Quote (bogie160 @ Apr 25 2019 09:19am)
The operation in Somalia was in support of UN humanitarian objectives, the hundreds of Somalis killed were part of a mob that overran American positions, killed soldiers, and dragged them through the street.
Omar's family fled to avoid being killed by the same militias the United States was combating. The battle of Mogadishu eventually led to the United States withdrawing from the region, and to no one's surprise Somalia is still a violence wracked mess today.
Omar blames the United States because it's easier and more satisfying than coming to grips with the internal and external factors that led to the collapse of the Somali state in 1991.
Did Somalia need to invade Ethiopia in the 70s? Of course not, and Soviet support for Ethiopia eventually led to Somalia's defeat, popular unrest, and the collapse of the central government.
No, no, Omar blames the United States, presumably for no other reason than because she's been fed that lie since she was born, compounded and amplified by leftist apologists in the United States.
whats more is that the tepid Somalian intervention was a classic example of Clinton's failings as a noninterventionalist president. There were no less than three major humanitarian crisises unfolding at the same time that Clinton was too reticient to intervene and stop. Somalia, Sudan & Kosovo all happened under his watch. Somalia collapsed into a civil war and Aidid's clan was killing humanitarian workers trying to distribute aid to relieve the millions of people starving. It was their goal to stop the food from being delivered and they killed 25 Pakistanis from the UN in one attack- they would seize it for themselves and try to leverage the starvation to take control of the country.
Clinton did not want the US dragged into a quagmire with no clear end in sight and no feasible way to resolve it cleanly, but he wasn't willfully blind to the crisis either. So he signed off on a surgical operation with the idea of pulling off a quick in-and-out raid to seize the Habr Gadr clan leadership from a meeting and hold them to try to bring Aidid to the table and resolve it diplomatically. This came after a previous bungled raid managed to galvanize that corner of mogadishu against the US when they killed a group of elders at a peace meeting with TOW missiles, killing dozens of civilians and leading to an angry mob that immediately lynched four American journalists trying to cover it. And of course, the famed battle of mogadishu ensued from this bungled raid- they got their clan leaders sure, and had no way to exfiltrate the troops and wound up in a bitter urban battle fighting their way out on foot through hundreds of ambushers. It was only a shitfuck because we were consciously
not bringing in the heavy guns and warthogs to provide heavy air support and crush the militias, because it was the big plan to not get involved militarily, just do these in and out operations.
There are pitfalls and traps for a president who is too much of an interventionalist like Bush, and there are similar failings for a president who is too much of a non-interventionalist like Clinton, and even when a pragmatist comes along and says "I wont' do stupid shit, I'll intervene but only when its smart" like Obama did:
you actually have to be smart. And his foreign policy wasn't, and he fucked it up in terms of both intervening where he shouldn't have and disengaging when he shouldn't have.