posted 01-29- 01:39 PM               

It pisses me off no end when I see and hear all the experts and politicians going on about what went wrong in Somalia, talking about "mission creep", "exit strategy", etc. and having none (that I've ever seen) even come close to hitting the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned.

What went wrong in Somalia was that the concept was flawed from the start. Bush Sr. and later Clinton implemented and carried on a policy with the dual goals of appearing to do somthing for the wretched population in Somalia and avoiding U.S. casualties. A recipe for disaster. I am all for intervening in places on humanitatian grounds when things have degenerated from a standard civil war into either one side's outright torture and slaughter of the other, Bosnia, or downright anarchy, Somalia. My problem is that the current definition of "humanitarian intervention" is seriously flawed. In practice, it is supposedly for the delivery of humanitarian aid to the population, without doing anything (or very little) to address the underlying reason bringing about the need for the aid. It didn't work in Bosnia (the UN operation), and it didn't work in Somalia. What's the good in feeding people if they're only going to be murdered en masse tomorrow?

If you accept that all human life is equally valuable and agree with interving on moral grounds in extreme situations as I do, what we should have done was go in with the stated intention of restoring order to the place, nation building (ooooooh, dirty word to some) if you will. The warlords who would not cooperate with the disarming of their thugs should have been squashed. House to house search and siezure of weapons should have been undertaken if necessary. The lawlessness was the cause of the problem in the first place and leaving it intact out of fear for our own casualties was a tactical, strategic, and moral blunder of the first order.

As it turned out, we go in just to deliver humanitarian aid, deal with local warlords as somehow legitimate despite their raping of the country for years, and end up with a situation where they can size us up, see what our main goal is (avoiding casualties), and then play us like a fiddle to suit their own ends. Then, when we are forced into a fighting situation and having to do something about the warlords and weapons, which we should have done at the outset, we're at a tremendous disadvantage, the U.S. public is not prepared for it, and when casualties happen (especially in the dramatic fashion which is the subject of the new film 'Blackhawk Down'), we bug out and convince the likes of Osama Bin Laden that we're a paper tiger.

Even after the events of September 11, the biggest losers in the situation are the vast majority of the Somali population. Most of them are still destitute and would happily support now, as they would have a decade ago, serious help to aid their country pull itself out of despair. As it is, ignorant Americans see and read just the headlines and write off all Somalis as an ungrateful bunch of thugs, when this is very far from the truth.

The arguement can, and has, been made that our turning tail and not doing what needed to be done from the outset in Somalia led directly to September 11 by emboldening our enemies, costing us billions of dollars, and more importantly, thousands of lives. It has cost the Somali people years of continued suffering and hundreds of thousands of lives, if not more.

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3dp
Visit RAF Harkness!

posted 01-29- 02:32 PM               

Bottom line, the warlords you and I want "squashed" are supported by the people under their rule. It was an attempt to arrest 2 of these guys which caused the shootout in Blackhawk Down. Tens, of thousands of people including women and children attacked our troops. Somali sources say we killed between 1,000 and 10,000 in 36 hours. This was not just a ragtag group of thugs like the Taliban with no popular support. If the Afghan people had turned against us like the Somali's did.....well, I don't want to think about it.

CNN recently covered the showing of Blackhawk Down in Somalia. It's a big hit there because the people view it as a victory over the Americans who invaded their country. So much for humanitarian relief. If they would rather starve then support efforts to help them I say "Let them eat cake".

posted 01-29- 03:19 PM               

The ability to call upon even thousands of supporters and concentrate them in time and space in front of the cameras is a very effective tool in creating the impression you want, even if hundreds of thousands or even millions are on the other side of the fence. Milosevic was the master of the tactic in Yugoslavia, and those in Somalia were equally adept. On the face of it, even the warlords supported us when we went in out of fear of our military and the opinion of the Somali population. They adapted quickly though and we commited the eternal sin of underestimating our enemy.

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Be seeing you,
3dp
Visit RAF Harkness!

posted 01-31- 08:25 PM               

In hindsight the operation was unnecessarily complicated, had no contingency plan, and most importantly, did not use overwhelming force.

But the lessons learned were obviously applied in Afganistan. If Somilia were to be repeated, we'd have used precision mutions (ie carpet bombed the shit out of them) to take care of the problem.

So the 19 dead soliders paid a heavy price, but their sacrifice saved the lives of many others.

posted 02-01- 01:25 PM               

I think the troops asked for APCs which may have helped, but by that point, it was too late for the operation as a whole. It did cost Les Aspin his job as Secretary of Defense though, but I'm sure that was small comfort to the grieving families.