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Washington's repeated attempts to bring peace to Somalia with state-building initiatives have failed, even backfired. It should renounce political intervention and encourage local development without trying to improve governance
ReadAs Washington ponders how long to stay in Iraq, it would do well to remember the limited impact of the United States' withdrawal from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s, and Somalia in the 1990s.
ReadTwo new books recognize that the United Nations cannot handle the burdens recently thrust upon it, but only one sees the need to set more realistic goals.
ReadDespite disagreements over troops in Bosnia, all sides want an exit strategy. That concept, however, dating back only to the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from Somalia, has nothing to do with military requirements and everything to do with post-Cold War politics. Exit strategies harm a mission's chances of success, and had they been required the United States would not have defended the armistice after the Korean War, kept the peace on the Sinai Peninsula after Camp David, or undertaken NATO. The real question is not when American troops will be out, but why they are going in.
ReadThe intervention in Somalia was not an abject failure; an estimated 100,000 lives were saved. But its mismanagement should be an object lesson for peacekeepers in Bosnia and on other such missions. No large intervention, military or humanitarian, can remain neutral or assuredly brief in a strife-torn failed state. Nation-building, the rebuilding of a state's basic civil institutions, is required in fashioning a self-sustaining body politic out of anarchy. In the future, the United States, the United Nations, and other intervenors should be able to declare a state "bankrupt" and go in to restore civic order and foster reconciliation.
ReadThe mistakes of the U.S. intervention in Somalia should not obscure its successes: a humanitarian tragedy was averted, and the political landscape was improved.
ReadPresident Clinton has tried to pursue a foreign policy agenda even more ambitious than his predecessor's. But as international realities and domestic priorities become clear, he has been forced to retreat in area after area of policy. The resulting flips and flops of policy toward Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, North Korea, and China have undermined U.S. credibility. But more important, they risk making Americans turn inward in dismay, forsaking the prudent internationalism that has characterized American foreign policy since World War II. Let us abandon a kind of leadership we are not prepared to exercise on behalf of a world order the price of which we have no intention of paying.
ReadThe Bush administration set out to clear relief channels and avert mass starvation in Somalia, resisting a more ambitious U.N. agenda. But the Clinton administration embarked on "nation-building" and "assertive multilateralism." The resulting violence and embarrassment cast doubt on the United Nations' competence in peaceenforcement and "nation-building."
Read"The drama of military intervention and the media's fixation on looters and 'warlords' now threaten to obscure the fact that, prior to late 1992, the international response to Somalia's long agony was indeed abject failure." Bungled, halfhearted efforts by U.N. diplomats, relief agencies and Security Council members contributed to the very circumstances of anarchy and violence that prompted the invasion by 21,000 U.S. Marines of the famine- and war-riven nation. International success in Somalia now depends on fashioning a more forceful U.N. presence and a lasting peace.
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