America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (69 page)

 32.
“Interview: Montgomery,”
Frontline.

 33.
Stewart,
United States Army in Somalia,
9.

 34.
“Interview: Montgomery,”
Frontline.

 35.
“Warner-Levin Report,” 23.

 36.
The sardonic quote, widely attributed to Charles de Gaulle, is likely to have originated much earlier.

 37.
The precise number of Somalis killed is a matter of dispute, with claims ranging from as few as seven to as many as seventy. Major John Evans, “TF 1-22 Infantry on the Horn of Africa” (2000),
1-22infantry.org/history/somaliapagefour.htm
, accessed January 19, 2015.

 38.
Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
121.

 39.
Task Force Raven, “Operation Continue Hope, 27 Aug 93–9 Jan 94, Lessons Learned” (August 20, 1994). This report is on file at the U.S. Army Center for Military History.

 40.
Overall, U.S. forces killed an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 Somalis during the course of Operation Restore Hope. Eric Schmitt, “Somali War Casualties May Be 10,000,”
The New York Times
(December 8, 1993).

 41.
Quoted in Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
121.

 42.
Madeleine K. Albright, “Yes, There Is a Reason to Be in Somalia,”
The New York Times
(August 10, 1993).

 43.
“Garrison and I probably talked once or twice a day most days,” Downing later recalled. The talks included guidance. “I kept telling General Garrison not to do anything crazy….Be patient, be careful, eventually you will get a shot at Aideed.” “Warner-Levin Report,” 39.

 44.
Jonathan Stevenson,
Losing Mogadishu
(Annapolis, 1995), 115.

 45.
U.S. Special Operations Command, “Task Force Ranger Operations in Somalia, 3–4 October 1993” (June 1, 1994). This heavily redacted document was originally classified SECRET/NOFORN.

 46.
Using that criteria, the 1970 Son Tay raid to free American POWs held in North Vietnam also rates as a success. It came up empty-handed, but those involved departed the scene without incident.

 47.
This was Osman Atto, a wheeler-dealer described as “Aidid’s moneyman.” Mark Bowden,
Black Hawk Down
(New York, 1999), 27.

 48.
Robert F. Baumann,
“My Clan Against the World”: U.S. and Coalition Forces in Somalia, 1992
–
1994
(Fort Leavenworth, 2003), 144.

 49.
Hirsch and Oakley,
Somalia,
125.

 50.
As Colonel Lawrence Casper, who commanded QRF aviation assets, subsequently wrote, “through repetition and consistency,” those commanding TF Ranger had “telegraphed their mode of operations to those who were interested.” Lawrence E. Casper,
Falcon Brigade
(Boulder, 2001), 37.

 51.
Bowden’s
Black Hawk Down
offers a book-length minute-by-minute account. For Garrison’s version of events, see his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “U.S. Military Operations in Somalia” (May 12, 1994), 2–14.

 52.
Michael Elliott and John Barry, “The Making of a Fiasco,”
Newsweek
(October 18, 1993).

 53.
Smith Hempstone, “In Somalia, My Unheeded Warning Comes True,”
The Wall Street Journal
(October 11, 1993).

 54.
“Somalia: Time to Get Out,”
The New York Times
(October 8, 1993).

 55.
John McCain, “McCain Remarks on Reports from Somalia” (October 4, 1993),
mccain.senate.gov//files/08/41/91/f084191/public/index.cfm/speeches?ID=59361aed-af91-43fd-af0c-f996319d4c67
, accessed January 20, 2015.

 56.
CENTCOM had withdrawn the gunships that had been available earlier that summer.

 57.
David H. Hackworth, “Making the Same Dumb Mistakes,”
Newsweek
(October 18, 1993).

 58.
James Mayall, ed.,
The New Interventionism, 1991–1994
(Cambridge, 1996), 17.

 59.
To take one example, it had been General Hoar, with General Downing concurring, who had nixed the request to include AC-130s in the Task Force Ranger “force package.” Garrison did not view the absence of AC-130s as a problem. In September, Hoar also told Montgomery that he did not support the request for tanks. For his part, Garrison later told congressional investigators, “If I had tanks, I don’t know if I would have used them. I never thought of a contingency plan” that included the use of armored vehicles. “Warner-Levin Report,” 28–30, 32–33.

 60.
Bill Clinton,
My Life
(New York, 2004), 553. Garrison defined success as having captured two of Aidid’s key aides along with nearly two dozen lesser figures.

 61.
Bowden,
Black Hawk Down
, 333.

 62.
Harry Summers,
On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War
(New York, 1984), 21.

 63.
Peter L. Bergen,
Holy War
(New York, 2002), 22;
The 9/11 Commission Report,
60; Tom Zeller Jr., “Back in Somalia, with al Qaeda’s Connection More Clear,”
The New York Times
(January 9, 2007).

9. Balkan Digression

 1.
For a concise summary of these events, see Margaret MacMillan,
Paris 1919
(New York, 2001), 109–24.

 2.
John F. Burns, “The Dying City of Sarajevo,”
The New York Times
(July 26, 1992).

 3.
For a more detailed account, see Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup,
The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina
(Armonk, New York, 1999), 62–127.

 4.
Laura Silber and Allen Miller,
Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation
(London, 1996), 201.

 5.
Misha Glenny, “Yugoslavia: The Revenger’s Tragedy,”
The New York Review of Books
(August 13, 1992).

 6.
“Partial Text of Clinton Yugoslavia Plan,”
Los Angeles Times
(July 28, 1992).

 7.
Jules Witcover, “Clinton, Gore Begin 2nd Bus Tour by Blasting Bush Foreign Policy,” Baltimore
Sun
(August 6, 1992).

 8.
John Pomfret, “Albright, Shalikashvili Signal U.S. Ties to Bosnia,”
Washington Post
(March 31, 1994).

 9.
Warren Christopher,
In the Stream of History
(Stanford, 1998), 347.

 10.
Daniel L. Haulman, “Resolution of Bosnian Crisis,” in
Short of War,
ed. Warnock, 224.

 11.
The incident provided the basis for three books, two written by O’Grady himself, and three documentaries, plus a “loosely based on” Hollywood movie.

 12.
For a concise account, see Burg and Shoup,
War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
128–88.

 13.
Kurt Miller, “Deny Flight and Deliberate Force: An Effective Use of Airpower?” M.A. thesis, U.S. Army Command and Staff College (1997), 48.

 14.
Haulman, “Resolution of Bosnian Crisis,” 224–25.

 15.
John McCain, “Peacekeeping Efforts in Bosnia and Somalia” (July 1, 1993),
mccain.senate.gov//files/08/41/91/f084191/public/index.cfm/speeches?ID=85bcd7dd-a857-4ecf-9a5c-21a264aa6947
, accessed January 28, 2015.

 16.
“The Shame of Bosnia,”
The Washington Post
(July 23, 1993).

 17.
Susan Sontag, “Godot Comes to Sarajevo,”
The New York Review of Books
(October 21, 1993).

 18.
“The Abdication,”
The New Republic
(February 28, 1994).

 19.
Stephen Kinzer, “Belgrade Meeting Backs Peace Plan,”
The New York Times
(May 13, 1993).

 20.
Fouad Ajami, “Standing Up to the Serbs,”
U.S. News and World Report
(May 2, 1994).

 21.
Michael Dobbs, “Saudis Funded Weapons for Bosnia, Official Says,”
The Washington Post
(February 2, 1996).

 22.
Marlise Simons, “Trial Offers Look at Secretive Warriors in Bosnia,”
The New York Times
(September 2, 2001).

 23.
Chris Hedges, “Fascists Reborn as Croatia’s Founding Fathers,”
The New York Times
(April 12, 1997).

 24.
Robert F. Baumann et al.,
Armed Peacekeepers in Bosnia
(Fort Leavenworth, 2004), 28; David Isenberg, “Soldiers of Fortune, Ltd.” (November 1997),
aloha.net/~stroble/mercs.html
, accessed January 31, 2015. This document is a monograph prepared under the auspices of the Center for Defense Information.

 25.
The withdrawal of UN peacekeepers eliminated concerns about the Serbs taking them hostage as a way of constraining NATO air attacks.

 26.
Rick Atkinson, “Air Assault Set Stage for Broader Role,”
The Washington Post
(November 15, 1995).

 27.
Determined Force did not “officially” end until September 20, but during its final week, NATO suspended further air attacks.

 28.
Earlier that summer, Bosnian Serb forces had succeeded in shooting down a U.S. Air Force F-16. The pilot successfully ejected, evaded capture, and was subsequently recovered.

 29.
Colonel Robert C. Owen, “The Balkans Air Campaign Study: Part II,”
Airpower Journal
(Summer 1997). Supplementing the effort by manned aircraft, the cruiser USS
Normandy
fired thirteen cruise missiles during Deliberate Force.

 30.
In the “Split Agreement,” signed on July 22, 1995, Croat and Bosnian leaders had promised to combine forces against the Bosnian Serbs. A three-way war now became a war of two against one.

 31.
Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Russian and European Analysis,
Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990–1995
(Washington, D.C., 2003), vol. 1, 376. This two-volume work provides a detailed campaign narrative of the entire Balkan War.

 32.
Robert Frasure quoted in Richard Holbrooke,
To End a War
(New York, 1999), 73.

 33.
Quoted in Mark Danner, “Operation Storm,”
The New York Review of Books
(October 22, 1998).