WASHINGTON INSIGHT

PEACE TOO PRICEY? The Bush Administration is irked with some peacekeeping budgets coming out of the United Nations. . . . At issue: the $634 million that U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the Security Council he needs to send more than 14,000 troops to supervise Yugoslavia’s cease-fire. The United States, the British and the Russians persuaded the Security Council to order him to lower the cost. Now diplomats want the United Nations to scale back the estimated $2-billion cost of dispatching more than 20,000 peacekeepers to Cambodia. . . . Said one diplomat: “We and other delegations are getting worried about what looks like a classic bureaucratic exercise in padding out budgets.”