It was Clinton who expanded the mission to go after Aidid, yet refused to provide the tools (armor and air support) to get the job done. He thought that would appear 'too aggressive'! As*h*le! In eight years of Clinton Administration, the US military was deployed forty-four times around the world, compared with only eight foreign deployments in the previous post-WWII admins. And we STILL have troops in the Balkans and apparently they will be there forever, despite Clinton's claim that they would be home by Christmas when they were originally deployed. And his little air war in the Balkans was never even authorized by Congress!!!!
"In eight years of Clinton Administration, the US military was deployed forty-four times around the world, compared with only eight foreign deployments in the previous post-WWII admins."
I remember when Inhofe made a speech before congress pointing out these similar statistics...and it was pretty damning. What was sad was that even with all of these deployments under the guise of nation-building, Clinton got nothing resolved, and in many cases, aggravated the situation.
Along with the failure in Somalia, Bush and the US has already had to go back to Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan...and who knows what's going to happen in the Balkans thanks to that half-assed job. Between the failures and appeasment in N. Korea, and double-dealings with China, Clinton's foreign policy was disaster we'll being paying for, for decades.
It's pretty sad...but what do you expect when the only succesful military operation on the man's resume was the siege at Waco. And even that was an unmitigated disaster.
You don't send a company of Rangers into an area and then claim you didn't want them to be "too aggressive". The entire point of the mission was to capture Aidid. You don't send in boy scouts for that type of mission.
Clinton sent those men in and left them hanging. He should have suffered a similar fate.