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Black Hawk Up, Part 5:
The US Campaign In Somalia, 1993-1997
by Chris Oakley
Summary:
In the first four chapters of this series, we reviewed
the circumstances that led to Al Gore’s unexpected accession
to the presidency in March of 1993; the start of the U.S. combat
presence in Somalia; the first clashes between U.S. ground troops
and al Qaeda fighters in Somalia; the heated showdown in Congress
in 1995 over President Gore’s request for additional troops to
be deployed to Somalia and the outcome of that showdown; the
escalation of the fighting in Somalia in the run-up to the 1996
U.S. presidential elections; and the course of Operation Swift
Repulse. In this installment we’ll look back at the final year of
U.S. and allied combat operations in Somalia.
In the wake of Operation Swift Repulse bin Laden and Aidid’s
mujaheddin forces were in utter disarray. Many of their most trusted
lieutenants were dead, and bin Laden and Aidid themselves were now
fugitives from U.S. and allied forces; few people doubted the end of
the U.S. mission in Somalia was at hand. But like a cockroach, the
bin Laden-Aidid movement would prove hard to kill-- predators, after
all, tend to be the most dangerous when wounded. In July of 1996, just
days after the Gore Administration hinted it might be ready to begin
calling troops home from Somalia, mujaheddin fighters hit U.S. ground
forces in the country simultaneously on four fronts in a brutal series
of assaults which tripled overall U.S. and allied casualties for the
three years since Operation Restore Hope had begun. This development
touched off a renewed wave of criticism of Gore’s foreign policy and
gave his chief Republican rival for the presidency, Kansas senator Bob
Dole, a substantial boost in the polls going into the 1996 Republican
National Convention.
And it didn’t help Gore’s case that within the same month as
the four-front mujaheddin assault in Somalia, agents of the terrorist
network al-Qaeda bombed a barracks in Saudi Arabia housing U.S. armed
services personnel. As the body count from that bombing continued to
escalate and al-Qaeda’s leadership issued bombastic propaganda videos
hailing the bombers as heroic martyrs, President Gore found himself
the target of a fresh wave of criticism of his handling of terrorism
and national security matters; at a campaign rally in Georgia three
weeks after the Saudi Arabia attack, Gore was heckled by right wing
protestors who accused the commander-in-chief of turning a blind eye
to the realities of global terrorism. Gore’s supporters countered this
attack by arguing that the president had done more to combat terrorism
in four years than his predecessors had in the previous twelve.
The national debate over the White House’s policy on Somalia
would be the central theme of the general election campaign: in three
presidential debates that fall, and in countless media appearances
during the weeks between the Republican and Democratic conventions,
Dole and Gore took harsh shots at each other’s respective views on
what should be done to achieve a final resolution to the conflict in
Somalia. The candidates’ respective Congressional allies did much the
same thing on Capitol Hill; in one particularly pungent retort to the
GOP’s criticisms of White House policy, a member of the Massachusetts
Congressional delegation made a few(to say the least) unflattering
comments about a Mississippi colleague’s parental ancestry after said
colleague mocked President Gore once too often.
The troops on the ground in Somalia had little patience for this
kind of playground bickering; regardless of who was sworn in as their
commander-in-chief on Inauguration Day that coming January, what they
most wanted from the man in the White House was the assurance that he
would make their interests a major priority of his administration. At
least one senior general anonymously confessed to Newsweek that he was
strongly considering resigning his commission to protest the seemingly
interminable name-calling that was going on between the Democrats and
the GOP back in Washington. A battalion commander actually did resign,
and punctuated that resignation by mailing all of his medals from the
Somali campaign back to the Secretary of Defense in the same envelope
which contained his resignation letter.
Bin Laden and Aidid’s propaganda teams had a field day with the
turmoil going on in Washington. Leaflets depicting President Gore and
his cabinet as indecisive modern day Hamlets were distributed all over
Mogadishu while bin Laden released a series of audiotapes mocking U.S.
troops as “paper tigers”. The mujaheddin also made extensive use of
home video technology, producing dozens of VHS tapes meant to inspire
the faithful and demoralize coalition troops. How effective they were
at the second job is still a hotly debated topic; they were certainly
successful at accomplishing the first. In a CIA confidential report
declassified in 2008, the agency’s station chief in Nairobi informed
his superiors of a strong uptick in morale among bin Laden’s fighters
just after the first video was released.
By September of ’96 the mujaheddin had managed, if only briefly,
to put coalition forces on the defensive both on the battlefield and
in the political arena. This didn’t sit well with Gore or his White
House advisors, who were counting on further successes in the Horn of
Africa region to improve Gore’s chances of earning another term in the
Oval Office. In a bid to take the wind out of the insurgents’ sails
once again, Gore sanctioned the deployment of Navy SEALs to the Horn
of Africa on September 27th with the express purpose of taking out bin
Laden or Aidid-- preferably both.
After several days of chasing false leads, the SEAL team finally
caught up with bin Laden and Aidid early on the afternoon of October
4th. Confidential sources had pinpointed the two terrorist chiefs at a
remote compound south of the town of Badhaadhe making preparations to
escape to the village of Filla near the Kenyan border. Around 6:30 PM
local time that evening, the SEALs made their move, dropping into the
Badhaadhe compound just as the perimeter guards were changing shifts.
Before anyone realized what was happening the SEAL team had shot Aidid
dead and were closing in on bin Laden; minutes after Aidid was killed,
bin Laden would die at the hands and rifle of a sniper. After taking a
moment to collect evidence to prove to the world the terrorist leaders
were indeed dead, the SEAL commandos exited the compound via a waiting
helicopter.
Within hours of the SEAL team’s departure from the compound, the
White House had called a press conference to officially announce the
deaths of bin Laden and Aidid. While the press conference was going on
Somali government troops swept into the compound to retrieve Aidid’s
and bin Laden’s bodies and arrest the remaining mujaheddin leadership;
though a few of Aidid’s and bin Laden’s inner circles managed to slip
through the net, by and large the Somali soldiers succeeded in locking
up the rest. It was a crippling blow to the insurgent forces, who for
the remaining months of Operation Restore Hope would find themselves
irrevocably on the defensive. Some of the mujaheddin would eventually
flee to Afghanistan, where they would later see combat in defense of
that country’s fundamentalist Taliban regime. Bin Laden’s demise also
gave a shot in the arm to the Gore presidential campaign, which at one
point had been polling so badly a few media pundits had actually dared
suggest Gore simply concede the November election to GOP candidate Bob
Dole.
Thanks to the approval rating surge he experienced in the wake
of bin Laden and Aidid’s deaths, Gore easily won another term in the
White House, taking 37 of 50 states from Dole. Armed with that mandate
and a renewed surge of popular support for his foreign policies, Gore
started making preparations to launch a final blow against the Somalia
insurgency and to draw down troops from Somalia once the objectives of
Operation Restore Hope had been accomplished. In January of 1997, just
after he was inaugurated for his next term as president, Gore drafted
the preliminary version of a nine-month plan for bringing U.S. combat
personnel home from the Horn of Africa. Few if any people in Congress
at that point were inclined to make much protest over his goals in the
withdrawal plan, but he did encounter a fair amount of criticism from
both sides of the aisle in Congress on his methods for achieving said
goals.
The final draft of the withdrawal plan would be unveiled six
weeks later during a press conference at the Pentagon held to tout
the unveiling of a new mobile battlefield air defense system. Under
the terms of the final version of the plan most U.S. troops then in
Somalia would leave the country by mid-July, with the rest scheduled
to come home between September 27th and October 1st. Thereafter, the
primary responsibility for maintaining peace in Somali would rest in
the hands of the regular Somali army along with observer groups from
the European Union.
When the first wave of transport planes bringing troops back
from Somalia touched down at U.S. bases, President Gore experienced
another upward bounce in his approval rating. In many quarters both in
and out of the Beltway, he was coming to be viewed as one of the great
peacemakers of modern American history; some political analysts began
to speculate that Gore’s mojo might rub off on Democratic Senate and
House candidates and thereby enable the Democrats to retain control of
Congress in the 1998 midterm elections. But while things were looking
up for Gore on the foreign policy front, a scandal was brewing on the
domestic front which would set the foundations for the final collapse
of his administration....
TO BE CONTINUED
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