Sources of Humanitarian Intervention:

Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy

in the U.S. Decisions on Somalia and Bosnia

Jon Western

On November 21, 1992, Gen. Colin Powell’s chief deputy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. David Jeremiah, stunned a National Security Council Deputies Committee meeting on Somalia by announcing, “If you think U.S. forces are needed, we can do the job.”[1] Four days later President George Bush decided U.S. forces were needed. On December 9, 1992, 1,300 U.S. Marines forces 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 expected that President Bush or his top political and military advisers would support a major U.S. humanitarian mission to Somalia.[2] 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 interventions in Somalia, Liberia, Bosnia, and elsewhere.[3] None of these conflicts was relevant to U.S. vital interests.[4] They were simply humanitarian tragedies.

With respect to Somalia, senior Bush administration and military officials argued repeatedly throughout most of 1992 that the deeply historic inter-clan conflicts that permeated Somalia would make any military intervention extraordinarily risky. The basic position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the senior White House staff was that military force would not be able to protect itself or the distribution of humanitarian relief because the nature of the conflict made it virtually impossible to distinguish friend from enemy or civilian from combatant. In short, the administration argued, roaming armed bandits fueled by ancient hatreds and intermingled with the civilian population was a recipe for disaster.

Yet, after nearly a year of extensive opposition to the use of American military force in Somalia, in November 1992 President Bush, with the firm support of all of his key advisors – including General Powell -- decided to launch a massive U.S. military intervention in Somalia. Why did the Joint Chiefs of Staff reverse its estimates from July 1992 that Somalia was a “bottomless pit” to its November proclamation that “we can do the job?” Nothing in that time period changed the political, military, or logistical factors on the ground. With the deaths of 300,000 Somalis by the summer of 1992, the crisis had long before reached a critical humanitarian mass. What explains the sudden change of heart within the Bush Administration on Somalia?

This article re-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 a short explanation of my argument. I then provide a detailed case study of the intervention decision that identifies the influence of competing foreign policy beliefs, information resources, and advocacy on the ultimate decision. Within this context, two other variables played an interesting role in the intervention decision: the influence of the 1992 presidential election and the conflict in Bosnia. I conclude with a discussion of lessons of this case for the development of future research on why the United States intervenes in some instances and not in others.

Conventional Views

Two views tend dominate the conventional understanding as to why the United States intervened in Somalia: 1) the CNN-effect and 2) President Bush’s moral indignation and the do-ability of the mission. Neither of these views, however, stands up to analytical scrutiny.

THE CNN-EFFECT

Perhaps the most common explanation for the U.S. intervention is that vivid mages of starving children on daily news broadcasts outraged not only the American public, but also President Bush and his key military advisors. The general impression is that these graphic pictures generated moral outrage and intense political pressure on the Bush Administration to respond aggressively to end the massive starvation. In short, “CNN got us into Somalia, and CNN got us out.”[5]

Despite the prevailing collective memory of these graphic images, Warren Strobel has demonstrated that most of the broadcast coverage of the Somali famine actually followed rather than preceded the U.S. policy decisions.[6] For example, Strobel found that nightly evening news broadcasts of Somalia were largely absent prior to President Bush’s August 12, 1992 decision to begin U.S. airlifts into Somalia. In the immediate aftermath of that decision, the media extensively covered the famine, but only for a relatively short four-week time period. By mid-September 1992 that coverage dissipated dramatically. And in the weeks running up to the President’s November 25 decision to intervene, Strobel’s findings suggest that the story was largely absent in the American press. Only after the November 25 decision by President Bush did the media again step up its coverage of the Somalia crisis.[7]

MORAL OUTRAGE AND A DO-ABLE MISSION

A second conventional explanation for the U.S. intervention suggests that by November 1992, the humanitarian situation simply had become morally untenable. According to this view, President Bush and his key military advisors were morally outraged by the increasing reports of massive starvation. By mid-November, they concluded that the situation was dire; that only the United States possessed the capabilities to off-set the enormous humanitarian crisis; and that Somalia was a case where the mission of providing security for humanitarian relief was well-defined and do-able.[8] Proponents of this view argue that Somalia was a case that fit most of the criteria of the Powell Doctrine: 1) the deployment was done with overwhelming force; 2) there were clearly defined political and military objectives; 3) the mission was do-able; and 4) there was widespread public and Congressional support.[9]

This argument, however, is unsatisfactory on several points. 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 Somalia had been declared the world’s worst humanitarian emergency.[10] In fact, as early as January 1992, the Assistant Director of USAID, Andrew Natsios, began holding regular press conferences to highlight the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.[11] By early summer, at least 300,000 civilians had already died and in July the International Committee of the Red Cross re-iterated its six-month old estimates that 95 percent of the population of Somalia was malnourished and 70 percent in imminent danger of death by starvation.[12] Virtually all available evidence suggests that the situation had become untenable long before November 21.

Second, contrary to the public statements by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President at the time of the decision, the precise mission was not well-defined -- other than a rhetorical “humanitarian mission.”[13] The President announced that 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 simply had not been addressed at the time of President Bush’s decision to intervene was whether or not U.S. forces would need to disarm the tens of thousands of roaming armed bandits who were at the heart of the security challenge.[14] In fact, at the time of the President’s decision, several military commanders feared that the U.S. deployment might lead to an escalation of violence that could quickly engulf the U.S. forces.[15] According to one senior Pentagon official, “if the Somali warlords did not back down quickly as was hoped, the number of troops required to continue the operation could add up in a hurry.”[16]

The final major critique of the argument that Somalia was do-able is that throughout most of 1992 the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the Bush Administration explicitly argued that Somalia was not do-able. For more than a year before the intervention, the Joint Chiefs consistently argued that humanitarian emergencies, by their nature, were political events in which one side or another would balk at international assistance. This meant that intervention would ultimately require taking sides -- and this inevitably would create a threat to U.S. forces. Corresponding to this view, the Joint Chiefs argued that intervention in Somalia would be risky. In its opposition to developing contingency plans for intervention in the spring and early summer of 1992, the Joint Chiefs argued at interagency meetings that the nature of the conflict in Somalia was fueled by age-old tribal animosities; that the tribal combatants were heavily armed and indistinguishable from civilian populations and would make U.S. force protection virtually impossible; that the desert terrain, while open, would create enormous operational and tactical difficulties (because of dusty conditions) for close air support for troops on the ground.[17] Furthermore, there was a consensus among senior officials that the crisis in Somalia was, at core, a political issue that could not be readily resolved with the use of U.S. military forces.[18] The Joint Chiefs argued vigorously that the U.S. military was not well suited for the type of operation that would be needed to provide humanitarian relief to those in need.

The Argument in Brief: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy

Why then did President Bush and General Powell agree to deploy U.S. combat forces on a mission with no clear exit strategy, no clearly defined mission, and no firm assurances of U.S. public support before the decision was made? 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 was the result of 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 officer corps, believed that U.S. military intervention should be reserved for those isolated cases when U.S. strategic vital material interests were directly threatened. Throughout 1991 and most of 1992 they opposed any form of U.S. military involvement in Somalia or Bosnia – and other humanitarian crises. The central challenge to selective engagers came from liberal humanitarianists who filled the ranks of humanitarian and human rights non-governmental organizations and who supported military intervention to provide humanitarian relief to aggrieved populations and to stop or prevent atrocities perpetrated against civilians.

Initially, selective engagers, with their asymmetric advantages on information and executive branch political mobilization resources, were able to frame both Somalia and Bosnia as conflicts fueled by ancient tribal and ethnic hatreds about which the United States could do little. With this portrayal of the conflict, the Bush administration was successful in tempering calls for greater U.S. involvement. However, as both crises persisted into the late summer and fall of 1992, liberal humanitarianists and the media began acquiring their own independent information about the conflicts. In both cases, they began to challenge the selective engagers framing of each crisis that the conflicts were fueled by bottom-up ancient tribal hatreds. Instead, liberals and the media began re-framing the conflicts as ones of sinister elite manipulation in which the violence against civilians was part of highly coordinated campaigns to advance narrow political ambitions of ruthless elites. 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 do something in both Somalia and Bosnia. As this political pressure intensified, Bill Clinton won the presidential election on November 8. 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 American 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 concluded that if the United States was going to intervene in response to a humanitarian crisis, it would be in Somalia and not Bosnia. Somalia was easier.

Somalia and Bosnia – 1992

The following section examines the U.S. decision to intervene in Somalia in 1992 and the decision not to intervene in Bosnia. 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 reflected 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 importance to the United States.[19] For selective engagers, the dissolution of Yugoslavia was of concern to the extent that unleashed ancient ethnic hatreds might create regional instability. The prudent choice in Yugoslavia -- 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 1991 and Bosnia in March 1992, the administration devoted its diplomatic energies to strategies to forestall the collapse of the Yugoslav federation. Once that violence erupted the policy shifted from prevention to containment.[20]

In Somalia, U.S. policy was similarly focused.[21] During the Cold War, the United States contributed vast sums to Somali leader 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 influence and competition, U.S. contributions to Barre were no longer seen as imperative to U.S. geostrategic interests. Without the financial backing of the United States to prop up Barre’s corrupt regime, Somalia quickly disintegrated into inter-ethnic civil conflict. 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’s position throughout much of 1991 and most of 1992 was that the crisis was an internal Somali problem. The Somali leaders needed to resolve the crisis themselves.[22]

INITIAL INFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA ADVANTAGES

Prior to the war in Bosnia, few Americans and few foreign policy elites focused on Bosnia.[23] To the extent that attention was paid to the crisis during the initial months of violence, the widely accepted view was that presented by selective engagers in the Bush administration. The administration criticized the Serb leadership in Belgrade for the violence and worked diplomatically to isolate Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, but it nonetheless firmly believed and publicly emphasized that the conflict was the inevitable consequence of intractable and primordial hatreds that were unleashed with the collapse of the tight communist control.[24] On numerous occasions, President Bush and his advisers equated Bosnia as rooted in ethnic hatreds that went back hundreds of years. Based on this analysis of the conflict, the administration argued publicly that the prudent policy was to refrain from involvement in a situation that could only lead to a Vietnam-style quagmire for the United States.[25] Consequently, most Americans came to perceive Bosnia as the tragic but inevitable resurrection of ancient hatreds. The public supported the administration’s limited policy to contain the conflict from spreading to areas that were of geostrategic interest to the United States – in particular to Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria.[26]

Initially, no one was in a position to critically challenge the administration’s paradigmatic framing of the conflict. In the spring of 1992, no clear precedent had been set for post-Cold War humanitarian interventions, and because Yugoslavia had been a relatively advanced economic and political society during the Cold War, very few nongovernmental humanitarian organizations had any presence or experience in the former Yugoslavia.[27] Furthermore, because only a few members of Congress had much interest in or understanding of events in Yugoslavia, most deferred to the administration resources and expertise on the conflict. 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 on which to mobilize public and political opposition to the Bush administration’s policies on Bosnia.

For their part, the U.S. media also began to focus on the war in Bosnia with little regional expertise. Few of the major news organizations had experienced correspondents on the ground.[28] When the war in Croatia broke out in June 1991, journalists scrambled to cover the story.[29] Most stories written and broadcast during the conflict in Croatia reinforced the view that the violent nationalist hatreds permeated all of the former Yugoslavia and were the inevitable result of the collapse of strong authoritarian rule. Furthermore, as early as the fall of 1991, American reporters and administration officials began warning that although the violence in Croatia was terrible, conditions in the more ethnically diverse Bosnia would be much worse. Consequently, when violence erupted in Bosnia in March 1992, there was widespread acceptance, at least initially, among journalists that the conflict there was simply a further manifestation of the unchecked nationalist hatreds that had been widely predicted.[30]