Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 12, 1993 TAG: 9310120168
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NICHOLAS M. HORROCK CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
The raid to snare 20 of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's lieutenants went bad from the beginning and, like some awful dream, tumbled forward, one mishap upon another.
The helicopters, those lifelines of escape, were shot down, and the first relief column ran into an unexpected attack and was sidetracked, its Humvees and trucks shot up.
The second rescue force stumbled around for hours trying to find equipment and drivers while the Rangers held their disastrous position, finally firing the ammunition of fallen comrades. Six hours after the first helicopter went down, a relief force of Americans, Pakistanis and Malaysians set out, creeping along at 3 mph because it was the first time the drivers had used night-vision glasses.
One firefight doesn't lose a battle, one battle doesn't doom a military expedition, and one expedition gone awry doesn't discredit a national policy.
Yet the firefight at Mogadishu's Olympic Hotel and what has followed hold all the components of the problems that dogged the United States through Vietnam, as though the dead of that war had sent back one ominous warning: beware.
Except for Beirut, no U.S. military expedition since Vietnam has so closely approximated the elements the United States found in Southeast Asia.
Operation Desert Storm, that deft victory over Iraqi forces in the Persian Gulf War, was so different from Vietnam as not to compare at all. Although the military saw it as a catharsis of the demons they had carried from the Ia Drang Valley and Khe Sanh, history will find it a throwback to World War II and before: large armies of ordered nations drawn up on a field of battle mercifully free of civilians and free to use the technological marvels of modern war.
But in the sweltering, narrow streets of Mogadishu last week, the United States met its future and its past, calling into question not simply the policy of President Clinton but also the very apparatus for decision-making in the post-Cold War era.
Late last year, President Bush, reacting to that great new determinant of national policy, the television screen, sent 28,000 U.S. troops to secure the delivery of food to millions of starving Somalis.
In Somalia food was being used, as it is in Bosnia, as a weapon of civil war. "Warlords," a pejorative term for local clan and military leaders, such as Aidid, were stealing food and dispensing it to their followers for profit and support.
So from the outset, the notion that the United States was on a humanitarian mission was nonsense. The Marines and soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were there to keep the warlords at bay.
Somalia was armed to the teeth, but the U.S. command, right up through Washington, concluded that it was too difficult to totally disarm the country. So they settled for trying to pick up just the heavy weapons.
That, says a veteran U.S. Army general, was a crucial misstep. It left bands of irregulars intact and better armed than any national police could be.
When the U.S. troops first arrived, the scene was like Da Nang in 1965, with everybody cheering. The average Somali was getting food, and some of the chaos and danger created by civil war was put in order. Whether or not they admit it, U.S. military planners found the situation more benign than they had expected, and it lulled them as commanders were lulled in Southeast Asia and Beirut.
It should have been assumed that Aidid and his men could be a serious threat. Aidid had been trained in an Italian military school and a Soviet military school, had risen to become chief of Somalia's uniformed forces and had just ousted opponents from a large section of Mogadishu.
But by spring, as a veteran Marine officer said, "a lot of arrogance was being served with coffee at the Pentagon. These were the heroes of the desert, weren't they? They'd dispatched Saddam Hussein."
Mogadishu, however, was going to be starkly different. Even Aidid's half-trained followers were dangerous in a built-up area where terror and ambush would be the weapons of choice. While U.S. forces were getting intelligence from untested sources in Somalia, Aidid had a living intelligence network on every street and every alley in his part of the capital and beyond. Like the tea girls and washerwomen of Vietnam, these eyes and ears missed no truck, no tank, no person who entered or left the compounds of the United Nations-U.S. forces. Aidid knew what was going on, and Washington didn't.
This emboldened Aidid to reassert his bid for control of the government that will survive in Somalia, and he chose methods straight from the little red book of China's Mao Tse-tung, that manual on guerrilla warfare that no U.S. officer was without in Vietnam.
Its primary rule is to immerse your fighters in the civilian population. When a modern military force of the type the United States puts in the field retaliates, its massive weapons often kill more women and children than fighters.
On Sept. 6, when urban guerrillas attacked Nigerian peacekeepers, the United States used helicopters to extricate them. The world was treated to video pictures of women and tiny children dying by U.S. machine-gun bullets.
The trouble with the analogies to Vietnam is that their message is hard to understand. In the days since the young men of the 75th Rangers died, Washington has been awash with rhetoric much like the rhetoric of the '60s.
Advice is all over the place. Leave. Stay. Seize Aidid. The only point of consensus is that the United States must try to recover Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant and any other hostages there, but beyond that is a deep policy void.
There was a national foreign policy consensus when the United States entered Vietnam: The United States was the only power big enough to resist the Soviet Union and world communism, and it had to help lesser nations resist aggression.
This policy came a cropper in Vietnam, where belatedly the United States discovered that what was going on was a civil war between ancient enemies fed by the arms and ideologies of outsiders.
Now the question on the nation's talk shows is "Why are we in Somalia?" Clinton would like to put off a debate on national purpose, but the Olympic Hotel firefight may not permit him to do so.
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