"These people [the incumbent administration] ran on responsibility, but as soon as you scratch them, they go straight to blame," Clinton said. "Now, you know, I didn't blame his father for Somalia when we had that awful day memorialized in Black Hawk Down. I didn't do that."
In that outburst to a TV reporter last week, Clinton did more than breach the tradition recent presidents have maintained of refraining from criticizing their successors. Once again, he lied.
The intentional inaccuracy in that statement, its arrogant premise that the American public is indifferent to the facts, is breathtaking even for an of-the-cuff remark by this particular former president.
Do you think that informed Americans have forgotten just why it was that the Somalia intervention ended up in disaster in October 1993, 10 months after it began? Let us review the facts.
As everyone knows, the United States first became enmeshed in the disintegration of Somalia in January 1991, when the collapse of central authority left the east African country in a state of anarchy and bloodshed between rival ethnic factions. On the eve of the Persian Gulf War, the Bush I administration was forced to send in a Marine unit to rescue U.S. and Western diplomats. By August 1992, over 300,000 Somalis had died of starvation, and another 1.5-2 million were suffering from dangerous levels of malnutrition caused by a famine that was the direct result of the clan warfare.
Initially unwilling to send U.S. troops into what many officials thought was a hopeless situation, the Bush I administration relented in August 1992 by organizing "Operation Provide Relief," a limited aerial food supply mission staged out of nearby Kenya to isolated parts of Somalia.
Then-Democratic Presidential nominee Bill Clinton applauded the move.
Two months later, when it became clear that the limited operation was having little overall effect on the famine, President George H.W. Bush - who had just lost to Clinton in the 1992 presidential election, but who still had six weeks left in office - reversed himself, and on Dec. 9, 1992, ordered 30,000 Marines and Army soldiers into Somalia under "Operation Restore Hope" to seize key ports and airfields to effect food deliveries. But the president, in a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali, issued a stern condition:
"I want to emphasize that the mission of the [U.S.-led] coalition is limited and specific: to create security conditions which will permit the feeding of the starving Somali people and allow the transfer of this security function to the U.N. peacekeeping force."
President-elect Bill Clinton warmly applauded this new intervention: "I have felt for a long time that we could do more in Somalia," Clinton said. "I think it is high time. I'm encouraged, and I applaud the initiative of President [G.H.W.] Bush and his administration."
Here's what happened next: Boutrous-Ghali, the U.N. secretary-general, wanted to do more than deliver food. He wanted to expand and widen the mission to include general disarmament of the Somali warlords, wide pacification efforts throughout Somalia, and an unspecified number of other "nation-building" projects. The Pentagon strongly resisted such "mission creep" and insisted that the operation remain limited in its focus.
That was difficult enough in the face of a slow but steady resumption of clan warfare that required U.S. troops to take more aggressive force-protection and security measures for their own safety and that of civilian relief workers. But shortly before the Bush administration left office on Jan. 21, 1993, the American command in Somalia signaled its commitment to the limited mission by staging a symbolic withdrawal of several hundred Marines as a prelude to a full pullout scheduled for several months later.
Then, Bill Clinton became president of the United States.
Two months after becoming the commander-in-chief, Clinton totally reversed his predecessor's insistence that U.S. military personnel would only be involved in a strictly focused and limited operation. On March 26, 1993, the new administration pressed the U.N. Security Council to adopt Resolution 814, which called on the U.N. secretary-general's personal representative (retired U.S. Navy Adm. Jonathan Howe) "to assume responsibility for the consolidation, expansion and maintenance of a secure environment throughout Somalia (italics added)."
That wasn't "mission creep." That was mission stampede. And the United States had willfully surrendered any control over the operation to the United Nations.
As the foreign policy chief of an administration ignorant of military realities yet enamored of multi-national diplomacy and peacekeeping operations, then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher boasted in June 1993, "We have phased out the American-led mission to Somalia, and taken the lead in passing responsibility to a United Nations peacekeeping force …. "
The force left in Somalia to carry out this ambiguously-defined and open-ended commitment comprised 27,000 U.N. soldiers, including 4,000 U.S. logistical personnel and a "quick reaction" force of 1,000 soldiers - later augmented by U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos - charged with carrying out any combat missions that might come along. Christopher said nothing about the fact that it was American soldiers who would have to deal with the consequences of this radical new policy.
And, of course, with political controversy growing at home in Congress over the "new" Somalia mission, then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Clinton's affable and incompetent Pentagon chief, refused (1) to allow an expansion in the number of combat troops as violence surged in the summer of 1993, (2) declined the ground force commander's request for M1A1 tanks, M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and AC-130 gunships, but (3) insisting that American commandos continue their attempts to seize Somali clan leader Mohammed Farah Aideed and his top lieutenants, while (4) the administration explored ways to negotiate with those same warlords.
And, of course, the Clinton administration had no inkling that a Saudi Arabian terrorist named Osama bin Laden had already dispatched operatives into Somalia to train Aideed's gunmen in ambush tactics that they would later use against Americans.
That, Mr. Clinton, is why on Oct. 3, 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers were killed and another 77 injured in the "Battle of the Black Sea" in Mogadishu, made famous, as you correctly noted, in the book and movie, Black Hawk Down.
One caveat is justified: There were no easy choices once the clan warfare resumed in early 1993, and Aideed must be blamed for inflaming the situation when he ordered his fighters to ambush and kill several dozen Pakistani peacekeeping soldiers in June 1993. Had President Bush the elder still been in office, he would have had to confront the same difficult decisions that his successor did.
But the bottom line remains: The decisions were Clinton's, and the resulting debacle happened as a result of his actions (and inactions).
As historians Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan described it in their account of Clinton administration foreign policy, While America Sleeps (St. Martin's Griffin, New York), Clinton "undertook a … solution [to Somalia] but provided neither the commitment nor the means to achieve it and fled the scene when the first reverse and the first casualties caused a storm of protest at home."
Mr. Clinton was indeed correct in the aftermath of the Somalia debacle not to blame President George W. Bush's father for the deadly firefight in Mogadishu. That's because the facts unequivocally dictated that the fault for Black Hawk Down should be laid directly at Clinton's own feet, and no one else's.
