—— Forwarded Message From: Patrick Redding
There is much about this incident that is often glossed over in the current media discussion of the movie. However, there are several points in the Independent article that strike me as (small-r) reactionary and inaccurate.
First of all, while few would dispute the insidious role of oil interests in the African regional conflicts, the fact that the U.S. made use of a Conoco facility to house its consular operations is hardly damning. In nations where the U.S. has not maintained day-to-day relations, it is quite common to lease or even borrow space from American corporations with a fixed presence. This is an arrangement of convenience and logistical expediency, not evidence of a deep-rooted conspiracy.
Secondly, the move to disarm local militia originated from the need to protect humanitarian efforts in Mogadishu proper. The situation in Mogadishu was not representative of Somalia as a whole. The inter-faction fighting in the city was exacerbated by an almost continuous flow of weapons and ordinance to the principal warlords operating there. UN food distribution efforts in other parts of Somalia were relatively successful and were welcomed by both the local governments and populace.
Next, the issue of race and alienation between U.S. Special Forces and the Somali populace: The article describes the military units involved in the 1993 operation as uniformly “white” and “racist.” In fact, the same 1994 investigation the article cites found that the Army’s ethnic makeup reflected the American population as a whole. Mark Bowden, who researched and authored the Black Hawk Down book, has stated that the soldiers he interviewed who were involved in the Battle of Mogadishu were Caucasian, Latino and African American, in pretty much the exact statistical distribution that you would expect to find across the whole U.S.
So are these troops racist? Special operations personnel in the Army are typically better educated and more well-rounded than their regular Army colleagues. It is customary for these troops to receive extensive training in the history, culture and language of the regions where they are deployed, and most of them, Rangers included, have participated in exercises or exchange programs with allied nations of varying ethnicity. This doesn’t by any stretch guarantee the indoctrination of a progressive, global world-view in a 19 year old who may have come from a culturally homogeneous environment; but viewed statistically over the forces as a whole, it has historically bred a more cerebral class of soldier, one who possesses some sensitivity and understanding of the people he is being asked to confront or protect. This approach has strong tactical benefits, particularly since Special Forces have been called upon to carry out psychological and political operations in most of their theaters of activity.
A more genuine concern stems from the ill-preparedness of American troops to be involved in exactly the kind of ‘asymmetric’ conflict that is expected to characterize warfare for the foreseeable future. Even as recently as the operation in Somalia, a kind of Cold War-era polarized thinking pervaded military and intelligence circles within the U.S. The experience in the Gulf War reinforced the doctrine of overwhelming force as a blanket approach to military action, in spite of the fact that the hostile elements in Somalia were completely mixed in with the general populace. It is as though the main lesson of Vietnam were completely erased as a result of one, largely mechanized conflict over 2 months in 1991.
It is a fact that hundreds, possibly a thousand or more Somalis were killed during the 24+ hour firefight that followed the retreating U.S. troops. It will never be clear how many of those people were bystanders and how many were armed participants. But to characterize those deaths as cold-blooded killings precipitated by racism is grossly irresponsible. It is the horrendous nature of urban warfare that battles of this type yield exactly these results, a fact of war that was demonstrated countlessly during WWII and every other modern conflict. It is tempting to assume that the crisp video and audio of the CNN Age somehow illuminates deeper levels of inhumanity in contemporary conflict than existed during the “Good” wars of our grandparents’ time. This is patently false. Combat has never, ever been anything other than destructive and indiscriminate for the people nearby.
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story4013
>
> Black Hawk Down: Shoot first, don’t ask questions afterwards
>
> In October 1993, 18 US soldiers died during a botched mission in Mogadishu.
> The incident is the subject of a new film, Black Hawk Down. But, asks Alex
> Cox, why have the deaths of the Somali civilians been forgotten?
>
> 12 January 2002
>
> In the 1970s and 1980s, Somalia was ruled by a corrupt president, Mohamed
> Siad Barre. It was a familiar story  an unpopular, despotic nutcase (read,
> Pinochet in Chile or the Shah in Iran) who suppressed popular dissent and
> did what the US government, or US-owned multinationals, told him to do.
>
> By his last days in power, Siad Barre had leased nearly two-thirds of
> Somalia to four huge American oil companies: Conoco, Chevron, Phillips, and
> Amoco (the story presumably involves British business interests also, since
> Amoco is now part of BP). The land was believed by geologists to contain
> substantial quantities of oil and natural gas.
>
> In 1991, unfortunately for the oil giants, Siad Barre was overthrown, and he
> fled the country. Somalia  as a functioning nation state with which they
> could do business  fell apart. The oil giants’ exclusive concessions to
> explore and drill were worthless in the absence of a viable government to
> enforce their claims.
>
> In the early 1990s, there were various humanitarian disasters also deserving
> of urgent intervention. For the United States to spearhead a United Nations
> mission to Somalia was, from a humanitarian viewpoint, capricious. But,
> citing famine in Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, and an
> urgent need to restore order, President Bush I sent in the Marines.
>
> The United States meant business in Somalia: this was obvious from the
> location of the American embassy, established a few days before the US
> marines arrived in Mogadishu, in the Conoco corporate compound. The Los
> Angeles Times reported that Bush’s special envoy to Somalia had used the
> Conoco compound as his temporary headquarters.
>
> The marines  along with their United Nations “partners”  settled down to
> their tasks of guarding American oil men and disarming the unruly populace.
> It didn’t go well. On 7 May 1993, the Canadian press reported that elite
> Airborne Regiment Commandos in Somalia had tortured and murdered a civilian
> teenager, Shidane Arone. Other reports of murder by Canadian peacekeepers
> followed.
>
> As for the Americans, having encouraged the ambitions of a Somali general
> and clan leader, Mohammed Aideed, they decided (shades of Osama Bin Laden!)
> that Aideed was their enemy. Half-a-dozen “United Nations” missions were
> dispatched to capture him. All failed.
>
> On 3 October 1993, a team of so-called “elite troops” Â Delta Force Rangers
> Â tried to capture Aideed again, in central Mogadishu. Aideed wasn’t there,
> but the American troops became confused. Shortly after, they were surrounded
> by angry crowds. In the massacre that followed, between 500 and 1,000
> Somalis, many of them women, children, and old people, were killed. Eighteen
> Americans also died.
>
> Of course, it is the American deaths, and the TV image of a couple of
> American bodies being dragged by enraged Somalis, rather than guilt over the
> massacre of hundreds of Africans, that haunts the popular-American-media
> mind. There wasn’t a massacre. There was a firefight. Only Americans lost
> their lives.
>
> In the aftermath of 3 October 1993, various articles appeared about the
> shootout/massacre, including internet postings by Mark Bowden and pieces in
> the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1999, Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down appeared.
>
> It’s interesting to observe how the story was re-told over that time. An
> article by the former Independent correspondent Richard Dowden the previous
> year makes the clear point that US troops killed unarmed men, women and
> children from the outset of their mission: “In one incident, Rangers took a
> family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans,
> she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot
> dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into
> silence. The killer is not identified.” Dowden’s original articles contain
> these horror stories. But his book does not. Instead, Black Hawk Down gives
> us lashings of extraordinary heroism in the face of blah, blah, blah. Rolf
> Harris singing “Two Little Boys”. Sanitized and deodorized Death From Above.
>
> The author of Black Hawk Down is aware of the problem with these “elite,
> superior, special forces”: they are all white. But he doesn’t deal with what
> that elite whiteness means, or where it leads. The American elite forces
> couldn’t perform their central role in Somalia  to protect the oil business
> Â because they were white racists, untrained and unable to relate to a
> humanitarian mission in Africa, even when corporate money was involved. The
> House Armed Services Committee laid the problem on the line the following
> year, 1994, in a comprehensive report on the state of racial affairs within
> the US military  An Assessment of Racial Discrimination in the Military: a
> Global Perspective, 30 December 1994, US Government Printing Office.
>
> The committee sent investigators to 19 military bases at home and abroad,
> where they interviewed 2,000 randomly selected GIs. They found that overt
> racism was “commonplace” at four of the bases, and that inadequate training
> in racial awareness was a widespread problem.
>
> Another task force, which investigated organised racism in the US Army, said
> the problem was particularly serious in all-white, so-called “elite” and
> “Special Operations” units. Such racial separatism could lead to problems,
> its report warned, because it “foster[s] supremacist attitudes among white
> combat soldiers”. (The Secretary of the Army’s Task Force Report on
> Extremist Activities, Defending American Values, 21 March 1996, Washington
> DC, page 15.)
>
> The Somalia mission ended in disarray. The Americans and the “United
> Nations” allies left. In the aftermath of the massacre, Canada, Italy and
> Belgium all held enquiries into the excesses of their troops. Canada put
> several “elite” white soldiers, who had tortured and killed Somalis, on
> trial. The US has never held any public investigation or reprimanded any of
> its commanders or troops for what went on in Somalia.
>
> Now the US prepares for another mission to Mogadishu. It may take the form
> of bombings, or of a poor Somali academic, harassed by the State Department
> and CIA into offering himself up as sacrificial prime minister in another
> doomed governance experiment. It involves a substantial propaganda angle.
> The oil business is all powerful, and must be obeyed.
>
> Not that I’m suggesting that the forthcoming film of Black Hawk Down,
> directed by Ridley Scott, is anything so crude as that. I’m sure that it
> will be even-handed, and depict its protagonists exactly as they were in
> life, skin pigment and all. And I look forward to the sensitive handling of
> Ewan McGregor’s character: elite, white GI John “Stebby” Stebbins, renamed
> as Company Clerk John Grimes in the film, who is now serving a 30-year
> sentence in Fort Leavenworth military prison for raping a 12-year-old girl.
> Massacres and rapes are horrible things. No one would stoop to glorify, or
> justify them, would they?
>
> The current US military doctrine is something called “Full Spectrum
> Dominance”. It is the brainchild of several other mighty corporations and
> the Pentagon. Consisting of putting weapons in orbit in outer space, it will
> mean the US is an even greater, more unstable, military power  in heaven as
> here on earth. It  along with anti-ballistic missile systems and the murder
> of prisoners of war  is currently illegal under international law.
>
> If British politicians go along with the next war, on Somalia, or on Iraq;
> if they loan the country to the US for their Star Wars and Echelon; if noted
> British film-makers like Ridley and Tony Scott (coming soon! Top Gun reality
> TV!) do devote themselves to burnishing the image of an elite US military in
> films like Black Hawk Down, perhaps it’s time for a debate in Britain about
> what America’s “Full Spectrum Dominance” really means.
>
> Alex Cox has just completed ‘Revengers Tragedy’, a British film, for Bard
> Entertainments and Exterminating Angel.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
—— End of Forwarded Message