U.S. Cools Toward Land Mine Phase-Out Plan

The Bush administration has backed away from a promise made by the Clinton White House that the United States will eventually comply with an international treaty banning land mines, because it believes U.S. forces may need to use the weapon, official correspondence indicates.

In a letter to Rep. James P. McGovern (D-Mass.), a leading congressional critic of land mines, the State Department’s chief lobbyist said the administration is reviewing “the need for land mines on the modern battlefields of the future.”

Paul V. Kelly, head of the State Department’s legislative affairs bureau, added that the department believes that land mine policy should be left “to our colleagues in the Department of Defense for their determination and judgment.”

The administration’s reluctance to embrace a treaty that has been signed by 140 countries and ratified by 117 of them is the latest example of what critics call an increasing U.S. tendency to go it alone in international affairs.

In a foreign policy address Thursday, House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri said, “The administration has ratcheted up the unilateral rhetoric in just the last few months.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in a CNN interview broadcast Thursday, insisted that the administration isn’t turning its back on international cooperation, although it has serious objections to some treaties. “Just because they are multilateral,” he said, “doesn’t mean they are good.”

McGovern said he was disturbed by the letter from Kelly because it didn’t acknowledge Clinton’s promise that the United States would comply with the treaty by 2006 after giving the Pentagon time to develop a substitute for the weapon, which kills or maims thousands of civilians every year.

In 1997, when much of the world endorsed the anti-mine treaty, the United States balked.

The Clinton administration acknowledged that many mines remain deadly for decades. But it said the weapon was a necessary part of U.S. strategy on the Korean peninsula, where mines are sown along the border that separates the Communist North from the democratic South.

While refusing to join the treaty, Clinton issued a directive in 1998 promising to obey the ban everywhere but the Korean peninsula by 2003 and in all countries by 2006.

McGovern said he was disappointed by Clinton’s cautious approach, “but I thought that the question was not if we would sign the treaty but when we would sign it. After reading the letter from Kelly, I have doubts about whether we ever will sign the treaty.”

In a separate letter, Deborah K. Hair, special assistant to the president, wrote that the administration “is currently reviewing all land mine policies.”

But she added: “Unfortunately, threats to freedom throughout the world occasionally require military response. Accordingly, President Bush believes that protecting the national security interests of the United States and the well-being of our troops and allies must be critical factors in any decision on land mine policies.”

Backers of the treaty argue that land mines are so indiscriminate that U.S.-placed mines caused casualties among U.S. troops in both the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.

Gina Coplon-Newfield, coordinator of the U.S. campaign to ban land mines, said the United States is becoming increasingly isolated on the issue. Every country in the Western Hemisphere except the United States and Cuba has signed and ratified the pact, she said. Every member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization except the United States and Turkey has signed, and Turkey is about to approve it, she added.

McGovern said Washington’s refusal to sign makes it impossible for the United States to pressure Russia, China and a handful of other countries to end the use of land mines.

“Because we won’t sign, we aren’t in a position to pressure or embarrass anybody else into not using mines,” he said.

Despite the administration’s reluctance to approve the 1997 treaty, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.S. government is working to clean up minefields throughout the world.

He said Powell “has met with a number of people on this topic and has, indeed, carried forth diplomatically our efforts to work on this. But at the same time, we’ve reserved the need to use them as necessary in Korea.”