MY SAY:ABOUT SOMALIA AND THE LEGACY OF THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION
Somalia has a long and virtually uninterrupted history of hating America. In 1969, after a bloody coup, it was taken over by Maj. General Mohammed Siad Barre, a bloodthirsty killer who formed a military alliance with the Soviet Union from whom he obtained training and ordnance in exchange for Soviet access to naval ports. Barre was, like Nasser and Qaddafi, a pseudosecular, Arab nationalist, Marxist crackpot, who combined Islam with Lenin. To burnish his Islamic credentials he joined the all Muslim Arab League in 1984.
Tribal and regional wars intensified and in 1991 Siad Barre was ousted in a coup that left Mohammed Ali Mahdi and Mohammed Farah Aidid “sharing” control of the Somaliland Republic. The brutal civil war that followed was compounded by a devastating drought in 1992 which resulted in the deaths of 300,000 lives.
President Bush, Clinton’s predecessor, sent U.S. peacekeeping forces to relieve famine and restore order in 1992 arousing congressional demands to “bring our troops home.” His successor, William Clinton, at first announced that he would keep the troops, that the mission was a success, but ceding to the “Murthaites” in Congress, he withdrew all but 1,200 troops. This was followed by months of ambush and attacks of UN peacekeeping troops – in June during an inspection of a Somali arms weapons storage site, 24 U.N.Pakistani soldiers were massacred – wanton murders, theft of all relief materials and unprecedented brutality against Somali civilians, some of whom were given succor and asylum in the United States.
By October of 1993, Clinton launched a new mission and sent United States Rangers and Special Forces to capture Mohammed Aidid and stabilize Somalia. His plan, presented to Congress with a timetable, was “to conclude our role there honorably but we do not want to see a reversion to the absolute chaos and the terrible misery which existed before.” His words came back to bite him.
Mogadishu was a disaster for the United States. Subsequent investigations disclosed that U.S. soldiers on the ground were left without armed vehicles or sufficient firepower from the air. The Clinton administration and then Secretary of Defense, the late Les Aspin, repeatedly denied the Special ops teams’ and the Rangers’ requests for more armored vehicles, AC-130 gunships and tanks.
The American public witnessed gruesome televised scenes of rampaging Muslim Somalis dragging and desecrating the bodies of American troops. Congress demanded a withdrawal and Clinton did a “cut and run” operation leaving Somalia in worse shape than ever and Aidid unbowed. The end result was the perception that America can be defied by any rag tag army of terrorists.
Les Aspin took the fall for his boss but the buck really stopped with President William “Un”Jefferson Clinton.
Since 1983 we have admitted 83,991 Muslim Somali immigrants into the U.S. More then half, 43,682, came since September 11th, and of those, the majority went to Minnesota .
There are millions of African refugees in America – decent, hard working people who escaped the chaos and brutality of failed states. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, under the guidelines of the Refugee Act of 1980, must report hard numbers to Congress each year.
Somali Americans did not assimilate and have grown increasingly militant in cities where they have a significant presence. And they remain of concern to law-enforcement agencies.
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