Word: mogadishu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...learned to endure. That hasn't happened yet; Shah-i-Kot marks the first time in many years that Americans have died in battle on a foreign field without a sense of outrage and shame at home. After 18 Army Rangers and special forces died at the battle of Mogadishu in 1993?the subject of the film Black Hawk Down?some relatives of the dead thought their sons had been betrayed by their political leaders, while many citizens felt guilty about allowing men to be placed in danger for an ill-defined purpose...
Remember "mission creep"? the Pentagon does. In 1993 what started as a humanitarian operation to feed starving Somalis turned into an exercise in "nation building" and ended with the death of 18 American soldiers on the streets of Mogadishu. Nobody in the U.S. military wants to repeat the experience...
...Pentagon loves Ridley Scott's film, and with good reason: It shows the truly heroic efforts of a small band of American soldiers fighting against thousands of Mogadishu residents in a 1993 street battle that killed 1,000 Somalis and 17 Americans. But Mark Bowden's meticulously researched text also tells the Somali point of view, the other, equally important half of the story. What emerges here is that while the Americans believed they were simply embarked on a noble mission to ensure that food reached the hungry, many Somalis saw the U.S. forces as intruders meddling aggressively in their...
...Somalia became a focus of attention again last week when it emerged that the U.S. and nato allies have stepped up surveillance flights over suspected al-Qaeda camps there. The Navy has deployed ships off the Somali coast to interdict suspicious vessels. State Department envoys are also visiting Mogadishu, urging its year-old transitional government to share intelligence on al-Qaeda and warning that Somalia could become the next target if it harbors the terrorists. But the U.S. doesn't think al-Qaeda fighters have reached there yet. "Obviously, Somalia is a place of concern," says a senior State Department...
That does not mean, however, that the troops in Mogadishu fought badly. On the contrary, they took everything the enemy threw at them, improvising their own deadly responses on the run. Under fire, they were, indeed, all that they could be. Afterward, Garrison pointed out that they carried out their mission successfully (he got his "personalities") and killed at least 300 of the enemy. It merely took more time and American blood than they ever imagined it would. In other words, you can see Black Hawk Down as antiwar if you're so inclined, but you cannot possibly...