Peace Support Operations

The remarkable story in your career is, having worn solely this military hat, with the end of the Cold War you take on responsibility for two of the major operations where the military is moving into the role of peacekeeper and peacemaker. I note that you served in the humanitarian support of Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq as part of the Persian Gulf war. What did you learn from that experience?

Well, that was grammar school for me, and I've got to tell you, it was an extraordinarily rewarding experience. I can take you very quickly how it all happened. We saw the Kurdish problem developing. Clearly the Kurds were being driven out of Iraq by Saddam Hussein and his crowd, and they were pressed up against the Turkish border. The Turks did not want them in Turkey. Lots of reasons for that we don't need to go into, except we had about 700,000 Kurds trying to get up into Turkey and the Turks were saying no way. So you ended up with all of these people on the side of a hill, or lots of hills, starving to death. They were dying at a rate of 500 - 600 per week.

On a Friday night my very good friend and now a three-star general in the marine corps, Tony Zenny, who was my deputy, and a marine colonel by the name of Frank Bruin, and I and our wives were having dinner at an Italian restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany. And the little brick rang, and it said that President Bush had decided to do something about the Kurdish problem in Iraq. And so we deposited our wives at our house and spent about the next ten days in our command center. I worked for a man by the name of General Jack Galvin and he's probably one of the last great soldier-statesmen this country is ever going to see. He is my hero. Jack Galvin was on the phone when I walked into the command center. My nickname is "Snuffy" Leighton Smith and he said, "Snuffy, I'm glad you're there. President Bush has decided to do something about the Kurdish problem. The most likely way to get started quick is to get an air drop of supplies into the hills. Quicker is better than cheaper (in other words, don't worry about the cost right now). Do what you have to do and call me tomorrow and tell me what you've done." Now those are the kind of orders that anybody can work with.

He hung up the phone and that night Tony Zenny and I put together a joint task force that was headed up by now four-star General Jim Jameson, who is also a very good friend. Tony Zenny ended up going over there as his deputy. Later General John M. Shalikashvili, who's now our Chairman, took over from Jim Jameson. Jim then became the deputy and Tony became the Chief of Staff. But we began putting together a force. And of course I was in a support role back in Stuttgart, pushing things to them. But I learned how you put together a force in a hurry. I learned what it meant to bring coalition forces in and how you integrate them. I learned how you work with civil affairs people -- a very, very important function when we got into Bosnia later on. I learned how you work with the nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] and the private volunteer organizations [PVOs], again a huge thing that we had to get involved with in Bosnia. I learned how you work with the United Nations, which was a very, very difficult problem. It never has gotten much easier. But you understand that all of these people want to do something right and something good.

The reason that we weren't able to operate together at first is that there was great mistrust. As an example, the PVO/NGOs see the military as somebody coming in there and ready to go kill people and do damage. And of course the military, in many cases, looked at the PVO/NGOs as being bunch of pacifists on the side of a hill trying to make angels out of everybody and getting in our way. The fact of the matter is that we were both trying to do the same thing. And in a very short period of time we were able to close those gaps and work together. And it was a magnificent event. I really enjoyed working there.

What did it involve? Negotiations, sitting down, talking and understanding each other?

You've got it. It's understanding what your mission is. "You're the UNHCR [U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees], you're the International Committee of the Red Cross, and somebody else is the World Bank, and somebody else is the World Food Organization; what is it you're trying to accomplish, and what can I do to help you make that happen? Here's what I'm going to do. Let's make sure what I'm doing is not interfering with you."

Let me just shift ahead and give you an example. The UNHCR is a huge, huge player in humanitarian aid. Madame Ogata is the High Commissioner. Her offices are in Geneva. When we went into Bosnia in on December 20, 1995, one of the things that we were afraid about is that UNHCR was putting a lot of food onto the tables of these people in Bosnia. The road systems in Bosnia are very, very fragile and the weather being bad made all of this worse. We were afraid that our deployment would disrupt the distribution of aid to the extent that a lot of people would be hurt as a result of our coming, and that we would have, basically, a negative impact. So we went to a great deal of effort to make sure that what we did was coordinated with them, and we tried to help them as much as possible so that we wouldn't disrupt and at a minimum they would get the same amount of food in there in December as they had in November and would in January. In January, Madame Ogata came to see me, and she told me that they delivered more aid after we arrived than before, and that the coordination process that we had undertaken with her and with her people had resulted in more aid. This is what I'm talking about. And you hit it right on the head -- understanding people, understanding what it is they're trying to accomplish, them understanding "We're not a threat to you. We want to try to help you," and then working together to make it happen. And it works.

Is doing this a threat to your primary mission and role as a soldier? How do you navigate this problem of maintaining the integrity of your forces as soldiers, as opposed to humanitarian workers? In my interview last year with Colonel Harry Summers, your predecessor as Nimitz Lecturer, he quoted Secretary Perry as saying, "We're an army, not the Salvation Army."

The first thing you need to understand is that in peace support operations (you can use the terms peace enforcement/peacekeeping -- I like the term "peace support" because you never know which one of these roles you're going to play at any given day), we made it very, very clear to our soldiers: "You are combat soldiers, you will act like combat soldiers because there is a threat here and that threat is serious and you'd better realize it. Now, as the Brits would say, a 'knockoff' benefit to your being here is that we're going to make a lot of improvements to this country. And as we get their military under control and we see what we consider to be the potential threat diminishing, we'll start moving out and doing other things." We knew when we went into Bosnia that the first several weeks would be principally a military operation: setting up a military occupation, damn near; getting ourselves on the ground; and sending a signal to the three factions, the Croats, the Bosnians and the Serbs, that "We are here on a business mission. We're not here to mess around. And if you mess with us, you're going to get hurt." And let me tell you something, that signal was sent and it was received. And we didn't have a problem. We didn't have a problem because we went in robust. We went in with the right rules of engagement. And I will say that the Serbs, who were considered to be our first principal concern, said later, "We believe this guy Smith. He said he'd bomb us and he did. Now he says he'll help us make peace and he will." And that's what I call resolved. They knew that I meant exactly what I said.

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