FFT said:
... Nobody died because Bill Clinton got a bj in the oval office.
The Somalia War, 1993
The intervention into Somalia in 1992 was an attempt to do good and may have been justified, but the decision by President Clinton to continue the mission in the Spring of 1993 was without a doubt a mistake. He abdicated his responsibility as Commander in Chief of the US military to Butros Gali and allowed the UN Secretary General to run a war against Aideed in an attempt to build a nation from a fragmented society.
...Controlling the distribution of food was the key to winning the war, so whoever controled the port kept control of the food for their clan. They could then dole it out the sub-clans to gain more power and soldiers. President Bush made the decision in late 1992 that the US would secure the distribution of food and so prevent the famine from growing worse. In this we were effective, but the clans had not yet come to accept a leader, so the problem simmered underneath the surface of our food distribution program.
The critical juncture was when Clinton declared the mission accomplished in May of 1993, but continued to keep US troops there as part of a vague UN mission to build a nation. This 'assertive multilateralism' was justified in the "State Dept Dispatch" by Albright as necessary for "rebuilding Somali society and promoting democracy in a strife-torn nation". . .
this required choosing sides in a conflict if we were to impose a government on the clans. Once we set this in motion, conflict was inevitable. Butros-Butros Gali, the Secretary General of the UN, had decided that Aideed's clan was an impediment to the above goals. The war began 5 June when Pakistani soldiers were attacked by militia of Aideed's United Somali Congress, killing 25 Pakistanis, and continued as a 'low-intensity conflict' until the end of the year. Tactics included morter attacks on UN compounds almost nightly, random sniper attacks, assaults on UN compounds, mines and command detonated explosives, children unwittingly blowing themselves up at the gates of compounds with grenades given them by adults, and RPGs used to shoot down helocopters.
In an effort to keep the Somali conflict out of the headlines, Clinton failed to build up the forces to the level required for the mission. We depended on less than forthright allies for armor support. In one incident, an Engineer Company was brought under attack in Sept 1993 while on a road clearing mission on 21st Oct Road. The Pakistani Armor support immediately fled, leaving the lightly armed company to fight its own way out. During the Oct 3rd battle in central Mogadishu the US was forced to depend on other nations to support the rescue convoy.
The US had no national security issues at stake in Somalia, and yet 29 US Soldiers died. The decision by President Clinton to send in the Rangers, Delta Force, and 160th Special Ops Aviation Rgt. to hunt for Aideed was a misallocation of resources. These are Strategic assets of the military, best used for high-value targets. They were bogged down in a civil war which meant 1) they were unavailable in the event of another crisis, 2)
lost some 80 injured and killed.
Failure to give them adequate resources left them hanging out to dry during the battle of October 3rd. The soldiers performed excellently, but were acting under a vague, mishandled policy, much like the situation in the Vietnam war that Mr. Clinton avoided.