People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [390]
The bombing of Baghdad was a sign that Clinton, facing several foreign policy crises during his two terms in office, would react to them in traditional ways, usually involving military action, claiming humanitarian motives, and often with disastrous results for people abroad as well as for the United States.
In Somalia, East Africa, in June 1993, with the country in a civil war and people desperate for food, the United States intervened late and badly. As journalist Scott Peterson wrote in Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda: “American and other foreign forces in Somalia committed startling acts of savagery, hiding behind the banner of the United Nations.”
The Clinton administration made the mistake of intervening in an internal conflict between warlords. It decided to hunt down the most prominent of these, General Mohamed Aidid, in a military operation that ended with the killing of 19 Americans and perhaps 2,000 Somalis in October 1993.
The attention of the American public was concentrated, as usual, on the deaths of Americans (glamorized in the film Black Hawk Down). The lives of Somalis seemed much less important. As Peterson wrote: “American and UN officers made clear that numbers of Somali dead did not interest them, and they kept no count.”
In fact, the killing of the American Rangers by an angry Somali mob was preceded months before by a critical decision made by the United States to launch a military attack on a house in which tribal elders were meeting. It was a brutal operation. First Cobra attack helicopters launched antitank missiles. “Minutes later,” Peterson reports, American ground troops stormed in and began finishing off the survivors—a charge U.S. commanders deny.” But a survivor of the raid told Peterson: “If they saw people shouting, they killed them.”
U.S. general Thomas Montgomery called the attack “legitimate” because they were “all bad guys.” Admiral Jonathan Howe, representing the UN operation (the United States had insisted an American must be in charge), defended the attack by saying the house was a “very key terrorist planning cell” and denied that civilians had died, though it was clear that the dead were tribal elders. The claim was that “tactical radios” were found in the compound later, but Peterson wrote: “I have never heard nor seen any evidence that this attack even remotely met a single criteria of ‘direct’ military advantage.”
Peterson commented: “Though we all had eyes and had witnessed the crime, mission commanders defended the indefensible and stubbornly clung to the illusion that more war could somehow bring peace. They thought that Somalis would forget the carnage, forget the spilled blood of their fathers and brothers. . . . ”
The Somalis did not forget, and the killing of the American Rangers in October was one consequence.
The catastrophic policy in Somalia led to another one the following year, in Rwanda, where famine and murderous tribal warfare were ignored. There was a UN force in Rwanda that might have saved tens of thousands of lives, but the United States insisted that it be cut back to a skeleton force. The result was genocide—at least a million Rwandans died. As Richard Heaps, a consultant to the Ford Foundation on Africa wrote to the New York Times: “The Clinton administration took the lead in opposing international action.”
When, shortly after, the Clinton administration did intervene with military force in Bosnia, journalist Scott Peterson, who had by this time moved to the Balkans, commented on the difference in reactions to genocide in Africa and in Europe. He said that it was “as if a decision had been made, somewhere, that Africa and Africans were not worth justice.”
Clinton’s foreign policy had very much the traditional bipartisan emphasis on maintaining friendly relations with whatever governments were in power, and promoting profitable trade arrangements