The only people held responsible are the Somalis who will soon taste
US vengeance for their "crimes".
    Medals all around in the good ol' USA.

    Larry (who is NOT flying a flag from his car antenna)

Jon Davies wrote:

> This article in yesterdays Guardian in the UK brought out much
> information that i hadn't heard about.
>
> Does anyone have any other info about the background to this
> incident?
>
> <snip>
> Far from resolving the conflict between the clans, the US accidentally
> enhanced it
>
> GM seems to indicate that the US where the authors of their own
> misfortune.  Was anyone held responsible?
>
> Cheers
>
> Jon
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4344998,00.html
>
> Both saviour and victim
>
>  Black Hawk Down creates a new and dangerous myth
> of American nationhood
>
> George Monbiot
> Guardian
>
> Tuesday January 29, 2002
>
> The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its
>  victimhood. In contemporary British eyes, the greatest atrocities
> of the 18th and 19th centuries were those perpetrated on
> compatriots in the Black Hole of Calcutta or during the Indian
>  mutiny and the siege of Khartoum. The extreme manifestations
> of the white man's burden, these events came to symbolise the
> barbarism and ingratitude of the savage races the British had
>  sought to rescue from their darkness.
>
> Today the attack on New York is discussed as if it were the
> worst thing to have happened to any nation in recent times. Few
> would deny that it was a major atrocity, but we are required to
> offer the American people a unique and exclusive sympathy.
> Now that demand is being extended to earlier American losses.
>
> Black Hawk Down looks set to become one of the bestselling
> movies of all time. Like all the films the British-born director
> Ridley Scott has made, it is gripping, intense and beautifully
> shot. It is also a stunning misrepresentation of what happened in
> Somalia.
>
> In 1992 the United States walked into Somalia with good
> intentions. George Bush senior announced that America had
> come to do "God's work" in a nation devastated by clan warfare
> and famine. But, as Scott Peterson's firsthand account Me
> Against My Brother shows, the mission was doomed by
> intelligence failures, partisan deployments and, ultimately, the
> belief that you can bomb a nation into peace and prosperity.
>
>  Before the US government handed over the administration of
> Somalia to the United Nations in 1993, it had already made
> several fundamental mistakes. It had backed the clan chiefs
> Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi against another warlord,
> shoring up their power just as it had started to collapse. It had
> failed to recognise that the competing clan chiefs were ready to
> accept large-scale disarmament, if it were carried out
> impartially. Far from resolving the conflict between the clans, the
> US accidentally enhanced it.
>
> After the handover, the UN's Pakistani peacekeepers tried to
> seize Aideed's radio station, which was broadcasting anti-UN
> propaganda. The raid was bungled, and 25 of the soldiers were
> killed by Aideed's supporters. A few days later, Pakistani troops
> fired on an unarmed crowd, killing women and children. The
> United Nations force, commanded by a US admiral, was drawn
> into a blood feud with Aideed's militia.
>
> As the feud escalated, US special forces were brought in to deal
> with the man now described by American intelligence as "the
> Hitler of Somalia". Aideed, who was certainly a ruthless and
> dangerous man but also just one of several clan leaders
> competing for power in the country, was blamed for all Somalia's
> troubles. The UN's peacekeeping mission had been transformed
> into a partisan war.
>
> The special forces, over-confident and hopelessly ill-informed,
> raided, in quick succession, the headquarters of the UN
> development programme, the charity World Concern and the
> offices of Midecins sans Frontieres. They managed to capture,
> among scores of innocent civilians and aid workers, the chief of
> the UN's police force. But farce was soon repeated as tragedy.
> When some of the most senior members of Aideed's clan
> gathered in a building in Mogadishu to discuss a peace
> agreement with the United Nations, the US forces, misinformed
> as ever, blew them up, killing 54 people. Thus they succeeded
> in making enemies of all the Somalis. The special forces were
> harried by gunmen from all sides. In return, US troops in the UN
> compound began firing missiles at residential areas.
>
> So the raid on one of Aideed's buildings on October 3 1993,
> which led to the destruction of two Black Hawk helicopters and
> the deaths of 18 American soldiers, was just another round of
> America's grudge match with the warlord. The troops who
> captured Aideed's officials were attacked by everyone: gunmen
> came even from the rival militias to avenge the deaths of the
> civilians the Americans had killed. The US special forces, with
> an understandable but ruthless regard for their own safety,
> locked Somali women and children into the house in which they
> were besieged.
>
> Ridley Scott says that he came to the project without politics,
> which is what people often say when they subscribe to the
> dominant point of view. The story he relates (with the help of the
> US department of defence and the former chairman of the joint
> chiefs of staff) is the story the American people need to tell
> themselves.
>
> The purpose of the raid on October 3, Black Hawk Down
> suggests, was to prevent Aideed's murderous forces from
> starving Somalia to death. No hint is given of the feuding
> between him and the UN, other than the initial attack on the
> Pakistani peacekeepers. There is no recognition that the worst
> of the famine had passed, or that the US troops had long
> ceased to be part of the solution. The US hostage-taking, even
> the crucial role played by Malaysian soldiers in the Rangers'
> rescue, have been excised from the record. Instead - and since
> September 11 this has become a familiar theme - the attempt to
> capture Aideed's lieutenants was a battle between good and evil,
> civilisation and barbarism.
>
> The Somalis in Black Hawk Down speak only to condemn
> themselves. They display no emotions other than greed and the
> lust for blood. Their appearances are accompanied by sinister
> Arab techno, while the US forces are trailed by violins, oboes
> and vocals inspired by Enya. The American troops display
> horrific wounds. They clutch photos of their loved ones and ask
> to be remembered to their parents or their children as they die.
> The Somalis drop like flies, killed cleanly, dispensable,
> unmourned.
>
> Some people have compared Black Hawk Down to the British
> film Zulu. There is some justice in the comparison, but the
> Somalis here offer a far more compelling personification of evil
> than the blundering, belligerent Zulus. They are sinister, deceitful
> and inscrutable; more like the British caricature of the Chinese
> during the opium wars.
>
> What we are witnessing in both Black Hawk Down and the
> current war against terrorism is the creation of a new myth of
> nationhood. America is casting itself simultaneously as the
> world's saviour and the world's victim; a sacrificial messiah, on a
> mission to deliver the world from evil. This myth contains
> incalculable dangers for everyone else on earth.
>
> To discharge its sense of unique grievance, the US government
> has hinted at what may become an asymmetric world war. It is
> no coincidence that Somalia comes close to the top of the list of
> nations it may be prepared to attack. This war, if it materialises,
> will be led not by the generals in their bunkers, but by the
> people who construct the story the nation chooses to believe.