Posted on 01/16/2002 2:15:06 AM PST by Ada Coddington
Black Hawk Downer
Laura Flanders - workingforchange.com
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.
© 2001 workingforchange.com
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=12628
I believe Clinton failed to fully appreciate how much the rival clans in Somalis trued hated and probably still do hate each other. US and UN forces were perceived as "taking sides", and once that happened, the situation became even more dangerous.
This author is an idiot. The TOW is not laser guided, it's guided by a very thin wire (3,750 meters long) and is brought to bear on it's target by an operator using either a infra-red night sight or high powered day sight that he uses to follow the target until the missle strikes.
Lasers have nothing to do with the TOW. In fact TOW stands for Tube Launched Optically Tracked Wire Guided Missile.
When a journalist gets facts wrong, I ignore the rest of the article.
Black Hawk Bilge
Now for disjuncture on another front, viz., Somalia, these days touted as a prospective target nation in the war on terror. The new movie Black Hawk Down hails the heroism of U.S. special forces, in the form of the Delta Force and Army Rangers. The reality was somewhat different. Recall that prior to U.S. intervention by Bush I in 1993 Somalia had spent many years under the corrupt sway of Siad Barre, and that the role of U.S. oil companies was sufficiently strong for the postintervention U.S. embassy to be located in the Conoco compound.
But, citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, and an urgent need to restore order, President Bush I sent in the Marines. The United States meant business in Somalia: this was obvious from the location of the American embassy, established a few days before the U.S. marines arrived in Mogadishu, in the Conoco corporate compound.
The "humanitarian" intervention was talked up as one of the first bouts of nation-building of the New World Order, supervised by various nonprofit aid groups and protected by the UN-sponsored military force. Soon ugly stories of murder and torture by Canadian "peacekeepers" appeared in the Canadian press. To efface such unpleasantness the U.S. press whipped up a frenzy about a local warlord called Mohammed Aidid, a sort of mini-Osama, and he became public enemy number-one, target of various bumbling efforts to kill or capture him.
On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" composed of Delta Force and Rangers tried to nab Aidid again, in central Mogadishu. But the American troops became confused. Shortly after, they were surrounded by angry crowds. There ensued a massacre in which somewhere between 500 and 1000 Somalians were killed, along with 18 Americans.
In 1999, Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down appeared. Bowden had worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and had filed pieces right after the 1993 massacre. As the movie director Alex Cox points out in a recent, excellent discussion of Black Hawk Down in The Independent, "It’s interesting to observe how the story was re-told over that time. An article by the former Independent correspondent Richard Dowden [not to be confused with Mark Bowden] the previous year makes the clear point that US troops killed unarmed men, women and children from the outset of their mission: ‘In one incident, Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence. The killer is not identified.’"
Bowden’s original articles were filled with these unpleasant details. They are not to be found in the book. I am reliably informed that the publisher, Grove Atlantic, thought it politic to remove them, preferring an unblemished epic of American heroism. The only blemish that disfigures the release of the movie is the fact that GI John "Stebby" Stebbins, renamed as Company Clerk John Grimes in the film, is now serving a 30-year sentence in Fort Leavenworth military prison for raping a 12-year-old girl.
Cox cites a subsequent U.S. Army investigation of organized racism in the U.S. Army, which concluded the problem was particularly serious in all-white, so-called "elite" and "Special Operations" units. Such racial separatism could lead to problems, the report warned, because it "foster[s] supremacist attitudes among white combat soldiers" (the Secretary of the Army’s Task Force Report on Extremist Activities, Defending American Values, March 21, 1996, Washington, DC, p. 15).
After the massacre, Canada, Italy and Belgium all held inquiries into the behavior of their troops. Canada put some of its soldiers on trial for torture and murder. The U.S. never held such public investigation or reprimanded any of its commanders or troops for the Somalian debacle.
Alexander Cockburn (pronounced 'Cock-burn') in New York Press, current edition.
Can you provide a reference for that?
He was oblivious to all cries for help.
Born a bastard, a communist piss-boy, he lived up to his calling.
Impeached... not worthy of office.
On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" composed of Delta Force and Rangers tried to nab Aidid again, in central Mogadishu.
Secondly, this Alexander Cockburn is an idiot, too. Yet another classic liberal mistake of exaggeration. The mission that day was NOT to nab Aidid, but his lieutenants. And they succeeded.
The humanitarian mission (food airlift and distribution) in Somalia started several months (perhaps even a year) before the media blitz. We were flying missions from Kenya into Somalia daily then moved operations to Mogadishu soon after. The humanitarian mission quickly morphed into the type of "nation building" operation that President Bush spoke of so negatively during the 2000 Presidential debates.
This was a result of the powers that be in Washington (starting with Bill Clinton) not having a clue about how to successfully wage "war". Rule no. 1 is to give the professional Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines in the theater of operations the freedom to do what you send us around the world to do, kill people and break things. War is not the time to get "touchy-feely".
The drought was in 1991 but, unfortunately, the feeding camps encouraged people to stay their and get free food.
When are we going to regret killing 10,000 Somalis?
The bait was supposedly Aidid's lieutenants with an added teaser that maybe even Aidid himself was going to be at the meeting. The most charitible explanation is that our CA was misinformed.
The Military gets its hat handed to them or we become "muscle for the UN"...
You need more memory my friend! This administration is a Conservative one....no matter the reasons....we usually get the military side right.
:o)
For whatever reason the producers accepted DOD assistence, knowing full well that there were strings attached. The thickest string, of course, is that there shall be no criticizm of the military and, by implication, US foreign policy. Given this, the producers knew not to open certain wormy cans.
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.
The mission, as Colonel Hackworth has pointed out, was suffering from "creep". The initial mission, famine relief, was problematical as the dought was abiding yet the people were reluctant to leave the feeding camps because free food is better than having to scratch it out from the soil.
There was more than one of these. Which one are you referring to, and what exactly was our means of support?
We were supporting Said Barre militarily because he wasn't Ethiopia. After he was overthrown, the local warlords were a factor in starving memebers of the opposing tribes.
Absent actual evidence, we might as well speculate that he wanted to put a spaceport in Mogadishu.
You don't consider the size of Conoco's headquarters in Mogadishu physical evidence of their interest in Somalia?
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.
I gather you don't consider it necessary to start first with yourself, i.e., you will condemn the Somalis for ambushing the US miliary but ignore the atrocities committed by UN forces against them.
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