On Oct. 3, 1993, U.S. forces entered the Somali capital of Mogadishu to capture officials of one of the main warring clans in the country and specifically its leader, Mohamed Farah Aideed. The mission was a complete fiasco. Of the 160 Americans involved in the operation, 18 were killed, 75 wounded and one captured. The bodies of American soldiers were dragged through the streets. Anywhere from 500 to 1,000 Somalis were killed that night.
The event, the subject of the Hollywood film \Black Hawk Down,"" raises an important question. Somalia is a country characterized by its factionalism. The running joke is that if there are four Somalis in a room, there are probably six rival clans present. Yet when the two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters went down, an entire city seemed to drop its internal differences and attack the very forces that were there to feed them.
Few populations, least of all those among the formerly colonized, warmly embrace foreign involvement in domestic affairs. But there were a number of specific factors that set the stage for the distinct fury in Mogadishu that day.
One important factor was the massacre of July 12. Three months prior to the downing of the Black Hawks, the United Nations and United States decided to pressure Aideed by attacking a meeting of his native Habr Gidr clan. The Washington Post described the event as a ""slaughter"" in which ""a half-dozen Cobras ... pumped 16 TOW missiles and 2,000 rounds of cannon fire"" into a gathering of elders, intellectuals, poets and religious leaders, ""first blowing away the stairwell to prevent anyone from escaping."" Aside from being conspicuously bloody, the move was also entirely counterproductive, since the meeting's purpose was to consider a U.S.-initiated peace plan and to argue against Aideed's anti-United Nations stance. The brutality of the attack not only unified the Habr Gidr clan behind Aideed but also recruited other clans in a desire for revenge.
The broader context leading up to the intervention is also important to consider. One of the main symbols of the West for average Somalis was the International Monetary Fund. Throughout the 1980s, the IMF attempted to stave off the country's financial woes by imposing austerity measures. Unfortunately, these measures only dismantled the local agricultural economy, putting the brunt of the suffering on the shoulders of the weakest in society. As a desperate migration from the countryside increased, young men arrived to cities with little more than an acute sense of anger toward so-called Western solutions.
It didn't help that the country was awash in arms. In Mogadishu it was, and still is, almost easier to buy a machine gun than lunch. For years, the United States kept Siad Barre propped up with $50 million in annual arms shipments, of which Barre kept the best hardware and redistributed the rest to the factions he skillfully played off each other. It was these same arms that were used as U.N. and U.S. forces tried to restore order.
None of these factors lessen the tragedy of the American lives lost when the Black Hawks went down, nor the hundreds of Somalis killed that day. They also do not take away from the bravery shown in that humanitarian mission. However, there may be lessons to learn. Rage such as that seen in Mogadishu is not born of nothing, and to misunderstand its origin is to guarantee its return. Short-term stabilizing relationships with repressive leaders have long-term destabilizing consequences, especially when these relationships are bought with weapons. Not only should the United States begin taking human rights more into account as it chooses its friends, it should also begin supporting the United Nations in efforts at international small arms controls. This would be a reversal from the role the United States, and the gun lobby behind it, played at the U.N. arms control convention last year.
The proper debate is not between interventionism and isolationism. When a country is devoid of central government, overrun with rival militias and facing a famine of 300,000 people, isolationism is neither moral nor pragmatic. The United Nations, with U.S. backing, was right to go into Somalia. But waiting until the last minute was a mistake that could only result in counterproductive uses of force, such as the massacre of July 12, or political miscalculations, such as the Aideed manhunt, which ended in the downed Black Hawks. Somalia was a lesson in the danger of ignoring failed states and the longer-term political and monetary policies that contribute to their demise. Leaving societies stateless so as to avoid the responsibility of nation-building is short-sighted foreign policy. The United States must bear this in mind as it withdraws from Afghanistan only to consider re-entering Somalia.
