarian mine clearance program.

Afghanistan was far from being the only country with a landmine problem. Cambodia, Vietnam, and about seventy other mostly developing countries were still hosts to about 110 million mines left over from long-ceased activities. These mines were killing or injuring about 26,000 people annually.
 2 
In January 1991, after months of caring for landmine victims in refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border, the leaders of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children called for a ban on antipersonnel mines in testimony before the U.S. Congress. That summer, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation opened its first prosthetics clinic in Cambodia. Then in September, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights published
The Coward’s War: Landmines in Cambodia
and added their voices to those calling for a ban. These and other groups eventually came together in the fall of 1992 to form the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL); to head the effort they chose a determined and energetic woman from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Jody Williams.

Williams threw herself into an unprecedented campaign that eventually brought together 1,300 NGOs in more than eighty-five countries under the ICBL banner. The campaign put great emphasis on building as large a coalition as possible and met early and often with religious, labor, business, academic, military, and political leaders. Among the most important early converts to the cause was Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. Leahy, along with Congressman Lane Evans of Illinois, introduced legislation, passed by Congress in 1992, to put a one-year moratorium on American exports of antipersonnel mines.
 3 
This proved to be a powerful catalyst. Politicians everywhere began to think that if the United States could take such a step, significant progress was really possible. During a trip to Cambodia in February 1993, French President François Mitterand announced that France would ban exports of mines; this was quickly followed by similar announcements from more than a dozen countries. Then in June of 1994 the Swedish Parliament called for a total ban on landmines. In August it was the turn of the Italian Senate, which ordered its government to work to ban all exports of mines. Then came the biggest gun of all. At the UN General Assembly’s annual opening meeting in September, President Clinton called for the ‘eventual elimination’ of landmines.
 4 
He followed all this with a new policy statement in May 1996 saying that the United States would end the use of ‘dumb’ mines by 1999 except in Korea, would continue to use ‘smart mines’ (mines that self-destruct after a pre-set time) indefinitely until an international agreement was reached, and would negotiate to reach an international agreement to ban antipersonnel mines.
 5 

That set the stage for the dramatic Ottawa Conference of October 1996. Canada invited all those governments in favor of a total ban on mines to meet to discuss strategy. Fifty governments participated along with twenty-four observer states and other participants from the NGO community and the UN. At the end of the conference, Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy announced the intent of the Canadian government to convene the same countries, along with any others who might want to join, one year later in December 1997 to sign a treaty completely and immediately banning antipersonnel landmines of all kinds. This effectively established an alternative, fast-track process to the ponderous UN talks on the same subject.

But as the Ottawa process gathered steam, U.S. statements began to sound just a tad tentative. Said U.S. Deputy UN Ambassador Karl F. In-derfurth, ‘We’re not prepared to set a date, but we are prepared to start work immediately. If this Ottawa process can take place within that time frame and if our concerns can be met, we’ll be very supportive.’
 6 
Positive, but a lot of ‘ifs.’ Actually, the United States was leading in mine destruction, having destroyed 3 million of the mines in its own stockpile and provided more financial support for de-mining around the world than any other country.
 7 
The United States had also continually extended its moratorium on exports and sponsored a UN resolution calling on all nations to ‘vigorously pursue’ a ban on mines. As the Ottawa process moved forward, however, U.S. officials began to express preference for the slower UN process.

This was because the U.S. Defense Department, in an effort to square a treaty with key defense needs, requested three exceptions. Mines must be permitted in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea; the United States must be allowed to continue mine use in mixed antitank systems; and the United States must reserve the right to use ‘smart’ mines. Korea, it was argued, should be exempted from any treaty because it was the last battleground of the Cold War and the mines were all that stood between the 37,000 U.S. troops guarding Seoul and 1 million North Korean soldiers on the other side of the DMZ.
 8 
In any case smart mines were not the problem: since they self-destructed, they shouldn’t be banned.

This position called forth a hail of criticism from Leahy and other congressional leaders, as well as from much of the world’s press. Princess Diana of Great Britain implicitly criticized the U.S. position with her visits to landmine victims during a tour of Angola. In response, Clinton changed course in August and agreed to join the Ottawa process talks that were to take place in Oslo in about two weeks. These were to prepare the treaty for final completion and signing in Ottawa in December. But although the United States had agreed to work within the Ottawa process, it continued to request the exceptions, at least temporarily. The pressure to maintain that position was only increased by a letter Clinton received from ten retired U.S. four-star generals calling the treaty ‘clearly defective, unverifiable, unenforceable, and ineffectual.’
 9 
After agonizing for another week, Clinton announced on September 17, 1997, that the United States would not sign the mine ban treaty as then constituted. Thus when 122 nations, including all of America’s closest allies, gathered in Ottawa in early December to sign the Mine Ban Treaty, the United States watched from afar. Said President Clinton: ‘Our nation has the unique responsibility…As Commander-in-Chief, I will not send our soldiers to defend the freedom of our people and the freedom of others without doing everything we can to make them as secure as possible.’
 10  
But that was not the last word. Shortly after the signing of the treaty, Jody Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Clinton administration later announced its intention to develop alternatives to present systems, to end the use of all landmines outside Korea by 2003, and to sign the Mine Ban Treaty by 2006. In May 2001, eight retired U.S. military leaders, including several former commanders in Korea and the former Superintendent of West Point, wrote the new President Bush urging that he sign on to the Mine Ban Treaty. Among other points, they emphasized two: far from being critical to defending Korea, mines were more likely to slow and obstruct the movements of U.S. and South Korean troops; and in any case the landmines in the DMZ are under the jurisdiction of the South Korean government and thus unaffected by U.S. accession to the treaty. More generally, their letter argued that antipersonnel mines are outmoded weapons that do more harm than good to U.S. forces. This sentiment followed statements by people like former Army Captain Ed Miles, who, having lost both legs to a landmine in Vietnam, said that ‘the weapon has outlived its usefulness, whatever usefulness it ever had.’
 11 
In August, President Bush announced a White House review of landmine policy; several officials emphasized America’s special security burdens and the priority of protecting our troops and allies (all of whom have already signed the treaty and destroyed their mines).
 12 
At the end of February 2002, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation launched a series of full-page ads and TV spots to urge the president to sign on to the treaty.
 13 
As I write, the matter remains under review.