Black Hawk Downer

01.11.02 - A military campaign cast, at least partly, as humanitarian, blunders into a viciously divided nation already devastated by cold-war conflict, warlords, drought and disease. Afghanistan? Yes, but also Somalia, where the president's father launched an ill-fated "peacekeeping" adventure a decade ago. The parallels are striking -- and especially relevant with Somalia being bandied about as the possible next target of our current President Bush's war.

All of which makes director Ridley Scott's new movie, "Black Hawk Down," a timely arrival in theaters. But the film, let's be clear, made by the SONY corporation, is about US soldiers in wartime, not Somalis under attack. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, Mark Bowden, who wrote the book on which the film is based, told Working Assets Radio that it would be good if film-goers started asking questions about the last war in Somalia after seeing the film, but the movie chooses one focus: what US special forces soldiers went through on the ground during one, three-day battle. And that's it.

It makes for a pretty good war movie --Black Hawk Down contains more grimey images of war than any news network has brought us from Afghanistan yet. Does it explain why US soldiers were treated to such a ghastly experience? No.

Those who are looking for an explanation for why Americans in Somalia came to be so vigorously hated, could do worse, however, than to take a look at Bowden's book. What's in there, that's not in the movie, moreover, gives a crash course on the politics of Hollywood.

The book, for example, starts its narrative three months before the Battle of Mogadishu depicted in the film. On July 12, 1993, American troops launched a devastating attack in the Somali capital which sowed the seeds of what happened later in Mogadishu's streets. For his book, Bowden fleshed out news accounts of this turning point by interviewing a local clan leader, Mohamed Hassan Farah, and other locals.

"Farah and the others in his clan had welcomed the UN intervention the previous December," writes Bowden. "It promised to bring stability and hope. But the mission had gradually deteriorated into hatred and bloodshed. Farah believed the Americans had been duped into providing the muscle for UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a longtime enemy of the Habr Gidr [clan] and clan leader General Mohammed Farrah Aidid. He believed Boutros-Ghali was trying to restore the Darod, a rival clan. Ever since July 12, [1993] the Habr Gidr had been at war with America."

Check out ABC's Somalia timeline and you won't find an entry for July 12, 1993. But on that day, with the war now under the command of Clinton, 17 U.S. helicopters circled a Mogadishu house where nearly a hundred of Aidid's clansmen -- intellectuals, elders and militia leaders -- were gathered. The leadership, writes Bowden, had come together to discuss how to respond to a peace initiative from Johnathan Howe, the retired American admiral who was then leading the UN mission in Mogadishu.

"Men of middle age were seated at the center of the room on rugs. Elders took chairs and sofas that had been arranged around the perimeter. Among the elders present were religious leaders, former judges, professors, the poet Moallim Soyan, and the clan's most senior leader, Sheik Haji Mohamed Iman Aden, who was over ninety years old...." (p. 83-84, "Black Hawk Down".)

The assembly included moderates and even enthusiastic capitalists ("businessmen who were eager to resume the flood of international aid and trading ties with America"), who were "troubled" by the dangerous game Aidid was playing with the United Nations. Some at the gathering were there to argue for peace. Farah, an engineer, was himself "eager for normalcy," writes Bowden.

Then U.S. TOW missiles crashed into the room. The specialized laser-guided missile spurts a jet of molten copper plasma upon impact, which then burns through the outer layers of their target, "allowing the missile to penetrate and deliver its full explosive charge within," reports Bowden. "The explosion is powerful enough to dismember anyone standing near it, and hurls deadly sharp metal fragments in all directions. "

Farah found himself in a pile of carnage. The International Committee of the Red Cross said later that there were 215 Somali casualties, including 54 dead. Some of the videotape taken at the scene, reports Bowden, showed women among the dead.

The incident was widely reported around the world after it happened but the emphasis in stories was, of course, on the deaths of four journalists present at the gathering. Washington Post reporter Keith Richburg, cited by Bowden, later called the July 12 attack "the UN's first-ever officially-authorized assassination."

As for Farah, Bowden describes his reaction this way: "It was one thing for the world to intervene to feed the starving, and even for the UN to help Somalia form a peaceful government. But this business of sending U.S. Rangers swooping down into their city killing and kidnapping their leaders, this was too much." Which partly explains, suggests Bowden, why half a city was ready to tackle American soldiers with their own hands, when October and the Battle of Mogadishu rolled around.

By the time U.S. troops left in 1994, some 10,000 Somalis had been killed by U.S. and UN forces, the humanitarian impact of the mission was up for debate and the Somali civil war wasn't over. Questions lingered about the real motive behind the operation -- was it famine relief or access to oil? And the image that remained in the public's mind was that of the half-naked corpse of Master Sgt. Gary Gordon being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

Far from restoring any kind of hope, Operation Restore Hope was said to have soured the public, or at least the Clinton administration on U.S. intervention for humanitarian purposes. Some argued that it was that sour taste which kept the UN and the West from intervening a year later as a million Rwandans were killed in one of the worst cases of attempted genocide in a century full of them.

With his "War on Terrorism mandate," George W. "Dead or Alive" Bush is contemplating more war in Somalia. Secretary of State Colin Powell says "[Somalia is] a place we're watching very, very carefully not just because it's a weak, broken state. It's because terrorist activity might find some fertile ground there."

More useful than repeating familiar condemnations about the familiar bigotries of Hollywood, Journalists would do well to use the release of "Black Hawk Down" as a starting point to revisit what fertilizes such ground in the first place.

Dear Ms Laura Flanders,

In your essay "Black Hawk Downer," you make some excellent points; indeed, this conservative applauds you for writing an essay that is far more substantive than the usual WFC pap (even if it is 90% based upon the work of Mark Bowden, you still get credit). However, it is marred by a few flaws. If I may, I'll comment point by point.

"A military campaign cast, at least partly, as humanitarian, blunders into a viciously divided nation already devastated by cold-war conflict, warlords, drought and disease. Afghanistan? Yes, but...."

We "blundered" into Afghanistan? Forgive me, but it seemed that our military campaign there was highly deliberate -- not to mention shockingly effective. Ascribe blundering where blundering is objectively due: Somalia, yes, but not Afghanistan. Not yet. You undercut your credibility when you assign such adjectives (which have fairly objective definitions) simply because of ideological prejudices. Believe it or not, there are conservatives like myself who read sites like WFC; if you have any interest in convincing us of the merits of your cause, such intellectual laziness must be curbed.

Of course, you may not care about convincing us, in which case this letter itself is pointless. But I will assume not.

"Those who are looking for an explanation for why Americans in Somalia came to be so vigorously hated, could do worse, however, than to take a look at Bowden's book. What's in there, that's not in the movie, moreover, gives a crash course on the politics of Hollywood."

You're quite right that Bowden's book is excellent. However, I'm not at all convinced that the narrative omissions in the movie are examples of Hollywood politicking. Partly this is because Hollywood is, from my perspective, far too reflexively left-wing to do such things with any conscious pro-American intent; however, I can just see my hard left friends blanche at the suggestion that "corporate media" is on their side. So let's leave that argument aside and focus on the very real probability that the narrative backstory was cut in order to make the film tighter and more coherent. This isn't at all implausible, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, Occam's razor demands that we assume it, rather than the more sinister and involved rationale of "Hollywood politics." Simply because something happened that you didn't like is not alone evidence that someone is antagonistic toward you (especially if that something is an act of omission). More is required.

"Farah believed the Americans had been duped into providing the muscle for UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali...."

As an aside, this is not an unreasonable assumption on Farah's part, though it's unlikely that the Americans were consciously complicit in this. Boutros-Ghali was notorious for this sort of thing; he was similarly unjust and biased in the Western Sahara. But that's a different story.

"By the time U.S. troops left in 1994, some 10,000 Somalis had been killed by U.S. and UN forces, the humanitarian impact of the mission was up for debate and the Somali civil war wasn't over."

The 10,000 Somalis figure isn't good, of course, but you could put it into some context. For starters, most of these individuals were killed in self-defense -- either by US/UN soldiers whose bases they were attacking, or by US/UN escorts of aid convoys they were attacking. The actual proportion of Somalis killed by US/UN offensive action was comparatively small. You can further contextualize this number by setting it against the lives saved by the US/UN intervention, which allowed food to reach famine-stricken areas. That number was in the hundreds of thousands. While a calculus of human lives is often abhorrent and always distasteful, it does nonetheless substantially alter the perception in your passage that ten thousand Somalis were somehow wantonly slaughtered without cause.

As for your statement that the "humanitarian impact of the mission was up for debate," I have no idea how that could be true. The humanitarian mission's impact was well-known and hardly up for interpretation. Given that this was a case of physically distributing food on the ground (rather than dropping it from planes, as in Afghanistan), the number and nature of the recipients were easily-catalogued. If the "humanitarian impact of the mission was up for debate," it was only because someone didn't look up the numbers.

In this entire passage, only the statement that the civil war continued is unvarnished truth.

"Questions lingered about the real motive behind the operation -- was it famine relief or access to oil?"

Questions from whom? Admittedly, conspiracy theories and suspicions of dark motives will pop up in someone, anytime, over anything (see Ted Rall). But to imply that the Somalia mission was meant to secure oil is to defy common sense. For starters, Somalia has no appreciable oil underneath it; nor can it threaten any of the neaby shipping lanes; nor, were the intervention actually over oil, would it have ended after what was (for us) a battle with minor losses. Again, an application of Occam's razor is needed here. Absent evidence, dark hints that the Somalia intervention was conducted for oil are intellectually irresponsible.

"Secretary of State Colin Powell says '[Somalia is] a place we're watching very, very carefully not just because it's a weak, broken state. It's because terrorist activity might find some fertile ground there.'....Journalists would do well to use the release of 'Black Hawk Down' as a starting point to revisit what fertilizes such ground in the first place."

In this, your finale, you tiptoe about your conclusion, and I'm not sure why. What do you think does "[fertilize] such ground in the first place"? I am forced to conclude that you think it's American ineptitude and ham-handedness; it provoked war in Somalia, ergo it provokes war/terrorism everywhere, in every case. Since you don't simply say this outright, it's difficult to truly say what your logical process is. So I'll have to answer the implied logical process, and you can correct as you will.

Your premise that we alone provoked war in Somalia is false. We did not force the Somalis in general to loot aid convoys, nor to kill aid workers, nor to kidnap those same workers, nor to use aid cutoffs and thievery as a means of starving their rivals into submission. Inept and foolish as our attack on Habr Gidr was, it was nonetheless a direct response to these things. Ascribing total moral responsibility to us requires one of two preconditions: either our initial attack took place in a total contextual vaccum (false), or the Somalis as a people are an amoral species of child-humans incapable of moral responsibility (also false).

To extend your analogy to terrorism at large and apply it requires subscribing to the same falsehoods: that terrorist grievances against us are wholly just and moral (frequently, if not usually, false), and that their resultant actions impart no moral responsibility upon them (true only if you regard them as a sort of amoral, violent nonhuman).

Of course, in the real world, people can make choices, and those choices have inescapable consequences moral and physical. Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not tacitly blaming America for the catastrophes of 11 September 2001 (and in truth, I am not sure that I should), your analysis still has only limited validity in its application toward formulating a response. Let's take it to its logical extreme and assume that the terrorists had justified grievances against America. Does that excuse murder? No. Does it mitigate their crime? No. Does it deprive us of the right to punish them? No. You seem to think that your analysis necessarily contradicts the military courses of action taken by the Administration; but it does not. Despite what you seem to think, self-reflection and self-correction are not antithetical to this war.

Thanks for reading.

I have always understood that the DOD price for technical assistance in Hollywood war movies is script approval.

True enough. However, this does not at all prevent war movies that the DOD does not approve of from being made. Bruckheimer and Scott were hardly beholden to DOD cooperation to make this film; they used it as a convenience. Given this, we can reasonably assume that the cutting of the backstory was a creative decision on the filmmakers' part (and by all reviews, a poor one), rather than something enforced by the DOD.

"Up for debate" because the famine had peaked and the country was recovering.

That's something different that what Ms Flanders was saying, though. You're saying that the necessity of the mission was up for debate. Fair enough. She's saying that the effect of the mission was up for debate. This is simply untrue.

We were also supporting the dictator who was using starvation as a weapon.

There was more than one of these. Which one are you referring to, and what exactly was our means of support?

You might use your "common sense" to appreciate that this was a Clinton mission and if his contributors wanted the country opened up to oil exploration, there was no reason that could not happen too :-)

Absent actual evidence, we might as well speculate that he wanted to put a spaceport in Mogadishu.

Well it does deprive us of the right to cast the first stone.

I hardly think so. If I've done wrong, it does not prohibit me from pointing out others' wrongs. In fact, having been a perpetrator of it rather increases my moral responsibility to stamp out wrong per se.

Fury writes: This is not entirely accurate. MG Garrison felt that the AC-130 was not necessary..... Nor did MG Harrison or his "one over" LTG Downing request an armor package for their task force..." The news media at the time state that US Military on the ground did request armor, endorsed by Pentagon, but denied by Les Aspin, and rumored to have actually denied by Clinton and Warren Christopher - but Aspin was allowed to take the fall for it. E.g.,[begin quote] Somali Options Reviewed As Discontent in Congress Grows By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 6, 1993; Page A01 The destruction by Somali militiamen of an American Ranger company, which suffered unit casualties unlike any seen in the U.S. Army since Vietnam, caught U.S. forces in Mogadishu without adequate contingency plans to rescue or reinforce the surrounded and outgunned force, according to new details of the firefight emerging yesterday. The 100 elite U.S. infantrymen, who tried to beard a Somali warlord in his den last Sunday, suffered 70 percent casualties...So badly pinned down were the Americans in Mogadishu that they could not evacuate their wounded, including Ranger commander Lt. Col. Danny McKnight, for nine hours..... Some of the operation's key weaknesses, however, were all-American. McKnight and Maj. Gen. Thomas M. Montgomery, the senior American commander in Somalia, did not anticipate a need for armored vehicles in the hastily launched U.S. operation to snatch the high command of warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, according to officers on the Pentagon's Joint Staff and U.N. officials in Mogadishu and New York.... Once the intense firefight in a congested neighborhood had begun, Montgomery needed armored vehicles because rescue helicopters could not hover or land and the Humvees and five-ton trucks of the U.S. quick reaction force had no protection against Somali gunfire. The U.S. general previously had made clear his awareness that his "thin-skinned" vehicles were vulnerable, and had asked last month for M-1A1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, according to U.S. military sources. But that request, endorsed by the U.S. Central Command, was turned down by Defense Secretary Les Aspin. An official representing Aspin's views said he refused the request because he got conflicting advice, saw "no great sense of urgency," and was sensitive to the likelihood of backlash in Congress. [end quote} My opinion remains that the contempt of the military in the Clinton administration in that first year [remember when Hillary threw a coffee cup at a marine guard who refused to leave his guard post to run a personal errand for her?] led them to be very casual about protecting the troops.

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