“The Pirates of Penzance”
The intervention in Somalia has had elements of opera bouffe. Remember the Marines splashing ashore in December in the dead of night but not in darkness, bathed by the bright lights of waiting camera crews? And there is a grimly comic aspect to the sophisticated aircraft of the world’s mightiest military power making Third World rubble bounce during the (so far unavailing) pursuit of someone currently described as a “fugitive warlord.” Not long ago he was described as a statesman. But this is not a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta spoofing imperial misadventures. This is real life, and death.
Last week about 400 army commandos, described as specialists in urban warfare and “stealthy and unconventional warfare,” including “snatch missions,” were dispatched to chase the warlord. A State Department official said, “This will be a wakeup call that we’re playing for keeps.” Presumably he meant that turbulent Somalis should wake up to Americas seriousness, and simmer down. But perhaps Americans ought to wake up and wonder what “playing for keeps” means in a place that not one in 10 Americans could point to on an unmarked map.
Regarding the warlord, a Pentagon official said, “We think he’s in southern Mogadishu. But looking for one guy in a robe among 200 people at a time all dressed the same way is tough.” It is hard not to bear in such words the recurring lament of even wellintentioned imperialists: The natives all look alike! Deucedly inconvenient, that. Roman centurions on the Rhine and along Hadrian’s Wall probably said the same.
Some people will say that in Somalia America is only doing its duty. After all, a great nation’s capacities generate duties. But America’s capacities are not that great. It is a principle of moral reasoning that there can be no duty to do what is impossible, or beyond one’s capacities, to do. Therefore there can be no U.S. duty to undertake what various U.S. officials say we have undertaken.
Robert Oakley, former special envoy to Somalia, says we are supporting a U.N.-led program of “total pacification and nation building.” David Shinn, another U.S. diplomat, defines the U.S. mission as “re-creating a country,” and he seems exhilarated by the challenge: “This has never been done before in the history of the world, at least the modem world.” Well, there’s a first time for everything, right? Actually, no there isn’t.
The December 1992 U.N. resolution under which President Bush sent thousands of troops to Somalia ordered them to establish a “secure environment.” That is something that the U.S. government has signally failed to establish in many jurisdictions, from the South Bronx to South-Central Los Angeles. And that U.N. resolutions stipulation that the Somali environment is insecure is germane to a U.S. law-the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
That resolution mandates certain congressional involvement, on a stipulated timetable, when U.S. forces are introduced “where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances” or “while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair or training.” Enacted by a Democratic-controlled Congress over President Nixon’s veto, the resolution attempted to codify matters that ideally should be left to regulation by constitutional language, prudently construed, and the political process, responsibly conducted.
The Constitution vests in Congress the power to “raise and supply” armed forces and to “declare” war. The president is commander in chief Institutional rivalries, occasionally leavened by a soupcon of disinterested reasoning, could produce a satisfactory modus vivendi in which Congress formally authorizes, and helps to define, all uses of military force other than those to repel sudden attacks. But in the climate of suspicion produced by Vietnam, Congress passed the resolution, the history of which has hurt the rule of law.
Every president since the passage of the resolution–Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and now Clinton-has not only not complied with it, each has made his noncompliance patent. Clinton has hardly needed to notice the resolution, so invertebrate is today’s Congress regarding foreign policy responsibilities. It was predictable that a Democratic president would have an anesthetizing effect on the foreign policy assertiveness of a Democratic Congress. Still, the resolution, which by now is stone dead, deserves decent interment in the form of repeal. That might be one of several benefits from the Somali misadventure.
There are in the lives of nations harmful successes and helpful failures. In 1979, when the Carter administration was cobbling together the Chrysler bailout, Alan Greenspan, then a private citizen, warned that the bailout was a bad idea because it would succeed, thereby encouraging government to try to forestall many of the rationalizing failures that are aspects of dynamic capitalism’s creative destruction. U.S. intervention in Somalia may prove to be, on balance, beneficial because it will be so discouraging. Perhaps, given the intermittent learning processes of our forgetful society, we now need a prophylactic failure to prevent a spate of similar episodes.
A medical analogy is apposite. Public health owes much to immunology, the science which sometimes uses small doses of diseases to stimulate resistance to diseases. The Somalia experience may inoculate America’s body politic against the temptations of humanitarian interventionism. If so, Operation Restore Hope, as it was called at the outset, may one day be remembered as a constructive failure. The dialectic of political life is like that.
