Word: somalia
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...other alternative is for the West to enforce a settlement, requiring the deployment of thousands of troops. While NATO troops are far superior to any of those fighting in Bosnia, such a deployment would inevitably lead to losses. If the U.S. experience in Somalia is any indication, the Clinton administration might not have the stomach for these losses...
...price cannot fail to be exorbitant. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that American intervention will only involve air strikes and military aid. What happens after the air strikes fail? After the embarrassing debacle in Somalia, can we really expect the Clinton administration to lose additional face by turning away from the Balkans? All we can expect is an escalation of involvement and a concomitant loss of American lives...
...neutrality has largely been shattered. "There is a definite change in the attitude toward humanitarian workers," says U.N. aid official Paul Mitchell. "We are now targets." Aid staff members, alone and together & with their uniformed escorts, have taken sides, wittingly and unwittingly, in these fragmented, fratricidal wars. In Somalia, "relief workers tend to become identified with different subclans," says Lance Salisbury, assistant country representative for Catholic Relief Services. "And the leaders attempt to draw you into larger conflicts." In Baidoa, where Salisbury is based, most of his staff is from the Lyssan subclan, which prompted attacks from an opposing subclan...
From the beginning it was widely understood that humanitarian aid was not going to resolve a war of such ethnic-based savagery as Bosnia's. But aid was deemed sufficient to straighten out Somalia, where the fighting was considered to be the result of hardship. Yet as both cases demonstrate, in the continued absence of concerted political and military initiatives for peace, humanitarian-aid workers are losing the war against misery. The West will pay a high price for that defeat in a loss of credibility, loss of capacity for effective action, loss of the right to call itself civilized...
When Clinton fails to go through the lengthy process, it is usually costly. He skipped it on gays in the military, the appointment of Lani Guinier (whose works he did not study until it was too late) and Somalia. But when he takes his time, it works. Last summer, after he announced that he would nominate Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, a beaming Clinton returned to the , West Wing and walked into McLarty's office to chat. "That just goes to show that if you give me enough time to make me feel great down here," he said...