America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (25 page)

First, doing so corrects the tendency to dismiss the 1990s as a mere “interwar decade,” lying flaccidly between two episodes of enduring importance. On the near side lay the Cold War and on the far side the so-called Global War on Terrorism, the United States having ostensibly dozed off when the former ended in 1989, only to be rudely awakened in 2001 when the latter appeared out of nowhere.

At the very least, the kicks and punches doled out to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq complicate that tidy storyline. In fact, the United States did not spend the 1990s sitting on its hands. The venture on which it had embarked back in 1980 continued apace and was intensifying. Being “at war” in the Greater Middle East had now become an everyday proposition, even if the American public generally preferred not to take notice. Only in one sense did the 1990s represent an interwar period: In the ashes left by the Second Gulf War smoldered the embers of a third. U.S. military actions during the 1990s were adding fuel to the fire.

Yet U.S. military operations in Iraq during the 1990s merit attention for a second reason as well. Here was an indication of what the passing of the Vietnam Syndrome portended—a heedless absence of self-restraint, with shallow moralistic impulses overriding thoughtful strategic analysis.

As a consequence, in debates over possible U.S. armed intervention, wariness now gave way to “why not?” One result was to endow the commander in chief with greater latitude, which George H. W. Bush (and Bill Clinton) did not hesitate to exploit in harrying Saddam. When it came to
batash,
presidents could do pretty much whatever they wanted. As long as someone issued a press release or went on TV to explain where the bombs had fallen—and as long as no Americans were killed—few questions were asked.

Yet the passing of the Vietnam Syndrome also had a further impact that impinged on America’s War for the Greater Middle East. Faced with some grave injustice or large-scale violation of human rights, presidents now found it increasingly hard to justify inaction. The possession of matchless military capabilities not only endowed the United States with the ability to right wrongs and succor the afflicted, it also imposed an obligation to do just that.

Now more than ever, the old concept of America First, with its preference for keeping the troops at home, seemed unduly selfish, even niggardly. A new sentiment emerged: America Everywhere, open to sending the troops wherever people were in dire straits. When suddenly confronted by the misfortunes besetting the luckless Iraqi Kurds, Bush himself had yielded to this view, setting the 1990s on course to become the “Do something!” decade.

Waiting in the wings were more such episodes, not only in the core of the Greater Middle East but also on the periphery. Yugoslavia, then in the throes of disintegration, offers one example, Afghanistan, soon to fall under the grip of the Taliban, another. To each of these we will attend in due course. But for Bush and then for Clinton, demands for employing the U.S. military as an instrument for doing good focused first on Somalia.

U.S. intervention there, which lasted from August 1992 to March 1994, began with the best of intentions and culminated in a bloody defeat and withdrawal. In the wake of that withdrawal, Somalia became a permanent battleground, one of the lesser theaters in America’s War for the Greater Middle East—lesser, that is, except for those living there.

Explaining the incorporation of such an impoverished African country into that larger conflict requires a brief explanation of context. Somalia is a big country, almost as large as Texas, with a coastline more than twice as long as California’s. It is also resource-poor. Even its population, consisting almost entirely of Sunni Muslims, is relatively sparse. During the Cold War, Somalia’s location on the Horn of Africa had drawn the attention of the world’s two superpowers, prompting a minor Soviet-American competition for Somali affections. For Siad Barre, who ran the country from 1969 to 1991, promoting economic development or advancing the well-being of ordinary Somalis rarely figured as priorities. The dictator wanted weapons, which the United States and the Soviet Union took turns providing. When the Cold War reached its conclusion, that competition abruptly ended. Right about the time the outside world was losing interest in Somalia, an uprising by well-armed clan-based militias overthrew Barre and then turned on one another. The country plummeted into chaos, its fragile food and medical systems collapsing. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to neighboring countries. Many others faced the prospect of imminent starvation.
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In response to a UN Security Council request for assistance, President Bush directed the Pentagon to help, albeit on a modest scale. On August 15, 1992, ten U.S. Air Force C-130s began ferrying supplies from Mombasa, Kenya, to the Somali capital of Mogadishu and other airfields throughout the country. This was Operation Provide Relief, distant cousin of Provide Comfort. Over the next several months, nearly 2,500 sorties transported twenty-eight thousand tons of food and other aid.
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Unfortunately, putting food on the ground did not automatically get it into the mouths of people in need. In the midst of ongoing civil war, protecting and distributing relief supplies posed challenges that greatly exceeded the capacity of the few lightly armed peacekeepers that the UN had sent to Somalia. As conditions continued to deteriorate, it became apparent that Provide Relief was coming nowhere close to what the situation required. Media pressure to do more escalated. “Don’t Forsake Somalia,”
The New York Times
pleaded.
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“End Somalia’s Anguish,”
The Christian Science Monitor
urged.
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Heartrending video clips of malnourished children became daily fare on American television. People were dying in very large numbers. The U.S. Army’s official history of this episode describes what happened next: “Unable to explain to the world why the United States, the ‘sole remaining superpower’ and leader of the ‘new world order,’ was not able to stop the starvation, President Bush ordered U.S. forces to deploy to Somalia.”
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On December 5, Provide Relief became Restore Hope, the name change suggestive of larger ambitions. Bush, having now lost his bid for reelection, was going to leave office on a grace note, committing U.S. forces to an act of pure altruism. The mission in Somalia, he explained in an address to the American people, was to “create a secure environment…so that food can move from ships overland to the people in the countryside,” thereby arresting the ongoing famine.
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Implicit in that mission was a requirement to bring order out of chaos. Yet the president was adamant that the United States was not going to involve itself in internal Somali politics. Nor were U.S. troops going to stay long, the White House promising—implausibly—to complete their withdrawal by the time Bush left office on January 20, 1993.
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Declaring an action apolitical does not make it so, however. Regardless of circumstance, armed intervention in the affairs of another country is an inherently political act, certain to yield political consequences, even if unintended and unforeseen. In this case, framing Restore Hope as an effort to save starving Africans in a failed state obscured two salient facts. First, despite the collapse of central authority, the fifteen or so clans forming the basis of Somali society retained their integrity. In other words, the appearance of rampant anarchy was deceptive. The loyalty commanded by warlords endowed them with power. Second, even if in Western eyes Somalia barely qualified as a nation-state, Somalis themselves were very much part of the larger Islamic world. The arrival of foreign troops, few of them Muslims, was certain to attract notice—and raise alarms—among their fellow believers.

Not everyone shared Bush’s expectations of the objects of American solicitude welcoming the arrival of U.S. troops. Smith Hempstone, a cheeky journalist then serving as U.S. ambassador to Kenya, created a stir with a cable (quickly leaked) warning that if the United States decided to “embrace the Somali tarbaby,” untoward developments were sure to follow. “If you liked Beirut, you’ll love Mogadishu,” he cautioned. Somalis “are natural-born guerrillas. They will mine the roads. They will lay ambushes. They will launch hit-and-run attacks. They will not be able to stop the convoys from getting through. But they will inflict—and take—casualties.”
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Above all, time posed a problem. “The warlords will fade away and wait us out,” Hempstone predicted. When foreign forces departed, the warlords would simply take up where they had left off.
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A reasonably accurate prediction of what actually ensued, this was not what Bush wanted to hear. Hempstone’s analysis clashed both with the outgoing president’s wish to demonstrate American (and his own) beneficence and with reigning precepts of U.S. military supremacy. That U.S. forces might find local militias difficult to handle was unfathomable. The intervention was going to proceed.

On the night of December 9, a reinforced battalion of U.S. Marines came ashore at Mogadishu, their arrival preceded by teams of commandos. A welcoming party of sorts awaited—“a swarm of journalists” armed with television cameras, spotlights, and flash attachments and eager to record the event for posterity.
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It made for an inauspicious beginning. This was not a military endeavor encumbered with an excess of seriousness. Fortunately, the Marines met no resistance.

In the days that followed, a steady stream of U.S. troops arrived. From Camp Pendleton, California, came the First Marine Division, from Fort Drum, New York, the army’s 10th Mountain Division. Nearly two dozen countries contributed smaller detachments. By the time the deployment was complete, UNITAF, as coalition forces were called, consisted of thirty-eight thousand soldiers, twenty-five thousand of them Americans, all responding to the orders of United States Central Command.
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The campaign began on a promising note. The plan devised by General Joseph Hoar, the Marine who had succeeded Schwarzkopf at CENTCOM, called first for establishing control of Mogadishu. After reopening port facilities and the international airport there, Hoar’s troops were to fan out, securing the countryside and thereby enabling relief organizations to do their work. With Somali warlords momentarily stepping aside, UNITAF operated in an agreeably permissive environment. One senior U.S. officer in January 1993 reported that “there had been none—no—zero—organized resistance.”
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Soon enough, conditions on the ground improved markedly. To keep busy, coalition forces turned to repairing roads, digging wells, rehabilitating schools, and vaccinating Somali children.
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By the time Bill Clinton was making himself comfortable in the Oval Office, the situation in Somalia seemed well in hand. Had the episode ended at this juncture, its relevance to this account would have been minimal. Yet with success seemingly in the offing, problems began cropping up.

Throughout America’s War for the Greater Middle East, this phenomenon recurred, typically attributable to a gap between military muscle and political acuity. While the commitment of raw military power might get things off to a good start, a faulty grasp of underlying political dynamics leaves the United States susceptible to ambush, both literal and figurative. Certainly that proved to be the case here.

The challenge that Clinton inherited from his predecessor was to make good on Bush’s original promise, leaving Somalia while also preserving all that Restore Hope had accomplished. The approach that soon emerged reflected the naiveté found in almost any newly installed administration, but afflicting the Clinton team more than most. In a nutshell, the Clinton plan called for expanding the mission while passing off to others most of the costs. Humanitarian assistance was to give way to nation-building, described by Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, as “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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Simultaneously, to reduce its own exposure, Washington pressed the United Nations into service as America’s de facto agent in this ambitious undertaking. In practical terms, this meant the following:

•  replacing UNITAF with a motley UN peacekeeping force, but one retaining a small U.S. combat brigade as a quick reaction force (QRF) in case of trouble;

•  installing a Turkish officer, Lieutenant General Çevik Bir, to command this new entity known as UNOSOM,
²⁸
but with an American deputy controlling the QRF, while answering to General Hoar back in Tampa; and

•  appointing as UN special envoy and chief nation-builder a retired U.S. Navy admiral by the name of Jonathan Howe, who had just recently stepped down from the post of White House deputy national security adviser and who maintained a direct line to Washington.

The defining features of this arrangement were fragmented responsibility and ambiguity of purpose.

A March 1993 document called the Addis Ababa Accords, signed by representatives of various misleadingly named factions such as the Somali Democratic Alliance, the Somali Democratic Movement, the Somali National Democratic Union, the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, and the like, supposedly represented buy-in on the part of the warlords. It did not. Their vision of Somalia’s future differed from the UN’s. One warlord was particularly displeased. His name was Mohamed Farrah Aidid, self-styled commander of the Somali National Alliance (SNA), a clan-based militia that was neither national nor an alliance. In Mogadishu itself, with its refugee-swollen population of 1.5 million, Aidid had an especially strong presence. This gave him the capacity to make real trouble, which he now proceeded to do.