Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention

By Walter S. Clarke

This book examines the intervention in Somalia and draws lessons for future peacekeeping operations, analyzing many aspects of peacemaking that are not well understood, including efforts to rebuild the police, the dynamics of the economy, and the performance of European armies.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813327946
• ISBN13: 9780813327945
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Many views of the Somalia debacle

This is a collection of essays by a group of academics, politicians, diplomats, and soldiers, which attempts to deal with the intervention in Somalia in the early 90s, and bring some perspective to what happened there. Although the book is valuable, at times the dry writing and repetitive nature of the individual essays detracts from the overall affect, which is generally quite positive. Somalia was more than just the Black Hawk Down episode. There were other military actions (notably when 24 Pakistani peacekeepers were killed a while before the Black Hawk Down episode). The humanitarian intervention, which was the whole rationale for the operation in the first place, turns out to have largely been a success (an estimated 100,000 people were saved from starvation) marred only by the precipitous extraction by the U.S. and U.N. forces once the various warlords made it clear that they didn't want to cooperate with outside forces. The essays here cover various aspects of the intervention, from the attempts to reconstruct the police forces and the courts, to the liaison between the various NGOs in the country on the one hand and the (largely U.S.) military on the other. There are chapters on the political dimensions of the intervention, including one discussing the role of the U.S. Congress, and a set of political chapters at the end that discuss fault-finding and credit-giving, one article having a liberal bias, the other conservative. While two of the articles were written by military people (one a retired Admiral who was the U.N. point man in the region, the other a U.S.M.C. Lt. Col. who handled coordination between the American military and the NGOs in Mogadishu) there's not much about the actual military confrontation in Somalia. Apparently, if anyone in the military learned anything of use tactically, no one told the authors about it. The prose here is pretty professorial, and so you'll have to slog along to get through the book. Also, each of the essayists feels the need to recount the same basic set of facts, and of course after a while this gets a bit wearing. These points aside, this is a valuable book on a subject that hasn't received enough study.