In Cambodia, soldiers had gone beyond any role previously performed in a peace operation. They had extended their activities far into the civilian sphere in order to save the UN mission from imminent failure. Parallel developments were taking place in Somalia, but under very different circumstances and with different results. Between December 1992 and May 1993, a powerful intervention force under United States command was given a much narrower mission to secure the delivery of food aid to a starving population amidst the reigning anarchy in Somalia. Confusion over the mission soon arose as there was no agreement to uphold – and therefore no peace to keep – and most of all, because no clear distinction was made between security for humanitarian goods and security for Somali people. The crucial question that emerged was how far a military intervention force should go in assuming the prerogatives of the state and help rebuild it, even if this was not part of the explicitly assigned mission.

As will be argued in the next chapter, those contingents interpreting their mandate broadly proved to be most successful. However, whatever positive experiences came from the intervention in Somalia in the first half of 1993 would be overshadowed by the death of eighteen American soldiers in Mogadishu in October 1993, leading to the withdrawal of US troops and the eventual embarrassing evacuation of all UN personnel in March 1995. These events have labeled the Somalia intervention as an outright failure. This triggered a revisionist version of events stimulated by the US government, portraying the first, American-led phase of the operation as an overwhelming military success – because it stuck to its narrow humanitarian mission – while passing all the blame for the failure onto the UN because it chose to do ‘nation building.’ This distorted version of events obscured the ability to see both the missed opportunities and the relative successes during the early phase of the intervention. As a result, the lessons learned from Somalia were often the wrong ones.

Hobbesian Anarchy

On the night of December 9, 1992, heavily armed US Marines landed on the Somali coast near Mogadishu. To their initial bewilderment and eventual outrage, they were greeted by TV floodlights on the beach in what became a historic scene.