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I was personally involved in the decision to move food to Somalia. The NGOs, which like CARE, Catholic Relief, CWS, MSF, etc., etc., have a large following in the Congress, complained mightily that they could not respond to famine because warlords were well armed. (It was a close thing that Somalia came along or Bush may have opted for the occupation of Southern Sudan.) Responding to that pressure, and to the fact that there was an extensive famine, the Marines were sent to Somalia. They accomplished their mission (or your mission, if you prefer). I should have been clear, the Marines left when they should have under the Bush plan. I was unaware that there were Marines in Somalia at the time of Black Hawk Down.

"The NGOs, which like CARE, Catholic Relief, CWS, MSF, etc., etc., have a large following in the Congress, complained mightily that they could not respond to famine because warlords were well armed."

As far as I am aware, the Marines were not there for Blackhawk down. I was not. That happened in August 1993 and we left in April 1993. However, when we left we could have predicted Blackhawk down because the mission had already changed.

You encapsulate the problem in your above statement. The warlords were preventing our shipments of food to starving people. It had nothing to do with a lack of food. As I said earlier, we have enough food to feed the world. We could eliminate famine on this earth for all intents and purposes if the problem was starving families. It's always more than that because food in many parts of the world is used as a weapon.

It comes down to this, there was no national interest in our going into Somalia. So America has to ask ourselves if it is worth Americas sons and daughters to go in and fix Somali society. Do you think that when we eventually pulled out in 1994 (I believe) that the people stopped starving? America should have never committed our forces to Somalia. If we really wanted to help, we should have gotten African forces in there to solve the crisis. We could have used Mercs (oh, no not those evil mercenaries!!) to solve the immediate situation and then worked with our partners in the region to solve it long term through African forces or UN forces. It was not our fight.