Word: somalia
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BOSNIA Future humanitarian interventions, the do-good exercises that so charmed Clinton before he took office, seem destined to be judged worthwhile only if the cost in American lives is negligible or nonexistent -- which rules out virtually everything besides earthquake relief. Bosnia will almost surely be a casualty of Somalia. In February, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said, "The world's response to the violence in the former Yugoslavia is a crucial test of how it will address the concerns of ethnic and religious minorities in the post-cold war world . . . Bold tyrants and fearful minorities are watching...
...complexity theory is valid, there may be hope someday for Somalia. There may even be hope for the Clinton Administration's foreign policy...
...longer organized around two neat poles of ideology. America's conception of its national interests and its moral role abroad, to say nothing of its idea of itself at home, is disheveled. It is therefore natural that in trying to find its way through problems like, say, Bosnia and Somalia, the Administration can see no farther than the range of its low-beam headlights...
Maybe so. But it is misleading to blame the diversity of the new world for the confusion in Somalia. The chaos has been there a long time. And it is also a very old story when the most wholesome moral intentions (such as the American desire to feed starving Somali children) lead down a road into nightmares of entanglement and unintended consequences. The best, brightest American policy thinking went off a cliff in Vietnam, for example...
...tried to do good by helping Boris Yeltsin. But by supporting him so unreservedly, the U.S. risks collaborating in the creation of a democratic authoritarianism. It is impossible to accomplish moral and political fine-tuning amid turmoil. American policy toward Haiti, a place almost as poignantly miserable as Somalia, is also smudged by uncertainty just at the moment when the Administration is sending military trainers and engineers to join a U.N. force...