‘Black Hawk Down,’ Two Decades Later

[Valin]

NRO:

How an extraordinary feat of arms was turned into a political catastrophe.

Jonathan Foreman

10/5/13

 

 

October 3rd and 4th marked the 20th anniversary of the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, also known as the First Battle of Mogadishu. The BBC ran a video report about it on Thursday entitled US Black Hawk Down military disaster revisited. It is worth watching as an encapsulation of a complacent standard media narrative about the battle that has not changed in two decades. (Disappointingly, the lazy analysis here is by Frank Gardner, the BBCs normally impressive security correspondent.)

 

Contrary to the BBCs assertion in the report, the Black Hawk Down battle was not a humiliation for the U.S. military. On the contrary, it was arguably an astonishing feat of arms, analogous to the 1879 battle of Rorkes Drift depicted in the film Zulu, or the 400 B.C. retreat to the sea by Xenophons 10,000 beleaguered Greeks depicted in his Anabasis.

 

It took tremendous skill and genuine heroism for a small, vastly outnumbered group of U.S. soldiers to hold off thousands of fighters and in some cases fight their way out of a teeming, hostile city along the Mogadishu Mile without leaving any wounded behind. If anyone was defeated, it was those thousands of well-armed Somali militiamen, who knew the terrain far better than the Americans.

 

(Snip)