Global Policy Forum

By Tim Weiner

Washington - A $12.6 billion foreign aid bill was passed by the House on Tuesday but faces a White House veto threat over its deep spending cuts and anti-abortion language. After three days of debate, the House took nearly $2 billion out of President Clinton's request for the coming year. The State Department called the spending provided in the measure "grossly inadequate." The final vote was 385-35.

The bill withholds $500 million the administration sought for help in carrying out the latest Middle East peace accords, reached last year at the Wye River plantation in Maryland. It also cut a $200 million program for interest-free loans to the world's poorest nations from the president's request. The bill also contains an amendment cutting off funds for any foreign group that performs abortions or advocates liberalizing its country's abortion laws. The Senate's foreign aid bill, passed last month, does not include the anti-abortion language.

The two foreign aid bills must now be reconciled in a House-Senate conference. Despite the fact that most House Democrats voted for the spending bill, many say they will oppose it in the final form unless some of the cuts are restored.

The foreign aid bill serves primarily as a vehicle for financing American allies and American aims overseas and occasionally as a means of questioning or quarreling with the White House and its conduct of foreign policy.

The House bill, like the Senate's, which was passed June 30, contains $2.88 billion in military and economic aid for Israel, $2 billion for Egypt and $325 million for Jordan. It made significant cuts in the White House's budget requests for the Peace Corps, the Agency for International Development, the Export-Import Bank, economic development funds for North Korea and peacekeeping operations. It provided $725 million for the independent states of the former Soviet Union, but that was $307 million less than the president sought, and half the aid to Russia would be contingent on Moscow's ending its cooperation with Iran on nuclear power and ballistic missile programs.

The bill contains $626.6 million for the World Bank and its subsidiaries. The House cut $200 million by withholding the sum from the World Bank's International Development Association, which provides loans without interest to the least-developed nations of the world. All told, the House bill includes $7.4 billion in economic aid, $3.6 billion for military assistance, $1.1 billion for various international agencies and $596 million for export aid.

Last week, the House also adopted an amendment to the bill that cut off money for recruiting and transporting Latin American military officers to the Army's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga. The vote, which surprised even the amendment's supporters, was an unusual act for the Republican-controlled Congress. It struck at an institution long criticized by the left for the conduct of some of its graduates, whose ranks include Manuel Noriega, the deposed dictator of Panama; the late Roberto D'Aubuisson, a prominent politician and reputed death-squad commander in El Salvador; and other unsavory exponents of the Cold War in Central America.

The Senate retained the financing for the School of the Americas.

A separate spending bill to provide funds for the State Department, which is scheduled to come to the House floor later this week, will raise the issue of whether the United States should pay the $1 billion in dues that it owes the United Nations.

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