Take up the White Man's Burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease.

By the summer of 1992, Somalia had reached a state of total disorder, with clan-based militias ravaging the country. Other nations, justifiably horrified, sent food to alleviate the largely man-made famine. Clan leaders-turned-warlords soon realized that by blocking the passage of food, they could starve their fellow citizens into submission. It was widely predicted that if the situation continued, as many as 1.5 million Somalis would starve to death.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need.

In its waning days, the Bush Administration decided to send American forces to assist the United Nations famine relief effort. Their efforts largely succeeded--by March of 1993, virtually the entire country was being fed under UN auspices.

But then the operation began to go awry. Initially, UN forces had come to Somalia solely to protect food shipments; order was to be restored only insofar as this mission necessitated it. During this phase of the operation, only 17 foreigners (including eight Americans) had died in Somalia, and countless Somalis had been saved. But U.S. and UN personnel now aimed to do more, to rebuild to Somali state under their tutelage.

Take up the White Man's burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.

The local warlords now feared that the UN occupation would permanently curb their ambitions. The most powerful warlord, Muhammad Farah Aideed, waged war against the United Nations, killing 23 Pakistanis. The United Nations and the United States now launched a campaign to hunt him down; the effort to stabilize Somalia degenerated into a vendetta to crush the most powerful person in the country. The campaign against Aideed failed, but not before it had exacted 18 more American lives and innumerable Somali ones.

Perhaps the State Department was ignorant of how nineteenth-century Africans, such as the Zulus and Ethiopians, had often vanquished better-armed European forces. These Africans had learned the lesson of the disadvantaged, a lesson later taken up by Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam: superior Western technology can be rendered ineffective by local leaders fighting the right kind of war. Our aircraft carriers, our nuclear weapons, our tanks--all are worthless in the face of a guerrilla adversary, one whom we cannot even differentiate from the people we are trying to help. Moreover, technology is no substitute for the will to fight. If the enemy is determined to win, and you are not, you will be inclined to leave as soon as the first casualties are incurred.

It was right to bring food to the people of Somalia, and to ensure its delivery; this policy achieved maximum benefit with minimal losses. But the United Nations' grandiose plans to re-establish Somalia through military occupation were flawed at a fundamental level. Only the Somalis themselves could create a new Somalia. External powers, however well-meaning, could only play a supporting role.

Americans have already learned this lesson twice. We tried, and failed, to generate a sense of South Vietnamese nationhood. And our earlier efforts to remake the Philippines in our image, though less well-known, were no less brutal. We fought the Filipinos from 1898 to 1902, at a cost of 4,000 American lives (and far greater numbers of Filipino dead). All captured Filipinos over the age of ten were shot. The American public supported the war on the popularly stated grounds that we would "civilize" the Filipinos. One of the voices favoring this policy was Kipling's; his poem, The White Man's Burden, was an appeal to the United States to rule the Philippines.

Few openly advocate Kipling's views today, but his ideas linger on in more subtle forms. Kipling's vision of civilizing a supposedly backward people through military occupation, dressed in modern language, has become an aim of the United Nations. The result has been a senseless loss of Somali, American, and Pakistani lives. We have tried to win the hearts and minds of the Somali people; instead, we have alienated them with our arrogance and our ill-planned acts of interference.

By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

--Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden