Locating accountability: the media and peacekeeping
by Susan D. Moeller "The unequivocal effect of the media is not to change or even shift policy, but to influence its timing--and especially to compress the time available for making policy decisions." In 1999, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden published his you-are-there account of the Battle of the Black Sea--a firefight in Somalia on 3 October, 1993, in which 18 Americans were killed and more than 70 injured. Titled Black Hawk Down, (1) Bowden's story was first serialized in 29 parts in the Inquirer. In short order, he was tapped to adapt the best-selling book into a film of the same name. Originally scheduled for March 2002, the release date was moved forward three months (to December 2001) by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer to capitalize on the massive public demand for military action movies in the wake of September 11. Black Hawk Down turned out to be a blockbuster. It has been called "powerful" and "rave" by reviewers--"so thoroughly convincing, it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation." (2) It is also a creation of the Pentagon, Director Ridley Scott told CNN that the Pentagon proved "very, very, very user-friendly" over the film, as long as "what you are actually trying to do is represent the [military] in the right and proper light." The result, Scott said, was an "almost page-by-page process of negotiation" with Pentagon officials about the screenplay. (3) An on-screen prologue sets up the battle explaining that "A combination of famine and civil war had persuaded the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force into Somalia." (4) But Scott doesn't delve into the geopolitical implications of the famine or the war, nor does he linger on the reasons why the fiercest firefight for Americans since the Vietnam War occurred in Mogadishu. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the images that Americans had come to associate most with the Battle of the Black Sea are precisely those images that are not included in the film. There is no footage of the Somali mob dragging the naked corpses of two American soldiers through the streets. Hollywood films, no matter whether their genesis is in news reporting, are not in the business of relating background, analyzing politics or locating accountability. That's what the media are supposed to do. They cannot do more. We can only hope that they do not do less. The conventional wisdom that the media hold Rasputin-like powers is a myth: a phenomenon similar to the fantasy that journalists were responsible for the loss of Vietnam. Proactively, decisionmakers work to exclude, to co-opt or to spin the media. The Bush administration employed all three tactics, for instance, during recent operations in Afghanistan, especially in regard to the bombing of civilian areas. But as events in Afghanistan have also demonstrated, the media are most effective at raising questions about policy after that policy has been implemented. Strategic and economic interests dictate the formation of policy; however, the media can, when they do their job, reveal that the wizard pushing the buttons and pulling the levers behind the curtain is not all he seems. The media are best at show and tell: If they can show and tell their audience what is happening, then those words and images can act to check the veracity of the diplomats' and policymakers' assertions. For example, the images that came out during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam--such as the street-corner execution--prompted Americans to question what they had been told by the Johnson administration. The news from Vietnam illuminated a gulf between prior official rhetoric and evident military reality. In Mogadishu, the media performed the same function. They dramatically showed that the peacekeeping doctrine of "armed humanitarianism" was both a rhetorical and a military oxymoron. DEFINING PEACEKEEPING The media's understanding--and therefore the public's understanding--of peacekeeping has been complicated by shifting notions within the United Nations about what the word means. What should be the role the organization's forces play in the buildup, the fighting and the aftermath of conflicts? Should the United Nations be engaged in high-risk, low-yield missions, or should it focus on humanitarian relief, political mediation and such post-conflict matters as voter registration, census-taking and job training? Peacekeeping seemed to mean what it sounded like in the first four decades of its use--simple and straightforward monitoring of border disputes, such as those in Korea and Kashmir. (5) But in the 1990s, peacekeepers were brought into civil wars, where the task of dividing political power in one state proved much more intractable than dividing political territory between states. The notion of inserting neutral soldiers as a barrier between two sides exposed some creaky logic in the careful games played during the Cold War. In the Hobbesian post-Cold War world, where opposing sides agree to ceasefires only to catch their breath, where any neutrality by outsiders seems tantamount to sanctioning evil--think of Rwanda and Sierra Leone, to name just two conflicts--peacekeeping has become an immensely more problematic enterprise. Blue-helmeted soldiers added to conflicts merely become pawns for the opposing sides to play. As a result, the job asked of peacekeepers expanded far beyond the capabilities of the UN institution and resulted in the sensational failures of the last decade, first in Somalia, then in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, and finally in Sierra Leone. As Michael Ignatieff, now director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, wrote in May 2000 about Sierra Leone: | |
As in Bosnia, the Security Council dispatched peacekeepers to enforce a
peace that did not exist. As in Rwanda, member countries supplied troops
without the capacity to defend themselves. As in Somalia, forces have been
sucked into a civil war without the means and the will to prevail. Once
again, peacekeepers have been taken hostage. In 1995, the Bosnian Serbs at
least chained them to buildings in full view of cameras. In Sierra Leone,
the United Nations can't even find them. (6)
| | In 2000, Lakhdar Brahimi, the former foreign minister of Algeria and currently the UN envoy to Afghanistan, was asked by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to head a panel to investigate the United Nations' use of peacekeepers. In a cogent and critical report the panel recommended that the previously distinct operations of peacekeeping and peacebuilding be formally fused and that UN peacekeepers be inserted in conflicts only where there was consent of the local parties, where there was sufficient political or financial support for their presence and where "robust rules of engagement" existed both to protect them and to allow them to act against those who would seek to undermine the existing peace accords. At the start of the millennium, Wall Street Journal editorial features editor Max Boot said the United Nations remained what it had long been, "a debating society, a humanitarian relief organization and an occasionally useful adjunct to great-power diplomacy--but not an effective independent force." Yet, noted Boot, the idealism behind the concept of peacekeeping continues to hold power--and remains a force "that policymakers cannot ignore in the CNN age." (7) BLACK HAWK DOWN It is, after all, the CNN age that in large measure got the business of peacekeeping into its current state. "We live in a world erected through the stories we tell," wrote media critic George Gerbner. | |
Violence and terror have a special role to play in this great storytelling
process. They depict social forces in conflict. They dramatize threats to
human integrity and the social order. They demonstrate power to lash out,
provoke, intimidate and control. They designate winners and losers in an
inescapably political game. (8)
| | The brutal conflicts that characterized the early 1990s generated millions of words and thousands of images in the international media--most of which can be distilled into a single bullet point: "Never Again" is back. When few countries were willing to step into the conflicts, and media-generated pressure became too intense to ignore, the assignment of stopping the new holocausts was handed over to the United Nations. UN leaders felt impelled to act, but there was neither adequate political will nor financial backing to do enough. When their efforts failed--for example, when under-strength Belgian peacekeepers were forced to watch Rwandan civilians hacked to death outside their compound or a Dutch battalion allowed thousands of civilians in Srebrenica to be massacred--the United Nations, and not any individual country, was deemed culpable. The decade became renowned for its scenes of unchecked mayhem and slaughter, but all wanted to duck responsibility for those acts. Media reports that another UN-led intervention had failed helped national policymakers in their attempts to exonerate themselves. A case in point is Somalia. In December 1992, the UN Security Council framed a new doctrine to address the crisis in Somalia. Articulated in Resolution 794, the doctrine of armed humanitarianism came to define, if not distinguish, the international response to the post-Cold War disorder. In hindsight, one UN peacekeeping official later said that armed humanitarianism was a "set-up for failure." (9) Not quite a year later, the doctrine of armed intervention unraveled as the world watched on television. On 5 October 1993, correspondent Frank Sesno sat in for Larry King on CNN's "Larry King Live": | |
The calls for the United States to get out of Somalia acquired a new
urgency today. That urgency largely was due to television. Harrowing images
of American servicemen dying under fire, their bodies dragged through the
streets or displayed as spoils of war, turned the Somalia issue from an
international annoyance to a front-page, banner-headline crisis. Overnight,
it became harder to find policy-makers willing to argue for the US to stand
its ground as part of the peacekeeping force." (10)
| | Sitting in for Ted Koppel on ABC's "Nightline" Cokie Roberts opened with the same thought: | |
We're seeing them again, pictures from another land so shocking that we're
moved to call Congress, call the President, tell them what the United
States should do. This time they're gruesome, horrible scenes of the
brutalized bodies of American soldiers dragged through the streets of
Mogadishu, pictures of a young American GI held hostage [Michael Durant],
painfully reciting the words his captors dictate. President Clinton rushed
back to Washington from California this evening to confer with his national
security advisors.
| | After roaming the corridors of Congress, Roberts concluded that "many members' minds were already made up because of the pictures." Staffers told of receiving more than 100 calls an hour from constituents, most saying the same thing: "Get out." Roberts interviewed Representative Billy Tauzin (D-LA): "If ever there gas an ugly picture of ingratitude carried to its extremes, it's the pictures we saw on television this weekend." And she talked to Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX): "The people who were dragging around the bodies of Americans don't look very hungry to the people in Texas." (11) A solid majority of Americans, 59 percent, in a poll conducted on 5 October by Gallup, CNN and USA Today, reported that they had seen "news photos of the corpse of a US soldier being dragged through the streets by [warlord Mohammad Farrah] Aidid followers." (12) The next day CBS White House reporter Bill Plante noted that "Staff members describe the president as upset--very upset at the gut-wrenching pictures of dead American troops being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu." (13) On 7 October, President Bill Clinton spoke to the nation live from the Oval Office. He began his 11-minute address by recalling the images that had prompted former President Bush to send the Marines into Somalia. | |
A year ago, we all watched with horror as Somali children and their
families lay dying ... the slow, agonizing death of starvation ... brought
on not only by drought, but also by the anarchy that then prevailed in that
country. This past weekend, we all reacted with anger and horror, as an
armed Somali gang desecrated the bodies of our American soldiers and
displayed a captured American pilot, all of them soldiers who were taking
part in an international effort to end the starvation of the Somali people
themselves. These tragic events raise hard questions ... Why are we still
there? What are we trying to accomplish? How did a humanitarian mission
turn violent? And when will our people come home? (14)
| | The seeming consensus of the public, of lawmakers in Congress and of the president himself was that the graphic images from Somalia that appeared on television and in print were appropriate guides for American policy. "It began with the pictures," wrote New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, "And now it will end with them." (15) The media's coverage of events in Mogadishu was taken as the pivotal element in the forming of and the timing behind the administration's decisions on Somalia. But most Americans were oblivious to the events that took place between the decision to feed the starving and the decision to bail on the UN nation-building effort. When Clinton entered the White House in January 1993, the humanitarian mission was still growing; American troop strength reached its height of 25,000 that month. The mission had already achieved measurable success in feeding the Somalis and ending the famine. By the end of February the policy debate was joined: Should the United States withdraw as soon as possible and hand over control to the United Nations or should the United States build on its relief effort and seek to address some of the root causes of the famine, instability and violence? The advocates of immediate withdrawal, including General Colin Powell, carried the argument, but individuals within the Clinton administration loath to relinquish all involvement remained a powerful force in shaping US policy. On 4 May, the United States handed over its mission to the second United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II), whose Security Council mandate was no less than "the economic rehabilitation of Somalia," a mandate it hoped to effect, in part, by creating a coalition government. (16) On the day after the bulk of the US force withdrew, Aidid began his offensive. On 5 June, his militia ambushed and slaughtered 24 Pakistani soldiers from UNOSOM who had been sent to inspect a weapons storage site at Aidid's radio station, Radio Mogadishu. The Clinton administration retaliated with its small remaining contingent in Somalia. As the summer progressed, despite numerous raids by US Special Forces alongside the United Nations, including one on Aidid's headquarters in July, Aidid escaped capture. In August, after the death of several American soldiers, Clinton secretly ordered in the Delta Force, supplemented by the Army Rangers. The confrontation was set between the most elite American military forces and a third-world warlord. Even before the final firefight on 3 October 1993, the "dean of American diplomacy," George Kennan, published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he quoted verbatim from his personal diary. His entry for 9 December 1992, the day the Marines first waded ashore, read in part: | |
There can be no question that the reason for [the general acceptance by
Congress and the public about what is being done] lies primarily with the
exposure of the Somalia situation by the American media, above all,
television. The reaction would have been unthinkable without this exposure.
The reaction was an emotional one, occasioned by the sight of the suffering
of the starving people in question.
| | What Kennan found immensely troubling was that the Bush administration decision to go into Somalia had been prompted by "an emotional reaction, not a thoughtful or deliberate one." Tying American policy to images on television was disturbing, but it was particularly alarming, he thought, when the policy involved "the uses of our armed forces abroad." In effect, the media effectively trumped "what have traditionally been regarded as the responsible deliberative organs of our government, in both executive and legislative branches." (17) In a "Letter to the Editor" published on 24 October 1993, written in response to a letter by CBS anchor Dan Rather that defended the role of television, Kennan elaborated further: | |
... when Mr. Rather refers to [the television coverage] as "giving the
American people the information with which they will form their own
opinions," implying this was mainly what they needed to make sound
judgments about the action in Somalia, I must demur. Fleeting, disjointed,
visual glimpses of reality, flickering on and off the screen, here today
and gone tomorrow, are not the "information" on which sound judgments on
complicated international problems are to be formed. (18)
| | Walter Goodman, the Times television reviewer, took up Kennan's concern about linking policy to the latest images in the news. "Where are one's emotions to settle? On the hostage? On the corpse? On the memory of the skeletal women and children? And what sort of policy making is it to have Washington's actions decided, even in part, on the latest affecting pictures on the evening news?" (19) Clinton announced that the United States would withdraw its military forces from Somalia within a few months, without any preconditions. By the end of October, UNOSOM II had opened negotiations with Aidid. By the spring of 1994, the United States had withdrawn almost all of its troops, and other nations began to pull their forces forces out of UNOSOM II as well. (20) On 31 March 1994, the National Security Council outlined its post-Somalia review of peacekeeping in Presidential Decision Directive No. 25. According to Alex de Waal, director of the London-based Justice Africa, the directive: | |
blamed the UN for a disaster that was all American in its inception,
planning and execution. The UN was routinely deemed incompetent in Somalia,
but it was Centcom in Florida that sent American servicemen to die in the
Mogadishu streets.... (21)
| | The military commitment in Somalia had been tentative, befitting the competing agendas of the decisionmakers. The apparent post-Mogadishu lesson, as communicated by the media and understood by the Clinton administration and the NSC, was "don't get involved"--that conflicts in most places are unfathomable and unstoppable. The real lesson of Somalia was that intervention is not foolhardy if you know what you are getting into. Until the Mogadishu debacle, the United States had been a mostly willing player in UN peacekeeping and peacemaking operations. After President Clinton signed the Presidential Decision Directive No. 25 into law on 3 May, 1994, the United States began to demand extraordinary specifics about costs and exit strategies before it would give the green light in the UN Security Council to any peacekeeping operations. And even then, the United States was finished contributing its own peacekeepers. (22) Once again, a politician had learned a lesson from the last war--in this case Somalia. Once again when the lessons were applied to the next war--in this case Rwanda--they turned out not to be applicable: a fast-developing genocide was allowed to run its course because the administration refused to act without up-front guarantees about cost and exit strategies. Four years later, in 1998, Clinton took a trip to Africa and apologized to the Rwandan genocide survivors, but he did not reverse his attitude about the need for Americans to stay out of multilateral peacekeeping operations. That attitude continues under the Bush administration. As Secretary of State Colin Powell said in his budget appropriation address to the House International Relations Committee in February 2002: | |
UN peacekeeping activities allow us to leverage our political, military,
and financial assets through the authority of the United Nations Security
Council and the participation of other countries in providing funds and
peacekeepers for conflicts worldwide. As we have seen in Afghanistan, it is
often best to use American GIs for the heavy lifting of combat and leave
the peacekeeping to others. (23)
| | In other words, it is best for the United States to control its own military action within distinct parameters--which not coincidentally means that the media's coverage can be controlled too, as was so often done during the early weeks of the operations in Afghanistan. (24)DETERMINING WHERE PEACEKEEPERS ARE SENT "Pictures have America looking for the exit" from Somalia, said CNN anchor Mary Tillotson in October 1993. (25) But what was so dramatic about the effect of those images was that they came in the midst of another compelling international crisis: the showdown between Boris Yeltsin and the Duma in Russia. The firefight and aftermath of the Battle of the Black Sea was, at first, wrote Boston Globe reporter Ed Siegel: | |
a back-burner item for CNN and the networks Sunday, not because it had few
foreign-policy implications, but because it had few pictures.... The
contrast between the flood of images coming out of Moscow and the drought
of images from Mogadishu couldn't have been more pronounced. CNN's Eileen
O'Connor came on at 11:30 PM Sunday and stayed on the air for 13 hours,
eventually joined by other CNN staffers, with dispassionate but nonetheless
dramatic descriptions of the storming of the Russian White House. CNN's
images from Mogadishu, on the other hand, lasted only a couple of minutes,
but they were no less devastating. (26)
| | In the months before the battle, most Western journalists left Somalia when they themselves became targets of attack: A mob had killed four foreign journalists on 12 July 1993 while they covered a US raid on Aidid's headquarters. In the weeks before the 3 October fight, other journalists and staffers had become targets; five Somalis attached to CNN had been killed. CNN obtained the dramatic footage of a mob dragging the corpses of two American soldiers through the streets from a Somali stringer, and the footage was picked up by the networks and local stations late the same night. The photograph that appeared the next day in newspapers around the world (and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year for spot news photography) was taken by Canadian Paul Watson, reporting for the Toronto Star. "Why did President Bush pick Somalia?" asked H.D.S. Greenway in the Boston Globe. The starvation in Sudan was worse, he noted, and there were dozens of other crises around the world. "The answer is that Somalia was where television was." He continued: | |
In the history of armed American interventions, Somalia will be remembered
for two precedent-breaking reasons. It was the first time an expeditionary
force was sent overseas purely for humanitarian reasons--nobody then or now
claims that the fate of Mogadishu is of strategic interest to the United
States--and it is the purest example of television not just providing, but
being the casus belli. (27)
| | "Last year, the pictures of starving children put a human face on the tragedy of Somalia," said CBS reporter Dan Martin, reporting from the Pentagon. "This week, the pictures of Durant put a human face on the dangers of UN peacekeeping." (28) The pictures from Somalia defined peacekeeping as more than its self-evident meaning: a neutral and disengaged force inserted between two opposing sides. The pictures defined the limits of what was acceptable as peacekeeping, a definition that did not include battered captives and mutilated corpses. Such eventualities might be acceptable within combat operations--although that was open to dispute; most American politicians believed that Americans had no stomach for military casualties of any kind. (29) But it was clear that the bait and switch, or "mission creep" as some called it, that had occurred in Somalia--Americans believing that their troops were sent in on a humanitarian mission to help people who wanted help when, in fact, the troops were waging war against Aidid--was unacceptable. It became apparent that the media's coverage--any media coverage, in fact--distinguished the operation as a political, not just a humanitarian one. As a result, the repercussions were political as well. Some claimed an even deeper effect for the photographs from Somalia. "Perhaps the mess in Somalia is hardening the hearts of Americans toward other such pictures," observed Walter Goodman. "Despite the brutal scenes from Bosnia," he wrote, "there has been no outcry for action; rather the contrary." (30) Anna Quindlen confirmed this view: "We won't be sending American troops to Bosnia any time soon after this, that's for certain, no matter what the pictures tell us about the horrendous plight of those poor people. " (31) But was the media's seeming lack of power to propel intervention in Bosnia a once-burned, twice-shy reaction to the presumptive image-driven debacle in Somalia, or were there other reasons? Not everyone who spoke up during those days thought the media's role had been so large. "To give television credit for so powerful an influence is to flatter us who toil there--but it's wrong," wrote Dan Rather in his letter to the New York Times. "If Mr. Kennan were right, there would be US marines on the ramparts of Sarajevo right now, defending the Bosnian Muslims.... Reporters sometimes feel strongly about the stories they cover, and some may wish for the power to direct public opinion and to guide American policy--but they don't have it." (32) Despite the personal activism of many journalists, personal politics rarely generates coverage. International coverage tends to follow the flag and is further circumscribed by deadline pressures, budget constraints, competition, access and the finite nature of time and space to air or run stories. An examination of the political context of the policy decisions suggests more compelling motivations for the shifts than media attention. The United States took action in Somalia in the latter days of a presidential campaign at a moment when two international crises were erupting, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia. Despite the flurry of presidential press conferences that the 2 August 1992 announcement of death camps in Bosnia precipitated, the immediate Bosnian crisis was defused by the end of the week by Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic's announcement that he was ready "to open any corner of this country, any prison of this country to the Red Cross." (33) President Bush's response was telling. He said he wouldn't rest until the camps were inspected, but he also expressed his fear of entering into another Vietnam: "I do not want to see the United States bogged down in any way into some guerrilla warfare. We lived through that once, and yet, I have a lot of options available to me and I will contemplate every one very seriously, but in conjunction with the United Nations." (34) By contrast, Somalia, which emerged as a crisis at approximately the same time, appeared to need only a do-able humanitarian effort. On 14 August 1993, three days before the Republication National Convention, President Bush ordered an emergency US military airlift of food to Somalia. After initially having rejected a UN Security Council plan to send a force of 500 armed UN troops in July, Bush also authorized a US military airlift of Pakistani guard forces. Samantha Power, executive director of the Carr Center, has argued that the media's influence on foreign policy diminishes in proportion to how clearly that policy is enunciated. She has identified five conditions that can conspire to decrease media's influence on policy: * the region or country is central to American strategic or national interest * the United States has a clear set of objectives * the policy options demand long-term commitments * elite opinion-makers have not arrived at a consensus * there is only sporadic media coverage of the situation. (35) Applied to Somalia, where few American interests were at stake and the desired response of Americans and the broader international community seemed to be a short-term delivery of aid to arrest the famine, the media could act as a catalyst. It wasn't coverage of Somalia per se that made the impact on policy in August 1992, it was how well that coverage aligned with pre-existing political interests. Stories in the media were used to buttress the desired policy maneuvers of the administration. Similarly, in October 1993, the images from Mogadishu may have altered the timing and pace of the Clinton administration's decisions about Somalia, but they also efficiently dramatized a fractious debate in Washington. Were the political benefits of escalation worth the costs? The administration had tried to have it both ways: escalating the US commitment with special forces but not agreeing to send in heavy armored vehicles and AC-130 Spectre gunships that could adequately protect them. There was no exit strategy. Even without the images that emerged from the Black Hawk Down battle, the argument that the political costs of remaining in Somalia were prohibitively high was compelling. The unequivocal effect of the media is not to change or even shift policy but to influence its timing--and especially to compress the time available for making policy decisions. According to Richard Holbrooke, the former US special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, the "reason the West finally, belatedly intervened" in Bosnia "was heavily related to media coverage. The reason Rwanda did not get the same kind of attention was heavily related to media coverage--or lack thereof." And again in Kosovo, Holbrooke argued, the "day by day" coverage by the press "profoundly, centrally affected" the process. "For policymakers, what is reported and what isn't matters profoundly." (36) When there is a singular split over the direction of policy, dramatic media coverage can affect how policymakers make their case, but it doesn't change their perceptions about whether intervention is in the strategic or economic interest of the country. With the real-time airing of crises, governments and international organizations do not have the time or the isolation for protracted internal debate that they formerly had. Intense television scrutiny and immediate editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post rob decisionmakers of the cocoon of privacy they enjoyed before satellite uplinks. President Kennedy's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, reflected on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, "I don't think I turned on a television set during the whole two weeks of that crisis. " (37) Now diplomats and administration officials may be monitoring live pictures from several televisions simultaneously. A second media effect on policy, therefore, is to influence the spin put on it. As Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Roy Gutman observed, policymakers' responses to dramatic media coverage tend to be directed more toward crisis management than crisis prevention. (38) Diplomats and foreign ministers may have to respond to televised images, but they don't have to act on them. Television and the front pages of major newspapers may prompt press conferences in which lip service is paid to the concerns raised by journalists. In such instances the media may be agenda-setting, but they aren't agenda-determining. The images from Tiananmen Square of Falun Gong protesters being rounded up--and even those still in memory from the democracy movement circa 1989--symbolize the lack of human rights in China, but as Secretary of State Powell said recently, although "we decidedly do not see eye-to-eye' with China on such issues as human rights, "we do not want the interests where we differ to constrain us from pursuing those where we share common goals." (39) Iconic images are important for riveting attention to a particular crisis, but what really makes a difference in the foreign policy equation is how effectively those images are used to confirm or undermine a political stance. It has often been said that the Bosnian case proves the point that pictures don't make a difference to foreign policy. (40) As Gutman wrote about Bosnia, "What you had is a lot of reaction to reports, but never any policy change." Warren Zimmerman, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, believed that in the early years of the Bosnian crisis the media made little difference to American policy. "It wouldn't have mattered if television was going 24 hours around the clock with Serb atrocities. Bush wasn't going to get in," he said. Lawrence Eagleburger, the former secretary of state, confirmed that opinion. "We had largely made a decision we were not going to get militarily involved. And nothing, including those stories, pushed us into it," he said. "It made us damn uncomfortable. But this was a policy that wasn't going to get changed no matter what the press said." (41) When the United States finally intervened, years after the start of the crisis, it may have been the media that kept the conflict in the public's eye, but it was strategic factors that ultimately guided Clinton's decision. Analogously, the televised and written reporting on the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia did prompt the UN Security Council to take the unprecedented step of creating the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as its own sub-organ, according to Justice Richard Goldstone, the first prosecutor of the International Tribunals. "Never before had it even been contemplated or suggested that it should use its peacekeeping powers to that end. That ethnic cleansing was happening in Europe and that the Cold War had come to an end were crucial to the endeavor. There can be no doubt, however, that it was media exposure that triggered the decision." (42) But it was not media exposure that made the decision. Agenda-setting, yes, but the exposure was not the ultimate determinant. BLACK HAWK DOWN REDUX Peacekeeping has changed. The United Nations is not getting out of the peacekeeping business per se, but after the Brahimi report and the media attention paid to the string of failed UN missions in the 1990s, the world body has come to recognize that it needs to rely on what have come to be called coalitions of the willing for peacekeeping operations--such as the British-led effort in Afghanistan--and on regionally led efforts--like that of the Australians in East Timor. "We're not in the enforcement business," said one UN peacekeeping official, "and we're going to be very skeptical about being thrust into situations where we can't succeed." (43) The media have helped make it all too clear that "UN forces don't do well" when a security situation is "messy." (44) But the media do not have the power to call out the troops. They can, however, draw attention to the moral as well as the strategic and tactical decisions made by governments and organizations engaged in peacekeeping operations. In their role as eyewitnesses, the media in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda, among other places, documented the moral bankruptcy of policies rhetorically based on humanitarianism. Educated by the media, the global public has discovered that the morality in peacekeeping--whether by governments or by international organizations--is chimerical. At best, the ideals of humanitarianism provide direction for policymakers; human rights abuses and humanitarian crises cannot be overlooked. And when such ideals are employed as reasons for the actions of governments and international organizations, the media and the public can hold the decisionmakers politically accountable, if and when discrepancies in action occur. That is what happened in Mogadishu. The media are more influential after a policy is in place than before. Although they may influence the selection of choices, they cannot initiate action. They are good, however, at holding governments and international organizations accountable for their actions--and they do that less through political persuasion or even by being actively adversarial. They hold political actors accountable by being eyewitnesses to events, by communicating what they see and hear to their audiences, by publicly juxtaposing a statement made previously with a comment made today. Journalists are best at holding such actors accountable when they themselves adhere to their own news values--when they are allowed to follow the ethical guidelines of their profession, when they get access, when they file regularly and continually, when they report accurately, when they report from all sides, when they understand that the assertions of the powerful comprise one account rather than the whole story. (1) Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1999). (2) Kenneth Turan, "More Than the Heat of Battle," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 2001, Calendar section, p. 1. (3) Scott Peterson, "Black Hawk Down," Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2002, p. 18. (4) Anthony Quinn, "Snapshot of the Worst Place on Earth," Independent, 18 (5) There were, of course, dramatic exceptions, such as the early-1960s operation in the Congo, the scene of the UN's first peacekeeping failure. (6) Michael Ignatieff, "A Bungling UN Undermines Itself," New York Times, 15 May 2000, p. A 19. (7) Max Boot, "Paving the Road to Hell: The Failure of UN Peacekeeping," Foreign Affairs, 79, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 2000), p. 145. (8) George Gerbner, "Symbolic Functions of Violence and Terror," in In the Camera's Eye: News Coverage of Terrorist Events, Yonah Alexander and Robert Picard, eds. (New York: Brassey's, Inc., 1993) p. 3. (9) Michael Jordan, "Why You Won't See UN Blue Helmets in Afghanistan," Christian Science Monitor, 18 December 2001, p. 7. (10) CNN, "Larry King Live," 5 October 1993. Transcript #931. (11) ABC, "Nightline," 5 October 1993. (12) Richard Benedetto, "Poll: Most Now Say US Troops Should Get Out," USA Today, 6 October 1993, p. 2A. (13) CBS, "CBS This Morning," 6 October 1993. (14) Reuters, "Clinton Text: `If We Were to Leave Tomorrow ... Chaos Would Resume," Los Angeles Times, 8 October 1993, p. A14. (15) Anna Quindlen, "We're Outta There," New York Times, 7 October 1993, p. A29. (16) United Nations and Somalia, 1992-1996 (NY: UN Dept. of Public Information, 1996), p. 261. (17) George Kennan, "Somalia, Through a Glass Darkly," New York Times, 30 September 1993, p. A25. (18) George Kennan, "If TV Drives Foreign Policy, We're in Trouble," New York Times, 24 October, 1993, Section 4, p. 14. (19) Walter Goodman, "The Effect of Images on Governmental Policy," New York Times, 7 October 1993, p. C28. (20) On 20 May 1994, Aidid entered Mogadishu, thronged by cheering supporters. In March 1995, the last of the UN forces left the country under the protection of the US military. (21) Alex de Waal, "The Quality of Mercy," Los Angeles Times, 19 March 2000, Book Review, p. 1. (22) In 2000, troops from developing countries provided 75 percent of the nearly 30,000 UN troops in 15 missions around the world. Over one-third of the 30,000 troops were provided by five countries: India, Nigeria, Jordan, Bangladesh and Ghana. The United States, the EU countries and Japan contributed few troops but over 85 percent of the $3-billion cost of UN peacekeeping that year. In 1993, the year before Presidential Directive No. 25, the United States had 3,300 peacekeepers. In 2000 no US forces participated in peacekeeping operations conducted by the United Nations, although many served in operations authorized by it (such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo where 65,000 peacekeepers were under NATO command). (23) House International Relations Committee, "Fiscal 2003 Budget: Foreign Affairs," testimony of Colin Powell, Secretary of State, 6 February 2002, (Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony). (24) Michael Gordon, "Gains and Limits in New Low-Risk War," The New York Times, 29 December 2001, p. A1. (25) CNN, "CNN & Company," 8 October 1993. (26) Ed Siegel, "CNN on Two Fronts: Do Pictures Affect Policy? Boston Globe, 5 October 1993, p. 13. (27) HDS Greenway, "It's Foreign Policy by Camera Crew," Boston Globe, 8 October 1992, p. 1. (28) CBS, "CBS Evening News," 8 October 1993. (29) The Pentagon still believes that the public will not support a war in which many Americans die. In the conflict in Afghanistan, for example, "American casualties were kept to a minimum, which despite Pentagon assurances about being prepared to accept losses, still appears to be a priority." Michael Gordon, "Gains and Limits in New Low-Risk War," New York Times, 29 December 2001, p. A1. (30) Walter Goodman, "The Effect of Images on Governmental Policy," New York Times, 7 October 1993, p. C28. (31) Anna Quindlen, "We're Outta There," New York Times, 7 October 1993, p. A29. (32) Dan Rather, "Don't Blame TV for Getting Us into Somalia," New York Times, 14 October 1993, p. A22. (33) Frederick Baker, "They Can't Read the Words.... "Independent, 5 August 1992, Comment section, p. 23. (34) ABC, "World News Tonight," 7 August 1992. (35) Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). (36) Richard Holbrooke, "No Media--No War," Index on Censorship, 3 (1999) pp. 20-21. (37) Michael Bescholoss, "The Video Vise: TV Squeezes Our Bosnia Options," Washington Post, 2 May 1993, p. C1. (38) Walter Stroebel, "The CNN Effect," American Journalism Review, May 1996, p. 32. (39) House International Relations Committee, "Fiscal 2003 Budget: Foreign Affairs," testimony of Colin Powell, Secretary of State, 6 February 2002 (Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony). (40) For more details on the reasons for and the timing of decisions to intervene in Somalia and Bosnia, see Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999), chapters 3, 5. (41) Walter Stroebel, "The CNN Effect," American Journalism Review, May 1996, p. 32. (42) Richard Goldstone, "Foreword," in Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, ed Roy Gutman and David Rieff (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 14. (43) Michael Jordan, "Why You Won't See UN Blue Helmets in Afghanistan," Christian Science Monitor, 18 December 2001, p. 7. (44) Patrick Tyler and Elaine Sciolino, "US Sees Limited Mission in Postwar Afghanistan," New York Times, 21 November 2001, p. B5. Susan D. Moeller is an assistant professor in media and international affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park. Author of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (Routledge, 1999) and Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (Basic Books, 1989), she frequently writes articles for scholarly journals as well as for the media. She was formerly the director of the journalism program at Brandeis University, a senior fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School. She has been a lecturer in American foreign policy at Princeton's history department and a Fulbright professor of international affairs in Pakistan and Thailand. Moeller holds a BA from Yale, an AM in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard. |
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