The Clinton administration began awkwardly. The president was overloaded, preoccupied with domestic issues. Foreign policy was getting only the most marginal attention; some foreign policy analysts, sensing the short shrift given a number of issues, thought it only a matter of time before the administration stumbled somewhere in the world. The inevitable stumble came in a distant and unbelievably poor country called Somalia, one of those sad, miserable countries whose condition, difficult even in the best of circumstances, was made even worse because it had been caught in the outer periphery of the Cold War. It rested on the Horn of Africa, with the most marginal of economies, a dreadful climate, and wretched, infertile soil. Its people were essentially nomadic, sheep, cattle, and camel herders. But the importance of Somalia had been for a time, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of life for the people there, greatly inflated by the Cold War, as if the outcome of what were always nothing more than their indigenous tribal struggles would in some way help determine a larger, global struggle and show which of the two giant superpowers held the key to the future.
Arms poured in from both superpowers, promises of more aid were made. Warlords were described in the media as either tough, no-nonsense military men (our proxies) or left-leaning radicals (their proxies). In the eyes of the locals, the game of America versus Russia, capitalist versus communist, was largely meaningless. To those in power who got the weapons, it was tribe against tribe and, most important in Somalia, clan against clan. If these strange white men wanted to speak so carelessly of Somalia’s critical role in the Cold War conflict, then so be it, as long as they came through with money and guns. They themselves knew what the arms were for—to whack a blood enemy, whose father had been the enemy of your father because his grandfather had been the enemy of your grandfather. The principal social organizations were the clans, which were, in effect, the Somalian form of tribalism. The clans were like giant warring gangs, the forces of any alternative authority were marginal, and the clans or gangs ran the country.
Somalia had had a somewhat checkered history in the Cold War. At one time it had been an American proxy. American weapons poured in. Back in the sixties when the West had chosen not to help, the then Somali rulers, who were anxious to regain territory lost to Kenya and Djibouti, turned to the East. Weapons again poured in, this time from Moscow and Prague. The dominant clan leader at that time was a military man named Mohammed Siad Barre, who staged a coup in October 1969 and quickly took Somalia into the Soviet orbit. But when Siad Barre, feeling a little flush and overconfident because of the massive Soviet aid, initiated a conflict against Ethiopia in 1977, the Soviets withdrew their support. Siad Barre thereupon threw them out of his country.
In time the West returned. The United States, seeking to improve its visibility in a part of the world where it was losing influence, sensitive to the rise of an Islamic regime in Iran, and believing that Somalia was now geographically and geopolitically more important than it had only recently been, began to create a presence there again. In the eighties, American aid poured in, economic as well as military. By 1985, as Bob Oakley and John Hirsch note in their book on Somalia, American economic aid to Somalia was the second-largest amount in sub-Saharan Africa.1 It was accompanied by hopes for reform, both economic and social, hopes that were essentially unrealistic.
The Americans had at first backed Siad Barre, who, given the power that came with the aid, became ever more authoritarian, and his government more dependent on the clans for its authority. The country was now divided between his clan and related clans against other clans considered less friendly. By 1988 the country was engaged in all-out civil war, in which Siad Barre’s growing excesses were a unifying factor among the growing number of dissidents. In the late spring of 1992, even as Bill Clinton was emerging as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, Siad Barre, having repeatedly been defeated by forces under the command of General Mohammed Farah Aidid, fled the country.
General Aidid was now the de facto ruler of Somalia. It was not a case of any change in outlook—a nobler vision, or a move toward democracy, or a greater loyalty to the West, or a commitment to the needs of ordinary Somalis—it was, to those who knew the country best, simply one warlord replacing another. The outs were in and the ins were out. Aidid now saw himself as the rightful ruler of the country. He had driven out Siad Barre and stolen it fair and square. Other clan leaders, of course, disputed his claim. It was a division without ideology—warlord against warlord, blood against blood. Even as Siad Barre’s forces were in retreat, Aidid continued to battle with other clans, the brunt of the struggle being borne by the citizens of Mogadishu, the capital city, with the internecine warfare, in Oakley and Hirsch’s phrase, “virtually destroying the city center, pulverizing the already fragile municipal infrastructure, and inflicting heavy damage.”2 The Washington Post reported that nearly one thousand people a week were dying, primarily from random artillery shelling.
By then the great superpowers, no longer engaged in their international rivalry, cared little. There was mass starvation, but relief programs and attempts to help the Somalis ran afoul of the different clans, whose leaders viewed any outside help as a threat to their political control. By the middle of 1992, Somalia had become one of the worst contemporary humanitarian disasters. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were pouring over the border into Kenya, with perhaps as many going to Ethiopia. An estimated one thousand people a day were leaving the country.
It was a classic example of the modern nonstate, a country that was not a country and had, for all intents and purposes, imploded. It could not provide even elemental services to its people, least of all protection from violence; the people allegedly governing the country were the principal source of the cruelty inflicted on their own subjects. The place was hopeless, a horrifying example of the kind of crisis the leaders of the developed world now faced, if they so chose, from the underdeveloped world. The Bush administration was in its last year, and because of the innate cruelty of the Somali leaders, the people who knew anything about the country warned the administration to be cautious. Being drawn in would be exceedingly dangerous, and any commitment should be carefully prescribed. Getting out, they said, was every bit as important as getting in. Any mission should be extremely limited, and any aspirations for political improvement were likely to run into deep-rooted clan resistance.
Yet what was happening in Somalia, despite all the rational warnings about any involvement, was haunting. In time, television cameramen and reporters found their way to Mogadishu, and what might have been shocking photos in the pretelevision age now had far greater force. Instead of still pictures of starving mothers and children, television cameras added a new dimension of horror. Viewers could see the frailest movement of those who were dying; they could see and hear the flies buzzing over the faces of emaciated children. It was powerful stuff and would create something relatively new in American foreign policy: a limited commitment to a country where we had little in the way of traditional ties and where American national security was in no way involved. The policy was driven largely by the power of images and the nation’s humanitarian instincts. The danger was that the roots of the policy were not deep; it was impelled more by emotion than by the forces that usually created foreign policy, particularly a policy that used the American military. In addition, if you made some kind of humanitarian commitment and it worked according to plan, the cameras, given the extremely limited attention span of the networks’ executive producers, would quickly go elsewhere. Among other things, this also meant that the policy was vulnerable to the boredom of the television executives and susceptible to the pull of countervailing emotion and the impact of a different kind of image—the counterimage.
The Bush administration made the first commitment to Somalia. Part of the reason was the pounding it had been taking from the Democrats, particularly candidate Clinton, about places like Bosnia, Haiti, and China as well as Somalia. By the summer of 1992, the televised images of Somalia were, if not worse than the images from Bosnia, certainly more plentiful. The Bosnian refugee camps were extremely difficult to get to, but in Somalia, finding and photographing people who were dying was easy. In July the Bush administration’s willingness to do something about Somalia had increased as the outcry over the pictures of starving children grew, and in mid-August it announced that it would fly UN peacekeeping forces to Somalia for humanitarian purposes. This first commitment would escalate into a policy that would have its own organic growth.
In the early fall, the situation in Somalia began to fall apart completely. UN personnel and other relief workers could not get food or medicine to the desperately needy people. The starving population of Mogadishu existed at the mercy of the warlords—and most of the food was going to them. At the same time, the Pentagon began to study its plans for military assistance there. Other options seemed rather limited. The United States, working through the UN, might offer support troops but not ground troops to expedite the food and medical assistance. That would mean a major multinational force that had no American troops at its core. But then in late November, the Pentagon reported at a deputies-level meeting that it would be willing to send as many as two divisions to Somalia. “If you think U.S. forces are needed, we can do the job,” Admiral David Jeremiah, Colin Powell’s representative on the deputies committee, said.3 The willingness of the Pentagon to send troops—virtually to volunteer them—stunned everyone else at the meeting. It was in sharp contrast to the resistance the Pentagon had always shown about getting involved in Somalia.
But Powell believed that as many as half a million Somali lives could be saved. Americans could protect themselves with a limited but adequate force, perhaps two divisions; and by keeping the mission limited and clearly defined, in time it could be turned over to the UN, thereby enabling the Americans to get out quickly. Looked at that way, he thought the job was manageable. The assumption of others in the NSC and in the Defense Department—especially among the senior uniformed military—was that with the administration under attack on Bosnia and with the images from Somalia growing more haunting, the pressure to do something somewhere was forcing the Pentagon’s hand. For a variety of reasons Somalia was the better choice, and the mission, though in a more distant country, appeared to be more containable and offer the easiest possibility of extraction.
Sending troops to Somalia, it was widely believed in both the top NSC and Pentagon circles, was Powell’s way of doing something humanitarian but, equally important, of not sending troops to Bosnia, a place that, as far as he was concerned, was far more dangerous. He did not want to send troops to Somalia, but he wanted even less to send them to Bosnia. Somalia seemed the easier one, with more control mechanisms. The result was a U.S.-led military mission to Somalia. Brent Scowcroft was worried about an exit strategy and bothered that, while American troops could protect the various groups trying to deliver food, nothing was likely to grow under that costly umbrella. When we left in a few months, the situation on the ground was likely to be the same, with less effective UN troops as the guarantors of safe passage. “We can get in,” he had said at one meeting, “but how do we get out?”
The decision was made, however. We would send ground troops for a limited time, a large enough force, over thirty-five thousand men, to be able to protect itself, and once the Americans had established control, they would be replaced by UN troops. It seemed to fit at least part of the Powell doctrine: sufficient force to take on a clearly defined mission with clear rules of engagement and a clear policy for departure. Bush wanted the departure date to be January 19 in order not to burden a new administration with an ongoing troop commitment in so treacherous a place. But that was too early; some of the troops might still be arriving at that time. The agreement was, however, that the troops would be there on a minimal tour.
In the beginning, the chief American political representative there was first-rate. Bob Oakley, who had been ambassador to Somalia from 1982 to 1984, was sent out as Bush’s special envoy, and he did exceptionally well in dealing with the different factions, particularly the dangerous Aidid. Oakley had been another of the boys of Saigon, a young political officer who was there with Holbrooke and Lake; Holbrooke, in the Carter years, had made him a deputy assistant secretary at State. Thereafter, he had held a number of exceptionally difficult ambassadorships—Somalia, Zaire, Pakistan—in which he had done well and learned how difficult it was to be guided by good intentions in underdeveloped parts of the world. He was aware of the danger of being grandiose in vision in dealing with the Somalis. He believed that true nation-building was undoable in so godforsaken a place. But because of his earlier time there, he had a good feel for the strengths and weaknesses of the antagonists. “Treat a warlord like a statesman and he will behave like a statesman,” he once said. “Treat a warlord like a warlord and he will behave like a warlord.” Oakley’s political deftness, his understanding that the mission was to be limited, and his sensitivity about how Aidid would see himself in this slightly changed political matrix were considerable assets. He knew just how much to do and how much not to do—and whose toes not to step on. Because of that, in the beginning, the mission was a success, the food was delivered, the very considerable power of the United States was respected, and Aidid and the Americans running the program got along just fine.
In January 1993, the change in administrations had just taken place, and eventually the Americans would have to hand the mission over to the UN. Here things began to go wrong. The Clinton people were not on top of events. In Washington no one was paying quite enough attention to Somalia. The commitment was not that big and appeared to be going well, and though the equation was about to change, no one in the upper level of the bureaucracy was riding herd on it. Yet there were certainly many warnings about potential dangers in Somalia, particularly the danger of either expanding American policy or in some way letting it free-float. Anyone reading the CIA’s estimates would have been extremely cautious about the future. Almost everything the Agency was saying about Somalia was bad. The CIA had, Jim Woolsey believed, some good people who knew the area extremely well. The escalated regional tensions of the seventies and eighties, intertwined as they were with Cold War dictates, had made this a major sphere of conflict, and we had sent some good and knowledgeable people to Somalia. The sum of what they thought was extremely cautionary. In this clan-dominated area, the clans were ruthless and self-absorbed with no larger vision, no concept of civic decency. They were obsessed by only one thing, holding on to power and driving out rival clans. To do that they would destroy everyone and everything in their way.
That view of the country was the same as Oakley’s. Any plan that suggested a larger, nobler, or better Somali political order would be seen as a threat to the most delicate balance, a balance arrived at quite violently, and would have no chance of success. No one, looking through the agency cables, would want to get deeply involved in Somalia. No one at the White House, Woolsey soon came to believe, was very much interested in what the CIA had to say about it. Others, old and close and trusted friends of the new administration, were quite pessimistic. Dick Moose, a close associate of some of the people in the Clinton administration, was nervous about Somalia. He was part of a group that included Aspin, Lake, Gelb, and Holbrooke whose roots went back to working together on the Vietnam War. Moose had been with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in those days. After that they all had served together in the Carter administration, where Moose was assistant secretary for African affairs. That made him extremely knowledgeable about contemporary Somalia. He was now undersecretary of state for management. At the start of the new administration, he had been asked by both Lake and Sandy Berger to write up something for them on Somalia, and he did, stating as bluntly as he could the case for getting out.
Moose had spent endless hours dealing with Somalia in his Carter years, and nothing that had happened in the Bush years—the cruelty the clan leaders inflicted on their own people, if need be—surprised him. He saw only negatives there. The people in Somalia would be different from those in almost any other country we had dealt with, and they would play games with us beyond our wildest imagination, he said. They have survived all these years on an unusually harsh piece of soil, he told Lake and Berger, only by their wits and through the gullibility of others, be it the British, the Russians, and now perhaps us. The idea that we could outwit them on their own turf, where their coming to power was so hard-won and their politics were so brutal, was inconceivable. Moose did not get much of a response to his memo, and he suspected that he was saying something that Tony Lake, his old comrade in arms, did not want to hear.
No one from a senior policy level on the Clinton team even went to Somalia. Later Frank Wisner, who was an undersecretary of defense in the early Clinton years and had been an undersecretary of state in the late Bush years when the original commitment was made, faulted himself for not trusting his instincts and staying on top of the situation. More than anyone else, Les Aspin at Defense was uneasy about everything he knew about Somalia and sensed that the policy was beginning to drift away from the original agreement. He wanted to have a look, and a trip was scheduled in the early days of his tour. He took the requisite shots and had so violent a reaction that the trip had to be canceled. (Some of his friends thought the reaction further damaged his already fragile health.)
The policy was, in fact, changing dramatically, and no one was aware of it. The handover from the American personnel to the UN troops was going badly, well behind schedule. Besides, the limited objectives that were at the core of the policy outlined by Colin Powell were now becoming broader because a critical new player had entered the game, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary general. The agenda of Boutros-Ghali, and therefore the mission he now envisioned (and the higher priority that he, coming from Egypt, gave to the region), was vastly different from that of George Bush, Colin Powell, and Bill Clinton—except that Bush was back in Texas, Powell was on his way out as head of the Joint Chiefs, and Clinton’s mind was on other matters.
Boutros-Ghali took a deep interest in Somalia and brought to the table something new, a highly personal loathing for Aidid. The secretary general was an interesting, talented, proud, and prickly man, with no lack of self-confidence. He was often smarter than many of the people he dealt with at UN headquarters—representatives from large, rich, and powerful nations—and his failure to hide the fact that he judged himself intellectually superior to others did not make him many friends in the West. An Egyptian Copt, a Christian in a predominantly Muslim country, he came from an old and prominent family. As a Copt he could rise only so high in the Egyptian government, and he had spent fourteen years as the deputy foreign minister. If he had been denied the right to rise to his proper level by the circumstances of his birth, it had not, even friends of his thought, made him more modest in his appraisal of his abilities.
As the deputy Egyptian foreign minister, Boutros-Ghali had been supportive of Siad Barre, which neither he nor Aidid had forgotten, and which would hang heavily over the unfolding events in Somalia. From the beginning, Boutros-Ghali was interested in not merely handing out food and doing it safely, but in changing the political character of Somalia—which meant trimming, if not ending, Aidid’s power. Aidid, who was nothing if not shrewd, was aware of the emergence of a new enemy. Bob Oakley, still on duty in Mogadishu, worked hard to soften Aidid’s suspicion of Boutros-Ghali and the UN, but the secretary general’s own words and deeds often undercut Oakley.
American troops, sure of their mission, sure of when to fire back, accepted by the locals, post–Gulf War, for the singular military presence they represented, were being replaced somewhat haphazardly by UN troops. The Somalis did not necessarily fear those troops in military terms, but their ruler saw their presence as a political threat. Boutros-Ghali was confident that he knew more about Somalia than almost anyone else he was dealing with, which might have been true, and that his goals were nobler than those of anyone else, which was almost certainly true. He wanted to change the political framework in Somalia to diminish not merely the power of the clans and particularly the power of Aidid, but to end this kind of rogue government once and for all so that future generations would not have to go through the same ordeal in case of a subsequent national tragedy. That was a worthy objective, but whether it could be achieved under the terms of the limited U.S. commitment was quite another question. Some people high in the UN thought that Boutros-Ghali had no idea how much his own background created additional tensions in Somalia; they believed that he should have removed himself on this issue from the beginning.
Somewhat predictably, the question of disarming the clans began to take precedence over everything else. Aidid was alert to the changing nature of the UN mission, and that he was inevitably going to be the target of it. In addition, Oakley, whose role had been so critical in dealing with Aidid and forging a fragile cease-fire, was gone. He had understood that either demonizing Aidid or trying to remove him was pointless. Aidid was not so much the creator of Somalian chaos and violence as he was a reflection of it. If you thought he was the problem, you were mistaken, because who would follow him was likely to be as bad or worse. Oakley had been replaced in early March by Jonathan Howe—an admiral who had been a deputy to Scowcroft and an Al Haig protégé—who was now technically assigned to the UN. The choice had been Tony Lake’s. To some in the larger world of security in Washington, the selection of Howe indicated how thin the Clinton administration’s bench strength was and how anxious it was, in delicate political-military situations like this, to place a military face on a difficult job. In this case, the military man had worked at a high level in the Bush-Scowcroft NSC and thus could not be accused of being soft. The job was important and demanded great political acumen and, if at all possible, a considerable knowledge of the region.
Howe was a type-A military man, a nuclear-sub guy, who was a good staffer and worked hard at his job. His political skills, however, were considered marginal. “The worst thing about Jon for that job,” said one colleague who had worked with him in the Bush years, “was not that he was a military man, but that he was the kind of person who, when the political genes were handed out, simply was absent that day—he had no feel for what would be a very complicated political situation.” Sending Howe there, this associate thought, almost guaranteed that some kind of collision would take place between the U.S. and Aidid. It was, he added, “almost a sure thing that Aidid would do something which Howe would take as a personal insult—the leader of a small rabble outfit there crossing and provoking the United States of America—how dare he? When that happened, and it was almost sure to happen, Howe would have to respond. It was not a good choice.”
There were two important differences between Howe and Oakley. Oakley had worked for Washington, and Howe worked for the UN; Oakley knew the terrain and its dangers, and Howe did not. In his final days, Oakley had tried to soften Aidid’s view of the UN and Boutros-Ghali, but with little success. Clan leaders do not readily change their spots. Their attitude toward their enemies tends to be personal rather than geopolitical. Nor do they think their sworn enemies are capable of changing their spots either. Furthermore, the top UN man in the field, like Oakley skilled at getting along with Aidid, was criticized in New York by Boutros-Ghali for being too close to Aidid and was soon replaced by another UN official, who quickly distanced himself from Aidid. Clearly, the original, narrowly focused American policy and the emerging UN-driven policy were growing apart. In late March 1993 the Security Council passed a resolution calling for “the rehabilitation of the political institutions and economy of Somalia.” Madeleine Albright, the administration’s ambassador to the UN, spoke vigorously on its behalf. The resolution, she said, represented “an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country.”4
That was strong stuff, and Boutros-Ghali wanted whatever force the UN had in the country used to disarm all the Somalis, which given the number of AK-47s they had been supplied by the Russians—one in every house, as one administration official said—was akin to a small handful of FBI men trying to disarm all the right-wing gun lovers in eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana. Clinton’s attention was elsewhere, Christopher’s voice was essentially muted, and Lake was not easy to reach. Aspin seemed eager to end the policy and cut back on the commitment, but no one was listening to him. Aspin later complained to his close friend Lee Hamilton that getting instructions from the White House about the policy on Somalia and other issues was hard. “I’ll be scheduled for an appearance on one of the Sunday-morning television interview shows, and on Saturday night I’ll still be calling around trying to find out what the policy is,” he said. But at the UN, Albright was talking about nation-building and the coming of a new and more democratic Somalia, sounding, some people in Washington thought, as if her voice were an echo of Boutros-Ghali’s. Her speech, so different from the original mission concept, was a clear sign that Washington was not taking events in Somalia seriously enough, and that no one was really in charge.
There were many telltale signs that things were not going to go as originally planned. George Bush had arrived in Somalia on New Year’s Eve for a three-day visit to thank the troops. That visit had gone exceptionally well. But then two days later, Boutros-Ghali had arrived and Aidid had arranged an angry anti-UN demonstration in his honor. So events were now in motion. Aidid began to challenge the UN mission; Howe, in turn, took his resistance as a personal affront. In Aidid’s eyes Howe was following the Boutros-Ghali line, favoring disarmament of Aidid’s forces. That represented a quantum change in the mission. Though the American commanders in the field felt that their mission was completed and their troops should leave, Howe lobbied Washington to keep them on. The JCS remained unconvinced, and gradually the withdrawal of the original American force began, with some 4,500 assigned to stay on as support troops. Roughly 4,000 Pakistani troops replaced 2,600 marines. But the Pakistani troops did not patrol as much as the Americans and were less sure of their role. When do soldiers of a peacekeeping force return fire on the people they are allegedly protecting? Soon Aidid was slipping his heavy weapons back into town. He was also being told by sources in the UN force friendly to him that the UN command intended to close down his radio station because of the inflammatory anti-UN messages being broadcast. That report proved true.
On June 5, 1993, a day after being told by UN officials that they were going to inspect his weapons depots, Aidid’s forces struck at Pakistani patrols throughout Mogadishu. By the end of the day twenty-four Pakistani soldiers were dead and many more wounded. Some of the bodies were badly mutilated—desecrated, really. Only the response of American troops—the Quick Reaction Force—and Italian armored cars kept it from being worse. It was a very bad day for the UN and for Washington, and the cycle of violence now escalated. Aidid would strike at the UN troops, they would respond, and more would die. Each attack triggered another attack, and as the tension grew, Howe would push Sandy Berger and Tony Lake for permission to retaliate. Moreover, in a political corollary to the violence, the demonization of Aidid now fully bloomed. Hunger and poverty and sickness were no longer the enemy: Aidid was.
The skirmishes between the rival forces of the UN and Aidid continued, and in mid-June Howe issued a warrant for his arrest, offering a $25,000 reward for his capture. That too changed the situation. Howe was a UN man, but to the Somalis, and particularly to Aidid himself, he was an American first and foremost. As Aidid was being demonized by the UN (and now the United States), the United States was being demonized in Somalia. The lines had been drawn. Amazingly, there was no high-level national security meeting at which the potential for greater violence inflicted on American troops was fully addressed.
In mid-July American helicopter gunships assaulted Aidid’s command headquarters. It was ostensibly a UN mission but approval went all the way up the chain of command to the White House itself. When the American troops pulled back from the site, an angry Somali mob attacked some of the foreign journalists who had arrived to cover the assault, and four of them were killed. It was no longer Aidid against other warlords; it was, in one of the strange twists that these things can take in poor third world countries, the Somalis (under the leadership of Aidid) against all outsiders, including Americans. The very people who had arrived on this most altruistic of missions to end the terrible misery in Somalia had become the targets for the anger that such misery generated. They might as well have been a colonial force.
In Washington, Bob Oakley, a veteran of the same inflated concept of nation-building in Vietnam—and its systematic failures—had a sinking feeling that he was watching a policy without genuine direction. Because of his Vietnam experience and his own common sense, nothing gave him greater concern than the idea of nation-building imposed in the third world at gunpoint. We appeared on the verge of doing that now in Somalia. Nation-building succeeded only when a nation wanted to be built and the forces worked from within—not when well-meaning foreigners, blissfully unaware of their own self-interest, tried to force it upon a distant and alien culture.
Madeleine Albright’s comments at the UN and in an op-ed piece in the New York Times had particularly disturbed Oakley. The Times piece, written in August, had represented a clear mandate for political change: “Failure to take action [against Aidid] would have signaled to other clan leaders that the UN is not serious. . . . The decision we must make is whether to pull up stakes and allow Somalia to fall back into the abyss or to stay the course and help lift the country and its people from the category of a failed state into that of an emerging democracy. For Somalia’s sake, and our own, we must persevere.”5 Oakley wondered if she had lost her mind. Emerging democracy! He marveled at the words. Nice people, he thought of the Clinton team, well-intentioned, but no one was really in charge. Though his part of the mission had gone well and he was back home in Washington, things were now reaching a crisis point, yet no one from the administration bothered to call him that summer to talk about Somalia.
The top Washington officials were becoming partially aware of the vulnerability of the American troops. In early August, Aidid’s forces exploded a remote-control bomb under an American humvee and four Americans were killed. The two people who were minding the store at the Pentagon, Aspin and Powell, were the ones most unhappy with the way the commitment was playing out. The people in charge in Somalia no longer seemed to be in accord with the people who had been responsible for sending the troops in the first place. It was a calamitous equation. To all intents and purposes, Aidid was calling the shots, initiating incidents to which we were responding. Both Powell and Aspin believed that the United States had to get out. Aspin was more and more concerned by the lack of response from the NSC people. He was, he told Powell, pounding on the NSC system, trying to get answers, but the answers were not coming back. That was a huge frustration for Aspin. He was the top civilian at the Pentagon and he was out of the loop. Almost from the start access had been a problem. Tony Lake was a difficult, distant person to reach. In Aspin’s view Lake held on to information too closely and did not ventilate the process. “Johnny, can you get anything out of Tony—I’m having a terrible time myself,” Aspin asked R. W. (Johnny) Apple, the Times’ veteran political reporter. Apple thought the question was bizarre, a high-level administration official asking a journalist whether he had greater access to the president’s national security adviser than the official himself had. But it was a constant problem for Aspin.
By the summer of 1993, Aspin was desperately trying to get a handle on Somalia, aware that it was slipping out of control and more concerned about the implications of what was happening than anyone else in the government. But he was running into two problems. The first was the lack of energy and interest in the White House on the issue. The second was that all the doubts about his ability to run the Pentagon had been validated. He was not in command there, decisive and in control, knowing exactly what he wanted to do at all times. For that reason he had been a flawed representative of the Pentagon at meetings at the White House. But no one outside the Pentagon was paying enough attention to the looming crisis in Somalia, which now had a dynamic of its own. More troops to protect the forces already there were requested. That had the smell of Vietnam. So both Aspin and Powell were caught between their fear of an escalation and the need, because of their positions in the chain of command, to ensure the safety of American troops and to honor, if at all possible, the requests of their commanders. It was a nightmare.
In late August, both men reluctantly approved a request from Major General Tom Montgomery for a battalion of Rangers and a Delta Force unit, the Pentagon’s supersecret commandos. The request had been on the table for some time and they had stiff-armed it before, but now they felt they had to comply. It was exactly what Powell hated: mission expansion, slipping toward an open-ended commitment. Like Oakley, Vietnam had taught Powell to distrust nation-building by well-meaning outsiders. He was torn between two impulses. He did not want to expand the Somalia commitment, but his man on the spot wanted more troops and Powell did not feel he could let him down. Powell told friends we were being nibbled to death in Somalia.
Aspin was equally unhappy with the idea of sending the Rangers and the Delta Force. In late August 1993, just before Dick Holbrooke shipped out for his new job as ambassador to Germany, he had dinner with Aspin in Washington. The dinner was supposed to start at 8 P.M. but Aspin arrived two hours late, looking terrible, drained of energy and absolutely gray in the face. “We’ve just made a fateful decision,” he told his friend. “We’re sending the Rangers to Somalia. We’re not going to be able to control them, you know. They’re like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them. They’re going to push right ahead.” The Rangers and the Delta Force became, as Bob Oakley later noted in his book, “a posse with standing authority to go after Aidid and his outlaw band.”6 Aspin was worried and complained to Powell about not being able to get the attention of the other NSC people. In a major speech, Aspin called for a reappraisal of our commitment, suggesting a more narrow, less idealistic policy that reflected a more realistic view of Somalia politics. It was time, he said, to get back to the peace table. That was in direct conflict with what had been coming out of State. But the president and Lake did not seem able to give the administration a clear voice.
Things were reaching a make-or-break point. The UN was going in one direction even as some people in Washington were beginning to hit the brakes, albeit not decisively. Recent assaults on American and UN forces had made the Congress edgier than ever. On September 22, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a continued policy of what was effectively nation-building. By then the U.S. was moving the other way. Warren Christopher, reflecting a changing attitude in the administration, met with Boutros-Ghali and handed him a memo that explained the American belief that there had to be a new emphasis on finding a political settlement. The search for Aidid had to stop. Somehow—how this was going to be done was never quite made clear—Aidid was supposed to leave Somalia and live under house arrest in a third country, a suggestion that Aidid was certain to reject. Boutros-Ghali was not pleased by what he saw as the American withdrawal from his bold vision for Somalia. He said he intended to bring Aidid to justice. Besides, he said, nothing positive could happen there unless the various forces in Somalia were disarmed. He was in the disarmament business, the Americans were not.
In late September, Powell, facing retirement in a few days, attended what would be his final high-level NSC meeting. All the top people were there, except Clinton: Lake, Aspin, and Christopher, plus Stephanopoulos and Gergen. Most of the meeting was about Bosnia. But toward the end, without having cleared what he was saying with Aspin, which was unusual, Powell spoke about Somalia. He said the United States was being sucked in against its wishes and contrary to the original policy limitations. He said the commander there, General Montgomery, had asked for reinforcements—primarily tanks and armored personnel carriers. Powell remembered that both Stephanopoulos and Gergen looked appalled because the last thing they wanted was to enlarge something that was supposed to be getting smaller. They were, after all, feeling more and more heat from the Hill. When the meeting ended, Powell was worried that Aspin might be irritated because he had spoken on his own without clearing his words. Not at all. Aspin felt even more strongly that the policy had to be curtailed. When they got back to Aspin’s office, Powell mentioned Montgomery’s request for armor. “It ain’t gonna happen,” Aspin said. He mentioned the growing pressure from the Hill. It was time to go the other way.
The atmosphere in Mogadishu among the American troops had got uglier and uglier in the summer of 1993. When Bob Oakley eventually returned to Mogadishu, he was appalled by the hatred of the Americans for the Somalis—the view that the only good Somali is a dead Somali. Again it reminded him of Vietnam, where our troops, in their need to survive in such a difficult war, had become even more bitter and spoken of the Vietnamese in the cruelest terms imaginable. Some nation-building, he thought. Three months of escalating combat had completely poisoned the air. Sooner or later there was going to be a tragic confrontation, and on October 3, it took place. It began with a heliborne attempt to capture Aidid and his leadership team at the Olympia Hotel in downtown Mogadishu. A company of Rangers and the elite Delta Force troops took part. So far the Delta Force–Ranger operations had gone well, with no real battles yet, but the elite American troops’ disdain for the Somalis was palpable. The Skinnies or the Sammies, these troops called them. Despite the heat in Mogadishu, most of the American troops, heavily laden with gear, did not bother to take two critical items: their water canteens and their night-vision glasses, which would give them a great technological advantage in the event of night fighting. They had made two amazingly arrogant assumptions. First, there would be so little resistance on this hot day that they would never need their water. Second, they believed they would be out so briefly that they would not need their night-vision glasses. Both assumptions turned out to be wrong.7
The Americans had the most modern of choppers, Black Hawks, and given the limits of Somali weaponry, they were thought to be virtually indestructible. The Somalis had only leftover Soviet RPGs, primitive, bazooka-like weapons that fired grenades. Against a chopper zipping across the horizon at full speed over an open battlefield, the RPGs might not be effective. But this situation, with a chopper hovering over a hotel as it unloaded troops into a downtown Mogadishu landing zone, was entirely different, and the American chopper pilots knew how vulnerable they were even to the relatively primitive weaponry of Aidid’s men. Almost immediately a chopper was shot down by an RPG. The mission changed suddenly from offensive to defensive. Forget about capturing Aidid. Now American troops trapped in an inner city, with their wounded and dead, had to be extricated. American troops, whose greatest asset was their mobility and their capacity to surprise the Somalis, were surrounded. Because of the limits the urban battlefield placed on American technology, with the hovering choppers easy targets in downtown Mogadishu, the battlefield became a horror, one that suddenly favored the Somalis.
Everything continued to go wrong. The Americans on the ground were armed with the latest weapons, and some of the grunts looked like Buck Rogers commandos instead of old-fashioned infantrymen. The technology in the command chopper flying above the battle resembled something out of the Pentagon war room. But the Somalis had their own way of communicating, albeit quite primitive. To alert other Somalis that a battle was taking place, they burned tires where the Americans were now trapped. Thousands of Somalis, all of them, it seemed, armed with AK-47s, poured into the downtown area. They might not have been good soldiers, they might have been poorly trained and inclined to duck down and hold their weapons up to fire away. But some of them were brave, there were a lot of them, and the AK-47 is one of the best infantry weapons of the modern age.
What took place was urban carnage. By the time the battle was over and relief columns were finally able to fight their way through to rescue the trapped units, eighteen Americans had died, at least seventy-four were wounded, and two helicopters had been shot down. Perhaps as many as one thousand Somalis were killed. But it was in all ways an American disaster, and by the end of the day video clips were being broadcast of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu to the cheers of local crowds. This was a major league CNN-era disaster. No sight could have been more bitter for ordinary Americans sitting at home to witness: the body of a dead soldier, who had gone so far away on a humanitarian mission, being dragged through the streets, while the people he was there to help cheered his desecration. It was a tragic example of the fickle quality of foreign policy arrived at because of images, in this case, images of starving people, which can quickly be reversed by a counterimage, that of a dead body being dragged through a foreign capital.
Clinton was furious. How could this happen? he ranted. Translated, that meant how could this happen to me, and he was deadly serious. He was appalled that the United States was being pushed around by what he called “two-bit pricks.”8 There had been, he decided, a shift in policy without his informed approval. That was the key phrase, his informed approval, and in his mind it effectively let him off the hook. Why hadn’t anyone told him about the downside of the policy?9 He believed the people who were supposed to protect him had not protected him. He had been a little careless, more than a little disengaged, in fact, but that did not mean he entirely accepted responsibility for what had happened. His anger needed a target, and gradually it focused on Les Aspin, who had been urging the White House team to clarify the policy and limit the vulnerability of the mission, but whose name, because he had decided to limit the mission just before that tragic day, was on several pieces of paper denying the forces in Somalia tanks in September. Some of Clinton’s anger was aimed at the UN people who had expanded the mission. Some of his anger was privately aimed at Colin Powell in a personal pique. Talking with reporters in later years, Clinton would often harp on Powell’s role in Somalia, that he had signed on to the partial escalation and yet had accepted none of the blame; the president saw this as one of the major injustices of his first term. He felt a lingering irritation with Tony Lake as well, believing that Lake had not adequately protected him on this one. Their relationship, some Clinton insiders thought, was never quite the same.
When it came time for some of the senior military men to respond to questions about Somalia on the Hill, the White House made it clear that it wanted to minimize Lake’s role and emphasize that of Jonathan Howe. For much of the concern immediately following the Mogadishu tragedy was over spin: how to make something so disastrous look a little less like a disaster and how to put as much distance as possible between the White House and that disaster. Clinton heard about it while he was traveling in California, and one of the first questions was not what to do about it but how the president should be perceived as responding to it. Should he return to Washington as a means of showing his concern for something so grave, or should he continue on his scheduled trip? Among the people he spoke to were his political consultants and image makers, Stephanopoulos, pollster Stan Greenberg, David Gergen, and Mandy Grunwald. Stephanopoulos and Greenberg thought he should return to Washington immediately; Tony Lake and Gergen thought he should not, fearing that a sudden return would make the crisis seem more important than it was. Clinton continued his trip through California.
Almost immediately both Aspin and Christopher were dispatched to the Hill, but instead of the difficult, somewhat hostile reception they might normally have expected, it was more like a lynching, a vast number of angry congressmen, regardless of party affiliation, screaming at them. To the people on the Hill, what had happened in Somalia smacked of everything that could possibly go wrong. It was a war in a distant country in which we had no vital interest; and it bore the unenviable imprimatur of the United Nations, a humanitarian exercise that had ended with these people—these savages—killing our boys. Neither Christopher nor Aspin arrived with a policy that day. Instead they suggested that members of the Congress help them find a policy. It was as if they had drawn their own blood so that the circling sharks could have a go at them. What was most noticeable about the meeting, some of the veteran congressmen noted, was that Christopher was content to let Aspin do most of the heavy lifting, and to play on his own, if at all possible, a cameo part.
On October 5, Tony Lake called Bob Oakley and asked him to come to the White House for breakfast first thing in the morning. “Why Tony—I’ve been home for six months,” Oakley answered.10 At the meeting were Lake, Sandy Berger, and Madeleine Albright; they talked for a time in Lake’s office and then went into the Oval Office, where they were joined by the president, the vice president, and Les Aspin as well as military representatives. The meeting went on for six hours. In Mogadishu, both Howe and Major General William Garrison, who had actually given the orders for the raid, wanted to continue the search for Aidid. That was no longer a possibility. Aidid had won the round. At this meeting, continuing the old policy, now fully orphaned, was not discussed. It was all about how to get out, or more accurately, how to cut and run without looking like we were cutting and running, to use Lyndon Johnson’s old phrase. The answer in the end was that we would reinforce our troops—by God, no one could push us around—and then we would get out as quickly as possible.
Somalia was in all ways a fiasco: a tragedy for the families of the young men killed, a tragedy for an uncertain and up until then somewhat boastful administration, a tragedy for the Somalis, whose cause seemed ever more hopeless. It was also a major tragedy for anyone who believed that America had an increased role to play in humanitarian peacekeeping missions. For the vulnerable of the world in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, American help, if it came at all, would come later rather than sooner, and it would come smaller rather than larger. It was also a tragedy for U.S.-UN relations, always fragile, but increasingly important if the United States was to become involved in peacekeeping missions in marginal parts of the world. The Congress hated it. Mitch McConnell, an influential Republican senator, was quoted as saying, “Creeping multilateralism died on the streets of Mogadishu.”11 Robert Byrd, one of the Democratic leaders, said afterward of a Senate resolution demanding an early withdrawal from Somalia, “We put an end to the business of the appearance of the UN leading us around by the nose.”12 Whatever else was going to happen in Bosnia, American military aid would be given more grudgingly, and it almost surely would not include ground troops.
It was for the Clinton team not unlike the Bay of Pigs thirty-two years earlier, a devastating blow for a new administration. But the young Jack Kennedy had been a war hero, confident of his own credentials in dealing with the military, and he had a chance relatively soon to recoup his political losses during the Cuban missile crisis. What had happened in Somalia confirmed the worst suspicions about the Clinton administration not merely to its critics, but also to those sitting on the fence. In addition, it also helped confirm Clinton’s worst suspicions about foreign policy. It was a tricky, murky business, outside the reach of domestic presidential control, with a greater possibility for negatives than positives, out of which relatively little good would come.
Someone had to pay the piper, and in this case it was Les Aspin, who had been more outspoken about Somalia than anyone else at a high level. He went overboard two months later. The president decided to cast him off, not just because of Somalia, but also because of constant reports that the Pentagon was not being run as it should. Aspin fought back, trying to hold on to his job, and he argued, not without some justification, that Somalia was an unfair test. Clinton wavered. But the private soundings from within the administration and from friends who knew the Pentagon were too loud. Aspin was never going to be the tough, cool administrator needed to run that shop.
Vernon Jordan, who had become Clinton’s closest adviser, someone more powerful than ever because he did not actually work for the president and was not in the chain of command, had cautioned Clinton not to change his mind. Aspin, Jordan said, as admirable a person as he might be, was not the right man for the job, and Clinton had to follow through. Jordan used a biblical quote to stiffen the president’s spine: “Woe be unto him who puts his hand upon the plow and turns back.” A subsequent Senate investigation would fasten on the failure to send the tanks and armored personnel carriers to Somalia, which was laid at Aspin’s door. That, rather than the vagueness and drift in the administration’s policy, became the hook for the blame.
But Clinton did not escape unscathed. For a president already shaky in his relationship with the military, it was a grave setback. He had been weak before the disaster took place, and now he was weaker still. The domestic implications were frightening. If it had happened in an election year, it could have cost a sitting president reelection. The senior military, already distrustful of the Clinton administration, would become even more distrustful after Somalia. It was a very bad stumble that the administration could ill afford. Colin Powell had retired two days before the events in Mogadishu, but the Powell Doctrine lived on—Somalia was ammo for it. Dick Holbrooke eventually came up with a name for the syndrome that followed the debacle—Vietmalia, combining Vietnam and Somalia. By that he meant a situation where a great power gets involved in some foreign country where American security is not involved. Because support for the policy is so fragile, and because even the policy makers have considerable doubts about what they are doing, the loss of just a few lives, and the televising of a few funerals, can spell the end of the policy.
The first year ended badly for the Clinton national security team. None of the principals had emerged as a person to be reckoned with. Aspin had been selected to take the fall for the Somalia disaster. But there was another serious stumble to come in the choice of Aspin’s successor. Some people wanted Bill Perry, an Aspin deputy, a man who knew a great deal about high technology and was said to be an excellent administrator. Perry, however, was a relatively low-profile figure in Washington. In contrast, Bobby Ray Inman, a former high-ranking CIA official, was exceptionally well-known, had backing across party lines, and was widely admired in some parts of the media. In recent years he had been working in Austin, Texas, in the world of high technology, trying to create a consortium of American companies to compete with the Japanese, who were less burdened by antimonopoly laws.
The idea of getting someone of a higher profile with great bipartisan connections, who would, at the least, sail through the Senate confirmation hearings, appealed greatly to Clinton. He and his people quickly went after Inman, but it was hard to tell whether Inman really wanted the job. He seemed to think he was doing the country a favor by coming back from the private sector to serve. In one notable public appearance, he had all but implied that rather than the president vetting him, he had vetted the president and found him worthy. Vernon Jordan, briefing Inman for his media moment before he met the press, found him unwilling to resign from the Bohemian Grove, the California establishment enclave that was a rare surviving redoubt of exclusionary male clubbery. Eventually a compromise of sorts was worked out, albeit a rather unsatisfactory one. Inman would resign from the club and be readmitted when he left government service. But Inman, of his own volition, soon withdrew his name from consideration at Defense, perhaps because he felt that the screening process, messy and public as it had become in recent years, was an intrusion into his privacy. As a result Bill Perry was chosen, probably the person who should have been picked in the first place, and who would become by general acclaim the most accomplished member of the Clinton national security team in the first term.