IMPERIAL MISADVENTURE
BOOT, MAX
IMPERIAL MISADVENTURE What Went Wrong In Somalia By Max Boot America seems fated to play in the twenty-first century the role Britain played in the nineteenth: Globocop—the country that protects...
...Bob Shacochis relates in The Immaculate Invasion that the Somali disaster emboldened Haiti’s military regime to resist U.S...
...force inflicted disproportionate casualties on the enemy: An estimated five hundred Somalis were killed and five hundred injured...
...demands to yield to elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide...
...The United States lost still more face eight days after the Battle of Mogadishu when the USS Harlan County, loaded with Special Forces and Canadian soldiers, was turned back from Port-au-Prince by a hostile mob...
...soldiers had invaded Haiti for the primary purpose of protecting themselves...
...They like playing Schwarzkopf, not Schweitzer...
...The story is easily summarized: A Delta Force team, supported by Army Rangers, ventured into the heart of Mogadishu to snatch two of warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid’s lieutenants...
...But there’s a price to be paid for taking up what Kipling called “the white man’s burden”: You have to be prepared to fight “the savage wars of peace...
...alike...
...Ninety-nine Americans were trapped all night, surrounded by thousands of “Sammies” firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s...
...But there’s a limit to what cruise missiles can accomplish, as we’ve discovered in our forays against Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden...
...For a regular Army officer, Bolger shows a surprising appreciation for these warriors who are often derided by Pentagon technocrats as testosterone-addled anachronisms...
...IMPERIAL MISADVENTURE What Went Wrong In Somalia By Max Boot America seems fated to play in the twenty-first century the role Britain played in the nineteenth: Globocop—the country that protects the weak from the strong (the Ottoman Empire from Russia, Kuwait from Iraq), safeguards international trade while stamping out contraband (slaves, nukes), and generally bosses around petty despots in the name of Western ideals (Christianity, human rights...
...There wasn’t a year of Victoria’s reign that her army wasn’t fighting somebody somewhere, from Afghanistan to Zululand...
...The plan went dramatically awry when two of the MH-60K Black Hawk helicopters supporting the ground team were brought down by rocket-propelled grenades...
...By the time the Battle of Mogadishu was over, eighteen Americans were dead and seventy-three injured...
...It’s a defensible strategy on its merits but Shacochis, a good “progressive” writer, never seems to face the implications of his policy preferences...
...The Gulf War matched their preferred style, Panama less so, Somalia and Liberia not at all...
...The Green Berets adapted as well as possible to this nebulous mission...
...Salvation came when the 10th Mountain Division was able to break through by borrowing tanks and armored personnel carriers from the Pakistani and Malaysian United Nations contingents...
...It’s called imperialism...
...These twin American fixations— restoring “democracy” and avoiding casualties—made for a hollow victory in Haiti...
...While both Black Hawk Down and The Immaculate Invasion are impressive pieces of reporting, neither is particularly reflective...
...The regular Army, to say nothing of the Navy and Air Force, hates these wars...
...occupation...
...Dead American soldiers...
...These wars are a constant source of frustration for U.S...
...Mark Bowden writes that “It speaks well of America that our threshold for death and injury to our soldiers has been so significantly lowered...
...The United States left a country that was still a cesspool of corruption, incompetence, and violence—but at least it had plenty of ballot boxes to stuff...
...Somalia didn’t even have that consolation...
...Bolger opines that these expeditions show the limits of the “firepower-intensive American way of war...
...A ground convoy sent to rescue Task Force Ranger was turned back by swarms of Somalis...
...But these latter-day Romans were severely circumscribed in exercising their authority...
...There’s ample precedent for this...
...But the Green Berets were frustrated that, as one sergeant put it, they couldn’t “take care of the bad guys, like we were supposed to be doing...
...Ammunition by the ton cannot do it all...
...soldiers and civilians Max Boot is editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal...
...But the Clinton administration, true to its “no-casualties” mantra, decided to cut and run...
...from the University of Chicago, delivers a less graceful but more clear-headed analysis of Haiti, Somalia, and other recent “operations other than war” in Death Ground...
...Next, it seems, is Kosovo...
...Bob Shacochis, a novelist by trade, is a better stylist but he occasionally puts flashy writing over narrative coherence...
...Indeed Special Forces troopers who fought in “Mog” were eager to return for another round...
...foreign policy: No casualties...
...This seemed to be the highest priority of American commanders...
...Although the battle was a public- relations disaster, as military missions go, it was a success...
...And in the wake of the Cold War, American troops have been deployed to Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia—and those are only the major missions...
...So while the fire department awaits a ten-alarm blaze, a series of smaller fires ravage the neighborhood...
...Faced with a harrowing ordeal, our highly trained soldiers reacted with cool professionalism and dedication...
...Let’s rock ’n’ roll...
...What was accomplished by snatching them is another matter...
...And the outnumbered U.S...
...Marines ran Haiti, creating a stable and sane, if unpopular, government...
...There are some conflicts—Vietnam was one— where “to do the job, you need fine infantry— good men willing to close in and fight...
...Between 1915 and 1934, U.S...
...Oddly enough, we’re far more sparing with the lives of professional soldiers— men who have eagerly volunteered for combat and its attendant risks—than we ever were with draftees...
...It didn’t take long to seize the country but, as Shacochis writes, “the central operational question that remained unanswered was, Now what...
...Any self-respecting imperial power would have exacted a terrible vengeance for the death of its soldiers, as the British did after the massacre at Isandhlwana (which preceded the defense of Rorke’s Drift...
...As the Rangers would put it: “Hoo-ah...
...They could protect themselves against threats but had limited power to arrest members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), paramilitary thugs who terrorized the populace...
...Marines in particular have a long history, stretching back to the Tripolitan War of 1801- 1805, of fighting these low-intensity conflicts...
...The objective— snatching two clan leaders—was accomplished...
...Does he really want Americans to run Haiti for the next decade or two...
...Americans like clean, antiseptic violence, death from a distance...
...Mark Bowden delivers a gripping minute-by-minute battle account, sort of like a nonfiction Tom Clancy without the character development...
...The Americans didn’t have armor of their own because Defense secretary Les Aspin had refused to send any—a mistake which he paid for with his job...
...Eventually President Clinton ordered a fullscale invasion, but before it began the Haitian army finally acceded to U.S...
...Many Pentagon brass and politicians want to husband our resources, avoid risking even a single life, and prepare endlessly for the Big One that may never come...
...The Marines even stamped out the cacos bandits, predecessors of FRAPH...
...These soldiers embrace the challenge of operations that Bob Shacochis evocatively describes as “an empty space in an army’s traditional reality, where there are no friends and no enemies, no front or rear, no victories and, likewise, no defeats, and no true endings...
...Kipling foresaw it all long ago: Fill full the mouth of Famine And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly, Bring all your hope to nought...
...These “D-boys”—Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart—were awarded posthumous Medals of Honor...
...Their gallantry, and that of their buddies, recalls the heroism of the outnumbered British garrison at Rorke’s Drift, which won a record eleven Victoria Crosses for holding off thousands of Zulu warriors on January 22-23, 1879...
...Operation Uphold Democracy was, in the narrow sense, also a success: Aristide was restored and the military government of Raoul C?dras was deposed...
...And they were supposed to restore civilian authority as soon as possible, even if that authority was venal and incompetent (as it usually was...
...Several new books illuminate the difficulties of acting like a superpower without being willing to pay any price in blood...
...These Green Berets quickly became the only authority around, their captain “the contemporary version of a Roman procurator, the sole authority over the lives of three hundred thousand people living under primitive conditions...
...The truly dismaying part of the Battle of Mogadishu was not the casualties— such things happen, alas, in the fog of war—but what occurred afterward...
...The public was horrified to see TV pictures of a dead American soldier being dragged through the dirt by jubilant Somalis...
...Shacochis brilliantly summarizes their paradoxical attitude: “U.S...
...they were freed a few months later...
...They were told by their commanders—who were told by Washington— that they were only supposed to restore Aristide and his Lavalas gang...
...Above all U.S...
...Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden concerns the second-worst-case scenario of American intervention (the worst case being Vietnam-level blundering): what happened in Somalia on October 3-4, 1993...
...Now that we have this elite infantry force—this thin green line—the question is what are we going to do with it...
...And bravery: After the second Black Hawk crashed amid a sea of hostiles, two Delta Force snipers volunteered to rappel down from their own helicopter to try to save the injured crew members—even though they knew it was a suicide mission...
...forces suffered few casualties...
...Bowden, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who wrote a series on the battle for his newspaper, tells the story through the eyes of the fighters, mostly Americans but also some Somalis...
...Unfortunately the alternative— sending men, not just machines— risks violating the prime imperative of post-Vietnam U.S...
...Shacochis spends most of the book describing the months he spent with a Special Forces team—six sergeants and a captain—in the northern town of Limb...
...The United States paid for its fickleness almost at once in lost respect around the world...
...Army colonel Daniel P. Bolger, a history Ph.D...
...Shacochis regrets that the United States didn’t engage in more “nation building...
...The thugs taunted Americans with cries of “Somalia...
...Luckily, America does deploy some infantrymen who are trained for these small wars—principally Special Forces and Marines, “America’s ‘911’ force...
...There’s another name for this type of “nation building...
...Night patrols, for instance, took advantage of voodoo superstitions by wearing inverted night-vision goggles whose “twin cones of ghoulish light” made them look like the living dead...
...I wonder if it doesn’t instead betray the moral myopia of a self-satisfied nation that risks forgetting that certain things are worth fighting and dying for...
Vol. 4 • March 1999 • No. 27
