Having set the course regarding U.S. involvement in Somalia for the next six months, President Clinton sought to return attention to his domestic agenda on Friday, arguing that violent street crime burdens the health-care system he is trying to reform.
Yet questions persisted about the president’s decision a day earlier to more than double the U.S. presence in Somalia and remain there up to another six months.
Before he left Washington to keep a long-scheduled appointment to lend a hand to New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio, who is engaged in a tough re-election battle, and to campaign for his health-care plan, Clinton came to the support of his embattled defense secretary, Les Aspin.
After last weekend’s raid in Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of 15 Americans, some in Congress have called for Aspin’s head once it was learned that he sat on a Pentagon request a month ago to bolster U.S. forces in Somalia.
Clinton, who said he hadn’t known about the request, repeated Aspin’s assertion that the military’s recommendation was put in terms of its offensive needs, but the secretary was attempting to rachet down American involvement and didn’t want to send the wrong signal by adding forces.
“Obviously, if he had known then what he knows now, he would have made a different decision,” the president told reporters.
The president acknowledged there is a danger that Somali warlords would go underground and wait out the March 31 deadline Clinton set for U.S. withdrawal. “It might happen,” the president said. “By then there should be an even larger UN force there.”
But other nations have been slower at signing on to the United Nations mission than originally expected, which was one reason the surrounded Americans acted on their own last Sunday in Mogadishu and then had to wait for hours for reinforcements when they got into trouble.
Nevertheless, Clinton sounded determined that his deadline will be met. By then, “We will have been there well over a year longer than we ever committed to stay,” he said. “We have obligations elsewhere. . . . So, I just don’t believe that we can be in a position of staying longer than that.”
The president even left open the door that Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the warlord who diverted UN attention from its humanitarian and political mission, could be part of an African-negotiated solution to the political stalemate.
“We have no interest in denying anybody access to playing a role in Somalia’s political future,” Clinton said without naming anyone. “Our job is not to play a role in post-war Somalia.”
The violence in Russia and then the events in Somalia have diverted attention from Clinton’s domestic initiatives since last Sunday, when his three-day trip to California to sell his domestic agenda was overshadowed by the foreign developments.
Appearing Friday morning before the Democratic National Committee, meeting in Washington, Clinton barely paid notice to events abroad as he returned to the menu of economic, social and health-care changes he hopes to bring to the country.
Violence and its impact on the health-care system was supposed to be the main topic of the day, according to White House aides.
Clinton chose a visit to a trauma center to highlight his crime bill, especially provisions that would put 50,000 additional police on the streets, reduce the availability of assault weapons and require a five-day waiting period before buying a handgun.
After visiting with shooting victims whose wounds ripped families and cost the health-care system hundreds of thousands of dollars, Clinton decried the fact that homicide is the leading cause of death among teenage boys in the U.S.
He challenged anti-gun control forces, paraphrasing their frequent contention that “people do these things, guns don’t.”
“We can’t keep saying that we deplore these things and it’s terrible and keep extolling our American values on how much more law-abiding we are than other people,” the president said.
