‘Friendly Fire’ Accusations Miss the Mark : We should be debating how to use U.S. forces and whether they are properly trained.

When the two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters were shot down by U.S. warplanes Thursday over Iraq, killing 26 people, it provided some insights into the emerging debate over America’s military role in the post-Cold War era.

Within hours, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the next House minority leader, blamed President Clinton for cutting defense too deeply while spreading U.S. forces too broadly “across the planet.” Gingrich’s comments echo the Republicans’ oft-repeated complaint that Clinton is creating a “hollow army” with too few resources to keep forces prepared to do battle.

Two days earlier, two GOP House members, Steven Buyer of Indiana and Henry Bonilla of Texas, appeared on the “MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour” to assess Clinton’s policy in Bosnia, where U.S. warplanes under NATO command had just bombed Serbian artillery positions near Gorazde. Buyer and Bonilla both chimed the same tune: Multilateral peacekeeping is a loser because American forces should not be under foreign commanders. The forces are “less efficient,” Bonilla said.

Here, then, are two legs of the Republican triad of American power: We should, they say, maintain an exceptionally well-heeled military, and we should eschew multilateralism in all its forms. The third leg, which underlies the “see no evil” approach to outrages like the dictatorship in Haiti, is that the United States should act militarily only to protect our “vital national interests.” Those vital interests, however, are rarely if ever articulated.

The sad incident over Iraq is revealing because it demonstrates how empty and partisan this Republican triad is. Operation Provide Comfort was begun three years ago, following the Gulf War, because Republican President George Bush had encouraged Iraqi Kurds to rebel and then abandoned them to the bloody whims of Saddam Hussein. It was only after widespread humanitarian protests embarrassed Bush that relief efforts and a safe haven for Kurds were enabled by U.S. and allied forces. If there was overreach--forces spread out too thinly across the planet--it was done well before Clinton was inaugurated and with Republican support.

Thursday’s “friendly fire” incident, far from exposing a “hollow” military, involved the most sophisticated equipment money can buy. And the aircraft were under U.S. command, transporting British, French and Turkish as well as American officers. The death toll was higher than the infamous firefight in Somalia last autumn that Republicans hold up as evidence for avoiding peacekeeping roles. There, too, U.S. forces were under U.S. command.

The vacuous critique by the Republicans, however, should not deter serious questions about U.S. military operations overseas. Indeed, there is a legitimate doubt about the advisability of Operation Provide Comfort. Is the United States, for example, to be the guarantor of Kurdish rights in northern Iraq indefinitely?

Puzzling, too, is our lack of attention to the mistreatment of Turkish Kurds just across the border. Turkey is being ripped apart by a civil war in which 10,000 have died since 1984. Kurdish rights, so important in the Iraqi context, are ignored by the State Department just a few miles away. Washington’s approach to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict is, almost exclusively, to supply weapons to the Turkish security forces; Turkey is now the third largest recipient of U.S. arms exports.

To be sure, the questions in Turkey and Iraq are complex. But it is increasingly clear that the United States cannot solve these complexities with military force. Like Bosnia, the Iraqi situation may be beyond satisfying solutions, with or without applications of armed might. That conclusion, like it or not, may apply to many conflicts around the world.

So the Republican critique misses the mark on at least two counts. The size and ability of U.S. armed forces are not in doubt; the question is how and when to use them, and whether they are trained properly for peacekeeping--in contrast to Cold War--missions. The matter of U.S. troops under foreign commanders is a red herring, thrown into the debate to stir up chauvinistic passions.

We should debate what our vital national interests are, however, and military intervention must always be based on clear and compelling purposes. In Iraq, it is that part of the Republican triad that should give us pause.