WARS WITHOUT RISK: U.S.HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS OF THE 1990S R Laurent Cousineau A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2010 Committee: Dr. Gary Hess, Advisor Dr. Neal Jesse Graduate Faculty Representative Dr. Robert Buffington Dr. Stephen Ortiz ii ABSTRACT Dr. Gary Hess, Advisor Wars Without Risk is an analysis of U.S. foreign policy under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton involving forced humanitarian military operations in Somalia and Haiti in the 1990s. The dissertation examines American post-Cold war foreign policy and the abrupt shift to involve U.S. armed forces in United Nations peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations to conduct limited humanitarian and nation-building projects. The focus of the study is on policy formulation and execution in two case studies of Somalia and Haiti. Wars Without Risk examines the fundamental flaws in the attempt to embrace assertive multilateralism (a neo-Wilsonian Progressive attempt to create world peace and stability through international force, collective security, international aid, and democratization) and to overextend the traditional democratization mandates of American foreign policy which inevitably led to failure, fraud, and waste. U.S. military might was haphazardly injected in ill-defined UN operations to save nations from themselves and to spread or “save” democracy in nations that were not strongly rooted in Western enlightenment foundations. Missions in Somalia and Haiti were launched as “feel good” humanitarian operations designed as attempts to rescue “failed states” but these emotionally- based operations had no chance of success in realistic terms because the root causes of poverty and conflict in targeted nations were too great to address through half-hearted international paternalism. Trapped by policies driven by empty rhetoric but lacking any validation in terms of national interests, Bush and Clinton weren’t willing to take serious risks in order to fulfill their overly idealistic mandates over unwilling or unmotivated populations. The operations in Somalia iii and Haiti were poorly conceived and lacked and real public support at home, thus perpetuating the need of policymakers to focus on crafting political theater and positive imagery over generating viable strategies to accomplish these missions. Both interventions in Somalia and Haiti were initiated and executed on the basis of their promise of producing risk-free operations for policies built upon flimsy foundations of empty rhetoric, internationalism, idealism, and the desire to create positive imagery for the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world and for the presidents that conducted humanitarian operations. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While a dissertation is essentially a lonely self-driven process, it is by no means a product of only the author’s efforts. I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dr. Gary Hess for his guidance and patience throughout the process and for keeping the project manageable and on an even keel. I also wish to recognize Dr. Rob Buffington for his invaluable input in helping me formulate the ideas surrounding the subject matter and how to utilize sources available to me, and Dr. Steven Ortiz for volunteering to step in for a committee member who retired while I was on military deployment. I am also heavily indebted to some knowledgeable and very supportive friends, namely Dave Haus, Jim Buss, and Matt Daley; who not only provided great advice along the way but encouraged me to “just get it done,” “do work,” and reminded me that “a done dissertation is a good dissertation.” Lastly, I want to acknowledge the enormous love, patience, and support of my fiancé, Corinna Draeger, who gently motivated me to complete the process so we could finally get married by reminding me, “Hurry and be done, so we can be one.” Thanks to all those mentioned above, I’m happy to report that after many years and enormous effort it is finally done. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………. 1 PROLOGUE………………………………………………………………………………….. 29 CHAPTER 1: THE UNWILLING, THE UNKNOWING, AND THE UNGRATEFUL: THE FLAWED POLICY OF FORCED HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION IN SOMALIA…. 43 CHAPTER 2: WHEN PEACE ENFORCEMENT FAILS: CLINTON’S ASSERTIVE MULTILATERALISM IN SOMALIA………………………………………………………. 79 CHAPTER 3: HOPE IS NOT A PLAN: AN ANALYSIS OF U.S. POLICYMAKING IN SOMALIA UNDER BUSH…………………………………………………………………... 120 CHAPTER 4: NO ADULT SUPERVISION: CLINTON ADMININSTRATION FOREIGN POLICY, UNOSOM II, AND NATION-BUILDING IN SOMALIA…………… 199 CHAPTER 5: THE ILLUSON OF SAVING DEMOCRACY IN HAITI……. ……………... 286 CHAPTER 6: SPINNING TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY: HAITI POLICYMAKING UNDER THE CLINTON AMININSTRATION……………………………………………... 315 CHAPTER 7: CREATING A SECURE ENVIRONMENT: PEACEKEEPING AND QUASI-NATION-BUILDING IN HAITI………………………………………………….... 380 CHAPTER 8: UNIMIH AND SPINNNING FAILURE IN HAITI…………………………. 440 vi CONCLUSION: RISK AVOIDANCE, IMAGE, AND HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION……………………………………………………………………………. 499 1 INTRODUCTION Wars without Risk: U.S. Foreign Policy and Peacekeeping in the Post-Cold War In the early 1990s, the United States was scrambling for a new cornerstone in foreign policy in the post-Cold War, and became lost in the contradictions between containment and new overinflated versions of Wilsonian idealism. The Bush and Clinton administrations (along with a complacent Congress) undercut the possibility for a formulation of in-depth foreign policy based on national interests in exchange for ad-hoc “low risk” multilateral adventures in Somalia and Haiti driven by overheated rhetoric and image management. The false notion that humanitarian interventions would present few real risks would be made apparent in these operations, and the emotional rhetoric surrounding saving victims of natural disasters, failed states, civil wars, and even disruptions of democracy augmented by reactionary responses to media images could not support the lack of solid policy formulation that would have been required to save targeted nations from them themselves. The following is an examination of the policies under the Bush and Clinton administrations to engage in collective assertive multilateralism and forced humanitarian interventions in Somalia and Haiti from 1991 to 2000 in an approach to conduct a new form of idealistic foreign policy and attempt to fight wars without risk. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the East-West conflict that divided Europe for nearly half a century, the United States suddenly found itself without a familiar sense of purpose in foreign affairs. The beast of the Soviet juggernaut had been put to sleep through American-led resistance; not by overt force of arms, but by outlasting them just as George F. Kennan, the father of containment policy, had predicted in the late 1940s. As the USSR collapsed in on itself, the Red Army pulled back inside Russia’s borders, the Eastern European satellites were freed of their communist shackles and the Soviet Union itself soon 2 broke up into smaller nationally based pieces. The familiar task of containing Soviet communist expansion had finally come to an end and the Cold War rivalry was no more. Communism, however, wasn’t eradicated; there were still the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the North Koreans and other communist factions still confronting the West, but to strategists in Washington these remaining Marxist states seemed almost stranded and demoralized without the force of the Soviets behind them. Although China was embracing market economics and was openly engaging with the West, it would still create a difficult enigma for U.S. foreign policy to grapple with in the 1990s. When it came to U.S. global strategic interests it was generally believed that the other totalitarian antagonists could be isolated, softened, or even perhaps transformed. At most they would be considered only regional threats as opposed to the global menace that the Soviet Union once ominously presented. Other threats to American security still existed, such as terrorism and Islamic extremism, but these paled in comparison to the defunct Russian obstacle to world security. More worrisome was that widespread economic and social disorder also could obviously endanger the newly minted democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, and conditions of extreme poverty and clashing ethnic factions would fracture the fragile balances of Third World countries everywhere. The world was finally free of the Soviet threat, but it could turn into a more chaotic and messy situation as the dynamics of a bipolar structure quickly evaporated leaving a variety of ethnic groups and political factions to fight it out over borders and for control of their respective governments as Cold War economic and military aid from both East and West quickly dried up. It was in this context that American foreign policy under George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton in the early 1990s sought out new foreign policy directions to undertake in what Bush quickly and others dubbed, “the New World Order”. 3 As civil wars and other low-intensity conflicts erupted throughout the world, the United Nations took on new ambitious roles to end both interstate and intrastate conflicts across the globe. The UN had been conducting traditional peacekeeping missions for decades in which both warring parties would invite international