Looking Backward Brilliantly

By Michael Kinsley

Hindsight is wonderful. And the foreign policy debate these days is a positive orgy of hindsight.

In hindsight, President Clinton undoubtedly wishes he'd stopped that U.N. Security Council resolution on Somalia last June -- the one leading to the pursuit and capture of warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Defense Secretary Les Aspin has admitted that he regrets vetoing the military's request for more tanks for Somalia in September -- tanks that might have prevented Aidid's massacre of American troops on Oct. 3. And the Administration might well be having second thoughts about the so-called Governors Island accord of July 3, which committed the U.S. to send at least a few troops to help restore democracy in Haiti.

These mistakes are said by many -- most notably by Republicans in Congress -- to demonstrate the Clinton Administration's incompetence, naivete and inexperience in foreign policy. And maybe they do. But if so, where were all these brilliant Monday-morning geo-sophisticates at the time the decisions in question were made? For the most part, they were silent.

The June 6 U.N. resolution, for example, was no secret. Aidid's forces had ambushed and killed 24 Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers. The Security Council voted for the "arrest and detention for prosecution, trial and punishment" of the perpetrators (though it didn't mention Aidid by name). The U.S. supported the resolution. All this was on the front page of the newspapers. A week later, U.S. troops counterattacked Aidid's headquarters, in a fire fight that was covered live on CNN.

Yet a search through the newspapers and the Congressional Record for June turns up no public figure who declared at the time any change of heart about U.S. involvement in Somalia. Very few politicians had the courage to be heartless and oppose the original deployment by President Bush late last year. Many more had begun agitating for withdrawal by September, as American deaths started to rise. There was some mild grumbling about the killing of civilians, but no criticism I could find of what is now held to be an obvious and devastating error: the change of mission.

The hindsight view was expressed in an Oct. 6 New York Times editorial calling on Clinton to "extricate U.S. troops from the gathering disaster in Somalia . . . The nature of the mission changed dramatically in June ((when)) the Security Council unwisely made ((Aidid's)) capture and trial an essential part of the mission." But back in June, while warning of a potential quagmire, the Times said, "Threatening General Aidid with arrest seems a minimal way of expressing international condemnation." And "Mr. Clinton dare not flinch . . . If the world's might cannot prevail against a Somali warlord, then what hope is there for collective security?"

While sharpening their hindsight, many critics are suffering a convenient memory failing about the original Somalia mission. This magazine laid it all out clearly. The headline on TIME's Somalia cover story last December was not "Feeding the Hungry." It was "Taking On the Thugs." American troops, TIME wrote, "will be conducting an experiment in world order: armed peacemaking, rather than peacekeeping." And from the beginning, it was no secret that even the minimal goal of preventing starvation would require some of what is now dismissed contemptuously as "nation building." TIME again: "Unless a contingent of peacemakers stays long enough . . . to fashion some kind of effective national authority, the causes of Somalia's chaos will only re-emerge."

By the time Aspin made his regrettable decision not to supply those tanks (and other equipment) in late September, hindsight on Somalia was at flood tide. Politicians of every stripe were calling for American forces to be withdrawn as quickly as possible. Both houses of Congress were about to be on record, by lopsided margins, against continued American involvement in Somalia.

Aspin's decision was not publicized, so no one can be accused of failing to criticize it at the time. But it's not hard to imagine what the reaction would have been if Aspin had announced the opposite decision: to send in more troops and tanks. The very politicians who now call for his hide for having failed to send in the tanks would have wanted his hide for escalating at a time when they thought we should be pulling out.

In the case of Haiti, as it happens, Aspin was the one with foresight. It was Aspin and Pentagon officials who warned all along against sending American troops there, and who also predicted that the military leaders would not honor their commitment to step aside, made at Governors Island in July. The Governors Island accord was also front-page news. The implied U.S. role was clear.

After a ship with almost 200 American soldiers was turned away from Port-au- Prince by rioters at the dock, Senate minority leader Bob Dole declared, "I wouldn't be sending anybody to Haiti." But in July, Bob Dole was silent. Only through the miracle of hindsight does he see the error of other people's ways.

Hindsight is wonderful. Too bad you can't run a government that way.