NARRATOR: With the help of UN peacekeepers and civilian volunteers, long-suffering citizens of Cambodia voted for a government of their own choosing in 1993. After years of bloody civil war and foreign intervention, the UN also helped to bring Cambodian refugees back home.

The cost was $1.7 billion -- a lot of money, but less than the price of a single B-2 bomber.

In Bosnia, however, UN peacekeepers were powerless to stop the killing and ethnic cleansing, often unable just to deliver food supplies to besieged civilians.

And in Somalia, UN peacekeeping troops have become embroiled in urban guerrilla warfare against the powerful leader of a local faction.

The UN: Peacekeeping or Warmaking?

Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the number of nations in the world has increased dramatically. Over 130 new nations have been added since that time. As a result, a great many problems have arisen in the world: ethnic problems, territorial boundary problems, just a lot of problems which the United Nations was set up to solve.

The question we have to ask ourselves today is: Is the United Nations properly structured, adequately funded in order to accomplish the solution of these problems? Our program is on that subject. I think you'll find it interesting.

NARRATOR: During the cold war the United States confronted Soviet and Chinese communist power around the world. It came to act as the anti-communist world policeman. In carrying out that self-assigned task, the United States intervened unilaterally in Lebanon in 1958; the Dominican Republic in 1965; Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; Grenada. For other reasons, the United States intervened in Panama in 1989. In addition, the United States launched covert operations to overthrow governments in Iran, Guatemala, Zaire, Cuba, Indonesia, Chile and Nicaragua.

Today, as the strongest military and economic power in the world, the United States is still clinging to the role of top cop. The Clinton Pentagon has conducted a "bottom-up" military review and assigned itself the role of world policeman to deal with regional conflicts. It is structuring its armed forces to be able to fight two wars the size of the conflict with Iraq nearly simultaneously and without allies.

GEN. COLIN POWELL, Retiring Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Press conference, 9/1/93):

"It is essential that the United States armed forces in the name of the American people be prepared to fight and win a major regional conflict in this part of the world, Southwest Asia. Why? Because we have alliances there, we have vital interests there. The oil of the Western world is located there.

"Similarly, we think we should be able to do the same thing in Northeast Asia."

NARRATOR: But if US policy is to shift away from the top cop role in a turbulent post-cold war world, what are the alter-natives? One possibility is for American policymakers to share the job of peacekeeping more equally with the other members of the United Nations.

Until now, the United States has paid 30 percent of all UN peacekeeping costs and sent American troops to Somalia and to Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia. At the UN General Assembly, President Clinton also announced a series of guidelines to govern future US participation in UN peacekeeping.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON (United Nations, Fall 1993):

"Our nation has begun asking harder questions about proposals for new peacekeeping missions. Is there a real threat to international peace? Does the proposed mission have clear objectives? Can an end point be identified for those who will be asked to participate? How much will the mission cost?"

NARRATOR: President Clinton suggested that there are definite limits to what the UN can do.

PRESIDENT CLINTON (same speech): "If the American people are to say yes to UN peacekeeping, the United Nations must know when to say no."

NARRATOR: Four things are making the America public, the Congress and the Clinton administration more cautious about a greater reliance on the UN. They are:

1. The problems in Somalia and Bosnia.

2. The UN's organizational weaknesses.

3. Opposition to surrendering any sovereignty to the world body, especially military command over US troops.

4. Urgent domestic problems.

Let's look at each of them in turn.

In Somalia, a UN humanitarian mission to bring food supplies to starving people bogged down in the capital city of Mogadishu into a bloody shooting war against supporters of Mohammed Farah Aideed. Over 70 troops, Americans and other nationalities in the UN force, and hundreds of Somali civilians have been killed. The casualties plus the fuzziness of US goals triggered a chorus of calls at home for the withdrawal of American troops from Somalia. President Clinton responded to those demands by setting a deadline for withdrawal.

The situation on the ground in Mogadishu was compli-cated by a split military command structure. American combat troops, the ones most aggressively trying to capture Aideed, were under US command. But American logistics and support troops and all the soldiers from 27 other nations were under UN command. It was not always clear who was calling the shots.

In Somalia, the UN became a combatant in a guerrilla war. In Bosnia, on the other hand, UN peacekeepers often became powerless bystanders. They lacked a mandate -- and the means -- to use force against those who blocked the delivery of food supplies to civilians.

The second source of American caution toward the UN is the world body's organizational weaknesses. They date from US-Soviet tensions after World War II. The UN was designed in 1945, with American officials as the chief architects, to assure "international peace and security." But the UN soon was crippled by the cold war.

The UN's founders gave the main decision-making power on keeping the peace to the five permanent members of the Security Council, the winners of World War II -- and the first five countries to develop nuclear weapons. For years they could agree on very little. They did, however, permit the development of limited peacekeeping operations -- the use of lightly armed UN troops as monitors of ceasefires agreed upon by warring parties.

But where were the troops to come from? The UN didn't have any, so each peacekeeping operation had to be improvised: Troops volunteered by a few countries, equipment and transport by others, covering the costs through an agreed assessment on UN member nations. The whole mission directed by a small civilian staff at UN Headquarters in New York without so much as an operations center.

It often worked. In Cyprus, for example, a ceasefire has held since 1964. But the length of the UN peacekeeping operation there also testifies to the political failure of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots to use the time to resolve their conflict.

More recently, the UN brokered a settlement of the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. UN peacekeepers have helped Namibia become an independent nation, and monitored elections and the disarma-ment of combatants in the civil war in El Salvador.

Today, peacekeeping has become much more complex.

MS. WELLS: The multilateral system, that is the United Nations, is going through a very difficult time, a difficult time in terms of our own perceptions of the world around us. It's almost trite to state the many comments that have been made about our disappointment that the post-cold war world has not turned out to be a neater, easier world to deal with.

NARRATOR: Melissa Wells is the US citizen in charge of the administration and management for the United Nations. Before becoming a UN official, she served as US ambassador to Zaire and Mozambique.

Ethnic and nationalist conflicts kill tens of thousands of civilians and push millions of refugees across borders. In civil wars, peacekeepers are now expected to disarm combatants, often in an atmosphere of deep distrust. In some conflicts, governments completely disintegrate, leaving armed bands competing for power. Sometimes, there's an old fashioned cross-border attack by one nation against another.

Yet, although the five permanent members of the Security Council are now nearly unanimous on most issues, the UN often lacks the means to enforce its decisions. It has no estab-lished command-and-control system, no logistics, no intelligence-gathering system, and no troops of its own. An operations center is only now being developed.

Yet another weakness, in the view of some critics, is UN mismanagement. Larry Pressler, the independent minded Republi-can senator from South Dakota, has twice served as a US delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.

SEN. PRESSLER: I want the UN to be able to deliver supplies safely, without them being stolen. So often, in many countries, supplies, food supplies will be put into a warehouse and the next morning they're gone. And the local officials will say, 'Well, they were stolen last night' by some rebels or something, and then they show up on the black market the next day. And, in fact, they weren't stolen. It's the local UN officials working with local mafias who steal the goods and resell them.

MS. WELLS: On that subject I know a great deal, not just from the UN but my experience with the US Government. Unfortu- nately, this is the plight of many countries and organizations who deliver relief goods in emergency situations. To single out the UN as being exceptional in this area I don't think is fair. But on the other hand, steps are taken to try to correct this.

SEN. PRESSLER: I want the UN to have an international civil service that is an elite type of civil service, that's honest, that there's merit to get into it, there's merit promo-tions and so forth.

NARRATOR: Melissa Wells' responds to the criticism that some countries have made the UN a dumping ground for their personnel.

MS. WELLS: The secretary-general is about to submit a report to the General Assembly in which a very clear line is delineated, saying, okay, this will be for political appointees, this is going to be for the international career service, and I think that's very healthy. And there's going to be a lot of squealing because, with the restructuring, we have fewer senior jobs and the membership keeps increasing.

NARRATOR: President Clinton and others have called for the creation of a UN inspector general to prevent fraud and corrup-tion. Melissa Wells says the UN has taken a first step in naming a top official in charge of inspections. In addition, she says, there are other existing UN units in charge of oversight.

MS. WELLS: What many people don't understand is that the secretary-general doesn't have a magic wand that he can simply wave around the common system of the United Nations and say 'this inspector general will now inspect all of those things out there.'

NARRATOR: As if there weren't problems enough, the UN is also perilously short of cash. The biggest dues payers, including the United States, are behind in their payments. And with more armed conflicts exploding around the world, more people look to the UN to put out the fires. The UN, with 17 peacekeeping missions now underway, is overextended. The number of peace-keepers in the field has jumped from 10,000 to 80,000 in just a few years.

In addition to Somalia and Bosnia, and the UN's weak-nesses, national sovereignty is the third reason many Americans are cautious about greater reliance on the UN. Persuaded that their country has exceptional virtues and duties, these Ameri-cans are unwilling to yield US decision making to foreigners or to place American troops under foreign command.

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: Given the fact that the world is full of un-likeminded nations, many of them hostile to us, we need our sovereignty, we need that sense of control over of our own forces which sovereignty gives us to defend ourselves, our friends and our interests, so I wouldn't want to give any of that up.

NARRATOR: Charles Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist and TV commentator.

SEN. PRESSLER: We have a special responsibility in the world. They don't parade in the streets with soldiers from any other country, but they will with an American because they know we value life so highly.

NARRATOR: Alton Frye is the national director and senior vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations. For over 20 years he has been an influential voice on American foreign policy.

MR. FRYE: We should try to share the load when we can. And if we're going to try to share the load, we can't expect always to be the captain of the team. We have to expect other states who have placed their forces under our command in collec-tive security operations sometimes to demand reciprocity.

NARRATOR: The fourth reason Americans are hesitant to rely more on the UN is their preoccupation with urgent problems here at home, problems that often eclipse international concerns: Jobs, health care, homelessness, the deficit, crime and violence. These problems festered during the cold war while our attention was elsewhere. Today, in the public mind safety on our streets may outweigh safety around the world.

Can the United Nations become the effective world body its founders hoped it would be? As the creature of its member nations, the UN can only go so far as the often-conflicting interests of 184 sovereign member nations allow. Without leader-ship and support from the United States, the UN won't go far.

In 1992, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali presented a series of recommendations for strengthening the UN. The secretary-general called for member nations, through agreements with the Security Council, to earmark military units on a standby basis for possible use by the UN.

MR. FRYE: That is an idea that has been around since the inception of the United Nations, the famous Article 43 provision. It has not been implemented; the time has come when we should do that.

NARRATOR: The secretary-general wants the UN Military Staff Committee, which was designed to include the military chiefs of staff of the five permanent Security Council members, to support the negotiation of agreements for standby forces. Because of the cold war, the Military Staff Committee met periodically but never functioned.

The secretary-general also recommended greater stress on preventive measures. These might include UN fact finding measures to countries where conflict is brewing, UN mediation, the creation of demilitarized zones and the deployment of military, police or civilian personnel to crisis areas before fighting breaks out.

If Kuwait, for example, had requested the deployment of several hundred unarmed UN peacekeepers along its border with Iraq in the Spring of 1991, would Saddam Hussein have attacked? We can't know the answer to that, but it raises intriguing possibilities.

And would anything have changed in Mogadishu if the first contingents of UN troops had been accompanied by street-smart community organizers, who listened through interpreters, to people's grievances.

Much can be done without guns to ease tensions before they burst into armed conflict if there is early action by experienced, neutral outsiders.

Another set of recommendations for strengthening the UN came from an official American source, the United States Commission on Improving the Effectiveness of the United Nations. The commission was named by President Bush and the two-party leader-ship of Congress. It was funded by private donations.

Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa, an outspoken Republican foreign policy expert, co-chaired the commission.

REP. LEACH: The advantage of the multilateral approach is that you share responsibility, you share risk, you share cost with other countries, and often the force that's involved in the multilateral operation is better perceived by people in the region.

NARRATOR: The commission recommended creation of a rapid-reaction force of 5- to-10,000 UN soldiers that could be deployed within hours after Security Council action. In addition, the commission supported standby forces from member countries. This, the commission said, would augment the size of the rapid reaction force, permitting the UN to respond to several crises at the same time.

A minority of the commission, including Co-Chair Charles Lichenstein, a former deputy to Ambassador Jeane Kirk-patrick at the UN during the Reagan administration, dissented from some of these proposals.

REP. LEACH: The commission was split on the rapid deploy-ment force idea and it reflects an honest division of opinion. Some members of the commission felt that the UN had not exercised its responsibilities well in the immediate past and that, there-fore, there was limited precedent for expanding any responsibili-ties for the United Nations.

NARRATOR: The commission's minority asked: "Should the UN command an army of its own? The answer is no."

Congressman Leach, on the other hand, who supports a UN rapid deployment force, tackles the problem of command.

REP. LEACH: Naval operations: It's pretty hard not to visualize American command. Air operations: It's pretty hard not to visualize, in most circumstances, an American command. But in terms of some people on the ground, it might well not be. And, in some cases, it might be a developing country commander, maybe an Indian, a Turk, depending on where the circumstance would be.

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: We become extremely important and useful targets to others when we are part of a peacekeeping operation. That's why it's best for us to stay out of it.

MR. FRYE: I think the real safeguard in situations like that is to work policy arrangements whereby large units -- American units trained to work together, equipped to function cooperatively -- large units would be available for command by some foreign commander under UN auspices.

NARRATOR: With contradictory advice coming in, where does the Clinton administration stand on UN peacekeeping?

As a first priority, the United States will help the UN set up an operations center and a command-and-control structure. It will try to help overcome the lack of UN logistics.

Then, if US troops are needed for UN operations in the future, the Pentagon wants the flexibility to choose the units for particular emergency situations. There will apparently be no negotiations with the Security Council for designated standby US forces.

The Pentagon, which was beginning to soften its opposition to placing US troops under UN command in peacekeeping operations, hardened its stance after the events in Somalia. The United States is likely to insist on US command of its combat troops.

Recently, in the Senate, a move to ban all foreign command over US troops was defeated, 67 to 33.

The United States paid over a half-a-billion dollars in back dues to the United Nations in 1993. That sum includes funds for both peacekeeping and the regular UN budget. The United States, which is assessed 25 percent of the UN's regular costs, still owed $396 million in October 1993. The United States disputes $124 million of those charges. Congress has cut funds for peacekeeping in 1994. The United States remains the UN's largest debtor.

In the last year of the Bush administration, the United States spent $2,016 on its own military for every dollar it spent on UN peacekeeping. That's 2000 times as much to prepare for war as to keep the peace. That figure has barely changed since then. While the Clinton administration is more supportive of the UN than were Presidents Reagan and Bush, its military plan- ning and spending still support the role of the United States as world policeman. We will spent $277 billion in 1994 for military forces designed to intervene unilaterally in two regional conflicts.

In an often violent and dangerously armed world, the United States has a choice of three basis approaches: One, try to remain as world policeman, under a new guise.

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: We have several national interests. One is to preserve and strengthen the family of democracies who are our allies. Second is to expand that family of friends to include, let's say the newly independent states of the ex-Soviet empire. And thirdly, to defend that core constituency, alliance and group of nations against the rogue and outlaw states like Iran and North Korea.

NARRATOR: A second choice, which can be linked to the first, would be to show token support for the UN and use it as a cover for US military action, as in Korea in 1950 and in Iraq in 1991.

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: When there is a question in which our national interest is involved, then we can't rely on others, as in the Gulf. We have to go in ourselves, perhaps under a UN resolution, perhaps under the cover of UN approval.

NARRATOR: A third choice would be to become a major leader in building a more effective United Nations.

MR. FRYE: The United States can be a leader in facilitating a coalition of the willing, a bringing together of states that accept multilateral responsibilities to address international crises that cannot be dealt with by strictly local means.

NARRATOR: If the United States clearly chooses the UN approach, there are various steps it could take to strengthen the world organization:

1. Seek answers to President Clinton's harder questions by the Security Council before launching new peacekeeping operations.

2. Encourage early use of non-military means of resolving conflicts.

3. Help the UN set up a command-and-control structure, military training program and logistics framework.

4. Help revive the UN Military Staff Committee.

5. Designate US airlift and sealift units on a standby basis for UN use in crises.

6. Train the designated US units in peacekeeping methods.

7. Keep the door open to US combat troops under UN command.

8. Provide relevant military intelligence to the Security Council.

9. Pay US back dues and negotiate reduction of the US peacekeeping assessment to a fair share.

10. Press for creation of a UN Inspector General with field staff for peacekeeping operations.

11. Consult regularly with Congress on UN peacekeeping missions.

So, there's still a lot of work to do.

Before an uncertain government in Washington decides which path to pursue in the post-cold war world, however, it would do well to open the issue to serious nationwide discussion and debate.

ADMIRAL LaROCQUE: Well, I think most people would agree that the United Nations has mounted some very successful peace-keeping operations in many areas of the world. Unfortunately, the number of areas and nations that require the presence of United Nations peacekeeping forces is growing faster than the capability of the United Nations to take care of them.

The United Nations is the only international body whose duty it is under their charter to handle situations which we see developing everywhere in the world today. I think it's wise for individuals all over the world, but particularly those of us in the United States to support the United Nations' efforts even if it requires some additional funding and restructuring to continue to make the United Nations effective in peacekeeping operations.

Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.

NARRATOR: This program is brought to you through a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.