ABSTRACT
Operations Provide Comfort in northern Iraq (1991) and Restore Hope in Somalia (1992-3) were both seminal events in terms of ‘humanitarian’ intervention. For many commentators the emergent norm of ‘humanitarian intervention’ witnessed in northern Iraq (1991) was cemented, at least initially, by intervention in Somalia. US willingness to deploy forces in combat conditions in which there existed no apparent national interest appeared to have become a post-Cold War reality. Both interventions were also major news events remembered perhaps most for the graphic scenes of Kurds freezing in mountains in the case of Iraq and, for Somalia, US marines being greeted on the beaches of Mogadishu, not by hostile gunmen, but by the world’s press. But by the end of Operation Restore Hope, with the world-wide broadcast of a dead US marine being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the future of Bush’s ‘New World order’ and humanitarian intervention appeared to be fatally undermined. As we shall see with the Rwanda case study, the perceived failure in Somalia had a substantive subsequent impact on the type of forcible intervention deemed tolerable. But precisely what form did the press-state relationship take with respect to these interventions? Were these allegedly norm-creating operations in any sense a product of media coverage?
