Word: envoys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Saddam failed to meet a U.N. deadline to remove six police posts that remain on Kuwaiti soil. The diplomatic community is not very hopeful that Bush's air strike will have much influence on the situation. "I don't think it will cause Saddam much pain," noted a Western envoy in Kuwait. "And I doubt it will deter him. He has a long history of miscalculations." Adds a Kuwaiti businessman: "We are behind the U.S. action, but we believe that Saddam will continue to defy...
...warlords' struggle for power that must be settled before peace can return to Somalia. Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy, believes Ali Mahdi and Aidid may actually turn out to be irrelevant to an eventual political solution. "Right now they are factors in the political landscape," he says. "But the Somalis don't like domination by a single political party. When people aren't fighting, they don't need military alliances." A former Somali journalist puts the issue in blunter terms: "The U.S. has to deal with these people to stabilize the environment in the short term. But when peace...
...what will become of Baker? For a while, it seemed as if President-elect Clinton might carve out a special Middle East envoy position for Baker. There is speculation that Baker may become Commissioner of Major League Baseball. (Working in the final months of the Bush administration was excellent preparation to deal with baseball's chaos, petty politics and sheer lack of direction.) Most likely, though, Baker will spend most of his time in the near future sitting on a lot of prestigious corporate boards...
...SOMALI MAN, SAYS U.S. SPECIAL ENVOY ROBERT OAKley, three things are important: "his camel, his wife and his weapon. The right to bear arms is in their soul." That is a stereotyped and simplistic view but with an element of truth. In Somalia's nomadic culture, a weapon has always been essential to defend against unknown enemies in the vast desert. Oakley believes that if American soldiers began confiscating weapons, they would quickly become the enemy...
...reality, as always, is different from, and harder than, what military planners imagined. Washington is already enlarging the political scope of the U.S. mission. Before the first troops landed, Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy, held a series of meetings in Mogadishu that resulted in reports that he had no intention of entering into negotiations with Somalia's warlords, but would simply inform them of U.S. military aims and lay down a deadline to withdraw their gunmen. By Friday, Oakley had brokered a temporary reconciliation between the country's two most powerful clan leaders, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid...