On 5 December 1992, I walked down the hall into John Rose’s office. “Hey John, I heard on the BBC this morning driving to work that the US is sending troops into Somalia.” John looked surprised, shook his head and said in his mid-western twang: “They know not what they do.”
‘Black Hawk Down’
John and I had several things in common in addition to working together at USAID Tanzania. We both grew up in Kansas, John in Emporia and me down the road in Wichita. We both played in a blues-rock band called The Wildebeats. And we had both worked in Somalia. I had run a World Bank-funded project there 1980–81; John had come a few years later as a USAID project officer.
Neither of us could be called experts, but we knew how things went down in Somalia and neither of us had the slightest doubt that US operations in Somalia would not go well. I talked to several others in the ensuing days who had some experience in the country and they all agreed with John and me – US troops in Somalia would result in an unholy mess.
The question I had at the time was: didn’t President George HW Bush and others involved ask anyone who knew Somalia what they thought would happen if US troops went in? Obviously they wouldn’t talk to John Rose or me, or even my friend Carl Harris who spoke Somali and was married to a Kenyan Somali, but there were a number of acknowledged experts on Somalia to consult.
Professor IM Lewis had written many books on Somalia. If they felt they couldn’t trust a Brit, they could get really radical and talk to an actual Somali – Ahmed Ismail Samatar at the University of Minnesota. Or if they didn’t want advice from an ivory tower ‘egghead’, they could have contacted author Nuruddin Farah. But they didn’t and neither did Bill Clinton and his really smart advisers, who took over from Bush in January 1993. The result was Black Hawk Down, just as John Rose predicted 10 months earlier – they know not what they do.
Governments need to know ‘what’s going on’
Not to know what’s going on has serious ramifications. If you watched the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam (and if you didn’t watch it, you should), America got into a long war there mainly because they didn’t understand what was really going on. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo compiled documents known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, so decision-makers could learn from the mistakes in Vietnam. They hadn’t done their homework – and did they learn from that?
Which brings us back to Somalia. Since President George HW Bush and his team didn’t know much if anything about Somalia, they probably thought it would be another Grenada or Panama. The 1983 Grenada invasion lasted 45 days and was pretty much a walk in the park, if you ignore the 19 Americans killed and 116 wounded. Panama in 1989 also was in and out in six weeks – 23 Americans killed (two by friendly fire) and 325 wounded.
Bush announced that the US forces were going into Somalia on 4 December 1992 and confidently said they would be out before President-elect Clinton’s inauguration in January 1993. Ten months (not six weeks) later and after Black Hawk Down, President Bill Clinton embarrassingly withdrew American soldiers. Thirty-two years later, Somalia barely functions.
Clinton and Rwanda – knowing, but doing nothing?
Six months after the Somali debacle on 6 April 1994, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down. That ushered in 100 days of genocide during which an estimated 800,000 Rwanda Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered. The US, along with the rest of the world, watched in horror but did nothing. No one, certainly not Bill Clinton, wanted a repeat of Black Hawk Down, this time in Rwanda.
There is ample evidence that Bill Clinton, Rhodes Scholar, knew what was going on in Rwanda, but did he bother to find out whether the situation bore any resemblance to the situation in Somalia? If he had, he might have done something. But Clinton was determined to avoid another fiasco – case closed.
Continuing with the list, empires have invaded Afghanistan for 3,000 years. Darius of Persia, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Mughals, the Sikhs, the British, the Soviets. They came, they conquered, they failed. But George W Bush somehow knew that the greatest nation in history would succeed where all others screwed up. A whole lot of people should have known better. But if some did, it wasn’t the American public.
After 9/11, after Afghanistan, after the invasion of Iraq, a poll was taken of Americans 18–25 years old. Over 40% did not know where Afghanistan is and the majority did not know where Iraq is. So when their president and the highly respected secretary of state Colin Powell told them they had to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and he was in league with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, well, in their ignorance the people had to assume their leaders knew what they were doing. We know how that ended.
So now, Iran …
Those opposed to the US getting involved in Iran most often cite America’s invasion of Iraq. According to the US Department of Defense, 4,432 Americans died and 31,993 were wounded in action. Coalition partner deaths totalled 4,799. Estimates of Iraqi deaths vary widely from 150,000 to over one million. The Iraq Human Rights Ministry put out a figure of 250,000 Iraqis wounded and injured from 2003 to 2012. As of 2022, the United Nations had registered 345,305 Iraqi refugees. There were nearly 1.2 million internally displaced people across the country.
The total cost of the war through 2013 was estimated at $1.7tn by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The cost to Iraq’s economy, education and health services, infrastructure, and the environment are beyond quantification. The country is still paying for W’s folly.
And so here we are – déjà vu all over again. Trump said: “I may do it, I may not do it” (attack Iran). He’d decide in the coming two weeks. He always says “two weeks”. That’s the time it takes for the media and public to forget his current mess and for him to come up with a new mess for everyone to focus on. However, in this case it took him only three days.
The Guardian reported that Trump’s advisers had originally opposed US intervention in Iran but “shifted their views in favour of a limited and one-off strike”. Wham-bam from Uncle Sam. That was then. Now Trump is hinting at regime change. Trump tends to say and do things unencumbered by the thought process. Do Trump advisers know what they’re doing?
Iran and Trump– some background
Let’s consider Iran. Trump said he wanted an agreement, but Iran hadn’t agreed to his terms. In fact there was an agreement sealed by President Barack Obama in July 2015, along with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, Russia, France, China and the UK – as well as Germany and the European Union. Most independent observers said it successfully limited Iran’s nuclear program. That effectively collapsed when Trump walked away from the pact in 2018. Not for the first time, he is now attempting to solve a problem that he himself created.
An Economist/YouGov poll conducted 13–16 June found that only 16% of Americans think the US military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran. Majorities of Democrats (65%), Independents (61%), and even Republicans (53%) oppose US military intervention in Iran. Only 24% think that the Iranian nuclear program is an immediate and serious threat.
Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified under oath to Congress that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Iran’s supreme leader has not reauthorised the dormant program even though it has enriched uranium to higher levels. Trump said she’s wrong. He claimed not to believe his own hand-picked director of national intelligence. Perhaps ‘intelligence’ is the problem? Whose intelligence…I dare not speculate.
The attacks on Iran
Trump should have let a few facts sink in. There are two ways to take out Iran’s nuclear programme. Fordo is the main uranium enrichment facility and is buried deep inside a mountain. The safest option is to use a $4mn, 13.6 tonne bunker buster bomb with a 2.5 tonne payload. It can penetrate around 60 meters underground before exploding. But the Fordo facility is thought to be 80-90 meters below the surface. The bombs might “just rattle the locks a little bit,” said retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an interview 19 June.
Trump claims that the bombing was “a spectacular military success” and Iran’s nuclear facilities have been “completely and totally obliterated.” The BBC reports that an Iranian spokesman, Hassan Abedini, said that the three facilities had been evacuated “a while ago” and Iran “didn’t suffer a major blow because the material had already been taken out”.
The fact is we don’t know yet how much damage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has sustained. It will take time to work it out. But Trump seldom considers the facts. During a White House press conference on 27 June, he was asked by a reporter if the US would consider bombing Iran again, if intelligence reports were to conclude that Iran could enrich uranium to a level that concerns him. “Sure, without question, absolutely,” he replied. If in fact Iran’s nuclear facilities are “totally obliterated”, it can’t enrich uranium and there is no need to bomb it again.
The second way – and according to Col Wilkerson the only sure way – to eliminate Iran’s nuclear programme is to send in ground troops. Invading Iran with a population of 90+mn would be a colossal mistake, he added. It would take 10 years of fighting, cost $2-3tn, and not yield any better results than the Iraq fiasco.
A new agreement on Iran
Of course, there is a third option – a new agreement to replace the agreement Trump tore up in 2018 that seemed to have worked just fine. On 28 June in an interview for the US TV programme Face the Nation, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency Raphael Grossi said:
“Iran had a very vast ambitious programme, and part of it may still be there, and if not, there is also the self-evident truth that the knowledge is there. The industrial capacity is there. Iran is a very sophisticated country in terms of nuclear technology, as is obvious. So you cannot disinvent this. You cannot undo the knowledge that you have or the capacities that you have…
“So I think this should be the incentive that we all must have to understand that military operations or not, you are not going to solve this in a definitive way militarily. You are going to have an agreement. You are going to have an inspection system that will give everybody in the region and elsewhere, the assurances that we can definitely turn the page…
“We have to go back to the table and have a technically sound solution to this. Otherwise, this will come hit us again, in terms of a situation which is not well clarified. And this is an opportunity.”
Trump’s advisers will give him a number of options. He generally choses to listen to the ones who support what he’s already decided. The Maasai of East Africa have a proverb: “The best adviser is the one who goes to the meeting and says what you would say.” They have another proverb (badly translated): “The reason the dog ate its own shit is not because it lacked a wise adviser.” Trump, who didn’t know that the Declaration of Independence in 1776 had no connection to the Civil War, may choose to listen to the wrong advisers and wind up eating his own … shit.
