Making War to Keep Peace (10 page)

Boutros-Ghali did show a marked preference for a large multinational military operation, and he was eager to experiment with new kinds of collective military operations and new approaches to the problems of failed states of Africa.

The U.S. Decision to Intervene

It was clear from the beginning that the peacekeepers' mission in Somalia would be very different from any in which the United States or its military had previously participated—different from Operation Desert Storm, from other UN police actions, and from typical peacekeeping, in which the peacekeepers work with separate parties who have signed a cease-fire.
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In Desert Storm, the U.S.-led coalition was organized in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait—a classic case of international aggression. The Security Council had demanded the withdrawal of Iraq's forces, authorized member states to use all necessary means to effect Iraq's withdrawal, and called on them to provide the necessary armed force to enforce the demand.
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The Kuwait crisis was conducted within existing legal and political structures, with clear and foreseen goals.

In Somalia, nothing was so clear. Here the problem was not international aggression but the breakdown of internal order and authority, aggravated by the presence of several armed factions and a lack of food. The original goal of the United States was to save the Somalis from starvation by delivering food.
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But if the objective was simple, achieving it was not. The relief effort was hampered by war and anarchy, by the need to protect relief workers, by the lack of a government in Somalia, and by Boutros-Ghali's desire to limit U.S. independence in the use of force and establish a central role for himself in this and other such international operations.

The situation was further complicated because the use of force to resolve the internal problems of a nation is explicitly forbidden by the UN Charter, 23 which allows the Security Council to consider the use of armed force only where it is necessary “to maintain international peace and security.”
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Nonintervention in the internal affairs of states is a central tenet
of the UN, as explicitly stated in Article 2.7: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter….” Without a direct threat to international peace and security, the UN had no authority to intervene in Somalia's civil war. When confronted with a humanitarian disaster in the post–cold war world, however, concerns about this violation of the Charter were swept away.

It could not be claimed of Somalia (as it was claimed of the Kurds in northern Iraq) that a massive human rights violation had created a danger to international peace and security by driving refugees across borders.
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For a long time, the crisis was contained in Somalia. There were other differences as well. In Kuwait, the goal was to return a government to power; in Somalia, there was no government.

If Somalia was no Kuwait, it was also no Lebanon, though it reminded some of October 1983, when 241 U.S. Marines, sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, were murdered by a truck bomber. But that multinational force was not a UN operation, and there was a big difference in the size of the operation: Where Ronald Reagan provided only a few hundred troops in Lebanon, George Bush would eventually send nearly twenty-eight thousand Americans to Somalia—heavily armed and authorized to use all necessary force. Nor was Somalia another Yugoslavia, where violence broke out among component states after the new Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, sought to consolidate power, trampling on the Yugoslav Constitution and the historic powers of its states. The violence quickly spread to four states and threatened to spread farther. That situation—to which the United States had not committed troops—constituted a clear threat to international peace and security.

The most pressing problem in Somalia was widespread hunger—a terrible humanitarian problem, but one that did not threaten to ignite an international conflict. Yet Boutros-Ghali insisted that the real problem in Somalia was the nation's economic and political underdevelopment, and the violence, which was at least a theoretical threat to the region. He cited the emerging theory of failed states—and the links among famine, break
down of internal order, and international peace and security—to justify the use of force.

Whatever the underlying reasons for the breakdown in Somalia, President Bush and the United States Congress found the humanitarian crisis sufficient grounds for sending forces to deliver food and medicine.
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Images of desperate, undernourished Somalis were appearing frequently on television screens by the fall of 1993, creating the phenomenon now known as the “CNN effect.” The world became aware of the unfolding tragedy without knowing why the problem had suddenly arisen, how it had developed, or what to do about it. And, as the United States cast about for a strategy to address the problem, the hard facts of the situation—that the famine had both natural and man-made causes, and that war and anarchy on the ground would make solving it nearly impossible—were temporarily overlooked.

In August 1992, Congress passed a resolution calling on the president to seek UN action and deploy security guards to protect food shipments. Bush ordered a new round of food airlifts to Somalia on U.S. aircraft. On September 16, he ordered four U.S. Navy ships to the Somali coast. A few days later, however, a U.S. flight bearing food was fired on; Bush responded by suspending all U.S. flights to Somalia.

To protect further food shipments and personnel, Bush proposed to Boutros-Ghali that aid should be delivered by an American-led coalition outside the auspices of the UN. Under this plan, the United States would deploy up to thirty thousand troops to secure seaports, airports, and roads in central and southern Somalia. These troops would operate under American command and would remain for a limited time, with the UN taking control of the operation after three to four months. The objectives would be specific and minimal: to stabilize the military situation to the extent necessary to deliver relief supplies.
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Neither the United States nor the UN had ever undertaken an operation quite like this one, in a country with no government. But top officials in the Bush administration had experience with various kinds of military operations, and Bush himself was deeply interested in international operations, collective action, and promoting cooperation in a UN context. A number of Bush administration members shared the president's interest in trying a new approach to collective security and military opera
tions. The United States had the food, the forces, and the transport capabilities to meet the Somalis' needs, and Desert Storm had left Americans with positive feelings about collective action, the role of the UN, and when it was permissible to use force.

In late November 1992, just two months before he left office, Bush decided to get involved in Somalia—on a large scale. After Secretary of State Larry Eagleburger assured the president that the Somalia operation was “doable,”
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Bush resolved to move, and Eagleburger informally assured the UN that the United States was ready to take the lead in organizing and ensuring the delivery of food to Somalia. The result was the U.S.-led “peacekeeping” mission that began as “Operation Restore Hope” and became the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), which would take the United States and the UN alike into uncharted waters.

THE NEW PEACEKEEPING

The history of UN peacekeeping to this point had been brief and limited in its scope. It had begun in June 1948, when 259 peacekeepers were deployed to oversee an armistice between Israel and the Arab states. Subsequently, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld drew up principles that shaped peacekeeping efforts in the Suez Crisis in 1956 and long afterward. UN peacekeepers would

1. oversee compliance with a cease-fire or armistice agreement that had already been negotiated…patrol a border or serve as a buffer between parties to a conflict;
   
2. be deployed with the consent of the parties to the conflict;
   
3. be neutral;
   
4. operate under the supervision of the secretary-general;
   
5. be lightly armed and use force only sparingly; and
   
6. not be drawn from the five permanent members of the Security Council.
   

Conventional peacekeeping under these principles was a useful tool for containing certain kinds of conflicts, though these missions did not solve problems and rarely, if ever, ended. Nearly every peacekeeping force dispatched in the postwar years is still serving to this day, fulfilling essentially the same function for which it was originally deployed. The forces deployed in 1948 to monitor the Arab-Israeli cease-fire were still there decades later; so were those deployed to the India-Pakistan border in 1949, to Cyprus in 1964, to the Golan Heights in 1974, and to Lebanon in 1978. Since very few troops were employed in UN peacekeeping, and none were American, the concept and practice of peacekeeping was not well understood in the United States, though support for UN-based collective, nonviolent use of force had begun to grow in American foreign policy circles by the end of the cold war.

By the early 1990s, such missions were multiplying thick and fast. As George H. W. Bush noted in a speech to the UN General Assembly in September 1991, “The United Nations has mounted more peacekeeping missions in the last thirty-six months than during the first forty-three years.”
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The increase had reached critical mass during Bush's tenure, when the number of UN peacekeepers quadrupled—from 11,000 to 44,000. By December 1994, the number had reached 80,800, and the U.S. share of peacekeeping costs was set at 31.7 percent of total UN spending on such missions.

In congressional hearings and in the press, Secretary of State James Baker defended the Bush administration's request for $460 million for peacekeeping in fiscal year 1993, up from $107 million in 1992—in addition to a supplementary request for $350 million for 1992. “Peacekeeping is a pretty good buy in my view,” he said.
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Baker defended the UN decision to assess the United States almost a third of the entire peacekeeping budget as consistent with the country's leadership role. “We have a preeminent and unique role in the United Nations as one of the Permanent Five.”
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In calling for increased peacekeeping expenditures, Baker ventured an argument that his successors, Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, would echo later—that “common problems demand a collective security response from the international community” and that “multinational collective engagement is a bargain.”
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Peacekeeping,
Baker predicted, would prove an important tool in resolving post–cold war regional conflicts—and it would be less expensive than war. This argument incorporated two dubious presumptions: (1) that peacekeeping would prevent war, and (2) that conflicts would inevitably lead to war in the absence of peacekeeping.

Baker was not the only official who was more enthusiastic than cautious in his judgments about the potential utility of peacekeeping; many members of the foreign policy elite shared his optimism. On August 28, 1992, the United States joined in Security Council Resolution 775, which increased the number of UN forces in Somalia from five hundred to thirty-five hundred at the request of the secretary-general. Because of high hopes that the UN would play an important future role, the response was generally favorable, even though intervention in the internal affairs of a member state seemed to be a clear violation of the UN Charter and would take U.S. forces into a country where we had no vital interests.

The parameters of peacekeeping, too, were expanding. In
An Agenda for Peace
, a monograph he published shortly before taking office, Boutros Boutros-Ghali described a new vision of UN peacekeeping—one that included operations normally considered as war.
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During Boutros-Ghali's tenure, peacekeeping came to refer to almost any activity in which conflict resolution was carried out by a multinational force under the auspices of the UN. This new conception dissolved the lines between humanitarian missions, peacekeeping, and military engagement. Some peace operations would involve no use of force, no danger, and no armed conflict; others would be coercive and dangerous. Boutros-Ghali even tried to absorb war itself into the category of peace operations, to change the goals from victory to accommodation, and to vest command and control in the secretary-general.

Somalia would be the first test of this new model of peacekeeping. Previously, peacekeeping operations had taken place under Chapter VI, which did not authorize the use of force. Security Council resolutions 688, which classified human rights within Iraq as a threat to international security, and 775, the resolution on Somalia, both authorized the use of force in interventions in the internal affairs of nations. Boutros-Ghali proposed to give the Secretariat jurisdiction over the conflict in
Somalia, which required some unprecedented concept-stretching to cover intervention in the internal affairs of a member state. The decision by the Security Council that “the magnitude of the human tragedy” constituted a threat to international peace and security (thus justifying the use of force under Chapter VII) was also new, though it had some precedent in Resolution 688.34

There were other differences, too. Boutros-Ghali believed that precedent, and Chapter VII, gave him the authority to recruit and organize forces, and to determine the rules of engagement under which they operated. Surprisingly, the Security Council accepted most of his claims, including his “right of oversight…in return for legitimizing the operation,” and his contention that he was equipped to deal with a civil war.
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In
An Agenda for Peace
and a later essay, “Empowering the United Nations,”
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Boutros-Ghali made a concerted effort to expand the jurisdiction of the secretary-general to include the resolution of disputes before they escalated into conflict. Under the rubric of
preventive diplomacy
, he grouped together the functions of
peacemaking
(as defined in Chapter VI);
peacekeeping
by military forces;
peace-building
actions that seek to prevent disputes;
preventive deployment
for a wide range of purposes, including facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance;
peace enforcement
; and broader functions of fact finding, intelligence, and analysis. More heavily armed missions to respond to aggression would be available on call, under the command of the secretary-general. Boutros-Ghali proposed a general shifting of authority, including financial authority, from the regional organizations to the secretary-general, in spite of the Charter's specific encouragement of regional arrangements to solve local disputes.
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He also proposed offering “peacekeeping services” for the settlement of longstanding conflicts in regions including Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Mozambique, as well as the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia.