A nasty little war - US involvement in Somalia

National Review, Nov 1, 1993 by Eliot A. Cohen

Is it possible to retrieve our mission in Somalia? What is our mission in Somalia?

The Bloody, horrible events in Somalia offer a sobering reminder that "peacemaking" is but the naif's name for war. The revolting spectacle of American corpses being dragged about the streets of Mogadishu, and the reality of a dozen American deaths, brought home this simple thought. Several weeks earlier, reports of American helicopters spraying twenty-millimeter cannon shells into a Somali mob that included grenade-tossing women and children prompted some senators to ask - too late - why we are in Somalia and when we should leave. Now, at any rate, the Administration will have to rethink its policy there. But policy may be too generous a term for the blend of sentimentality, wishful thinking, and absent-mindedness that has led us into a nasty little war.

Some have argued that the Somalia fiasco resulted from the expansion of a feasible and narrowly humanitarian mission of famine relief into something far more ambitious and far less tractable. Such a case would vindicate the burst of altruism that led the Bush Administration to throw 25,000 troops into the Horn of Africa without a trace of national interest to justify their action. Such excuses, however, fail to exculpate President Bush. Did he or his former Cabinet members publicly declaim against the strategic error of an expanded mission this spring? And does not his former deputy national-security advisor, Admiral Jonathan Howe, serve as the LTN representative in Somalia?

The current predicament originated in the commitment to Somalia in the first place, and not simply in the blunders of the Clinton Administration. The Somali famine that induced our intervention originated not in the caprices of nature, but in the anarchy of men. The American intervention came to remedy the chaos bred by years of civil war. To end the famine, the occupying forces had to restore order. To restore order we had either to cow or to bribe the thugs who stole food from their countrymen and terrorized aid workers. Unwilling to buy off the bandits, we chose to coerce them. They fought back. We have pursued the most wily of these bandit chieftains with the results we have seen.

The origins of this crisis have to do, in part, with an overreaction to a military caution about the use of force that reached for impossible levels of political clarity and certitude about the outcome. Such conservatism may well resurface after the Somalia affair has ended. But the more profound reasons for the current state of affairs have to do with the dangerous naiveta about force that has spread in our policy elites. It is astonishing how little play was made of the inefficiency and corruption of the United Nations. More than a few American officers have returned from Somalia admiring General Aidid's men far more than America's allies. How little attention was given to news reports that the Italians not only disagreed with American policy, but went so far as to tip Aidid off in advance of raids on his hiding places. Americans, brought up with a heritage of anti-colonialism, seemed to forget that establishing law and order in a society that has known neither is the work of decades.

Vietniks 25 Years Later

What irony, to have an Administration staffed by so many notable opponents of the Vietnam War shrugging off the steady trickle of civilian casualties our intervention inevitably caused. Many of them might have demonstrated against American atrocities 25 years ago, and surely many of them would have scorned our eagerness to right the world's wrongs with tracer bullets and self-propelled grenades. How curious the spectacle of those talking about nation-building, who a quarter-century ago would have - correctly - deplored the absurdity of such a notion.

These paradoxes are not so amusing for American soldiers who now dread what will happen to them should they fall into the hands of gunmen who desire to avenge themselves on an army they cannot outshoot. Alas, we cannot, as some singed hawks now wish, flutter away from Somalia overnight. Our government put American prestige on the line by making the original commitment to Somalia, singling out for capture the man we should have negotiated with, and then sending our very best commandos to track him down. Should we withdraw now, we send an unacceptable message to all potential adversaries: kill a dozen Americans and desecrate the corpses, and the Yanks will cave in. For the sake of cases where our national interest is at stake, that is a lesson we cannot afford to teach anyone.

The outlines of a workable policy might be this: to admit (within the government, if not publicly) that our chief purposes now are to restore our prestige and to get out of Somalia. To do the former, we will need to make Aidid and his men pay in blood for the atrocities in Mogadishu: it is probably no longer in the American interest to take him alive, if the grimmer alternative exists. The American people should be prepared for bloody deeds.