On November 21, 1992, Gen. Colin Powell's chief deputy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. David Jeremiah, stunned a National Security Council Deputies Committee meeting on Somalia by announcing, "If you think U.S. forces are needed, we can do the job." Four days later President George Bush decided U.S. forces were needed. On December 9, 1992, 1,300 U.S. Marines forces landed in Mogadishu, and within weeks more than 25,000 U.S. soldiers were on the ground in Somalia.
Prior to the November 21 deputies meeting, virtually no one in or out of the administration expected that President Bush or his top political and military advisers would support a major U.S. humanitarian mission to Somalia. For more than a year, the Bush administration, and General Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in particular, had steadfastly opposed calls for U.S. humanitarian military interventions in Somalia, Liberia, Bosnia, and elsewhere. None of these conflicts was relevant to U.S. vital interests. They were simply humanitarian tragedies.
With respect to Somalia, senior Bush administration and military officials argued repeatedly throughout most of 1992 that the deeply historic inter-clan conflicts that permeated Somalia would make any military intervention extraordinarily risky. The basic position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the senior White House staff was that military force would not be able to protect itself or the distribution of humanitarian relief because the nature of the conflict made it virtually impossible to distinguish friend from enemy or civilian from combatant. In short, the administration argued, roaming armed bandits fueled by ancient hatreds and intermingled with the civilian population was a recipe for disaster.
Yet, after nearly a year of extensive opposition to the use of American military force in Somalia, in November 1992 President Bush, with the firm support of all of his key advisors - including General Powell -- decided to launch a massive U.S. military intervention in Somalia. Why did the Joint Chiefs of Staff reverse its estimates from July 1992 that Somalia was a "bottomless pit" to its November proclamation that "we can do the job?" Nothing in that time period changed the political, military, or logistical factors on the ground. With the deaths of 300,000 Somalis by the summer of 1992, the crisis had long before reached a critical humanitarian mass. What explains the sudden change of heart within the Bush Administration on Somalia?
This article re-examines the U.S. decision to intervene in Somalia. I begin with a brief discussion and critique of the conventional explanations of the intervention followed by a short explanation of my argument. I then provide a detailed case study of the intervention decision that identifies the influence of competing foreign policy beliefs, information resources, and advocacy on the ultimate decision. Within this context, two other variables played an interesting role in the intervention decision: the influence of the 1992 presidential election and the conflict in Bosnia. I conclude with a discussion of lessons of this case for the development of future research on why the United States intervenes in some instances and not in others.
Conventional Views
Two views tend dominate the conventional understanding as to why the United States intervened in Somalia: 1) the CNN-effect and 2) President Bush's moral indignation and the do-ability of the mission. Neither of these views, however, stands up to analytical scrutiny.
THE CNN-EFFECT
Perhaps the most common explanation for the U.S. intervention is that vivid
mages of starving children on daily news broadcasts outraged not only the American
public, but also President Bush and his key military advisors. The general impression
is that these graphic pictures generated moral outrage and intense political
pressure on the Bush Administration to respond aggressively to end the massive
starvation. In short, "CNN got us into Somalia, and CNN got us out."
Despite the prevailing collective memory of these graphic images, Warren Strobel has demonstrated that most of the broadcast coverage of the Somali famine actually followed rather than preceded the U.S. policy decisions. For example, Strobel found that nightly evening news broadcasts of Somalia were largely absent prior to President Bush's August 12, 1992 decision to begin U.S. airlifts into Somalia. In the immediate aftermath of that decision, the media extensively covered the famine, but only for a relatively short four-week time period. By mid-September 1992 that coverage dissipated dramatically. And in the weeks running up to the President's November 25 decision to intervene, Strobel's findings suggest that the story was largely absent in the American press. Only after the November 25 decision by President Bush did the media again step up its coverage of the Somalia crisis.
MORAL OUTRAGE AND A DO-ABLE MISSION
A second conventional explanation for the U.S. intervention suggests that by
November 1992, the humanitarian situation simply had become morally untenable.
According to this view, President Bush and his key military advisors were morally
outraged by the increasing reports of massive starvation. By mid-November, they
concluded that the situation was dire; that only the United States possessed
the capabilities to off-set the enormous humanitarian crisis; and that Somalia
was a case where the mission of providing security for humanitarian relief was
well-defined and do-able. Proponents of this view argue that Somalia was a case
that fit most of the criteria of the Powell Doctrine: 1) the deployment was
done with overwhelming force; 2) there were clearly defined political and military
objectives; 3) the mission was do-able; and 4) there was widespread public and
Congressional support.
This argument, however, is unsatisfactory on several points. First, it ignores that the situation in Somalia had long been one of intense need. The U.S. decision in November 1992 came nearly a full year after Somalia had been declared the world's worst humanitarian emergency. In fact, as early as January 1992, the Assistant Director of USAID, Andrew Natsios, began holding regular press conferences to highlight the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. By early summer, at least 300,000 civilians had already died and in July the International Committee of the Red Cross re-iterated its six-month old estimates that 95 percent of the population of Somalia was malnourished and 70 percent in imminent danger of death by starvation. Virtually all available evidence suggests that the situation had become untenable long before November 21.
Second, contrary to the public statements by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President at the time of the decision, the precise mission was not well-defined -- other than a rhetorical "humanitarian mission." The President announced that the operation was designed to establish a stable security framework to ensure the delivery and distribution of relief aid to famine victims. Yet, a basic point of contention that simply had not been addressed at the time of President Bush's decision to intervene was whether or not U.S. forces would need to disarm the tens of thousands of roaming armed bandits who were at the heart of the security challenge. In fact, at the time of the President's decision, several military commanders feared that the U.S. deployment might lead to an escalation of violence that could quickly engulf the U.S. forces. According to one senior Pentagon official, "if the Somali warlords did not back down quickly as was hoped, the number of troops required to continue the operation could add up in a hurry."
The final major critique of the argument that Somalia was do-able is that throughout
most of 1992 the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the Bush Administration
explicitly argued that Somalia was not do-able. For more than a year before
the intervention, the Joint Chiefs consistently argued that humanitarian emergencies,
by their nature, were political events in which one side or another would balk
at international assistance. This meant that intervention would ultimately require
taking sides -- and this inevitably would create a threat to U.S. forces. Corresponding
to this view, the Joint Chiefs argued that intervention in Somalia would be
risky. In its opposition to developing contingency plans for intervention in
the spring and early summer of 1992, the Joint Chiefs argued at interagency
meetings that the nature of the conflict in Somalia was fueled by age-old tribal
animosities; that the tribal combatants were heavily armed and indistinguishable
from civilian populations and would make U.S. force protection virtually impossible;
that the desert terrain, while open, would create enormous operational and tactical
difficulties (because of dusty conditions) for close air support for troops
on the ground. Furthermore, there was a consensus among senior officials that
the crisis in Somalia was, at core, a political issue that could not be readily
resolved with the use of U.S. military forces. The Joint Chiefs argued vigorously
that the U.S. military was not well suited for the type of operation that would
be needed to provide humanitarian relief to those in need.
The Argument in Brief: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy
Why then did President Bush and General Powell agree to deploy U.S. combat forces on a mission with no clear exit strategy, no clearly defined mission, and no firm assurances of U.S. public support before the decision was made? In short, why did Bush and Powell violate the Powell doctrine on Somalia?
The argument presented here suggests that the U.S. intervention in Somalia was the result of the political interplay of competing foreign policy elites who held different normative beliefs about when and where the United States should intervene and the cumulative pressure on the administration to act in both Somalia and Bosnia. Selective engagers, who dominated the Bush Administration and the senior military officer corps, believed that U.S. military intervention should be reserved for those isolated cases when U.S. strategic vital material interests were directly threatened. Throughout 1991 and most of 1992 they opposed any form of U.S. military involvement in Somalia or Bosnia - and other humanitarian crises. The central challenge to selective engagers came from liberal humanitarianists who filled the ranks of humanitarian and human rights non-governmental organizations and who supported military intervention to provide humanitarian relief to aggrieved populations and to stop or prevent atrocities perpetrated against civilians.
Initially, selective engagers, with their asymmetric advantages on information
and executive branch political mobilization resources, were able to frame both
Somalia and Bosnia as conflicts fueled by ancient tribal and ethnic hatreds
about which the United States could do little. With this portrayal of the conflict,
the Bush administration was successful in tempering calls for greater U.S. involvement.
However, as both crises persisted into the late summer and fall of 1992, liberal
humanitarianists and the media began acquiring their own independent information
about the conflicts. In both cases, they began to challenge the selective engagers
framing of each crisis that the conflicts were fueled by bottom-up ancient tribal
hatreds. Instead, liberals and the media began re-framing the conflicts as ones
of sinister elite manipulation in which the violence against civilians was part
of highly coordinated campaigns to advance narrow political ambitions of ruthless
elites. Based on this portrayal, they argued that U.S.-led interventions targeted
against these political elites would quickly mitigate the humanitarian catastrophes.
Throughout the fall of 1992, liberal humanitarianists escalated their advocacy efforts and mobilized political pressure on the Bush administration to do something in both Somalia and Bosnia. As this political pressure intensified, Bill Clinton won the presidential election on November 8. President Bush and General Powell concluded that liberal humanitarianism would dominate the new Administration. They also believed that liberal humanitarianists, in control of the White House bully pulpit, would campaign heavily for American intervention in Bosnia. Given the shift in power in Washington and the intensity of mobilized political pressure to respond to humanitarian emergencies, Bush and Powell concluded that if the United States was going to intervene in response to a humanitarian crisis, it would be in Somalia and not Bosnia. Somalia was easier.
Somalia and Bosnia - 1992
The following section examines the U.S. decision to intervene in Somalia in 1992 and the decision not to intervene in Bosnia. This research is based on extensive interviews with several of the principal decisionmakers and participants in the policy deliberations.
SELECTIVE ENGAGERS AND NO VITAL INTERESTS
U.S. policy toward Somalia and the former Yugoslavia in 1990 and 1991 reflected
the prevailing views among President Bush and his core advisers, most of whom
were selective engagers, that with the end of the Cold War, both the horn of
Africa and the Balkans had dramatically diminished in strategic importance to
the United States. For selective engagers, the dissolution of Yugoslavia was
of concern to the extent that unleashed ancient ethnic hatreds might create
regional instability. The prudent choice in Yugoslavia -- despite the profound
transitions occurring throughout the rest of Eastern and Central Europe -- was
to support some form of centralized authority and to press for gradual change.
From 1990 until the outbreak of war in Croatia in 1991 and Bosnia in March 1992,
the administration devoted its diplomatic energies to strategies to forestall
the collapse of the Yugoslav federation. Once that violence erupted the policy
shifted from prevention to containment.
In Somalia, U.S. policy was similarly focused. During the Cold War, the United States contributed vast sums to Somali leader Siad Barre in an effort to stabilize the Horn of Africa in the face of the Soviet-backed regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. With the erosion of Soviet influence and competition, U.S. contributions to Barre were no longer seen as imperative to U.S. geostrategic interests. Without the financial backing of the United States to prop up Barre's corrupt regime, Somalia quickly disintegrated into inter-ethnic civil conflict. Because, the 1991-92 crisis posed little threat to U.S. political or economic interests, and did not constitute a threat to regional or international stability, the Bush administration's position throughout much of 1991 and most of 1992 was that the crisis was an internal Somali problem. The Somali leaders needed to resolve the crisis themselves.
INITIAL INFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA ADVANTAGES
Prior to the war in Bosnia, few Americans and few foreign policy elites focused
on Bosnia. To the extent that attention was paid to the crisis during the initial
months of violence, the widely accepted view was that presented by selective
engagers in the Bush administration. The administration criticized the Serb
leadership in Belgrade for the violence and worked diplomatically to isolate
Slobodan Milosevic's regime, but it nonetheless firmly believed and publicly
emphasized that the conflict was the inevitable consequence of intractable and
primordial hatreds that were unleashed with the collapse of the tight communist
control. On numerous occasions, President Bush and his advisers equated Bosnia
as rooted in ethnic hatreds that went back hundreds of years. Based on this
analysis of the conflict, the administration argued publicly that the prudent
policy was to refrain from involvement in a situation that could only lead to
a Vietnam-style quagmire for the United States. Consequently, most Americans
came to perceive Bosnia as the tragic but inevitable resurrection of ancient
hatreds. The public supported the administration's limited policy to contain
the conflict from spreading to areas that were of geostrategic interest to the
United States - in particular to Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Turkey,
and Bulgaria.
Initially, no one was in a position to critically challenge the administration's paradigmatic framing of the conflict. In the spring of 1992, no clear precedent had been set for post-Cold War humanitarian interventions, and because Yugoslavia had been a relatively advanced economic and political society during the Cold War, very few nongovernmental humanitarian organizations had any presence or experience in the former Yugoslavia. Furthermore, because only a few members of Congress had much interest in or understanding of events in Yugoslavia, most deferred to the administration resources and expertise on the conflict. As a result, those who might have opposed the administration's selective engagement analysis - such as a few liberal humanitarianists in Congress who did have some regional interest -- lacked a strong organizational and political base on which to mobilize public and political opposition to the Bush administration's policies on Bosnia.
For their part, the U.S. media also began to focus on the war in Bosnia with little regional expertise. Few of the major news organizations had experienced correspondents on the ground. When the war in Croatia broke out in June 1991, journalists scrambled to cover the story. Most stories written and broadcast during the conflict in Croatia reinforced the view that the violent nationalist hatreds permeated all of the former Yugoslavia and were the inevitable result of the collapse of strong authoritarian rule. Furthermore, as early as the fall of 1991, American reporters and administration officials began warning that although the violence in Croatia was terrible, conditions in the more ethnically diverse Bosnia would be much worse. Consequently, when violence erupted in Bosnia in March 1992, there was widespread acceptance, at least initially, among journalists that the conflict there was simply a further manifestation of the unchecked nationalist hatreds that had been widely predicted.
In addition, many journalists and editors wanted to ensure "objective" and "balanced" reporting, which meant that stories often identified and reported atrocities as though all sides were equally culpable. All of this produced predictable pressures and influences on the reporting during the first several months of the war in Bosnia that portrayed the violence as tragic, but ultimately endorsed the administration's line that the conflict was caused by age-old ethnic hatreds line in which all sides were equally culpable.
Further aiding the Bush administration's policies was the support and informational advantages of General Powell and his senior advisers within the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell and his advisors strongly believed that foreign military intervention in limited conflicts would inevitably degenerate into a Vietnam-type quagmire. In Bosnia the Joint Chiefs stressed the inherent military dilemmas associated with any type of U.S. force deployment. For example, during a discussion in June on whether to use U.S. military aircraft in support of an emergency humanitarian airlift to Sarajevo, senior planners told members of Congress that even such a limited operation would require the presence of more than 50,000 U.S. ground troops to secure a perimeter of 30 miles around the airport. According to then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, the Joint Chiefs "probably inflated the estimates of what it would take to accomplish some of these limited objectives, but once you have the Joint Chiefs making their estimates, it's pretty hard for armchair strategists to challenge them and say they are wrong."
Consequently, throughout the first four months of the conflict in Bosnia, the American public largely accepted the administration's view that the conflict was fueled by ancient hatreds about which the United States could do little, and there was general support for the administration's selective engagement position. Little information emanated from the conflict to contradict that judgment and, in the face of a proliferation of "objective" reporting from Bosnia, there was very little discernable influence on American public opinion with respect to a more forceful U.S. response to the crisis.
Meanwhile, the collapse of nearly all state structures in Somalia and the intense fighting between rival factions -- led respectively by General Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed -- in the wake of Siad Barre's flight from Mogadishu in January 1991 left much of the country's civilian population under severe threat of malnutrition and starvation. Amid increasing security concerns, the United Nations withdrew its relief operations in mid-1991, leaving only a few non-governmental organizations to deal with the escalating humanitarian crisis. By January 1992, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that almost half of the country's 6 million people faced severe nutritional needs, with many subject to death by starvation without some form of immediate assistance. Furthermore, by January 1992 300,000 had already died of malnutrition; more than 3,000 people were dying daily from starvation; more than 500,000 had fled to neighboring Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya, severely taxing resources in those countries; and more than 70 percent of all livestock in Somalia had perished from famine.
As with the former Yugoslavia, selective engagers in the Bush administration did not see any tangible U.S. interests at stake in Somalia. The administration deferred to the United Nations for a response to the crisis. But even here, selective engagers were focused on their own perception of U.S. interests and remained wary of supporting new military initiatives through the United Nations. During UN Security Council debates in April 1992, the Bush administration opposed initiatives to create an armed UN security force, fearing that new peacekeeping missions would further bloat an already inefficient UN bureaucracy and inevitably necessitate greater U.S. military involvement.
For liberal humanitarianists, Somalia was significant, but it was only one of many regional conflicts that had humanitarian concerns. Wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, Liberia, Mozambique, southern Sudan, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere all produced humanitarian challenges that diverted concentrated liberal attention and resources from Somalia. The few NGOs working in Somalia issued reports beginning in the fall of 1991 citing the catastrophic conditions. And efforts were made by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to mediate a settlement between the warring factions. But neither the UN mediation efforts nor the ad hoc reports from humanitarian organizations generated attention. There was no galvanizing force that either linked disparate humanitarian organizations or mobilized the press corps. Consequently, even though the famine intensified dramatically in the fall of 1991 and early 1992, Somalia emerged in the public discourse very slowly in 1992, and there was very little discussion on the crisis within the foreign policy elite community.
By June of 1992, although 300,000 civilians were already dead and nearly 4.5
million were on the brink of starvation in Somalia, and although nearly 100,000
people were dead in Bosnia and another 1 million were displaced from their homes,
there was no concerted pressure on the selective engagers within the Bush administration
to alter their policies on either Somalia or Bosnia. The administration strongly
believed that even though both crises were tragic, each was rooted in intractable
and ancient hatreds and each ultimately fell outside of U.S. interests. Furthermore,
senior military commanders in the Joint Chiefs who opposed U.S. participation
in limited wars remained convinced that military options in both Somalia and
Bosnia were wholly untenable.
THE EROSION OF INITIAL INFORMATION ADVANTAGES
The Bush Administration's dilemma in Somalia and Bosnia intensified as both
crises lingered into the summer of 1992 with no prospects for improvement.Throughout
the summer, both the media and liberal humanitarianists gradually developed
and dedicated more resources for their own information collection efforts.
In Somalia, liberal humanitarianists were able to gain more direct access to Somalia and they dramatically increased their collection of information during June and July. In late June, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Smith Hempstone Jr. traveled to refugee camps on the Somali-Kenyan border for the first time. He reported his trip in a cable entitled "A Day in Hell," which presented a vivid report of the humanitarian suffering. The cable resonated with many liberal humanitarianists in the State Department who believed that the Bush administration needed to do more in Somalia, and the cable was immediately leaked to the press. Meanwhile, liberal humanitarianists in Congress, led by Senators Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kansas) and Paul Simon (D- Illinois), conducted fact-finding missions to Somalia in June and July and reported horrific conditions. They returned and urged their colleagues to support sending an armed UN security mission to Somalia. And several international nongovernmental organizations -- such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and CARE -- mobilized grass roots campaigns to lobby for a stronger response to Somalia, while prominent international figures such as Irish President Mary Robinson and UNICEF spokeswoman Audrey Hepburn conducted high-profile visits to Somalia to draw international media attention to the crisis. Furthermore, the ICRC facilitated a trip by New York Times correspondent Jane Perlez into Somalia to expand U.S. media attention. And on July 22, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali repeated the six-month-old UN High Commission for Refugees prediction that 1 million Somali children were at immediate risk and more than 4 million people needed food assistance urgently. Other international aid organizations publicly repeated their predictions that as many as 2 million people would die within the next few weeks. On July 26, the Security Council passed resolution 767 authorizing an emergency airlift to provide relief to southern Somalia.
This political pressure began to resonate at the White House. In late July, President Bush encouraged his staff to examine additional diplomatic efforts to enhance the UN efforts in Somalia. However, according to Scowcroft and his deputy Walter Kansteiner, although the president was beginning to feel some political pressure to take action, his concern was limited to finding ways in which the United States could assist the United Nations in dealing with the problem. According to Scowcroft, "there was no discussion of using U.S. force for any purpose at this point."
At the staff level, this led to a bureaucratic deadlock. Some liberal humanitarianists sought to put forward military options for provision of relief, whereas selective engagers remained opposed to the use of U.S. military force, calling Somalia a "bottomless pit." This opposition frustrated the liberal humanitarianists. According to James Bishop:
I went to one interagency meeting and there was this brigadier general from the Joint Staff. We came up with this option to use helicopter gunships to support relief delivery. This general sat there and said we couldn't use helicopters in such a dusty environment. Hell, we had just fought a massive war in the Persian Gulf desert with lots of helicopters. I was evacuated from Mogadishu in January 1991 in a Marine Corp helicopter that operated just fine. But that was their attitude. They didn't want anything to do with it and they were prepared to lie to keep them out of it. At every meeting, no matter the proposal, the Joint Chiefs opposed it.
By early August, according to Ambassador Bishop, "we were just churning and rumbling and rumbling, but there was no real interest from above." Herman Cohen, then the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, concurred: "We were told to be forward leaning, but the president paid even less attention to us."
BOSNIA: IMPACT OF CAMP DISCLOSURE.
Meanwhile, throughout July and early August, liberal humanitarianists greatly
intensified their pressure on the Bush Administration to intervene in Bosnia.
At the time, the administration's control of the public message on Bosnia began
to be challenged by liberal humanitarian members of Congress and the media,
as independent reports from Bosnia started to contradict the administration's
statements. By early July many American journalists began shifting the emphasis
in their reporting. Instead of suggesting that the conflict was the spontaneous
actions of neighbor killing neighbor, journalists began to report on the activities
of small bands of highly radical Serb nationalists and paramilitaries accused
of committing horrific atrocities in highly organized campaigns.
This view of a highly coordinated and systematic campaign of violence was reinforced
in early August with the disclosure of Serb-controlled concentration-style camps
in Bosnia. The images were haunting and, for many, conclusive proof that the
U.S. administration was deliberately distorting the events in Bosnia, especially
given the administration's initial response to downplay the reports on the camps.
By then, reporters had spent months in Bosnia and had gained critical experience.
Furthermore, many journalists began to conclude, according to National Public
Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten, who was then reporting from Bosnia, that reporting
all sides as equally complicit in the violence was "quite simply incorrect.
Objectivity in this sense does not mean a kind of even-handedness, giving one
paragraph to the atrocities of one side, one paragraph to atrocities of the
other side, one paragraph to atrocities of the third side."
Consequently, media coverage began to represent a wider range of interpretations of the conflict. The pressure on the selective engagers in the wake of the camp disclosures in early August was particularly intense. Between August 2 and August 14, forty-eight news stories on Bosnia totaling 151 minutes and 30 seconds were broadcast on the three major network evening news programs. The stories challenged Bush's policies and gave significant attention to the views and criticisms of Bush's political rival, Bill Clinton. Several stories contrasted Clinton's visible outrage on the concentration camps with Bush's tempered reaction. On August 9, ABC World News Tonight ran a profile distinguishing Clinton and Bush's approaches to Bosnia by extensively quoting Clinton on the need for strong, decisive U.S. leadership.
Liberal humanitarianists in Congress also escalated pressure on the president. With greater access to information and with increasing suspicion of selective engagers in the Bush administration, liberal humanitarianists in both the House and Senate launched a series of hearings. On August 14, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a scathing report on ethnic cleansing that presented the Serb ethnic cleansing campaign as a deliberate and highly coordinated politically driven campaign of violence - and not the result of spontaneous bottom-up hatreds.
Furthermore, former Cold War hard-liners now entered the fray. After nearly four months of what they perceived to be a total European failure to handle the situation in Bosnia, hard-line critics such as Richard Perle, long-time nuclear weapons strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Jeane Kirkpatrick and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sensed that growing violence, coupled with what they viewed as Serb aggression, would inevitably spill over to violence in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and ultimately Greece and Turkey - all of which would escalate geostrategic threats to the United States. In particular, the hard-liners opposed the United Nations arms embargo that had been imposed in mid-1991 with the hopes of mitigating the Serb-Croat war and which had been extended to include Bosnia in March 1992. Hard-liners believed that the arms embargo reinforced the Serbs' military superiority in Bosnia by restricting the Bosnian Muslims' ability to acquire capabilities to defend against the Serb onslaught. The hard-liners argued that United States should lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims - unilaterally if need be - and commit its air power to strike Serb artillery sites, military convoys, and transportation routes.
Amid this escalation in political pressure surrounding the disclosure of the camps in Bosnia, Bush urgently assembled his national security team on August 8 at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to discuss the matter. Although there is no evidence that public opinion had shifted toward greater support for direct U.S. involvement in Bosnia, on the eve of the 1992 Republican Presidential Convention, the mobilized political opposition to Bush's handling of the crisis struck a nervous chord among Bush's political advisers. Bush, who had taken tremendous pride in his foreign policy accomplishments -overseeing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the Persian Gulf War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union -- was now being publicly castigated by highly respected foreign policy commentators. This was a particularly sensitive issue among Bush's senior political advisers -- James Baker, Dennis Ross, Margaret Tutwiler, and Robert Zoellick -- all of whom had moved from the State Department to the White House on August 1 to take charge of Bush's failing re-election bid.
In particular, selective engagers in Bush's political camp feared that liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners were altering the public conception of Bosnia and making the administration look callous in the face of an egregious humanitarian crisis. Several liberal humanitarianists and hard-line commentators and members of Congress suggested that intervention could be done without fear of U.S. forces become embroiled in a Vietnam-style quagmire. They focused their attention on Serb aggression and the role of Slobodan Milosevic as the primary culprit for the violence. Their prescription was that if the United States removed Milosevic or directed a targeted military strike against him and his radical supporters, the violence in Bosnia would quickly dissipate. For example, an editorial in the New Republic proclaimed, "The Balkan war is not so politically complicated that no judgment about its morality can be made. It is not merely an ethnic conflict. It is a campaign in which a discrete faction of Serbian nationalists has manipulated ethnic sentiment in order to seize power and territory. It is an act of international aggression, an assault on a member of the United Nations. Despite the U.N.'s condemnation, there have been too many platitudes about the responsibility of all factions for the war. This lazy language is an escape hatch through which outside powers flee their responsibilities."
This mobilized criticism and the campaign to reframe the nature of the crisis
frustrated the most senior levels within the Administration. Scowcroft recalls
his reaction to the domestic criticism unleashed at the time, "I was very
suspicious that people who had never supported the use of force for our national
interests were now screaming for us to use force in Yugoslavia.… I disagreed
with the humanitarianists who deliberately downplayed the intractability of
the conflict, who demonized Milosevic and saw this simply as a war of aggression.
Milosevic was a factor, but to that extent there were also national hatreds
there, that couldn't be ignored."
Despite the intensity of this political pressure, selective engagers at the
White House and within the military remained convinced that Bosnia would be
a quagmire. After meeting his advisers on August 8, Bush reiterated his caution:
"We are not going to get bogged down in some guerilla warfare." He
also ordered his team to contest the liberal humanitarian view that U.S. intervention
could quickly break the siege of Sarajevo with little cost in American lives.
Over the next several days, selective engagers in the Bush camp and within the Joint Chiefs intensified their public campaign to sell their beliefs about the potential dangers associated with direct U.S. involvement in the conflict. On August 11, Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a principal deputy to General Powell, publicly discussed the Joint Chief's views with ABC World News Tonight, saying emphatically that, despite the tragedy, "there is no military solution." Earlier that day, senior military planners told a congressional hearing that between 60,000 and 120,000 ground troops would be needed to break the siege of Sarajevo and ensure uninterrupted relief. Other commanders suggested that a field army of at least 400,000 troops would be needed to implement a cease-fire.
SOMALIA: AIRLIFT IS SUPPORTED.
In the midst of the public furor over the camp disclosure in Bosnia, President
Bush announced an abrupt shift on his Somalia policy and ordered U.S. Air Force
C-130s to assist in providing relief to famine victims in Somalia. The president
also reversed his opposition to funding the deployment of 500 Pakistani peacekeepers
to Somalia; in fact, he announced that the Pentagon would provide transportation
for the 500-man team and its equipment.
Conventional arguments suggest that CNN compelled the president to act in Somalia -- that vivid images of starving and emaciated children in Somalia provoked a sense of moral outrage within the American populace. However, among the three major U.S. television networks, Somalia was mentioned in only fifteen news stories in all of 1992 prior to Bush's decision to begin the airlift and nearly half of these "showed only fleeting glimpses of Somalia's plight" as part of other stories.
The evidence suggests that Bush's policy shift on Somalia came in response to both the increasing pressure to do something in Somalia and also in response to the political backlash on Bosnia that occurred on the eve of the Republican convention. Scowcroft recalls, "It [the Bosnian camp issue] probably did have a significant influence on us. We did not want to portray the administration as wholly flint-hearted realpolitik, and an airlift in Somalia was a lot cheaper [than intervention in Bosnia] to demonstrate that we had a heart."
FURTHER MOBILIZATION OF INTERVENTIONISTS
On Bosnia, the selective engagers in the administration continued their public
strategy to downplay the magnitude of the violence and characterize the conflict
as one of ancient blood feuds. In response to a question about the causes of
the war in Bosnia, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger proclaimed,
"It is difficult to explain, but this war is not rational. There is no
rationality at all about ethnic conflict. It is gut; it is hatred; it's not
for any common set of values or purposes; it just goes on. And that kind of
warfare is most difficult to bring to a halt." Later in a television interview
on the McNeil-Leher News Hour he argued, "I'm not prepared to accept arguments
that there must be something between the kind of involvement of Vietnam and
doing nothing, that the New York Times and the Washington Post keep blabbing
about, that there must be some form in the middle. That's again, what got us
into Vietnam -- do a little bit, and it doesn't work. What do you do next?"
By September, liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners in the bureaucracy had forged a unified coalition and began a concerted effort to identify the effect of the upcoming winter on the civilian population in Bosnia. As part of the effort, they detailed estimates of civilian casualties that displaced populations would face in the impending winter months. Andrew Natsios, the assistant administrator for food and humanitarian assistance for the Agency for International Development, warned Eagleburger in a letter that "immediate and massive action must be taken now to avert a tragedy by the onset of the winter season." A week later, a secret Central Intelligence Agency analysis estimate that as many as 250,000 Bosnian Muslims might die from starvation and exposure was leaked to the press even before it was briefed to the National Security Council (NSC). NGOs began working with professional staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to increase congressional oversight of the intelligence community's collection and analysis of war crimes and atrocities and to report on whether Serb actions constituted genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
As liberal humanitarian and hard-line interventionist voices began to permeate Washington's political debate, serious concern emerged among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the intense political and public debate over intervention was leading toward direct U.S. involvement in Bosnia. According to Adm. David Jeremiah, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the view among the Joint Chiefs was one of increasing frustration with the political campaign on intervention by liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners: "[They] made unrealistic claims about what could be done with the use of force…. They wanted us to volunteer military solutions to very complex political problems, and they wanted us to do it in a way where nobody would get hurt. It was just unreasonable."
As the cumulative pressures for action in Bosnia escalated, General Powell embarked on an unprecedented public campaign to keep U.S. troops out of Bosnia. On September 27, Powell called Michael Gordon of the New York Times into his office for an extensive interview. Gordon describes Powell as at times angry during the interview and that he "assailed the proponents of limited military intervention to protect the Bosnians." Powell argued that "as soon as they tell me it is limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me 'surgical,' I head for the bunker." He further complained about the civilians calling for military action in Bosnia:
"These are the same folks who have stuck us into problems before that we have lived to regret. I have some memories of us being put into situations like that which did not turn out quite the way that the people who put us in thought, i.e., Lebanon, if you want a more recent real experience, where a bunch of Marines were put in there as a symbol, as a sign. Except those poor young folks did not know exactly what their mission was. They did not know really what they were doing there. It was very confusing. Two hundred and forty-one of them died as a result."
Meanwhile, some selective engagers on Bush's political team began to look for ways to take more aggressive action short of direct U.S. military intervention in hopes of alleviating some of the domestic criticism. Scowcroft and Eagleburger developed a plan to establish a no-fly zone over Bosnia. President Bush agreed to the no-fly zone but, in deference to Powell and Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, he publicly warned that the administration would "prevent the no-fly zone from becoming a slippery slope leading to deeper involvement."
Two days later, the New York Times published a scathing editorial directed at General Powell entitled "At Least Slow the Slaughter." It strongly criticized Powell and his reluctance to intervene in Bosnia:
The war in Bosnia is not a fair fight and it is not war. It is slaughter.
When Americans spend more than $280 billion a year for defense, surely they ought to be getting more for their money than no-can-do. It is the prerogative of civilian leaders confronting this historic nightmare to ask the military for a range of options more sophisticated than off or on, stay out completely or go in all the way to total victory.
With that in hand, President Bush could tell General Powell what President Lincoln once told General McClellan: 'If you don't want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for a while.'
By all accounts, Powell was livid. In his memoirs, he recalls that he "erupted" in anger. He then dashed off a scathing rebuttal in which he argued that the conflict is "especially complex" and has "deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years."
In sum, all of these various pressures put Powell and his advisors on the defensive. The State Department was initiating new policy initiatives that, while stopping short of outright U.S. intervention, were seen by the military command staff as the initial steps to a much greater U.S. involvement. Liberal humanitarianists in Congress were demanding more. In addition, the media was openly questioning Powell's leadership. This was the cumulative pressure on Powell and the Bush administration in early November when Bill Clinton, who had campaigned on an activist policy in Bosnia, won the 1992 presidential election.
SOMALIA - ALSO ADRIFT.
Throughout much of September, October, and early November, Somalia again fell
off the radar screen. After an initial wave of news broadcasts and printed reports
on Somalia following the decision to begin the airlift, the media moved to other
international stories. Within the NSC Somalia also quickly disappeared. Those
within the NSC who worked on Africa turned their focus toward the negotiations
in South Africa leading up to free elections and the brutal civil wars in Angola
and Mozambique - both cases that were deemed more important to overall U.S.
geostrategic interests than Somalia.
This indifference to the situation in Somalia was felt within the bureaucracy and the interagency task force that had been established to monitor the airlift. The U.S. air relief was dropping food into Baidoa and feeding centers were established, but those most in need were not able to get to it. On November 6, the Office of Food and Disaster Assistance reported that more than 25 percent of Somali children under the age of five had already died. Despite these conditions, there was very little bureaucratic movement on additional remedies to the crisis.
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND LIBERAL HUMANITARIANISTS RESURGENT
On November 8, political power changed in Washington with the election of Bill
Clinton. With respect to foreign policy, Clinton had surrounded himself with
several members of former President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy team, and
the general belief within the Washington foreign policy elite community was
that the new Clinton team would shift markedly toward a liberal humanitarian
foreign policy agenda.
There was wide speculation that Clinton would take quick action on Bosnia by lifting the arms embargo and possibly using U.S. air power to strike Serb targets. Sensing the power shift, within days of the election liberal humanitarianist and hard-line staffers at the State Department circulated a new initiative to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia. By November 16, every relevant bureau in the State Department had signed on to the policy proposal. Furthermore, momentum quickly grew for dramatically expanding UN peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and dedicating NATO air assets to support the peacekeepers -- the UN Security Council agreed to the measure on November 16.
SOMALIA - PRESSURE BUILDS AGAIN. In early November, dozens of international relief groups and representatives from UNHCR again urged the international community to step up its efforts to mitigate the famine. InterAction, a coalition of 160 U.S.-based nongovernmental relief organizations issued public and private appeals to President Bush detailing the extensive problems that relief groups were facing in Somalia without any security from roaming bandits. InterAction requested that the United States increase its support for the UN to provide security for relief operations. Furthermore, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reiterated his criticism that the Bush administration - with all of its public focus on the Bosnia war in Europe - was ignoring the more acute plight of millions of black Africans in Somalia.
In response to this pressure, a wide range of policy options was discussed at a series of interagency meetings during the first three weeks of November. The question of military intervention was not open for discussion because of continued and absolute opposition from the military. Instead, the interagency group outlined a series of recommendations short of any U.S. military participation and forwarded them to a Deputies Committee meeting of the National Security Council on November 20.
CLINTON'S FIRST TRIP TO WASHINGTON. Meanwhile, on November 19, two weeks after the election, President-elect Bill Clinton arrived in Washington for separate briefings from President Bush and General Powell. Although both meetings were designed to be a thorough discussion of U.S. national security priorities (i.e., U.S. relations with Russia and China, the future of NATO alliance and NATO expansion) in both meetings, Clinton pressed Bush and Powell extensively about Bosnia. On this subject, the meeting with Powell was especially tense. Even before the meeting, Powell and his colleagues in the Joint Chiefs were highly concerned that Clinton might propel the United States into Bosnia on an ambiguous, feel-good mission. According to Powell's account, Clinton started their meeting by asking, "Wasn't there some way, he wanted to know, that we could influence the situation [in Bosnia] through air power, something not too punitive?" Powell lamented later: "There it was again, the ever-popular solution from the skies, with a good humanist twist; let's not hurt anybody." Powell says he didn't want to sound too negative on the first meeting and told the president-elect that he would have his staff "give the matter more thought."
CUMULATIVE PRESSURE. By now, liberal humanitarianists had mobilized extensive public and internal political pressure on the administration on both Somalia and Bosnia. At the White House, Scowcroft recalls that the president, coming off of his post election blues, was personally affected by the reports and by the pressure he was receiving on Somalia from groups like InterAction. Bush began asking his advisers whether anything could be done on Somalia. Furthermore, the Joint Chiefs were increasingly anxious that the new president might escalate U.S. military involvement in Bosnia. They were especially embittered -- strikingly evident in Powell's discussion with Clinton -- by liberal humanitarianst claims that intervention in support of humanitarian missions, and in Bosnia in particular, could be done on the cheap.
This cumulative pressure ultimately catapulted a policy reversal by the Joint Chiefs - again, not on Bosnia but on Somalia. The day after Powell's meeting with Clinton, the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council met to discuss the situation in Somalia. Three options were put on the table: increasing U.S. financial and material support for the current UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia; coordinating a broader UN effort in which the United States would provide logistical support but no ground troops; and initiating a U.S.-led multinational military intervention to Somalia. According to John Hirsch and former Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley's account, however, the only consensus at the November 20 meeting was that the third option "was not a serious option." In fact, the option of military intervention was not even raised for discussion.
The next day, however, Admiral Jeremiah returned and stunned the deputies meeting by announcing that General Powell and the Joint Chiefs, if force was desired in Somalia, the military could do the job. Admiral Jeremiah recalls that by then, the frustration within the Joint Chiefs had reached a critical mass:
There was a lot of pressure on us to do something. I went in to see Powell. As far as I was concerned, this was the president's decision to be made. But we had weeks of hand wringing and futzing around [by the civilian policymakers] trying to figure out the right thing to do. Nobody wants to send troops…[where groups]…have been fighting for hundreds of years.
When I said it, I was frustrated because we were taking all of the heat on Somalia and Bosnia. Everyone wanted us to volunteer - to go into Bosnia and to go into Somalia -- but nobody was making decisions about what they wanted to do.
During the November 21 deputies meeting, I presented our [Joint Chiefs'] view that -- if you decide -- this is what it will take to do the job. Were our figures overkill? Probably. But we weren't going to go in with a weak force. We said just give us the resources and let's get on with it already."
Jeremiah further added: "Thirty thousand troops is a pretty heavy deployment. No one thought Somalia was going to be cheap or completely risk free. But Bosnia made it seem as though we could do Somalia with a relatively moderate force….Thirty thousand wouldn't get you a running start in Bosnia."
Scowcroft recalls that he too was struck by Joint Chiefs abrupt shift: "I know that the military had long felt that [Somalia would be a quagmire because the combatants would be virtually indistinguishable from the civilians]. I was struck, and I still am, with the alacrity with which Colin Powell changed gears."
THE PRESIDENT'S DECISION.
On November 25, after receiving briefings on the famine and the military situation,
the president told his advisers that he wanted to deploy U.S. forces to Somalia.
The president's decision was directly linked to the cumulative pressures of
the public criticism on both Somalia and Bosnia. It was also tied to the fact
that the Joint Chiefs were prepared to support the action, and that military
commanders now believed they could effectively mitigate the famine. In addition,
according to Scowcroft, by this time, Bush had become more sensitive to his
presidential legacy, which had become jeopardized by the exhaustive liberal
criticism of the administration's apparent callousness to humanitarian crises.
Somalia seemed like a good contribution to that legacy.
For their part, the Joint Chief's abrupt shift on Somalia also reflected the cumulative pressure and criticism from liberals on them for their reluctance to use force in support of the crisis in Bosnia. Powell's support for intervention in Somalia was explicitly based on the condition that U.S. forces would not be called into a similar effort in Bosnia.
After Bush's decision to intervene in Somalia, Powell and Scowcroft met to work out the details. According to Walter Kansteiner, Deputy White House spokesman, one of Powell's principal requests was that the White House do everything necessary to sell the operation to the American public. Powell then told Scowcroft that the mission would be named Operation Restore Hope to ensure widespread public support. By then Scowcroft recalls, he and the president were convinced of public support: "From what we saw of the public commentary and the political debates prior to the decision, we knew everyone in Washington supported this one."
Conclusion
In the past decade, the conditions for regional and civil violence appear to have increased. New wars have cropped up throughout the world, and they are ugly, persistent, and show no signs of abating. In response, scholars have dedicated significant energy in the study of regional and civil conflict in hopes of finding strategies for controlling and mitigating violence. Much of this literature identifies conditions under which intervention can be effective. However, if we are to develop sophisticated strategies for responding to regional and civil violence, it is important to understand not only when intervention can be an effective in mitigating the violence, but also to understand the conditions and processes by which intervention is implemented as an instrument of U.S. policy. In short, we need to understand why the United States intervenes in some instances and not in others.
COMPETING BELIEFS
The cases of Somalia and Bosnia in 1992 have several idiosyncrasies that make
generalizations difficult. But one implication from these cases suggests that
a starting point for future research on why the United States intervenes in
some instances is to examine competing normative beliefs and the politics of
intervention. From Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Northern Iran, Rwanda, Sierra-Leone,
Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere in the past decade American foreign policy elites
have expressed differing normative beliefs about when and where the United States
should intervene. These competing beliefs appear to rotate around the selective
engager and liberal humanitarian axis. The cases presented here suggest that
these beliefs not only exist, but that they are significant contributors to
our understanding of why the United States intervenes.
INFORMATION ADVANTAGES
In addition to competing beliefs, advocacy, information, and advocacy resources
also mattered. Initially, President Bush and his advisors faced little opposition
to their policies on Somalia and Bosnia. They captured significant information
advantages on both crises, and with little or no liberal humanitarian or media
presence on the ground in Somalia or Bosnia; selective engagers effectively
portrayed the conflict as one fueled by ancient tribal hatreds about which the
United States could do little.
The shifts in the Bush Administration's policy on Somalia - first in August 1992 and then again in November 1992 -- came only in the face of mobilized political opposition. The critical variables behind these policy shifts stem from the shift in information and propaganda advantages once competing elites and the media developed and dedicated resources to the conflict areas to challenge the administration's framing of the crisis.
Three factors helped shift the information advantages - and ultimately the political dynamic leading to the U.S. intervention in Somalia. First, the duration of each crisis compounded the political effects. As each crisis lingered month after month with no signs of abating, the political pressures compounded. The persistence of the humanitarian crises enabled the media, liberal humanitarian, and hard-line opponents of the Bush Administration gradually to collect information independent of the administration and mobilize their own advocacy resources. In each case, the independent collection of information and the mobilized dissemination and propagation of that information - and ultimately the political pressure -- came several months after the violence and humanitarian crises reached massive proportions. Had each crisis abated in the late summer or in the fall of 1992, the United States likely would not have intervened in Somalia.
Second, the breakdown of executive cohesion and disarray within the ranks of the administration ultimately exposed alternative analytical narratives of each crisis. The prevailing (and cohesive) view among the senior Bush Administration and military leaders was unwavering throughout the first year of the Somalia crisis and the first five months of the Bosnia. However, in the wake of the camp disclosure issue on Bosnia in August 1992 and the corresponding media attention, dissent and fragmentation within the administration with respect to both Somalia and Bosnia escalated significantly. Mid-level and senior liberal humanitarian and hard-line officials consistently challenged the selective engager policies of the Bush Administration on each crisis. As the crises progressed, hardliners and liberal humanitarianists within the bureaucratic ranks of the State Department and the Pentagon began to leak information about the crises to the press. These leaks gave liberal humanitarianist opponents of the administration additional information on which to criticize the administration's policies and led to a dramatic opening of the political debate on intervention.
Finally, with the election of Bill Clinton, on November 2, President Bush and
General Powell, in particular, concluded that the election represented a full-scale
power shift in Washington from selective engager Bush administration to what
they believed would be a very active liberal humanitarian Clinton administration.
As part of this, they believed that liberal humantarianists within the new administration
would be intent on making a strong case for American intervention in Bosnia.
In the end, Bush and his advisors concluded that Clinton would likely alter
public attitudes toward Bosnia and launch some form of military action there.
Unable to control the spin on each crisis and in response to the election of
Bill Clinton, Bush and Powell concluded that if the United States was going
to intervene in response to a humanitarian crisis, it would be in Somalia and
not Bosnia.
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
The preliminary implication of this research is that interventions are inherently
political decisions - contested within a highly political context. No universal
grand strategy or doctrine on intervention - such as the Powell Doctrine --
is likely to prevail within this political context. Those who rule out intervention
from the outset may find themselves under intense and persistent pressure that
will likely distract other foreign policy initiatives and ultimately lead to
some form of intervention under less than desirable or optimal terms.
Second, "do-ability" as a basis for intervention is a highly subjective consideration. The belief among senior Bush Administration officials that Somalia was "do-able" emerged only in the context of the intense pressure from competing foreign policy elites on Bosnia as well as Somalia. And, that pressure came from liberal humanitarianists and hard-liners who were able to challenge the views of the selective engagers in the Bush Administration only after they had cultivated their own access to information -- thereby breaking the Administration's information monopoly. Prior to this pressure, Bush and his senior military advisors led by General Colin Powell adamantly opposed use of force in Somalia arguing that it did not meet the criteria of the Powell doctrine.
Third, this case demonstrates that senior U.S. military officials are often intimately involved in policymaking. General Powell's initiation of an explicit political campaign to influence American policy on Bosnia may have been relatively unique. However, more broadly, the military has significant advantages on information and institutional resources on military planning that can be used for political purposes. On both Somalia and Bosnia, opponents of the Joint Chiefs position criticized the military for inflating estimates of U.S. intervention in both conflicts. Whether or not these inflations were real or not is difficult to determine for certain. Nonetheless, for the first several months of the conflicts in both Somalia and Bosnia, these estimates helped diffuse political pressure on the administration to use military force in the two conflicts. It is clear that the Joint Chiefs do enjoy a monopoly of information on military planning that can allow it to influence policy when they feels strongly about a particular situation.
Finally, the traditional conception of the "CNN-effect" oversimplifies the influence of the media on intervention decisions. The media can provide a forum for the collection and dissemination of information that critically assesses the views presented by the administration. However, the nature of regional and civil conflicts -- which are fought in remote corners of the globe -- often preclude exhaustive reporting from the ground, at least initially. Consequently, because of a lack of resources, expertise, and access to the conflict, the media often focuses its early attention on the U.S. policy response and reporting from Washington. Initially most journalists did not have significant experience in, or access to, Somalia and Bosnia. This created an early bias in favor of the analytical portrayal of the conflicts by selective engagers in the Bush administration, i.e., those with information. However, as more journalists and liberal humanitarianists traveled to the conflict zones, alternative analyses of the crises were broadcast and printed. As this occurred, the media facilitated the mobilization by groups challenging the administration's views on both Bosnia and Somalia.
An interesting side-note to this is that the post-Cold War downsizing of the media may have a significant effect on future media coverage. In the past decade, most news organizations have reduced the numbers of their foreign-based correspondents. Instead, "celebrity journalists" tend to parachute into the world's hot spots. While these journalists are extremely skilled, they are not likely to have pre-existing knowledge or information resources and learning curves are likely to be steep. This may further bias reporting of regional and civil conflicts that reinforce early analytical narratives produced and disseminated by administration officials - whether they be selective engagers or liberal humanitarianists.