On Sources of Humanitarian Intervention

Home , Roy Gutman

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.

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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 provide 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 variables—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 intervenes 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.

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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 example, 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 organizations 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.

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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. Second, contrary to the public statements by the Joint Chiefs and the president at the time of the decision, the U.S. mission was not well deªned—other 14 than as a rhetorical “humanitarian mission.” The president announced that

9. This seems to be the general argument made by most of the principal decisionmakers and is well developed in Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, p. 42. 10. Powell’s views are best summarized in his autobiography, Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), passim. 11. See Mohamed Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington, D.C.: USIP, 1994). 12. Telephone interview with Natsios. 13. “Emergency Plan of Action: Somalia,” International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, Switzerland/Nairobi, Kenya, July 21, 1992. 14. According to James Woods, the entire set of political questions concerning the deployment— such as who would be in charge in Somalia, how could the mission be successfully turned over to a follow-on United Nations force, and would the famine be mitigated without a comprehensive political solution to Somalia’s failed state apparatus—were relegated to “planning assumptions” that would be addressed when the American force was on the ground. Interview with Woods. Fur- thermore, Herman Cohen recalls, “There wasn’t any real planning on this. If you have a Somalia with no institutions—a collapsed state—you want to ªgure out how to reestablish some order. You need to do this at a minimum to make the effort worthwhile. There was a lot of technical discus-

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the operation was designed to establish a stable security framework to ensure the delivery and distribution of relief aid to famine victims. Yet a basic point of contention that had not been addressed was whether U.S. forces would need to disarm the tens of thousands of roaming armed bandits who were at the heart 15 of the security challenge. In fact, at the time of the president’s decision, several military commanders feared that the U.S. deployment might lead to an es- 16 calation of violence that could quickly engulf U.S. forces. According to one senior Pentagon ofªcial, “If the Somali warlords did not back down quickly as was hoped, the number of troops required to continue the operation could add 17 upin a hurry.” Finally, whereas in November 1992 the Joint Chiefs and others in the Bush administration argued that a U.S. mission to Somalia was doable, throughout most of the year they had contended precisely the opposite. For more than a year before the intervention, the Joint Chiefs had consistently maintained that humanitarian emergencies were by nature political events, and thus one side or another would balk at international assistance. This meant that intervention would ultimately require taking sides—and this would inevitably create a threat to U.S. forces. The Joint Chiefs also insisted that intervention in Somalia would be risky. In their opposition to developing contingency plans for intervention in the spring and early summer of 1992, the Joint Chiefs made three arguments in a series of interagency meetings: (1) the conºict in Somalia was fueled by age-old tribal animosities; (2) the tribal combatants were heavily armed and indistinguishable from the civilian population, making U.S. force protection virtually impossible; and (3) the desert terrain, although open, would create enormous operational and tactical difªculties (because of dusty 18 conditions) for close air support for troops on the ground. Moreover, senior

sion on the need for police building, municipal services, and how we could harass the UN to do these things. There was also a lot of discussion on the mission—we concluded that we should disarm [warring factions] to the extent it was needed for the success of the mission. But we didn’t really know what that meant. Should we send our forces to weapons storage sites? We really weren’t sure what we were doing.” Interview with Cohen. 15. “Into Somalia,” Newsweek, December 21, 1992, pp. 26–28. 16. Ibid. 17. Quoted in Art Pine, “U.S. Offers GIs to UN for Somalia,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1992, p. A1. Ultimately, it was the issue of disarming the roaming bandits and the lingering threat these bandits posed to UN forces that resulted in U.S.-led efforts to locate and arrest tribal leader Mohammed Farah Aideed and the fateful October 3 raid in Mogadishu in which eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed. See two-part series by Rick Atkinson, “The Raid That Went Wrong,” Washington Post, January 30, 1994, p. A1; and Rick Atkinson, “Night of a Thousand Casualties, Washington Post, January 31, 1994, p. A1. 18. Based on interviews with Bishop, Cohen, Woods, and Kansteiner; and telephone interview with Natsios.

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ofªcials had come to agree with the Joint Chiefs that the crisis in Somalia was, at core, a political issue that could not be readily resolved with the use of U.S. 19 military forces.

The Argument: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy

Given the administration’s consistent opposition to U.S. intervention in Soma- lia, why then did President Bush and General Powell agree in November 1992 to deploy U.S. combat forces on a mission with no clear exit strategy, no well- deªned objectives, and no ªrm assurances of U.S. public support prior to the decision? In short, why did Bush and Powell violate the Powell Doctrine on Somalia? The argument presented here suggests that the U.S. intervention in Somalia resulted from the political interplay of competing foreign policy elites, who held different normative beliefs about when and where the United States should intervene, and the cumulative pressure on the administration to act in both Somalia and Bosnia. Selective engagers, who dominated the Bush administration and the senior military ofªcer corps, believed that U.S. military intervention should be reserved for those isolated cases when U.S. strategic material interests were directly threatened. Throughout 1991 and most of 1992, they opposed any form of U.S. military involvement in either Somalia or Bosnia—as well as in other humanitarian crises. The central challenge to selective engagers came from liberal humanitarianists who ªlled the ranks of humanitarian and human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and who supported military intervention to provide relief to aggrieved populations and to stop or prevent atrocities perpetrated against civilians. Given their asymmetric advantages in access to information and executive branch political mobilization resources, selective engagers were initially able to frame both Somalia and Bosnia as conºicts fueled by ancient tribal and ethnic hatreds about which the United States could do little. Relying on this portrayal, the Bush administration was successful in tempering calls for greater U.S. involvement. As both crises persisted into the late summer and fall of 1992, however, liberal humanitarianists and the media began to amass their own independent information about the conºicts. In each case, they started to

19. Nearly all senior Bush administration ofªcials and outside experts understood that Somalia was a collapsed state and that any lasting food relief and stabilization required answers to the difªcult political questions confronting the country. Telephone interview with Natsios; and interview with former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Washington, D.C., April 29, 1999. See also Jeffrey Clark, “Debacle in Somalia,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 109–123.

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challenge the selective engagers’ framing of the crisis. In addition, liberals and the media were able to reframe the conºicts as highly coordinated, violent campaigns to advance the narrow political ambitions of ruthless elites through the manipulation of civilians. Based on this portrayal, they argued that U.S.- led interventions targeted against these political elites would quickly mitigate the humanitarian catastrophes. Throughout the fall of 1992, liberal humanitarianists escalated their advocacy efforts and mobilized political pressure on the Bush administration to take action in both Somalia and Bosnia. As this pressure intensiªed, Bill Clinton won the presidential election on November 3. President Bush and General Powell concluded that liberal humanitarianism would dominate the new administration. They also believed that liberal humanitarianists, in control of the White House bully pulpit, would campaign heavily for U.S. intervention in Bosnia. Given the shift in power in Washington and the intensity of mobilized political pressure to respond to humanitarian emergencies, Bush and Powell decided that if the United States was going to intervene, it would be in Somalia—not in Bosnia. Somalia was the easier of the two missions.

Somalia and Bosnia, 1992

This section examines the U.S. decisions to intervene in Somalia in 1992 but to refrain from taking similar action in Bosnia the same year. This research is based on extensive interviews with several of the principal decisionmakers and participants in the policy deliberations.

selective engagers and no vital interests U.S. policy toward Somalia and the former Yugoslavia in 1990 and 1991 reºected the prevailing views among President Bush and his core advisers, most of whom were selective engagers, that with the end of the Cold War, both the Horn of Africa and the Balkans had dramatically diminished in strategic 20 importance to the United States. For selective engagers, the dissolution of Yu- goslavia was of concern to the extent that unleashed ancient ethnic hatreds might create regional instability. Thus the prudent choice in Yugoslavia—

20. On Yugoslavia, see Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995); and Saadia Touval, “Lessons of Preventive Diplomacy in Yu- goslavia,” in Chester Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conºict (Washington, D.C.: USIP, 1996). On Somalia, see Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope; and Samuel Makinda, Seeking Peace from Chaos: Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993).

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despite the profound transitions occurring throughout the rest of Eastern and Central Europe—was to support some form of centralized authority and to press for gradual change. From 1990 until the outbreak of war in Croatia in June 1991 and Bosnia in March 1992, the administration devoted its diplomatic energies to developing strategies to forestall the collapse of the Yugo- slav federation. Once violence erupted, the policy shifted from prevention to 21 containment. 22 In Somalia, U.S. policy was similarly focused. During the Cold War, the United States contributed vast sums to Somali President Mohammed Siad Barre in an effort to stabilize the Horn of Africa in the face of the Soviet-backed regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. With the erosion of Soviet inºuence and competition, policymakers in Washington no longer considered U.S. contributions as imperative to American geostrategic interests. Without the ªnancial backing of the United States to propupBarre’s corruptregime, Somalia quickly disintegrated into interethnic civil conºict. But because the 1991–92 crisis posed little threat to U.S. political or economic interests and did not constitute a threat to regional or international stability, the Bush administration throughout much of 1991 and most of 1992 viewed the crisis asan internal problem that the Somali leadership needed to resolve them- 23 selves.

initial information and propaganda advantages Prior to the outbreak of war in 1992, few Americans or foreign policy elites had 24 focused on Bosnia. To the extent that attention was paid to the crisis during the initial months of violence, the view most widely accepted was that of the selective engagers in the Bush administration. The administration criticized the Serb leadershipin Belgrade for the violence and worked diplomaticallyto isolate Slobodan Miloševi ’s regime, but it nonetheless ªrmly believed and publicly emphasized that the conºict was the inevitable consequence of intractable and primordial hatreds unleashed with the collapse of the communist

21. See Wayne Bert, The Reluctant Superpower: United States’ Policy in Bosnia (New York: St. Mar- tin’s, 1997); and James Steinberg, “International Involvement in the Yugoslavia Conºict,” in Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conºicts (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), pp. 27–76. 22. Terrence Lyons and Ahmed I. Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Occasional Papers, 1995); and Jeffrey Clark, “Debacle in Somalia, Failure of the Collective Response,” in Damrosch, Enforcing Re- straint, pp. 205–240. 23. See ofªcial statement on Somalia, U.S. Department of State Dispatch, June 29, 1992. 24. Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, News Interest Indexes, December 1991.

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25 government’s tight control. When speaking of Bosnia, President Bush and his advisers referred frequently to a land steeped in ethnic hatreds dating back hundreds of years. Based on this analysis, the administration argued publicly that the prudent policy was to avoid any U.S. involvement in a situation that 26 could only lead to a Vietnam-style quagmire in the Balkans. Given the lack of opposing views, most Americans came to share the administration’s position. The public supported its limited policy to contain the conºict from spreading to areas of geostrategic interest to the United States—in particular Kosovo, 27 Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Initially, no one was in a position to challenge the administration’s paradig- matic framing of the conºict in Bosnia. In the spring of 1992, no clear precedent had been set for post–Cold War humanitarian interventions, and because the former Yugoslavia had been a relatively advanced economic and political soci- ety during the Cold War, few nongovernmental humanitarian organizations 28 had any presence there. Furthermore, because only a handful of members of Congress had much interest in or understanding of events in Yugoslavia, most deferred to the administration on policy questions. As a result, those who might have opposed the administration’s selective engagement analysis—such as a few liberal humanitarianists in Congress who did have some regional interest—lacked a strong organizational and political base from which to mobilize public and political opposition to the Bush administration’s policy. For their part, when the U.S. media began to focus on the war in Bosnia, they too had little regional expertise. Few major news organizations, for example, 29 had experienced correspondents on the ground. Of course, when war broke

25. For ofªcial statements on Serb aggression, see U.S. Department of State Dispatch Supplement, September 1992, p. 22. For assessment of the general and publicly proclaimed views of the conºict held by the Bush administration, see Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia (Shaftesbury, U.K.: Element, 1993); Leonard J. Cohen, ed., Broken Bonds: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993); and David Gompert, “How to Defeat Serbia,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 4 (July/August, 1994), pp. 30–47. 26. Bert, The Reluctant Superpower, chap. 7. See also Gompert, “How to Defeat Serbia”; and James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 202–207. 27. Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, News Interest Indexes, December 1991. See also Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 295–297. 28. Interview with a representative from InterAction, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1999. 29. See Brent MacGregor, Live, Direct, and Biased? Making Television News in the Satellite Age (Lon- don: Arnold, 1997), pp. 35–37. Furthermore, most reporters assigned to Eastern Europe were busy covering the democratic and market transitions in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Interest- ingly, Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden had been covering Africa until his reassignment to Warsaw in the fall of 1989. New York Times correspondents John Burns, Roger Cohen, and Ray Bonner wrote extensively on the war after it broke out but had relatively little or no experience in Bosnia prior to the war.

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30 out in Croatia in 1991, journalists scrambled to cover the story. Most pieces written and broadcast during the conºict reinforced the view that violent nationalist hatreds permeated all of the former Yugoslavia and were the inevitable result of the collapse of authoritarian rule. Furthermore, as early as the fall of 1991, American reporters and administration ofªcials began warning that although the violence in Croatia was terrible, conditions in the more ethnically diverse Bosnia were much worse. Consequently, when violence erupted in Bosnia in March 1992, there was widespread acceptance among journalists, at least initially, that the conºict there was simply a further manifestation of the 31 unchecked nationalist hatreds that had been widely reported. In addition, because journalists and editors wanted to ensure “objective” and “balanced” reporting, stories often identiªed and reported atrocities as 32 though all sides were equally culpable. All of this produced predictable pressures and inºuences on the reporting during the ªrst several months of the war in Bosnia that portrayed the violence as tragic, but ultimately endorsed the Bush administration’s position that the conºict was caused by age-old eth- 33 nic hatreds in which all sides were equally to blame. Further strengthening the Bush administration’s position was the support and informational advantages of General Powell and his senior advisers within the Joint Chiefs. Powell and his advisers believed strongly that limited military intervention in conºicts would inevitably degenerate into Vietnam- like quagmires. In Bosnia the Joint Chiefs stressed the inherent military dilem- mas associated with any type of U.S. force deployment. For example, during a discussion in June on whether to use U.S. military aircraft in support of an emergency humanitarian airlift to Sarajevo, senior planners told members of Congress that even such a limited operation would require more than 50,000 34 U.S. ground troops to secure a thirty-mile perimeter around the airport. Ac- cording to then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, the Joint Chiefs “probably inºated the estimates of what it would take to accomplish some of these limited objectives, but once you have the Joint Chiefs making their esti-

30. Telephone interview with Roger Cohen, April 27, 1999; and interview with Tom Gjelten, Wash- ington, D.C., March 10, 1999. Gjelten is a National Public Radio correspondent who covered Bosnia on the ground. 31. Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, pp. 102–105; telephone interview with Roger Cohen; interview with Roy Gutman, Washington, D.C., March 9, 1999; and interview with Gjelten. 32. Interview with Gjelten. See also Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, pp. 102–105. 33. Interview with Gjelten. See also Tom Gjelten, “Professionalism in War Reporting: A Correspon- dent’s View,” Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conºict (New York: Carnegie Corporation, June 1998). 34. Barton Gellman, “Defense Planners Making Case against Intervention in Yugoslavia,” Wash- ington Post, June 13, 1992, p. 16.

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mates, it’s pretty hard for armchair strategists to challenge them and say they 35 are wrong.” Consequently, throughout the ªrst four months of the conºict in Bosnia, the American public largely supported the administration’s selective engagement position. Scant information emanated from the conºict to contradict the legiti- macy of the administration’s judgment, and in the face of a proliferation of “objective” reports from Bosnia, inºuence on American public opinion sug- 36 gesting a more forceful U.S. response was effectively indiscernible. The collapse of nearly all of Somalia’s state structures and the intense ªghting between two rival factions in particular—led by Gen. Mohammed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed—in the wake of Siad Barre’s ºight from Mogadishu in January 1991 left much of the country’s civilian population under severe threat of malnutrition and starvation. Amid increasing security concerns, the United Nations withdrew its relief operations in mid-1991, leav- ing only a few NGOs to deal with the escalating humanitarian crisis. By Janu- ary 1992 the ICRC estimated that almost half of the country’s 6 million people faced severe nutritional needs, with many subject to death by starvation with- 37 out some form of immediate assistance. Three hundred thousand Somalis had died from malnutrition; more than 3,000 were dying daily from starvation; more than 500,000 had ºed to neighboring Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya, se- verely taxing resources in those countries; and more than 70 percent of all live- 38 stock had perished from famine. As with the former Yugoslavia, selective engagers in the Bush administration did not see any tangible U.S. interests at stake in Somalia. Thus the administration deferred to the UN for dealing with the crisis. But even here, selective engagers were focused on their own perception of U.S. interests and remained wary of supporting new military initiatives through the UN. During Security Council debates in April 1992, for example, the Bush administration opposed initiatives to create an armed UN security force, fearing that new peacekeeping

35. Interview with Scowcroft. 36. Andrew Kohut and Robert C. Toth, “The People, the Press, and the Use of Force,” in Aspen Strategy Group, The United States and the Use of Force in the Post–Cold War Era (Queenstown, Md.: Aspen Institute, 1995), p. 149. Many journalists covering the Bosnian conºict expressed bewilder- ment with the overall public indifference to the conºict. Warren Strobel suggests that most Ameri- cans simply believed that any attempt by the United States to intervene in Bosnia would be futile. Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, pp. 143–152. 37. Cited in Walter Clarke, Somalia: Background Information for Operation Restore Hope, 1992–1993 (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. War College, December 1992). See also estimates presented in Stephen John Stedman, “Conºict and Conciliation in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Michael E. Brown, ed., The In- ternational Dimensions of Internal Conºict (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 235–266. 38. Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities, p. 16.

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missions would further bloat an already inefªcient bureaucracy and inevitably 39 necessitate greater U.S. military involvement. For liberal humanitarianists, Somalia was signiªcant, but it was only one of many regional conºicts with a humanitarian dimension. Wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, Liberia, Mozambique, southern Sudan, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere all produced humanitarian challenges that diverted concentrated liberal attention and resources from Somalia. The few NGOs working in Somalia issued reports beginning in the fall of 1991 citing the cata- strophic conditions. And efforts were made by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to mediate a settlement between the warring factions. But neither the UN mediation efforts nor the ad hoc reports from humanitarian organizations generated attention. There was no galvanizing force that either linked disparate humanitarian organizations or mobilized the press corps. Consequently, even though the famine intensiªed dramatically in the fall of 1991 and early 1992, Somalia emerged in the public discourse very slowly and 40 with little discussion among the foreign policy elite. By June 1992, with 300,000 Somali dead and close to 4.5 million on the brink of starvation—and nearly 100,000 people dead in Bosnia and another 1 million displaced from their homes—there was still no concerted pressure on the selective engagers within the Bush administration to reconsider their policies. The administration continued to believe that even though both crises were tragic, each was rooted in intractable and ancient hatreds and ultimately fell outside the scope of U.S. interests. Furthermore, senior military commanders in the Joint Chiefs who opposed U.S. participation in limited wars remained

39. According to Herman Cohen, ofªcials in the State Department and the NSC intensely debated this issue. Cohen recalls that several of them wanted to establish the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) as a strong multilateral presence in the country. But this idea received no support among the most senior ofªcials in the Bush administration. A major point of contention for opponents to UNOSOM, led by John Bolton, then assistant secretary of state for international organizations, was the fear that deployment of armed forces would be a precedent-setting action by the Security Council and might lead to greater U.S. military involvement when UN forces got into trouble. Interview with Cohen. See also Clark, “Debacle in Somalia”; and Stephen John Stedman, “UN Intervention in Civil Wars: Imperatives of Choice and Strategy,” in Donald C.F. Daniel and Bradd C. Hayes, eds., Beyond Traditional Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). 40. For example, Andrew Natsios, assistant administrator of U.S. AID and a noted advocate for Somalia within the administration, began holding monthly press conferences to discuss conditions in Somalia. He states that despite repeated invitations, hardly any correspondents from major national print or broadcast news organizations attended. Telephone interview with Natsios. See also Thomas J. Callahan, “Some Observations on Somalia’s Past and Future,” CSIS Africa Notes, No. 158 (March 1994), p. 2; and Don Oberdorfer, “U.S. Took Slow Approach to Somali Crisis: Delay in Ac- tion Attributed to Civil War, Other Global Problems, Lack of Media Attention,” Washington Post, August 24, 1992, p. A13.

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convinced that a military option in either Somalia or Bosnia was wholly untenable.

the erosion of initial information advantages The Bush administration’s dilemma in Somalia and Bosnia intensiªed as both crises continued into the summer of 1992 with no prospects for improvement. Throughout the summer, both the media and liberal humanitarianists gradually developed and dedicated more resources to their own information- gathering efforts. In Somalia, liberal humanitarianists were able to gain more direct access, dramatically increasing their collection of information during June and July. In late June the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Smith Hempstone Jr., traveled to refu- gee camps on the Somali-Kenyan border for the ªrst time. Reporting on his trip in a cable entitled “A Day in Hell,” Hempstone presented a vivid picture of the humanitarian suffering. The cable resonated with many liberal humanitarianists in the State Department who believed that the Bush administration needed to do more in Somalia, and the cable was immediately leaked to 41 the press. Meanwhile liberal humanitarianists in Congress, led by Senators Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kansas) and Paul Simon (D-Illinois), conducted fact- ªnding missions to Somalia in June and July and reported horriªc conditions. They returned and urged their colleagues to support the sending of an armed UN security mission to the country. In addition, several international NGOs— such as the ICRC and CARE—mobilized grassroots campaigns to lobby for a stronger response to Somalia, while prominent international ªgures such as Irish President Mary Robinson and UNICEF (UN International Children’s Emergency Fund) spokeswoman Audrey Hepburn conducted high-proªle vis- 42 its to the country to draw international media attention to the crisis. Further- more, the ICRC facilitated a tripby New York Times correspondent Jane Perlez 43 to Somalia to expand U.S. media attention. And on July 22, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali repeated the six-month-old UN High Commissioner for Ref- ugees’ prediction that 1 million Somali children were at immediate risk of

41. Cleavages existed between Natsios, Bishop, and Cohen—all of whom were pressing for active U.S. engagement in Somalia—and Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Bolton, the National Security Council staff, and the Joint Chiefs—all of whom opposed expanding the U.S. role. See Lyons and Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction, p. 88, n. 27. 42. Lyons and Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction, p. 31. 43. Ibid., p. 88, n. 34. See also Jane Perlez, “Deaths in Somalia Outpace Delivery of Food,” New York Times, July 19, 1992, p. A1.

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death by starvation and more than 4 million people needed food assistance ur- 44 gently. Other international aid organizations publicly repeated their predic- 45 tions that as many as 2 million people would die within a few weeks. On July 26 the Security Council passed resolution 767 authorizing an emergency airlift to provide relief to southern Somalia, where the conditions were most desperate. By this time the political pressure had begun to resonate in the White House. And in late July, President Bush encouraged his staff to consider additional 46 diplomatic steps to enhance the UN efforts in Somalia. However, according to Scowcroft and NSC staff member Walter Kansteiner, although the president was beginning to feel some political pressure to take action, he limited himself to ªnding ways in which the United States could assist the UN. According to Scowcroft, “there was no discussion of using U.S. force for any purpose at this 47 point.” At the staff level, the result was bureaucratic deadlock. Some liberal humanitarianists sought to put forward military options for providing relief, 48 but selective engagers remained opposed, calling Somalia a “bottomless pit.” Not surprisingly, this opposition frustrated the liberal humanitarianists. Ac- cording to then U.S. Ambassador to Somalia James Bishop: I went to one interagency meeting, and there was this brigadier general from the Joint Staff. We came up with this option to use helicopter gunships to support relief delivery. This general sat there and said we couldn’t use helicopters in such a dusty environment. Hell, we had just fought a massive war in the Persian Gulf desert with lots of helicopters. I was evacuated from Mogadishu in January 1991 in a Marine Corps helicopter that operated just ªne. But that was their attitude. They didn’t want anything to do with it, and they were prepared to lie to keep them out49 of it. At every meeting, no matter the proposal, the Joint Chiefs opposed it.

44. Seth Faison, “U.N. Head Proposes Expanded Efforts for Somalia Relief,” New York Times, July 25, 1992, p. 1. 45. See Julian Ozanne, “UN’s Harsh Dilemma,” Financial Times (London), July 29, 1992, p. 3. 46. Ambassador Hempstone’s cable and a New York Times article by Jane Perlez ultimately made their way to President Bush, who reportedly wrote in the margins that “this is a terribly moving situation. Let’s do everything we can to help.” Oberdorfer, “U.S. Took Slow Approach to Somali Crisis.” See also Perlez, “Deaths in Somalia Outpace Delivery of Food.” 47. Interviews with Scowcroft; and Kansteiner. 48. Quoted in Oberdorfer, “The Path to Intervention,” p. A1. 49. Interview with Bishop. Similarly, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Africa and Inter- national Security Affairs Woods recalled that in the summer of 1992, Fred Cuny, a leading international humanitarian relief expert and a founding member of the International Crisis Group, went to the Pentagon and briefed a team of ofªcers from U.S. Southern Command (SOCOM) on a “light option.” Under the plan, U.S. troops would be deployed to Somalia in areas outside of Mogadishu to establish security zones for humanitarian relief and distribution. The SOCOM team was ex-

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By early August, according to Ambassador Bishop, “we were just churning 50 and rumbling and rumbling, but there was no real interest from above.” Herman Cohen, then assistant secretary of state for African affairs, concurred: “We were told to be forward leaning, but the president paid even less attention 51 to us.” bosnia: impact of camp disclosure. Throughout July and early August, liberal humanitarianists greatly intensiªed their pressure on the Bush administration to intervene in the Bosnian conºict. At the same time, liberal humanitarian members of Congress and the media began to challenge the administration’s control of the public message on Bosnia, as independent reports from the region started to contradict the administration’s statements. By early July many American journalists began shifting the emphasis of their reporting. Instead of suggesting that the conºict was the spontaneous result of neighbor killing neighbor, journalists began to report on the activities of small bands of radical Serb nationalists and paramilitaries accused of committing 52 atrocities in a series of highly organized campaigns. This view of a well-coordinated, systematic campaign of violence was reinforced in early August with the disclosure of Serb-controlled concentration- 53 style camps in Bosnia. The images were haunting and, for many, conclusive proof that the Bush administration was deliberately distorting the events in Bosnia, especially given its initial response to downplaying the reports on the 54 camps.

tremely interested in the proposal, but the Joint Chiefs representatives reacted “negatively.” When Woods followed upon the idea a few weeks later, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff denied the existence of any light option.” They said that Cuny “had not briefed any SOCOM team—they even said no SOCOM team had been in the building, they were never there, it never happened.” Interview with Woods. 50. Interview with Bishop. 51. Interview with Cohen. 52. Telephone interview with Roger Cohen; and interviews with Gjelten and Gutman. 53. Roy Gutman, “Personal Account of Terror,” Newsday, August 3, 1992, p. 4, broke the story. See also Gutman, A Witness to Genocide. 54. According to Gutman, the administration’s response to the disclosure of the camps was an “outrage” and motivated him and others to stepuptheir investigative reportingin Bosnia: “When somebody denies your story and you know its right, it gets you motivated. It was such a big lie; when you are being told a lie and you can disprove it, it eggs you on to work harder and prove the story with even more explicit evidence. I sensed more lies and more deliberate cover-ups to come.” Interview with Gutman. Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger acknowledged in an interview with Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, p. 150, that the administration “kind of wafºed around a little bit. All of us were being a little bit careful...because of this issue of whether or not it was going to push us into something that we thought was dangerous.”

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55 By then, reporters had spent months in Bosnia, gaining critical experience. Moreover, according to Tom Gjelten, many journalists had begun to conclude that reporting all sides as equally complicit in the violence was “quite simply incorrect. Objectivity in this sense does not mean a kind of even-handedness, giving one paragraph to the atrocities of one side, one paragraph to atrocities 56 of the other side.” Given this increased exposure, media coverage began to represent a wider range of interpretations of the conºict. The pressure on the selective engagers in the wake of the campdisclosures in early August was particularlyintense. Between August 2 and August 14, forty-eight news stories on Bosnia total- ing 151 minutes and 30 seconds were broadcast on the three major network 57 evening news programs. The stories challenged Bush’s policies and gave signiªcant attention to the views and criticisms of Bush’s political rival, presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Several stories contrasted Clinton’s visible outrage at the existence of the concentration camps with Bush’s tempered 58 reaction. On August 9, ABC World News Tonight ran a proªle comparing Clinton’s and Bush’s approaches to Bosnia by extensively quoting Clinton on the need for strong, decisive U.S. leadership. Liberal humanitarianists in Congress also escalated pressure on the president. With both greater access to information and increasing suspicion of selective engagers in the Bush administration, liberal humanitarianists in the House and Senate launched a series of hearings. On August 14, the Senate Foreign Re- lations Committee released a scathing report that presented the Serb “ethnic cleansing” campaign as deliberate, highly coordinated, and politically 59 driven—and not the result of spontaneous bottom-up hatreds. Former Cold War hard-liners also began to enter the fray. After nearly four months of what they perceived to be a total European failure to deal with the conºict in Bosnia, hard-line critics such as Richard Perle, long-time nuclear

55. According to Tom Gjelten, there was a learning curve for most reporters on the scene because few had any prior experience in the region. “It took a while for us to ªgure it out,” he said. Inter- view with Gjelten. 56. Quoted in Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, p. 104. 57. Network Evening News Abstracts, Television News Archives, August 2–14, 1992, Vanderbilt University, at http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/eveningnews.html. 58. See, for example, ABC World News Tonight, August 8, 9, and 10, 1992; NBC Nightly News, Au- gust 7, 8, and 10, 1992; and CBS Evening News, August 8 and 9, 1992—all from Network Evening News Abstracts, Television News Archives, Vanderbilt University, at http://tvnews.vanderbilt. edu/eveningnews.html. 59. The Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia-Hercegovina, United States Senate, Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee report, August 15, 1992 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofªce, 1992).

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weapons strategist Albert Wohlstetter, former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sensed that growing violence, coupled with what they viewed as Serb aggression, would inevitably spill over into Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, and ultimately Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria—all of which would escalate geostrategic threats to the United States. In particular, the hard-liners opposed the UN arms embargo that had been imposed in mid-1991 with the hopes of mitigating the Serb- Croat war and that had been extended to include Bosnia in March 1992. Hard- liners believed that the embargo reinforced the Serbs’ military superiority in Bosnia by restricting the Bosnian Muslims’ ability to acquire capabilities to de- fend against the Serb onslaught. The hard-liners argued that the United States should lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims—unilaterally if need be—and commit its air power to strike Serb artillery sites, military con- 60 voys, and transportation routes. Amid this escalation in political pressure surrounding the disclosure of the camps in Bosnia, Bush urgently assembled his national security team on Au- gust 8 at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to discuss the matter. Although there is no evidence that public opinion had shifted toward greater support for direct U.S. involvement in Bosnia, on the eve of the 1992 Republi- can National Convention, the mobilized political opposition to Bush’s han- 61 dling of the crisis struck a nervous chord among Bush’s political advisers. Bush, who had taken tremendous pride in his foreign policy accomplish- ments—overseeing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reuniªcation of Germany, the execution of the Persian Gulf War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union— was being publicly castigated by highly respected foreign policy commentators. This was a particularly sensitive issue among Bush’s senior political advisers—James Baker, Dennis Ross, Margaret Tutwiler, and Robert Zoellick—all of whom had moved from the State Department to the White House on Au- gust 1 to take charge of Bush’s failing re-election bid. In particular, selective engagers in Bush’s political camp feared that liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners were altering the public conception of Bosnia and making the administration look callous in the face of an egregious humanitarian crisis. Several liberal humanitarianists and hard-line commentators as well as members of Congress suggested that intervention could be done without fear of U.S. forces becoming embroiled in a quagmire. They focused their

60. See, for example, Margaret Thatcher, “Stop the Excuses: Help Bosnia Now,” New York Times, August 6, 1992, p. A23. 61. Interview with Scowcroft.

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attention on Serb aggression and Slobodan Miloševi as the primary culprits. According to their prescription, if the United States removed Miloševi or di- rected a targeted military strike against him and his radical supporters, the violence in Bosnia would quickly dissipate. An editorial in the New Republic, for example, proclaimed: “The Balkan war is not so politically complicated that no judgment about its morality can be made. It is not merely an ethnic conºict. It is a campaign in which a discrete faction of Serbian nationalists has manipu- lated ethnic sentiment in order to seize power and territory. It is an act of international aggression, an assault on a member of the United Nations. Despite the U.N.’s condemnation, there have been too many platitudes about the responsi- bility of all factions for the war. This lazy language is an escape hatch through 62 which outside powers ºee their responsibilities.” This mobilized criticism and the campaign to reframe the nature of the crisis frustrated ofªcials at the most senior levels within the administration. Scowcroft recalls his reaction to the domestic criticism unleashed at the time: “I was very suspicious that people who had never supported the use of force for our national interests were now screaming for us to use force in Yugosla- via....Idisagreed with the humanitarianists who deliberately downplayed the intractability of the conºict, who demonized Miloševi and saw this simply as a war of aggression. Miloševi was a factor, but to that extent there were also 63 national hatreds there, that couldn’t be ignored.” Despite the intensity of this political pressure, selective engagers at the White House and within the military remained convinced that U.S. intervention in Bosnia would be a mistake. After meeting with his advisers on August 8, Bush reiterated his caution: “We are not going to get bogged down in some 64 guerrilla warfare.” He also ordered his team to contest the liberal humanitarian view that U.S. intervention could quickly break the siege of Sarajevo with little cost in American lives. Over the next several days, selective engagers in the Bush campand within the Joint Chiefs intensiªed their public campaign to sell their beliefs about the potential dangers associated with direct U.S. involvement in the Bosnian conºict. On August 11 Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a principal deputy to General Powell, publicly discussed the Joint Chiefs’ views on ABC World News Tonight, saying emphatically that despite the tragedy, “there is no military solution.”

62. “Rescue Bosnia,” New Republic, August 17 and 24, 1992, p. 7. 63. Interview with Scowcroft. 64. Quoted in Jim Hoagland, “August Guns: How Sarajevo Will Reshape U.S. Strategy,” Washing- ton Post, August 9, 1992, p. C1.

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Earlier that day, senior military planners told a congressional hearing that between 60,000 and 120,000 ground troops would be needed to break the siege of 65 Sarajevo and ensure uninterrupted relief. Other commanders suggested that a ªeld army of at least 400,000 troops would be required to implement a cease- ªre. somalia: airlift is supported. In the midst of the public furor over the campdisclosure in Bosnia, President Bush announced an abruptshift in his So - malia policy and ordered U.S. Air Force C-130s to assist in providing relief to the famine victims. The president also reversed his opposition to funding the deployment of 500 Pakistani peacekeepers to Somalia; in fact, he announced that the Pentagon would provide transportation for the 500-man team and 66 their equipment. Conventional arguments suggest that the CNN effect compelled the president to act in Somalia—that vivid images of starving children provoked a sense of moral outrage within the American populace. Among the three major U.S. television networks, however, Somalia was mentioned in only ªfteen news stories in 1992 until Bush’s August decision to begin the airlift, and nearly half of those “showed only ºeeting glimpses of Somalia’s plight” within 67 the context of other stories. The evidence suggests that Bush’s policy shift on Somalia came in response to the increasing pressure to take action and to the political backlash on Bosnia that occurred on the eve of the Republican National Convention. Scowcroft recalls, “It [the Bosnian campissue] probably did have a signiªcant inºuence on us. We did not want to portray the administration as wholly ºint-hearted real- politik, and an airlift in Somalia was a lot cheaper [than intervention in Bosnia] 68 to demonstrate that we had a heart.”

further mobilization of interventionists On Bosnia, the selective engagers in the administration continued their public strategy to downplay the magnitude of the violence and characterize the

65. Quoted in Michael Gordon, “Conºict in the Balkans: 60,000 Needed for Bosnia, a U.S. General Estimates,” New York Times, August 12, 1992, p. 8. 66. James Gerstanzang and Melissa Healy, “U.S. to Airlift Food to Combat Somali Famine,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1992, p. 1. The U.S. reluctance to make any ªnancial contribution to the deployment of the UN peacekeeping units was based on its position that humanitarian crises should be funded through “voluntary contributions” and not through any formal, precedent- setting action by the Security Council. See, for example, “Security Council to Send Observers to Oversee Humanitarian Aid in Somalia,” Agence France-Press, April 24, 1992. 67. Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, pp. 131–137. 68. Interview with Scowcroft.

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conºict as one of ancient blood feuds. In response to a question about the causes of the war in Bosnia, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger proclaimed, “It is difªcult to explain, but this war is not rational. There is no rationality at all about ethnic conºict. It is gut; it is hatred; it’s not for any common set of values or purposes; it just goes on. And that kind of warfare 69 is most difªcult to bring to a halt.” Later, in a television interview on the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, he argued, “I’m not prepared to accept arguments that there must be something between the kind of involvement of Vietnam and doing nothing, that the New York Times and the Washington Post keepblab - bing about, that there must be some form in the middle. That’s again what got us into Vietnam—do a little bit, and it doesn’t work. What do you do 70 next?” By September, liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners in the bureaucracy had forged a uniªed coalition and had begun a concerted effort to identify the likely effects of the upcoming winter on the civilian population in Bosnia. As part of the effort, they detailed estimates of civilian casualties that displaced populations would probably suffer in the impending winter months. U.S. AID’s Assistant Administrator Natsios warned Eagleburger in a letter that “immediate and massive action must be taken now to avert a tragedy by the 71 onset of the winter season.” A week later, a secret Central Intelligence Agency analysis estimate stating that as many as 250,000 Bosnian Muslims might die from starvation and exposure was leaked to the press even before it 72 was briefed to the NSC. NGOs began working with professional staff members on the Senate Intelligence Committee to increase congressional oversight of the intelligence community’s collection and analysis of war crimes and atrocities and to report on whether Serb actions constituted genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of 73 Genocide. As liberal humanitarian and hard-line interventionist voices began to per- meate Washington’s political debate, serious concern emerged among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the intense political and public discussion over intervention 74 was leading toward a call for direct U.S. involvement in Bosnia. According

69. Quoted in U.S. Department of State Dispatch Supplement, September 1992, p. 14. 70. Ibid. 71. Quoted in Michael Gordon, “Winter May Kill 100,000 in Bosnia, the CIA Warns,” New York Times, September 30, 1992, p. 13. 72. Ibid. 73. Interview with William Hill, director of East European analysis, Bureau of Intelligence and Re- search, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1999. 74. Interview with Admiral Jeremiah.

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to Admiral Jeremiah, the view among the Joint Chiefs was one of increasing frustration with the political campaign for intervention launched by liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners: “[They] made unrealistic claims about what could be done with the use of force....They wanted us to volunteer military solutions to very complex political problems, and they wanted us to do it in a 75 way where nobody would get hurt. It was just unreasonable.” As the cumulative pressures for action in Bosnia escalated, General Powell embarked on an unprecedented public campaign to keep U.S. troops out of the conºict. On September 27 he called Michael Gordon of the New York Times into his ofªce for an extensive interview. Gordon describes Powell as at times angry, saying that he “assailed the proponents of limited military intervention to protect the Bosnians.” Powell argued that “as soon as they tell me it is limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me ‘surgical,’ I head for the bunker.” He further complained about the civilians calling for military action in Bosnia: “These are the same folks who have stuck us into problems before that we have lived to regret. I have some memories of us being put into situations like that which did not turn out quite the way that the people who put us in thought, i.e., Lebanon, if you want a more recent real experience, where a bunch of Marines were put in there as a symbol, as a sign. Except those poor young folks did not know exactly what their mission was. They did not know really what they were doing there. 76 It was very confusing. Two hundred and forty-one of them died as a result.” Meanwhile, some selective engagers on Bush’s political team began to look for ways to take more aggressive action short of direct U.S. military intervention in hopes of alleviating some of the domestic criticism. Scowcroft and Eagleburger developed a plan to establish a no-ºy zone over Bosnia. President Bush agreed to the no-ºy zone but, in deference to Powell and Secretary of De- fense Richard Cheney, he publicly warned that the administration would “prevent the no-ºy zone from becoming a slippery slope leading to deeper 77 involvement.” Two days later, the New York Times published a scathing editorial strongly criticizing Powell and his reluctance to intervene in Bosnia:

75. Ibid. 76. Quoted in Michael Gordon, “Powell Delivers a Resounding No on Using Limited Force in Bosnia,” New York Times, September 28, 1999, p. 1. 77. Quoted in John Goshko, “Bush Urges Flight over Bosnia,” Washington Post, October 3, 1992, p. A1.

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The war in Bosnia is not a fair ªght and it is not war. It is slaughter. When Americans spend more than $280 billion a year for defense, surely they ought to be getting more for their money than no-can-do. It is the preroga- tive of civilian leaders confronting this historic nightmare to ask the military for a range of options more sophisticated than off or on, stay out completely or go in all the way to total victory. With that in hand, President Bush could tell General Powell what President Lincoln once told General McClellan:78 “If you don’t want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”

By all accounts, Powell was livid. In his memoirs, he recalls that he “erupted” in anger. He then dashed off a scathing rebuttal in which he argued that the conºict was “especially complex” and had “deep ethnic and religious roots 79 that go back a thousand years.” The combined effect of these pressures put Powell and his advisers on the defensive. The State Department was launching new policy initiatives that, although stopping short of outright U.S. intervention, were seen by the military 80 command staff as the ªrst steps toward greater U.S. involvement. Liberal humanitarianists in Congress were demanding more. In addition, the media was openly questioning Powell’s leadership. Thus was the cumulative pressure on Powell and the Bush administration in early November when Bill Clinton, who had campaigned on an activist policy in Bosnia, won the 1992 presidential election. somalia—also adrift. Throughout much of September, October, and early November, Somalia again fell off the radar screen. After an initial wave of news broadcasts and printed reports following the airlift, the media turned its

78. Editorial, “At Least Slow the Slaughter,” New York Times, October 4, 1992, p. 16. 79. Colin Powell, “Why Generals Get Nervous,” New York Times, October 8, 1992, p. 35. 80. In mid-October, another Balkan issue surfaced—one that ultimately brought together selective engagers, hard-liners, and liberal humanitarianists from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the NSC staff. All were concerned that Serb leaders might attempt a similar campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing in Serbia’s province of Kosovo. The American ofªcials believed that because of the overwhelming majority of ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo, any action against them might easily ignite a wider conºict throughout the Balkans—one that might eventually lead to violence between Greece and Turkey. By early November, a consensus began to emerge among selective engagers and liberal humanitarianists that Kosovo was a “different kettle of ªsh” than Bosnia and was within U.S. geostrategic interests. The NSC discussed the matter in November and concluded that the United States would have to issue a deliberate warning to Miloševib against taking any action in Kosovo. Powell and Cheney adamantly opposed including language on the threat of U.S. force in the démarche, fearing that this was part of the inevitable slippery slope that would lead to U.S. forces being drawn into the conºict more directly. See Elaine Sciolino, “Bush Asks France and Britain to Back Force of Monitors in Kosovo,” New York Times, November 25, 1992, p. A6.

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81 attention to other international stories. In the NSC, staff working on Africa abruptly shifted their focus toward the negotiations in South Africa leading up to free elections and toward the brutal civil wars in Angola and Mozam- bique—both cases that were deemed more important than Somalia to overall 82 U.S. geostrategic interests. This indifference to the situation in Somalia was felt within the bureaucracy and the interagency task force that had been established to monitor the airlift. The U.S. airlift was dropping food into Baidoa, and feeding centers were being established. Yet those most in need were not able to reach the food because of 83 ªghting in the area. On November 6 the Ofªce of Food and Disaster Assis- tance reported that more than 25 percent of Somali children under the age of 84 ªve had died. Despite these conditions, there was little bureaucratic move- ment on additional remedies to the crisis.

the presidential election and liberal humanitarianists resurgent On November 3 political power in Washington shifted with the election of Bill Clinton. Clinton had surrounded himself with members of former President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy team, and the general belief within Washington was that the new Clinton team would lean markedly toward a liberal humanitarian foreign policy agenda. There was also wide speculation that Clinton would take quick action on Bosnia by lifting the arms embargo and possibly using U.S. air power to strike Serb targets. Sensing the power shift, within days of the election liberal humanitarianist and hard-line staffers at the State Department circulated a new initiative to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia. By November 16 every relevant bureau in the State Department had signed on to the policy pro- 85 posal. Furthermore, momentum quickly grew for dramatically expanding UN peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and dedicating NATO air assets to support them. The Security Council agreed to the measure on November 16.

81. See Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, pp. 131–138. 82. Interview with Kansteiner. 83. Interview with Bishop. 84. Cited in Herman Cohen, “Intervention in Somalia,” in Allan E. Goodman, The Diplomatic Re- cord, 1992–93 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995), p. 63. 85. Telephone interview with U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1999; interview with John Fox, Ofªce of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1999; interview with James Hooper, deputy director, Ofªce of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., March 18, 1999; and interview with Hill.

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somalia—pressure builds again. In early November, dozens of international relief groups and representatives from the ofªce of the UN High Com- missioner for Refugees again urged the international community to stepup its efforts to mitigate the famine. InterAction, a coalition of 160 U.S.-based nongovernmental relief organizations, issued public and private appeals to President Bush detailing the extensive problems that relief groups were facing in Somalia because of the lack of security against the roaming bandits. InterAc- tion requested that the United States increase its support for the UN to provide security for relief operations. In addition, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali reiterated his criticism that the Bush administration—with all of its public focus on the Bosnian war in Europe—was ignoring the more acute plight of millions 86 of black Africans in Somalia. In response to this pressure, the administration launched a series of interagency meetings during the ªrst three weeks of November to discuss a wide range of policy options. The question of military intervention was not open for discussion because of the continued—and absolute—opposition from the military. Instead, the interagency groupoutlined a series of recommendations short of any U.S. military participation and forwarded them to a Deputies Committee meeting of the National Security Council on November 20. clinton’s first trip to washington. On November 19, two weeks after the election, President-elect Bill Clinton arrived in Washington for separate brieªngs from President Bush and General Powell. Although the meetings were designed to be a thorough discussion of U.S. national security priorities (i.e., U.S. relations with Russia and China, the future of the NATO alliance, and NATO expansion), Clinton used both to press Bush and Powell hard on the issue of U.S. intervention in Bosnia. On this subject, the exchange with Powell was especially tense. Even before the meeting, Powell and his colleagues in the Joint Chiefs were highly concerned that Clinton might propel the United States into Bosnia on an ambiguous, feel-good mission. According to Powell’s account, Clinton started their meeting by asking, “Wasn’t there some way, he wanted to know, that we could inºuence the situation [in Bosnia] through air 87 power, something not too punitive?” Powell lamented later: “There it was

86. Interview with Scowcroft. See also Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, pp. 137–138. 87. Powell, My American Journey, p. 562. Clinton also found the meeting somewhat tense: Powell “laid it on the line and did not fudge one of our disagreements.” Apparently, Clinton refused to back down on either Bosnia or trying to lift the ban on gays in the military—two issues on which Powell held particularly strong positions. See Thomas Friedman, “The Transition: The President- Elect: Clinton Says Bush Made China Gains,” New York Times, November 20, 1992, p. 1.

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again, the ever-popular solution from the skies, with a good humanist twist; let’s not hurt anybody.” Powell says he did not want to sound too negative in their ªrst meeting and told the president-elect that he would have his staff 88 “give the matter more thought.” cumulative pressure. By this time, liberal humanitarianists had mobilized extensive public and internal political pressure on the administration to take action in both Somalia and Bosnia. At the White House, Scowcroft recalls that the president, coming off of his post-election blues, was personally affected by the reports and by the pressure he was receiving on Somalia from groups such 89 as InterAction. Bush began asking his advisers whether anything could be done on Somalia. Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs were becoming increasingly anxious that the new president might escalate U.S. military involvement in Bosnia. They were especially embittered—strikingly evident in Powell’s discussion with Clinton—by liberal humanitarianist claims that intervention in support of humanitarian missions, and in Bosnia in particular, could be done on the cheap. This cumulative pressure ultimately led to a policy reversal by the Joint Chiefs—again, not on Bosnia but on Somalia. The day after Powell’s meeting with Clinton, the NSC’s Deputies Committee met to discuss the situation in Somalia. Three options were put on the table: (1) increasing U.S. ªnancial and material support for the current UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia; (2) coordinating a broader UN effort in which the United States would provide logistical support but no ground troops; and (3) initiating a U.S.-led multina- 90 tional military intervention in Somalia. According to John Hirsch and former Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley, however, the only consensus at the November 20 meeting was that the third option “was not a serious op- 91 tion.” In fact, the option of military intervention was not even raised for dis- 92 cussion. The next day, however, Admiral Jeremiah returned and shocked members at the deputies meeting by announcing that General Powell and the Joints Chiefs had decided that, if force was desired in Somalia, the military could do the job. The admiral recalls that by then, the frustration within the Joint Chiefs had reached a critical mass:

88. Powell, My American Journey, p. 562. 89. Interview with Scowcroft. 90. According to Herman Cohen, these options reºected Henry Kissinger’s classic policy options paper: The ªrst option is too weak, the third option is too strong, and the second option is just right. Interview with Cohen. 91. Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, p. 43. 92. Interview with Cohen.

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There was a lot of pressure on us to do something. I went in to see Powell. As far as I was concerned, this was the president’s decision to be made. But we had weeks of hand-wringing and futzing around [by the civilian policymakers] trying to ªgure out the right thing to do. Nobody wants to send troops...[where groups] . . . have been ªghting for hundreds of years. When I said it, I was frustrated because we were taking all of the heat on So- malia and Bosnia. Everyone wanted us to volunteer—to go into Bosnia and to go into Somalia—but nobody was making decisions about what they wanted to do. During the November 21 deputies meeting, I presented our [Joint Chiefs’] view that—if you decide—this is what it will take to do the job. Were our ªgures overkill? Probably. But we weren’t going to go in with a weak93 force. We said just give us the resources and let’s get on with it already.

Jeremiah further added: “Thirty thousand troops is a pretty heavy deployment. No one thought Somalia was going to be cheapor completelyrisk free. But Bosnia made it seem as though we could do Somalia with a relatively moderate force....Thirty thousand wouldn’t get you a running start in 94 Bosnia.” Scowcroft recalls that he too was struck by the Joint Chiefs’ abrupt shift: “I know that the military had long felt that [Somalia would be a quagmire because the combatants would be virtually indistinguishable from the civilians]. I was struck, and I still am, with the alacrity with which Colin Powell changed 95 gears.” the president’s decision. On November 25, after receiving brieªngs on the famine and the military situation, President Bush told his advisers that he wanted to deploy U.S. forces to Somalia. The president’s decision was directly linked to the cumulative political pressure to take action on both Somalia and Bosnia. It was also tied to the fact that the Joint Chiefs were prepared to support the action and that military commanders had come to believe that they could effectively mitigate the famine. In addition, according to Scowcroft, Bush had become more sensitive to his presidential legacy, which appeared jeopar- dized by the exhaustive liberal criticism of the administration’s apparent cal- lousness to humanitarian crises. U.S. action in Somalia seemed a positive 96 contribution to that legacy.

93. Interview with Admiral Jeremiah. 94. Ibid. 95. Interview with Scowcroft. 96. It should be noted that Bush’s concern with his legacy in response to Somalia reached a critical mass only when the political pressure for intervention had also reached a critical mass.

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For their part, the Joint Chiefs’ abrupt shift on Somalia also reºected the toll that the cumulative pressure and criticism from liberals vis-à-vis their reluctance to use force in Bosnia had taken. Powell’s support for intervention in So- malia was explicitly based on the condition that U.S. forces would not be called 97 into a similar effort in Bosnia. After Bush’s decision to intervene in Somalia, Powell and Scowcroft met to work out the details. According to NSC staff member Kansteiner, one of Powell’s principal requests was that the White House do everything necessary 98 to sell the operation to the American public. Powell then told Scowcroft that the mission would be named Operation Restore Hope to ensure widespread public support. By then, Scowcroft recalls, he and the president were convinced that they had this support: “From what we saw of the public commen- tary and the political debates prior to the decision, we knew everyone in 99 Washington supported this one.”

Conclusion

In the past decade, the conditions for regional and civil violence appear to have increased. New wars have erupted around the world, and they are ugly, 100 persistent, and show no signs of abating. In response, scholars have dedicated signiªcant energy to the study of regional and civil conºict in hopes of ªnding strategies for controlling and mitigating the violence. Much of this lit- erature identiªes conditions under which intervention can be effective. If we are to develop sophisticated strategies for responding to regional and civil violence, however, we must understand not only when intervention can be effective but the conditions and processes by which intervention is implemented as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. In short, we need to understand why the United States intervenes in some instances but not in others.

competing beliefs The cases of Somalia and Bosnia in 1992 have several idiosyncrasies that make generalizations difªcult. But one implication from these cases suggests that a starting point for future research on the reasons the United States intervenes in some instances is to examine competing normative beliefs and the politics of

97. Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, p. 139. See also “Operation Restore Hope,” U.S. News and World Report, December 14, 1992, pp. 26–30. 98. Interview with Kansteiner. 99. Interview with Scowcroft. 100. See, for example, Crocker, Hampson, and Aall, Managing Global Chaos.

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intervention. In Bosnia, Haiti, northern Iran, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere in the past decade, American foreign policy elites have expressed differing normative beliefs about when and where the United States should intervene. These competing beliefs appear to rotate around the selective engager and liberal humanitarian axis. The cases presented here suggest that these beliefs not only exist but that they signiªcantly contribute to our understanding of why the United States intervenes.

information advantages In addition to competing beliefs, information and advocacy resources also mattered. Initially, President Bush and his advisers faced little opposition to their policies on Somalia and Bosnia. They captured signiªcant information advantages on both crises, and there was little or no liberal humanitarian or media presence on the ground in either place; selective engagers effectively portrayed the conºicts as the boiling over of ancient tribal hatreds about which the United States could do little. The shifts in the Bush administration’s policy on Somalia—ªrst in August 1992 and then again in November 1992—came only in the face of mobilized political opposition. The critical variables behind these policy changes stem from the shift in information and propaganda advantages that occurred once competing elites and the media developed and dedicated resources to the conºict areas to challenge the administration’s framing of the crises. Three factors helped to shift the information advantages—and ultimately the political dynamic leading to the U.S. intervention in Somalia. First, the du- ration of each crisis compounded the political effects. As the months passed and neither crisis showed any signs of abating, the political pressures mounted. The persistence of the humanitarian crises enabled the media as well as liberal humanitarian and hard-line opponents of the Bush administration to gradually collect information independent of the administration and mobilize their own advocacy resources. In each case, the independent collection of information and the mobilized dissemination and propagation of that information—and ultimately the political pressure—came several months after the violence and humanitarian crises reached massive proportions. Had each crisis abated in the late summer or fall of 1992, the United States likely would not have intervened in Somalia. Second, the breakdown of executive cohesion and disarray within the ranks of the administration ultimately exposed alternative analytical narratives of each crisis. The prevailing (and cohesive) view among the senior Bush administration and U.S. military leaders was unwavering throughout the ªrst year of

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the Somalia crisis and the ªrst ªve months of the Bosnia conºict. However, in the wake of the disclosure of concentration-like camps in Bosnia in August 1992 and the corresponding media attention, dissent and fragmentation within the administration with respect to both Somalia and Bosnia escalated signi- ªcantly. Midlevel and senior liberal humanitarian and hard-line ofªcials consistently challenged the selective engager policies of the Bush administration in each crisis. As the crises worsened, hard-liners and liberal humanitarianists within the bureaucratic ranks of the State Department and the Pentagon began to leak information about each to the press. These leaks gave liberal humanitarianist opponents of the administration additional information with which to criticize the administration’s policies and led to a dramatic opening of the political debate on intervention. Finally, with the election of Bill Clinton on November 3, President Bush and General Powell, in particular, concluded that the election represented a full- scale power shift in Washington from the selective engager Bush administration to what they believed would be a very active liberal humanitarian Clinton White House. As part of this, they believed that liberal humanitarianists within the new administration would be intent on making a strong case for U.S. intervention in Bosnia. In the end, Bush and his advisers decided that Clinton would likely alter public attitudes toward Bosnia and launch some form of military action there. Unable to control the spin on each crisis, Bush and Powell concluded that if the United States was going to intervene in response to a humanitarian crisis, it would be in Somalia and not Bosnia.

policy implications The preliminary implication of this research is that no universal grand strategy or doctrine on intervention—such as the Powell Doctrine—is likely to prevail within the political context of decisionmaking. Those who rule out intervention from the outset may ªnd themselves under intense and persistent pressure that will likely detract attention from other foreign policy initiatives and ultimately lead to some form of intervention under less than desirable or opti- mal terms. Second, determining whether a humanitarian mission is doable as a basis for intervention is a highly subjective consideration. The belief among senior Bush administration ofªcials that Somalia was doable emerged only in the context of intense pressure from competing foreign policy elites on Bosnia as well as So- malia. And that pressure came from liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners who were able to challenge the views of the selective engagers in the Bush ad-

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ministration only after they had cultivated their own access to information— thereby breaking the administration’s information monopoly. Prior to this, Bush and his senior military advisers led by Gen. Colin Powell adamantly opposed the use of force in Somalia, arguing that conditions did not meet the criteria of the Powell Doctrine. Third, this case demonstrates that senior U.S. military ofªcials are often inti- mately involved in policymaking. General Powell’s initiation of an explicit political campaign to inºuence U.S. policy on Bosnia may have been relatively unique. More broadly, however, the military has signiªcant advantages on access to information and institutional resources on military planning that can be used for political purposes. On both Somalia and Bosnia, opponents of the Joint Chiefs’ position criticized the military for inºating estimates of U.S. intervention in both conºicts. Whether these estimates were accurate is difªcult to determine. Nonetheless, for the ªrst several months of the conºicts in both So- malia and Bosnia, these estimates helped to diffuse political pressure on the administration to use military force. It is clear that the Joint Chiefs do enjoy a monopoly of information on military planning that can allow them to inºuence policy when they feel strongly about a particular situation. Finally, the conception of the “CNN effect” oversimpliªes the inºuence of the media on intervention decisions. The media can provide a forum for the collection and dissemination of information that critically assesses the views presented by the administration. However, the nature of regional and civil conºicts, which are frequently fought in remote corners of the globe, often pre- cludes exhaustive reporting from the ground, at least initially. Consequently, because of a lack of resources, expertise, and access to a particular conºict, the media often focus their early attention on the U.S. policy response and report- 101 ing from Washington. Initially most journalists did not have signiªcant experience in or access to Somalia or Bosnia. This created an early bias in favor of the analytical portrayal of the conºicts by selective engagers in the Bush administration. As more journalists and liberal humanitarianists traveled to the conºict zones, alternative analyses of the crises were broadcast and printed. As

101. In his extensive survey of New York Times coverage of overseas crises, Nicholas O. Berry found that in the early days and weeks of a crisis, the American media are often not well staffed to report on the crisis from the region in turmoil. Furthermore, much of the initial coverage tends to focus on the deliberative process among the president and his national security staff. Berry argues that this is why the media are often criticized as being overly apologetic for the executive in the early days of a crisis. As the crisis persists, the media begin deploying their own resources to develop independent sources. At this point, Berry argues that the media start to report much more critically. Berry, Foreign Policy and the Press: An Analysis of the New York Times’ Coverage of U.S. For- eign Policy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990).

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this occurred, the media facilitated the mobilization by groups challenging the administration’s views on both Bosnia and Somalia. An interesting side note to this is that the post–Cold War downsizing of the media may have a signiªcant effect on future media coverage. In the past decade, most news organizations have reduced the numbers of their foreign- based correspondents. Instead, “celebrity journalists” tend to parachute into the world’s hot spots. Although these journalists are often extremely skilled, they are not likely to have preexisting knowledge or information resources, and learning curves are likely to be steep. This may further bias reporting of regional and civil conºicts that reinforce early analytical narratives produced and disseminated by administration ofªcials—whether they be selective engagers or liberal humanitarianists.

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