Keepers Without Peace.("Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests")(Book Review)

Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests, by Frederick H. Fleitz Jr. (Praeger, 248 pp., $39.95)

With his good intentions and his blue helmet, the U.N. peacekeeper was an icon of post-World War II internationalism. He was G.I. Joe for the Eleanor Roosevelt set, muscular assurance that the days of the feeble League of Nations would never return. And for a while it seemed to work. The record was far from perfect, but from Cyprus to West New Guinea to Namibia, the presence of relatively small numbers of U.N. troops was sufficient to separate warring forces and supervise the return to peace. The key to their success was evenhandedness and the consent of those whom they had come to police.

In the wake of the Gulf War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, this comparatively restrained approach to peacekeeping underwent a transmutation. The shambles that ensued is neatly summarized in this book's delightfully blunt title. The author, Frederick Fleitz Jr., knows his material well: He is a former CIA analyst who covered the U.N. and its peacekeeping efforts during parts of the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. Today, he is special assistant to the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, though readers are warned that his opinions "do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the U.S. government." But what Fleitz has to say makes a great deal of sense, so we must hope that this warning is not to be taken literally.

The real starting point for this book is the Soviet collapse, which made it possible for the West to intervene more aggressively in some of the world's most dangerous trouble spots. Fleitz's central thesis is that U.S. policymakers threw this opportunity away: Instead of building on the Cold War victory with a foreign policy that combined the judicious use of force with enlightened national interest, the government decided to expand the United Nations' global role in peacekeeping. The Clinton administration's poorly thought-out liberal- internationalist agenda combined sanctimony, parsimony, and ineffectiveness in roughly equal measure. The consequences were bad for the U.N., in that they made a mockery of belief in that organization's potential usefulness, and often disastrous for the U.S. There is a good reason that this book is dedicated to the U.S. Army Rangers and aircrew killed in Somalia in the terrible events of October 1993.

The rot began in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. As Fleitz explains, supporters of a more activist U.N. "seized on the fact that Operation Desert Storm was authorized by the U.N. Security Council" as proof that a new era had arrived. The U.N.'s role in approving the Gulf War was said by many liberals to herald "an end to the unilateral use of military force, at least by the United States." But as Fleitz correctly observes, "these claims . . . ignored the reality that the first Bush administration used the U.N. endorsement . . . largely as a fig leaf to protect the sensitivities of America's Middle East allies."

These claims may have ignored reality, but they helped create a climate in which U.N. peacekeeping could be transformed. The scope of peacekeeping operations became more ambitious and the traditional requirements of consent and impartiality were abandoned. U.N. forces could now be empowered to impose "peace" on warring parties and, if necessary, take sides in a conflict. Fleitz argues that this more aggressive definition of peacekeeping (and the ...