Gwynne Dyer
29 January 2002
opinion
London — THE "Mogadishu Line" still stands, as firm as when it was first erected in 1993, and the success of Scott Ridley's new film Black Hawk Down with the American public should ensure that it will stand for years longer yet. Which means that Saddam Hussein can sleep soundly tonight: he is not next after Afghanistan on the target list of the US 'war on terrorism'.
Black Hawk Down is the latest of a string of films that show the realities of ground combat in a much more graphic and horrific way than previous generations of war movies, but it is not set in the comfortably distant past of the Second World War or Vietnam. It is set in Somalia only nine years ago, when an American force operating alongside a United Nations famine relief mission lost nineteen soldiers killed in a single day.
The film is a reconstruction of the bungled operation in which US Ranger and Delta Force troops captured senior members of a Somali warlord's army in central Mogadishu in a mission that was supposed to be over in half an hour. Instead they were trapped in the heart of the warlord's territory for over half a day. By the time Pakistani troops of the UN force got them out, they had lost nineteen killed and over a hundred wounded.
The American public was horrified, especially when a mob of the warlord's people was videotaped dragging the body of a dead American soldier through the streets in triumph.
Two weeks later President Bill Clinton pulled all 30,000 American soldiers out of Somalia. It was the ignominious end of the elder George Bush's New World Order, and by the end of 1993 it had been replaced by a new doctrine: the "Mogadishu Line".
What it said, in essence, was that the United States would not again commit troops to overseas operations short of a world war if the anticipated casualty toll was higher than - oh, nineteen, say. To accept any higher number of deaths would simply result in a popular and media revolt against the commitment back in the United States, so better not to commit yourself in the first place.
This doctrine never got into formal statements of US strategy because it sounds just too timid, but it has been observed in practice ever since. Neither in Kosovo three years ago nor in Afghanistan last year did the US commit ground units to combat at all, and in neither war did
American casualties, including accidental fatalities, cross the Mogadishu Line. Yet the United States won both wars, mainly thanks to the decades-long effort it has put into developing reliable stand-off weapons.
However, the new American force structure has not really eliminated the need for ground troops. You still need soldiers to seize and hold the ground in the end. It's just that you don't need as many of them, and they don't have to be very good soldiers, if they have the full resources of US air power to open the way for them.
So long as there is some local force that can fill this role, like the Kosovo Liberation Army in the Balkans three years ago or the Northern Alliance last year in Afghanistan, the strategy works just fine. But what if there is no local force available to take the place of the ground troops the United States will no longer risk itself?
There is no armed opposition force in Iraq that could easily be built up to take on the role that the KLA and the Northern Alliance played in America's last two wars. The various Kurdish forces in the north cannot agree on a common front for more than five minutes at a time, and have no interest in marching on Baghdad anyway. The Shias in the south have been beaten and terrorised into utter submission. And it's over a quarter-century since there was any open armed challenge to Saddam Hussein's rule from the Sunni Arabs in central Iraq.
The US can bomb Iraq far harder than at present, if it wants (though there really is very little evidence linking Saddam to al-Qaeda).
But the Mogadishu Line still stands, and without a reliable local force in Iraq to act as its ground troops it can do nothing more.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2002 New Vision. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
