Clinton's foreign policy issues - 8 October 1993

It's the most obvious but plaguey irony of the Clinton presidency that he was elected by a sizeable majority of those Americans who thought that Mr Bush had spent too much time on foreign affairs and too little on the state of the nation. And in less than a year, President Clinton found himself confronted by a flood of foreign disasters that could not be stemmed or ignored.

Of course, he inherited and knew he'd inherited the recurring headaches of Cambodia and its horrors, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Chinese insistence on nuclear testing, the scary possibility that the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia might draw in its neighbouring patrons including Turkey and Russia. Russia itself lurching sometimes forward, sometimes backwards towards what we fervently hoped was some workable form of democracy.

It was bad enough to have to drop these burdens on a president sworn to do something soon and drastic about crime, education, drugs, free trade, medical insurance, the inner cities, but then he'd no sooner announced his plan for a grand reform of the national medical system than two or three foreign sleeping dogs came alive and rabid. First of course, no sleeping dog but a growling bear that broke through the bars.

On the night when the Russian government seemed to have gone down in upheaval, the best the president can do was to give immediate backing to Mr Yeltsin while praying that he would put down the insurrection and that he could do it without reverting to force and then to dictatorial power. Well, he did the first any and it was plain enough that he'd reached the credible limit of pleading and threatening, so the bombing of the parliament was deplored here but reluctantly approved. The closing of Pravda and censorship of the press was widely deplored, but that order was soon lifted. Really the best any of us in the West can do seems to be to take the bet that Mr Yeltsin is more than anyone in sight most likely to stagger towards a general democracy in the long run. The other snarling dog is Bosnia and if the Western nations have more or less given up on it, so with much riving and some shame has the United States.

The one issue that nine months ago seemed humane, straightforward and solvable is the one that has turned into a nightmare, a nightmare that projects the lurid recollections of Vietnam, Somalia. It's rough now to recall that when the American Marines first went into Somalia, Mr Bush was in the White House and Mr Clinton was about to move in on 20 January. The Marines went in to succour the starving people whose grisly shapes and clanking bones we winced at on television. It was a humane mission and everybody, Republicans, Democrats, independents alike were in favour of it.

The idea was to restore the health of the children, deliver the food, which was being stolen by small raids of darting bandits and then let the United Nations forces restore order and calm. Incidentally of course, the bandits would take to the hills or flee the country as in the movies. Well we know what happened there, the food got through, the children began to look fine, but to the surprise and despair of their saviours, they began to admire the leading bandit giving him a sort of heroic Robin Hood status. Here is a man who has a few hundred guerrillas who for almost four months has held off something like 18,000 troops, American then United Nations, all there under the well-known tag of peacekeeping. American intelligence, crack soldiers, American gunships can't find him let alone topple him.

The new and ugly turn in, I suppose the history of United Nations peacekeeping, came when a native population looked on the UN Forces as fighting men, combatants, enemies and shot them. When the now sturdy children turned on their saviours and mocked them, suddenly the UN forces are resisted and attacked as invaders and the Americans are the chief villains, so there arises all over this country a great baying chorus of "get out". Some of you may have heard me last week read the remarkable entry in December 1992 in the dairy of George Kennan the former American ambassador to the Soviet Union and number one Kremlinologist. He thought from the beginning that the American mission was a dreadful error of policy that it did credit to American idealism, but mainly attested the new power of television in creating so much sympathy as to send American troops all over the world on adventures from which there was no discernible way out.

Well, I'm very sorry to say that Mr Kennan called the precise tune, everything that's happened he predicted and this week, the administration was faced with either a great humiliation or a frightening risk to withdraw letting it be seen that America had been beaten by a self appointed general with a rabble of a few hundred guerrillas or to send in more and more American troops to redeem or greatly strengthen the continuing mission of the United Nations. On this topic, television is outdoing itself here giving equal weight to the off-hand opinions of senators, journalists, mothers, motorcar mechanics, athletes, hamburger flippers, schoolchildren, soldiers, of course, and rightly or madly half of them mumble something about Vietnam.

Now neither the strategic situation nor the political situation nor the rationale is the same as Vietnam, but one awful truth keeps emerging from the lips of innocents or ignoramuses who know nothing about Vietnam, it's the thought of pouring human lives into a sieve. I, myself, while irritatedly dismissing this automatic relapse into an analogy with Vietnam, I couldn't help remembering with painful vividness a morning in the White House in the summer of 1965 when President Johnson was doing a very creditable job of persuading two of us – or brainwashing us – myself and an American journalist on the prospects of victory in Vietnam. Now this was 1965 just short of 10 years before the surrender of the south or, if you like, the American defeat.

At one point, I asked the president if the commitment of American men to Vietnam was ever likely to match the 400,000 who'd gone into Korea. LBJ gasped, he beamed and shook his head as you might to reassure a frightened child and he advanced, there's no other word advanced on me with both arms outstretched and welcome his enormous hands embracing cubic feet of atmosphere. "My dear boy," he cried, "there's a chance in hell that we're going to send in there 400,000 men or 300,000 or 200,000 or anything like 100,000 I give you my word." I believed him and I believe he believed himself. In the end, we sent in 543,000.

That simple boring statistic is one everybody alive and sentient 20 years ago has never forgotten. The way the statesmen in Congress now put it, they don't say how does he know when we'll get out, they say has the president formulated an exit strategy? Well yes he has after talking for two whole days with everybody of any account in Congress, old ambassadors and such, he felt he could not just quit and bow to the obvious galling triumph of Mohammad Farrah Aidid, so he will send 1,700 more American troops and 3,600 Marines offshore to be there for just six months in the hope of bringing order to the country a very odd way of entering a war telling your enemy when you're going to leave. He hopes that the United Nations forces will, meanwhile, as never before somehow dissolve the chaos of a lawless country without a government, he hopes devoutly that we shall not see quote "a reversion to the absolute chaos and terrible misery, which existed before", an inevitability predicted by George Kennan nine months ago.

In the president's move there's no guarantee that any of us, the United States or the UN can put together and impose a government on the Somalians, short as George Kennan made clear, short of admitting that America is no longer just a humane helper but is involved in a police action in another country.

The other day in an unlikely place, there was another sharp reminder of Vietnam and what it meant to a generation now well into middle age. A woman comfortable looking matron wispy fair hair glasses stood before a judge in a Boston courtroom and was sentenced to from eight to 12 years in jail. She was an accessory to a manslaughter, she'd driven the getaway car with her four accomplices who were involved in the shooting killing of a policeman. The bizarre side of all this is the fact that Catherine Ann Power is the last of the team to be sentenced and served time, she appeared in the courtroom 23 years after the crime because she chose to, she'd never been caught. She changed her name, lived in a town in Oregon become a cook, ran a restaurant lived openly as a peaceable and useful citizen. This summer she could take it no longer, she turned herself in under her real name. She belonged to the 1960s student Vietnam protesters generation, some raised hell on the campuses, some took over the college offices, some robbed banks. Catherine Ann Power helped to shoot a policeman.

One of the nine children of the dead policemen, a Boston Catholic Irishman said in court, "murdering a policeman in Boston to bring peace to South East Asia was utterly senseless then and is just as senseless now". I think what this sentence and the vacant face of the convicted woman reflected was the sad truth about the student protest movement against Vietnam, however well intentioned, however seemingly selfless its aims, it was also for much of the time motivated by simply hate.

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