Part 2

Summary: In the first chapter of this series, we reviewed the circumstances that led to Al Gore’s unexpected accession to the presidency in March of 1993 and the beginning of the U.S. combat presence in Somalia. In this chapter we’ll look back at the first clashes between U.S. ground troops and al Qaeda fighters in Somalia and the heated battles in Congress in 1995 over President Gore’s request for additional troops to be deployed to Somalia.

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From the moment the first U.S. ground troops arrived in Somalia in the spring of 1993, it was clear to all parties concerned that the stakes for Operation Hope were extremely high. Its success or failure would not only serve as an early test for the Gore Administration’s national security policy but also as a gauge of whether rule of law could be restored to  a nation which had been enduring chronic lawlessness for years; last but not least, it was Washington’s first major attempt in the post-Cold War era to confront terrorism. Since the Carter administration the Democratic Party had been dogged by accusations that it was soft in dealing with terrorists, and Gore wanted to silence those accusations once and for all. As he put it to one of his defense advisors in a now-famous comment, he was "tired of swatting flies". He wanted to go after targets that mattered -- and next to bin Laden, Aidid was the top priority on his personal hit list.

To that end, he gave the CIA the green light to cultivate allies among Aidid’s rivals as well as among the Somali civilian population. He also authorized extensive military and financial assistance to the regular Somali army and had the State Department dispatch special envoys to Ethiopia to enlist that nation’s aid in  neutralizing Aidid. In doing so, he caught considerable flak from some of the more leftist factions of the Democratic Party, who had grim visions of a return to the furtive meddling which had been routine U.S. national security policy back in the days when the GOP held the presidency.

One particularly sharp critic of Gore’s newly aggressive foreign policy was Vermont governor and future 2000 Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean. Dean had long sympathized with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and as a result was inclined to oppose large-scale U.S. military deployments overseas as a matter of principal. He had campaigned on Gore’s behalf in 1992 and 1996 because he supported Gore’s emphasis on diplomacy over force in resolving foreign policy cries; he saw the new, more hawkish stance being adopted by the Gore Administration as a mockery of everything the Democrats stood for and began chastising Gore in the press. Not surprisingly, the White House was quick to fire back at Dean; in a full-tilt media blitz that barely hinted at Gore’s anger towards the Vermont governor, the administration reminded the public that Dean had little-- if any --experience in foreign policy matters and was therefore probably criticizing Gore’s approach to Somalia more due to personal and ideological reasons than practical ones.

Dean was not one to endure such criticisms in silence, and before long the Vermont governor was locked in a full-fledged PR war with the commander-in-chief that raged across the newspapers and TV screens of America and alarmed the Democratic Party leadership. With Congress in Republican hands and the GOP setting its sights on regaining the White House in ’96, the last thing the Democrats needed was to have two of their party’s most prominent lawmakers engaging in a verbal steel cage match with each other.

Accordingly, in mid-January of 1995 Democratic National Committee national chairman Donald Fowler arranged a conference call with Dean and Gore to try and iron out the two men’s differences over US policy on Somalia. Though it might not have been everything Fowler had hoped for, the conference call did do a great deal to defuse the tensions between the Dean and Gore camps; after it was over, Dean adopted a far more supportive view of Gore’s Somalia policy in public(although in  private he continued to voice some degree of doubt about the wisdom of recruiting rival warlords to battle Aidid).

About a month after the conference call two units of U.S. Marines, supported by a group of Army Rangers and a British infantry division, raided an Aidid militia training camp just yards from the Somalian-Ethiopian border. That same raid also netted documents suggesting some of the soldiers in Aidid’s militia were foreigners honing their combat and terrorism skills on Somali battlefields before returning to their homelands to plot and carry out attacks on U.S. interests abroad. When these documents were further examined by intelligence officials and by the Justice Department, it became terrifyingly apparent that the Aidid insurgency in Somalia was just one facet of a broader global campaign by Islamic militants against Western civilization. The documents also served to further establish ties between Aidid and bin Laden.

Last but not least, they confirmed long-held suspicions that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that happened a month before Clinton’s aneurysm had been just the first blow in what bin Laden, Aidid, and their followers intended to be a series of attacks on New York City and other major urban areas in the United States. Indeed, some of the papers recovered from the abandoned border camp indicated that senior members of bin Laden’s inner circle were giving serious thought to the horrific notion of commandeering a passenger jet and crashing it into a large building on U.S. soil. Whether the hijackers would board the jets overseas or infiltrate them at domestic airports was uncertain at that point, but neither the Justice Department nor the Pentagon wanted to take any chances, and so a dragnet was put out on three continents for anybody mentioned in the captured papers as having even a tenuous connection with the suspected hijacking plot. Washington didn’t have to wait long for that dragnet to pick up suspects; within three weeks after the papers were first recovered, the US consulate in Munich got word that German regional and federal police had stormed a suspected terrorist safe house in southern Bavaria and arrested eleven Egyptian nationals thought to have connections with the hijacking conspiracy.

At least three of the eleven would confess under questioning to having had personal contact with Aidid in late 1992 or early 1993. Two others would disclose that they had made a number of trips to the United States under aliases to obtain weapons and explosives for the hijacking attempt and make a surveillance of security measures at six major airports on the East Coast.¹ These confessions would provide the U.S. Justice Department with much-needed ammunition to crack down on other terrorist cells....

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...and give the Gore Administration a powerful tool with which to make its case to Capitol Hill when in the spring of 1995 the White House petitioned Congress to authorize an increase in the total number  of troops deployed to Somalia. The question wasn’t whether more men should be committed to the Somali mission; rather, the main bone of  contention between Gore and the Republican-dominated Congress was how many combat personnel should be added to the existing contingent. Gore thought 50,000 men would be sufficient, whereas the prevailing belief among Congressional Republicans was that a minimum of between 80,000 and 100,000 troops would be needed to give the U.S. combat contingent in Somalia the necessary further strength to complete its mission.

There was also stern criticism from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his Congressional allies over what they deemed mistakes in assigning operational zones for U.S ground combat units. There was, Gingrich said, too much emphasis on urban defense and too little on protecting the food convoys which were supposed to be Operation Hope’s main priority. Naturally that accusation didn’t sit well with the Gore Administration, least of all with the generals who Gore had entrusted with overseeing combat operations in the Somali theater. One of those generals, Wesley Clark, blasted the critics of White House policy on Somalia as "Monday morning quarterbacks" and implied their criticisms were based less on practical concerns than on ideological dislike of the commander-in-chief.

As one might expect, General Clark’s comments offended Gingrich and his supporters; a war of words between the two camps ensued that not only hampered efforts to reach a deal on the troop increase, but also threatened to derail the federal government’s operations on many other fronts-- not the least of which was the White House’s effort to secure a lasting peace in the Balkans after three years of bitter and often genocidal warfare between the new Serb and Bosnian states which had arisen from the wreckage of the 1991 breakup of Yugoslavia. It was only after Gore personally intervened with Gingrich in General Clark’s defense and Robert Dole made a conciliatory phone call to Clark at the general’s field headquarters on the Ethiopian-Somali frontier that the verbal bloodletting finally stopped.

In early June of 1995 the House of Representatives approved a 90,000-man increase in the size of the U.S. troop contingent deployed to Somalia; the Senate signed off on the increase two days later. It was fortunate for Operation Hope that the troop increase came when it did, because U.S. and allied forces were about to face a major test of their commitment to fulfilling Operation Hope’s mission....