Posted on Sun, Oct. 08, 2006
The truth about Mogadishu
No, the battle was not an al-Qaeda ambush. Yes, President Clinton could have done more.
Mark Bowden
is a former Inquirer reporter, now a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and author of "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam"
As we passed an anniversary last week of the Battle of Mogadishu, which took place on Oct. 3 and 4, 1993, it surprised me that with all the conflict this nation has seen since those days, the episode - and our entire sojourn in Somalia - remains such an object of contention.
Former President Bill Clinton caused a disturbance recently when he raised his voice and jabbed his finger at Fox News Sunday interviewer Chris Wallace in a vehement defense of his administration's antiterrorism credentials. Clinton was answering not just Wallace, who seemed startled to have touched such a nerve, but also a widespread conservative take on recent history that casts him as asleep at the wheel, or diddling an intern in his outer office while Osama bin Laden bombed and ambushed his way to Sept. 11, 2001.
Somalia figures in this self-serving, oversimplified narrative as an early Islamist "attack" on America, one from which Clinton ran. Of course, no one is better at this game than Bill Clinton, and typically, there was some truth in what our talented former president said about Mogadishu, and some artful spin.
First of all, the Battle of Mogadishu was not an al-Qaeda production. The battle resulted when an elite force of American soldiers ambushed and arrested two lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, and then lingered too long at the point of the raid in downtown Mogadishu. The delay allowed Somali militia to respond by massing and directing enough firepower to down American helicopters.
Clinton was right when he said, "There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down, or was paying any attention to it, or even knew al-Qaeda was a growing concern in October of '93." There was no thought of it and there was no truth to it, despite bin Laden's later claim to the contrary - there are other people in this world who have mastered the art of the self-serving, oversimplified narrative.
No one ever mentioned al-Qaeda to me when I researched the book Black Hawk Down, my account of the battle, published first as a serial in this newspaper in 1997. I was told that some in Aidid's militias had been trained in the art of shooting down helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades by "fundamentalist Islamic soldiers, smuggled in from Sudan."
That information was confirmed in more detail recently in Lawrence Wright's excellent book, The Looming Tower, which describes "a handful" of bin Laden's fighters dispatched to Mogadishu to help train Aidid's men. Two of these al-Qaeda men were present during the battle, according to Wright, but played no part in it and quickly fled the country afterward. The myth of an al-Qaeda role in "ambushing" American forces was given official life in 1998 by the federal indictment of bin Laden, but the charges were later dropped. I was questioned by FBI agents after the Sept. 11 attacks, and told them I believed there was no connection between al-Qaeda and the battle. Nevertheless, the lie appears to have legs. I continue to see the battle referred to as an "al-Qaeda ambush."
The second part of Clinton's comments concerned his response to the battle. Speaking of conservative leaders who now fault him for abandoning the mission afterwards, Clinton said: "They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day... and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations."
Clinton is right about the pressure from Congress to withdraw from Somalia after the battle, after images of dead American soldiers being dragged through city streets by angry mobs infuriated the country. Conservatives and liberals alike forcefully demanded a withdrawal. Conservatives in particular objected to American involvement in "nation-building," which was what the United Nations was trying to do in Somalia. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a single voice arguing in favor of pressing on with the mission. As I pointed out in Black Hawk Down, it is doubtful that Clinton had the political muscle at that point in his presidency to defy such pressure even if he had wanted to.
The "I refused to do it" is less than a half-truth. It's more like a one-tenth truth. Clinton reinforced Task Force Ranger - the assault force involved in the Battle of Mogadishu - after the battle, but he also immediately halted the mission to apprehend Aidid, the reason it was there. The deployment of a fresh Delta Force squadron and the decision to keep it sitting around Mogadishu for months lent the appearance of resolve, but no one in Mogadishu was fooled. Offensive operations against the warlord and his men stopped. That's why Somalis were still celebrating the one-sided battle (the mission on Oct. 3 succeeded, but at a cost of 18 American and more than 500 Somali lives) as a "victory" when I visited there in 1997.
Neither the Clinton nor the Bush administration took al-Qaeda seriously enough before Sept. 11, but saying so is nothing more than the wisdom of hindsight. There is no question that Clinton's decision to call off the mission in Somalia after the battle heartened our Islamist enemies and confirmed their judgment that the United States would withdraw at the slightest sign of determined resistance. They were wrong about America. For better or worse, I suspect today they know they are in a fight.
