| What a difference a day makes. On Oct. 3, 1993, 18 U.S. servicemen were killed and 78 were wounded by militiamen in Somalia. For that reason, the 1992-95 Somalia peace mission came to symbolize failure, even though the early stages of the intervention saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The legacy of Oct. 3 hamstrung the world's only superpower, severely undercut the United Nations' ability to share the burden of actions in America's own interest, and helped destabilize Africa. Why? We learned the wrong lesson from an episode that needn't have happened.
The initial errors add up to mismanagement. Almost casually, the brand-new Clinton administration early in 1993 expanded the original humanitarian mandate in Somalia to include nationwide policing and governance—then replaced the mission commanders. That wasted crucial on-the-ground judgment, cultural experience and relationships built up over months. Washington set up more complex command arrangements and simultaneously cut troop strength. All this invited a test of wills between foreign forces and local militias. It was a formula for failure.
A new and debilitating doctrine was born. Ever since Mogadishu, the view has been that the United States won't tolerate casualties in humanitarian operations. This is highly debatable and has never been put to a serious test. Nonetheless, beginning a few days after the fatal firefight, when Washington made it clear to U.S. commanders there that there should be no further U.S. casualties, American policymakers and pundits have operated on that premise. Leaders from both parties have repeated the mantra of "no casualties." This led directly to the "immaculate coercion" guidance of our Kosovo air war, a doctrine that accepts open-ended local casualties in return for zero American losses. Thugs and militant warlords the world over have known since Somalia that we are prepared to fight "our" wars, but not to get involved in scenarios that entail a measure of combat risk.
Somalia also turned Washington callously hypocritical about the United Nations. An administration that came into office promoting "assertive multilateralism" did a 180-degree turn. Washington made the United Nations the scapegoat for actions that flowed from decisions of the U.N. Security Council—even though that body is dominated by Washington. It served the purposes of both the Clinton administration and of congressional Republicans to make the United Nations take the rap for their own policy failures. This is not to say that U.N.-led operations are capable of Chapter VII peace enforcement, but since Somalia, leaders in both parties have joined in a bidding war to blame the United Nations whenever its operations and missions fall short. Then they guarantee future "failure" by withholding critical support from those more limited operations that the United Nations can handle.
Africa has suffered most from this incoherence. Before Somalia, Washington led the search for peaceful solutions and effective conflict management in the world's most troubled region. Barely six months later, the United States forced the United Nations out of Rwanda, foreclosing actions that might have warded off the worst genocide since Nazi Germany. Next, narrowly circumscribed relief guidelines created massive refugee camps in eastern Congo, without separating innocent civilians from the genocidal thugs who had caused the mayhem in the first place.
The Rwandan catastrophe triggered a cycle of warfare in much of central Africa. First came Laurent Kabila's military overthrow of the Mobutu regime in former Zaire. That rebellion began with Rwanda's dispersal of militant Hutu militias from the border camps and ended in a military campaign joined by six neighbors in 1996-97. This triggered a devastating civil war in the neighboring, smaller Congo Republic, a conflict in which Washington has doggedly blocked any meaningful U.N. action. When Kabila's shaky coalition fell apart and his ex-allies went into rebellion against him in mid-1998, the cancer of unmanaged conflict repolarized neighboring African states. Angola fell back into civil war last year. The result is an ongoing human tragedy.
Like the effect of butterfly wings in chaos theory, Somalia shows how events in a place of little or no apparent strategic interest can have enduring effects. The real lesson is not that Washington must stay out of such conflicts in the world's strategic slums. It is that when the United States decides it must act, it should act competently.
CHET CROCKER is James R. Schlesinger professor of strategic studies at Georgetown University. He served as assistant secretary of State for African affairs in the Reagan administration where he was the architect of the "constructive engagement" policy with SouthAfrica's apartheid government.© 1999 Newsweek, Inc.
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