The U.S. Leads Operation Wrong Target

By ANGELO CODEVILLA
The Wall Street Journal, JANUARY 7, 1993

Operation Restore Hope is likely to do more harm than good because it was conceived in part to
preclude a “harder” mission to the Balkans, and because escorting relief convoys begs all the
essential qualities of policy making. The Bush team that made the policy and the Clinton team that
approved it have shed none of the prejudices that made ’60s foreign policy such a mess, and have
picked up additional incompetence on the way.

Horrid as the Somali civil war is to people caught in it, it has no wider consequences — certainly
not for the U.S. By contrast, Serbia’s amassing of an evil little empire in the heart of Europe may
well hasten the day when the American people will have to decide whether to go to war to defend
Europe.

Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, has already shown that starting an ethnic war can help a
communist nomenklatura salvage their status. Western Europe’s 340 million people have accepted
Mr. Milosevic’s mockery of democratic elections. In the name of peace they are denying arms to
Mr. Milosevic’s victims, and are happy enough to live with mass murder, rape and starvation
camps on their doorstep. When the U.S. organized the expedition to Somalia, it abetted Europe’s
flight from responsibility for its own backyard.

Hence Russia’s communist apparatchiks, who are now recouping their powers in Moscow and
have already started border wars in Georgia and Moldova, have reason to believe that the West
would stand by if they tried to reassert control over Ukraine and the Baltics and that afterward
Europe would pay them protection money. Would the American people let Europe reap the
consequences of its own impotence? Probably not. At any rate, we may soon face a dreadful
choice.

U.S. policy makers considered military options in Bosnia — no-fly zones, escorted relief convoys,
or strikes on Serbian artillery. The Journal proposes arming the Bosnians. But the essence of the
problem is Mr. Milosevic and his generals in power in Belgrade. Only military power can bring
them to trial as war criminals, turn Serbia from ethnic war to dismantling communism, and give
incentives to peace to those Russians who need them most. However, just as in the Gulf War U.S.
policy makers aimed military power at everyone except Saddam Hussein, they now refuse to aim
it at the Milosevic regime.

In Somalia, by contrast, there is no one set of human beings whose death or defeat would do
much good. Hence, military power is inherently less meaningful. Hunger itself is only a symptom.
The problem, as in much of the rest of Africa, is nothing less than the nonexistence of noncriminal
elements in public life. Somalis and other Africans have plenty of land, and the talent to live from
it. But they suffer because thieving, murderous claimants to power treat them worse than
domesticated animals. What can U.S. military force do about this?

U.S. troops can try to stick to the mission President Bush stated — making the country safe for
the delivery of relief supplies. However, the drought is over, Somali farms are producing, and too
great an emphasis on relief wrecks the country’s agricultural base. Once the Americans leave and
the predators revert to type, the people may be worse off than ever. But to the extent that U.S.
troops disarm some Somalis rather than others, and deal with one set of killers while bypassing
others, they expose the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s intellectual inadequacies.

Recall that in the 1950s Somalia and most of what we got used to calling the Third World
exported food and were beginning to enjoy the benefits of Western civilization, including safety,
property, the rule of law, medicine, missionaries and education. But European liberals came to
hate their own civilization. Backed by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, they handed a large
percentage of humanity to a set of politicians, whom historian Paul Johnson calls “the Bandung
generation,” who were supposed to show what great things non-Westerners could do when
carrying out the schemes of Western Intellectuals financed by Western taxpayers. However,
nearly all post-colonial rulers turned out to be monsters, and decolonization was a disaster.

The U.S. government has not begun to rethink the wisdom of anti-colonialism. Even as
circumstances were forcing U.S. troops to “dictate political outcomes” (contrary to President
Bush’s promise), his envoy to Somalia, Ambassador Robert Oakley, was making it clear that the
U.S. had learned from the ill effects of following the recipes of political scientists in Vietnam and
elsewhere, and that it has no intellectual compass by which to steer Somalia. As for Bill Clinton’s
liberals, rooted in fashionable multiculturalism, it is easier to imagine them bringing Third World
values to America than the other way around. And so the U.S. government will play sorcerer’s
apprentice.

The Clinton administration is likely to follow its predecessor in involving the United Nations
rather than the American people in formulating its foreign policy and in hiding its judgments
behind the supposed majesty of the U.N. But the majority of the U.N.’s member governments are
morally repugnant fruits of anti-colonialism. The current U.N. secretary-general is a product of
Egypt. Should Americans die to impose on Somalia or an anyplace else the standards of Egyptian
democracy and impartial administration? Should they, as in Somalia, enforce the agendas of
private agencies that have the U.N. bureaucracy’s ear? The U.N. has no legitimacy with ordinary
people any where.

Our only realistic choice in Somalia and in all too many similar places is either to leave them to
their misery or to re-establish something very much like colonialism. But, Leninist economics
notwithstanding, bearing what used to be called the White Man’s Burden entailed a net
expenditure of resources. Colonialism is an act of generosity and idealism of which only rising
civilizations are capable. Since colonialism is about dictating political outcomes of which we can
be proud, it requires the very opposite of cultural agnostics like George Bush and Robert Oakley
never mind Mr. Clinton’s multiculturalists.

It is perhaps too much to expect our politicians to be Churchills and Kitcheners. But a little sense
of our own self interest and a little more attention to the fundamentals of international affairs
would have been enough to conclude that the suffering in the former Yugoslavia is just as
humanly compelling as that in Somalia, that the Balkans’ problems are more tractable by U.S.
military power, and that their alleviation is likelier to save us bigger problems down the road.

Mr. Codevilla is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.