A Nasty Little War

THE BLOODY, horrible events in Somalia offer a sobering reminder that “peacemaking” is but the naïf’s name for war. The revolting spectacle of American corpses being dragged about the streets of Mogadishu, and the reality of a dozen American deaths, brought home this simple thought. Several weeks earlier, reports of American helicopters spraying twenty-millimeter cannon shells into a Somali mob that included grenade-tossing women and children prompted some senators to ask—too late—why we are in Somalia and when we should leave. Now, at any rate, the Administration will have to rethink its policy there. But policy may be too generous a term for the blend of sentimentality, wishful thinking, and absent-mindedness that has led us into a nasty little war.

Some have argued that the Somalia fiasco resulted from the expansion of a feasible and narrowly humanitarian mission of famine relief into something far more ambitious and far less tractable. Such a case would vindicate the burst of altruism that led the Bush Administration to throw 25,000 troops into the Horn of Africa without a trace of national interest to justify their action. Such excuses, however, fail to exculpate President Bush. Did he or his former Cabinet members publicly declaim against the strategic error of an expanded mission this spring? And does not his former deputy national-security advisor, Admiral Jonathan Howe, serve as the UN representative in Somalia?

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Eliot A. Cohen

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THE BLOODY, horrible events in Somalia offer a sobering reminder that “peacemaking” is but the naïf’s name for war. The revolting spectacle of American corpses being dragged about the streets of Mogadishu, and the reality of a dozen American deaths, brought home this simple thought. Several weeks earlier, reports of American helicopters spraying twenty-millimeter cannon shells into a Somali mob that included grenade-tossing women and children prompted some senators to ask—too late—why we are in Somalia and when we should leave. Now, at any rate, the Administration will have to rethink its policy there. But policy may be too generous a term for the blend of sentimentality, wishful thinking, and absent-mindedness that has led us into a nasty little war.

Some have argued that the Somalia fiasco resulted from the expansion of a feasible and narrowly humanitarian mission of famine relief into something far more ambitious and far less tractable. Such a case would vindicate the burst of altruism that led the Bush Administration to throw 25,000 troops into the Horn of Africa without a trace of national interest to justify their action. Such excuses, however, fail to exculpate President Bush. Did he or his former Cabinet members publicly declaim against the strategic error of an expanded mission this spring? And does not his former deputy national-security advisor, Admiral Jonathan Howe, serve as the UN representative in Somalia?