End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JAN. 25, 2002
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
The right way to fight a war
Learning the lessons of 'Black Hawk Down'

"Black Hawk Down" is a currently popular action film accurately portraying the heroism of American soldiers who stood by their dead and wounded comrades despite being outmanned and outgunned during this nation's previous intervention in the Horn of Africa.

That 1993 deployment to Mogadishu -- capital of Somalia -- started out as a "humanitarian mission" to make sure food shipments intended for famine relief reached their intended beneficiaries, rather than being hijacked at the docks by warring local strongmen.

But -- as was also discovered in the Balkans -- that's a miserable way to get into a war. The goals were amorphous and open-ended -- troops initially put in for mere "lifeguard" duty soon expected to succor the sick and needy ... and then often as not kept around as the mission morphed into "nation-building," whatever that means.

Most of the peoples in question have lived where they are -- and harbored their grudges and feuds -- for centuries or even millennia longer than America has been a nation. Are we really so arrogant as to believe we can end their squabbles as easily as a playground monitor threatening to make the unruly children stay after school? It rarely works, and more importantly it's an undertaking into which our leaders have no authority or permission to enter. America's role is to trade freely with all nations, to set a good example, and to sell guns to anyone attempting to throw off the yoke of tyranny. We have armies and a Navy to protect our shores and our trade routes, not to do charity work.

Somalia was nearly a worst-case scenario for such misguided use of military force: The U.S. commander on the scene asked the Pentagon to send him armor to protect his men in a volatile urban environment, where the bad guys were able to hide behind crowds of women and children, often rendering American G.I.s unwilling or unable to return their fire. The request was turned down at the highest levels of the Clinton administration: It "wouldn't have looked good on TV" to send in tanks.

And so 18 American boys bled and died, heroically but largely unnecessarily, and America eventually withdrew to leave the thieving warlords to dance victorious while dragging American bodies through the streets, all because the threat was underestimated. (Some now say this may even have been the nation's first encounter with the armed agents of anti-American terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.)

Now, as a new U.N. delegation tours Somalia to again "assess the security situation" in the war-ravaged country, and U.S. planes beef up reconnaissance flights seeking to determine whether Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network is regrouping there, there is speculation that Somalia could become the next target in America's war on terrorism.

War, which can take on a life of its own, is never to be entered without a sober-minded assessment of the likely repercussions -- unintended as well as intended. Those who still believe in our government of limited powers also deserve more than a chuckle and a shrug when they point out that Congress alone is granted the power to declare war, and that President Bush since Sept. 11 has been waging war without that formal congressional debate and authorization, as required by our Constitution. (Surely lopsided approval would be easy to win -- can it actually be that the White House doesn't want to set a precedent for obeying the highest law of the land?)

But meantime, the vast majority of Americans are rightly relieved today that our military is back in the hands of mature and responsible leaders unlikely to duplicate the mistakes of our Clinton-era military involvements, where too little force was sent in too often with too little planning or support, and then brought sheepishly home the first time we suffered losses ... our brave soldiers deprived of the resolve or the resources or the clear mission statement necessary to fight and prevail.

The careful build-up and forceful sweeping aside of the Taliban in Afghanistan was a good, contrasting example of military force built up to irresistible levels and then used effectively, as was "Desert Storm" a decade ago.

The result has been stunning. Note the echoing silence from the Arab "street," which four months ago was dancing in the squares following Sept. 11 and predicting disaster for the American "paper tiger" bogged down in the mud and snow of "another Vietnam" near Kabul, running for home in the face of a rising wave of righteous mujahadin.

Hopefully, a new American war in Somalia will prove unnecessary, or will be limited in scope to what's truly necessary to root out and destroy those responsible for the events of Sept. 11.

But if another war does come, we can all be thankful our troops are no longer at the mercy of the kind of dilettantes who sent them to Somalia in 1993 without a clear mission, a commitment to win, or the armor and other logistical support needed to get the job done.

Avoid war when possible. But when war cannot be avoided: win.

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Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $96 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591, where information on his next book, "The Ballad of Carl Drega," is also available.

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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken