Mogadishu is a place most Americans would rather forget. During the 1990s, the "Black Hawk Down" debacle symbolized the dangers of dabbling in far-off lands we don't understand. | Some of us took a different lesson from that shameful incident. The rest of us re-elected Billy Bob "Too Busy Getting BJs" Clinton. |
TV images of a half-stripped GI being dragged through the dust by gleeful Somalis—he was one of 18 U.S. Army Rangers killed in a botched effort to arrest a warlord—became an emblem of American vulnerability. But Mogadishu, it seems, won't be forgotten. Somalia is erupting in violence again. And with little warning, Americans find themselves once more in the middle of battles they only dimly comprehend—and may well be losing.
Last week, for the first time since the early 1990s, much of the Somali capital was engulfed in bloody fire fights. By all accounts, a jihadist militia of the so-called Islamic Courts Union was gaining ground on an alliance of secular warlords who have received U.S. backing. Observers say the Union has been winning adherents by casting its enemies as stooges of Washington, especially since the U.S.-friendly warlords formed a group called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism last winter. The revived fighting inside Somalia—a lawless state on the Horn of Africa with no central government—has raised new questions about America's global war on terror, which is being fought mostly out of the public eye.
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