The Past As Prelude

By Mark Thompson/Washington

Administration officials pondering a military campaign in Haiti ought to be poring over the Pentagon's classified reports detailing what went wrong in Somalia. When the last U.S. official and his 59 Marine bodyguards leave Mogadishu this week, the U.S. will be abandoning a failed investment of $1.3 billion and 44 American lives. Two still secret postmortems spell out how the humane mission to feed starving Somalis degenerated into a guerrilla war that has left the country little better off than it was before the U.S. intervened.

The Pentagon's top brass have declined to release the studies because they are "politically embarrassing," according to officials familiar with their contents. TIME has obtained the written summary of a briefing by Pentagon analyst Michele Flournoy -- labeled SENSITIVE: CLOSE HOLD for its obvious, though oblique, criticism of the Clinton Administration -- that details flawed U.S. decision making. "You can't see this presentation on the lessons of Somalia," a White House official says, "and not worry that we're about to make many of the same mistakes in Haiti." TIME has also read portions of a second after-action report, conducted by then Major General Thomas Montgomery, who commanded U.S. forces in Somalia and concluded that the U.N. was ill equipped to coordinate military operations.

The Somalia reports and interviews with other officers involved warn against the following mistakes:

-- Leaders did not build public support first. From the day U.S. troops swarmed ashore, neither the American people nor Congress really had a firm fix, Flournoy says, on "the U.S. interests at stake, the objectives sought, our strategy for achieving them and the risks associated with intervention." Many Congressmen and voters are not persuaded an invasion of Haiti serves U.S. interests, and Clinton may be starting to make the case too late.

-- Political and military goals never meshed. Initially presented as a purely humanitarian mission, Operation Restore Hope gradually shifted from feeding Somalis to fighting them. Unaware of the "mission creep," the public was outraged when 18 U.S. soldiers died in an October 1993 fire fight.

Seven months later Clinton stunned some of the victims' families when he told them during an Oval Office meeting that he was surprised the soldiers were trying to apprehend warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. By then, he said, the U.S. was supposed to be emphasizing diplomacy over confrontation. "When the President has troops in combat, that must be his No. 1 priority, and he must be fully aware of what they're doing," Larry Joyce, whose son died in the fire fight, told TIME recently.

Flournoy's report says U.S. military operations require "sustained policy oversight" and "more effective mechanisms for coordinating policy between Washington, U.N. headquarters and the field." Officers planning for Haiti worry about how well Clinton has thought through the lengthy peacekeeping phase after the invasion and the U.N.'s ability to manage it.

-- U.S. troops invariably became the main targets. In Somalia, as the best- trained and -equipped contingent, the Americans tended to get the toughest missions: they were the ones ordered into risky ventures like nabbing Aidid. "When the U.S. commits significant numbers of troops to an operation," Flournoy says, "it must be prepared to play more than a supporting role and to be held accountable for the results." In Haiti, officials insist, U.S. troops will play a minimal role after the invasion -- but Americans could make up as much as half of that postinvasion force.

-- Washington promised more than it could deliver. The military has not proved adept at manhunts: it failed to arrest Aidid or kill Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and spent two frustrating weeks before it arrested Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said two weeks ago that the apprehension of Lieut. General Raoul Cedras and the Haitian junta is a "dead certainty," but such comments make Pentagon officials very nervous.

-- Victory was never defined -- so the U.S. did not know when it could successfully go home. President George Bush could declare victory in the Persian Gulf War once the U.S.-led alliance pushed Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. But internal conflicts like Somalia -- and Haiti -- require a "realistic assessment" of the "desired end state," Flournoy's report says, "and whether military forces can play a useful role" in achieving it. Will the overthrow of the Haitian junta be enough -- or will it take creation of a working government and economy?

-- Don't count on the U.N. Montgomery's report concludes that "the most important lesson" learned in Somalia is that the U.N. cannot lead a military mission. "The U.S. has to lead like we did before the Gulf War and let everybody else follow," says an Army officer. Flournoy agrees, adding that U.S. allies in Somalia often declined to conduct even routine operations. That forced "the U.S. to choose between U.S. mission creep and U.N. mission failure." In Haiti the U.S. military will be watching President Clinton's every move and hoping he -- and the nation's troops -- doesn't end up with such a bleak choice.