Over the past few months analysts and commentators in and outside the US have been busy trying to determine whether the Obama administration will or will not intervene in Syria before the November 2012 US presidential elections.
Most have concluded that President Barack Obama will be too hesitant to take the risk and get directly involved in the Syrian crisis. Given past experiences of the US interventions, however, it would be a mistake to completely rule out military action before the upcoming elections.
In fact, highlighting the humanitarian aspect of the crisis through extensive media coverage could indeed push US policy-makers to take decisions that under different circumstances they would not take. The US intervention in Somalia in 1992 is a case in point.
In September 1992, just two months before the US presidential elections, president George Bush Sr decided to intervene militarily in Somalia basing his decision on humanitarian grounds. Following the fall of Somalia’s dictator, Mohammad Siad Barre, the country was ravaged by civil war and famine. Bush was too reluctant to get involved, fearing that that could affect his chances for re-election. Yet, he sent US troops into Somalia.
Most experts and policy-makers agree today that media coverage played a key role in the US decision. In his memoirs, President Bush wrote that “it was television pictures of starving Somalis that led him to order the use of US troops in Somalia”. General Colin Powell (at the time JCS Chairman) was quoted as saying: The world had a dozen other running sores that fall, but television hovered over Somalia and wrenched our hearts, night after night, with images of people starving to death before our eyes”.
Marlin Fitzwater, at the time White House Press Secretary, stated: “We heard it from every corner that something had to be done. Finally the pressure was too great…TV tipped us over the top … I could not stand to eat my dinner watching TV at night. It made me sick.”
Fact and fiction
In an article published in the New York Times in 1993, prominent US scholar and former diplomat George F. Kennan espoused this idea wherein he argued that media coverage of the humanitarian crisis triggered the intervention. “The reaction would have been unthinkable without” television exposure of the “suffering of the starving” Somalis.
Indeed, one should be careful to accept these claims without scrutiny. Yet, several academic studies have accepted the story of a media-driven foreign policy in the case of Somalia based on the “absence of articulated policy” which forced George Bush in his waning days as president to react to televised pictures of starving Somalis. Further, it is a well-known fact today that the decision to intervene in Somalia was the result of conventional pressure group politics. It was mid-level political actors (junior policy-makers and congressmen) who fed the media with a consistent daily news line and, thus, set its agenda in an attempt to influence principal policy-makers and push them to act
accordingly.
In a well-documented study, Jonathan Mermin found that it was mainly congressmen who drew the attention of the media to Somalia and for domestic reasons (elections) the administration decided to take the initiative from its opponents and head towards intervention.
For the media to influence
policy-makers on humanitarian grounds there are three
‘pathways’. The first is the ‘direct path of influence’ in which the news media could emotionally affect principal policy-makers and urge them to do something. The second is the ‘indirect path of influence’ in which the news media might generate sympathy among the public whom in turn might place pressure on policy-makers to do something. The third pathway is ‘a variation on the two first’.
Here, “policy-makers rely on media content as a surrogate measure of public opinion, or implicitly regard media content as an expression of public opinion.
Having brought these facts to the fore, one can safely argue that if the US media manage to build the case in Syria as a humanitarian crisis and that something must be done about it, then military action could well be on the table. In addition, Obama is already under attack from his Republican contestant, Mitt Romney, on both humanitarian and geo-political grounds. Obama is criticised for not doing enough to stop the bloodletting in Syria. Geo-politically, he is accused of wasting a golden opportunity to weaken US rivals in region; namely Russia and Iran.
One might argue that foreign policy is never an issue in presidential elections at peacetime. That is absolutely true. It is also true that when the contest is too fierce and the race is too close, foreign policy does matter in presidential elections. That was the case in 1992 when Bush intervened in Somalia.
Syrian Affairs 