Word: mogadishu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pablo Escobar. The next year he advised Attorney General Janet Reno on what kind of gas to use to end the Federal Government's standoff with a religious group in Waco, Texas. But the experience that perhaps marked him most came six months later, in October 1993, in downtown Mogadishu. He and his troops were there when 18 soldiers died in an effort to snatch a Somali warlord--a tough day immortalized in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down. Boykin told a Florida audience last year that he collapsed in his bunk that day, angry that...
...forces, sometimes being briefly detained or having their tapes confiscated. The military also no longer allows camera crews to film bodies arriving home in flag-draped caskets. The evident concern is to avoid generating troubling visuals - and the reasons are obvious: If the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu is the defining military trauma of the past decade, it's worth noting that by the measure of combat fatalities in postwar Iraq has matched the Mogadishu death toll more than six times over. But it hasn't produced anything like that day's ugly visuals of American bodies being dragged...
...years, the Vietnam syndrome was conventional wisdom among our political and cultural elites. It held that Americans wouldn’t support moralistic or strategic military intervention if it proved too costly in American lives. The Vietnam syndrome evolved into its post-Cold War form on the streets of Mogadishu. The domestic outrage that ensued convinced Bill Clinton that public opinion would inevitably revolt against any nation-building effort—or any war at all—at the first sign of casualties. This concern echoed throughout his presidency. It led to his ordering the USS Harlan County?...
...years after the Battle of the Black Sea, U.S. soldiers are once again dying in a faraway country. To date, the number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq war is over 17 times as large as the number that perished in Mogadishu. Yet as Lawrence Kaplan details in a recent New Republic article, polls indicate that between 60 and 70 percent of the public supports an extended U.S. presence to establish civil order in Iraq, even if it takes several years and means substantial casualties...
Reflections on the tenth anniversary of the Mogadishu disaster have largely focused on all that went wrong. But let us also remember what went right: namely, the skill, motivation and heroism of our young soldiers. As Bowden so poignantly puts it, “No matter how critically history records the policy decisions that led up to this fight, nothing can diminish the professionalism and dedication of the Rangers and Special Forces units who fought there that...