Clinton Goes to Vets for Backing

President Clinton asked military veterans Monday for support in his fight with Congress for full funding of programs to promote peace in the Mideast and the Balkans, counter weapons proliferation and honor U.S. obligations to the United Nations.

“We’re cutting the very programs designed to keep our soldiers out of war in the first place,” Clinton told members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “If we have only one arrow in our quiver--our military--we sacrifice the work of peace and increase the risk of war.”

Clinton won several rounds of applause from VFW members gathered here for the organization’s 100th convention. The VFW is the nation’s second-largest veterans group, with 2 million members.

A small number of vets had declared an intent to protest Clinton’s visit because he did not serve in the armed forces. But there was no sign of dissent among the estimated 7,500 people in the massive Kansas City convention center.

With Congress in recess for a month while key budget matters remain unresolved, Clinton interrupted an extended weekend visit at Camp David in northern Maryland to enlist veterans in his lobbying effort. Portraying federal spending on international peace initiatives and foreign aid as an investment that goes hand in hand with spending on military hardware, training and salaries, he declared: “Underfunding our arsenal of peace is as risky as underfunding our arsenal for war.”

“If we continue to underfund diplomacy, we will end up overusing our military,” he said. “Problems we might have been able to resolve peacefully will turn into crises that we can only resolve at a cost of life and treasure.”

The programs to which he referred pay for such diverse efforts as resolving conflicts in Africa and preventing underpaid Russian nuclear scientists from marketing their knowledge to terrorists. Their combined cost amounts to no more than one-fifteenth of the Pentagon budget, which has been held below $300 billion for more than a decade after sharp growth in the early 1980s.

Most of the programs cited by Clinton are funded in the foreign operations budget, which includes economic assistance for other countries, some military aid, the Peace Corps account and export credits. The House has allocated $12.7 billion in foreign operations funds for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, or about $2 billion less than the amount sought by Clinton.

Congress has not yet acted on assistance Clinton has requested for Israel and the Palestinian Authority as part of a $1.9-billion “land-for-peace” package the president helped broker in October. So far, it has acted only on funds requested for Jordan.

If the Middle East “becomes again a place of war, it will cost us far more than investing in a common, shared, peaceful future,” he said.

Clinton also is seeking $4.5 billion over five years to help the states of the former Soviet Union safeguard their chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. But Congress has removed $300 million in first-year funding from an account that encompasses these programs and others.

Since 1992, Clinton said, the United States has helped deactivate nearly 5,000 nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union, eliminate nuclear weapons from three former Soviet republics and strengthen weapons security at more than 100 sites.

In addition, congressional support for Clinton’s plan to make good on the United States’ long-running debt to the United Nations remains uncertain.

“Unless we want America to pay all the costs and take all the risks to solve the world’s big problems, we have to work with others--and that means paying our fair share of dues, like every other country does, to the United Nations,” he said.