By Brian Carnell

Monday, February 25, 2002

David Horowitz has published his long pamphlet, How the Left Undermined America's Security, at FrontPageMagazine.Com, and his argument does little credit to the conservative position on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I have to confess I stopped closely reading this screed after the fourth paragraph which is not only inaccurate, but -- oddly enough -- inaccurate in a way that is far too kind to Horowitz's nemesis, Bill Clinton. The subject is the U.S. debacle in Somalia. Here's how Horowitz describes that event,

In fact, the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks had first engaged U.S. troops as early as 1993 when the Clinton Administration deployed U.S. military forces to Somalia. The purpose was humanitarian: to feed the starving citizens of this Muslim land. But, America's goodwill ambassadors were ambushed by al-Qaeda forces. In a 15-hour battle in Mogadishu, 18 Americans were killed and 80 wounded. One dead U.S. soldier was dragged through the streets in an act calculated to humiliate his comrades and his country. The Americans' offense was not that they had brought food to the hungry. Their crime was who they were-"unbelievers," emissaries of "the Great Satan," in the political religion of the enemy they now faced.

It is difficult to conceive how Horowitz could have written such unbridled nonsense with a straight face.

Humanitarian food relief? The American soldiers ambushed in Mogadishu weren't attacked while trying to deliver food aid, they were attacked while trying to arrest a Somali warlord. The Somalia debacle occurred because the mission changed from providing food to hungry Somalians to trying to bring stability to Somalia by becoming an active participant in that country's civil war.

Moreover, the successful ambush showed the idiocy of the so-called "mission creep" that was the hallmark of Clinton-era military interventions. Namely, that the effectiveness of U.S. military power was almost always overestimated and that of those it targeted was underestimated. The disaster in Mogadishu happened because U.S. commanders became sloppy and lazy thinking the Somalians were easy targets, and as a result they were lured into an ambush that was, frankly, brilliantly set up.

For Horowitz, the message seems to be that Clinton erred in pulling out of Somalia after the Mogadishu disaster. Horowitz cites Osama bin Laden's 1998 interview broadcast on ABC News in which bin Laden cited the U.S. abandonment of Somalia as an example of how quickly the world's last superpower could tuck tail and run.

But the real problem there was allowing a mission to bring humanitarian food relief to Somalia to devolve into actively participating in that war.

Source:

How the Left undermined America's security. David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine.Com, February 18, 2002.

Discuss (1 Replies) | Printer Friendly