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general election, Bush began to send Marines into the country. The Bush administration, as dictated by Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, considered Somalia a place the "United States could do something about the problem at a low risk (Hyland 53). In intervening in the conflict, Bush had put American troops into a "police action in an area where no American security interests were involved" (Hyland 54).

By the time Clinton took office in January 1993, the American military presence had reached approximately 25,000 troops. During the first few months of his presidency, Clinton had worked to reduce "the American force to just over 4,000. Then, in June 1993, Clinton's work took a severe hit when Aidid's clan, who controlled most of the capital city of Mogadishu, killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers, leading to a failed raid and the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident. Thus began the first foreign policy crisis of the Clinton administration.

Following the murder of the Pakistani peacekeepers, the UN, unable to capture Aidid on its own asked for help from the Clinton administration. The feeling at the UN was that the capture and trial of Aidid was the only path to civility in the country, and that such an operation would only be a success if designed and executed by the United States military. The Clinton administration agreed to develop a plan for such a raid, initiating an offensive that put the US military in the middle of a civil war that had no bearing on America's national security. The raid went woefully wrong as it developed from an attempt to arrest Aidid to a desperate attempt to rescue trapped US soldiers, resulting in heavy casualties and the dragging of the body of a dead US serviceman through the streets of Mogadishu by Aidid sympathizers. Upon learning of the failure of the mission, "Clinton then precipitously terminated the American deployment in Somalia" (Brzezinski 115).

In leading up to the decision to conduct the raid, it was well known in Washington that the Clinton administration was not "on top of events" (Halberstam 253) in Somalia. The CIA was quite vocal regarding the issues that should have evoked caution, "no one at the White House was very much interested" (Halberstam 253) in the information. When former President Jimmy Carter's Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Dick Moose bluntly suggested, in a report requested by National Security Advisors Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, getting out of Somalia immediately, there was virtually

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