Making War to Keep Peace (12 page)

At the Bush administration's recommendation, Boutros Boutros-Ghali had appointed retired U.S. admiral Jonathan T. Howe as his special representative to oversee the military operations in Somalia. The authorized force was increased from 4,219 in UNOSOM I (the original UN force) to approximately 28,000 military personnel in UNOSOM II and a civilian staff of 2,800 in UNITAF (the U.S. force). Like everyone else, Howe faced unexpected problems when he arrived. “[I]t took a concerted guerilla campaign to demonstrate unmistakably the significant limitations of the type of UN multinational force deployed in Somalia,” he later said.
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Very quickly, some American officials realized that restoring a stable government to Somalia might be an impossible task for an international operation.

On March 1, 1993, Oakley urged the UN to assume responsibility for the Somali effort promptly, as it had promised. He told the
Washington Post
that the operation was costing the U.S. military $30 million to $40 million a day. It was planned that most of the seventeen thousand U.S. troops still in Somalia would withdraw as soon as possible, leaving about five thousand U.S. troops and troops from more than twenty-five other countries. Oakley himself was scheduled to depart on March 3.63 On that day, he said that the U.S. mission to “stop the killing from war, famine, and disease…has largely been accomplished.”
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Later, Oakley would be criticized by the UN for “attempting to give a somewhat false impression of security” to help hasten U.S. departure from the area.
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It was true that he pushed hard for quick action, stating flatly that American support for other UN peacekeeping missions was being jeopardized by the perception that the UN was stalling in this one.
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But it was also true that the UN forces were slow in arriving.

As the date neared for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, relations between the secretary-general and the United States grew strained. Boutros-Ghali acknowledged that U.S. forces had helped restored a degree of peace in Somalia, but said that “a secure environment has not been established.”
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In his report to the Security Council, he said:

Member states accepted this extraordinary claim, and Boutros-Ghali acquired command and control authority by claiming it—first in Somalia, then in Bosnia, then elsewhere. He encountered no effective opposition in the Security Council, some of whose members objected to U.S. command and saw the United Nations as the only alternative.

The secretary-general would later claim that the United States had made commitments that Bush said he had never made. Still later, President Bill Clinton would complain that the United States had signed on to an expanded mission without having had the opportunity to understand what was involved.
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In Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike would complain that they had been given no chance to judge the commitment of U.S. forces to a mission that had all the characteristics of war.

But Bush
had
understood the critical difference between delivering food and establishing a government, and he had signed on only to deliver food. The United States and its allies had successfully fostered democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II, but those countries had been defeated in war and were occupied by conquering armies for years. Moreover, both were already modern states with modern political cultures. Somalia had none of these attributes.

In his December 7, 1992, address to the nation, Bush had said: “This operation is not open-ended. We will not stay one day longer [in Somalia] than is absolutely necessary. Let me be very clear: Our mission is humanitarian, but we will not tolerate armed gangs ripping off their own people, condemning them to death by starvation.” Bush understood that
creating a modern state in Somalia would take decades, if it were possible at all. While he supported large-scale, short-term humanitarian aid, he had never approved occupying this remote society for the purpose of reconstructing it.

A New Team in Washington

When Clinton became president, Boutros Boutros-Ghali sought a mandate for the larger U.S. mission that Bush had rejected. This time he got it. In his March 3, 1993, report to the Security Council, he argued that the central goal of the Somalia operation was “to assist the people of Somalia to create and maintain order and new institutions for their own governance.” He made the case for the development of a national police force capable of maintaining order:

The Somali people needed assistance, he said, in “rebuilding their shattered economy and social and political life, reestablishing the country's institutional structure, achieving national political reconciliation, recreating a Somali state based on democratic governance and rehabilitating the country's economy and infrastructure.”
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Boutros-Ghali, who had arrived in office with a sweeping vision of what needed to be done in Africa and what the UN could do, offered a plan for Somalia. The Security Council (including the United States) commended him on his plan for the establishment of a Somali government, including police, penal, and court systems, and formally recognized national reconciliation as the top priority for UNOSOM II in Security Council Resolution 814.
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In later accounts, Boutros-Ghali and Bill Clinton would be blamed for the expansion of the mission, but some of that responsibility should be shared by the Bush team—as emphasized by reporter Michael Maren in
The Road to Hell
:

Yet Maren understates the clarity with which Bush himself saw the mission and the firmness with which he held to his vision. Maren also fails to see the conceptual break between the Bush administration's idea of a large-scale but limited humanitarian operation and the Clinton administration's drift into a full-scale international adventure in military operations and nation building.

At first, the Clinton administration's Somalia policy continued on the path laid out by Bush. After several days of rioting and fighting in Mogadishu in late February, Clinton announced that the United States would continue with its scheduled withdrawal. Yet instead, in the months that followed, the Clinton team gradually gave U.S. forces a new mission, sent new troops, and placed them under UN command—all of which largely escaped the notice of the American people.
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At the same time, the ambiguity and unprecedented nature of the situation obscured the implications of Boutros-Ghali's requests for expanded powers, including command of forces. Although these new powers were a marked departure from previous practices, the Security Council, including the United States, acquiesced.

By late February 1993, danger signals were already multiplying on the ground. At first Aideed had welcomed the arrival of American forces, but on February 24 he accused the United States and the UN of allowing a rival to grab territory after forces loyal to Aideed's archenemy, Mohamad Said Hersi Morgan, slipped past U.S. and Belgian forces and seized several blocks of territory in Kismaayo from Aideed's ally Omar Jess.
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A mob attacked the Egyptian embassy, the French embassy was fired on, a hotel was attacked, and three U.S. Marines and two Nigerians were wounded. A U.S. military official noted that Somalia was too unstable for UN peacekeepers, who have a reputation for passivity.
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It was
clear that the conflict among the factions had continued to grow despite the presence of the peacekeepers. The response in New York and Washington, however, was to enlarge the UN mandate—while reducing the forces on hand to carry it out.

New Administration, New Mandate

The new administration in Washington endorsed Security Council Resolution 814, which gave Boutros-Ghali most of what he wanted regarding the mission in Somalia. The resolution, passed on March 26, 1993, substantially altered the UN mandate in Somalia, now called UNOSOM II. It gave UN forces expanded military goals, including disarmament of the country. It vested command and control in the UN, and called for the “Secretary-General, through his Special Representative, to direct the Force Commander of UNOSOM II to assume responsibility for the consolidation, expansion, and maintenance of a secure environment throughout Somalia.”
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Nation building became a primary goal, including the reestablishment of national and regional institutions and civil administration; the reestablishment of a Somali police force; and the removal of land mines.
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Boutros-Ghali cautioned, as if as an afterthought, that UNOSOM II should not be expected to substitute itself for the Somali people. “Nor can or should it use its authority to impose one or another system of governmental organization,” he added. “It may and should, however, be in a position to press for the observance of United Nations standards of human rights and justice.”
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The Security Council called on the secretary-general, through his special military representative, Admiral Howe, to help with the repatriation of refugees, promote “political settlement and national reconciliation,” restore law and order, re-create civil society, and undertake the establishment of the new operation and the transfer of security responsibility from the U.S.-led UNITAF to the UN-led UNOSOM II.
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At the time, Kofi Annan of Ghana held the top peacekeeping job at the Secretariat. Annan said, “This will be the first time the United Nations has had command and control of an enforcement action under Chapter VII.”
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It was also the UN's first experience in nation building.

The Clinton team was euphoric about the operation in Somalia. For the principals of the administration, peacekeeping provided a new solution to an old problem—and a fig leaf for a president whose campaign had included charges of draft dodging.
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Like the president himself, many in the administration came from the Vietnam generation and viewed the U.S. armed forces with attitudes ranging from mild distrust to outright contempt. As Colonel Kenneth Allard, author of
Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned
, later commented, “I think much of the atmosphere was poisoned by the…deep-seated distrust, often expressed quite publicly, between the people [who] constituted the administration at the second and third tiers and the professional military.”
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Ambassador Robert Oakley also noted this underlying hostility and its effect on the Somalia operation: “I remember one…newspaper article that reported a female employee of the Clinton administration…said to one of our top generals, ‘We don't appreciate people in uniform in the White House. Please get out if you're wearing your uniform.'” In Oakley's view, the U.S. military in Somalia “felt very keenly that they were…not appreciated by the Clinton administration.”
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For some leaders of the new administration, the “new peacekeeping” provided a new theory of national security under which the military could be used to further a liberal agenda, namely, the rehabilitation of failed third world states. Somalia was an exciting first venture in nation building. Les Aspin, Clinton's secretary of defense, said, “We went there to save a people, and we succeeded. We are staying there now to help those people rebuild their nation.”
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Aspin's sentiments were seconded by Madeleine Albright, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations: “[W]ith this resolution, we will embark on an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning and viable member of the community of nations.”
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Aspin and Albright seemed to believe that the UN force would be welcomed as surely as U.S. troops had been—before the peacekeeping troops became involved in the conflict among the clans.

On March 27, 1993, the day after the Security Council passed Resolution 814, the warring Somali clan leaders at the Addis Ababa Conference on National Reconciliation agreed to reestablish some semblance of
a government.
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Despite this agreement, however, there would be little progress toward a rebuilt Somalia through the next year.

Clinton administration spokespeople later claimed that it never considered the transformation of the Somalia mission at the highest level. In her book
On the Edge
, Elizabeth Drew noted that the first principals meeting on Somalia came after the October 1993 ambush in Mogadishu. “The Clinton Administration had inherited an un-thought-through mission to Somalia,” she wrote. “Among the un-thought-through questions were the varying responsibilities of the United States and the UN, which was to take over from the U.S. in May 1993.”
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In fact, the Clinton team had arrived in office with a clear commitment to support the rapid expansion of multinational UN-sponsored peacekeeping operations around the world, to upgrade the size and professionalism of the UN headquarters staff, and to provide troops for operations carried out under UN command and UN rules of engagement. The assumption was that the end of the cold war had freed the United States to deal with the world's problems, and that this could best be done through collective action. Albright called the new approach “assertive multilateralism.” At least some of its architects understood that the kinds of involvement and the uses of force they advocated constituted a revolutionary policy that would change the way the Department of Defense—and Americans in general—thought about security. The policy included new conceptions of national interest, national security, and national defense, defined now to include strategic humanitarian emergencies, democracy building, nation building, regional threats, and a new attitude toward the use of force.