THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9412300006
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
This is the last in a series of editorials examining issues that will face the 104th Congress.
With the new GOP majority in Congress come January, critics of Bill Clinton's activist and expensive foreign-policy inclinations will chair key House and Senate committees and sub-com-mit-tees.
That's not all bad. There's much to Republican claims and criticisms. Foreign aid, particularly the chunks long earmarked for particular countries, gets too little scrutiny. Free-market reforms do benefit poor nations more than free money from Washington. Channeling U.S. aid to private enterprise in developing countries makes sense.
But funds for family-planning programs benefit poor nations, too, and international lending institutions, like the International Monetary Fund, can more easily demand economic reforms of government borrowers than can the United States alone. Such programs will need more than a peep out of Republicans who, along with Democrats, want to preserve them.
As a measure of the hard time in store on foreign affairs, consider this: Some of those new chairmen make Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican and soon chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, look tame. It is Helms' committee that will draft legislation authorizing foreign-aid funds. It was Helms who recently announced that much of some $2 trillion spent in foreign aid has gone ``down foreign rat holes.''
Yet one senator's rat hole can be another's worthy cause, and Helms can distinguish between them. Even he balked the other day when Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, like-ly chair-man of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee, called for abolishing the Agency for International Development, slashing billions from its funds and sending what's left mainly to the Middle East and the former Soviet Union.
Those aren't solutions to swallow whole, but it's time Congress chewed on the problems. AID measures its success as much in the evils its programs ward off abroad as the positive good they do. Among those who would most suffer from cuts in foreign aid would be the corrupt, repressive governments that skim it. In 1994, almost half of U.S. aid went to the Middle East and about a fifth to the former Soviet republics - what did it buy?
A Congress serious about improving the efficacy of foreign aid will find better tools for promoting U.S. interests and democracy and prosperity abroad will find better tools o deal with these issues.
The $14 billion or so in foreign aid is a drop in a $1.5 trillion budget, and a Congress seriously evaluating U.S. policies abroad will move quickly to larger pressing issues: peacekeeping, humanitarian missions, military intervention.
Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia have given President Clinton a dose of international reality, peacekeeping a bad name, nation-building little encouragement and U.S. taxpayers a peacekeeping tab as big as their doubts of its worth. The Defense Department picks up most of the costs of U.S. troops involved in peacekeeping missions. The U.S. also picks up more than 30 percent of the bill for all U.N. peacekeeping missions, plus 25 percent of the U.N.'s general operating budget.
The GOP's Contract With America directly addresses peacekeeping and the United Nations.
It would not ban U.S. troops or treasure for peacekeeping missions.
It would prohibit the president's putting U.S. armed forces under foreign command without telling Congress why and detailing the circumstances.
It would require that Congress approve the conditions under which U.S. troops come under foreign command in any specific peacekeeping contingent and that the president retain the right to pull U.S. troops out at will.
The Contract requests annual, detailed accountings of all costs of peacekeeping to both the United Nations and the United States. It requests that the president withhold half of U.S. peacekeeping contributions to the U.N. until that organization has established an independent inspector general.
Presidents can live with those conditions. The United Nations would be better for them.
A congressional brake on spending, is important. More important is a congressional governor on a Clinton foreign policy that speeds past cautions raised at home and abroad. Most Americans are far more leery than their president and his advisers of the U.S. armed forces as world policeman, Seabee and rescuer from famine, thugs and sharks. Nothing they have seen in the past two years, from Mogadishu to Port-au-Prince, Pyong-yang to Bihaj, has lessened their re-luc-tance.
On the contrary, every reversal that cold reality has forced on the White House's warm fuzzies, from repatriating Haitians to lifting the arms embargo for Bosnian Muslims, has reinforced what the public instinctively knows about military intervention and the new Republican Congress seems to grasp: Few foreign wars affect America's vital interests. No moral but doomed gestures are worth American lives. by CNB