[Mb-civic] A Lesson From Somalia - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Lesson From Somalia

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006; A21

"You can only help people if you have sufficient resources and they have 
sufficient political unity and will to be helped," declared Anthony 
Cordesman, the well-known military analyst. "And we should not risk 
American lives without far better planning, intelligence and 
understanding of exactly what it is we're trying to do and of the risks."

One prominent senator declared: "If the Congress voted right now, we 
would vote to pull our troops out." Another warned against "a vague, 
open-ended, humanitarian mission, gradually taking sides against an 
urban guerrilla force, having no exit strategy before you go in, having 
troops on the ground before you've defined their mission, and a series 
of ad hoc decisions."

But the president insisted that we should "finish the work we set out to 
do," and he won praise from an official on the ground who declared: "It 
would be a disaster if the United States pulled out now."

All these eerily contemporary comments came from an Oct. 10, 1993, 
broadcast of ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley." The participants 
were reflecting on administration policy in Somalia a week after a Black 
Hawk helicopter was shot down by rebel forces. Eighteen Americans died 
in the incident. The senators were Phil Gramm and Bill Bradley, the 
president was Bill Clinton, and the supportive comments came from Adm. 
Jonathan Howe, the U.N. special envoy to Somalia.

There are many flaws in comparisons between Somalia and Iraq, but one 
similarity should not be forgotten. If the United States is not careful, 
our troops will find themselves in the middle of a full-blown Iraqi 
civil war. This could make President Bush's talk about "victory" -- he 
used the word at least 13 times in his speech on the war yesterday -- 
seem hollow.

No one is more aware of this than our military commanders, which is why 
attention must be paid to comments last week by Lt. Gen. John R. Vines 
to the New York Times, and to an important news story by Jonathan Finer 
in the Jan. 4 Post.

Vines praised the large turnout in Iraq's Dec. 15 election but noted 
that the "vote is reported to be primarily along sectarian lines, which 
is not particularly heartening." The new government, he said, "must be a 
government by and for Iraqis, not sects." He added: "As the government 
forms, if we see indicators that there are purges of competent people to 
be replaced with ideologues in the security ministries, that would be 
disturbing. If competent commanders were to be replaced by those whose 
main qualification is an allegiance to a sect, that would be of concern 
to us."

The importance of that last sentence was brought home by Finer's Post 
report: "Over the strong objections of U.S. commanders in Baghdad, the 
Iraqi government has nominated a new leader for a brigade that is set to 
assume control over some of the capital's most sensitive areas."

Why was the American choice cast aside? "U.S. commanders," Finer wrote, 
"are concerned that the rejection of a qualified Sunni Muslim candidate 
by a government that is dominated by the rival Shiite Muslim majority 
will fuel perceptions of Iraq's security forces as sectarian 
institutions, particularly in Sunni regions where sympathy for the 
insurgency runs deep."

The potential for a full-scale civil war is closer than ever. The 
administration presumably knows this, but the Bush team's record for 
anticipating bad news is not encouraging. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. 
civilian authority in Iraq after the invasion, admitted on NBC's 
"Dateline" that "we really didn't see the insurgency coming." If they 
missed that, what else can they miss?

Bush's election-year attacks yesterday on "partisan critics" and 
"defeatists" don't give much hope he's open to any advice from the 
opposition. But he ought to listen to Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan 
Democrat who opposed the war but keeps trying to help Bush out of this 
mess. Levin argues that the United States' priority is not simply to 
create a broad coalition government in Iraq. America must use its 
influence to push the Shiite majority to change provisions in the 
recently adopted constitution in ways that will give the minority Sunnis 
a bigger stake in the future. "There's no military solution in Iraq 
unless there is a political coming together in Iraq," Levin said during 
an interview, offering words that should be framed and hung somewhere in 
Bush's office. Without constitutional changes, he added, "there will be 
a civil war regardless of how many troops we have there."

Maybe Bush, who yesterday reminded the Shiites and the Kurds of the 
importance of protecting minority rights "against the tyranny of the 
majority," is listening. Somalia offers a sobering lesson of what can 
happen to American forces when our government blunders into the middle 
of a civil war. We dare not do it again. And we had better see the 
warning signs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/10/AR2006011001180.html?nav=hcmodule
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