In classical theater, a tragedy is not just a sad story. The meaning of tragedy is more specific, deeper, and more meaningful. A tragedy occurs when a hero or heroine of good intention and high principle takes action to achieve a positive end. But that very action, driven by a character flaw, causes the opposite outcome, the outcome the hero/heroine was trying to prevent. Oedipus was abandoned as a baby by his father, the king, after the oracle warned his father that he would be killed by his son, who would then marry his wife, the queen. Without knowing who they were, Oedipus, acting out of good intention, did both things.
I read with no surprise, but a sinking heart, that the Biden administration will reverse the Trump decision to withdraw US forces from Somalia and send 500 soldiers back in, to train Somali soldiers, gather intelligence and conduct drone operations against the terrorist organization Al Shabab. This from the President who withdrew US forces from Afghanistan last year, saying it “was time to end the forever war.”
An already tragic war will continue, one that began long ago. In the service of defeating (good intention), even more terrorism will result (tragic outcome).
I am suddenly transported back in time to 30 years ago. I sit in a dark Situation Room underneath the West Wing of the White House. The room is dark because this is a SVTS (pronounced “sivits”), an encrypted, secure video teleconferencing system America’s national security establishment uses to communicate around the globe.
It seems things are not going well in Somalia. An US-supported UN humanitarian operation to nourish and care for the Somali people, is failing. Militias are fighting; terrorists are threatening; people are starving; the country is insecure. The Bush administration was fully committed to supporting the relief operation but the absence of government in Mogadishu and in the country has made progress impossible. The Clinton administration has to decide what to do next.
Richard Clarke, leading the meeting as senior director for democracy and global issues on the National Security Staff is raising a cry of alarm in this SVTS. (He became famous later for his un-heeded warning to the second Bush president before 9/11 that Al Qaeda intended to attack the US.)
We cannot allow the security situation to deteriorate in Somalia, he argues. We need a stronger military presence with a broader mission – to stabilize and strengthen governance by uniting traditional leaders and defeating the warring militias. We need to get involved, to pull things together, to “lead.” The other counselors argue back, warning of the potentially tragic outcome – we will be dragged into a war and political situation we cannot control.
Clark, harangues, lectures, interrupts, overwhelms the resistance. The case for intervention prevails. A new resolution is pushed through the UN and US forces are deployed on the ground.
Until the inevitable tragedy strikes. On October 3, 1993, two US Army Black Hawk helicopters carrying US troops are shot down in Mogadishu. After a day-long firefight, 18 American soldiers are dead, 73 wounded, and more than a thousand Somalis have perished. The bodies some of the soldiers are dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, a televised scene of humiliation and failure that turned the US population against the intervention. Burned by the pictures, the Clinton administration withdraws its forces and urges an end to the intervention.
Tragedy temporarily stalled the instinct to intervene. But that instinct never really died in the hearts of American policymakers. In between then and now, 9/11 drove a stake through the idea of sensible restraint in how the US engages the world. Afghanistan followed, then Iraq. The intervention establishment swelled up like a balloon.
We now know that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were also tragedies; hortatory good intentions followed by self-defeating mission creep, followed by failure, 7,000 American dead, thousands of wounded, increased soldier suicides. In the end military failure and withdrawal. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan were worse off, in the bargain.
The emerging tragedy of US military engagement in Africa is under the radar; most Americans never see it. And now we are back in Somalia. The road to tragedy started with the creation in 2007 of a US military command – AFRICOM – to deal directly with US military operations in Africa. The root of the problem is right in AFRICOM’s mission statement: ”U.S. Africa Command, with partners, counters transnational threats and malign actors, strengthens security forces, and responds to crises in order to advance U.S. national interests and promote regional security, stability, and prosperity.”
It so reads like a gigantic expansion of the mission of that small intervention 30 years ago in Somalia. Now the US military is everywhere, doing everything. It has an “enduring footprint” in 10 African countries, and a “non-enduring” footprint (temporary deployments) in another five.
The big US “footprint” is Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti, with over 4,000 US forces deployed. But there are little installations scattered throughout the continent, as recorded in David Vine’s detailed 2020 study of US overseas basing.
The oil slick of tragedy has spread, with a growing US military presence in the Sahel region, involving the US in conflicts in places like Chad, Cameroun, Mali, and Niger. In Niger the tragedy nibbles away at us. Four US soldiers were killed in an under-reported military operation in Niger in 2017. It was the biggest loss of US military lives in Africa since the battle of Mogadishu in 1993.
The acceleration of terrorism in these countries has followed from the US-led destruction of the government in Libya, which unleashed a flow of arms and terrorists south across the Sahara.
Oh, most of us don’t hear about this tragedy. Even Biden’s Somalia decision was a one-day news story. Many Americans probably think, if they think about Africa at all, that “helping” stem terrorism, fix governments, provide humanitarian aid, encourage economic development are good things. Americans like to feel they have good intentions.
So, we don’t pay attention to the outcomes: sending the military to fix these problems has resulted in more problems, and, inevitably, more deployments of force. The US military’s own research shows that terrorist attacks in the Sahel region have grown; attacks on civilians have grown; terrorist capacity has grown, all as the US military presence has grown.
It’s like the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a Goethe poem written more than 200 years ago (popularized in the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia): the more we chop the terrorist water carriers in two, the more terrorists there are, carrying more water. We are continually engaged in the magical thinking that intervention pays.
The solutions to terror in Africa will not grow out of the barrels of US guns. They are in the hard work of diplomacy and, especially, in decisions by the African people and governments themselves that growth, governance, and security are in their best interests. More intervention on top of failed intervention will only lead to tragedy.
I'm stuck at this definition of tragedy. I've always thought it meant the story of a good person with a fatal flaw. Your definition is more like No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Sigh. As to our right role in the world, I've worked in Japan, Congo, and Vietnam and seen our klutziness, galumphing about with our vast resources and our naive assumptions, breaking the furniture at every turn. Yeah, it's discouraging.
Nicely done. I watched this all unfold as a correspondent on the ground in Somalia in the late 1970s, when the US and the USSR were pumping in weapons, and again as an embedded journalist with the 1st Battalion 2nd Marines that spring and summer of 1993. It was painful to see the needless and futile bloodshed in the 70s, and the pointless loss of life thereafter. And so it goes ...