U.S. Ruling Out Pentagon for Global Welfare Role

As U.S. Marines prepare to land in Somalia in an exercise of military might driven by compassion instead of economic interests or global strategy, the Bush Administration insisted Sunday that the operation will not convert the Pentagon into a worldwide welfare agency.

Although conditions are about as bad in parts of Sudan, Liberia, Mozambique and the former Yugoslav republics as they are in Somalia, officials said that the United States has no obligation to send U.S. military forces to deal with other crises.

Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger said that the outgoing Administration decided to intervene in Somalia because “it is an area where we can, in fact, affect events. There are other parts of the world where things are equally tragic but the costs of trying to change things would be monumental.”

Interviewed on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” Eagleburger said that the Somalia operation is not the first stage of a new post-Cold War “global plan.” But he said President-elect Bill Clinton and his incoming Administration must soon come to grips with the implications of a world in which the United States is the only superpower.

“If President Bush had not done something about (Somalia), Mr. Clinton would have faced the issue on Jan. 20,” Eagleburger said. “Thousands more would have died.

“We are going into a world that none of us can predict, that is far less stable than most of the last 50 years, in which these kinds of challenges like Somalia will happen all of the time,” he said.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” conceded that the United States has no critical national interest in Somalia of the kind that drove Washington’s resistance to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But he said the Somalia situation is one “where the United States is the only country that has the capability to restore the situation to the point where it can be dealt with by normal means.”

Nevertheless, the contrast could hardly be greater between the war in the Persian Gulf, where Bush sought to lay down enduring rules for a new world order, and the situation in Somalia, which, if allowed to create a firm precedent, would seem to point to a bottomless pit of troubled nations and suffering people.

“The forces that drive policy in the post-Cold War era are radically different from the forces that drove policy in the Cold War,” said Michael Clough, a senior fellow for Africa on the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

In the past, he said, U.S. actions in Africa and much of the rest of the Third World were often shaped by a concern that the Soviet Union might achieve a strategic advantage. Throughout the 1980s, for instance, Washington armed Somalia as a counterweight to neighboring Ethiopia, which was supported by Moscow.

But today, Clough said, policy seems to be determined by news organizations, especially television. The U.S. government can ignore pockets of starvation all over Africa as long as haunting images of the population are not projected into American living rooms. But once television coverage of the Somali disaster began, U.S. intervention became almost inevitable.

“This is going to raise expectations on the part of other Africans of U.S. intervention,” Clough said in a telephone interview. “We have to be careful, because the humanitarian issue can be manipulated in the way the old geopolitical issue was manipulated. There is a risk of increasing dependency and causing local groups to look for outside support.”

But Hibaaq Osman, a Somali citizen and director of communications for the Fund for Peace in Washington, said that the U.S. intervention is welcome even though there is little evidence that the Administration has thought through the issue.

“Why Somalia, and why now?” she asked rhetorically. “Why not Sudan? It has to be done case by case. Somalia had the media attention. There is momentum now. We should take advantage of it.”

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) agreed with Administration officials that the Somalia operation should not be allowed to set the sort of precedent that would bind the nation to take similar actions elsewhere.

“There is always a desire and a tendency to seek to draw general conclusions from specific events,” he said. “I don’t think the United States should commit itself to the concept that if we help in one place we are inevitably required to help in other places.”

Although the Somalia operation enjoys strong--although not unanimous--support on Capitol Hill, the biggest unanswered questions are how long the intervention will last and if the United States will be able to withdraw its forces cleanly and without a renewal of anarchy and starvation.

“The real difficulty, as always in this situation, will be getting out. . . . I think everyone should be worried about that,” Mitchell said on CNN’s “Newsmaker Sunday.”

Asked if Somalia will prove to be a quagmire, he added: “It need not be. It could be, obviously. But I think that if the military objectives are clearly outlined and they’re limited in nature and the President is able to complete the action in a short period of time and have the United States troops replaced by U.N. peacekeeping forces, as is proposed, then I think it can be a successful operation.”

Both Cheney and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft said the objective is to get U.S. forces out of Somalia as soon as the situation is stabilized and the security role can be turned over to U.N. peacekeeping troops. But both said that some U.S. forces, possibly numbering in the thousands, may remain in the area after the main force has been withdrawn.

“Our objective is to go in, open up the ports, open up the distribution centers, . . open up the communications routes, then turn it back over to the peacekeepers who will come in,” Scowcroft said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

“I think there may be some (U.S.) support units left” when the rest of the U.S. troops pull out, Scowcroft said.

“One of the things we have to remember is that unlike in Desert Storm, where we went into Saudi Arabia with a complete infrastructure built to U.S. specifications, here there’s nothing,” he said. “Here, the planes can’t even refuel. They’ll have to land somewhere like Djibouti, refuel, go in, drop their supplies and then go out and refuel somewhere else. There’s no fuel, no water. Everything has to be brought in.”

He said that “maybe a few thousand support people” would remain to assist the U.N. forces.

Cheney said that “after we’ve done the basic bulk of our work, there still may be a need for various kinds of specialized units to stay. You may want to leave a Marine amphibious ready group off the coast for a while, because that would give the support to the U.N. . . . force so that you could deal with the situation if it got out of control. You may want to leave some of our logistics or our medical engineering people there for a longer period of time, because we’ve got capabilities there that other nations don’t have.”

But he added, “If you’re looking for the U.S. to stay until all the problems are solved in Somalia, that is not going to happen.”