On Sources of Humanitarian Intervention

Sources of Jon Western Humanitarian Intervention Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy in the U.S. Decisions on Somalia and Bosnia Sources of Humanitarian Intervention On November 21, 1992, Gen. Colin Powell’s chief deputy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. David Jeremiah, stunned a National Security Council (NSC) Deputies Committee meeting on Somalia by announcing, “If you think U.S. forces are needed, we 1 can do the job.” Four days later President George H.W. Bush decided that U.S. forces were indeed needed. On December 9, 1992, 1,300 U.S. Marines landed in Mogadishu, and within weeks more than 25,000 U.S. soldiers were on the ground in Somalia. Prior to the November 21 deputies meeting, virtually no one in or out of the administration had expected that President Bush or his top political and mili- 2 tary advisers would support a major U.S. humanitarian mission to Somalia. For more than a year, the Bush administration, and General Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in particular, had steadfastly opposed calls for U.S. humanitarian military intervention in conºicts in Somalia, Liberia, Bosnia, and else- Jon Western is Five College Assistant Professor of International Relations at Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges. The author would like to thank the United States Institute of Peace Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace for its generous financial support. He also wishes to thank Sally Blair, Mark Blythe, Vincent Ferraro, Bruce Jentleson, Robert Jervis, Colin Kahl, Kavita Khory, Jane Sharp, Jack Snyder, and Jenifer Urff for their critiques and comments on earlier drafts. 1. Quoted in John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reºections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace [USIP], 1995), p. 43. 2. In fact, according to several participants, the option of U.S. military deployment was not even on the agenda of the November 21 meeting. Author interview with Adm. David Jeremiah, Oakton, Virginia, April 29, 1999; telephone interview with Andrew Natsios, then assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development and president’s special representative on Somalia, March 29, 1999; interview with Herman Cohen, then assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Arlington, Virginia, March 30, 1999; interview with James Woods, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa and international security, Arlington, Virginia, March 30, 1999; and interview with Walter Kansteiner, then staff member responsible for Africa on the National Security Council, Washington, D.C., March 29, 1999. International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002), pp. 112–142 © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 112 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228802753696799 by guest on 26 September 2021 Sources of Humanitarian Intervention 113 3 4 where, arguing that none of these conºicts was relevant to U.S. vital interests. They were, instead, humanitarian tragedies. With respect to Somalia, senior Bush administration and military ofªcials argued repeatedly throughout most of 1992 that the deeply historic interclan conºicts that permeated the country would make any military intervention ex- traordinarily risky. The basic position of the Joint Chiefs and the senior White House staff was that U.S. forces would not be able to protect themselves or the distribution of humanitarian relief because the nature of the conºict made it nearly impossible to distinguish friend from enemy or civilian from combat- ant. In short, the administration argued, attempting to rein in roaming armed bandits fueled by ancient hatreds and intermingled with the civilian population would be a recipe for disaster. Why then did President Bush, with the ªrm support of all of his key advisers—including General Powell—ultimately decide to launch a massive U.S. military intervention in Somalia? Why did the Joint Chiefs reverse their esti- 5 mation from July 1992 that Somalia was a “bottomless pit” to their November proclamation that “we can do the job”? Nothing in that period had changed the political, military, or logistical factors on the ground. And with the deaths of 300,000 Somalis by the summer of 1992, the crisis had long since reached a critical humanitarian mass. This article examines the U.S. decision to intervene in Somalia. I begin with a brief discussion and critique of the conventional explanations of the intervention, followed by an overview of the main points of my argument. I then pro- vide a detailed case study of the intervention decision that identiªes the inºuence of competing foreign policy beliefs, information resources, and advocacy on the ultimate decision. Within this context I argue that two other vari- ables—the 1992 presidential election and the conºict in Bosnia—were inºuential in this decision. I conclude with a discussion of lessons from this case for the development of future research on why the United States inter- venes in some instances but not in others. 3. Telephone interview with Natsios; and interviews with Kansteiner, Cohen, and James Bishop, then acting assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, Washington, D.C., March 29, 1999. 4. U.S. Department of State Dispatch Supplement, September 1992, p. 14; and interview with Kansteiner. 5. Quoted in Don Oberdorfer, “The Path to Intervention: A Massive Tragedy We Could Do Some- thing About,” Washington Post, December 6, 1992, p. A1. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228802753696799 by guest on 26 September 2021 International Security 26:4 114 Conventional Explanations for Intervention Two explanations tend to dominate the conventional understanding for why the United States intervened in Somalia: (1) the “CNN effect,” and (2) the moral indignation of key members in the Bush administration, including the president himself, and the belief that the United States could successfully carry out a humanitarian mission. Neither, however, stands upto analytical scrutiny. the cnn effect Perhaps the most common explanation for the U.S. intervention in Somalia is that vivid images of starving children on daily news broadcasts outraged the American public. In turn, this moral outrage led to political pressure on the Bush administration to respond aggressively to end the massive starvation. In 6 short, “CNN got us into Somalia, and CNN got us out.” Despite the prevailing collective memory of these horriªc images, Warren Strobel has demonstrated that most of the broadcast coverage of the famine ac- 7 tually followed rather than preceded U.S. decisionmaking on Somalia. For ex- ample, Strobel found that evening news broadcasts largely ignored Somalia prior to President Bush’s decision, on August 12, 1992, to begin U.S. airlifts into the country. In the immediate aftermath of that decision, the media began extensive coverage of the famine, but only for a relatively short (four-week) period. By mid-September 1992, that coverage had dropped dramatically. And in the weeks running upto the president’s November 25 decision to intervene, Strobel’s ªndings suggest that Somalia was once again largely absent in the American press. Only after November 25 did the media renew their coverage 8 of the crisis in Somalia. moral outrage and a doable mission A second conventional explanation for the U.S. intervention suggests that by November 1992, the humanitarian situation in Somalia had become morally untenable. According to this view, the growing outrage felt by President Bush 6. Warren P. Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media’s Inºuence on Peace Operations (Washington, D.C.: USIP, 1997), pp. 131–137. 7. Ibid. 8. Even the much-ridiculed press coverage of the U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Somalia was encouraged and, in part, coordinated by the Pentagon, which informed the news organiza- tions a week before the landing as to when and where the marines would come ashore. The Penta- gon “even offered advice on camera positions,” according to Jonathan Alter, “Did the Press Push Us into Somalia?” Newsweek, December 21, 1992, p. 33. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228802753696799 by guest on 26 September 2021 Sources of Humanitarian Intervention 115 and his key military advisers over reports of massive starvation led them to three conclusions: (1) the situation had become dire; (2) only the United States possessed the capabilities to tackle the crisis; and (3) Somalia was a case where the mission of providing security for humanitarian relief was well deªned and 9 achievable. Proponents of this view argue that Somalia was a case that ªt most of the criteria of the Powell Doctrine: (1) the deployment could be done with overwhelming force; (2) the political and military objectives were clearly deªned; (3) the mission was doable; and (4) public and congressional support 10 was widespread. This argument, however, is unsatisfactory for three reasons. First, it ignores that the situation in Somalia had long been one of intense need. The U.S. decision in November 1992 came nearly a full year after the famine there had been 11 declared the world’s worst humanitarian emergency. In fact, as early as Janu- ary 1992 the assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Devel- opment (AID) and a noted advocate for Somalia, Andrew Natsios, had begun holding regular press conferences to highlight the country’s ongoing humani- 12 tarian catastrophe. By early summer, some 300,000 civilians were dead, and in July the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reiterated its six- month-old estimates that 95 percent of the Somali population was malnour- 13 ished and 70 percent in imminent danger of death by starvation. Indeed almost all available evidence suggests that the situation had become untenable long before November 21.

Load more