USA Foreign Policy and Intervention Essay Example for Free

USA Foreign Policy and Intervention Essay During the first half of the 1990s, many intervention operations were launched, including in Somalia. In general, their main aim of intervention in Somalia was to alleviate the conflict. Notwithstanding, the instruments that were used to achieve this goal were mainly military. The reaction of the Western military establishment, asked to intervene in armed conflicts in the developing world, has been to look at familiar concepts used in military training and operations (Deutsch 12). It has been argued that their outlook on armed conflict, dominated by Cold War inter-state war thinking, was at the heart of the many difficulties the intervening states faced in these interventions. What has gone wrong in Somalia, what could have been done differently and how to change approach? Answers to these problems range from instituting a different emphasis in the training of soldiers, to reform of the United Nations to deal with armed conflicts. Background and Overview At the beginning of 1992, Mohammed Siad Barre, who had ruled Somalia for two decades, was overthrown. At this time civil war and starvation grasped Somalia. In January of 1992, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution. This resolution called to cease fire a political settlement of the conflict (Duyvesteyn 78). In March this cease-fire went into effect. However, already by August â€Å"as many as 1. 5 million of an estimated Somali population of 6 million were threatened with starvation, with approximately 300,000 Somalis already having died, including roughly 25 percent of all children under the age of five† (Duyvesteyn 80). In April, the Security Council created a modest military operation. However, negotiations with Somali factions detained the implementation of the operation. On July 27, the Security Council voted to airlift food to Somalia, and on August 12 the U. N. announced plans to send 500 troops to protect the international relief effort. On August 14, the White House announced that the United States would take charge of the airlift (Duyvesteyn 90). The 500 troops arrived in September—â€Å"with the support of four U. S. warships carrying 2,100 Marines†Ã¢â‚¬â€but proved unable to do much to protect the relief effort (Duyvesteyn 78). In November, U. N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared the Security Council that the relief measures were not working. On November 26, the Bush administration decided that the United States to send troops to Somalia. For this the Security Council had to pass an authorizing resolution. On December 3 the Security Council passed the resolution. On October 3-4, 1993, eighteen U. S. soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in a fierce firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia. Their deaths were the direct result of U. S. leadership in a series of United Nations -sanctioned military interventions in Somalia that. With the Cable News Network (CNN) providing almost instantaneous transmission to audiences in the U. S. and abroad, the victorious Somali forces not only paraded a captured U. S. helicopter pilot, Corporal William Durant, through the streets of Mogadishu, but also dragged the naked corpse of a U. S. soldier past mobs of Somali citizens who vented their anger by spitting on, stoning, and kicking the body (Freidman 2). These media images triggered a firestorm of public debate that asked, in the words of one journalist: â€Å"How did an operation that began with American soldiers feeding starving Somalis wind up with an American soldiers corpse being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by Somalis starving only for revenge? † The visceral response of the American public was to demand an immediate withdrawal of U. S. military forces. â€Å"Its really very simple,† explained Tony Bright, an emergency health care administrator who captured the public wave of protest against any further U. S. involvement in Somalia. â€Å"If I have to choose between pictures of starving Somalian babies or dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, well, I dont want to see any more dead Americans. Sorry. Its time to bring the boys home† (Ayres 3). The Somalia case presents a splendid opportunity to examine U. S. decision making in the post-cold war period. The implementation of Operation Restore Hope constituted the first time that the U. S. had supported a peacemaking (as opposed to a peacekeeping) operation under the auspices of the U. N. and without the approval of the sovereign government of the target country. The case is also unique in that the U. S. experience had a negative impact on the way U. S. policy makers perceived the viability of future U. S. involvement in peacemaking operations in Africa and the other regions of the Third World, most notably the U. S. ability to resolve ethnic strife and the practicality of launching joint U. S. -U. N. military operations. High-Level Neglect in the Bush Administration The first phase of U. S. policy lasted from January 1991 to December 1992. In this phase presidential and congressional attention focused mainly on the Gulf War. This phase involved leadership from the traditional foreign policy bureaucracy, especially the State Departments Africa Bureau. The decline of cold war tensions ensured that neither the Somali civil war nor the impending overthrow of the Siad regime attracted the ongoing attention of the White House, despite the fact that President Bush had to authorize the emergency evacuation of U. S. embassy personnel in Mogadishu. Humanitarian Crisis and Military Intervention under Bush In the late fall of 1992, the second phase of U. S. policy began. It involved high-level attention to what was perceived to be an accelerating crisis in Somalia. Images of a humanitarian disaster displayed daily in practically every media outlet. Congressional and public criticism was increasing. White House attention focused on Somalia shortly after the 1992 election. As a consequence of high-level White House reviews in November 1992, President Bush and his top advisers devised a plan to deal with the events in Somalia. In sharp contrast to the limited objectives associated with Operation Provide Relief, Bush announced on December 4, 1992, that his administration was prepared to lead a massive multilateral military operation to â€Å"create a secure environment† for the distribution of famine relief aid. Five days later the first contingent of U. S. troops led by three teams of navy SEALS (sea-air-land commandos) landed on the beaches of Mogadishu and secured the airport and the port. The U. S. military operation popularly was referred to as Operation Restore Hope and known in U. N. circles as the United Task Force (UNITAF). The operation was sanctioned by U. N. Security Council Resolution 794. In the weeks that followed, over 38,000 foreign troops from twenty countries (including approximately 25,000 U. S. military personnel) occupied various cities and towns throughout central and southern Somalia. The troops began the task of opening food supply routes, as well as creating distribution networks. The UNITAF ground forces were under the direct command of Lieutenant General Robert Johnston, chief of staff to General Norman Schwarzkopf during Operation Desert Storm, who reported to General Joseph P. Hoar, commander of the U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM) (Scott 65).