Word: somalia
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...overall drift of the Administration he was part of. "Les Aspin was dealt a difficult hand," says Oklahoma Representative Dave McCurdy, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which Aspin once chaired. "The first card was gays and lesbians: faceup. Then came the three regional problems -- Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti -- for which nobody in the Administration had real answers." The heaving and rocking of the Clinton White House as it struggles to define America's role in the world may prove to be Bobby Ray Inman's biggest vexation too. If the Secretary of Defense is supposed to symbolize...
...Aspin appeared at a quickly arranged press conference to announce that the Secretary would be leaving his job in January. But Washington gossip had been building for months that one or more members of the President's foreign-policy team would have to go. The October battles in Somalia that left 18 American servicemen dead had merely provided a focus for the growing sense that every time the Administration stepped abroad it stumbled. Though Aspin may not have been the man most responsible, he was one of the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the problem...
...there was no single incident that led to Aspin's departure, the murderous firefight in Mogadishu made it a foregone conclusion, especially after it was followed by a disastrous closed-door briefing to Congress at which Aspin was reportedly at a loss to describe the Administration's intentions in Somalia. But as far back as September, Aspin was seeing signs that Clinton's doubts about the foreign-policy team were beginning to focus upon him. During his regular meetings with the President, the Secretary had begun to detect a certain "crispness" in Clinton's manner. "Things just deteriorated," says...
...controversy since the beginning of his tenure, when he was caught in the middle of the fight over allowing gays in the military. His disorganized, professorial style alienated many in the Pentagon, and in October he was criticized in Congress for his not sending armored vehicles to troops in Somalia who were later caught and decimated in a firefight...
Moreover, he has dispelled the fears that his foreign policy inexperience would lead to rash decisions. The knee-jerk reaction in Bosnia would have been intervention. In Somalia, it would have been a hasty withdrawal. In China, it would have meant revocation of most-favored-nation trade status. On the contrary, Clinton's decisions have been the measured responses of a seasoned statesman...