Does Operation Restore Hope in Somalia represent a new pattern of US intervention in the world?

I don't think it really should be classified as an intervention. It's more of a public relations operation for the Pentagon.

In fact, it's intriguing that it was almost openly stated this time. Colin Powell, the [former] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made a statement about how this was a great public relations job for the military. A Washington Post editorial described it as a bonanza for the Pentagon.

The reporters could scarcely fail to see what was happening. After all, when the Pentagon calls up all the news bureaus and major television networks and says: "Look, be at such-and-such a beach at such-and-such an hour with your cameras aiming in this direction because you're going to watch Navy Seals climbing out of the water and it will be real exciting," nobody can fail to see that this is a PR job. That would be a level of stupidity that's too much for anyone.

The best explanation for the "intervention," in my opinion, was given in an article in the London Financial Times on the day of the landing. It didn't mention Somalia -- it was about the US recession and why the recovery is so sluggish.

It quoted various economists from investment firms and banks -- guys that really care about the economy. The consensus was that the recovery is slow because the standard method of government stimulation -- pump priming through the Pentagon system -- simply isn't available to the extent that it's been in the past.

Bush put it pretty honestly in his farewell address when he explained why we intervened in Somalia and not Bosnia. What it comes down to is that in Bosnia somebody might shoot at us. In Somalia it's just a bunch of teenaged kids. We figure thirty thousand Marines can handle that.

The famine was pretty much over and fighting had declined. So it's photo opportunities, basically. One hopes it will help the Somalis more than harm them, but they're more or less incidental. They're just props for Pentagon public relations.

This has to be finessed by the press at the moment, because Somalia is not a pretty story. The US was the main support for Siad Barre, a kind of Saddam Hussein clone, from 1978 through 1990 (so it's not ancient history). He was tearing the country apart.

He destroyed the civil and social structures -- in fact, laid the basis for what's happening now -- and, according to Africa Watch [a human rights monitoring group based in Washington, DC], probably killed fifty or sixty thousand people. The US was, and may well be still, supporting him. The forces, mostly loyal to him, are being supported through Kenya, which is very much under US influence.

The US was in Somalia for a reason -- the military bases there are part of the system aimed at the Gulf region. However, I doubt that that's much of a concern at this point. There are much more secure bases and more stable areas. What's needed now, desperately needed, is some way to prevent the Pentagon budget from declining.

When the press and commentators say the US has no interests there, that's taking a very narrow and misleading view. Maintaining the Pentagon system is a major interest for the US economy.

A Navy and Marine White Paper in September 1992 discussed the military's shift in focus from global threats to "regional challenges and opportunities," including "humanitarian assistance and nation-building efforts in the Third World."

That's always been the cover, but the military budget is mainly for intervention. In fact, even strategic nuclear forces were basically for intervention.

The US is a global power. It isn't like the Soviet Union, which used to carry out intervention right around its borders, where they had an overwhelming conventional force advantage. The US carried out intervention everywhere -- in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East and in places where it had no such dominance. So the US had to have an extremely intimidating posture to make sure that nobody got in the way.

That required what was called a "nuclear umbrella" -- powerful strategic weapons to intimidate everybody, so that conventional forces could be an instrument of political power. In fact, almost the entire military system -- its military aspect, not its economic aspect -- was geared for intervention. But that was often covered as "nation building." In Vietnam, in Central America -- we're always humanitarian.

So when the Marine Corps documents say we now have a new mission -- humanitarian nation building -- that's just the old cover story. We now have to emphasize it more because traditional pretext -- the conflict with the Russians -- is gone, but it's the same as it's always been.

What kind of impact will the injection of US armed forces into Somalia have on the civil society? Somalia has been described by one US military official as "Dodge City" and the Marines as "Wyatt Earp." What happens when the marshal leaves town?

First of all, that description has little to do with Somalia. One striking aspect of this intervention is that there's no concern for Somalia. No one who knew anything about Somalia was involved in planning it, and there's no interaction with Somalis as far as we know (so far, at least).

Since the Marines have gone in, the only people they've dealt with are the so-called "warlords," and they're the biggest gangsters in the country. But Somalia is a country. There are people who know and care about it, but they don't have much of a voice here.

One of the most knowledgeable is a Somali woman named Rakiya Omaar, who was the Executive Director of Africa Watch. She did most of the human rights work, writing, etc. up until the intervention. She strongly opposed the intervention and was fired from Africa Watch.

Another knowledgeable voice is her co-director, Alex de Waal, who resigned from Africa Watch in protest after she was fired. In addition to his human rights work, he's an academic specialist on the region. He's written many articles and has published a major book on the Sudan famine with Oxford University Press. He knows not only Somalia but the region very well. And there are others. Their picture is typically quite different from the one we get here.

Siad Barre's main atrocities were in the northern part of Somalia, which had been a British colony. They were recovering from his US-backed attack and were pretty well organized (although they could, no doubt, have used aid). Their own civil society was emerging -- a rather traditional one, with traditional elders, but with lots of new groups. Women's groups, for example, emerged in this crisis.

The area of real crisis was one region in the south. In part, that's because of General Mohammed Hersi's forces, which are supported from Kenya. (Hersi, who's known as Morgan, is Siad Barre's son-in-law.) His forces, as well as those of General Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi, were carrying out some of the worst atrocities. This led to a serious breakdown in which people just grabbed guns in order to survive. There was lots of looting, and teenaged gangsters.

By September-October [1992], that region was already recovering. Even though groups like US Care and the UN operations were extremely incompetent, other aid groups -- like the International Red Cross, Save The Children, and smaller groups like the American Friends Service Committee or Australian Care -- were getting most of the aid through.

By early November, 80-90% of their aid was reportedly getting through; by late November the figures were up to 95%. The reason was that they were working with the reconstituting Somalian society. In this southern corner of real violence and starvation, things were already recovering, just as they had in the north.

A lot of this had been under the initiative of a UN negotiator, Mohammed Sahnoun of Algeria, who was extremely successful and highly respected on all sides. He was working with traditional elders and the newly emerging civic groups, especially the women's groups, and they were coming back together under his guidance, or at least his initiative.

But Sahnoun was kicked out by [UN Secretary General] Boutros-Ghali in October because he publicly criticized the incompetence and corruption of the UN effort. The UN put in an Iraqi replacement, who apparently achieved very little.

A US intervention was apparently planned for shortly after the election. The official story is that it was decided upon at the end of November, when George Bush saw heart -- rending pictures on television. But, in fact, US reporters in Baidoa in early November saw Marine officers in civilian clothes walking around and scouting out the area, planning for where they were going to set up their base.

This was rational timing. The worst crisis was over, the society was reconstituting and you could be pretty well guaranteed a fair success at getting food in, since it was getting in anyway. Thirty thousand troops would only expedite it in the short term. There wouldn't be too much fighting, because that was subsiding. So it wasn't Dodge City.

Bush got the photo opportunities and left somebody else to face the problems that were bound to arise later on. Nobody cared what happens to the Somalis. If it works, great, we'll applaud and cheer ourselves and bask in self-acclaim. If it turns into a disaster, we'll treat it the same as other interventions that turn into disasters.

After all, there's a long series of them. Take Grenada. That was a humanitarian intervention. We were going to save the people from tragedy and turn it into what Reagan called a "showplace for democracy" or a "showplace for capitalism."

The US poured aid in. Grenada had the highest per capita aid in the world the following year -- next to Israel, which is in another category. And it turned into a complete disaster.

The society is in total collapse. About the only thing that's functioning there is money laundering for drugs. But nobody hears about it. The television cameras were told to look somewhere else.

So if the Marine intervention turns out to be a success, which is conceivable, then there'll be plenty of focus on it and how marvelous we are. If it turns into a disaster, it's off the map -- forget about it. Either way we can't lose.