[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[October 8, 1993]
[Pages 1715-1716]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Exchange With Reporters on Departure for New Brunswick, New Jersey
October 8, 1993

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin

    Q. Are you going to support Les Aspin?
    The President. Well, yes. I mean, what is the question in reference 
to? I'm sorry.
    Q. In reference to all the complaints on Capitol Hill about his 
performance.
    The President. Well, I will say again, I asked Secretary Aspin why 
the extra--weren't sent to Somalia. He said to me that when they were 
asked for, there was no consensus among the Joint Chiefs that it should 
be done. And he normally relied on their reaching a consensus 
recommendation on an issue like that, a military--[inaudible]. And 
secondly that it was never suggested to him that they were needed for 
the kind of defensive purposes that it's been speculated that they're 
useful for during this last raid, that it was only for offensive 
purposes, and that it was his best judgment that we were trying to get 
the political track going again, and we didn't want to send a signal 
that we were trying to conduct more offense in Somalia. He also said if 
anybody had made the defensive argument, that would have been an 
entirely different thing. And obviously if he had known then what he 
knows now, he would have made a different decision.
    Q. Mr. President, did you know about the request in advance, sir?
    The President. Did I know? No.
    Q. Were you told--[inaudible]--and also do you think----
    The President. No. And I was talking to General Powell on a very 
regular basis about this

[[Page 1716]]

whole thing. This was not something that anybody brought to me directly.

Somalia

    Q. Why won't the Somali warlords just go underground for 6 months 
and wait for us to get out and then declare victory? Isn't there a 
danger in giving them a deadline when we're going to get out?
    The President. Well, it might happen. But keep in mind, we're going 
to wind up--by then there should be an even larger U.N. force there. And 
that's our objective. In 6 months, we will have been there well over a 
year longer than we ever committed to stay.
    So we will have given them well over a year longer, more personnel, 
and more efforts in this endeavor. We have obligations elsewhere, 
including this very important effort that we've invested a lot in in 
Haiti, to try to support that. So, I just don't believe that we can be 
in a position of staying longer than that.
    I also think once we send a signal to them that we're not going to 
tolerate people messing with us or trying to hurt our people or trying 
to interrupt the U.N. mission, that we have no interest in denying 
anybody access to playing a role in Somalia's political future. I think 
a mixed message has been sent out there in the last couple of months by 
people who are doing the right thing. Our people are doing the right 
thing. They're trying to keep our folks alive, trying to keep the 
peacekeeping mission going, trying to get the food out there. But we 
need to clearly state, unambiguously, that our job is not to decide who 
gets to play a role in post-war Somalia, that we want the political 
process to work. So let's give it a chance to work and see if it does.
    Thank you.

Note: The exchange began at 12:20 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White 
House.