bout intervention in Rwanda, the Clinton administration certainly had Somalia on its mind. It had inherited the Somali civil war crisis from the Bush administration, which, as described, had chosen to intervene in large part due to public opinion. A key aspect of the AE framework is that leaders tend to use the availability heuristic to choose the analogy on which they’ll base their next decision. Broadened to the American public, the AE framework would posit that the people also had Somalia on their minds, coloring their feelings toward intervention in Rwanda. In fact, the Bush administration had chosen humanitarian intervention over remaining out of the conflict in war-torn Somalia amid public pressure largely stemming from the horrific images in the nightly news. That choice ended in the death of American soldiers, which flipped the public opinion completely against humanitarian intervention, according to Darren Brunk in “Curing the Somalia Syndrome: Analogy, Foreign Policy Decision Making, and the Rwandan Genocide.” This
…show more content…
Proponents of the AE framework and it’s use of the Somalia analogy make valid points about why the American public felt that the two conflicts were so similar. The geographic location of the two coupled with the historical proximity understandably was enough to make the public wary of risking American lives a second time. As Brunk asserted, “In confusing contrast to this early media backdrop of U.S. troops feeding hungry Somali children and of Gulf War-style casualty-free warfare, the images of dead U.S. servicemen gunned down by lightly-armed street gangs in the autumn of 1993 was a jolt to the U.S. public’s understanding of Somalia, and America’s place in Africa more broadly.” However, this assertion does not have give the AE framework as much strength as the evidence does for Offensive
Proponents of the AE framework and it’s use of the Somalia analogy make valid points about why the American public felt that the two conflicts were so similar. The geographic location of the two coupled with the historical proximity understandably was enough to make the public wary of risking American lives a second time. As Brunk asserted, “In confusing contrast to this early media backdrop of U.S. troops feeding hungry Somali children and of Gulf War-style casualty-free warfare, the images of dead U.S. servicemen gunned down by lightly-armed street gangs in the autumn of 1993 was a jolt to the U.S. public’s understanding of Somalia, and America’s place in Africa more broadly.” However, this assertion does not have give the AE framework as much strength as the evidence does for Offensive