Analysis applying Hume's criteria to Bush/Iraq here --
dailykosNational Review, November 1, 1993During the closing weeks of the Bush Administration, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger quietly flew to New York to confer with UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali. Eagleburger had to make two trips before Boutros-Ghali got the message, which was that the 28,000 U.S. troops Mr. Bush was sending to Somalia would be there only as long as it took to get relief supplies flowing to starving Somalis.
The Secretary General had a more ambitious mission in mind. He wanted the U.S., as one senior Bush aide recalls, "to stick around until the UN had the whole thing stabilized." Mr. Bush, however, was keen to have the U.S. forces out by inauguration day. While Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell had warned him that might be impossible,
Mr. Bush was very clear about keeping the mission focused and brief. "The point is," said the Bush aide, "we knew what we were not going to do."
As things have turned out, what the Bush Administration knew it was not going to do is precisely what the Clinton Administration was gradually lured into doing. It is what led to the disastrous October 3 raid in which 17 Americans were killed or fatally wounded and which turned public opinion against Mr. Clinton more emphatically than anything else in his Presidency.
It was typical of Mr. Bush that he had sent a broad force to accomplish a narrow mission in a short time. His experience under a series of Republican Presidents had left him with strong views about the use of military force. The central conviction of his Presidency was that American power was a force for good in the world and that a President should not shrink from applying it. However,
Mr. Bush agreed with General Powell that the amount of force used should be not merely adequate, but overwhelming. That, he believed, made for short missions with success guaranteed and casualties minimized. It is a lesson that Mr. Clinton only now seems to be learning. The day after the debacle in Mogadishu, he said ruefully, "None of this happened when we had 28,000 people there."
Mr. Bush also believed in defining missions clearly, and narrowly. Nobody in the Bush Administration had forgotten the 1983 Marine-barracks bombing in Beirut,
after which the Reagan Administration had difficulty explaining what the Marines had been doing there. Thus Mr. Bush's determination during the Gulf War to go only as far as the UN resolutions authorized. Mr. Bush had also tried to keep the focus of his earlier Panama invasion narrow, insisting that catching Manuel Noriega was secondary to liberating the country. But the Noriega manhunt turned out to be enough of a cliffhanger that Mr. Bush and General Powell considered it
proof of the danger of having U.S. forces play sheriff, the very thing that Mr. Clinton's shrunken U.S. force in Somalia ended up doing in trying to capture the elusive General Aidid.
The failure to apply the military doctrines of his predecessor only partly explains how Mr. Clinton came to grief in Somalia.
Equally important was his Administration's enchantment with the do-good potential In one of the most spectacular photo-ops of his Presidency, Mr. Clinton, surrounded by a large contingent of U.S. soldiers in their desert fatigues, walked the length of the South Lawn toward the waiting cameras and microphones. "One can now envision a day when Somalia will be reconstructed as a functioning civil society." That, of course, was the nation-building cause for which Mr. Boutros-Ghali had failed six months earlier to enlist the United States. Eventually he would succeed.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
