Unrealistic policies

The dispatch of USA marines to protect food supplies reaching starving Somalians in 1992 was a policy fraught with unfounded assumptions: that once delivery of the supplies to distribution points had been ensured, the food would get to the people needing it; that there was benefit in treating a limited and short-term aspect of the population's distress (starvation) which has its roots in drought, overpopulation and the social chaos arising from lack of any government authority, but that would not relieve these causal factors and had the potential to worsen them; that warranted foreign military intervention in a non-threatening situation; and was worth the expense of hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when essential US domestic needs were not being met for want of money and the USA government was deeply indebted.

In Russia in 1993 observers commented on the lack of any connection between government procedure (with meetings, signature of agreements, passage of legislation) and what was actually happening in the country, in relation to which such activities appeared surrealistically irrelevant.